I said, “Let’s get back to that threatening letter you received. Do you still have it?”
“Somewhere in this mess. You want to see it?”
“If you don’t mind.”
He shuffled among the papers Miss Irwin had picked up, found an envelope, and handed it over. Plain white dime-store envelope, with O‘Daniel’s name and the company address printed in an exaggerated child’s hand-somebody’s method of disguising his handwriting. No return address, of course. The envelope had been slit at one end; I shook out the single sheet of paper it contained. It had been torn off a ruled yellow pad, and its message had been printed in the same scrawly hand:
Frank O’Daniel,
If you don’t leave Musket Creek alone you’ll wish your mother never had you. Look what happened to your partner Randall. Don’t let anything like that happen to you. Get out NOW! OR ELSE!
When I looked up from the paper Miss Irwin was back with some aspirin and another glass of water. I waited until O’Daniel was done swallowing before I asked him, “Have there been other letters like this?”
“No. This is the first one.”
“Other threats of any kind?”
“Well… not exactly.”
“How do you mean, ‘not exactly’?”
“There were a bunch of hang-up calls,” he said. “Back when we first started buying up land in Musket Creek. Every time you’d pick up the phone, the bastard on the other end would hang up.”
“Just here? Or at your home too?”
“Both. You remember, Shirley? A fucking nuisance.”
“I remember,” she said.
“It went on for a couple of weeks,” O’Daniel said. “I had my home number changed finally, unlisted, but we couldn’t do that here.”
“No other calls since then?”
“No. They just stopped and that was it.”
I tucked the anonymous letter back into its envelope, but I didn’t give it back to O’Daniel. “Were either of your partners ever threatened? Letters, calls, in person?”
“Ray Treacle was. An artist named Robideaux who lives over there threatened him to his face.”
“Yes, he told me about that. What about Munroe Randall? Was he ever threatened?”
“Not that he mentioned to me.”
I said bluntly, “Do you think he was murdered, Mr. O’Daniel?”
“Munroe? Hell, I don’t know what to think.”
“This letter you just got hints that maybe he was.”
O’Daniel didn’t say anything for a time. You could see the wheels turning inside his head: thinking about that hundred-thousand dollar double indemnity payoff, probably. “The police say it was an accident,” he said at length. “They ought to know, shouldn’t they?”
“The police overlook things sometimes. Everybody does.”
“Yeah, I guess so. But that note-it could just be a crank thing. I mean, whoever wrote it might want me to think Munroe was murdered. You know, trying to take advantage of the accident. That could be it.”
“It could be,” I admitted. “But I’d like to keep the note anyway, if that’s all right with you.”
“Sure, go ahead.”
I put the envelope into my coat pocket. “Let’s assume that Jack Coleclaw didn’t write it,” I said. “Any other candidates?”
“Anybody in Musket Creek, just about.”
“The letter’s fairly literate. Whoever wrote it has a pretty fair grasp of English fundamentals.”
“Well… Penrose, maybe.”
“Who’s Penrose?”
“A writer. Writes stuff on natural history. All writers are nuts, but that one is a real fruitcake. You’ll see what I mean when you talk to him.”
“That should be pretty soon,” I said. “I’m going out there tomorrow.”
“If I were you,” O’Daniel said, “I’d take along a couple of cops. They don’t like strangers, particularly strangers asking questions that have anything to do with Northern Development.”
“It can’t be that bad, Mr. O’Daniel.”
“No?” He put a hand up to his throat. “Well, it’s your neck this time, not mine.”
Kerry was out by the pool, soaking up the last of the dying sun, when I got back to the Sportsman’s Rest. She was in better spirits too, which was a relief. She wanted to know all about my day, and she kept asking questions and chattering at me the whole time we were getting ready to go out for dinner.
But by the time we picked out a restaurant, her mood had shifted. Periods of silence again, interspersed with grouchy comments on the food, the decor, my table manners, and the feeble quality of my jokes. She didn’t say much on the ride back to the motel, and nothing at all for the first half hour we were in the room.
I figured it was going to be a long evening, so I got out the three typed, single-spaced sheets Shirley Irwin had given me before I’d left the Northern Development offices, and read up on the citizens of Musket Creek. But pretty soon Kerry’s mood shifted again, and when she got into bed she wanted to make love. So we did, and she was half-wild about it, exhausting both of us, and afterward she clung to me and said the things lovers say to each other and apologized for being so moody and said she’d be much better company for the rest of the trip.
Only then I made the mistake of asking her what it was that was troubling her, and she shut up again and turned away from me and pretended to go to sleep.
I lay there staring up at the dark ceiling, feeling sorry for myself and thinking that Eberhardt was right: I don’t understand women worth a damn.
CHAPTER SIX
The road that led off State Highway 299 to Musket Creek was not only unpaved; it was rutted, narrow, full of dips and hairpin turns, and so dusty in places you felt as though you were driving through a kind of talcum-powder mist. The terrain was mountainous, heavily forested, with small open meadows here and there that were carpeted with wild clover and purple-blue lupine-scenic, yet without any spectacular vistas. Far off to the east you could see the immense snow-capped peak of Mt. Shasta jutting more than 14,000 feet into the cloud-flecked sky. But that was a commonplace sight in this country; on a clear day, that granddaddy of mountains was visible from just about anywhere within a fifty-mile radius.
Beside me, Kerry kept putting her head out of the open passenger window and sniffing the air like a cat. She was in a pretty good mood today, and she seemed to be enjoying herself so far-living up to last night’s promise. She had insisted on coming along; she hadn’t felt like sitting around the motel alone, she’d said, and she was curious about Ragged-Ass Gulch. So I’d given in and let her come, to keep the peace between us, but I wasn’t sure it was such a hot idea. I kept thinking about Jack Coleclaw’s attack on O‘Daniel yesterday, all the things I’d been told about the “loonies” of Musket Creek. There probably wasn’t anything to worry about; hell, you could classify both O’Daniel and Treacle as loonies, if you felt like it. But it still made me a little trepidatious.
The road seemed to go on endlessly. The car’s odometer showed 7.2 miles when the dusty strip slanted between a couple of high, wooded cliffs and the mountains folded back finally to reveal a little valley down below. And there it was-Musket Creek in all its glory.
The valley floor had a rippled look, full of hillocks, like a bright green carpet that had been bunched in at both ends to make a series of wrinkles. The town-such as it was-lay sprawled toward the far end, where the narrow line of the creek meandered through high grass, wildflowers, and stands of fir trees. Some of the buildings had been built on the hummocks; what looked to be the main street of the old mining ghost town was on flat ground paralleling the creek. 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 nostalgic quaintness.