Schemers

14

JAKE RUNYON

Harmony was nothing more than a break in the two-lane county road. He came out of dense timber and there it was, like the appearance of a mirage-a scatter of buildings and a few hundred yards of surrounding meadowland. More thick forest walled it in on the east. Four miles in that direction, according to the directions Tamara had sent, an old logging road branched off and wound up to where the Hendersons’ hunting camp was located.

You couldn’t call Harmony a village or even a hamlet. The only public buildings were a tavern and a general store made of redwood siding and fronted by a couple of gas pumps. There was a house across the road, set far back at the edge of the meadow where cows and a sorrel horse grazed. Parts of a couple of other houses or cabins were visible at higher elevations among the timber.

The store and tavern were both closed. He should’ve figured nothing would be open this early, a little past nine by his watch. But he’d been too restless to hang around the motel in Fort Bragg, the nearest large town, where he’d spent the night. It’d been after dark when he pulled in there, too late to go out looking for Harmony and the hunting camp, and the downtime had weighed heavily on him. He’d left the motel at 7:00 a.m., wasted most of an hour on breakfast and a few more minutes driving around the area before finally heading out here.

He pulled over in front of the store, got out to look at the posted hours. Open at eleven. Two more hours to kill, unless he wanted to start knocking on doors hunting for the owner of the Harmony General Store. Better to use the time checking the Hendersons’ property first thing instead of second.

He drove on through the close-grown stands of pine and Douglas fir, climbing gradually. The logging road was right where Tamara had indicated, 8.6 miles from Harmony. Rutted, and muddy in patches of deep shade, but not too bad; there hadn’t been much rain or snow this winter. The Ford had all-wheel drive, so he had no trouble negotiating the rough spots.

Half a mile of bouncing and rattling brought him to the private road that led uphill through more timber and finally emerged in what appeared to be a man-made clearing. Tree stumps, old and crumbling from the assaults of insects and woodpeckers, spotted it here and there. He threaded his way among them to within fifty feet of the main cabin, one of three buildings that made up the camp.

He stepped out into biting cold and dead-calm stillness. Clouds and mist clung to the tops of the surrounding forest, as if somebody had draped them with puffs and streamers of gray bunting. Faintly, from behind the cabin, the sound of running water came to him-a trout stream that ran down to a small river whose name he’d already forgotten. He buttoned his coat against the chill as he moved toward the cabin.

It was the standard peeled-log variety, simple but sturdylooking even though it and the two outbuildings hadn’t been maintained over the past several years. High grass grew up along its sides, the A-frame roof was missing a couple of shingles, and one of the porch stanchions showed cracks and splinters. But it wasn’t only simple neglect, he saw as he drew closer. The glass in the single facing window was broken, the front door stood a few inches ajar.

He went up and looked at it. A hasp for an old Yale padlock had been pried loose from the jamb, hung bent to one side. He pushed the door open. Two steps inside was as far as he went, as far as he needed to go.

The three-room interior had been torn apart. Furniture hacked to pieces by an ax or hatchet, the only escapees a flat-armed Adirondack chair and a small table. Canned goods split open and their contents splattered on walls and floor, glasses and bottles reduced to shards. But it wasn’t just wanton destruction, the kind that kids or homeless squatters perpetrated. It was cold, vicious, calculated-a systematic act of hate or vengeance or both.

Burn holes and blackened streaks in the floorboards, wallboards. Pieces of glass and metal fused and bubbled. Acid. Flung helter-skelter after the first wave of damage was done.

The Hendersons’ phantom stalker.

Runyon backed out, toed the door shut, and went to look at the outbuildings. One was a woodshed, about a third full; the cordwood had been kicked around and doused with the corrosive, as had the walls. Same frenzy in the second building. Padlock pried off the door, a couple of old sleeping bags and some blankets and other goods torn apart and burned with acid. And in one corner, the scorched remains of something that might once have been a wood rat.

The desecration of Lloyd Henderson’s gravesite and the attacks in Los Alegres were bad enough, but this showed even greater levels of rage and hate. Any man capable of this kind of carnage wasn’t going to be satisfied for long with venting on inanimate objects and rodents. Sooner or later, he’d start using his acid on human flesh.

N ot quite eleven o’clock when Runyon rolled back into Harmony, but the general store was open early. Inside, he found the usual cramped hodgepodge of out-of-the-way mountain stores: hunting and fishing supplies and hardware items in one section, groceries in another. A burly, balding man was stocking shelves while a thin woman with hair dyed the color of French’s mustard swept the floor. Both were in their sixties and wore the same style of plaid lumberman’s shirt. The Fraziers, Ben and Georganne. Friendly and accommodating enough, but apologetic when Runyon asked them about a young woman named Jenny who’d worked there twenty years ago.

“Afraid we can’t help you,” Frazier said. “We’ve only owned this place four years. Bought it right after I retired from PG and E.”

“Who’d you buy it from?”

“Man named Collins. But I don’t think he owned it twenty years ago.”

“He didn’t,” Mrs. Frazier said. “I remember he told us he reopened it about fifteen years ago. Closed for a while before that. Not everybody likes living in wilderness country like this. We love it, though.”

“Does Collins still live in the area?”

“No. He was old, couldn’t get around very well anymore. Moved down to Sacramento to live with his daughter right after the sale to us went through.”

“Would you know who owned the store before it closed?”

“No. No idea.”

“Any longtime residents in the area who would know?”

“Well… Mrs. Genotti, Ben?”

“She’d know,” Frazier agreed, “but her memory’s not too good. She’s in her eighties.”

“Anyone else?”

“Let me think. Twenty years ago, you said?”

“About that.”

Before Frazier could respond, his wife said, “Oh, wait, Ben. That old desk in the storeroom-it’s full of papers and receipts. There might be something in there.”

“That’s right. Might be at that.”

“Would you mind if I had a look?”

“I guess it’d be all right,” Frazier said. “Why’d you say you were looking for this Jenny?”

“Not her so much as a relative of hers.”

“This relative do something wrong?”

“He may have. So you don’t mind if I have a look through the desk?”

Frazier shrugged and glanced at his wife. “Georganne?”

“As long as you don’t take anything.”

“I won’t,” Runyon said. “Names and addresses are all I’m looking for.”

They led him into the rear storeroom, then into an alcove that at one time had been used as an office. The scarred old desk took up most of the space and was piled high with cardboard cartons. More cartons were stacked alongside it.

“Have to move those boxes,” Frazier said. “Okay for you to do that, but I’ll ask you to put ’em back the way they were when you’re done.”

Runyon promised he would and began shifting the cartons around so he had access to the desk drawers. The Fraziers stood watching him, not offering to help. None of the desk drawers was locked. The usual desk clutter, some string-tied accordion files full of receipts for delivered goods and paid bills dating back to the midseventies. The only name on these was Harmon Digges, evidently the store’s owner up until 1992. Runyon made a mental note of the name.

In the last of the large bottom drawers he found a stack of dusty ledger books. One contained a meticulous record of charges and payments made by individuals who had been allowed to shop on credit. None of the first names was Jenny or Jennifer or anything similar. The second ledger listed payments made by Digges for various supplies, utilities, and services. In a separate section were pages headed Employees, Salary-and the name Runyon was looking for.

Jenny Noakes.

Employed from June 1984 to April 1988.

The salary record gave no address. He rummaged through the rest of the papers in the desk, hunting for an address book, social security and tax records-anything that would tell him where Jenny Noakes had lived during that period, her age, something of her background. Nothing. Nor was there any document that gave a clue as to why her employment had been terminated.

Frazier was still hanging around, watching him to make sure he kept his word about not taking anything and putting the alcove back in order. Runyon asked if the name Jenny Noakes was familiar to him. It wasn’t. He replaced the cartons, offered to pay for the rummaging privilege. Frazier shook his head. “Not necessary,” he said. “But if you’re hungry, my wife makes the best deli sandwiches you ever tasted.” Runyon wasn’t hungry, but he bought a deli sandwich anyway.

Jenny Noakes. Up to Tamara now. All she needed to track anybody living or dead was a name.

H is cell phone didn’t work in the mountains; it wasn’t until he was down near the coast that he was able to pick up the satellite signal so he could call Tamara. A few minutes later he was back in the old lumbering and fishing town of Fort Bragg. He hadn’t had much breakfast; he found his way to a seafood restaurant under the long, new bridge that spanned the harbor entrance. He was sipping hot tea, waiting for a bowl of clam chowder, when Tamara called. He went outside to talk to her.

“Took a little longer than I thought,” she said. “You’ll see why.”

“What’ve you got?”

“Jenny Noakes. Born Jennifer Torrance 1962 in Ukiah, married to Anthony Noakes June 1981, son Tucker born early 1982. Father listed on the birth certificate as Anthony Noakes. Looks like you were wrong about the kid’s old man being Lloyd Henderson.”

“Unless she was screwing around as a newlywed.”

“Been known to happen. But she and the husband were living in Ukiah when the baby was born.”

Ukiah was a long way inland across the mountains, the county seat at the eastern end of Mendocino county. Small chance she would have met Henderson there. He said, “When did she move to Harmony?”

“No record of her ever living in Harmony. But she and Anthony Noakes split up in eighty-five and she got custody of the kid. Aunt of hers lives in Deer Run. That’s where she went after the breakup-same Deer Run address as her aunt’s from late eighty-four to August eighty-eight.”

Deer Run was about a dozen miles from Harmony. He’d passed through it going up and coming back.

“Where does she live now?”

“She doesn’t. She’s dead.”

“When?”

“August of eighty-eight.”

“What happened to her?”

“She was murdered,” Tamara said. “Body found in the woods off a side road south of Deer Run three months after she died. Strangled and dumped.”

Runyon digested that before he said, “Case solved?”

“Doesn’t look like it.”

“Suspects?”

“Can’t tell you that. Online information’s pretty sketchy.”

“County sheriff’s department the investigating agency?”

“Yep. I don’t have a name for you, but whoever handled the investigation was probably mentioned in the Fort Bragg and Santa Rosa papers. Their online files don’t go back as far as eighty-eight.”

“What happened to the ex-husband?”

“Dropped off the radar in eighty-eight. Probably moved somewhere out of state. Could be significant, maybe-the date, I mean. Same year Jenny Noakes was killed.”

“What about the son?”

“No record anywhere in the state of a Tucker Noakes. Unusual first name. Maybe it’ll help track him down.”

She had nothing more to give him, except for the address of the aunt, Pauline Devries, in Deer Run-177 Hill Road. He went back inside, looked at his cold tea and cooling bowl of clam chowder, left some money on the table, and took himself out to the car.