the water's edge. A sea of grass and wild mustard, rippling and swaying in odd restless patterns, with one gnarled oak flourishing in the middle of it all like a satisfied hermit. More fissures showed dark brown among the green, half a dozen of them, one at least a foot wide in places, another some fifty feet long. They made me think of the old apocryphal tales of a tremored earth yawning wide and swallowing people, houses, entire towns. They made me wonder if maybe those tales weren't so apocryphal after all.
There were some other things to see from up there: a newish Ford pickup parked on the road below, and two men off to one side of it, working with hammer and nails, wire and timber, and a post-hole digger to repair a toppled section of fence. They hadn't noticed me yet, and didn't until I got down near the pickup and hailed them. Then they stopped working and watched me warily as I approached.
One of the men was about the same age as the woman down at the ranch-lean, balding, with the kind of face that looks as if somebody had been working on it with an etching tool. The other was more of the same, only at half the age and with all of his hair. Father and son, I thought. Which proved to be the case: the first generation was Emil Corda and the second generation was Gene Corda.
They were friendly enough when I finished showing them my license and telling them what it was I wanted. Emil was, anyway; his son was the taciturn sort and didn't seem overly bright. Emil, in fact, seemed downright pleased with me, as if he welcomed a break in the drudgery of fence-mending. Or as if meeting a private detective who wanted to poke around on his land made this something of a red-letter day for him.
“Guess I don't have any objections to you having a look,” he said. “But I'll come along, if it's all the same to you.”
“Fine.”
“All those cracks-you see 'em out there. Got to watch your step.”
I nodded. “Some quake, wasn't it?”
“Yeah it was. Gave us a hell of a scare.”
“Me too.”
“Next time we get a big one, this whole section's liable to break right off and float on over to Waikiki Beach,” he said, and then grinned to show me he was kidding. “Fellow down at Olema claims one of his heifers disappeared into a crack, didn't leave a trace. You believe that?”
“Do you?”
“No sir,” Corda said. “I've seen cows break a leg in one, I've seen 'em get stuck in one. But swallowed up? Publicity stunt, that's all. Fellow wanted to get his name in the papers.” He sounded disappointed as well as disapproving, as if he wished he'd thought of it himself so he would have gotten his name in the papers.
I said, “Will you show me where the cabin used to stand, Mr. Corda?”
“Sure thing.” He looked at his son. “Gene, you dig another half dozen holes. When I come back we'll anchor those new posts.”
The younger Corda mumbled something agreeable, and Emil and I set off toward the far end of the peninsula. The road wasn't much along here, just a couple of grassy ruts, and long before we neared the water it petered out into a cow track. One of the fissures cut a jagged line across it in one place, disappearing into a cluster of poppies.
The outer rim of the peninsula was maybe a hundred feet wide, squared off, with a thin strip of pebbled beach and a couple of acres of mudflats beyond, visible now that the tide was out. The flats weren't being used as oyster beds anymore; at least there was no sign of the poles that are used to fence off most beds. All that was out there was a dozen or so pilings, canted up out of the mud at oblique angles, like a bunch of rotting teeth. I asked Corda about them.
“Oyster company dock,” he said. “Big storm broke it up fifteen, sixteen years ago. We managed to salvage some of the lumber.”
“Was there also a pier that went with the cabin?”
“Not so far as I know.” He gestured to the north, beyond a fan of decaying oyster shells that was half- obliterated by grass. “Cabin was over that way. You can still see part of the foundation.”
We went in that direction, up into a little hollow where the remains of a stone foundation rose out of more thick grass and wild mustard. There wasn't anything else in the hollow, not even a scrap of driftwood.
“What happened to the cabin?” I asked.
“Burned down, so I heard.”
“Accident?”
He shrugged. “Couldn't tell you.”
“Do you know when it happened?”
“Long time ago. Before the oyster outfit bought the land.”
I nodded and moved back to stand on the little strip of beach. Two-thirds of the distance across the bay was an island a few hundred yards in circumference, thickly wooded, with a baby islet alongside it. On the larger island, visible from where I stood now, were the remains of a building-somebody's once-substantial house. Those remains had been there a long time and had always fascinated me. Who would live on a little island in the middle of a fogbound bay?
Not for the first time, I wondered if I could do it. Well, maybe. For a while, anyhow. Buy an island like that, build a house on it, wrap myself in solitude and peace. Never mind the wind and fog; all you'd need when the fog rolled in was a hot fire, a good book, and a wicked woman. For that matter, throw in some beer and food and you had all you needed on any kind of day.
A seagull came swooping down over the tideflats, screeching the way gulls do. The only other sound was the humming of the wind, punctuated now and then by little wails and moans as it gusted. It had begun to chill me; I could feel goosebumps along my arms and across my shoulders. But I was reluctant to leave just yet. There was something about this place, a sense of isolation that wasn't at all unpleasant. I could understand why Harmon Crane had come here to be by himself. I could understand why he found it a place that stirred his creative juices.
When I turned after a minute or two I saw that Emil Corda had wandered off to the south, following one of the bigger earth fissures through the rippling grass. I walked over to the fan of oyster shells. As I neared them my foot snagged on something hidden in the grass; I squatted and probed around and came up with part of an old wooden sign, its lettering element-erased to the point where I had to squint at it close up to make out the words: EAST SHORE OYSTER COMPANY. Oddly, it made me think of a marker at a forgotten gravesite.
I straightened, and the wind gusted again and made me shiver, and from forty or fifty yards away Emil Corda let out a shout. I swung around, saw him beckoning to me, and hurried over to where he was, watching my step as I went. He was standing alongside the fissure he'd been following at a place where it was close to a foot wide. There was an odd look on his seamed face, a mixture of puzzlement, awe, and excitement.
“Found something,” he said, as if he still didn't quite believe it. “First time I been down this far since the quake.”
“Found what?”
“Look for yourself. Down in the crack. This beats that Olema fellow's cow story all to hell. Man, I guess it does!”
I moved over alongside him and bent to peer into the crack. The hairs went up on the back of my neck; a little puzzlement and excitement kindled in me too. Along with a feeling of dark things moving, shifting, building tremors of violence under the surface of what until now had been a routine investigation.
Down at the bottom of that crack were bones, a jumble of old gray bones. The remains of a human skeleton, complete with grinning skull.
TWELVE
Emil Corda and his son drove back to their ranch to call the county sheriff's office. I sat in my car, off to one side of the dirt road, and brooded a little. Those bones out there didn't have to have anything to do with Harmon Crane; they didn't have to be related to his severe depression during those last few months of 1949 and to his eventual suicide. But they were old bones, there was no mistake about that. And they looked about the way bones
