Where Echoes Live (7 page)

Two of the prospectors I tried to locate after I left Nickles weren't around; a third ran me off with a shotgun. By the time I reached Hopwood's so-called claim, it was late afternoon and the temperature— thank God—had dropped slightly.

The claim was at the far end of the valley, in a boulder-clogged box canyon where the stream cascaded over a high granite ledge. I'd had to walk the whole way—better than three miles by my estimation—and was glad I was in even better shape than usual, thanks to the long vigorous walks on the beach George and I had been taking. Still, I was weary and parched, and it was with considerable relief that I spotted Hopwood's cabin.

It was fairly substantial, set back from the streambed under a jagged overhang. From the weathered look of the pine and the wavy window glass I guessed that Hopwood had scavenged his building materials from Promiseville. The reinforced plank door was secured by a hasp and padlock, but I went up to it and knocked anyway. After the unsurprising lack of an answer, I checked the windows; like those at Nickles's house, they were draped in cloth. The cabin—in fact, the entire little canyon—held that hushed stillness that said no one was there, had not been for a while now.

Before taking a more thorough look around, I went to the stream's edge and cupped up some of the icy water in my hands to drink; it had a pleasant metallic tang. My thirst slaked, I took off my shoes and socks and dangled my feet in the eddying coolness. I closed my eyes for a bit and listened to the rush of the falls. Thought of the long walk back to my car and sighed.

What had I found out today? Only that there was a perfectly reasonable explanation for why no one in the town or valley had seen Earl Hopwood for more than two weeks. I'd confirmed that Lily Nickles had never heard of Franklin Tarbeaux, and that the Transpacific people weren't sampling the ore on their land but were cautious to the point of employing armed guards. Well, what of it? The company was under foreign management who didn't understand this part of the country. In the locations of most of their other operations guards were probably a routine necessity. My day's work had told me nothing helpful.

So why did I have this heightened sense of wrongness?

Well, for one thing, Nickles had said she was afraid, and she didn't strike me as a woman who frightened easily—or would normally admit to it. And there were the still-unexplained break-ins at Ripinsky's home, the trailers, and the lodge. Plus the person who'd spied on me in the tufa forest, the additional break-in last night, the call to All Souls.

Besides, the sense of wrongness was particularly strong in this little box canyon—too strong for a place whose only resident had simply gone on a gambling-and-womanizing spree in Nevada.

I don't believe in the supernatural, but I do believe that sometimes places can absorb the emotions surrounding events that have happened there. A house where people have been happy has a good feel. A place of misery never seems quite right. Crime scenes—especially those of homicides— are the worst of all, filled with an aura of rage and desperation and pain.

I got up and began looking around. The area behind the cabin, between it and the cliff face, was full of rusted prospecting gear, tools, and cast-off automotive parts. I circled the building, trying the windows, but they were securely locked. I might have been able to justify going inside had one been left open, but in no way did the circumstances warrant an illegal forced entry. Turning away, I covered the surrounding area foot by foot in widening semicircles; then I crossed the stream, stepping from rock to rock, and began to search the opposite bank.

And smelled something putrid.

It didn't take long to pinpoint the source of the smell: behind a pair of man-sized boulders near the cliff face. My stomach lurched as I moved closer, and I thought,
Oh, no …

Reluctantly I made myself step around one of the boulders. And felt a flash of both revulsion and relief at what I saw.

Earl Hopwood's garbge dump. Its mounds of refuse looked as if they'd been years in the making, and were compacting and decaying just as slowly. Flies buzzed around them. The stench was bad enough to make me breathe shallowly through my mouth. I started to turn away, sure I couldn't stomach any further investigation.

But something caught my eye, a few feet away on top of the rotting mass. It was a jagged piece of wood that looked as if it had once been part of a crate. With a red-lettered word on it, not at all faded by the elements: “Dynamite.”

Above that was the bottom of another line of letters. “Red Devil,” it looked like. A brand name.

I glanced around, found a broken broom handle, and used it to pull the piece of crate toward me. It was slimy with some kind of decayed food, so I picked it up gingerly, carried it to the stream, and washed it. I wanted to take it with me as evidence—but of what, I hadn't a clue.

Dynamite, I thought. Dynamite was used by hard-rock miners to blast into hillsides. Dynamite was used by high-tech commercial miners like Transpacific.

It was
not
used by prospectors for placer gold— prospectors like Lily Nickles and Earl Hopwood.

So what had Hopwood been doing with an entire case of it?

I decided to run this one by the Tiger Lily.

The sun had sunk behind the hills by the time I got back to Promiseville; the derelict buildings were wrapped in purple shadow that made them look like ghosts of a romantic past rather than reminders of an era fraught with hardship and disappointment. The windows of Nickles's house showed no light, and the Jeep was nowhere in sight.

I stood on her front porch listening to the silence for a minute, and the feeling of lonesomeness she'd described stole over me. The headstones on the barren knoll across the valley caught the rays of the rising moon, seemed to glow phosphorescently through the encroaching darkness. I thought of Nickles sitting here night after night, looking out at the place where so many dreams were buried and perhaps going a little crazy. Although I was anxious to talk with her, I was glad she'd gotten out of here, if only for a little while.

Back at my car, I locked the fragment of the dynamite crate in the trunk before I started for Vernon. When I passed Hy Ripinsky's ranch house, I saw the lights were on and the Morgan parked next to the Land Rover. On impulse, I pulled off the road and knocked on his door.

Ripinsky answered at once, a book in hand, his tall figure clad in faded jeans, a badly frayed sweater, and scuffed moccasins. He blinked in surprise, but seemed glad to see me.

The house's living room was more attractive than its exterior suggested: Woven Indian rugs covered the pegged-pine floor, the sectional sofa and chairs were deeply cushioned and comfortable looking, on shelves flanking the stone fireplace sat hundreds of colorfully jacketed books, and on the wall above the mantel was a display of antique rifles. Ripinsky offered me a beer and went to fetch it. I crossed to one of the bookcases and studied the titles.

Justice Rides Alone; Horses, Honor, and Women; Wear a Fast Gun; Hell on the Pecos; Bitter Sage; The Last Days of Horse-Shy Halloran.
Westerns, apparently. I picked up a volume that lay horizontally on top of some others:
Hopalong Cassidy and the Trail to Seven Pines,
by someone called Tex Burns. Leering wickedly, Hoppy crouched over the recumbent figure of a man while Topper gazed on placidly. Hoppy was—so help me!—dressed prettily in lavender. This book, I thought, could easily become a hot collector's item in San Francisco's predominantly gay Castro district.

Ripinsky returned and handed me a Bud. “I see you're interested in my westerns.”

“This in particular.” I held up Hopalong.

He grinned. “Bet you never suspected about old Hoppy. I bought that one strictly for the dust jacket—the book is unreadable. Actually I bought a lot of my collection for the jackets; they were wonderful, particularly on westerns, in the thirties and forties.”

He spent a few minutes showing me some of the better ones, many by an artist named Nick Eggenhofer. Then he took me to the shelves on the other side of the fireplace and pointed out a book on Eggenhofer's life and art—appropriately titled
Horses, Horses, Always Horses
—as well as other reference works on the Old West.

“I've got to confess I haven't read half the nonfiction,” he said. “I prefer fiction. My wife claimed the little boy in me was trying to make up for never getting to be a gunfighter.”

But according to local gossip, I thought, he
had
become a gunfighter of sorts. I wanted to ask him about his rumored connection with the CIA, but his face had grown melancholy after he spoke of his dead wife. This was not the time to question him about personal matters. I sensed there might never be a good time for that.

“So,” he said, motioning for me to sit on the couch, “brief me on what you found out in the valley.”

“Very little, I'm afraid.” I filled him in, ending with my discovery of the fragment of dynamite crate on Earl Hop-wood's garbage heap.

“Odd,” he commented. He took a briar pipe from the table next to his easy chair and began filling it. “Earl doesn't prospect much anymore, and he never did go in for anything as ambitious as hard-rock mining, even though he owned that acreage on the mesa. I can't imagine what he'd be doing with dynamite.”

“Lily says she doubts there's ever been any gold near his cabin. What do you suppose he lives on?”

Ripinsky lit his pipe. Through the curling smoke he said, “I'm sure he's found a fair amount of gold up and down that stream over the years, and he's bound to have Social Security. You forget—it doesn't cost much to live in this part of the state, particularly in the manner Earl's become accustomed to.”

“Become?”

“Earl hasn't always been a prospector. Up until twenty years ago he ran the filling station across from where the office park is. Then his daughter, Peggy—she was my age, we went to school together—left town and Earl didn't see much reason for staying. So he gave up the station, moved out to the valley.”

“Lily says he's just squatting on that land.”

“She's probably right. To tell the truth, I never thought about it. Earl calls it his claim, but now that you mention it, I don't see how there could be enough gold in that canyon for him to file. And even if there was, I doubt he'd bother; after Peggy left, Earl lost whatever ambition he had to start with.”

“She was his only child?”

“Yeah. Earl was widowed young, raised her himself from when she was just a baby. Pretty Peggy, we called her. She was too pretty to waste her life in Vernon.”

“What happened to her?”

“She went to Berkeley, got some kind of job and attended the university. Married well—two or three times.”

“What are the chances Hopwood's been with her the past two weeks?”

“Not good; the longest I ever remember him visiting Peggy was over the weekend one Christmas.”

“Still, I should check it out. What's her married name?”

Ripinsky thought, then shook his head. “If I ever knew any of her husbands' names, I've forgotten them.”

“Who would know?”

“Maybe Rose Wittington. She used to take care of Peggy when she was a little girl, and they were fond of each other. I can't think of anyone else—she cut all her ties to Vernon when she left.”

Like you, I thought. But you came back.

I asked, “What do you think of Lily's idea that Hopwood's over in Nevada living it up on the proceeds of his land sale?”

“On the surface it sounds reasonable, but it feels wrong to me.”

“To me, too. And then there's the other man involved in the Transpacific deal—Franklin Tarbeaux. Why doesn't anyone know anything about him?”

Ripinsky frowned. “You know, the name bothers me. Sounds familiar, has all along. But I can't place it.”

“Are you sure you haven't met him at some time?”

“Given my own name, other distinctive ones make an impression on me. If I'd met Tarbeaux, I'd remember.”

“That's what Lily said. I went by her place on the way back from Hopwood's, to ask her if she's ever known him to use dynamite or heard any blasting going on while he was still in the valley, but she wasn't home. Any idea where she'd go on a Saturday night?”

He smiled. “You city folks lead complicated lives, given your options. Here, on the other hand … unless Lily ran into town for a six pack or to do her laundry, there's only one place she'd be—Zelda's.”

“Of course. I think I'll stop by there and talk with her.”

Ripinsky emptied his pipe into the ashtray and stood, stretching. “If you want, I'll follow you in, keep you company.”

“I've already interrupted your evening.” I motioned at the book he'd been carrying when I arrived.

“That's okay. I need to get out of here.” Briefly he glanced around the room, as if searching the shadows for someone no longer there. “Memories,” he added with a rueful half smile.

“I know.” Oh, yes, I did. Bittersweet memories hadn't plagued me recently, but up until a few months ago, they'd seemed to be the only sort I had.

By eight o'clock the parking lot at Zelda's was so crowded that I had to leave the MG on the shoulder of the road. I waited until Ripinsky's Morgan pulled up behind me, then got out and walked back to meet him. The night was cold now; the full moon spilled an icy path of light across Tufa Lake. I zipped my suede jacket and stuffed my hands in its pockets, glad I'd thought to bring it along this morning.

Zelda's red-and-gold neon sign flashed a welcome against the black sky. Music boomed from the building—country music with a hard-driving beat. Although I grew up on rock, in recent years my taste has shifted to classical and country. Classical because it soothes and inspires me; country because it's either upbeat and humorous or so emotionally down-and-out that I know my life can never possibly get that bad. Lonesome whistles and lost weekends and prison sentences and all varieties of broken hearts—now
that
can lift the spirits. Besides, I have a family connection with the C-and-W world: my sister Charlene's husband, Ricky Savage, broke into the big time with his “Cobwebs in the Attic of My Mind” and has followed it up with such hits as “My Library of Memories” and “The Cellar of Despair.” (If there's a theme to Ricky's songs, it's more or less architectural.)