Mortal Crimes: 7 Novels of Suspense (2 page)

“Girl's camp? There's the Girl Scouts camp down by Palisades.”

“I mean near my grandfather's cabin.”

The shopkeeper looked toward the rafters, as if that would help his memory. “Maybe you're talking about Camp Aratauk.”

“Camp Aratauk?”

“A girls' summer camp used to be up there, probably a half-mile north of your place as the crow flies. Until ten years ago.”

“It's not there anymore?”

“They went into Chapter Eleven after that little girl was kidnapped.”

Steve felt a ripple of coldness fan out across his shoulders. He glanced up at the wall behind him and noticed a vent blowing cold air. He looked at the man. “Kidnapped? There was a kidnapping up here? I never heard of that.”

“Happened at Rose Canyon—in fact, they dragged the lake. Never did find her. Probably killed by somebody passing through—you know, one of those serial killers that are all over the place now. Funny you haven't heard that story.”

Now that the man mentioned it, Steve did have a vague memory of distraught parents on the local news, people walking a grid on Mt. Lemmon. “You sure the place went under? Maybe some other camp is using the buildings.”

The shopkeeper shrugged. “Could be. A lot of things have changed since the fire—plenty of new people coming in, building God knows what. That'll be seven bucks even.”

As Steve left, the man called out behind him, “Let me know if there is a camp up there. Maybe I can work out a catering deal with them.”

________

Late in the afternoon, Steve took another hike up the creek. Without Jake to slow him down, he could move at a decent pace. He topped one hill and then another, his eye trying to pick out something man-made among the trees. He realized he was looking for Camp Aratauk.

He found and followed an old logging road. The sky above him had paled to a color somewhere between lemon and turquoise. A faint concussion sounded from the Tucson valley—somebody shooting off fireworks already.

Between the trees on the right, Steve caught the glint of metal—a tin roof. Through the undergrowth he could see something dark and rectangular, solid enough to swallow the light. A cabin.

He left the road and bushwhacked through the heavy underbrush, the trees growing thicker here. Suddenly, he was in a clearing. At one time it had been a lawn ringed with small boulders painted white. The boulders remained, but the lawn was overgrown, weedy saplings growing wild. Flagpole in the center, the flag itself long gone.

Camp Aratauk.

There were five bungalows, a smaller building marked OFFICE, and what looked like a mess hall, all facing onto the common area. Pine log construction, painted brown. Two steps up to a shallow porch for each of them. Rows of windows that had once been screened. Vandals and the weather had taken care of most of them; rusty mesh ballooned out of the rest.

Steve glanced at the sky; it was pale lavender now. If he stayed much longer, he'd need a flashlight.

A breeze sifted through the pines and dry oak leaves shuttled across the office porch. Dank coolness emanated from the empty window spaces, making him think of dark things—beetles and spiders and rotting wood.

It reminded him of the derelict house he and his friends frequented as a kid. He experienced the delicious little tingle born of fear—a carnival-ride thrill—and had the sudden urge to explore the building. But there could be broken floor boards inside; it wouldn't do to break a leg out here.

Tomorrow.

Steve worked his way back down to the logging road, but couldn't find the place where the trail intersected. He thought about the road into the camp, which he knew would eventually connect to the highway. Maybe he should have taken it instead of trying to find his way back in the dark. But the road could have gone on for miles. God only knew where it came out.

He couldn't be that far from home. He gave up looking for the trail and bushwhacked straight down the hill, heading in the direction of the cabin. Every now and then, he stopped to get his bearings, peering into the gloom. One of these times, he heard something rustling.

His heart rate jumped into the red zone.

It came from above, over the hill. More rustling and then a crashing sound.

He stood still, his heart pounding. Waited, listening, but heard only silence.

Finally he started back down the hill, trying not to picture what might be behind him—a garbage-seeking omnivore who walked upright and had no fear of human beings—and soon realized he was back at the stream bed. Steve was surprised at the relief he felt, pouring over him like warm water.

The stream bed would lead him home. He squinted into the gloom, following the pale scatter of rocks that marked the shallow impression in the earth. Steve's Most Amazing Adventure nearly at an end.

That was when he saw the black shape digging among the rocks ahead.

“Jake!” His own voice sounded explosive in his ears.

The animal raised its head. For a moment, Steve wondered if it
was
Jake … or another dog, a stray. He didn't like the way the animal canted its head toward him. Something menacing about it.

The dog put its head back down and started digging again, and the impression vanished. Steve recognized the dog's tail, which had a slight curl to it from some unknown genetic donor. It was Jake.

By the time he reached Jake, the dog's tail was wagging.

“How'd you get out?” But he thought he knew. The porch screen door locked by a hook latch. Steve had made sure the door was closed, but apparently, Jake had managed to push it open.

Jake didn't spare him a look; he was too busy pawing at whatever he'd uncovered in the stream bed. Pawing first, then digging frantically. Manic, the way he scrabbled at the earth, dirt, and pine duff, torn bits of fern flying out between his hind legs.

Steve bent over the dog and saw something man-made just above the surface of the surrounding earth. Jake stopped and looked at him as if to say: “Gonna take over for me for a while, pal?” Steve got down and gently brushed the dirt from the object. Even in the near dark, he could see it was a book. Badly damaged from being encased in the earth, dampness seeping into its bones. Steve was still able to make out shapes, although the colors were faded and stained with earth. Red, yellow, blue. Primary colors.

As he unearthed the book, the cover materialized in the dusk: A fat moon sitting on a porch swing, legs dangling down, talking to a boy in a striped T-shirt.

The title of the book was
The Man in the Moon
.

________

After dinner, Steve searched the Internet for references to the kidnapping. He tried several word combinations on Google, but came up with nothing. Probably the story was too old. Mark Galiardo had told him the girl had been kidnapped eleven years ago. The Internet in the mid-nineties wasn't the monster database it was now. There might have been an article, maybe a
few
articles, but after all this time, they had slipped through the cracks of history.

He stared at the last search words he had typed in: Camp Aratauk. No references whatsoever. It was as if Camp Aratauk had never existed.

The book sat next to him on his grandfather's cluttered desk, stained mud-brown, giving off the odor of overturned earth. The big, fat moon holding a glass of lemonade.

He typed “The Man in the Moon” into the Amazon search box.

And there it was. A slew of
Man in the Moon
books actually.
The Man in the Moon goes to Paris
.
The Man in the Moon goes to the World Series. The Man in the Moon goes to Mars
.

“The Man in the Moon hits the Powerball, moves to Tahiti, and marries Paris Hilton.”

Jake, lying at Steve's feet, looked up at the sound of his voice, eyebrows wrinkling. But he didn't remove his head from his paws.

The first book,
The Man in the Moon
, had been published in 1987 and appeared to have gone into several printings.

Steve called a bookstore in Tucson and asked the young man who answered if he had any copies of
The Man in the Moon
.

“The computer shows we have three copies. Do you want me to save one for you?”

“No, that's okay.”

He hung up and stared at the book. No way for him to tell how long it had been in the earth. A month? A year? Ten years?

With a groan, Jake rolled onto his side, stretching until his legs trembled. Steve saw no signs of the malevolence he'd felt for a brief moment up by the creek bed. Jake was just Jake, his companion—an animal Steve knew better than he knew most people.

He must have imagined it, whatever he'd seen.

He tapped the desk with his fingertips. Okay, what did he really have here? Some little girl, who maybe came from Camp Aratauk or possibly
another
camp—he remembered Mark telling him that there were so many new places up here he couldn't keep track—this little girl, looking for her book. How it ended up buried in the stream bed near his house, he didn't know. Maybe it got washed downstream after a rain.

Except there hasn't been any rain since April. And the only camp up there is deserted and has been for a long time
.

He heard a car engine, gravel popping off tires. Headlights washing across the pine wall.

Julie.

He picked the book up and slid it into the bookshelf by the window—hidden in plain sight. Barely aware that his heart rate had gone up, that it was imperative to him that Julie not know about the book.

Not that she would think he was crazy. No. Julie believed in
everything:
astrology, palm reading, the Ouija board. She loved that stuff so much she had recently opened up a New Age gift shop on Fourth Avenue, where she could surround herself with crystals and Tarot cards.

He didn't know why he wanted to hide it from her. Didn't know why he suddenly felt secretive, almost ashamed. Perhaps because he was the scientist, the one who always kept his feet solidly rooted to the earth. The anchor for Julie's wildly tacking sailboat.

He heard a car door slam.

Wished he'd remembered to call her back, deflect her drive up here.

Too late now.

CHAPTER TWO

A vague sense of unease followed Steve out of sleep, quickly solidifying into a bad case of guilt.

He untangled himself from the bed sheets, donned his wire-rimmed glasses, and pulled on his jeans, making sure not to wake Julie. At the doorway, he turned back to look at her. Julie was a beautiful woman—and even more beautiful in sleep. She was petite with shoulder-length, curly, black hair that was always a bit wild, as he imagined a gypsy's hair would be.

The top half of her body was exposed. Her breasts were perfect globes in the soft light. For so many years, Steve had wanted her and no one else—sex had always been great between them. It still was.

The rest of the time was the problem. Like a row of numbers that, no matter how hard you tried to make them fit, didn't add up.

Looking at her, he felt sorrow.

He would have to tell her.

She dumped
you
, remember?
The voice in his head, the one that kept the ledger. His own little crack at double-entry bookkeeping. Always seeking balance, always trying to make it turn out right, where he was ahead or at least even.

She had dumped him, but that didn't change the way he felt about her now. He didn't want to hurt her, but he knew it would never work.

Steve didn't know when exactly he had stopped loving her—some time before their divorce was official a year and a half ago. That was when he realized he couldn't go back to the way it was. It was Julie who had taken up with someone else, Julie who had filed for divorce. Steve's world was full of accepted theories and unalterable facts, so when she told him it was over, he'd had no choice but to believe her. His brain had figured it out, and now it seemed, the rest of him had followed.