Hellbox (Nameless Detective) (6 page)

Tomorrow morning early, I thought, if I could haul my creaky old carcass out of bed in the cold light of dawn, I’d go out again. Today was the first time I’d been trout fishing in years, ever since that harrowing time at Deep Mountain Lake high up in the Sierras near Quincy. Thought I’d lost my zest for the sport, but today’s outing was proof that I hadn’t; I had just needed some time away from it, was all. If we did end up buying this place, I’d probably indulge in quite a bit of catch and release in the future. As much as I’d once enjoyed fresh trout pan-fried in butter, I’d reached the point in my life where I could no longer willingly take a life of any kind.

I’d have one more try at talking Kerry into coming with me tomorrow. She wouldn’t have to put a line out herself, just be there to keep me company and share the experience. Convince her to try it once, and she’d be as hooked as one of the rainbows or browns I planned to catch.

I finished my beer, went inside for another. Moved my chair to the far side of the deck, put my feet up on the rail, and sat there sipping and taking in the view. The beer and the day’s exercise made me drowsy; I nodded off for a while, until an ear-buzzing mosquito jerked me out of it. The low angle of the sun told me it must be close to six o’clock. A glance at my watch confirmed it.

And still no Kerry. She must have left just before I got back, I thought. Then I thought no, she had to’ve been out for at least a half hour by then or it wouldn’t have been so stuffy inside.

Some walk. But how far could she have gone? Quite a ways if she’d taken the secondary road below; it meandered along the hillside for a considerable distance in both directions before dropping down to the main valley road. But she’d said something this morning about a walk in the woods. Which woods? There was timber all around the property, all along Ridge Hill Road.

Possible she’d gotten herself lost, but that wasn’t likely. There were other houses tucked in among most of the nearby forestland, except for the section that ran along the ridge above and down the other side, and she wouldn’t have gone up that far. Kerry was not a risk-taker for one thing, and for another, she had a built-in compass that operated even in unfamiliar surroundings.

Some kind of accident? Tripped, fell, hurt herself badly enough so that she couldn’t make it back? That possibility was what worried me the most. Accidents could happen to anybody at any time, no matter how careful you were.

I let another fifteen minutes go by, my nerves jumping, the fear of some sort of accident jabbing at my mind. And when she still didn’t show, I went looking for her.

The woods at the rear first. There was a gate in the fence back there … through it seemed the most likely way for her to have gone. On the other side was what looked like a deer trail, and I followed that to where it split in two. Damn! I went a little ways along each fork, looking for some sign of recent passage and not finding any. She could have gone in either direction—the timber ran all along the rear of the property and down on both sides. If she’d come in here at all.

I took the left fork first, followed it until it petered out against a deadfall. You could get around it, but not without making a detour through fern groves on either side. None of the ferns appeared to have been trampled.

Back to the other fork and along its winding course. Broken twigs, scuffed-through needles … somebody had been this way recently. Kerry? It could also have been a deer; in one place, I came on a little pile of black pellet droppings. I was not enough of a woodsman to make the distinction.

The trail led me out of the trees, across a shallow streambed and a rock-strewn brown meadow. No sign of Kerry. No sign that she’d ever been here. What was discernible of the path ended at the far end of the clearing, beyond which was a moderately steep incline through trees and underbrush. I thought about climbing up there, but I didn’t do it. The muscles in my legs were already tight-drawn from the exertion.

I couldn’t keep searching blind like this. The dusky light was deepening, which made the footing even more uncertain; in my tired and edgy state, I was liable to be the one to suffer a harmful fall. My watch told me I’d been chasing around in these woods for nearly an hour. Kerry might have returned to the cabin by now, be there waiting and wondering where I’d gone. If she had, I’d feel like a fool for all this frantic activity—a relieved fool.

I made my way back through the trees, and even with my eyes cast downward, I stumbled a couple of times over hidden obstacles. Once I thought I’d managed to get myself lost, then located the trail again and finally emerged at the gate in the boundary fence. I half ran around to the front of the cabin.

The door was still locked.

Kerry wasn’t there.

Now I really was scared. I hurried down to the graveled parking area, drove to Ridge Hill Road. The shortest route to the main valley road was to the north; I turned in that direction. No Kerry. There was a good-sized public park on the west side of the valley road intersection, a campground a short distance away on the east side; I made looping passes through both. No Kerry. Back along Ridge Hill in the opposite direction. No Kerry. Another secondary road branched upward to the left; the signpost there gave its name as Skyview Drive and warned that there was
No Outlet.
I swung up there. No Kerry.

Ahead was another intersection, this one on the left. When I neared it, I saw that the branch was unpaved and heavily rutted—an old logging road probably, that angled up through the woods. I sleeved sweat off my face as I slowed to make the turn. Follow the logging road as far as it goes, I thought, and if I still didn’t find her, go back to Ridge Hill and start knocking on doors in the vicinity and asking if anyone had seen her.

The explosion happened just as I swung onto the logging road.

Booming concussion, somewhere nearby. A fireball inside a cloud of oily black smoke boiled up above the timber to my right—very close. My frayed nerve endings sparked like live wires; reflexively, I jammed on the brakes. The flames were no longer visible, but the smoke kept pumping upward in great gouts, putting a black filter across the fading blue of the sky.

I don’t believe in the kind of ambulance chasing mindset that draws people to accident scenes, but with Kerry missing and the nearness of the blast, I wasn’t about to ignore it. Christ knew what had happened over there. I slammed the gear shift into reverse, backed out in a sideways slide onto Skyview Drive pointing south. The blacktop climbed up over a rise, and when it dropped down out of the pines into several hundred yards of rolling open space, I had a clear view of the source and aftermath of the explosion.

There was a house in a pocket backed by a humpbacked hill … what had been a house. Now it was a pulsing, squared-off sheet of flame, the oily smoke still pouring out of it and blackening the sky above. A car in the yard had been blown onto its side by the force of the blast, its blue paint scorched and blistered. Which meant at least one person had been inside the house when the place went up. Dead … no way anybody could have survived that kind of fiery eruption.

Not Kerry. Of course, not Kerry.
Not Kerry!

I was the first person on the scene: no other cars on the road or on the drive leading up to the burning house. I accelerated to the bottom of the rise, pulled up in a shallow ditch on the far side of the driveway. There was no good reason for me to run up into the yard but I did it anyway, propelled by my half-panicked fear for Kerry. No sign of anybody inside or out, alive or dead. I couldn’t get any closer to the conflagration than fifty yards. The radiating waves of heat were intense, the smoke thick enough to affect my breathing, start me choking and hacking.

Neither of the two outbuildings, a barn and a smaller structure, had caught fire yet, but falling embers had already ignited patches of grass in the yard and on the lower edges of the hill. The pine woods along the hilltop and on the near perimeter were untouched so far. If a fire got started in any part of them, as dry as some of the underbrush was, it would move fast enough to destroy acres of timberland and threaten any number of other homes.

Other vehicles were arriving now—a couple of private cars, a deputy sheriff’s cruiser. In the distance, I heard the first wail of sirens. I was back on the access drive by then, away from the pulsing heat and roiling smoke, trying to suck in enough fresh air to clear my lungs.

A fresh-faced young deputy came running up. “What the hell happened here?”

“I don’t know,” I said between coughs. “Sudden explosion, that’s all I know. Only been here a couple of minutes.”

“Either of the Verrikers inside?”

Verriker. The name was vaguely familiar, but I didn’t try to place it. “Car there says somebody was.”

“Christ. Oh, Christ.”

I had nothing to say to that. The roof of the barn was burning now, in crawling flames like napalm. Out on the road, the oncoming noise of sirens and rumbling engines overrode the thrum and crackle of the blaze.

The deputy said to me, “Go back to the road, stay out of the way,” and hurried off without waiting for an answer.

I retreated down the driveway. People were still showing up; eight or nine cars were now strewn along both sides of Skyview Drive. Men and a few women had begun milling around in little groups, their faces reflecting shock and that avidity you always see in the watchers at disaster scenes—a mixture of dread, relief that it was somebody else’s disaster, and a primitive eagerness for the horrors they might be confronted with. A fat man in a stained undershirt crowded up next to me as I came out onto the road, saying excitedly, “What was it? The furnace blow up?” I shook my head at him, moved over to stand next to my car. I didn’t want to talk to anybody else. I felt bad for whoever had died in that house, but it was a distracted sympathy. All I could think about was Kerry.

A few seconds later, the fire trucks came rushing into view, three of them with
Green Valley VFD
written on their sides, the one in the middle a tanker; a paramedic unit made it a caravan of four. They barreled up the access drive, lights flashing and sirens dying, and veered off across the yard. Firefighters jumped out and scurried to unload hoses, axes, shovels, and other equipment. A pair of EMTs emerged, too, but there was nothing for them to do except stand around looking alert.

No other vehicles came down Skyview Drive; a roadblock must have been hastily set up to keep out any more gawkers. The two deputies on the scene had joined forces to disperse the ones that were already here. One of them had a bullhorn and was shouting through it, telling everyone to leave the area for their own safety. The small crowd broke up pretty fast, people heading for their cars but with their heads turned and their eyes fixed on what was happening on the property—firemen deploying with hoses that sprayed water and fire retardant foam, other volunteers swarming along the hill above and behind the burning house to dig firebreaks. I was anxious to leave, too, get back to the cabin to find out if Kerry had returned. At the same time, I was reluctant because I didn’t know for sure that she hadn’t been inside the house when it exploded. Crazy notion, the odds against it millions to one. What would she have been doing here? But I could not get it out of my head.

I had the driver’s door open when a white van careened down over the rise, let through for a reason that soon became clear. Somebody near me called out, “Look! That’s Ned Verriker’s van.” It raced up, slewed to a stop, and a wiry, dark-faced man in work clothes jumped out and started a splay-footed run up the driveway. I knew then why his name sounded familiar: he was one of the trio who’d occupied the booth behind Kerry’s and mine in the Green Valley Café yesterday.

The deputies got in his way, held him back. “You don’t want to go up there,” one of them said. “Nothing you can do.”

“She … she didn’t get out? Alice?”

“Looks that way. I’m sorry, Ned.”

“Oh God, that’s her car in the yard, she must’ve just got home when … What happened? I don’t understand—”

“Easy now. Easy.”

“I had to work late or I’d’ve been in there, too. Alice … oh Jesus, Alice!”

I felt a little sick listening to Ned Verriker’s outpouring of pain, but at the same time, his words brought a sense of relief. Must’ve just got home, he’d said. Then Kerry
couldn’t
have been anywhere in the vicinity when it happened; there was no sensible reason for her to have hung around an empty house.

A sudden roaring, echoing crash drowned out the other sounds: the roof of the house collapsing into the black- and white-foamed shell. Flames and firebrands burst up and outward through fresh billows of smoke. The firefighters manning the retardant hoses continued to pour foam over the house while the water pumpers worked on saving the barn, putting out the grass fires. Keeping the blaze contained so it didn’t spread into the surrounding timber was the important thing now.

All the onlookers were in their cars, backing and filling and jockeying into a stream that flowed uphill on Skyview Drive. I maneuvered into the middle of the pack. It crawled along; crawled along because the drivers up front were still rubbernecking. I had to resist a sharp impulse to lean on the horn, stick my head out the window, and howl at them to hurry the hell up.

Up over the hill at last, and then the line moved a little faster to the intersection with Ridge Hill Road. That was where they’d set up the roadblock: flares and another deputy, this one a woman, directing traffic from in front of her cruiser. Ridge Hill had become a parade route, only the big-eyed watchers were inside the passing cars. It took a couple more minutes before I was past the cruiser and able to turn northbound, but the driver of the car in front of me wouldn’t go over twenty-five despite a couple of horn taps from close behind. By the time I got to the Murray property driveway, I was soaked in sweat and the blood beat in my ears was like an extended jazz drum riff.

I slid the car into the parking area, spewing gravel, and ran up onto the front deck. Empty. I yanked open the screen door, twisted the knob. Locked, as I’d left it.