Hellbox nd-37

by Bill Pronzini

  Bill was in high spirits when he appeared and Kerry didn’t want to dampen them by voicing her concerns about Cybil. He was wearing old clothes, his hiking boots, and that godawful droopy green hat with the moldy feather he’d dredged up out of the trunk of the car-his standard fishing outfit.

  “I’m ready to head out,” he said, “do battle with some trout. Sure you won’t come along?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “It’ll be cooler down in the valley.”

  “I don’t mind the heat as much as you do,” she said. “I made you a couple of sandwiches. They’re in the fridge.”

  “ Grazie. What would I do without you?”

  “Make your own sandwiches and load them up with too much butter and mayonnaise.”

  He laughed. “So what’re you going to do with yourself here alone?”

  “Read, relax. Maybe take a walk in the woods.”

  “Watch out for bears.”

  “Uh-huh. Bears. If I see one, I’ll imitate one of your growls and scare the wits out of it.”

  As soon as he was gone, she tried Cybil’s number again. Still no answer. Oh, Cybil, come on! she thought. Then chided herself for being such a worrywart. But when you had an elderly, fiercely headstrong, frail, and fall-prone mother that you loved dearly, it was increasingly difficult not to worry.

  She read for a while, stretched out on one of the deck chairs, but she couldn’t seem to concentrate. Another unanswered call. An unbidden image of Cybil sprawled out on the duplex floor flashed across her mind; immediately, she blanked it out. Too much imagination, dammit, inherited from Cybil-one of the 1940’s most accomplished pulp fiction writers and the author of two well-received mystery novels written in her late seventies. The Writing Wades, mother and daughter. Although in Cybil’s not-so-humble opinion, a series of stories and two books about a tough-talking private eye named Samuel Leatherman was superior work to the creation of advertising slogans and campaigns. “We both write fiction,” she’d said once, “but when you get right down to it, my kind’s more honest.” Well, maybe she had a point. A debatable one, anyway.

  Lunch was a dish of strawberries. At one o’clock, another call went unanswered. Then, at one-thirty “Hello?” Cybil’s voice, sounding perfectly fine.

  “There you are,” Kerry said, relieved. “I called a couple of times earlier-”

  “Did you? Why?”

  “Oh, just to let you know that we’re still in Green Valley-”

  “Where?”

  “Green Valley. In the Sierras near Placerville.”

  “What’re you doing up there?”

  Oh, Lord. “Looking for a second home. I told you that the last time we talked, remember?”

  “Of course I remember. I think it’s a good idea.”

  “What is?”

  “That you have a second home.”

  “Well, I think we finally found one that suits us. That’s why we’re still here-staying a few days to make sure we like the place enough to make an offer. It’s a hillside cabin with a valley view-”

  “Good, I’m glad. You can tell me all about it when I see you. When are you coming home?”

  “Well, we’re not sure yet. We were planning on Thursday, but we may stay over the Fourth and drive back Saturday. If there’s anything you need-”

  “Why should I need anything?”

  “I just thought there might be.” Don’t ask where she’s been, Kerry thought. But a question slipped out in spite of herself. “Were you out shopping?”

  “Shopping?”

  “This morning… today.”

  “Yes. Jane Greeley and I went to lunch afterward. Why?”

  “I just wondered.”

  “Where I was and what I was doing. Checking up?”

  “No, no…”

  “Yes, yes. Well, I’m fine. No falls lately. But I did cut my thumb slicing a tomato last night. Bandaged it all by myself, too.”

  “Don’t be testy, Cybil. I was just-”

  “I’m not testy. When did you say you were coming home? After the Fourth?”

  “We’re not sure yet. Either Thursday or Saturday.”

  “Is Emily up there with you?”

  “No. She’s in Los Angeles with her school glee club. I told you that before we left, didn’t I?”

  “No, I don’t think so. When will she be home?”

  “Sunday.”

  “That long?”

  “Well, they’re giving a holiday performance-”

  “When are you going to bring her over for a visit? I haven’t seen the child, or you or that husband of yours, in weeks.”

  One week, to be exact. Cybil really was getting vague, her memory slipping badly. No use trying to deny it.

  Kerry said carefully, keeping the concern out of her voice, “One day next week, whichever one’s good for you.”

  “Any day is fine. I’m always here, you know that. Except when I go out to shop and have lunch with Jane Greeley. Call first, before you come.”

  “Of course I will.”

  “Good-bye, dear. Enjoy the rest of your little vacation.”

  “’Bye, take care,” Kerry said, but her mother had already broken the connection.

  She sighed as she tucked her cell into her purse. The thought that Cybil might not be with them much longer crossed her mind; instantly, she rejected it. Just because her mother was showing signs of senility didn’t mean she was teetering on the edge of the grave. Her father’s death had been difficult enough to deal with, even though they hadn’t been close, but it had happened so many years ago, her memories of him were faint and fuzzy, like images in very old photographs. It was different with Cybil. Friend and mentor, a woman she admired and respected-yes, and needed-as well as loved. Losing her would be as painful as losing Bill or Emily.

  But it wasn’t going to happen soon. It simply wasn’t. Why start hanging crepe needlessly?

  Time to go for her walk. Worry always made her restless, and the only cure for that was exercise. Besides, the cabin had grown stuffy with trapped heat. It’d be much cooler in among the pines that crowded around the edges of the property.

  Bill probably wouldn’t be back before she was, but just in case, she wrote him a short note and left it on the kitchen table. Then she rubbed some sunblock on her face and bare arms, put on her wide-brimmed sun hat, closed all the windows, and locked up after she went out-a precaution because she didn’t see any need to take her purse along. Bill had a key; Sam Budlong had given them two.

  Where to go? The woods behind the house seemed the most inviting. She went up past the gnarled old apple trees and through the gate in the sagging perimeter fence. A barely discernible path, man-made or animal-made, meandered through the timber beyond: she’d spotted it on Saturday’s inspection. She picked her way along it for a hundred yards or so, to where it split into two sharply divergent forks. Arbitrary choice: the right one. She turned that way, and the forest closed in around her.

  Much cooler in among the old-growth pines, the air scented with a mixture of resin and needle and leaf mold. The cool semidarkness, the cathedral-like quiet, reminded her of Yosemite-a camping trip she’d been taken on there as a child, not by Cybil and her father-he hadn’t been an outdoorsman in any sense of the word-but by the family of a school friend. Fabulous mountain vistas and ice-blue lakes that she could still recall with a sense of wonder, but it had been the forests, dark and deep and hushed, that had impressed her the most. She never tired of walking in forests vast like those or small like these, reexperiencing that childhood pleasure.

  Dark, deep woods. The phrase made her think of the poem by Robert Frost about woods-walking on a snowy winter’s evening. A poem that was also a metaphor about life, the long travel from beginning to end and the promises you made along the way. Promises like hers to Bill and Emily and Cybil and herself, the meaningful ones that she had kept and would continue to keep if she could, if only there were enough time.

  Gloomy reflections, harking back to
her concern for Cybil. She erased them the way Cybil had taught her to erase unpleasant thoughts as a child-with one mental swipe, as if they were chalked words on a blackboard.

  The path continued to meander, growing fainter and harder to follow in the darkish light. Kerry wondered if she ought to mark trees or snap off twigs or fern fronds in case she lost her way. Not necessary, she decided. Her sense of direction was good and she wouldn’t wander far. Besides, it wasn’t as if she were walking through miles of unbroken forest. There were other homes in the area. If she did lose her way, she was bound to stumble upon one of them.

  Beyond a mostly dry streambed, the tree growth thinned into a long rocky meadow. Once she’d crossed it, the terrain gradually sloped upward through another stand of timber. The trail disappeared partway up the incline and she found herself plowing through tightly packed trees and thickening ground cover. She stopped finally, and would have turned back if she hadn’t seen what looked like a road through a break in the pines at the top of the incline.

  It was a road, she found when she’d climbed up the rest of the way-what looked to be the rutted remains of an old logging road. At first look, it seemed long disused, but then she spied evidence of recent passage in the ragged carpeting of pine needles and decaying vegetation that covered it. A shortcut to someone’s home, possibly. Or maybe a local lover’s lane.

  Might as well follow it a ways. A dead pine branch covered with decaying cones lay next to the spot where she’d emerged; she noted it, then set off to her left, walking on the verge to avoid ruts and potholes.

  She’d gone a hundred yards or so when she saw the pickup.

  It was drawn in on a grassy area on the right-hand side of the road, so that only a small section of its rear end was visible from a distance. Kerry moved ahead until she was abreast of the vehicle. Dirty white pickup, several years old, its bed empty. There didn’t seem to be anybody inside, either.

  She hesitated, then moved out into the middle of the road. There was nothing to see anywhere around the truck, nothing to hear except the chatter of a jay. Don’t be nosy, she told herself. But she’d always had a lively curiosity, another inheritance from her mother, and it got the best of her.

  Slowly, she advanced until she was standing next to the driver’s door. She bent to peer through the dirt-streaked side window. The cab was empty except for fast-food remains, bags and rags and miscellaneous clutter. Whoever owned the pickup was a sloppy housekeeper.

  On impulse, she reached down and tried the door. Locked. Just as well; she shouldn’t be poking around private property. The pickup didn’t look abandoned. Probably parked here by a hiker like herself.

  She still had her hand on the door handle when she heard rustling sounds behind her. She jerked upright, turning, just as a man’s voice said harshly, “What the hell you doing there, lady?”

  He’d come up out of the trees on this side of the road, no more than twenty feet away. A big man, dressed in khaki work clothes, carrying a toolbox in one hand. When he started toward her, glowering, she recognized him: the unattractive, middle-aged man who’d been called mayor in the Green Valley Cafe yesterday. Balfour, wasn’t it? Pete Balfour?

  “I said what you doing, snooping in my truck?”

  “I wasn’t snooping,” she said. “I saw it parked here, and I thought it might be abandoned-”

  “Who are you? I never seen you before.”

  He was still moving toward her. The ferocity of his expression made her back away from him, along the side of the pickup.

  “I don’t live here. My husband and I are renting the Murray cabin-”

  “What you doing in these woods?”

  “Walking, that’s all. Hiking.”

  He stopped abruptly, staring hard at her, his mouth twisted into a grimace that gave him a troll-like aspect. Kerry stopped, too. She felt the urge to turn and hurry away from him, but not because she was afraid. Nervous and embarrassed, yes, but not afraid-not yet.

  “Why the hell’d you have to show up here, now?”

  “I don’t understand what you mean, Mr. Balfour. I-”

  “What? What’d you say?”

  “I said-”

  He yelled, “Screwing everything up, goddamn you!” and dropped the toolbox and lunged at her.

  The sudden attack caught her completely off guard; she had no time to run or try to defend herself. He caught hold of her, threw her sideways into the pickup’s rear gate, jamming her elbow, wrenching her back, ripping loose a cry of pain and surging terror. He crowded in against her, spewing sour breath into her face. She tried to claw him, tried to scream, but by then, his body was wedged against hers and his thick hands were tight around her throat.

  Squeezing, squeezing, until his face, the trees, the daylight all faded to black.

  5

  It was a quarter after four when I got back to the cabin. The locked front door surprised me a little because it meant Kerry wasn’t there. I let myself in, and on the kitchen table I found a note: Out for my walk. Back soon. So she must have gone later than she’d indicated she would. Probably spent most of the day lazing around, maybe had herself a nice long nap.

  In any case, she’d been away for a while because the cabin was muggy with all the windows closed. I opened four of them to let in the light afternoon breeze, provide some cross ventilation. Then I got a bottle of Sierra Nevada out of the rattling old refrigerator and took it onto the deck.

  Cooling some now, with the breeze and the down-sliding sun. Hot day in the valley. Much of the terrain I’d explored had been open and unshaded, and I’d worked up a pretty good sweat. Tired myself out, too. I could feel the stiffness in my legs and back from all the tramping over uneven ground. I must’ve walked four or five miles, a lot more distance than I was used to.

  But I’d found a couple of likely fishing spots, neither of them on the map I’d bought in the sporting goods store in Six Pines-one along a clear, shallow, fast-moving stream, the other a tree-shaded, moss-banked pool. Plenty of trout moving in and out of that pool; you couldn’t quite see them, except as faint shadows gliding among darker shadows beneath the surface, but they were there all right. I’d figured a Blue Quill or Thorax Dun would work well in the stream, and a Gray Hackle just right for the pool. Wrong on all three counts. Or maybe the fish just weren’t biting today. I hadn’t even had a decent nibble.

  Tomorrow morning early, I thought, if I could haul my creaky old carcass out of bed in the cold light of dawn, I’d go out again. Today was the first time I’d been trout fishing in years, ever since that harrowing time at Deep Mountain Lake high up in the Sierras near Quincy. Thought I’d lost my zest for the sport, but today’s outing was proof that I hadn’t; I had just needed some time away from it, was all. If we did end up buying this place, I’d probably indulge in quite a bit of catch and release in the future. As much as I’d once enjoyed fresh trout pan-fried in butter, I’d reached the point in my life where I could no longer willingly take a life of any kind.

  I’d have one more try at talking Kerry into coming with me tomorrow. She wouldn’t have to put a line out herself, just be there to keep me company and share the experience. Convince her to try it once, and she’d be as hooked as one of the rainbows or browns I planned to catch.

  I finished my beer, went inside for another. Moved my chair to the far side of the deck, put my feet up on the rail, and sat there sipping and taking in the view. The beer and the day’s exercise made me drowsy; I nodded off for a while, until an ear-buzzing mosquito jerked me out of it. The low angle of the sun told me it must be close to six o’clock. A glance at my watch confirmed it.

  And still no Kerry. She must have left just before I got back, I thought. Then I thought no, she had to’ve been out for at least a half hour by then or it wouldn’t have been so stuffy inside.

  Some walk. But how far could she have gone? Quite a ways if she’d taken the secondary road below; it meandered along the hillside for a considerable distance in both directions before d
ropping down to the main valley road. But she’d said something this morning about a walk in the woods. Which woods? There was timber all around the property, all along Ridge Hill Road.

  Possible she’d gotten herself lost, but that wasn’t likely. There were other houses tucked in among most of the nearby forestland, except for the section that ran along the ridge above and down the other side, and she wouldn’t have gone up that far. Kerry was not a risk-taker for one thing, and for another, she had a built-in compass that operated even in unfamiliar surroundings.

  Some kind of accident? Tripped, fell, hurt herself badly enough so that she couldn’t make it back? That possibility was what worried me the most. Accidents could happen to anybody at any time, no matter how careful you were.

  I let another fifteen minutes go by, my nerves jumping, the fear of some sort of accident jabbing at my mind. And when she still didn’t show, I went looking for her.

  The woods at the rear first. There was a gate in the fence back there… through it seemed the most likely way for her to have gone. On the other side was what looked like a deer trail, and I followed that to where it split in two. Damn! I went a little ways along each fork, looking for some sign of recent passage and not finding any. She could have gone in either direction-the timber ran all along the rear of the property and down on both sides. If she’d come in here at all.

  I took the left fork first, followed it until it petered out against a deadfall. You could get around it, but not without making a detour through fern groves on either side. None of the ferns appeared to have been trampled.

  Back to the other fork and along its winding course. Broken twigs, scuffed-through needles… somebody had been this way recently. Kerry? It could also have been a deer; in one place, I came on a little pile of black pellet droppings. I was not enough of a woodsman to make the distinction.

  The trail led me out of the trees, across a shallow streambed and a rock-strewn brown meadow. No sign of Kerry. No sign that she’d ever been here. What was discernible of the path ended at the far end of the clearing, beyond which was a moderately steep incline through trees and underbrush. I thought about climbing up there, but I didn’t do it. The muscles in my legs were already tight-drawn from the exertion.