More Oddments

by Bill Pronzini

  But Charlie didn't stay put. He was back again the next morning, all smiley and chipper, like butter wouldn't melt in his mouth and the hatchet and varmint gun hadn't durned near taken his head off twice.

  Mrs. Rakubian was ready for him, though. She'd decided not to take any chances and it was a good thing she had. She didn't let him say a word this time. As soon as she saw him, she took Papa's old Frontier Colt out from under her apron and shot him right between the eyes.

  "Now I'm not going to tell you again, Charlie," she said when she got him to the well. "Don't come bothering me no more. You're dead three times now and you'd better start acting like it."

  She had a day and a half of peace before the sheriff's car drove in through the farm gate and stopped right in front of where she was sitting under the cottonwood tree drinking tart lemonade. The driver's door opened and Charlie got out.

  Mrs. Rakubian was used to his tricks by now. She stared at him in disgust.

  "Maude," Charlie said, "I got some questions to ask you. Seems Ed Beemis, the mailman, and Lloyd Poole from the gas company have disappeared and they was both last seen out this way—"

  She didn't let him finish. She yanked Papa's Colt out from under her apron and let fly at him. One bullet knocked him down but the other ones missed, which allowed him to crawl to safety behind the sheriff's car. Then durned if he didn't pull a gun of his own and start blasting away at her.

  Mrs. Rakubian flung herself into the house just in the nick of time. She locked the door behind her, reloaded Papa's Colt, and took the varmint gun down and made sure it was loaded too. Then she waited.

  For a time there wasn't much noise out in the yard. Then there was—a regular commotion. Cars, voices . . . why, you'd of thought it was the Fourth of July picnic out there. Pretty soon Charlie started yelling at her over some contraption that made his voice real loud, only she didn't pay much attention to what he was saying. Instead she yelled right back at him.

  "You Charlie, you go back into the well where you belong! Go on, git, and leave me be!"

  Charlie didn't git and leave her be—not that she'd expected he would, after all the times he'd come back from the dead to devil her. So she was ready for him again with Papa's Colt and the varmint gun when he busted down the door and come in after her.

  She thought she was ready, anyhow. In fact she wasn't, not with just six bullets and two loads of buckshot. Mrs. Rakubian took one look at what come piling through the door, screamed once, and swooned on the spot.

  It was Charlie, all right.

  But the sneaky old booger had brought a dozen other dead Charlies along with him.

  Smuggler's Island

  The first I heard that somebody had bought Smuggler's Island was late on a cold, foggy morning in May. Handy Manners and Davey and I had just brought the Jennie Too into the Camaroon Bay wharf, loaded with the day's limit in salmon—silvers mostly, with a few big kings—and Handy had gone inside the processing shed at Bay Fisheries to call for the tally clerk and the portable scales. I was helping Davey hoist up the hatch covers, and I was thinking that he handled himself fine on the boat and what a shame it'd be if he decided eventually that he didn't want to go into commercial fishing as his livelihood. A man likes to see his only son take up his chosen profession. But Davey was always talking about traveling around Europe, seeing some of the world, maybe finding a career he liked better than fishing. Well, he was only nineteen. Decisions don't come quick or easy at that age.

  Anyhow, we were working on the hatch covers when I heard somebody call my name. I glanced up, and Pa and Abner Frawley were coming toward us from down-wharf, where the café was. I was a little surprised to see Pa out on a day like this; he usually stayed home with Jennie when it was overcast and windy because the fog and cold air aggravated his lumbago.

  The two of them came up and stopped, Pa puffing on one of his home-carved meerschaum pipes. They were both seventy-two and long-retired—Abner from a manager's job at the cannery a mile up the coast, Pa from running the general store in the village—and they'd been cronies for at least half their lives. But that was where all resemblance between them ended. Abner was short and round and white-haired, and always had a smile and a joke for everybody. Pa, on the other hand, was tall and thin and dour; if he'd smiled any more than four times in the forty-seven years since I was born I can't remember it. Abner had come up from San Francisco during the Depression, but Pa was a second-generation native of Camaroon Bay, his father having emigrated from Ireland during the short-lived potato boom in the early 1900s. He was a good man and a decent father, which was why I'd given him a room in our house when Ma died six years ago, but I'd never felt close to him.

  He said to me, "Looks like a good catch, Verne."

  "Pretty good," I said. "How come you're out in this weather?"

  "Abner's idea. He dragged me out of the house."

  I looked at Abner. His eyes were bright, the way they always got when he had a choice bit of news or gossip to tell. He said, "Fella from Los Angeles went and bought Smuggler's Island. Can you beat that?"

  "Bought it?" I said. "You mean outright?"

  "Yep. Paid the county a hundred thousand cash."

  "How'd you hear about it?"

  "Jack Kewin, over at the real estate office."

  "Who's the fellow who bought it?"

  "Name's Roger Vauclain," Abner said. "Jack don't know any more about him. Did the buying through an agent."

  Davey said, "Wonder what he wants with it?"

  "Maybe he's got ideas of hunting treasure," Abner said and winked at him. "Maybe he heard about what's hidden in those caves."

  Pa gave him a look. "Old fool," he said.

  Davey grinned, and I smiled a little and turned to look to where Smuggler's Island sat wreathed in fog half a mile straight out across the choppy harbor. It wasn't much to look at, from a distance or up close. Just one big oblong chunk of eroded rock about an acre and a half in size, surrounded by a lot of little islets. It had a few stunted trees and shrubs, and a long headland where gulls built their nests, and a sheltered cove on the lee shore where you could put in a small boat. That was about all there was to it—except for those caves Abner had spoken of.

  They were located near the lee cove and you could only get into them at low tide. Some said caves honeycombed the whole underbelly of the island, but those of us who'd ignored warnings from our parents as kids and gone exploring in them knew that this wasn't so. There were three caves and two of them had branches that led deep into the rock, but all of the tunnels were dead ends.

  This business of treasure being hidden in one of those caves was just so much nonsense, of course—sort of a local legend that nobody took seriously. What the treasure was supposed to be was two million dollars in greenbacks that had been hidden by a rackets courier during Prohibition, when he'd been chased to the island by a team of Revenue agents. There was also supposed to be fifty cases of high-grade moonshine secreted there.

  The bootlegging part of it had a good deal of truth though. This section of the northern California coast was a hotbed of illegal liquor traffic in the days of the Volstead Act, and the scene of several confrontations between smugglers and Revenue agents; half a dozen men on both sides had been killed, or had turned up missing and presumed dead. The way the bootleggers worked was to bring ships down from Canada outfitted as distilleries—big stills in their holds, bottling equipment, labels for a dozen different kinds of Canadian whiskey—and anchor them twenty-five miles offshore. Then local fishermen and imported hirelings would go out in their boats and carry the liquor to places along the shore, where trucks would be waiting to pick it up and transport it down to San Francisco or east into Nevada. Smuggler's Island was supposed to have been a short-term storage point for whiskey that couldn't be trucked out right away, which may or may not have been a true fact. At any rate, that was how the island got its name.

  Just as I turned back to Pa and Abner, Handy came out of the processing shed with t
he tally clerk and the scales. He was a big, thick-necked man, Handy, with red hair and a temper to match; he was also one of the best mates around and knew as much about salmon trolling and diesel engines as anybody in Camaroon Bay. He'd been working for me eight years, but he wouldn't be much longer. He was saving up to buy a boat of his own and only needed another thousand or so to swing the down payment.

  Abner told him right away about this Roger Vauclain buying Smuggler's Island. Handy grunted and said, "Anybody that'd want those rocks out there has to have rocks in his head."

  "Who do you imagine he is?" Davey asked.

  "One of those damn-fool rich people probably," Pa said. "Buy something for no good reason except that it's there and they want it."

  "But why Smuggler's Island in particular?"

  "Got a fancy name, that's why. Now he can say to his friends, why look here, I own a place up north called Smuggler's Island, supposed to have treasure hidden on it."

  I said, "Well, whoever he is and whyever he bought it, we'll find out eventually. Right now we've got a catch to unload."

  "Sure is a puzzler though, ain't it, Verne?" Abner said.

  "It is that," I admitted. "It's a puzzler, all right."

  If you live in a small town or village, you know how it is when something happens that has no immediate explanation. Rumors start flying, based on few or no facts, and every time one of them is retold to somebody else it gets exaggerated. Nothing much goes on in a place like Camaroon Bay anyhow—conversation is pretty much limited to the weather and the actions of tourists and how the salmon are running or how the crabs seem to be thinning out a little more every year. So this Roger Vauclain buying Smuggler's Island got a lot more lip service paid to it than it would have someplace else.

  Jack Kewin didn't find out much about Vauclain, just that he was some kind of wealthy resident of southern California. But that was enough for the speculations and the rumors to build on. During the next week I heard from different people that Vauclain was a real estate speculator who was going to construct a small private club on the island; that he was a retired bootlegger who'd worked the coast during Prohibition and had bought the island for nostalgic reasons; that he was a front man for a movie company that was going to film a big spectacular in Camaroon Bay and blow up the island in the final scene. None of these rumors made much sense, but that didn't stop people from spreading them and half-believing in them.

  Then, one night while we were eating supper Abner came knocking at the front door of our house on the hill above the village. Davey went and let him in, and he sat down at the table next to Pa. One look at him was enough to tell us that he'd come with news.

  "Just been talking to Lloyd Simms," he said as Jennie poured him a cup of coffee. "Who do you reckon just made a reservation at the Camaroon Inn?"

  "Who?" I asked.

  "Roger Vauclain himself. Lloyd talked to him on the phone less than an hour ago, says he sounded pretty hard-nosed. Booked a single room for a week, be here on Thursday."

  "Only a single room?" Jennie said. "Why, I'm disappointed, Abner. I expected he'd be traveling with an entourage." She's a practical woman and when it comes to things she considers nonsense, like all the hoopla over Vauclain and Smuggler's Island, her sense of humor sharpens into sarcasm.

  "Might be others coming up later," Abner said seriously.

  Davey said, "Week's a long time for a rich man to spend in a place like Camaroon Bay. I wonder what he figures to do all that time?"

  "Tend to his island, probably," I said.

  "Tend to it?" Pa said. "Tend to what? You can walk over the whole thing in two hours."

  "Well, there's always the caves, Pa."

  He snorted. "Grown man'd have to be a fool to go wandering in those caves. Tide comes in while he's inside, he'll drown for sure."

  "What time's he due in on Thursday?" Davey asked Abner.

  "Around noon, Lloyd says. Reckon we'll find out then what he's planning to do with the island."

  "Not planning to do anything with it, I tell you," Pa said. "Just wants to own it."

  "We'll see," Abner said. "We'll see."

  Thursday was clear and warm, and it should have been a good day for salmon; but maybe the run had started to peter out, because it took us until almost noon to make the limit. It was after two o'clock before we got the catch unloaded and weighed in at Bay Fisheries. Davey had some errands to run and Handy had logged enough extra time, so I took the Jennie Too over to the commercial slips myself and stayed aboard her to hose down the decks. When I was through with that I set about replacing the port outrigger line because it had started to weaken and we'd been having trouble with it.

  I was doing that when a tall man came down the ramp from the quay and stood just off the bow, watching me. I didn't pay much attention to him; tourists stop by to rubberneck now and then, and if you encourage them they sometimes hang around so you can't get any work done. But then this fellow slapped a hand against his leg, as if he were annoyed, and called out in a loud voice, "Hey, you there. Fisherman."

  I looked at him then, frowning. I'd heard that tone before: sharp, full of self-granted authority. Some city people are like that; to them, anybody who lives in a rural village is a low-class hick. I didn't like it and I let him see that in my face. "You talking to me?"

  "Who else would I be talking to?"

  I didn't say anything. He was in his forties, smooth-looking, and dressed in white ducks and a crisp blue windbreaker. If nothing else, his eyes were enough to make you dislike him immediately; they were hard and unfriendly and said that he was used to getting his own way.

  He said, "Where can I rent a boat?"

  "What kind of boat? To go sport fishing?"

  "No, not to go sport fishing. A small cruiser."

  "There ain't any cruisers for rent here."

  He made a disgusted sound, as if he'd expected that. "A big outboard then," he said. "Something seaworthy."

  "It's not a good idea to take a small boat out of the harbor," I said. "The ocean along here is pretty rough—"

  "I don't want advice," he said. "I want a boat big enough to get me out to Smuggler's Island and back. Now who do I see about it?"

  "Smuggler's Island?" I looked at him more closely. "Your name happen to be Roger Vauclain, by any chance?"

  "That's right. You heard about me buying the island, I suppose. Along with everybody else in this place."

  "News gets around," I said mildly.

  "About that boat," he said.

  "Talk to Ed Hawkins at Bay Marine on the wharf. He'll find something for you."

  Vauclain gave me a curt nod and started to turn away.

  I said, "Mind if I ask you a question now?"

  He turned back. "What is it?"

  "People don't go buying islands very often," I said, "particularly one like Smuggler's. I'd be interested to know your plans for it."

  "You and every other damned person in Camaroon Bay."

  I held my temper. "I was just asking. You don't have to give me an answer."

  He was silent for a moment. Then he said, "What the hell, it's no secret. I've always wanted to live on an island, and that one out there is the only one around I can afford."

  I stared at him. "You mean you're going to build on it?"

  "That surprises you, does it?"

  "It does," I said. "There's nothing on Smuggler's Island but rocks and a few trees and a couple of thousand nesting gulls. It's fogbound most of the time, and even when it's not the wind blows at thirty knots or better."

  "I like fog and wind and ocean," Vauclain said. "I like isolation. I don't like people much. That satisfy you?"

  I shrugged. "To each his own."

  "Exactly," he said, and went away up the ramp.

  I worked on the Jennie Too another hour, then I went over to the Wharf Café for a cup of coffee and a piece of pie. When I came inside I saw Pa, Abner, and Handy sitting at one of the copper-topped tables. I walked over to them.

&nb
sp; They already knew that Vauclain had arrived in Camaroon Bay. Handy was saying, "Hell, he's about as friendly as a shark. I was over to Ed Hawkins's place shooting the breeze when he came in and demanded Ed get him a boat. Threw his weight around for fifteen minutes until Ed agreed to rent him his own Chris-Craft. Then he paid for the rental in cash, slammed two fifties on Ed's desk like they were singles and Ed was a beggar."

  I sat down. "He's an eccentric, all right," I said. "I talked to him for a few minutes myself about an hour ago."

  "Eccentric?" Abner said, and snorted. "That's just a name they give to people who never learned manners or good sense."

  Pa said to me. "He tell you what he's fixing to do with Smuggler's Island, Verne?"

  "He did, yep."

  "Told Abner too, over to the Inn." Pa shook his head, glowering, and lighted a pipe. "Craziest damned thing I ever heard. Build a house on that mess of rock, live out there. Crazy, that's all."

  "That's a fact," Handy said. "I'd give him more credit if he was planning to hunt for that bootlegger's treasure."

  "Well, I'm sure not going to relish having him for a neighbor," Abner said. "Don't guess anybody else will either."

  None of us disagreed with that. A man likes to be able to get along with his neighbors, rich or poor. Getting along with Vauclain, it seemed, was going to be a chore for everybody.

  In the next couple of days Vauclain didn't do much to improve his standing with the residents of Camaroon Bay. He snapped at merchants and waitresses, ignored anybody who tried to strike up a conversation with him, and complained twice to Lloyd Simms about the service at the Inn. The only good thing about him, most people were saying, was that he spent the better part of his days on Smuggler's Island—doing what, nobody knew exactly—and his nights locked in his room. Might have been he was drawing up plans there for the house he intended to build on the island.

  Rumor now had it that Vauclain was an architect, one of those independents who'd built up a reputation, like Frank Lloyd Wright in the old days, and who only worked for private individuals and companies. This was probably true since it originated with Jack Kewin; he'd spent a little time with Vauclain and wasn't one to spread unfounded gossip. According to Jack, Vauclain had learned that the island was for sale more than six months ago and had been up twice before by helicopter from San Francisco to get an aerial view of it.