Kerry said, “Why, it’s beautiful,” in a surprised voice. “No wonder the people who live here don’t want the place developed.”
“Yeah,” I said.
We went on a ways. Then she said, “Why would anybody in his right mind call such an idyllic spot Ragged-Ass Gulch?”
“Somebody’s idea of a joke, maybe. Miners had oddball senses of humor.”
“That’s for sure.”
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 the old camp, passing between facing rows of its abandoned buildings, and the other hooked over and disappeared onto the rising ground to the west. According to the information supplied by Shirley Irwin, more people lived back there in the woods.
The first buildings we came to were before the fork, on a long stretch of level ground-a combination single-pump gas station, garage and body shop, and general store. The garage and store were weathered and unpainted, but in a decent state of repair. A couple of hand-lettered signs hung over the screen-doored entrance to the latter; the big one said MUSKET CREEK MERCANTILE and the little one said BAIT TACKLE • AMMUNITION • GUIDE SERVICE. The garage 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: Jack, his wife, and their son Gary.
I decided I might as well get my talk with Jack Coleclaw out of the way first, so 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’d better do this alone,” I said to Kerry. “You wait in the car.”
“All right.”
I got out, 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 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 to Weaverville this morning.”
“When will he be back?”
He shrugged. “This afternoon sometime.”
“How about your mother? Is she here?”
“No. She went to Weaverville too.”
“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 Munroe Randall in Redding-”
“The Northern 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, mister, you working for them? Them Northern guys?”
“No.”
“Yeah, you are. Them damn Northern guys.”
“No, I’m working for the insurance-”
But he had pivoted away from me, was hurrying back inside the garage. I called after him, “Hey, wait,” but he didn’t stop or turn. An old black Chrysler sat on the floor inside, its front end jacked up; there was one of those little wheeled mechanic’s 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 fire,” I said.
I drove out along the road again. Just beyond the right fork, two more occupied cottages sat on adjacent hummocks, like odd-shaped nipples on a pair of big breasts. The nearest one had a deserted look, but in the yard of the second, a heavy-set woman of about seventy, 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 Musket Creek.
Kerry said, “None of the natives is very friendly, the way it looks.”
“So I’ve been warned.”
I kept on going along the right fork, through what was left of the mining camp. It amounted to about two blocks’ worth of buildings on both sides of the road, although here and there in the surrounding meadows you could see foundations and other remains of what had once been additional structures. Most of the buildings still standing were backed up against the creek. There were about fifteen altogether, all made of whipsawn boards on stone foundations, some reinforced with tin siding and roofs, a third with badly decayed frames and collapsing eaves. The largest-two-storied, girdled by a sagging and partly missing veranda at the second level-looked to have been either a hotel or a saloon with upstairs accommodations; it bore no signs other than one somebody had painted on its sheet metal roof, advertising Bull
Durham tobacco. Several of the others did have signs, or what was left of them: UNION DRUG STORE, MEAT MARKET, MINER’S HALL; M. SANDERS and SON, BLACKSMITHS; MUSKET CREEK GENERAL MERCHANDISE and HARDWARE, S.WILBUR, PROP.
As far as I could tell as we passed, all their doors and windows were either boarded up or sealed with tacked-on sheets of tin.
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?”
“Well over a century, some of them.”
“And people have been living here all that time and nobody ever tried to restore 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 Northern Development 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?”
“That’s another good question. I guess we’ll find out pretty soon.”
The four fire-destroyed buildings had been set apart from the others, on the south side of the road. That, along with the facts that there had been no wind on the night of the blaze, that the meadow grass was still spring-green, and that Jack Coleclaw and the other residents had spotted the fire right away and rushed to do battle with it, had saved the whole of the abandoned camp from going up. As it was, there was nothing left of the four structures except stone foundations and timber fragments like blackened and splintered bones, 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, “I suppose you’re going to go poke around over there.”
“Yup. Come along if you want to.”
“In all that soot? No thanks. I think I’ll go back and look at the ghosts.”
We got out into the hot sunshine. It was quiet there, peaceful except for the distant yammering of a jay, and the air was heavy with the scent of wildflowers and evergreens. Kerry wandered off along the road; I took out the old, soot-stained trenchcoat I’d worn in Redding, put it on and belted it, and then went across the firebreak to the burned-out buildings.