Bones nd-14

by Bill Pronzini

  “Well, I don't know,” she said. “The earthquake the other night opened up some cracks out there. It might be dangerous.”

  “I'll be careful.”

  She considered, and I could see her thinking, the way people do nowadays: What if he falls into one of the cracks and breaks a leg or something? What if he sues us? “I don't know,” she said again. “You'd better ask my husband.”

  “Is he here now?”

  “No, as a matter of fact he's over on that section. Mending fence that the quake knocked down. He had to take thirty head of cattle off there yesterday.”

  I thanked her, took the car back out to the highway and up to the dirt road, and turned it along there, stopping nose up to the gate. The wind almost knocked me over when I got out. The gate wasn't locked; I swung it aside and trudged up the incline, bent forward against the force of the wind, the smells of salt water and tideflats sharp in my nostrils. Ahead on my left as I neared the crest I could see the first of the fissures that the earthquake had opened up-a narrow wound maybe three inches wide and several feet long.

  From atop the hump I had a clear look at the rest of the peninsula spread out below, sloping downward to the water's edge. A sea of grass and wild mustard, rippling and swaying in odd restless patterns, with one gnarled oak flourishing in the middle of it all like a satisfied hermit. More fissures showed dark brown among the green, half a dozen of them, one at least a foot wide in places, another some fifty feet long. They made me think of the old apocryphal tales of a tremored earth yawning wide and swallowing people, houses, entire towns. They made me wonder if maybe those tales weren't so apocryphal after all.

  There were some other things to see from up there: a newish Ford pickup parked on the road below, and two men off to one side of it, working with hammer and nails, wire and timber, and a post-hole digger to repair a toppled section of fence. They hadn't noticed me yet, and didn't until I got down near the pickup and hailed them. Then they stopped working and watched me warily as I approached.

  One of the men was about the same age as the woman down at the ranch-lean, balding, with the kind of face that looks as if somebody had been working on it with an etching tool. The other was more of the same, only at half the age and with all of his hair. Father and son, I thought. Which proved to be the case: the first generation was Emil Corda and the second generation was Gene Corda.

  They were friendly enough when I finished showing them my license and telling them what it was I wanted. Emil was, anyway; his son was the taciturn sort and didn't seem overly bright. Emil, in fact, seemed downright pleased with me, as if he welcomed a break in the drudgery of fence-mending. Or as if meeting a private detective who wanted to poke around on his land made this something of a red-letter day for him.

  “Guess I don't have any objections to you having a look,” he said. “But I'll come along, if it's all the same to you.”

  “Fine.”

  “All those cracks-you see 'em out there. Got to watch your step.”

  I nodded. “Some quake, wasn't it?”

  “Yeah it was. Gave us a hell of a scare.”

  “Me too.”

  “Next time we get a big one, this whole section's liable to break right off and float on over to Waikiki Beach,” he said, and then grinned to show me he was kidding. “Fellow down at Olema claims one of his heifers disappeared into a crack, didn't leave a trace. You believe that?”

  “Do you?”

  “No sir,” Corda said. “I've seen cows break a leg in one, I've seen 'em get stuck in one. But swallowed up? Publicity stunt, that's all. Fellow wanted to get his name in the papers.” He sounded disappointed as well as disapproving, as if he wished he'd thought of it himself so he would have gotten his name in the papers.

  I said, “Will you show me where the cabin used to stand, Mr. Corda?”

  “Sure thing.” He looked at his son. “Gene, you dig another half dozen holes. When I come back we'll anchor those new posts.”

  The younger Corda mumbled something agreeable, and Emil and I set off toward the far end of the peninsula. The road wasn't much along here, just a couple of grassy ruts, and long before we neared the water it petered out into a cow track. One of the fissures cut a jagged line across it in one place, disappearing into a cluster of poppies.

  The outer rim of the peninsula was maybe a hundred feet wide, squared off, with a thin strip of pebbled beach and a couple of acres of mudflats beyond, visible now that the tide was out. The flats weren't being used as oyster beds anymore; at least there was no sign of the poles that are used to fence off most beds. All that was out there was a dozen or so pilings, canted up out of the mud at oblique angles, like a bunch of rotting teeth. I asked Corda about them.

  “Oyster company dock,” he said. “Big storm broke it up fifteen, sixteen years ago. We managed to salvage some of the lumber.”

  “Was there also a pier that went with the cabin?”

  “Not so far as I know.” He gestured to the north, beyond a fan of decaying oyster shells that was half-obliterated by grass. “Cabin was over that way. You can still see part of the foundation.”

  We went in that direction, up into a little hollow where the remains of a stone foundation rose out of more thick grass and wild mustard. There wasn't anything else in the hollow, not even a scrap of driftwood.

  “What happened to the cabin?” I asked.

  “Burned down, so I heard.”

  “Accident?”

  He shrugged. “Couldn't tell you.”

  “Do you know when it happened?”

  “Long time ago. Before the oyster outfit bought the land.”

  I nodded and moved back to stand on the little strip of beach. Two-thirds of the distance across the bay was an island a few hundred yards in circumference, thickly wooded, with a baby islet alongside it. On the larger island, visible from where I stood now, were the remains of a building-somebody's once-substantial house. Those remains had been there a long time and had always fascinated me. Who would live on a little island in the middle of a fogbound bay?

  Not for the first time, I wondered if I could do it. Well, maybe. For a while, anyhow. Buy an island like that, build a house on it, wrap myself in solitude and peace. Never mind the wind and fog; all you'd need when the fog rolled in was a hot fire, a good book, and a wicked woman. For that matter, throw in some beer and food and you had all you needed on any kind of day.

  A seagull came swooping down over the tideflats, screeching the way gulls do. The only other sound was the humming of the wind, punctuated now and then by little wails and moans as it gusted. It had begun to chill me; I could feel goosebumps along my arms and across my shoulders. But I was reluctant to leave just yet. There was something about this place, a sense of isolation that wasn't at all unpleasant. I could understand why Harmon Crane had come here to be by himself. I could understand why he found it a place that stirred his creative juices.

  When I turned after a minute or two I saw that Emil Corda had wandered off to the south, following one of the bigger earth fissures through the rippling grass. I walked over to the fan of oyster shells. As I neared them my foot snagged on something hidden in the grass; I squatted and probed around and came up with part of an old wooden sign, its lettering element-erased to the point where I had to squint at it close up to make out the words: EAST SHORE OYSTER COMPANY. Oddly, it made me think of a marker at a forgotten gravesite.

  I straightened, and the wind gusted again and made me shiver, and from forty or fifty yards away Emil Corda let out a shout. I swung around, saw him beckoning to me, and hurried over to where he was, watching my step as I went. He was standing alongside the fissure he'd been following at a place where it was close to a foot wide. There was an odd look on his seamed face, a mixture of puzzlement, awe, and excitement.

  “Found something,” he said, as if he still didn't quite believe it. “First time I been down this far since the quake.”

  “Found what?”

  “Look for yoursel
f. Down in the crack. This beats that Olema fellow's cow story all to hell. Man, I guess it does!”

  I moved over alongside him and bent to peer into the crack. The hairs went up on the back of my neck; a little puzzlement and excitement kindled in me too. Along with a feeling of dark things moving, shifting, building tremors of violence under the surface of what until now had been a routine investigation.

  Down at the bottom of that crack were bones, a jumble of old gray bones. The remains of a human skeleton, complete with grinning skull.

  TWELVE

  Emil Corda and his son drove back to their ranch to call the county sheriff's office. I sat in my car, off to one side of the dirt road, and brooded a little. Those bones out there didn't have to have anything to do with Harmon Crane; they didn't have to be related to his severe depression during those last few months of 1949 and to his eventual suicide. But they were old bones, there was no mistake about that. And they looked about the way bones would look if they had lain buried beneath the earth for more than three decades.

  No, they didn't have to have anything to do with Harmon Crane. But they did. I knew that, sitting there, as surely as I knew that this was a bad day in October. I felt it in my bones.

  Corda came back pretty soon, without his son, and I went over and sat in his pickup and talked some. The way he figured it, only the top layers of that fissure were newly split ground; the bottom layers were an old seam, the product of another quake many years ago, that had been gradually sutured and healed and hidden by nature. However the bones had gotten into the original crack, it must have happened while the fissure was still fresh, not too long after the quake that had caused it.

  Yeah, I thought. Thirty-five years ago, the quake of October 1949. And maybe it wasn't only nature that had sutured and hid the part of it containing the bones.

  A couple of deputy sheriffs arrived within a half hour, and we took them out and showed them what we'd found. One of them got down on his belly, poked around a little, and said, “Some other stuff down here.”

  “What stuff?” the second deputy asked.

  “Dunno yet. Something that looks like… hell, I don't know, a cigarette case, maybe. Few other things too. It's all pretty dirty and corroded.”

  “Better leave it be until San Rafael gets here.”

  The one deputy got up and we all trooped back out by the highway, playing question-and-answer on the way. I told the deputies why I was there and let them draw their own conclusions, not that either of them seemed particularly interested. Old bones didn't excite them much. New bones, on the other hand, would probably have had them in a dither.

  It was another twenty minutes before “San Rafael”-a reference to the Marin county seat-arrived in the person of a plainclothes investigator named Chet DeKalb and a technician with a portable field kit. We went through the same routine of going out to look at the bones, of Corda and me explaining how we'd found them and what my business there was. DeKalb seemed a little more interested than the two deputies, but not much. He was in his forties, thin and houndish, with a face that looked as if it would crack wide open if he ever decided to smile. He was the unflappable type. A room full of corpses might have thrilled him a little; bones, old or new, didn't even raise an eyebrow.

  He and the lab guy began to fish out the bones and bone fragments and other objects from the fissure, with the technician bagging and labeling them. The rest of us stood around and watched and shivered in the icy wind. I moved up for a look at the other items as they came out; as near as I could tell, they included a cigarette case or large woman's compact, some keys, a lump of something that might have been jewelry-a brooch, maybe-and a couple of rusted things that appeared to be buckles. I also took a close look at the skull when DeKalb handed it up to the lab man. It was badly crushed in a couple of places, probably as a result of its internment in the fissure. It would take a forensic expert to determine if any damage had been done to the skull or any of the other bones prior to burial.

  When he was satisfied they'd got everything out of the crack, DeKalb led the parade back to where the cars were parked. He took down my address and telephone number, asked a few more questions about Harmon Crane, and said he might want to talk to me again later on. Then he and the technician went away with the bones and other stuff, and the two deputies disappeared, and Corda said he'd better get back home, his wife and son were waiting and besides, it wasn't every day somebody found a bunch of human bones on his property and maybe a reporter from one of the newspapers would want to contact him about it. From the look in his eyes, if a reporter didn't contact him pretty soon he'd go ahead and contact a reporter.

  Before long I was standing there alone, shivering in the wind and watching sunset colors seep into the sky above Inverness Ridge. For no reason I walked up on top of the hump again and looked out over the peninsula, out over the bay to the wooded island, its ruins dark now with the first shadows of twilight.

  Maybe I wouldn't want to live out there after all, I thought. Or maybe it's just that I wouldn't want to die out there, all alone in the cold and the fog and that endless wind.

  Six o'clock had come and gone when I got back to San Francisco. I went to the office first, found it still locked up as I'd left it. Eberhardt hadn't come in; the note I'd written him was right where I had put it on his desk blotter. I checked the answering machine: three calls, all from the contacts I had phoned earlier and all negative. No one named Ellen Corneal had died in San Francisco during the past thirty-five years; but neither was anyone named Ellen Corneal registered with the DMV, or the owner of any of the dozens of available credit cards.

  For a time I stood looking at my phone, thinking that I ought to call Michael Kiskadon. But I didn't do it. What could I tell him? Maybe his father had perpetrated or been involved in some sort of criminal activity and maybe he hadn't been; maybe those bones were why he'd shot himself and maybe they weren't. Not enough facts yet. And Kiskadon had too many problems as it was without compounding them for no good reason.

  The office, after Eberhardt's continued absence, and with darkness pressing at the windows, only added to the funk I was in. I shut off the lights, locked the door again, and went away from there.

  Kerry said, “Where can he be, for God's sake? I must have tried calling him half a dozen times today and tonight.”

  She was talking about Eberhardt, of course. We were sitting in the front room of my flat; she had been waiting for me there, working on a glass of wine and her own funk, rereading one of her mother's Samuel Leatherman stories in an old issue of Midnight Detective. She did that sometimes-came by on her own initiative, to wait for me. We practically shared the place anyway, just as we shared her apartment on Diamond Heights. She had put a roast in the oven and the smell of it was making my mouth water and my stomach rumble. I drank some more of my beer to quiet the inner man until the roast could do the job right and proper.

  “I called Wanda too,” Kerry said. “Somebody at Macy's told me she was home sick, but she hasn't answered her phone all day. The two of them must have gone off somewhere together.”

  “Probably.”

  “But where? Where would they go?”

  “The mountains, up or down the coast-who knows?”

  “Just because of what I did to Wanda?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe they decided to elope.”

  She looked at me over the rim of her wineglass. I had said it as a joke, but she wasn't laughing. For that matter, neither was I.

  “You really think they'd do that?” she asked.

  “No,” I lied.

  “God, I can't imagine Eberhardt married to that woman.”

  “Neither can I. I don't even want to try. Let's talk about something else. That roast out there, for instance.”

  “Ten more minutes. Tell me some more about the bones you found.”

  “There's nothing more to tell. All I know right now is that they're human. And I didn't find them; Emil Corda did.”

  “Well, he wou
ldn't have if you hadn't been there,” she said. “What are the chances the Marin authorities can identify them?”

  “Hard to say. Modern technology isn't infallible.”

  “Can't they do it through dental charts and things like that?”

  “Maybe. It all depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On how long ago the victim was buried. On how much dental work he or she had done. On whether or not the dentist is still alive and can be found. On a whole lot of other factors.”

  “Victim,” Kerry said. “Uh-huh.”

  “What?”

  “You used the word victim. You think it was murder, don't you.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “It has to be murder,” she said. “People don't bury bodies in convenient earth fissures unless they're trying to cover up a homicide.”

  “By ‘people’ I suppose you mean Harmon Crane.”

  “Who else? He killed some woman up there, that's obvious.”

  “Is it? Why do you think it was a woman?”

  “He had a frigid wife, didn't he? Besides, there's that cigarette case-”

  “Men also carried cigarette cases back then, you know.”

  “ — and the brooch. Men didn't wear brooches back then.”

  “If it was a brooch.”

  “Of course it was. The brooch and the cigarette case and the keys and other items must have been in her purse. He buried the purse with her and it rotted away to nothing, leaving the buckles. Simple.”

  I sighed. Kerry fancies herself a budding detective; and ever since she'd had some success along those lines-as a but-tinsky on a case of mine in Shasta County this past spring, at considerable peril to her life and my sanity-she had been slightly insufferable where her supposed deductive abilities were concerned. It was a bone of contention between us, but I didn't feel like worrying it anymore right now. The only bone I wanted to worry tonight was the one in that roast in the oven.

  “Go check on dinner, will you?” I said. “I'm starving here.”

  “You're always starving,” she said, but she got up and carried her empty wineglass into the kitchen with her. She was just the slightest bit sloshed again tonight, a state to which she was entitled considering how hard she'd been working and her futile efforts to soothe her conscience about last night's fiasco. Not to mention her ex-husband, Ray Dunston, who had given up his law practice a while back to join a Southern California religious cult and who was pestering her to “re-mate” with him in a new life of communal bliss and daily prayer chants. But if being sloshed again was an omen of things to come, I didn't like it much. I had already had a demonstration of Kerry's impulsive behavior while under the influence, and one demonstration was all I wanted to witness, thank you.