Bones

ELEVEN

I drove south on Shoreline Highway, following the eastern rim of Tomales Bay. The bay is some sixteen miles long and maybe a mile at its widest, sheltered from the rough Pacific storms by a spine of foothills called Inverness Ridge that rises above the western shore. The village of Inverness lies over there, along the water and spreading up into the hills; and beyond the ridge are the white-chalk cliffs, barren cattle graze, and wind-battered beaches of the Point Reyes National Seashore. On this side are a sprinkling of dairy ranches and fishermen's cottages, a few oyster beds, a boatworks, a couple of seafood restaurants, the tiny hamlet of Marshall, and not much else except more wooded hills and copses of eucalyptus planted as windbreaks. It's a pretty area, rustic, essentially untarnished by the whims of man-one of the last sections of unspoiled country within easy driving distance of San Francisco. That wouldn't be the case if it weren't for the weather; developers would have bought up huge chunks of prime bay-front property years ago and built tracts and retirement communities and ersatz-quaint villages, the way they had farther up the coast at Bodega Bay. But down here the fog lingers for days on end, so that everything seems shrouded in a misty, chilly gray. Even on those rare days like this one when the sun shines, the sea wind is almost always blustery and cold; right now, gusting across the bay, it had built whitecaps like rows of lace ruffles on the water, was tossing anchored fishing boats around as if they were toys, and now and then smacked the car hard enough to make it reel a little on the turns. Out on the National Seashore, I thought, it would be blowing up a small gale.

Bad weather doesn't bother me much, though; I come out to Tomales Bay now and then for a picnic, a visit to the Point Reyes lighthouse, fried oysters at Nick's Cove or one of the other seafood restaurants. The bad weather hadn't bothered Harmon Crane, either. It didn't bother the people who lived out here now, nor would it bother the people living elsewhere who could be induced to move here when one or another gambling developer finally pulled the right strings and the inevitable rape of Tomales Bay began. Onward and upward in the name of progress, good old screw-'em-all free enterprise, and the almighty dollar.

Bleak thoughts, a product of the mood Eberhardt's no-show and my unorthodox meeting with Angelo Bertolucci had put me in. Gloom and doom. It was too bad the sun was out; a dripping gray pall of fog would have been just the right backdrop for a nice, extended mope.

When I passed Nick's Cove I began looking for the peninsula Bertolucci had mentioned. It came up a mile or so farther on: a wide, humpbacked strip of grassland, dotted with scrub oak, that extended out some two hundred yards into the bay. A dirt road snaked up onto it off the highway, vanishing over the crest of the hump; but there was a gate across the road a short ways in and a barbed-wire fence stretching away on both sides. Bushes and a morass of high grass and tall anise blocked my view of the terrain beyond the rise.

Not far away, on the inland side of the highway, was a cluster of ranch buildings surrounded by hilly pastures full of dairy cattle. I drove that way. A lane lined with eucalyptus connected the ranch buildings with the county road, and a sign on one gatepost said CORDA DAIRY RANCH-CLOVER BRAND. I turned into the tunnel formed by the trees, which led me to an old gabled house ringed by bright pink iceplant. A couple of hounds came rushing toward the car, but their tails were in motion and their barks had a welcoming note. One of them jumped up and tried to lick my face when I got out, and a woman's voice called sharply, “Dickens! Down, you! Get down!” She had come out through the front door of the house and was starting toward me. The dog obeyed her, allowing me to go and meet her halfway.

She was in her mid-fifties, pleasant-featured and graying-Mrs. Corda, she said. I showed her the photostat of my investigator's license and told her what I was doing here. Then I asked her if she'd known Harmon Crane.

“No, I'm sorry,” she said. “My husband and I are both from Petaluma. We bought this ranch in 1963.”

“You do know there was once a cabin out on that peninsula?”

“Yes, but there's almost nothing left of it now. Nor of the oyster company that owned the land before us.”

“Would you mind if I had a look around anyway?”

“Whatever for?”

I wasn't sure myself. If I had been a mystic I might have felt I could establish some sort of psychic connection by standing on the same ground Harmon Crane had stood on thirty-five years ago. But I wasn't a mystic. Hell, chalk it up to the fact that I was nosy. It also gave me something to do, now that I was here.

“ Do you mind, Mrs. Corda?”

“Well, I don't know,” she said. “The earthquake the other night opened up some cracks out there. It might be dangerous.”

“I'll be careful.”

She considered, and I could see her thinking, the way people do nowadays: What if he falls into one of the cracks and breaks a leg or something? What if he sues us? “I don't know,” she said again. “You'd better ask my husband.”

“Is he here now?”

“No, as a matter of fact he's over on that section. Mending fence that the quake knocked down. He had to take thirty head of cattle off there yesterday.”

I thanked her, took the car back out to the highway and up to the dirt road, and turned it along there, stopping nose up to the gate. The wind almost knocked me over when I got out. The gate wasn't locked; I swung it aside and trudged up the incline, bent forward against the force of the wind, the smells of salt water and tideflats sharp in my nostrils. Ahead on my left as I neared the crest I could see the first of the fissures that the earthquake had opened up-a narrow wound maybe three inches wide and several feet long.

From atop the hump I had a clear look at the rest of the peninsula spread out below, sloping downward to the water's edge. A sea of grass and wild mustard, rippling and swaying in odd restless patterns, with one gnarled oak flourishing in the middle of it all like a satisfied hermit. More fissures showed dark brown among the green, half a dozen of them, one at least a foot wide in places, another some fifty feet long. They made me think of the old apocryphal tales of a tremored earth yawning wide and swallowing people, houses, entire towns. They made me wonder if maybe those tales weren't so apocryphal after all.

There were some other things to see from up there: a newish Ford pickup parked on the road below, and two men off to one side of it, working with hammer and nails, wire and timber, and a post-hole digger to repair a toppled section of fence. They hadn't noticed me yet, and didn't until I got down near the pickup and hailed them. Then they stopped working and watched me warily as I approached.

One of the men was about the same age as the woman down at the ranch-lean, balding, with the kind of face that looks as if somebody had been working on it with an etching tool. The other was more of the same, only at half the age and with all of his hair. Father and son, I thought. Which proved to be the case: the first generation was Emil Corda and the second generation was Gene Corda.

They were friendly enough when I finished showing them my license and telling them what it was I wanted. Emil was, anyway; his son was the taciturn sort and didn't seem overly bright. Emil, in fact, seemed downright pleased with me, as if he welcomed a break in the drudgery of fence-mending. Or as if meeting a private detective who wanted to poke around on his land made this something of a red-letter day for him.

“Guess I don't have any objections to you having a look,” he said. “But I'll come along, if it's all the same to you.”

“Fine.”

“All those cracks-you see 'em out there. Got to watch your step.”

I nodded. “Some quake, wasn't it?”

“Yeah it was. Gave us a hell of a scare.”

“Me too.”

“Next time we get a big one, this whole section's liable to break right off and float on over to Waikiki Beach,” he said, and then grinned to show me he was kidding. “Fellow down at Olema claims one of his heifers disappeared into a crack, didn't leave a trace. You believe that?”

“Do you?”

“No sir,” Corda said. “I've seen cows break a leg in one, I've seen 'em get stuck in one. But swallowed up? Publicity stunt, that's all. Fellow wanted to get his name in the papers.” He sounded disappointed as well as disapproving, as if he wished he'd thought of it himself so he would have gotten his name in the papers.

I said, “Will you show me where the cabin used to stand, Mr. Corda?”

“Sure thing.” He looked at his son. “Gene, you dig another half dozen holes. When I come back we'll anchor those new posts.”

The younger Corda mumbled something agreeable, and Emil and I set off toward the far end of the peninsula. The road wasn't much along here, just a couple of grassy ruts, and long before we neared the water it petered out into a cow track. One of the fissures cut a jagged line across it in one place, disappearing into a cluster of poppies.

The outer rim of the peninsula was maybe a hundred feet wide, squared off, with a thin strip of pebbled beach and a couple of acres of mudflats beyond, visible now that the tide was out. The flats weren't being used as oyster beds anymore; at least there was no sign of the poles that are used to fence off most beds. All that was out there was a dozen or so pilings, canted up out of the mud at oblique angles, like a bunch of rotting teeth. I asked Corda about them.

“Oyster company dock,” he said. “Big storm broke it up fifteen, sixteen years ago. We managed to salvage some of the lumber.”

“Was there also a pier that went with the cabin?”

“Not so far as I know.” He gestured to the north, beyond a fan of decaying oyster shells that was half-obliterated by grass. “Cabin was over that way. You can still see part of the foundation.”

We went in that direction, up into a little hollow where the remains of a stone foundation rose out of more thick grass and wild mustard. There wasn't anything else in the hollow, not even a scrap of driftwood.

“What happened to the cabin?” I asked.

“Burned down, so I heard.”

“Accident?”

He shrugged. “Couldn't tell you.”

“Do you know when it happened?”

“Long time ago. Before the oyster outfit bought the land.”

I nodded and moved back to stand on the little strip of beach. Two-thirds of the distance across the bay was an island a few hundred yards in circumference, thickly wooded, with a baby islet alongside it. On the larger island, visible from where I stood now, were the remains of a building-somebody's once-substantial house. Those remains had been there a long time and had always fascinated me. Who would live on a little island in the middle of a fogbound bay?

Not for the first time, I wondered if I could do it. Well, maybe. For a while, anyhow. Buy an island like that, build a house on it, wrap myself in solitude and peace. Never mind the wind and fog; all you'd need when the fog rolled in was a hot fire, a good book, and a wicked woman. For that matter, throw in some beer and food and you had all you needed on any kind of day.

A seagull came swooping down over the tideflats, screeching the way gulls do. The only other sound was the humming of the wind, punctuated now and then by little wails and moans as it gusted. It had begun to chill me; I could feel goosebumps along my arms and across my shoulders. But I was reluctant to leave just yet. There was something about this place, a sense of isolation that wasn't at all unpleasant. I could understand why Harmon Crane had come here to be by himself. I could understand why he found it a place that stirred his creative juices.

When I turned after a minute or two I saw that Emil Corda had wandered off to the south, following one of the bigger earth fissures through the rippling grass. I walked over to the fan of oyster shells. As I neared them my foot snagged on something hidden in the grass; I squatted and probed around and came up with part of an old wooden sign, its lettering element-erased to the point where I had to squint at it close up to make out the words: EAST SHORE OYSTER COMPANY. Oddly, it made me think of a marker at a forgotten gravesite.

I straightened, and the wind gusted again and made me shiver, and from forty or fifty yards away Emil Corda let out a shout. I swung around, saw him beckoning to me, and hurried over to where he was, watching my step as I went. He was standing alongside the fissure he'd been following at a place where it was close to a foot wide. There was an odd look on his seamed face, a mixture of puzzlement, awe, and excitement.

“Found something,” he said, as if he still didn't quite believe it. “First time I been down this far since the quake.”

“Found what?”

“Look for yourself. Down in the crack. This beats that Olema fellow's cow story all to hell. Man, I guess it does!”

I moved over alongside him and bent to peer into the crack. The hairs went up on the back of my neck; a little puzzlement and excitement kindled in me too. Along with a feeling of dark things moving, shifting, building tremors of violence under the surface of what until now had been a routine investigation.

Down at the bottom of that crack were bones, a jumble of old gray bones. The remains of a human skeleton, complete with grinning skull.