Alisha.
Mother? Wife? Who was she and just what kind of relationship did Lucas have with her? Now she couldn’t get the questions out of her head.
Well, there was an easy way to answer a couple of them, at least. Tomorrow at the agency.
Bad, girl, wanting to check up on a casual lover. Better not do it. Be smart. It’s not important, it might put an even quicker end to the hookup. Don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t really want to know.
Good arguments. She listened to them as Lucas poured wine, and nodded to herself, and made a promise to herself that she wouldn’t do it-and knew she’d break the promise two minutes after she walked into the agency tomorrow morning.
14
JAKE RUNYON
Harmony was nothing more than a break in the two-lane county road. He came out of dense timber and there it was, like the appearance of a mirage-a scatter of buildings and a few hundred yards of surrounding meadowland. More thick forest walled it in on the east. Four miles in that direction, according to the directions Tamara had sent, an old logging road branched off and wound up to where the Hendersons’ hunting camp was located.
You couldn’t call Harmony a village or even a hamlet. The only public buildings were a tavern and a general store made of redwood siding and fronted by a couple of gas pumps. There was a house across the road, set far back at the edge of the meadow where cows and a sorrel horse grazed. Parts of a couple of other houses or cabins were visible at higher elevations among the timber.
The store and tavern were both closed. He should’ve figured nothing would be open this early, a little past nine by his watch. But he’d been too restless to hang around the motel in Fort Bragg, the nearest large town, where he’d spent the night. It’d been after dark when he pulled in there, too late to go out looking for Harmony and the hunting camp, and the downtime had weighed heavily on him. He’d left the motel at 7:00 a.m., wasted most of an hour on breakfast and a few more minutes driving around the area before finally heading out here.
He pulled over in front of the store, got out to look at the posted hours. Open at eleven. Two more hours to kill, unless he wanted to start knocking on doors hunting for the owner of the Harmony General Store. Better to use the time checking the Hendersons’ property first thing instead of second.
He drove on through the close-grown stands of pine and Douglas fir, climbing gradually. The logging road was right where Tamara had indicated, 8.6 miles from Harmony. Rutted, and muddy in patches of deep shade, but not too bad; there hadn’t been much rain or snow this winter. The Ford had all-wheel drive, so he had no trouble negotiating the rough spots.
Half a mile of bouncing and rattling brought him to the private road that led uphill through more timber and finally emerged in what appeared to be a man-made clearing. Tree stumps, old and crumbling from the assaults of insects and woodpeckers, spotted it here and there. He threaded his way among them to within fifty feet of the main cabin, one of three buildings that made up the camp.
He stepped out into biting cold and dead-calm stillness. Clouds and mist clung to the tops of the surrounding forest, as if somebody had draped them with puffs and streamers of gray bunting. Faintly, from behind the cabin, the sound of running water came to him-a trout stream that ran down to a small river whose name he’d already forgotten. He buttoned his coat against the chill as he moved toward the cabin.
It was the standard peeled-log variety, simple but sturdylooking even though it and the two outbuildings hadn’t been maintained over the past several years. High grass grew up along its sides, the A-frame roof was missing a couple of shingles, and one of the porch stanchions showed cracks and splinters. But it wasn’t only simple neglect, he saw as he drew closer. The glass in the single facing window was broken, the front door stood a few inches ajar.
He went up and looked at it. A hasp for an old Yale padlock had been pried loose from the jamb, hung bent to one side. He pushed the door open. Two steps inside was as far as he went, as far as he needed to go.
The three-room interior had been torn apart. Furniture hacked to pieces by an ax or hatchet, the only escapees a flat-armed Adirondack chair and a small table. Canned goods split open and their contents splattered on walls and floor, glasses and bottles reduced to shards. But it wasn’t just wanton destruction, the kind that kids or homeless squatters perpetrated. It was cold, vicious, calculated-a systematic act of hate or vengeance or both.
Burn holes and blackened streaks in the floorboards, wallboards. Pieces of glass and metal fused and bubbled. Acid. Flung helter-skelter after the first wave of damage was done.
The Hendersons’ phantom stalker.
Runyon backed out, toed the door shut, and went to look at the outbuildings. One was a woodshed, about a third full; the cordwood had been kicked around and doused with the corrosive, as had the walls. Same frenzy in the second building. Padlock pried off the door, a couple of old sleeping bags and some blankets and other goods torn apart and burned with acid. And in one corner, the scorched remains of something that might once have been a wood rat.
The desecration of Lloyd Henderson’s gravesite and the attacks in Los Alegres were bad enough, but this showed even greater levels of rage and hate. Any man capable of this kind of carnage wasn’t going to be satisfied for long with venting on inanimate objects and rodents. Sooner or later, he’d start using his acid on human flesh.
N ot quite eleven o’clock when Runyon rolled back into Harmony, but the general store was open early. Inside, he found the usual cramped hodgepodge of out-of-the-way mountain stores: hunting and fishing supplies and hardware items in one section, groceries in another. A burly, balding man was stocking shelves while a thin woman with hair dyed the color of French’s mustard swept the floor. Both were in their sixties and wore the same style of plaid lumberman’s shirt. The Fraziers, Ben and Georganne. Friendly and accommodating enough, but apologetic when Runyon asked them about a young woman named Jenny who’d worked there twenty years ago.
“Afraid we can’t help you,” Frazier said. “We’ve only owned this place four years. Bought it right after I retired from PG and E.”
“Who’d you buy it from?”
“Man named Collins. But I don’t think he owned it twenty years ago.”
“He didn’t,” Mrs. Frazier said. “I remember he told us he reopened it about fifteen years ago. Closed for a while before that. Not everybody likes living in wilderness country like this. We love it, though.”
“Does Collins still live in the area?”
“No. He was old, couldn’t get around very well anymore. Moved down to Sacramento to live with his daughter right after the sale to us went through.”
“Would you know who owned the store before it closed?”
“No. No idea.”
“Any longtime residents in the area who would know?”
“Well… Mrs. Genotti, Ben?”
“She’d know,” Frazier agreed, “but her memory’s not too good. She’s in her eighties.”
“Anyone else?”
“Let me think. Twenty years ago, you said?”
“About that.”
Before Frazier could respond, his wife said, “Oh, wait, Ben. That old desk in the storeroom-it’s full of papers and receipts. There might be something in there.”
“That’s right. Might be at that.”
“Would you mind if I had a look?”
“I guess it’d be all right,” Frazier said. “Why’d you say you were looking for this Jenny?”
“Not her so much as a relative of hers.”
“This relative do something wrong?”
“He may have. So you don’t mind if I have a look through the desk?”