Chapter Two（2）

After breakfast I climbed back in the Bronco and drove to Basking to pick up some supplies; not that fried eggs and beer for breakfast didn’t make me feel macho as hell, but as a steady diet it gets old fast.

Basking is much smaller than Sonora, which is one of the better known of California’s old mining towns, as well as being the County Seat. This is mother lode country, but nowadays revenue comes from logging, tourism, and agriculture. Mark Twain and Brett Harte made the area famous, though the tourists had yet to zero in on Basking. It was a small town; some buildings dating back to the 1800s, which is old in California. The narrow, steep streets were partially bricked and lined with trees older than the town itself. Glass front windows were painted in old-fashioned script that spelled out things like: Gentlemen’s Haberdashery or Polly’s Confectionery. Victorian clapboard houses had been preserved to doll house perfection in kindergarten colors. .

There were few people about on that Friday morning; a couple of geezers sat outside the grocery store as I climbed the wide wooden stairs to the porch.

“So Custer says to his brother,” one of the wizened ones said to the other, “I don’t know what the hell’s wrong with them Injuns—they seemed okay at the dance last night!”

The second old timer cackled in toothless appreciation and slapped his knee.

I pushed open the peeling door. A bell rang noisily as I stepped inside the store. The first thing that met my eyes was a gigantic moth-eaten buffalo head mounted over the counter. My gaze dropped to meet that of a lady of about eighty (give or take a decade) calmly eyeing me as she probed her teeth with a blue toothpick.

“Help you, sonny? You look lost.”

I told her what I needed and she directed me amiably down the aisles of pickled calves feet and pork rinds.

“Do you sell Tab?”

“Sonny, I haven’t seen that stuff since the ’60s.”

Coincidentally that appeared to be the age of some of the cans on the shelves in front of me. Food or collectible? You decide.

“Passing through?” the proprietress inquired around the toothpick when I piled my groceries on the counter at last.

“No. I’m staying out on Stagecoach Road.”

She contemplated me with her gimlet eyes and gave an unexpected cackle that I thought would end with her swallowing her toothpick. “I know you now. You’re that skinny little kid used to come in here with Anna English.”

“That’s me.”

She removed the toothpick and waved it at me to make her point. “Grandkid or something, ain’t you? Only living kin. You’re the one paying that no account Ted Harvey to sit around and smoke dope all day.”

“I’m paying him to look after my property.” Smoking dope was a perk.

“That’s what you think, sonny,” the crone informed me. She began to ring my groceries on an antique register, raising her penciled-in brows at such oddities as smoked almonds and apple-cinnamon instant oatmeal.

“Planning to stay awhile, I guess,” she remarked.

“A week or so.”

“You got company with you?”

“No.” I said it and immediately thought better of it. “Not until tonight.” Why advertise that I was by myself in an isolated valley?

“How come you never came back when your granny passed away?”

“I was eight. I didn’t have my driver’s license.”

This reminded her of all the people who did have licenses and shouldn’t. She treated me to a couple of traffic-death horror stories, finished bagging my groceries and remarked, “You better have a pow-wow with that no-account Ted Harvey. He’ll burn the place down one of these days.”

When I got back to the ranch I had another look for that no-account Ted Harvey. He was still missing.

The rest of the afternoon was spent making myself at home, home on the range. I threw open the windows and doors to air out the place, balled up the dustsheets and attacked the most noticeable cobwebs with a broom that looked like an antique itself. I dusted, scrubbed, swept—anything to avoid writing. However, the war machine ground to a halt when I reached my grandmother’s study.

There, long forgotten by me, were several glass-front cases loaded with books.

I dropped the broom and approached slowly, my pulse quickening in excitement known only to book lovers in the advanced stage of addiction. Wiping the dusty pane, I peered close. Cloth-bound hardcover, embossed white print and the words, The Bride Wore Black. Cornell Woolrich. A first edition. A rare first at that.

I pulled open the glass door and squatted down. Mysteries. Shelf after shelf of mysteries.

I expelled a long breath. Paperback and hardcover. Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler. All the good old stuff: Hammett, Tey, Stout, Marsh—a couple of my fave rave Leslie Ford. Young Jim Hawkins couldn’t have been more jazzed at a trunkful of pirate gold.

There were a couple of gothic romances but mostly my grandmother’s taste seemed to lean toward the hard-boiled. No gay mysteries of course. The first “normal” gay detective didn’t come out, literally speaking, till 1970 with Joseph Hansen’s Fadeout. Hansen may not have hit the New York Times bestseller list with his Brandstetter series, but he set the standard for the rest of us.

The funny thing was that until that moment I didn’t remember my grandmother being a mystery buff. Now I wondered if her reading habits had subconsciously influenced my own. Lisa, my mother, read nonfiction when she read anything at all.

About five o’clock I tore my nose out of the books long enough to fry up salmon and potatoes just the way Granna had taught me twenty-something years before. Jake would have been impressed. He was under the impression that I would starve to death if I ever lost my can opener.

I wondered how long it would take him to notice I’d left town—if he ever did notice.

After supper I popped Andrea Bocelli into the CD player, found a couple of hoary logs in the wood carrier and tossed them in the fireplace. Curling up in one of the oversized Victorian chairs, I prepared to spend the evening with Grace Latham. Grace is the quintessential amateur sleuth of her post-WWII era. She’s wealthy, well-bred, and usually way off the mark in her detecting, so don’t ask why I feel kinship with her.

Several blissful hours passed before my concentration was disturbed by the distant grind of a truck engine.

Laying the book aside, I wandered outside onto the long porch that ran the length of the back of the house. In the distance I could see spectral lights drifting down the mountainside—headlights. That road was the old stagecoach road and it led to this house which had originally been the old stage stop. Shoving my hands into my pockets, I waited. The night smelled of wood smoke and the roses growing wild beside the house. It was biting. I longed for the warmth of the house wafting out through the open door.

As I stood there rocking back and forth on my heels I began to feel very much alone, miles from town, miles from the nearest neighboring ranch, miles from nowhere. The wind through the trees sounded like rushing water, a mournful sound. It was a quarter of a century since I’d been out of hailing distance of other people. City boy, I jeered at myself.

After a time the sound of the engine died away with the lights. That was weird. Were they camping in the woods?

Rustlers? Slim pickings for rustlers these days. Briefly, I thought about investigating. Perhaps here lay the answer to my missing corpse. But unlike my intrepid Jason—or even good old Grace Latham—I concluded that night reconnaissance was not a hot idea. Even more briefly I considered calling the sheriffs, but after our last encounter I hesitated to look like the nervous nellie I knew they had pegged me for.

Going back inside, I threw a couple of logs on the fire and returned to my book. But shortly after, the lines began to run together. Worn out by more physical activity than I’d had in a month, I crawled into my sleeping bag and fell instantly asleep.

I woke to the hoot of an owl. For a moment I wondered where I was. The room was moonlit. The shadow of a tree swayed against the wall. I squinted at the red embers in the fireplace, listening intently.

At last I heard it again, the crunch of footsteps on gravel. Rolling out of the sleeping bag, I went to the windows. The night looked like it had been shot through a blue filter for a cheap horror flick.

All was silent. Still.

Had I imagined those furtive footsteps?

Pulling on a pair of jeans, I shoved my feet into shoes and grabbed my flashlight. The air was bitter as I stepped out onto the porch. The surrounding mountains prickled with gleaming arrowheads of pine. Soft-footing it across the porch, I froze as a wooden board cracked underfoot loudly as a bone break.

Nothing moved.

I continued on around the house.

The outlying sheds and barn stood dark and motionless in the moonlight. Frost glittered the rooftops. Quietly I picked my way down the steps. Nothing stirred in the yard. I stayed in the shadows of the house and waited.

Nothing.

Hours seemed to pass while I watched. I was dozy. I was chilled. I told myself that if there had been a prowler he was long gone now. I reminded myself that I needed my rest. I was a writer, not a detective, amateur or otherwise, and this was just a waste of time and valuable sleep.

Finally I convinced myself and headed back inside the house. I tossed another log on the dying embers in the fireplace and dived for the sofa, shivering into my sleeping bag.

After a few minutes my body defrosted and I sank back into confused dreams of Grace Latham sweeping cobwebs out of Ted Harvey’s trailer.

We’ve got to get to the bottom of it, she informed me in my dream state.

The bottom of what?

The floor, Grace replied simply.

I was up with the birds, a meadow lark providing pleasant substitute for my alarm clock. In the fresh first light I cruised past the empty corrals, the empty stable and the empty trailer of my missing handyman, then up into the hills.

I roved out quite a way enjoying the warm kiss of sunlight on my face. Taking my time I climbed the hillside, which was really more of a small mountain. “Find the nearest mountain, climb it, and peace shall flow into you as the sun flows into the trees,” said John Muir. At the crest of the hill I paused and inhaled a lungful of mountain air. When I stopped coughing I looked around.

That’s when I noticed the field I was standing in was not of wild flowers, nor wild grasses nor bracken, familiar though those ragged green leaves seemed.

Running it through the old calculator I deduced that I was waist high in grass—the kind you smoke, not mow. For a moment or two I stood there quietly aghast, and then I tore down the hillside and into the house to the telephone; I knew there was a reason I continued paying for the service. Instinctively I called my old pal Detective Jake Riordan.

Drumming my fingers on the scratched counter, I waited for the answering machine. After four rings Jake picked up and mumbled, “ ‘Lo?”

“Jake,” I puffed, still out of breath from my sprint. “It’s me. I need hel—advice. When I got here there was a body—a dead man in the yard. He’d been shot. In the back. When the sheriffs got here he was gone. Vanished. Now I’ve just found grass—pot growing on my hill.”

Into my pause for oxygen Jake growled, “How the hell much coffee have you had this morning?”

In the background I heard a voice murmuring inquiry. A feminine voice.

I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me until then that Jake was still seeing other people. Female people. I figured he was still doing the leatherscene; I accepted that as a normal part of his screwed-up psyche. But dating women? Sleeping with women?

Where exactly did I fit in his life? Apparently he could sleep with everyone but me. Friends? I was the friend he didn’t want to be seen with. So if we weren’t friends and we sure as hell weren’t lovers, why was I placing hysterical phone calls to him on a Saturday morning before breakfast?

“Never mind,” I said. “Wrong number.”

“Adrien, where —”

I replaced the receiver quietly and carefully, not slamming it down because I was an adult after all, and whatever I was feeling now was my problem, not Jake’s. But the unrequited gig was getting old fast.

I tottered into the front room and dropped down on the nearest chair. After a minute or so my breathing returned to normal and I noticed how quiet it was. Way too quiet. I got up, punched Play on the CD player and stared out the window.

There’s a phrase in Titus Andronicus: “the heart’s deep languor.” For the record it wasn’t that I didn’t understand. And it’s not that I don’t like women. Some of my best friends are women. Women intrigue me with their fragile little bones and Amazon loyalty. I dig their Jr. Scientist makeup kits, their Machiavellian reasoning, their extraordinary notions of nutrition and geography. I just wouldn’t want my son to marry one. Okay, maybe my son, but not my boyfriend.

Spooky footfalls in the night are not nearly as frightening as the prospect of being alone and lonely.

One of life’s ironic moments occurred then, as the next CD dropped on the player. “Con Te Partiro.” Time to Say Goodbye.