The channel that led to Whiskey Island loomed ahead. Cheer up, I told myself-the important thing is that this time, 120 years after the first one, the red-haired Irish bludgeon victim is being brought out alive and the man who assaulted him is sure to wind up in prison. The ghost of O'Farrell, the Gold Rush miner, won't have any company when it goes prowling and swearing vengeance on those foggy nights in Dead Man's Slough.
The Ghosts of Ragged-Ass Gulch
1
The name of the place was Ragged-Ass Gulch.
That was the name the town had been born with anyway, back in the days of the California Gold Rush when gold fever raged up in Trinity County as well as in the Mother Lode and a group of miners discovered nuggets in Musket Creek north of Weaverville. Nobody seemed to know any more why the town that sprang up along the creek's banks had been so colorfully dubbed. But it wasn't unusual for miners, who were themselves a colorful lot, to give their camps unconventional names; Whiskeytown, Lousy Ravine, Rowdy Bar, Bogus Thunder, and Git-Up-And-Git were just a few of their other inventions.
At any rate, Ragged-Ass Gulch had flourished for three or four years, with a population of fifteen hundred at its peak, until the gold in the vicinity petered out and the miners left for other diggings. Then, slowly, it had begun to die. By the mid-1850s, only a hundred or so people remained and the town was renamed Cooperville, after the largest of the families that came to settle there. Those hundred had shrunk to less than thirty by the turn of the century, which made it a virtual ghost town. It was still a virtual ghost town: at last count, exactly sixteen people lived there.
I had my first look at it on a bright morning in mid June. Beside me in the car, Kerry said, "Good Lord, it's beautiful," in a surprised voice. "No wonder the people who live here don't want the place developed."
We had just angled between a couple of high forested cliffs, and down below the mountains had folded back to create a huge park-like meadow carpeted with wild clover, poppies, purple-blue lupine. The town lay sprawled at the back end, where the narrow line of Musket Creek meandered through the high grass and wildflowers. Most of the buildings were tumbledown-and off to the left I could see the blackened skeletons of the four that had burned ten days ago-but at a distance the sunlight and the majestic surroundings softened the look of them, gave them a kind of odd, lonely dignity. Far off to the east, you could see the immense snowcapped peak of Mt. Shasta jutting more than fourteen thousand feet into the dusky blue sky.
"Now why would anybody call a pretty spot like this Ragged-Ass Gulch?" Kerry asked.
"Somebody's idea of a joke, maybe. Miners had strange senses of humor."
"That's for sure."
She put her head out of the open passenger window and sniffed the air like a cat, looking off toward Mt. Shasta. She seemed to have begun to enjoy herself finally, which was a relief. She hadn't wanted to come because she was miffed at me, and I'd had to do some fast talking to convince her. Ordinarily I would not have considered bringing Kerry along on an investigation; my profession being what it was, it was seldom a good idea to mix business and pleasure. But in this instance, there were extenuating circumstances.
When we reached the meadow, the road deteriorated into little more than a pair of ruts with a grassy hump in the middle. It angled off to the right and eventually forked; one branch became the single main street of Cooperville, nee Ragged-Ass Gulch, and the other hooked up and disappeared into the flanking slopes to the west, where I had been told some of the townspeople lived.
The first building we came to was on the near side of the fork. It was one of the few occupied ones in the town proper, a combination single-pump gas station, garage and body shop, and general store. The garage and store buildings were weathered and unpainted, but in a decent state of repair; a sign that said Cooperville Mercantile hung over the screen-doored entrance to the latter, and the facing wall was plastered with old metal Coca-Cola and beer signs. Around back, to one side, was a frame cottage with a big native-stone chimney at one end. The folks who lived in the cottage and ran the businesses were the Coleclaws: one husband, one wife, one son.
I pulled in off the road and stopped next to the gas pump. A fat brown-and-white dog came around from behind the store, took one look at the car, and began barking its head off. No one else appeared.
"I'll go see who's here," I said to Kerry. "You wait in the car, okay?"
"Like a nice dutiful little wife?"
Here we go again, I thought. "Come on, babe, you know this is business."
"It wasn't supposed to be business. It wasn't supposed to be Ragged-Ass Gulch either."
"Kerry…"
"Oh, all right. Go on, I'll wait here."
I got out of the car, sighing a little, keeping my eye on the dog. It continued to bark, but it didn't make any sudden moves in my direction. I took the fact that its tail was wagging to be a positive sign and started toward the entrance to the store.
Just before I got there, a pudgy young guy in grease-stained overalls appeared in the doorway of the adjacent garage. "Be quiet, Sam," he said to the dog. He didn't say anything to me, or move out of the doorway. And the dog went right on yapping.
I walked over to where the young guy stood. He was in his middle twenties and he had curly brown hair and pink beardless cheeks and big doe eyes that had a remote look in them. The eyes watched me without curiosity as I came up to him.
"Hi," I said. "You're Gary Coleclaw, right?"
"Yeah," he said.
"I'd like to talk to your father, if he's around."
"He's not. He went into Weaverville this morning for supplies."
"How about your mother? Is she here?"
"No. She went to Weaverville too."
"When will they be back?"
He shrugged. "I dunno. This afternoon sometime."
"Well, maybe you can help me. I'm a detective, from San Francisco, and I-"
"Detective?" he said.
"Yes. I'm investigating the death of Allan Randall, over in Redding-"
"The Munroe guy," he said. His face closed up; you could see it happening, like watching a poppy fold its petals at sundown. "The fire. I don't know nothing about that. Except he got what was coming to him."
"Is that what your father says too?"
"That's what everybody says. Listen, you working for them? Them Munroe guys?"
"No.
"Yeah, you are. Them damn Munroe guys."
He wheeled away from me and hurried back inside the garage. I called after him, "Hey, wait," but he didn't stop or turn. An old Chrysler sat on the floor inside, its front end jacked up; there was one of those little wheeled mechanics' carts alongside, and he dropped down onto it on his back and scooted himself under the Chrysler until only his legs were showing. A moment later I heard the sharp, angry sound of some kind of tool whacking against the undercarriage.
The damned dog was still barking. I sidestepped it and went back to the car. When I slid in under the wheel, Kerry asked, "Well?"
"He wouldn't talk to me. And his folks aren't here."
"What now?"
"The Cooperville fire," I said.
2
I drove out along the road again. Just beyond the fork, two more occupied cottages sat side by side; the nearest one had a deserted look, but in the yard of the second, a heavyset woman in her late sixties or early seventies, wearing man's clothing and a straw hat, was wielding a hoe among tall rows of tomato vines. She stopped when she heard the car and stood staring out at the road as we passed by, as if she resented the appearance of strangers in Cooperville.
Kerry said, "None of the natives is very friendly, the way it looks."
"I didn't expect that they would be," I said.
I took the right fork that led through what was left of the town. It amounted to about two blocks' worth of buildings on both sides of the road, although on either end and back into the meadow you could see foundations and other remains of what had once been more buildings and streets.
Most of the structures still standing were backed up against the creek. There were about fifteen altogether, all made of logs and whipsawed boards, some with stone foundations, a third with badly decayed frames and collapsed roofs. The largest, two stories, girdled by a sagging verandah at the second level, looked to have been either a hotel or a saloon with upstairs accommodations; it bore no signs, and as was the case with the others we passed, its doors and windows were boarded up. Except for faded lettering over the entrance to one that said Union Drug Store, it was impossible to tell what sort of establishments any of them had been.
Kerry seemed impressed. "This is some place," she said. "I've never been in a ghost town before."
"Spooky, huh?"
"No. I'm fascinated. How long have these buildings been here?"
"More than a hundred years, some of them."
"And there've been people living here all that time and nobody ever tried to restore any of them?"
"Not in a good long while."
"Well, why not? I mean, you'd think somebody would want to preserve a historic place like this."
"Somebody does," I said. "The Munroe Corporation."
"I don't mean that kind of preservation. You know what I mean."
"Uh-huh. It's a good question, but I don't know the answer."
She frowned a little, thoughtfully. "What kind of people live here, anyway?"
I had no answer for her. Half of the sixteen residents had been born in Cooperville; the other half had gravitated to it because they liked its isolation. It was up near the Oregon border, three hundred miles from San Francisco, and to get to it you had to take an unpaved road that climbed seven miles off State Highway 3. The tourists hadn't discovered it because it was so far off the beaten track. The residents liked that, too. What they seemed to want more than anything else was to be left alone.
The problem was, they weren't being left alone. Most of the land in the area was government protected-the Shasta Trinity National Recreation Area-but the land on which Cooperville sat was owned by Trinity County. A group of developers, the Munroe Corporation, had begun buying it up during the past year, with the intention of turning Cooperville into a place the tourists would discover: widening and paving the access road, restoring the rundown buildings after the fashion of the Mother Lode towns, adding things like a Frontier Town Amusement Park, stables for horseback rides up into the mountains, and a couple of lodges to accommodate vacationers and overnight guests.
The Cooperville residents were up in arms over this. They didn't want to live in a tourist trap and they didn't want to be forced out of their homes by a bunch of outsiders. So they had banded together and hired a law firm to try to block the sale of the land, to get Cooperville named as a state historical site. Lawsuits were still pending against the Munroe Corporation, but everybody figured it was just a matter of time before the bulldozers and workmen moved in and another little piece of history died and was reincarnated as a chunk of modern commercialism.
One of the residents seemed to have been unwilling to accept that fate, however, and had taken matters into his own hands. Four of the town's abandoned buildings had burned to the ground ten days before, including the remains of a "Fandango Hall"-a saloon-and-gambling house-that the developers had been particularly interested in restoring. The Munroe people thought it was a blatant case of arson, and put pressure on the county sheriff's office to investigate; but the law had found no evidence that the fire had been deliberately set, and the official report tabbed it as "of unknown origin."
Bad feelings were running high by this time, on both sides. And they got worse-much worse. Two days ago, there had been another fire, not in Cooperville this time but in Redding, some forty miles away, where the Munroe Corporation had its offices. The bachelor home of the president of the Munroe combine, a man named Randall who had been the most outspoken against the citizens of Cooperville, had gone up in flames shortly past midnight. Randall had gone up with it. He was not supposed to be home that night-it was common knowledge that he was going to San Francisco on company business-but he'd put off the trip at the last minute. He had evidently been asleep when the blaze started, had been overcome by smoke before he could get out of the burning house. There was no evidence of arson; as far as the local cops were concerned, his death was a tragic accident.
But the other Munroe partners thought otherwise. The Great Western Insurance Company, which carried a hundred-thousand-dollar double indemnity partnership policy on Randall's life and on the lives of the three remaining partners, was also skeptical. Insurance companies are always leery when a heavily insured party dies under unusual circumstances, especially when his business partners are the beneficiaries. Great Western wanted Randall's death investigated for that reason. And the Munroe people wanted his death investigated both to exonerate themselves of any wrongdoing and to find out which of the Cooperville residents was responsible for the fires.
That was where I came in. Great Western had called me first, in the person of Barney Rivera, their head claims adjustor in San Francisco; they were a small company and did not maintain an investigative staff, so they farmed out that kind of work to private operatives like me. Then, six hours after I accepted the job, one of the three surviving Munroe partners, Raymond Treacle, showed up at my office. He offered Munroe's full cooperation in my investigation, plus five thousand dollars if I helped bring about the arrest and conviction of the guilty person or persons. There was no conflict of interest in that, as long as the guilty person or persons turned out to be someone other than a member of the Munroe Corporation, so I agreed.
Both Barney Rivera and Raymond Treacle had given me plenty of background information, but neither had been able to provide any concrete leads. From what Treacle had told me, all sixteen Cooperville residents were backwoods cretins capable of anything, but I discounted that opinion as biased. He had a list of their names and what they did to earn a living, and I ran a background check on each of them that netted me nothing much. I also ran a background check on Treacle and Randall and the other two Munroe partners; that got me nothing much either.
The only thing left for me to do was to drive up to Trinity County. And that was where the difficulty with Kerry lay. We had planned a nice quiet vacation for this week, down in Carmel. My financial position was not exactly stable, however, and this job-particularly after Raymond Treacle sweetened the pot with his five-thousand-dollar offer-was one I could not afford to turn down. Kerry understood that, but she was still disappointed. So in a weak moment I'd suggested that she come along to Trinity County; maybe I could wrap up my investigation in a few days, I said, and we could still get in some vacation time-Shasta Lake was real pretty this time of year. She'd agreed, but without much enthusiasm, and she had been grumpy on the drive up yesterday. Last night and this morning, too.
Now, though, she seemed a little more pleased about things, and I had hopes that the trip would turn out all right after all, on the personal as well as the financial front. Maybe tonight I would get what I hadn't got last night. The thought made me lick my lips like a horny old hound.
The four fire-destroyed buildings had been set apart from the others, on the left-hand side of the road. That was one reason the whole of Cooperville hadn't become an inferno; others were that there'd been no wind on the night of the blaze, the meadow grass was still green thanks to late-spring rains, and Jack Coleclaw and some of his fellow residents had spotted the fire immediately and rushed to do battle with it. Even so, there was nothing left of the four structures except a jumble of blackened timbers, with a wide swatch of scorched earth and a hastily dug firebreak ringing them.
I stopped the car at the edge of the firebreak. Kerry said as I fumbled around in back for the old trench coat I'd brought along, "I suppose you're going to go poke around over there."
"Yup. You can come along if you want to."
"In all that soot and debris? No thanks. I'll go back and look at the ghosts that are still standing."
; We got out into the hot sunshine. It was quiet there, peaceful except for the distant raucous screeching of a jay, and the air was heavy with the scent of evergreens. Kerry wandered off along the road; I put the trench coat on and belted it, to protect my shirt and trousers, and then went across the firebreak to the burned-out buildings.
The county sheriff's investigators had been over the area without finding anything; I didn't expect to find anything either. But then, I'd had some training in arson investigation myself, back when I was on the San Francisco cops, and I read the updated handbooks and manuals put out by police associations and by the insurance companies. I had also had a handful of jobs over the years involving arson. So there was a chance that I might stumble onto something that had been overlooked.
The first thing you do on an inspection of a fire scene is to determine the point of origin. Once you've got that, you look for something to indicate how the fire started, whether it was accidental or a case of arson. If it was arson, what you're after is the corpus delicti- evidence of the method or device used by the arsonist.
One of the ways to locate point of origin is to check the "alligatoring," or charring, of the surface of the burned wood. This can tell you in which direction the fire spread, where it was the hottest, and if you're lucky you can trace it straight to the origin. I was lucky, as it turned out. And not just once-twice. I not only found the point of origin, I found the corpus delicti as well.
It was arson, all right. The fire had been set at the rear of the building farthest to the north, whatever that one might once have been; and what had been used to ignite it was a candle. I found the residue of it, a wax deposit inside a small cup-shaped piece of stone that was hidden under a pile of rubble. It took me ten minutes of sifting around and getting my hands and the trench coat leopard-spotted with soot to dredge up the stone. Which was probably why the county sheriff's people hadn't been as thorough as they should have been; not everybody is willing to turn himself into the likeness of a chimney-sweep, even in the name of the law.
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