I said, 'How do you suppose the fire got started? The one here in Cooperville, I mean.'
'Does it matter, Mr. Wade?'
'I'm just curious.'
'It was a burning curiosity that laid the ghosts,' he said, and cut loose with his laugh again. Listening to it, and to him, was making me a little uncomfortable. I get just as edgy around unarmed oddballs as I do around those with weapons.
'Is it possible somebody set the fire deliberately?' I asked him. 'Somebody who feels as you do about cremating the ghosts?'
It was the wrong thing to say. Penrose's mean little eyes narrowed, and when he spoke again his voice had lost its friendliness. 'I think you'd better leave now. I have a great deal of work to do.'
Kerry said, 'Couldn't we talk a while longer, Mr. Penrose? I really would like to know more about-'
'No,' he said. 'No. Come back and visit me again if you decide to move here. But I don't think you should; it's probably too late. Goodbye, now.'
There was nothing for us to do but to leave. We went out onto the platform deck, and Kerry thanked him for his hospitality, and he said, 'Not at all,' and banged the door shut behind us.
On the way down the stairs she said to me, 'Why do you always have to be so blunt?'
'He was getting on my nerves.'
'We could have found out more if you'd been a little more tactful.'
'We? Bill and Kerry Wade, from San Francisco. Christ!'
'It got him to talk to us, didn't it?'
'All right, so it got him to talk to us.'
'Which is more than you accomplished with your direct approach to Mrs. Bloom,' she said. 'You probably blurted out that you were a detective to Gary Coleclaw and that artist, Thatcher, too. No wonder they wouldn't tell you anything.'
'Listen, don't tell me how to do my job.'
'I'm not. I'm only suggesting-'
'Don't suggest. I didn't bring you along to do any suggesting.'
'No, I know why you brought me along. Women are only good for one thing, right?'
'Oh, for God's sake-'
'You can be a macho jerk sometimes, you know that? You think you know everything. Well, why don't you go screw yourself? You've been doing it all day.'
She slid into the car and sat there with her arms folded, staring straight ahead. I wanted to say something else to her, but I didn't seem to have any words. The thing was, she was right. I had handled things badly with Penrose, and with Gary Coleclaw and Thatcher and Mrs. Bloom. And with Kerry, too. It was just one of those days when I couldn't seem to get the proper handle on how to deal with anybody. But it galled me to have to admit it. Kerry wasn't the detective here, damn it; I was.
A half-mile farther along there was another homesteader's cabin, this one owned by a family named Butterfield, but I was in no frame of mind for another interview. I drove back into town. When we came to the Coleclaw place I looked it over for some indication that Jack Coleclaw and his wife had returned from Weaverville. There wasn't any-no automobiles, no people, not even any sign of the fat yapping brown and-white dog. So there was no point in stopping there either; I kept on going up the road and out of town.
Kerry didn't say one word to me all the way back to Weaverville.
5
Thirty seconds after I pulled into the lot of the Pinecrest Motel, Raymond Treacle showed up.
I had forgotten all about him. He lived in Redding, and I had talked to him on the phone last night and arranged to meet him here at five o'clock. It was now two minutes past five. My first thought when I saw him drive in was that it was a good thing I had decided not to stop anywhere else in Cooperville. Failing to show up for a meeting with a man who was willing to pay you five thousand dollars was very poor business. I could not seem to do anything right today, except by accident. Maybe I needed a vacation more than I thought I did.
Kerry and I were already out of the car, and she had finally spoken to me, saying that she was going to go in and take a shower, when Treacle appeared. He was driving a brand new Lincoln Continental, and in spite of the heat-it was a good ten degrees hotter in Weaverville than it had been higher up in the mountains-he was wearing a three-piece suit. But he was one of these people who manage to look cool and comfortable no matter what the temperature might be.
He was a handsome guy in his forties, lean and fit, with close-cropped black hair and a fashionable mustache. Throughout our first meeting in San Francisco, which had lasted about an hour, I had kept trying to dislike him. He was glib, he was materialistic and status-oriented, he didn't seem to care much about the feelings of others-he was everything I wasn't and considered distasteful about the modern businessman. And yet he was also so damned earnest, and tried so hard to be friendly, that I couldn't seem to work up much of an antipathy toward him.
He came over and shook my hand in his earnest way. When I introduced him to Kerry he took her hand, too, and smiled at her approvingly. She seemed to like that; the smile she gave him in return was warmer than any she'd let me have in the past couple of days.
Treacle said to me, 'How did it go in Cooperville today?'
'I didn't find out much from the people I talked to,' I told him, 'but I did find evidence that the fire there was deliberately set.'
'Oh?'
'Whoever did it used a candle,' I said. I went back and opened up the trunk and showed him the cup-shaped piece of stone with the wax residue inside. 'I found this among the debris.'
He used one of the rags in the trunk to pick it up, and peered at it. 'Travertine,' he said.
'Pardon?'
'That's the kind of mineral this is. Travertine-layered calcium carbonate. Geology is one of my interests.'
'An unusual stone?'
'No, not for this part of the country.' He rubbed at it with the rag, ridding it of some of the black from the fire. 'It's fossilized,' he said, and showed me the imprints in the stone.
'Bryophytes.'
'What are bryophytes?'
'Nonflowering plants. Mosses and liverworts.'
'Is that kind of fossil uncommon?'
'Not really. They turn up fairly often around here.'
Treacle picked at the wax residue with his fingernail. 'This is purple, isn't it?'
I nodded. 'One of the women in Cooperville makes purple candles as a hobby. Ella Bloom.'
'That one,' Treacle said wryly. 'She's crazy. Did you talk to her?'
'I tried to. She threatened me with a shotgun.'
'I'm not surprised. Do you think she…?'
'Maybe. I don't know yet.'
I closed the trunk. Kerry was fanning herself with one hand; even as late in the day as it was, the heat out there in the parking lot was intense. Treacle noticed her discomfort and waved a hand toward the motel's restaurant-and-bar. 'Why don't we go in where it's cool and have a drink?'
'I could use one,' Kerry said.
I said, 'I thought you were going to go take a shower?'
'I'd rather have a drink. Do you mind?'
I sighed. I seemed to be doing a lot of sighing today. And the three of us went off together to the bar.
Inside, the air-conditioner was going full-blast and it was nice and cool. We sat in a booth, away from the half-dozen other patrons, and ordered drinks-beer for Kerry and me, a Tom Collins for Treacle. While we were waiting for them I filled him in on how my interviews, or attempted interviews, had gone in Cooperville.
