At the fork I took the left branch that led away from town and up into the wooded slopes to the west. The first house we came to belonged to Paul Robideaux; the second, almost a mile farther along, was a free-form cabin that resembled a somewhat lopsided A-frame, built on sloping ground and bordered on three sides by tall redwoods and Douglas fir. It had been pieced together with salvaged lumber, rough-hewn beams, native stone, redwood thatch, and inexpensive plate glass. A woodbutcher’s house, woodbutchers being people who went off to homestead in the wilds because they didn’t like cities, mass-produced housing, or most people.
When I slowed and eased the car off the road next to a parked Land Rover, Kerry asked, “Who lives here?”
“Hugh Penrose. He’s a writer.”
“What does he write?”
“Articles and books on natural history. He used to be a professor at Chico State. Apparently he’s an eccentric.”
“Mmm. How about letting me come with you this time? You don’t seem to be doing too well one-on-one.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea-”
“Phooey,” she said, and got out and went up toward the cabin.
Well, damn! But there was nothing I could do except to follow her, telling myself this was the last time I brought her along on an investigation.
We went up a set of curving limb-and-plank stairs to a platform deck. From inside I could hear the sound of a typewriter rattling away. I knocked on the door. The typewriter kept on going for half a minute; then it stopped, and there were footsteps, and pretty soon the door opened.
The guy who looked out at us was one of the ugliest men I had ever seen. He was about five and a half feet tall, fat, with a bulbous nose and misshapen ears and cheeks pitted with acne scars, and his bullet-shaped head was as bald as an egg. His eyes were small and mean, but there was more pain in them than anything else. This was a man who had lived more than fifty years, I thought, and who had suffered through every one of them.
He looked at Kerry, looked away from her as if embarrassed, and fixed his gaze on me. “Yes? What is it?”
“Mr. Penrose?”
“Yes?”
Before I could open my mouth again, Kerry said cheerfully, “We’re the Wades, Bill and Kerry. From San Francisco. We’re thinking of moving up here-you know, homesteading. I hope you don’t mind us calling on you like this.”
“How did you know my name?” Penrose asked. He was still looking at me.
“The fellow at the mercantile gave it to us,” Kerry said. “He told us you were a homesteader and we thought we’d come by and look at your place and see how you liked living here.”
I could have kicked her. It was one of those flimsy, spontaneous stories that sound as phony as they are. But she got away with it, by God, at least for the moment. All Penrose said was, “Which fellow at the mercantile?” and he said it without suspicion.
“Mr. Coleclaw.”
“Which Mr. Coleclaw?”
“I didn’t know there was more than one. He was in his twenties and the only one around.” Kerry glanced at me. “Did he give you his first name, dear?”
“Gary,” I said. “Dear.”
“Poor young fool,” Penrose said. “Poor lost lad.”
“Pardon?”
“He has rocks in his head,” Penrose said, and burst out laughing. The laugh went on for maybe three seconds, like the barking of a sea lion, exposing yellowed and badly fitting dentures; then it cut off as if somebody had smacked a hand over his mouth. He looked embarrassed again.
Definitely an oddball, I thought. Musket Creek seemed to be full of them, all right. But Penrose, at least, had my sympathy; the strain of coping with physical deformities like his was enough to throw anybody a little out of whack.
“That was a dreadful pun,” he said. “Gary can’t help it if he’s retarded; I don’t know what makes me so cruel sometimes. I apologize. No one should make fun of others, should they.” It wasn’t a question, so he didn’t wait for a response. He went on, “What else did the boy tell you? Did he say anything about the Northern Development Corporation?”
Kerry simulated a blank look that would have got her thrown out of any acting school in the country. But again, Penrose didn’t notice; he still wasn’t looking at her, except for brief sidelong eye-flicks whenever she spoke. “No,” she said, “he didn’t. Is that something we should know about?”
“Yes. Oh yes. If they have their way you won’t want to move here.” He paused. “But I’m forgetting my manners. I haven’t many visitors, you see. Would you like to come in?”
Kerry said, “Yes, thanks. That would be nice.”
So Penrose stepped aside and we went in. The interior of the cabin-just one big room-was furnished sparsely with mismatched secondhand items and strewn with books. Against the back wall was a long table with a typewriter, a bunch of papers, and an unlit candle on it. The candle caught and held my attention. It was fat, it was stuck inside a wooden bowl, and it was purple-the same color purple as the one I’d found at the burned-out ghosts.
I went over to the table for a closer look. When Kerry finished declining Penrose’s offer of a cup of coffee I said to him, “That’s a nice candle you’ve got there.”
“Candle?” he said blankly.
“I wouldn’t mind having one like it.” I gave Kerry a pointed look. “We collect candles, don’t we, dear.”
“Yes, that’s right. We do.”
“Did you get it locally?” I asked Penrose.
“From a widow lady who lives here, yes.”
“May I ask her name?”
“Ella Bloom. She makes them; it’s her hobby.”
“Just purple ones? Or other colors too?”
“Just purple. Her favorite color.”
“Does she sell them to anyone besides you?”
“Oh, I didn’t buy it from her. She gave it to me. She doesn’t make them to sell.”
“Does she give them away to everyone around here?”
“Yes. Everyone. Maybe she’ll give one to you, if you ask her. Her house is right near the mercantile.”
So much for the purple-candle angle.
I steered Penrose back to the topic of Northern Development, and this time he managed to stay on it without getting sidetracked. He launched into a two-minute diatribe against the developers and what he called “the warped values of modern society.” He didn’t seem quite as militant as Robideaux and Mrs. Bloom, but then he didn’t know I was a detective.
I said, “Isn’t there anything that can be done to stop them, Mr. Penrose?”
“Well, we’ve hired attorneys, you know, and they’ve filed suit to block the sale of the land. There’s nothing else to be done until the suit comes to trial.”
“Have you tried appealing to the Northern people? To get them to modify their plans?”
“Oh yes. They won’t listen to us. Awful people. The head of the company was an insensitive swine.”
“Was?”
“He died a few days ago,” Penrose said, with a hint of relish in his voice. “A tragic accident.”
“What sort of accident?”
“He went to blazes.” Penrose did his barking sea-lion number again. This time he didn’t look quite so embarrassed when the noise stopped. “One shouldn’t speak lightly of the dead, should one,” he said.
“You mean he died in a fire?”
“Yes. In Redding.”
“That’s a coincidence,” I said.
“Coincidence?”
“You had a fire here recently. We noticed the burned-out buildings on the way through.”
“Oh, that. It was only four of the ghosts.”
“Another accident?”
He didn’t answer the question. Instead he said, “I told the others they should have let the fire spread, let it purge the other ghosts as well, but they wouldn’t listen. A pity.”
Kerry said, “You wanted all the buildings to burn up?”
“All the ghosts, yes.”
“But why?”
“They’re long dead; cremation is fitting and overdue,” he said. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”
I said, “Shouldn’t the buildings be preserved for historical reasons? After all, this was once a Gold Rush camp-”