Scenarios

6

It was nearly six-thirty when I came down between the cliffs and back into Cooperville. The sun was dropping behind the wooded slopes to the west; evening shadows had begun to gather among the ghost buildings along the creek. The meadow grass had a warm golden sheen. Cooperville was a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't have wanted to live there-not now and especially not after the Munroe Corporation finished with it.

There was a dark green pickup parked alongside the Cooperville Mercantile, which probably meant that Jack Coleclaw and his wife were back from Weaverville. I wasn't interested in talking to Coleclaw, at least not yet, but when I saw the other cars parked over near the cottage I turned in there on impulse. There were five cars altogether, among them Paul Thatcher's jeep and Hugh Penrose's Land Rover. The way it looked, the residents were having some kind of town meeting.

I stopped where I had that afternoon, alongside the gas pump. When I got out of the car, the door to the mercantile opened and Gary Coleclaw came out with a can of Coke in one hand and a half-eaten sandwich in the other. As soon as he saw me he did an about-face and went right back in again. There was no sign of the fat brown-and-white dog. And nobody else came out of the store.

I was not about to go over to the cottage; facing the entire population of Cooperville was something I had no desire to do. I started to get back inside the car-and a man came hurrying around the far corner of the mercantile, from the direction of the cottage. He was alone, and he was somebody I had never seen before.

He stopped two feet away, put his hands on his hips, and stared at me with eyes as cold as winter frost. He was about my age, mid-fifties; dark-complected, powerfully built, with not much neck and not much chin. Running to fat, though. You couldn't see the belt buckle of his Levi's because of the paunch that hung over it.

"You're the insurance detective," he said.

"More or less. And you?"

"Jack Coleclaw. If you're here to talk to me, you wasted the trip. I've got nothing to say to you."

"Nobody seems to have anything to say to me. Why is that, Mr. Coleclaw?"

"You're trying to make out one of us killed that Munroe man in Redding, that's why. No one here had anything to do with Randall's death, mister; no one here started any fires. Now suppose you just get back in your car and get the hell out of Cooperville. And don't come back, if you know what's good for you."

"Is that a threat, Mr. Coleclaw?"

"Nobody's threatening you."

"Two people this afternoon made a pretty good imitation of it."

"Feelings run high around here where Munroe is concerned," he said. "All we want is to be left alone. If we're not…"He didn't finish the sentence.

"Suppose I go to the county law and tell them I'm being harassed? Do you want that kind of trouble?"

"You can't prove it. Besides, we cooperated with the county cops when they made their investigation. They didn't find anything; there wasn't anything they could find. The sheriff's department doesn't worry us, mister."

"Then why should I?"

"You don't."

"No? How come the summit meeting, then?"

He scowled. "What?"

"It looks like you're entertaining everybody in town tonight," I said. "I figure that's because of me. Or do you all get together regularly for coffee and cake?"

"What we do of an evening is none of your business," Coleclaw said. "You keep coming around here, you'll get the same you got today-and more of it. Now that's all I got to say. You've been warned."

I watched him stalk off the way he'd come and disappear around the far corner of the store. I did not like the feeling I had now: bad vibes, a sense that there was more to this business than the idea I had developed back in the motel bar in Weaverville. There was too much hostility here, that was the thing. And it was too intense. But I couldn't seem to get a handle on what lay at the root of it.

I drove away from the pump, out onto the road again. If anybody was watching me from inside Coleclaw's house, the curtained front windows hid them. I couldn't see anybody anywhere now. The whole damned town might have been a ghost, lying still and crumbling in the golden light of an approaching sunset.

When I got to the fork I took the branch that led between the abandoned mining-camp buildings. I parked in front of the hotel, got my flashlight from its clip under the dash, and locked the car. Then I went around to the rear, to where the back door still stood hanging open on one hinge. I stepped inside.

Not much light penetrated now, at this time of day, through the chinks in the outer walls. The place had a murky, eerie look to it, as if there might actually be spooks and specters lying in wait on the shadowed balconies and among the decaying rubble. I switched on the flashlight, crossed the rough whipsawed floor.

The light picked up the collapsed pigeonhole shelf, the door in the wall behind it. I swung the door open. Mica particles and iron pyrites gleamed in the flash beam when I played it across the tier of shelves and their collection of arrowheads and chunks of rock. I moved over there. Some of the rocks had fossils embedded in them, all right. Bryophyte fossils, just like the ones in the stone cup in the trunk of my car.

I picked up one that looked to be the same sort of mineral-travertine, Treacle had called it-as the stone cup, and put it into my pocket. Then I swept the rest of the room with the light, looking for something that might confirm my suspicion as to who it was who spent time here. The Coleman lantern, the stacks of National Geographic, the cot with its straw-tick mattress told me nothing. But under the cot I found a small spiral notebook, and the notebook had a name on it, and that was all I needed.

I put the notebook into the same pocket with the fossil rock. As I started out the light, probing ahead, showed me nothing but the edge of the desk and the pigeonhole shelf and dim shadow shapes beyond. I took one step through the doorway

Something moved to my right, behind the desk.

That was the only warning I had, and it wasn't enough. He came rushing toward me out of the gloom with something upraised in his hand, something that registered on my mind as a length of board. He swung it at me in a flat horizontal arc like a baseball bat. I dropped the flashlight, threw my arm up too late.

The board whacked across the left side of my face and head, and there was a flash of bright pain, and I went down and out.