by B. E. Scully
“So there’s no way to get in touch with her?” Martinez asked.
“No, and unless you missed my point, that’s the whole point. But like I said, she goes every year at this time. You can ask anybody. I think this year she went clear up to Washington. Mount Rainier National Park, I think it was this time. Usually stays away, oh, about two, maybe three weeks. Wait a sec, here’s Jack—Jack? Come on in here a sec.”
A thin, pale young man with a face comprised mostly of beard and mustache popped his head through the doorway of the shop.
“Jack, these detectives here are worried that Mabel has gone missing. I was just telling them how she always goes missing around this time. Wasn’t she just saying the other day how this year she’s going up to Mount Rainier?”
“Yep,” Jack said. “Helped her make sure her tent and gear were in good order just last week.”
Shirdon reached into the plastic bag and held the pink clog up for Mabel to see. “Do you recognize this?”
“Of course I do! That’s my sister’s garden clog. She lost it the other night when we were coming home from our walk. It was too darn dark to find it. Poor Mary had to hobble all the way home with only one shoe!”
“Well, thanks for your time, Ms. Dell,” Martinez said. “When your sister comes home, we’d appreciate it if she could give us a call. Just a follow-up for our records.”
“Sure thing. Oh, and if you don’t mind—” Mabel Dell held her hand out toward Shirdon. “I’d like to have that clog back. Mary’ll be thrilled to see it’s been found once she gets home.”
The Goodmans were sitting on deck chairs in their backyard, waiting. This time the wife had a small brown and black dog on her lap that sprang to attention the second the two detectives came into view.
Cal Goodman stood up and rubbed his hands together briskly. “So, did you find Mary or Mabel or whichever one of them my wife thinks is missing?”
When Martinez told them what they’d learned from Mabel Dell, Rachel put her hands to her mouth in a tight little fist. “Oh my god—she knows I called the police on her. Oh my god, Cal!”
“Don’t worry, hon. Just a misunderstanding, like I said. It’ll all blow over.” He turned to the two detectives, the smile more expansive now. “Things have been a little tense around here what with moving in and having so many hassles with this guy.” He jerked his head toward Roy Crampton’s house the same way his wife had done. “Anyway, we’re sorry for dragging you all the way out here, but—better safe than sorry, right?”
“Wait a minute,” Rachel said, “what’s going to happen now?”
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Shirdon said, “but I don’t think Mary Dell has any kind of medical condition or mental disability that makes finding her a top priority. And no one has actually reported her missing, so at this point we’ll check back in two or three weeks when she’s supposed to come home and then go from there if she doesn’t turn up.”
“But if Mabel pushed her into the canal, it’ll be too late by then!”
Cal put his arm around his wife’s shoulders, perhaps a little too tightly. “Oh, honey, come on now! Let’s not waste any more of the detectives’ time, okay?”
“We’ll give the power company a call and tell them to have their workers keep an eye out along the canal,” Martinez said. “If she was pushed or fell in, a body should turn up somewhere.”
“Not it if makes it to the processing center first,” Cal said. “Based on what I’ve seen it do to tree limbs and debris, there won’t be much left of her after that.”
Everyone turned to look at Cal Goodman, but he was staring off toward Roy Crampton’s house.
“Where’s the shoe?” Rachel asked. “Where’s the clog I found?”
“Mabel Dell asked for it back,” Shirdon told her.
“And you just gave it to her? What could be the only piece of evidence?”
“Evidence for what?” Cal asked, his eyes back on his wife. “Our neighbor losing her shoe?”
Martinez took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the sweat from his brow. It was blazing hot out, the grass crunching beneath his feet like glass. “We don’t have any legal basis to hold it, ma’am. Technically there hasn’t been a crime committed.”
“This whole place is a crime,” Rachel said. She buried her face in the little dog’s fur as if trying to keep herself from crying.
Shirdon couldn’t help coming back to the next-door-neighbor who seemed to absorb so much of their attention. “Ms. Goodman, does your neighbor have any kind of quarrel going on with Mary Dell?”
“He has a quarrel going on with everybody! I’m telling you, there’s something wrong with that house! With this whole stretch of canal! Do you know that he never leaves his property? And he has these dogs trapped inside these awful sheds with this grunting sound coming from them—”
Cal gave his wife’s shoulders a little shake. “Rachel—”
“And sometimes there’s smoke coming from his house in the middle of the day—who would ever have a wood stove going in this heat?”
“Rachel, please.” Cal Goodman was working his jaw so hard Martinez thought he might break a tooth. “My wife’s been a little stressed out with the move and all. There’s really no reason to get Roy Crampton involved in all this.”
Rachel opened her mouth as if to say something and then closed it.
“Where in California are you folks from?” Martinez asked.
Cal laughed, his jaw relaxed and the smooth surface restored. “Is it that obvious?”
Martinez pointed to the driveway. “License plate on the car.”
“Oh, yeah. Right. We’re from Los Angeles.”
“I grew up there,” Martinez said. He turned to Rachel and said, “It’s a big change of pace up here. A good one, though, believe me. It just takes a while to adjust, like anything else.”
“Can’t wait for all of that rain to start coming in,” Cal said. “As far as this sun is concerned, we never left L.A.”
“It’ll come, but be careful out here until then,” Martinez said, thinking of the cigarette he’d like to light. “Until we get a few good soakings, fire conditions are extreme.”
“Right. Hey, listen,” Cal said, again offering them his hand, “thanks again for coming all the way out here.”
“No problem,” Shirdon said, eager now to get back in the car. That Irish heritage she’d told Martinez about had also given her the red hair and chalk-stick skin that required half a bottle of sunscreen to be outside even ten minutes in weather like this. “Give us a call if anything else out of the ordinary happens, and hopefully Mary Dell will be back at the farm before you know it.”
Cal Goodman nodded and smiled. His wife, on the other hand, didn’t look the least bit reassured.
“Well, what do you think?” Shirdon asked when they were back in the car, air-conditioner on full-blast.
“Maybe that Sherlock Holmes guy was onto something after all.”
They drove next door and pulled into a space just big enough for a car at the end of Roy Crampton’s driveway. But after five minutes of pounding on the seven-foot high, solid steel gate blocking off the rest of the property, they gave up.
“If anyone’s home, no one’s answering,” Martinez said.
Shirdon studied the gate. “There’s no buzzer or code box or anything. It looks like it has to be unlocked and rolled to the side by hand on this track. Looks like he rigged the system up himself.”
“Lots of do-it-yourselfers out here,” Martinez said as they climbed back in the car. “Wouldn’t be surprised if the whole thing’s booby-trapped. Anyway, I doubt we’ll be back out here again. Just a case of city folks’ nerves adjusting to the wild.”
Shirdon stared out the window at the flat, gray house behind the gate. “Maybe.”
Martinez gave his partner a suspicious look. “Don’t tell me you’re getting one of those ‘feelings’ again, Cass. Whenever you get one of those feelings, strange things start happening.”<
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“I don’t know,” Shirdon said, “but whatever did or did not happen to Mary Dell, I do in fact have one of those strange feelings. And it’s telling that we definitely haven’t heard the last from this place.”
As they headed back toward the city, Shirdon glanced in the rearview mirror and saw a thin tendril of smoke coming from the chimney of Roy Crampton’s house.
PART II
1
Husbands and wives keep secrets from each other. Without secrets, Cal Goodman reasoned, there wouldn’t be a marriage left standing past the one year mark. Cal knew that Rachel kept plenty of things to herself—her secret hiding spot up in the turret room, for example, where she sat and spied on people. Even though she wouldn’t admit it to those two cops she drug out here for no good reason whatsoever, Cal knew that’s what she did up there—spied on people along the canal way, just like she accused Roy Crampton of doing.
Two weeks ago she’d started her new job, and despite Cal’s daily questions about how it was going, so far the most he’d gotten out of her was a less than revealing, “So far, so good.” There were plenty of things Rachel was keeping to herself these days, alright, but Cal didn’t mind. He had a few secrets of his own lately. In fact, he was just about ready to indulge in one of them.
Taking Jackson out for his last call had become one of Cal’s permanent chores now that Rachel was working full-time and he wasn’t. Never mind that he slaved away at the house and yard all day. Since he didn’t put on a suit and tie and drive to an office for ten hours a day, as far as Rachel was concerned, Cal “wasn’t working.” At first he resented taking Jackson out every single night while Rachel crawled into bed to read a book or sometimes even fall asleep before he’d even joined her. But after a while he started to enjoy the nocturnal excursions. Walking along the pathway behind the house in the shadows of the towering pines, it was easy to imagine that he and Jackson were the last creatures left on earth. And somewhere along the line, even though Rachel constantly reminded him to never, ever let Jackson off the leash, Cal had started letting him run free. He reasoned that Jackson was pretty much trapped behind the houses with nowhere to go, and it wasn’t as if there was anything around to distract him at eleven o’clock at night.
“Might as well enjoy a little freedom once in a while, buddy,” he told the pup as he leaned down and unlatched his leash. Cal flexed his right hand open and closed, running his finger along the place where he’d torn his hand on the fence their very first day here. The wound was still red and livid, but it was finally starting to stitch itself into a scar. And it was going to be a particularly nasty-looking, jagged-ass one, Cal noted with satisfaction.
Jackson took off down the pathway to find the perfect spot while Cal stood and watched the dark canal glide past. He often stood there watching the water or gazing up at the pine trees throwing shadows across the sky like ancient, long-silent giants. But just as often he stood on the pathway and stared at Roy Crampton’s house, trying to figure out the pattern of his neighbor’s lights. Sometimes the entire property was flooded by blinding white security lights, and sometimes it was pitch-black. Sometimes a light was burning in a single back window, and sometimes rooms were lit all over the house.
Tonight was a pitch black, no-lights night.
The lights were just one of the many things Cal had been trying to figure out about Roy Crampton lately. And if Jackson’s leash-free excursions counted as one of the minor secrets Cal was keeping from his wife, what had been going on between Cal and Roy Crampton since she’d been back to work was about as major as it got.
Cal had never intended to start talking to Roy Crampton. In fact, if he and his neighbor were the last two people on earth, Cal just might take a vow of silence. But not only had Roy Crampton spoken to him first, he’d kept right on speaking to him every afternoon for the past two weeks.
Maybe Cal had been lingering a little too long behind Crampton’s house that day—Rachel’s first day back at work, and the first time Cal had taken Jackson for a walk without her. But it wasn’t as if he’d been spying on the guy, even though Cal knew the Crampus spied on them. More than once Cal had seen the old man’s head silhouetted in one of the windows that faced their house, or caught him darting out onto his back porch to see what they were working on in the yard. But all Cal cared about as far as Roy Crampton’s property was concerned was that gnarly old apple tree sitting square at the corner of where the two yards met.
Some people say trees have faces. If so, the apple tree’s face was as ancient and gnarled as the rest of it: two evenly spaced knot holes served as suspicious, always-open eyes gazing at passersby beneath bark-heavy lids; a dark, groaning recess of a mouth cleaved through the bottom center of the trunk, frozen in silent testament to the timeless passage of time. The branches, some so bent and twisted in on themselves they almost touched the ground, reached and grabbed in all directions like some deranged, self-replicating octopus. The tree belonged to a time when great, lumbering beasts ruled an earth still steaming and teaming with swamplands and deserts and forests so thick a fox could barely slip through—an ancient, primal thing that never slept, just watched and waited in weary, earth-bound silence.
And the weary, bone-gray house watched and waited with it.
“Sure is a beauty, isn’t she?” Roy Crampton said on Cal’s first solo walk with Jackson, when he’d lingered a little too long beneath the tree. The old man had stepped out of the shadows the same sneaky way as when Rachel and Cal had first met him. He was even wearing the same battered straw work hat pulled down low over his eyes. At the sound of Crampton’s voice, Jackson let out a low growl.
Cal knew he should just keep walking—engaging a person like Roy Crampton was like a fly helping a spider build its web. And yet nothing in the world could have kept Cal from responding.
“Maybe about twenty, thirty years ago,” Cal said. “Old thing’s worn out now, though. Time to come down, I think. Make way for a younger, healthier tree to take over.”
Crampton smiled beneath his straw hat. “Now isn’t that something? Fellow that lived next door before you folks got here once had the same idea. Wanted to take this old soldier down. Only he found out the same thing you’ll find out—that this tree is only fifty-percent on your land. Guess where the other fifty-percent is?”
The smile widened into a leer. A memory of the obscene gesture Cal thought he’d seen Crampton give Rachel that first day blipped into his mind and then blipped back out again. “That’s ridiculous. Whose property was the tree on first, before it got so big?”
“Who knows? Nobody around from that long ago to say for sure.”
“It’s a fire hazard, if nothing else, especially since the wind seems to favor blowing west around here. And you’ve got that flat roof on your house—I’d think you’d want this tree gone.” Cal gazed at the smoke coming from Crampton’s chimney. “Especially with your woodstove going full steam. Spark could light up this tree like a fire cracker.”
“Never had any problems in over forty years living here,” Crampton said, stroking the side of the apple tree as if it were a horse. “Nope, this tree will outlast the both of us, Goodman. Take my word on that.”
Even though Cal was disgusted with himself for it, he couldn’t deny feeling just a little bit pleased that Crampton had used his name.
After that, Cal made a point of walking Jackson at the same time each day. Sure enough, Roy Crampton was beneath the apple tree at the same time each day, too, waiting for Cal to walk by. Then he’d step forward as if it was the most natural thing in the world to stand around skulking beneath a tree all day and make some completely out-of-the-blue remark. And each day, despite his entirely empty promises to himself not to, Cal would respond and what passed for a conversation in Roy Crampton’s world would take place between them.
On Rachel’s first weekend off from work, Cal made a point to walk Jackson at the same time as usual. But whenever Rachel was with him, Roy Crampton was a no-show, and th
at suited Cal just fine. He didn’t want Roy Crampton to even think about Rachel, particularly after the time he brought her up in one of their barbed-wire fence sessions.
“I see your wife’s not with you during the week anymore,” Crampton had said one sweltering afternoon. “Got you on ‘house husband’ duty, eh?”
“I work at home,” Cal said.
“One of those computer fellows, I’m guessing.”
Sometimes Cal wondered about Crampton’s whole ‘country bumpkin just out of the pumpkin patch’ routine. No one would ever mistake the guy for an urban sophisticate, but sometimes Cal suspected Crampton laid the “aw, shucks” routine on just a little too thick, as if it was just one more steel gate or barbed wire fence in Crampton’s ongoing battle to keep the world off-limits and off-guard at the same time.
“That’s right,” Cal said. “Just another one of those computer fellows.”
“Woman shouldn’t make more money than her husband. Upsets the balance in a household.”
“No worries there. The balance in our household is equal on both sides,” Cal said. “Seems to be working out just fine.”
“That so. Scales are a tricky thing, though. By the time you realize they’re out of balance, it’s too late to fix them.” The Crampus shook his head mournfully, as if contemplating some unthinkable injustice. “And then all that time you think you’ve been measuring things correctly, you find out you haven’t even been close.”
Cal couldn’t imagine Roy Crampton having much of a household to balance in the first place. In the many times Cal had passed behind it, he had never once sensed that comfortable familiarity that even the most run-down homes give off—the sense of belonging to someone, and having someone belong to you. Roy Crampton’s house seemed to belong to nothing or no one but the passage of time. And maybe not even that.
