Full House: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 3) (21 page)

“You were his landlady?” Rosie asked. “When did he leave?”

“Yes, this is my house. He left, oh, it’s been nearly a month ago, now. I was sorry to see him go. Are you friends of his?”

I nodded. “Do you know why he left?”

“Well, I’m afraid it was because he lost his job, poor man. He was working nearby, you know.”

“Yes, I know. Do you have a forwarding address for him?”

“I certainly do. Let me just go find it.” She was gone for just a few seconds. “Here you are, you can write it down. He said he was going back home because nothing made any sense out here, those were his words.”

I looked down at the slip of paper. William Howard had, apparently, gone back to Cleveland, Ohio.

“Do you know that he went right back east when he left here?”

“Oh, yes. I got a postcard from him… oh, three weeks ago it’s been. From Cleveland.”

Not wanting her to think I wasn’t grateful, I copied the Cleveland address into my notebook.

Passing through Guerneville, I honked my horn at Rosie, who was leading the way. She pulled over; I pulled up behind her and aimed an index finger across the street toward the restaurant with the award-winning pancakes. It was lunchtime, and I don’t like to work on an empty stomach.

The place was crowded, but we found a booth.

“I noticed,” Rosie said, “that you didn’t tell Durell we were coming up here.”

A slice of tomato, greased with mayonnaise, slid out of my hamburger with the first bite. I managed to drop it on my plate instead of in my lap. “I don’t want anyone to be expecting us. I didn’t want our questions stage-managed this time.”

She nodded thoughtfully. “We never did hear what any of those people actually said to Fred, did we?”

“No. And it doesn’t make sense that no one would remember what day she was here— especially if she did come early that Saturday morning. Some of the ark crew must have weekday jobs, some must come only on nights or weekends. There must be some difference between the days up there. And it would have been early. Someone has to have noticed.”

“And if someone did notice, and no one’s telling us…”

“Yeah.”

We ran through several hypothetical time-lines, disappearance through murder. We picked at the bits and pieces that were beginning to come together in what looked like a sketchy but logical trail of leads. Sketchy because there were big chunks that didn’t seem to fit at all, that had to be stuck over to one side for a while.

Fortified with food and scenarios, we crossed the street again and got into the cab of Rosie’s pickup, an oven after an hour parked on the sunny street. Rosie dug a red sweatband out of her dash compartment and pulled it over her dark hair. She had just started the engine when I saw a familiar-looking car cruising by. A big old American car, early seventies, dark blue. A dent in the passenger side door. I caught a glimpse of the rear license plate, just enough to read the first three letters: CYC. I couldn’t see if the driver had blond hair, and there was no passenger.

I told Rosie. She shot the truck into gear and took off after the blue car. We were one curve behind, but the dust hadn’t settled on the dirt road to the ark. We held our distance the rest of the way. By the time we got there, the blue car— it was a Pontiac— was parked off to the side of the clearing next to another car that looked familiar— a white Toyota. We pulled in behind, blocking the way out for both of them, and went looking for Fred. Yellow-haired Fred.

He was up on the deck with the owner of the white Toyota. Doreen, the Saturday secretary at Yellow Brick Farms. We climbed the ladder.

“Whose car is that?” I pointed at the Pontiac.

“The Toyota? Mine. Why?” Doreen asked.

“The Pontiac.”

Fred took over. “It’s just an old car we use around here for errands. Everyone uses it.”

“Who just drove it in here?”

“I did,” Fred answered.

“You use it for a lot of errands, don’t you?”

“What are you talking about?” He laughed.

“This is Doreen,” I told Rosie. “She works at Yellow Brick Farms on Saturdays.” I turned to Doreen. “You up here a lot?”

“I help out.”

“Do you ever help out on Saturdays?”

“How could I?” she asked reasonably. “You just said I work at—”

“Right. I’d like to talk to someone who does work here on Saturdays. Excuse me.” I saw a pair of workers down at the far end of the deck and walked toward them. Rosie headed for the hatch.

“Excuse me,” I heard Fred yell, “but where do you think you’re going?”

I turned to look at him. He was talking to Rosie, who was poised at the entrance to the hold.

“I just want to talk to whoever’s down there,” she said.

“No one’s down there. And this is private property. And neither one of you should be bothering our workers. They’re busy.”

“So are we,” I answered. “And we’re here to ask some questions.”

“Fine. Talk to whoever you want. Just don’t keep them from their work. But there’s no one below.”

Rosie didn’t argue. She nodded agreeably, crossed the deck, and climbed down the ladder to the ground.

I started with the two I’d spotted earlier, up on the deck. One of them was tossing plywood scraps down to the ground. Neither one of them had ever met anyone named Marjorie, and didn’t remember seeing anyone who looked like her.

Doreen and Fred were still standing on deck, watching me. I waved at them and climbed down the ladder, looking for Rosie. She was nowhere around. One by one, doggedly, I picked off the rest of the crew, and got pretty much the same answer from all of them. Nobody knew what I was talking about.

Fred came down to stand next to me, looking impatient, while I talked to the last of the workers. When Rosie appeared suddenly, at the edge of the clearing, pushing her way through the ferns, he noticed her emergence, frowned, but said nothing. She wasn’t wearing her red sweatband any more.

“If you two are finished…” Fred sighed.

“Tell me something,” Rosie interjected conversationally, “Do you bring your supplies in by road?”

“Well, of course. What else would we do?”

“I was just wondering. You must be pretty close to the river on this side.” She jerked a thumb back toward the woods she’d just come out of.

He laughed, a superior chuckle. “You couldn’t move serious building materials or anything down that river. It’s too shallow and too slow, especially this time of year. And why would you even try? You can pull a truck right in here.”

Rosie shrugged. “Just wondering. Change of pace, maybe.”

He shook his head, tolerant but weary. “We’re not playing games here, you know.”

“I’m sure you’re not. Well, thanks for your help.”

We got back in the truck. She swung it around and drove slowly back along the dirt road.

“What was all that stuff about supplies?”

“Just fishing,” she laughed.

“River talk,” I parried.

“No, really. I was wondering what they use the river for. There’s a canoe tied up on the bank back there. The river’s only about three hundred feet away from the ark.”

“Will we be able to find it?”

“Yes.”

I looked at my watch. Two o’clock. “Let’s go rent a canoe.”

We went back to the same motel we’d stayed in a few days before.

“Here again?” the clerk asked, pen poised over the registration form.

“Not to stay,” I told him. At least I hoped not. I had a date in four hours.

We set off downstream, paddling hard. It didn’t take very long to go the distance, not much longer than by car.

“There it is,” Rosie said quietly. I looked over at the river bank, to our right, and saw the canoe, half-hidden in brush. But Rosie was pointing up, above the canoe, at the marker she’d left wrapped around the branch of a bay tree, well above eye level. Her red sweatband.

We pulled our own boat aground a dozen feet from the other one, just out of sight behind an eroded bank.

Rosie climbed the tree to retrieve her sweatband and stuck it in her pocket. A dozen feet from the water, we were into deep woods. Bay, shrubbery, oak and poison oak, with the redwoods towering just ahead.

We couldn’t have been far from the ark, if Rosie’s estimate of its distance from the river was anything like accurate, but I didn’t hear anything. No hammering. No sawing. I was wishing they’d make some noise so I wouldn’t have to move so damned carefully. There were dry twigs everywhere, and between maneuvering around nature’s noisemakers and the prolific poison oak— bright red and easy to spot, anyway— I was so alert I quivered.

I heard something. I grabbed Rosie’s hand and dropped behind a fallen bay tree.

“Probably a deer,” she whispered.

The deer, which had not seen us, stepped out from behind a redwood tree on two legs, carrying a heavy-looking canvas bag, dressed in filthy camouflage pants, shirt, and cap. His face was smeared with mud. The beard was longer than in the photo I had, and the frizzy hair stuck out from under the cap. Noah. Rosie pinched my hand, hard, so I knew she recognized him, too.

I froze, torn between wanting to watch him secretly and wanting to grab him and cart him home before anyone got in any more trouble.

Rosie, however, never freezes. Which is good and bad.

“Psst! Noah!” She wrenched her hand out of mine and stepped out from behind the tree. His eyes widened in his dirty face, and he turned into a deer again, bounding out of sight.

We went after him, but he could have been hiding anywhere in the brush. “Well, hell, at least we know where he is. Or was,” I added bitterly.

Rosie shushed me with a wave of her hand. “He’s all right. The important thing now is the ark.” We crept on, following the trail she had left to the clearing: broken branches, little piles of needles and cones. “You know, I’ll bet that was his canoe.” I guessed so.

We were getting close to the ark, she said, but there were still no sounds of work. Dead quiet. Except for a sudden soft rustle to our right. This time I wasn’t going to take any chances. I hurled myself at the source of the sound. He rose up from the ferns like a mountain, and that’s what he felt like when I crashed into him. The goon from Tahoe. The big one. He clamped a hand over my mouth, but Rosie hit him with a flying tackle and he fell back into the undergrowth again, grunting, pulling me down with him. Rosie had found a branch the size of a baseball bat. She swung at his head. I tumbled out of the way. She was stopped in mid-swing by the goon’s partner, who leaped out from behind a tree and grabbed her arm. Same partner as before, the one who had mashed me in the Tahoe parking lot.

We all smelled the smoke at once, and we froze like four grown-ups playing that old kids’ game, Statues. Goon number one, sprawled facing me, mouth open, head turned toward the ark, still hidden by trees. Rosie, frozen with raised branch, forearm in the grip of Goon number two. I, squatting on the forest floor, head raised, nose wiggling like a rabbit’s.

Smoke. And the crackle of fire. All the statues came alive, racing for the clearing.

I smelled gasoline and saw the can lying on the ground near the ark.

Noah was running toward us, scuttling like a crab, looking back at the fire that had eaten half the ladder and was blackening the hull. I grabbed him. His canvas bag was empty. Fred came over the rail, started down, jumped the last eight feet to the ground, stumbled, recovered, and headed for me. Doreen was standing on the deck waving her arms and yelling. Another man, who hadn’t been around when I’d talked to the crew members before, climbed down the scaffolding— the ladder was now gone— carrying an ax. He ran to the burning section of hull and began hacking at it. Something about his run, his sneakers, his size: it was the punk who had mistaken Pa for me that night at the house.

Tahoe Goon number one intercepted Fred. I was still holding Noah, who was laughing his head off.

None of the other ark workers was anywhere in sight; the two cars were gone from the clearing. A Corvette pulled in to take their place. Joe Durell leaped out, ran to the ark, and looked wildly around for the ladder. He started to run toward the guy with the ax, saw me clutching Noah, and pulled a gun. Goon number two pulled out his own gun and shot Durell in the shoulder. Durell’s weapon dropped to the ground and so did he, screaming. Doreen stuck her head out of one of the holes the ax-wielder had made and yelled, “Is the fire out?”

The axman yelled something back, but none of us heard it. The soft rhythmic percussion I’d barely registered, a background beat for the scene on the ground, swelled to an ear-battering racket as the helicopter appeared above the tall shivering trees and hovered over the clearing, beating the smoke down again in suffocating gray waves that pushed me and my laughing prisoner back to the edge of the woods.

Doreen reappeared at the hole in the hull and began tossing dozens of little plastic bags full of white stuff out to the guy with the ax, who dropped his firefighting equipment, grabbed an armload of bags, and ran for the Corvette. Which could no longer be maneuvered out of the clearing because a Sonoma County Sheriff’s car had just pulled up tight against it.

And out of the police car, along with two shotgun-toting deputies, came a couple of men in street clothes. One of them was Sergeant Ralph Hawkins of the Oakland Police Department.

In the distance, I heard sirens.

The cops were rounding us all up when the fire truck bulled its way down the road. The helicopter had backed off, and the smoke was clearing.

The firefighters checked out the ark, chopped a few more holes in it, and said something into their radio. The helicopter clattered off into the distance.

Hawkins was saying something to me about “free-lance writers really getting around,” but I was watching another cop who had crawled into the ark through a door-sized hole. He took over where Doreen had left off, dumping out armloads of plastic bags. Another cop, with a much bigger bag, was collecting them.

I didn’t get much of a chance to watch, though. More cops had arrived and we were all hustled down to the sheriff’s office for questioning. Hawkins separated me and Rosie, but I figured she’d know how to handle her end of things.