by Gwen Moffat
‘But not everyone is a naturalist.’
‘What was that, ma’am?’
‘I said not everyone here is a naturalist. I saw a car in the parking lot with a bumper sticker: “I Love Spotted Owls. Roasted.”’ He gaped at her. ‘A man in a Stetson with a tall blonde in a black mini-skirt and high red heels.’
‘That’s Andy Keller. And the girl he— He put that on his bumper? Andy? He dared?’
‘They’re a local couple?’ She was the picture of innocent surprise, although she couldn’t hold that expression long in the face of his own amazement; but now he was thinking, which was something that didn’t come easily to Boligard, at least in these circumstances.
‘His wife,’ he muttered, almost to himself, ‘is a dedicated conservationist, and Grace feels the same way … ’course, he’s only her step-father and often there’s resentment, isn’t there? They tell me Bill Ferguson was a regular guy, pity he got himself drowned. Fine sailor, they say.’ He shot her a glance. ‘This guy with the bumper sticker’s married to Ferguson’s widow.’ But Miss Pink looked bewildered and he made an attempt to change the subject. ‘Gossip,’ he said firmly. ‘Place like this, all we got to do is gossip about the neighbours. You’ll meet them all; Lois Keller is a fine woman, she’s a published author, writes crime novels, murder mysteries and stuff, makes a good living too. The blonde – lady – in the short skirt is her husband’s assistant. Keller writes screenplays.’ He regarded her steadily. This was fact, he implied, not gossip.
She smiled. ‘I see why your social life is hectic.’
He nodded but she had the impression he wasn’t listening. ‘There’s a restaurant here but no food store,’ he told her. ‘We mostly shop in Salmon, ten miles south. You can get everything you need there.’
‘I came through Salmon on my way here. What is the food like at the restaurant?’
‘It’s gourmet food,’ he said, his thoughts still elsewhere.
He wasn’t far out in his judgment of the Tattler’s cuisine. If the rest of the menu proved as good as the bowl of clam chowder she had for lunch – and the portions as generous – she was faced with the familiar problem of balancing intake with a vast expenditure of energy. In her sixties she felt that, at a time when one might be excused for hoping to take life easily, it was most unfair that burning off fat should have become such a strenuous chore. She sighed as the waiter asked her what she would like to follow, declined his suggestion of various pies and ices, and asked if he were the son of the house.
He beamed at her. ‘No, ma’am, I’m merely helping out.’
‘You live here?’
‘I’m staying with a friend. What part of England are you— ’
He stopped as the couple from the brown Chevrolet came in. Miss Pink regarded them benignly, wondering if the man – Andy Keller – had alopecia or some other condition that might account for his not liking to remove his hat indoors, wondering why his assistant was dressed so unsuitably for the seaside. There was a clatter as the waiter dropped a knife and fork and, straightening, backed into a chair. As he made his way to the kitchen the couple watched him, the girl smiling, Keller with a look of contempt.
Miss Pink sipped her coffee and contemplated the highway beyond the dining-room windows. After a minute or two an elderly man came in from the back quarters; his face and bearing: close-cropped hair, bristling moustache and rigid stance, reminiscent of the old soldier but this impression marred by a large plastic apron. He stopped at the other table.
Keller looked at him with amusement. ‘Charming,’ he announced in a ridiculous falsetto. ‘Quite charming.’
‘I work in a kitchen,’ the old fellow said. ‘Grease sticks. Like all dirt.’ He held the other’s eye.
‘You’re the cook?’ the girl asked in amazement.
‘Yes, ma’am. Cordon bleu.’
‘You speak French too.’ Keller’s eyes widened.
The chef sagged a little, like an old horse resting a leg. He didn’t look at Miss Pink. ‘I’ll take your order, Andy,’ he said calmly.
‘You haven’t given us the menu.’
‘I can tell you what we have— ’
‘Bring a menu for my lady here.’
‘No, that’s OK; you can tell us.’ In contrast with her flamboyant appearance the girl had a shy breathless little voice and she was obviously ill at ease in this place with its linen tablecloths and real flowers, its one other customer minding her own business. The chef disregarded the protest anyway and brought menus from a sideboard. As Keller studied his the old fellow regarded the Stetson thoughtfully, then shot a glance at Miss Pink, surprising her own vague stare.
They ordered crab and cheese sandwiches. The chef retired and after a moment a plump woman emerged from the kitchen and advanced on Miss Pink with the bill. She asked if everything had been satisfactory.
‘Delicious.’ Miss Pink smiled. ‘Too good, but I shall come back. I’ve taken the cottage called Quail Run.’
‘I know. We shall be glad to see you. We like our food at the Tattler. My husband trained in Paris, and he’s worked at the Dorchester and the Ritz.’
‘You wouldn’t get clam chowder like that in London.’
‘Well, they don’t have the ingredients. You might get it in New England however, providing they had my husband to prepare it.’ She smiled serenely and moved away, pausing at the other table to remark pleasantly, ‘A splendid hat, Andy, but you need tooled boots and spurs to go with it. Even a horse. Or a car.’
‘He’s got the car,’ the girl said, going along with the joke.
‘Oh, has he, dear?’ The woman looked puzzled and nodded towards the windows. ‘Not the Chevrolet. That belongs to Mrs Keller.’
The kitchen door swung to behind her broad back. Keller swallowed as his eyes came back to the girl. Miss Pink rose and walked out. In the open air she paused and exhaled, and realised that she had been holding her breath.
She returned to her cottage to find a small man busily engaged in cutting back the brambles from her parking space. A schnauzer rushed round the corner of the house barking, chased by a tiny woman making grabs at his collar. Dark and sharp-eyed as a chipmunk, she wore fine pink cotton marked with sap stains.
‘I’m your neighbour,’ she said, extending her free hand. ‘Miriam Ramet. My place is along the road, on the creek. I’m a friend of your landlord and I look after things when he’s away. If we’d known you were taking the cottage we’d have cleared the yard before you arrived.’ Her tone implied disapproval of the lack of notice.
Miss Pink murmured something about not bothering with it, and paused to be introduced to the man who, however, continued to slash at the brambles.
‘That’s Willard.’ Miriam acknowledged the pause carelessly. ‘And this monster is Oscar. He doesn’t bite.’ She released the terrier which ran straight to Miss Pink’s car to urinate on a wheel. ‘Establishing territory,’ explained his owner.
‘Won’t you come inside?’ Miss Pink asked politely, and Miriam entered the cottage without so much as a glance at Willard.
This, the first guest at Quail Run, had no small talk but was concerned to discover a person’s background and intentions as quickly as possible. In a very short time she had elicited the information that Miss Pink lived in Cornwall with a housekeeper, two cats and a large garden, that she was travelling up the coast to British Columbia, that her hobby was birding and she had an interest in food – and that gave Miss Pink an opening.
‘I lunched at the Wandering Tattler,’ she said. ‘The clam chowder was superb.’
‘Too rich for me. Carl Linquist uses cream in everything. I mean, look at his wife! I eat sensibly and I run four miles every day. I’m ten years older than Eve Linquist.’
‘Really. And who is the boy?’
‘What boy?’
‘Waiting on table. Is he a student?’
‘What’s he look like?’ Miriam was bristling with an emotion that was too intense for curiosity.
‘
A handsome lad, quick and deft … shortish hair, wearing a T-shirt with a killer whale on the front. He said he was staying with a friend, just helping out at the restaurant.’
‘Did he now. That’s Oliver. He is, in fact, staying with me.’ The tone was acid. ‘No doubt he got tired of my tuna on cracked wheat for lunch. I can think of no reason other than food that could take Oliver down to Eve Linquist’s place. Of course, she’s a very comfortable person.’
Miss Pink refused to confirm or deny this. Instead she said idly, ‘They were quiet at lunchtime; I suppose most tourists will picnic on the shore. There were only two customers besides myself. A man’ – she smiled wryly – ‘who wore his Stetson in the dining-room, and a very striking blonde.’
‘Oh yes.’ Miriam’s eyes shifted. She studied the ocean. ‘You see how the fog lays out there, just offshore? Like an animal, I always think, waiting to come back in the night.’
‘It’s a wild coast. I’m not surprised that you should see no boats out on the water.’ They stared at the stacks. ‘Is Willard your gardener?’ Miss Pink asked.
Miriam took a deep breath. ‘He’s the gardener, handyman, dog-sitter when I go abroad. When my husband died I built a little house on my land and Willard lives in that and looks after things for me. You feel more secure with a man around.’
‘Surely there’s no crime in Sundown?’
‘Not among the locals, but you never know who’s about in the summer. Hikers stop at the bar, and you see some very peculiar people on the road. After all, if you wanted to get to San Francisco from Portland and avoid the highway patrols, you’d come down the coast instead of taking the interstate. And there are some nice homes in Sundown; a criminal would expect to find some good jewellery lying around.’ She glanced at the large ruby guarding her wedding ring. ‘And most of us aren’t into guard dogs and guns in the night table. Except perhaps Carl Linquist. A gun, I mean; they don’t keep a dog.’
‘He’s fond of guns?’
‘Carl’s a redneck. So is Eve. Perhaps redneck is too strong; it implies low-class people. Let’s say the Linquists are a trifle reactionary in their attitudes.’
‘He made it obvious that he disapproved of the man in the Stetson.’
‘Did he say anything?’
‘His wife did. She made some remark about his needing a horse to complete the outfit, even a car, and seemed to be telling the girl that the Chevrolet outside belonged to – a Mrs Keller?’
‘And I bet she smiled when she said it.’
‘Well, I was on my way to the door— ’
‘And I have to finish clearing up your yard— ’
‘Please don’t trouble— ’
‘No trouble. It’s Willard’s job … ’
Voicing amicable platitudes they parted, and Miss Pink drove to town to stock her larder and refrigerator.
The coast was gorgeous but she paid it little attention, thinking as she drove about that little community on the edge of the Pacific with the towering forests behind the village and the fog in front, lying on the water, waiting to come back in the night. The people seemed a little off-beat but not so much as might be expected: living in an ambience of potential violence, albeit elemental, not human. A good place to pause for a week and watch nature play out her dramas, she thought contentedly and, returning to basics, focused her attention on road signs and traffic as she entered the town of Salmon at the mouth of the Sockeye River.
Chapter 4
Before dark the fog came back to Sundown and that evening Miss Pink basked in the cosy atmosphere of her temporary home. She lit the fire in the wood-burning stove, pulled the curtains, switched on a couple of lamps and stood back to approve the result.
Her living-room was predominantly white, the carpet and curtains a flat grey. Colour was disposed carefully about the space: lampshades in old rose, gentian cushions on grey chairs and sofa, glass floats in lemon and bottle-green on white shelves. A television set was hidden in a white wood cabinet. She didn’t switch it on. Quail Run was a seaside cottage that smelled of salt and weed; it seemed appropriate that the only sound to penetrate its walls should be that of the fog horn. In such surroundings it was like the call of a friendly water beast. That thought was less fantastic than a curious book which she found on the shelves: a well-produced comic that was a mish-mash of popular science fiction and ancient myths. There were mermaids and mermen and beautiful naked female bipeds writhing in the gauntlets of monsters in armour – armour perfect down to the last ring of chain-mail. There were worms, fat and oozy with a head at each end. The commentary was a form of prose-poetry. She found the whole thing silly and rather nasty but she appreciated that it would have considerable appeal for people nourished on juvenile comics. She replaced it on its shelf and turned to the map she had bought in Salmon.
This was a Forest production and, since the Forest Department’s boundary reached the shore on either side of Sundown, it covered the area from the ocean to far back in the hinterland, although not in detail. She sighed for Ordnance Survey maps where even the walls of fields might be delineated – but there was one peculiar advantage to a map with a scale of two miles to the inch, and no contour lines: it held surprises. The map was crude. On a vast plane of green (forest, not lowland) a trail left the loop road north of Bobcat Creek and zigzagged past a black dot that could be a house but was most probably a cabin because there was no road to it. There was no indication of gradient other than the zigzags, and the fact that beyond the black dot the trail ran straight to Bobcat Creek, which it crossed to follow a stream up Porcupine Gulch. The stream headed in Pandora Ridge, which was an arc of a great rim of high ground that enclosed the basin at the back of Sundown and which was drained by Bobcat Creek.
Other routes were marked to Pandora Ridge, one starting only a few hundred yards from Quail Run, and starting with close zigzags, indicating a steep slope. Another, between that and the trail up Porcupine Gulch, was too short to be anything else but precipitous. She folded the map contentedly; tomorrow she would go up Porcupine – the route would be no more than nine miles if she descended directly to her cottage; moreover it would be feasible in poor weather: a pleasant woodland walk.
The trail started easily, more like a path through a Devon wood than one in the coastal range of Oregon. Opposite a drive with a post and the name Keller burned in a slab of driftwood, was a narrow earthen trail and a Forest sign that said ‘Coon Gulch 5m, Pandora Ridge 4m, Porcupine Gulch 1.5m’. The introduction seemed a trifle pedestrian, even more so when, having strolled slowly up the graded zigzags to give her knees the chance to absorb the feel of a slope again, she came to a cabin with Navajo blankets thrown over the rail and a pair of chukka boots on the porch. The door was closed and the fly screen obscured the side window so she couldn’t tell if it were open. There was no sound from inside as she walked past, treading carefully on the pine needles. She glanced at her watch. It was ten thirty.
The fog showed no signs of clearing and she had gone only a short distance beyond the cabin before it was out of sight. Now she was surrounded by the trunks of trees: insubstantial pillars that disappeared in a cotton-grey ceiling with no hint of how far above her head were their crowns. From the size of their trunks she calculated that the trees, mostly Douglas firs, were probably well over a hundred feet tall. Nothing moved, no bird called; the loudest sound was that of a leaf brushing the twigs of a myrtle as it fell. The leaf was scarlet and had come from a vine maple. She frowned; there was something intimidating about a country where leaves changed colour in August.
The trail was damp, the dust laid by the fog, and in the silty surface were the marks of shoes and cleated soles. For over a mile the gradient was so gentle that it was almost level although she traversed a steep slope. This section of the forest had been logged a long time ago; among old but massive stumps there was an under-storey of shrubs and huge ferns that must have been all of six feet tall, and there were mounds so covered with mosses that it was impossible to see whether t
he base was rock or rotting wood. Once she heard a squirrel scolding in the fog, and when it stopped she was aware of water close at hand. She had come to the creek. The big trees stopped on the lip of the eroded bank and some had fallen to jam the stream. There were alders here, and maples, and among them small warblers with flashes of yellow flitted through the foliage.
She crossed the creek at a point where a tributary came down the far slope and started up the course of Porcupine Gulch. After a short distance the trail left the water to rise in sharp zigzags, the drop increasing rapidly. For over two miles she had seen no grass to speak of, and no trace of cows; indeed, in the upper reaches of the timbered depression it was obvious that no cow would be able to keep its footing off the trail. This coast range was a world away from the Rocky Mountains where, despite the altitude and the alpine grandeur, there were flowery meadows and marshy lakes where cows grazed and riders could gallop through the forest to plunge down slopes and splash through creeks, jump fallen logs and never bother about a trail. Here – she looked around – you could only pray that your horse didn’t put one foot off the trail; in fact she had a sudden terrifying thought: if a walker left the trail, in a dozen places he would fall, and almost anywhere he would be lost.
Her pace slackened. She was aware, not only of the profound silence but that, apart from the squirrel, the water and the occasional falling leaf, there had been no sound for over an hour. The fog muffled noises, of course (she hadn’t heard the horn since she left the village) and it could be that it was the fog itself that was responsible for a sensation that she related, not to the absence of sound, but to the presence of something animate. Her quiet progress became that much quieter and where it had been idle it became wary. She was not alone in this place. Bears, she thought; there’s a bear about, but she had seen no tracks.
The path bore right and there was a lifting of the atmosphere, a feeling with which she was familiar; she looked up and saw the fog move, but there was no blue sky. A breath of air came down the slope and grey wraiths wafted through the canopy, lifting long strands of lichen that looked like Spanish moss.
