Crazybone

13

Gualala is one of several villages strung along the Pacific rim of Sonoma and Mendocino counties, between Fort Ross and Port Bragg. Some people think the name is Native American, but in fact it’s a Spanish phoenetic rendering of Valhalla, the mythological home of heroes fallen in battle. Timber interests working the long spine of mountains to the east built a logging camp there in the 1850’s — one of the “doghole ports” used as shipping points for schooners carrying redwood to San Francisco Bay. For over a hundred years much of the Bay Area’s lumber supply came from the area.

Its modern evolution began in the early 1960s, when logging went into a big decline. Retirees and wealthy individuals looking for second homes and private retreats began to move in, drawn by some of the most ruggedly unspoiled coastline in the state. Developers, naturally, weren’t far behind. Under close watch by the Coastal Commission, they built a ten-mile-long stretch of environmentally friendly homes on large parcels called Sea Ranch; and farther north, oceanfront property stretching halfway to Point Arena was gobbled up at increasingly higher prices. Gualala, smack in the middle and loaded with old-fashioned seaside charm, flourished for that reason, and because its isolation, generally temperate weather (the area is known as the “Banana Coast”), and scenic attractions made it desirable to artists, writers, and other urban dropouts.

A little of the old charm has been diluted by such growth byproducts as minimalls and motels, but for the most part it’s still a down-home place. It may not be quite as unspoiled as a few of its “doghole” neighbors, but on the other hand it hasn’t gone the way of Mendocino, the best known of the coastal towns fifty miles to the north, and become a cloyingly quaint, tricked-up tourist trap.

It was a quarter of two when I crossed the long bridge spanning the mouth of the Gualala River and entered the town. The weather up here was mostly clear and sunny, but there was a fog bank out at the horizon line and a gusty wind that threatened to drive it inshore before dark. The Banana Coast’s mean temperature may be higher than San Francisco’s, but it gets just as many year-round smothers of fog.

I pulled into the lot next to the old Gualala Hotel and went in there to ask directions to Port Creek Road. It was at the north end of the village, leading up into the hills. I found it all right, climbed past a school and through a long wooded section. The number 2410 was painted on one of four mailboxes at the foot of a private access lane. The last of the four houses back in there, set on a piece of high ground, was the one I wanted.

It was a small place that had seen better days, built of redwood logs and shakes, with a front deck that looked as though a good wind might knock it down into kindling. Just as ramshackle were an empty carport, a lean-to stuffed with firewood, and a shedlike structure in the trees behind the house. I’d seen woodsmoke coming from the chimneys of two of the other houses; there was none here. Nobody home, evidently.

I left my car on the turnaround where the lane ended and walked up to number 2410. The stairs felt spongy under my feet as I climbed onto the deck. The boards up there were in such bad shape that my weight on them brought creaks and fluttery movement from an ancient chain-supported porch swing. Some place. Aunt Karen wasn’t anywhere near as well off as the Hunters. But then, she might be the kind of artist who didn’t give a damn about material rewards.

There was no bell so I banged on the door. All that got me was more creaking from the rusty swing. Well? I turned to glance along the lane. The thick growth of pine and fir on the Port Creek Road side cut off any view of the neighboring houses. I faced the door again. Knocked once more, listened, didn’t hear anything, and tried the knob. I expected it to be locked; the fact that it wasn’t stirred me. I hesitated with my hand on the knob. Better not, I thought, somebody could show up any minute.

Emily, I thought. And opened the door and leaned inside.

Dark in there — curtains open but not much natural light coming through the windows. A faint, pulsing red showed in the fireplace: the last dying embers of a recent fire whose warmth still lingered. I glanced back at the empty lane another time, then went in all the way, leaving the door open so it would be easier to hear the sound of an approaching car.

When my eyes adjusted I could see that the room was maybe twenty feet square. Not much furniture, rag rugs on a bare hardwood floor, a breakfast bar and a pocket-size kitchen to my left. Pieces of stained glass, mounted and suspended from the ceiling, served as wall decoration on both sides of the fireplace. I couldn’t tell much about them in the gloom and I wouldn’t have been able to judge their quality anyway.

A narrow hallway bisected the wall opposite, next to the kitchen; I went that way, taking in the room. Karen Meineke was not much of a housekeeper. Papers, unemptied ashtrays, unclean dishes, other items littered most surfaces. Woodsmoke, cigarette smoke, fried foods, dust and dampness created a heavy, hanging smell that encouraged mouth breathing. I walked along the hall. A right-angle extension led to one bedroom; another, larger bedroom opened up ahead. The larger one had an unmade brass-frame bed, piles of dirty clothes, and not much else. I backed up and moved into the second bedroom.

Things were neater in there. The bed had been made, the floor was free of personal droppings. The closet door stood open; inside I could see a closed suitcase. The case was small, powder blue, and looked both new and expensive. I squatted and worked the catches, it wasn’t locked.

Kid’s clothing. Little girl’s.

All right, good, I thought as I straightened up. Emily must be staying here, at least. Off somewhere now with Aunt Karen — back eventually.

I searched the closet, the bureau; even got down on all fours and squinted under the bed. Emily’s suitcase was the only one, and there was no sign of anything that might belong to her mother. I returned to the other bedroom. Nothing of hers there, either. All the clothing belonged to a woman much larger and far less fashion conscious than Sheila Hunter — jeans, bargain-rack blouses, wool shirts, bulky knit sweaters. That told me something else: Karen Meineke lived here alone. The only item of masculine apparel in the room was a pair of heavy wool socks, of the type that Kerry wore during the winter.

I thought I heard something outside, hurried to the front door for a look. Imagination; the access lane was as deserted as before. Still time to comb through the rest of the place.

Two items of interest turned up in the living room. The first, in the drawer of a table next to an armchair, I didn’t like at all — a snub-nosed Smith & Wesson .38, all its chambers full. Loaded gun just lying around like that, with a ten-year-old in the house. Stupid and irresponsible. I stood looking at it for a few seconds. Then I emptied the cylinder, dumped the cartridges into a paper sack of garbage under the kitchen sink, and carried the piece into Karen Meineke’s bedroom and hid it on the top shelf of the closet under a jumble of caps and scarves. Let her go hunting for it and wonder how it got there, empty, when she found it.

The second interesting item I found on a shelf in a storage closet — a photograph album with cracked plastic covers. About two-thirds of it was filled, mostly with candid color snapshots. There were half a dozen professional photos, three posed portraits and three wedding pictures. Two of the portraits, judging from the head-and-shoulders poses and the subjects’ age and clothing, were high school graduation photos. The young woman in one was unmistakably Sheila Hunter, even though her eyebrows were thicker and her hair dark brown and shag cut. The young woman in the other had a round face, a pouty mouth, the same color hair worn longer. Karen Meineke. The resemblance between her and Sheila Hunter was plain enough, and the third portrait pretty much confirmed the fact that they were sisters. It was of the pair of them, their shoulders touching, their heads turned slightly so that they were smiling at each other. The resemblance was even stronger in that one.

I slid the portraits out to see if anything was written on the backs. No. The three wedding photos were of Karen Meineke and a tall man with a beard and shoulder-length hair; she appeared to be in her early to mid-twenties at the time, as did the man. The backs of two were blank, but the third — a full-length portrait of the bride and groom — bore a notation in a round girlish hand: Mr. and Mrs. Chas Willis, and below that, Yes!

I took a quick flip through the candid shots. Most were of the two sisters, some with adults who were probably their parents and other family members, ranging from infancy to late teens. The last two dozen or so were of Karen Meineke and her bearded husband; a couple of those had snowcapped mountains in the background. At random I chose four of the sisters together, from girlhood to adulthood. All had tag lines on their backs, the first two in ballpoint pen in a precise hand — their mother’s, likely — and the last two in the round, girlish hand.

So Aunt Karen’s name was also a new identity, no doubt adopted for the same unknown reason. Chas Willis, too? Mr. Meineke? Depended on exactly when the two of them had been married. No clue here as to Jack Hunter’s real identity; or if there was, I couldn’t pick it out because I’d never seen a photo of him.

I put the album back where I’d found it. I’d seen in here long enough; pressing my luck as it was. I checked out front — empty and quiet except for the yattering of jays in the pines — and then stepped onto the porch and shut the door behind me.

I went down and around to have a look at the outbuilding behind the house. It was bigger than a shed, but not by much, with a flat tarpaper roof — the kind of structure that gets put up fast and as cheaply as possible without a building permit. If it had a window, it was on the side opposite where I was. The door was on the back side, and for some reason it had been wedged shut by means of a two-by-four fitted slantwise from the ground to the knob. Busted latch? The length of wood was tightly jammed; I had to kick it loose. The door didn’t come open when the two-by-four popped free, so the latch was all right. And not locked. I opened up and stuck my head inside.

Karen Meineke’s workshop. Cluttered with tools and sawhorses and pieces of plywood and bars of lead, the walls honeycombed with cubbyholes that contained chunks of colored glass. And not as empty as I’d expected. It jarred me when I saw that the cold, dark room had an occupant and who it was.

Emily Hunter. Sitting hunched on a stool in one shadowy corner, like a bad little girl being punished.

She recognized me, said my name and hopped off the stool. But she didn’t move in my direction; she stood very straight, her arms down at her sides — a small, forlorn figure bundled in a fur-collared coat.

“I knew you’d come,” she said.

“Are you okay?”

“Oh, yes. Just cold. It’s cold in here.”

“Come outside into the sun.”

We went around to the front of the house. She walked close to me and stayed close when I stopped in a patch of sunlight near the stairs, as if she were afraid I might go away and leave her alone again. She was pale except for splotches of color the cold had put across her cheekbones. Otherwise she seemed all right. No visible marks on her. If there had been, I don’t know what I would have done.

She said, “My aunt’s not back yet. Good.”

“She the one who put you in the shed?”

“Yes.”

“How long ago?”

“I don’t know. Not long.”

“So you wouldn’t run away or use the phone.”

“Yes.”

“Where’d she go?”

“Shopping. She won’t take me with her when she goes into town because she’s afraid I’ll say something to somebody or try to get away.”

“How many times has she locked you up?”

“One other time. Yesterday.”

I had to work to hide my anger behind a poker face. “She hasn’t hit you or anything like that?”

“No. She doesn’t like me, but she wouldn’t hurt me.”

“Why doesn’t she like you? She’s your real aunt, isn’t she?”

Emily nodded. “She hates kids, I guess. Kids are a pain in the ass, that’s what she said.”

“She live here alone?”

“Yes. She and Uncle Mike are divorced.”

“Uncle Mike. Mike Meineke?”

“Yes.”

“How long have they been divorced?”

“I think I was about eight. Two years.”

“Where does he live now?”

“I don’t know. Up here somewhere, I think. Do you know where my mother is?”

“I was going to ask you. She brought you up here?”

“Yes. On Friday.”

“How long did she stay?”

“Just a few minutes. She and Aunt Karen went outside to talk so I couldn’t hear them.”

“So it was late Friday afternoon when she left. Did she tell you where she was going?”

Nod. “Back home. She was supposed to come pick me up Saturday night or Sunday morning, but she didn’t. At first I was glad because I knew you’d come when you got my letter. But now I’m worried. She hasn’t called and she doesn’t answer the phone. Aunt Karen’s called home a dozen times. She’s really upset.”

So am I, I thought. “Where were you going after she picked you up?”

“Someplace new to live. She wouldn’t say where.”

“Emily, was anyone with you and your mom when you drove up here?”

“No. Just us.”

“And you came in your mother’s car?”

“Yes.”

“Did she say why she needed to go back home right away?”

“Some things she had to take care of.”

“Meet someone? Trevor Smith?”

“I don’t think so. She didn’t want to see him anymore.”

I ran it around inside my head. Some things to take care of. The money kind, maybe; and the loose ends kind. Close out bank accounts, clean out safe-deposit boxes — banks are open on Saturdays now. Make sure there was nothing incriminating or revealing left in the house. Tasks she hadn’t had time to do or to finish doing on Friday. Her first priority, or one of the first, had been to stash Emily with her sister, keep her away from me. But what had happened after her return to Greenwood? Why was her car still parked in the garage and where was she? And how did Dale Cooney’s death connect with her disappearance, if it did?

Emily asked, “What’re we going to do now?”

“Wait for your aunt to get back so I can talk to her.”

“About what’s making everybody so scared.”

“That’s right. Do you have any idea what it is?”

“No. Nobody will tell me anything. It must be something really awful if a man wants to kill my mom.”

“Did she say his name, even his first name?”

“No.”

“Your aunt knows who he is.”

“Yes, and I want to know, too.”

“She won’t talk about it in front of you.”

“I know,” Emily said. “Will you tell me if you can make her tell you?”

Difficult question. She had a right to know; it involved her parents, her aunt, and it was having an immediate and chaotic effect on her life. Mature for her age, but still a kid, with a kid’s emotions, and she had already suffered a devastating blow with the death of her father. “Something really awful” might open wounds that would never heal.

I hedged by saying, “Maybe it’s best if you don’t know everything, at least not right away.”

“That means you won’t tell me anything.”

“Emily, do you trust me?”

“...Yes.”

“Then believe this. I won’t keep anything really important from you, but I have to know all the facts first. That means talking to other people besides your aunt.”

“I’m not a baby,” she said.

“I know you’re not. And I’m not treating you like one. I’m telling you the same thing I’d tell an adult.” Which was the truth, and to prove it to her I held her gaze, let her see it in my eyes.

“All right,” she said slowly. “But I hate not knowing. I hate being afraid.”

“Me, too,” I said. “Always.”

A jay began squalling in one of the pines. The racket turned my head for a few seconds. When I looked down at Emily again, she said, “Is it okay if I go with you?”

“With me?”

“When you leave. After you talk to Aunt Karen.”

It caught me off guard; I didn’t have an immediate answer.

“Please? You’re going to look for my mother, aren’t you? In Greenwood? I don’t want to stay here anymore. Aunt Karen... she doesn’t want me and she makes me more afraid. Please let me go with you.”

Christ. What can you say?

“Please,” she said again.

“I wish I could.” Also the truth, gently. “But I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“You’re in your aunt’s care. I can’t just take you away.”

“Even if I say it’s what I want?”

“You’re a minor. Emily. I’d have to have written permission, and when your aunt finds out who I am she’ll never give it. Besides, your mom expects you to be here. Suppose she’s on her way right now? She’d be frantic if she found you gone.”

“I don’t think she’s on her way.” Now it was her eyes, big and dark and tragic, holding mine. “I don’t think she’s going to come at all.”

Another sound saved me from having to fumble up a response to that. This one was the thrum and whine of an approaching car. I swung around to look along the access lane.

“That’s Aunt Karen’s van,” Emily said.