Scenarios

appearance of strangers in Cooperville.

Kerry said, 'None of the natives is very friendly, the way it looks.'

'I didn't expect that they would be,' I said.

I took the right fork that led through what was left of the town. It amounted to about two blocks' worth of buildings on both sides of the road, although on either end and back into the meadow you could see foundations and other remains of what had once been more buildings and streets. Most of the structures still standing were backed up against the creek. There were about fifteen altogether, all made of logs and whipsawed boards, some with stone foundations, a third with badly decayed frames and collapsed roofs. The largest, two stories, girdled by a sagging verandah at the second level, looked to have been either a hotel or a saloon with upstairs accommodations; it bore no signs, and as was the case with the others we passed, its doors and windows were boarded up. Except for faded lettering over the entrance to one that said Union Drug Store, it was impossible to tell what sort of establishments any of them had been.

Kerry seemed impressed. 'This is some place,' she said. 'I've never been in a ghost town before.'

'Spooky, huh?'

'No. I'm fascinated. How long have these buildings been here?'

'More than a hundred years, some of them.'

'And there've been people living here all that time and nobody ever tried to restore any of them?'

'Not in a good long while.'

'Well, why not? I mean, you'd think somebody would want to preserve a historic place like this.'

'Somebody does,' I said. 'The Munroe Corporation.'

'I don't mean that kind of preservation. You know what I mean.'

'Uh-huh. It's a good question, but I don't know the answer.'

She frowned a little, thoughtfully. 'What kind of people live here, anyway?'

I had no answer for her. Half of the sixteen residents had been born in Cooperville; the other half had gravitated to it because they liked its isolation. It was up near the Oregon border, three hundred miles from San Francisco, and to get to it you had to take an unpaved road that climbed seven miles off State Highway 3. The tourists hadn't discovered it because it was so far off the beaten track. The residents liked that, too. What they seemed to want more than anything else was to be left alone.

The problem was, they weren't being left alone. Most of the land in the area was government protected-the Shasta Trinity National Recreation Area-but the land on which Cooperville sat was owned by Trinity County. A group of developers, the Munroe Corporation, had begun buying it up during the past year, with the intention of turning Cooperville into a place the tourists would discover: widening and paving the access road, restoring the rundown buildings after the fashion of the Mother Lode towns, adding things like a Frontier Town Amusement Park, stables for horseback rides up into the mountains, and a couple of lodges to accommodate vacationers and overnight guests.

The Cooperville residents were up in arms over this. They didn't want to live in a tourist trap and they didn't want to be forced out of their homes by a bunch of outsiders. So they had banded together and hired a law firm to try to block the sale of the land, to get Cooperville named as a state historical site. Lawsuits were still pending against the Munroe Corporation, but everybody figured it was just a matter of time before the bulldozers and workmen moved in and another little piece of history died and was reincarnated as a chunk of modern commercialism.

One of the residents seemed to have been unwilling to accept that fate, however, and had taken matters into his own hands. Four of the town's abandoned buildings had burned to the ground ten days before, including the remains of a 'Fandango Hall'-a saloon-and-gambling house-that the developers had been particularly interested in restoring. The Munroe people thought it was a blatant case of arson, and put pressure on the county sheriff's office to investigate; but the law had found no evidence that the fire had been deliberately set, and the official report tabbed it as 'of unknown origin.'

Bad feelings were running high by this time, on both sides. And they got worse-much worse. Two days ago, there had been another fire, not in Cooperville this time but in Redding, some forty miles away, where the Munroe Corporation had its offices. The bachelor home of the president of the Munroe combine, a man named Randall who had been the most outspoken against the citizens of Cooperville, had gone up in flames shortly past midnight. Randall had gone up with it. He was not supposed to be home that night-it was common knowledge that he was going to San Francisco on company business-but he'd put off the trip at the last minute. He had evidently been asleep when the blaze started, had been overcome by smoke before he could get out of the burning house. There was no evidence of arson; as far as the local cops were concerned, his death was a tragic accident.

But the other Munroe partners thought otherwise. The Great Western Insurance Company, which carried a hundred-thousand-dollar double indemnity partnership policy on Randall's life and on the lives of the three remaining partners, was also skeptical. Insurance companies are always leery when a heavily insured party dies under unusual circumstances, especially when his business partners are the beneficiaries. Great Western wanted Randall's death investigated for that reason. And the Munroe people wanted his death investigated both to exonerate themselves of any wrongdoing and to find out which of the Cooperville residents was responsible for the fires.

That was where I came in. Great Western had called me first, in the person of Barney Rivera, their head claims adjustor in San Francisco; they were a small company and did not maintain an investigative staff, so they farmed out that kind of work to private operatives like me. Then, six hours after I accepted the job, one of the three surviving Munroe partners, Raymond Treacle, showed up at my office. He offered Munroe's full cooperation in my investigation, plus five thousand dollars if I helped bring about the arrest and conviction of the guilty person or persons. There was no conflict of interest in that, as long as the guilty person or persons turned out to be someone other than a member of the Munroe Corporation, so I agreed.

Both Barney Rivera and Raymond Treacle had given me plenty of background information, but neither had been able to provide any concrete leads. From what Treacle had told me, all sixteen Cooperville residents were backwoods cretins capable of anything, but I discounted that opinion as biased. He had a list of their names and what they did to earn a living, and I ran a background check on each of them that netted me nothing much. I also ran a background check on Treacle and Randall and the other two Munroe partners; that got me nothing much either.

The only thing left for me to do was to drive up to Trinity County. And that was where the difficulty with Kerry lay. We had planned a nice quiet vacation for this week, down in Carmel. My financial position was not exactly stable, however, and this job-particularly after Raymond Treacle sweetened the pot with his five-thousand-dollar offer-was one I could not afford to turn down. Kerry understood that, but she was still disappointed. So in a weak moment I'd suggested that she come along to Trinity County; maybe I could wrap up my investigation in a few days, I said, and we could still get in some vacation time-Shasta Lake was real pretty this time of year. She'd agreed, but without much enthusiasm, and she had been grumpy on the drive up yesterday. Last night and this morning, too.

Now, though, she seemed a little more pleased about things, and I had hopes that the trip would turn out all right after all, on the personal as well as the financial front. Maybe tonight I would get what I hadn't got last night. The thought made me lick my lips like a horny old hound.

The four fire-destroyed buildings had been set apart from the others, on the left-hand side of the road. That was one reason the whole of Cooperville hadn't become an inferno; others were that there'd been no wind on the night of the blaze, the meadow grass was still green thanks to late-spring rains, and Jack Coleclaw and some of his fellow residents had spotted the fire immediately and rushed to do battle with it. Even so, there was nothing left of the four structures except a jumble of blackened timbers, with a wide swatch of scorched earth and a hastily dug firebreak ringing them.

I stopped the car at the edge of the firebreak. Kerry said as I fumbled around in back for the old trench coat I'd brought along, 'I suppose you're going to go poke around over there.'

'Yup. You can come along if you want to.'

'In all that soot and debris? No thanks. I'll go back and look at the ghosts that are still standing.'

We got out into the hot sunshine. It was quiet there, peaceful except for the distant raucous screeching of a jay, and the air was heavy with the scent of evergreens. Kerry wandered off along the road; I put the trench coat on and belted it, to protect my shirt and trousers, and then went across the firebreak to the burned-out buildings.

The county sheriff's investigators had been over the area without finding anything; I didn't expect to find