I drove on slowly through the night-filled hills until I came to a tourist camp. I rented a cottage from a bleary-eyed boy and had a bad night’s sleep, wrestling nightmare on a lumpy bed.
Chapter 15
Lake Perdida was a narrow body of water held in place at six thousand feet by a concrete dam inserted in the slot between two timbered mountains. It was midmorning when I babied my hot engine over the top of the final grade and caught a glimpse of the lake between the trees. A cold wind from the Sierra peaks flawed its polished surface and soughed in the evergreens.
The blacktop followed the contours of the shore. I passed a tourist lodge, a roadside restaurant, a scattering of cottages. All of them were closed, and shuttered up for the winter. About midway in the lake’s five- or six-mile length I came to a filling station which looked as if it might be open. I stopped in front of the gas pumps, which were sheltered under a portico made of unpeeled logs, and leaned on my horn.
When nothing happened, I got out and walked around my car. There was a handwritten announcement pinned to one of the uprights of the portico: “Gone down the hill. Take water or air as needed, your welcome. For gas you’ll have to wait. Back by ten (a. m.)”
I filled my steaming radiator and pushed on. Half a mile beyond the gas station a weathered wooden sign was attached to a pine tree on the upper side of the road: Green Thought: Craig, Las Cruces. A smaller, newer metal sign: J. Donald Kerrigan, Esq., was nailed below it. I turned up the rocky lane.
The cabin stood on a slope, hidden from the road by the trees. It was a large one-story house with a deep veranda. Its squared redwood timbers were gray with age. The shadow of the ancient trees hung over it like a foretaste of winter.
My feet rattled the boards of the veranda. The heavy wooden shutters mat framed the windows were hanging open. I looked through the multipaned window beside the door into a dim deep room walled with oak paneling, roofed with slanting rafters. A Kodiak bearskin lay like something flattened by a steamroller in front of the stone fireplace at the far end.
I unlocked the door and went in. The air inside was chilly, and impregnated with the stale vestiges of a party. There were traces of a party in the main room. A brass ashtray on the redwood-bole coffee table was half full of cigarette ends, most of them smudged with lipstick. There were two dirty drinking glasses on the table, one marked with a telltale red crescent. Sniffing the glasses without touching them, I guessed that they had once contained good bourbon.
I went to the fireplace and felt the light wood ashes in the grate. The ashes were cold. As I stood up, I noticed something in the fur of the bearskin rug. It was a brown enameled woman’s bobby pin. I searched the rug with my fingers and found another bobby pin. The bear’s glass eyes were blase. His teeth leered in a fixed lascivious grin.
I went through the sleeping-rooms. There was a big bunkroom with half a dozen two-tiered berths built along its walls. The layer of dust on the floor hadn’t been disturbed for weeks or months. One of the two smaller bedrooms was equally disused. The other had been occupied more recently. The floor was swept. The maple bed had been slept in, and not made. I straightened out the tangled sheets. A limp rubber tube lay among them.
There were no clothes or luggage in the room, but there were several articles on top of the rustic bureau. A woman’s nail-file, a jar of face cream standing open and beginning to dry out, a pair of tortoise-shell sun glasses, a number of bobby pins like the ones I had discovered in the bearskin. In the adjoining bathroom I found a tube of toothpaste and a toothbrush, lipstick, a bottle of estrogen oil. They accounted for the things that were missing from Anne Meyer’s apartment in Las Cruces.
The kitchen was bright with chintz and knotty pine. A pot on the butane stove had remnants of spaghetti in the bottom, crawling with flies. The kitchen table had been set for two and not cleared, though the dishes were dirty. An empty wine bottle stood in the center of the table.
I left the kitchen to the languid autumn flies and let myself out the back door. Several cords of cut wood were piled under a tarpaulin against the rear wall. I looked under the tarpaulin and found black beetles. The outdoor brick oven in the yard was empty. A log outbuilding was cluttered with the remnants of past summers: canvas chairs, a small skiff, fishing tackle. I poked around in the outhouse and among the pine needles in the yard. Nothing.
I went back into the lodge through the kitchen door.
There seemed to be a thickening and darkening of the air in the deserted rooms. In the living-room I had a moment of panic. I thought that one of the giant trees was going to crash down on the house. The irrational fear passed over quickly, but it left a sense of disaster. The glass-eyed bear in front of the dead fire, the blood-red cigarette ends in the dully gleaming ashtray, were infinitely dreary. I got out.
I locked the door behind me, not so much to keep intruders out as to keep the disaster in. It slipped through the walls and followed me down the lane nagging at the nightmares in the back seat of my mind, where sex and death embraced.
The note had been removed from the front of the filling station. The door of the small stone building was standing open, and a gray-haired woman came out. She wore blue jeans and a battered man’s felt hat with a trout fly stuck in the ribbon like a cockade.
“Hello there. You want gas?”
“It’ll take about ten.”
I handed her the keys and stood beside her while she manipulated the hose. Her face was square and weathered, and her eyes looked out of it like someone peering through a wall.
“You from L. A.?”
“I am.”
“You’re the first customer I’ve had today.”
“It’s getting pretty late in the season, isn’t it?”
“Season’s over, far as I’m concerned. I’m closing up this week and moving down the mountain before it snows. Old Mac at the Inn is the only human being that stays up here all winter. He can have it.” Hanging up the dripping nozzle, she read the meter: “That will be three and a quarter.”
I gave her a ten-dollar bill – I’d cashed a traveler’s check at the place where I spent the night – and she made change from the pocket of her jeans.
“We get a lot of tourists from L. A. in the summer. What brings you up here so late?”
“Just looking around. I suppose you get plenty of people here from the valley towns?”
“Sure, they come up to get away from the heat. There’s cottagers from all over – Fresno, Bakersfield, Las Cruces. I live in Fresno myself in the wintertime. My son’s a junior at the college.”
“Good for him.”
“Ralph’s a fine boy,” she said, as if to rebut an argument to the contrary. “He appreciates me, even if some people don’t. Ralph knows a good mother when he sees one. And he’s not afraid of work, either. He helped me all summer with the station, and all fall he’s been coming up weekends. Ralph’s a real manly boy, not like some I could name.”
“I like to hear of a boy like that.” I was establishing myself with her, but I also happened to mean it. “I come across a lot of the other kind in my work.”
“What sort of work is that?”
“I’m a detective.”
“Oh. That must be interesting work. Ralph’s father – Mr. Devore was a constable, before he took to – other things.” She gave me a hard bright look over the pump. “Looking for somebody, mister?”
“You guessed it.”
“There’s nobody left up here, excepting me and old Mac and the foresters. The Inn is closed down for the winter.” I followed her gaze through the trees and saw the brown peaked roofs of the Inn at the upper end of the lake. She turned back to me with something girlishly fearful in her eyes. “It isn’t Ralph? He hasn’t done anything wrong?”