by Gwen Moffat
‘Oh yes,’ murmured Rose, trance-like. ‘He can’t claim Vogel was a mistake. There was the barbed wire.’ She shuddered.
Charlotte shouted: ‘Vogel was dead when he strung him up!’
‘Oh, God!’ Semple staggered, knocked over a stool, righted it and sat down. He eyed the pistol on the bar. Lovejoy signalled wildly to Miss Pink and she shook her head. They all knew it wasn’t loaded.
‘I’ll have another bourbon,’ Semple said, and grinned like a death’s-head. ‘The condemned man, you know? I’m running up a bill but my wife will pay.’ He turned the ghastly grin on her. ‘Won’t you, sweetie?’
‘Julius, it’s going to be all right –’
‘I’m sure it is. You’re more than capable.’ He tossed back the bourbon, put the glass down with a crack and looked meaningly at Lovejoy who brought his eyes round slowly to Miss Pink as if a sudden movement would result in violence. She nodded.
‘Miss Pink gives her permission,’ Semple said, and turned to Blair. ‘You guys chose the best lifestyle; I never envied you until this moment, never saw any future in shacking up with a fellow – you needn’t look at me like that, Earl, I’m not being offensive, just telling you how it looks from where I’m at.’ He drank half his bourbon, savouring it. They watched him warily. He went on, still addressing the partners: ‘You got it made, you two; the rest of us is in shackles. Women!’ He smiled: a sad and reminiscent smile: ‘There was Joanne: a gorgeous girl who don’t give a damn for anyone – and then there’s a lady like my wife –’ He stopped, sucking in his cheeks, staring at her, ruminating. ‘However, beauty’s only skin-deep, isn’t it, sweetie?’ Charlotte turned her head away and all they could see was the mane of dyed red hair. ‘And my wife,’ went on the implacable voice, ‘far from being careless, will never lose faith in me. If I’m going to fry in the electric chair, this lady will be protesting my innocence right to the very end, or at least saying I had provocation.’ Charlotte walked unsteadily to the window. Semple raised his voice: ‘Won’t you, honey?’
She turned. She was haggard but she spoke firmly, with only the slightest quaver: ‘I can’t do that, Julius, but I’ll stand by you – there’s no question of that –’ Her voice strengthened, she came back, put her arm on his shoulders and stroked his hair. ‘You’re my old boy,’ she said firmly. ‘As if I’d ever let you down.’ He pushed his glass across the bar. ‘Should you –?’ she asked.
‘You go and pack my gear,’ he said.
Their eyes locked. She gave the faintest shrug and turned to go. On her way to the door she paused and looked at Miss Pink. ‘You destroyed my husband,’ she said coldly, and walked out.
Semple smiled at Miss Pink. Lovejoy said: ‘Don’t take no notice; she’s not thinking straight.’
‘Oh, she’s thinking straight,’ Semple said, and stood up, taking the Colt from the bar. He strode across the room and pushed open the screen. They craned their necks to follow his progress down the street, his heels raising little spurts of dust. Blair lifted the counter flap, Lovejoy followed him and everyone moved across the room, but slowly as if frightened that he would turn suddenly and see them.
He came to the museum and stood against the wall outside the door. Facing the street, he lifted the pistol and took something from his pocket. ‘Jesus!’ Rose gasped. ‘He’s loaded it!’
Lovejoy picked up a chair and swung it at the window. The noise of shattered glass was shocking but Semple didn’t flinch. He yanked open the screen door and leapt inside. There was a report, and another, overlapped by more, then silence.
‘Someone had better telephone,’ Miss Pink said when nothing happened, no one screamed or emerged from the museum and there were no more shots. ‘Call for an ambulance, Verne, and a doctor.’
‘What do we do?’ Rose whispered. ‘We can’t go across.’
‘Two people were firing.’ Lovejoy was incredulous. ‘Two!’
‘They were firing at each other?’ Rose asked. No one answered her. They listened to Blair telephoning in the kitchen. They waited, staring at the museum door.
The screen opened slowly and Semple emerged, looking as if a can of scarlet paint had been emptied over his shoulder. He held his forearm gingerly with the other hand and started to lurch across the road towards the Queen. They hurried out of the restaurant.
‘What happened to Charlotte?’ Rose asked as they reached him. ‘Who was firing?’
‘We both were. I was the lucky one. She’s dead.’
‘Lucky!’ Lovejoy repeated. ‘You killed three people now.’
‘No,’ Semple said. ‘Only one. She killed the others.’
‘She blackmailed me from the first.’
They had dressed the wound and told him to stay quiet, to wait for the ambulance but, still shaking with shock, he couldn’t stop talking.
‘She had to tell me she shot Timothy,’ he said, ‘because I thought we had an intruder that evening. The television was on, I thought she was watching it. I’d been working late in the museum but I’d finished and I was drinking coffee in the cabin. I heard someone come in the back door and I went for my rifle – and it wasn’t there. She came in the kitchen carrying it, and she told me she’d left the pick-up outside town, told me to go and fetch it. She didn’t tell me the rest until I came back. By that time anyone looking would have seen me drive the truck home. She was in the clear.’ He looked at them, seated round him in the partners’ sitting room. ‘What I never understood was, she didn’t care for me much.’ He shook his head. ‘But she hated Joanne. She meant to kill that girl, she thought she had, or at least driven her to her death in the crashed Jeep … Then she killed Vogel.’
‘So Timothy did know who shot him,’ Lovejoy said. ‘And he told Vogel.’
‘No. He was unconscious when she got back to the cabin. That was when she took his wallet. She thought he was dead and she left him for Vogel to find. Vogel was the fall-guy. And he had to be killed before he could be questioned because he’d probably have an alibi for Timothy’s murder. Even if he had to admit he was delivering a consignment of heroin, so long as it was a hundred miles away, that was preferable to a murder charge. So she killed him and planted the wallet in his stove.’ His eyes closed and he slumped in his chair.
They moved away, talking quietly. ‘That woman was a monster,’ Rose said. ‘She shot Timothy in mistake for Joanne, and then she followed Joanne to try again. She thought she’d succeeded. And yet Julius says Charlotte didn’t care for him. What is this?’
‘It wasn’t sex,’ Lovejoy said.
‘Of course it was,’ Miss Pink countered. ‘But not directly. Julius wasn’t having an affair with Joanne but Charlotte was possessive even if she didn’t care for him, and she was insanely jealous of the girl’s youth and beauty, perhaps most of all she was fiercely resentful of Joanne’s total disregard of men’s feelings.’ She smiled wryly. ‘Charlotte was no feminist.’
Blair said: ‘Of course he was never frightened of Joanne, it was Charlotte who kept saying he was. What Julius was terrified of was his own wife; he knew what she was capable of.’
‘She was setting him up,’ Lovejoy said. ‘He was to be the last fall-guy.’
‘She almost won,’ Rose said. ‘He was behaving like he was beaten in here.’
‘He knew he was no match for her.’ Blair smiled thinly. ‘Who would be?’
‘Except he had the gun,’ Lovejoy pointed out. ‘And he had the magazine in his pocket.’ He frowned. ‘That don’t look like he was prepared to be anyone’s fall-guy. You know, I reckon those two hated each other.’
‘He was carrying the Colt for self-defence,’ Blair said firmly. ‘He was married to a woman had killed one guy to silence him; it had to have crossed his mind that he was in a very vulnerable position himself. She’d killed twice – and she was about to kill again. He shot in self-defence. We all heard her fire first. There was the report of the rifle: the heavy boom, the shot that hit him, and then he fired, right?’
‘Righ
t,’ they said.
⋆
‘What do you propose to do now?’ Rose asked later that evening as the Rattlesnake Hills smouldered above the shadow of the Sierras. ‘Will you continue along the Joplin Trail from here or go back to the Missouri and start over? Or forget about them altogether?’
‘I have to write the book,’ Miss Pink said. ‘It’s the least I can do: to finish the job Timothy started. Besides, I’m attracted to Permelia Joplin.’
‘Backlash! The virtuous pioneer women and their stalwart men forging westward against all odds: macho stuff.’
‘They forged westward but the rest could be myth.’
‘Oh, come on! The diaries aren’t myth.’
‘Diaries are written for posterity.’
‘Are you suggesting that they left out significant bits, like bad relationships? You reckon there were women around as bad as Charlotte?’
‘They’ve always been around.’
‘Not on the pioneer trails!’ Rose was incensed.
Miss Pink smiled. ‘I suspect there was some form of balance in operation; public opinion would have put a curb on the ones who were merely naughty, like malicious gossips, but for women who were a serious threat to the community you’d need something more drastic.’
‘Like a husband with a blazing Colt?’
‘No. Other women probably, operating quietly and secretly, in the dark. Survivors don’t go in for confrontations. High noon is for the men.’
THE RAPTOR ZONE
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 1
Two people sat on Cape Deception in the fog. ‘I’m frightened,’ the woman said. ‘I don’t know where I am.’
‘Fog never bothered you before.’
‘That’s not what I meant.’
The man made no immediate response and they lapsed into a silence that held an element of tension. After a time he said quietly and without heat, ‘You should leave him.’
‘Be reasonable, Chester; it’s my home. My father built it.’
‘Then make him go.’
‘How?’
‘He’s away now; don’t take him back.’
‘What do I do: change the locks? Don’t crowd me, man.’
‘You raised the subject.’
He glanced sideways. Her face, which he thought was beautiful, appeared relaxed in profile but when she turned towards him her eyes were filled with tears.
‘This has to be an early menopause,’ she said helplessly. ‘These last few days I’ve felt drained, bereft, as if someone died. I even cry when I’m alone.’
‘Oh no, not you!’ He was shocked.
She shrugged and turned back to the white space below the headland, then she gasped. ‘Oh, look! Look, Chester!’
The fog had swayed and parted like a cosmic curtain, revealing a stretch of shadowed water across which a line of pelicans flapped with lazy wingbeats.
‘About time too,’ said Chester Hoyle, relieved at the diversion. ‘It’s unusual for the fog to persist so long in August. The sun should burn it off by mid-morning.’
‘We’ve affected the whole global weather system: drought in Africa, floods in India, destruction of the rain forest, the greenhouse syndrome, earthquakes.’
‘Not earthquakes.’ He smiled indulgently. ‘We’re not responsible for earthquakes.’
‘How do you know that?’ Her face softened, her eyes dwelt on his gentle mouth. ‘Of course not,’ she conceded. ‘I love you, Chester; you keep my feet on the ground.’ She paused. ‘You keep me sane,’ she added.
He looked down at the water and his mouth twitched as if at a spasm of pain. The fog was melting away like steam. She glanced southward at the rollers creaming past the sea stacks to break and spread along the pale sand. A few figures were down there in the cove below the village and they could hear faint calls. A dog barked. From the cliffs under their perch the sea lions could be heard: females crying dolefully, the males growling.
‘I’d hate to be a sea lion,’ she mused. ‘Imagine: swimming in deep water, and knowing the great whites are about. How could you live like that: a hungry carnivore lurking out there on the fringe of your world?’
‘There must be a hundred times as many people killed on this highway as are taken by sharks.’
‘Sharks on the highway?’
They giggled and leaned towards each other. They might have been husband and wife, not long married; they were both in middle-age, although separated by a decade, both spare, neither of them particularly striking but nor were they nondescript in appearance. Lois Keller was forty today, a woman of average height but muscular. She had short curling hair: chestnut-brown but not shaped nor tinted. She wore no make-up. Her features were regular, the mouth wide and full, the teeth uncapped, the eyes expressive under dark brows. She wore shabby hiking boots, faded jeans and a T-shirt with pumas and the exhortation to Protect California Mountain Lions. She looked like – and was – a backwoods traveller, a person who, if she did get lost, would very soon find her way again.
Chester Hoyle was lean and fit for his age. He wore spectacles, he looked bookish, clever, concerned. He was concerned with her; she was concerned with herself, at least, with her family problems. Chester was careful about his appearance: he wore a grey chamois shirt, laundered Levis, oiled boots. Lois didn’t bother about appearances except where the environment was concerned.
‘This is a dreadful coast,’ she said now, observing intermittent splashes of surf where no rock was visible. ‘Look at that submerged reef! And if you were in a boat trying to get out from shore into deep water you’d run on to the Spine.’
They considered the rocks they called the Devil’s Spine some two miles offshore. ‘It’s all right if you don’t sail,’ he pointed out. ‘It’s great scenically. You love the Oregon coast.’
‘It’s like the sharks: fascinating to see the fin cruising above the surface but no way would you want to be out there.’
He frowned. ‘You’re in a very negative mood this afternoon. Did something happen you haven’t told me about? Has he called?’
‘No, he didn’t phone. And he hasn’t written. I wouldn’t expect him to. He’ll come back when he’s tired of whoever it is, whatever it was, took him to the city. I think I’ve got the autumnal disease or condition or whatever. I’m always like this at the end of summer, and I guess I’m becoming more perceptive with age. Everything’s dying.’
‘Oh, come on! Look around you— ’
‘Most of the birds have left. The young have flown, the swallows will soon be gone, the vine maple’s turning red— ’
‘There are buds; there are catkins on the alders.’
‘So – you talked me out of it – “and if winter comes, can spring be far behind?” Who said that? Problem: how do we get through the winter?’
‘The same as every other winter, except that this one you’ve got me besides your other friends. And that reminds me, shouldn’t we be getting back?’
‘What would I do without you?’
They stood up, she gracefully, he with the incipient stiffness of his years. They didn’t start back immediately but stood for a moment surveying the ocean with keen eyes.
‘No whales,’ she said. ‘Too early for the greys but there’s always the chance of a blue whale.’ Her gaze passed over the long southern cliffs, timbered to their wild summits. Inland conifers friezed the spiky skyline unevenly and draped the canyons, hiding contours, crags and waterfalls: a wall of green fur that was bright in the sun but with folded shadows in the depths. At the foot of this bastion of the coastal ra
nge the roofs of the village showed above thick brush, appearing, from their tiny scale, vulnerable to all the elements: fire and water, earth and air. Rain brought landslides, drought and lightning produced forest fires; with the winter came the gales. Permanency here lay in the ocean and the forest, and both were dangerous.
‘Yes,’ Lois Keller said quietly, as they strolled across the scorched grass, ‘this place suits me.’
‘You’re a chameleon. You can be happy anywhere, providing the circumstances are congenial.’
‘That’s the point.’ She stopped and stared at him. ‘I never told you this but you remember the little girl went missing recently from the campground on the Rogue River?’
‘Of course I do.’
‘Before he left this time he told me to keep quiet that he was in San Francisco that weekend.’
‘So?’ His tone was loaded.
‘So on that Monday he came up the coast and he spent Monday night in the same campground, the one the child was at, the night she disappeared.’
‘Are you telling me— ’ He couldn’t go on but shook his head savagely.
Her shoulders slumped. ‘I’m telling you what he told me, Chester; he was at that camp the night the kid was taken and he told me to keep quiet about it. If anyone asked I was to say he was in Portland that weekend: the opposite direction.’
‘He’s crazy.’ They resumed walking, Chester a pace ahead, his back stiff. After a few steps he swung round on her. ‘He’s trying it on: pushing it, riling you, tormenting. It’s his form of humour; it’s obscene.’
‘Bad taste,’ she said weakly. ‘All the same— ’
‘All the same, what?’ All gentleness had gone and he was so furious that he didn’t realise she was getting the fall-out from his anger.
‘Grace thinks like you, and she says he was nowhere near the Rogue River, except possibly to stay in a motel at Gold Beach that night. She says that doesn’t mean he’s not attracted by the kind of situation. And he is attracted or he’d never have appropriated the crime, as it were.’ He was silent. She went on defiantly, ‘Well, Grace left home; she’s safe.’ Her hand went to her mouth as if to repudiate that but he was still silent and this seemed to provoke her. ‘Small thanks to me, you think? Hell, Chester, you don’t know what a man’s nature is when you marry him. It’s not like us; we’ve known each other for over a year, we have the same interests, we discuss things – and there’s no sex to get in the way’ – he flinched at this but, watching the trail, she missed the movement – ‘that was the problem with Andy and me. It was a long time since Grace’s father died and – well, OK, I made a mistake when I married Andy, but let’s be thankful for small mercies: we didn’t have any children. And Grace took no harm.’
