Wolf in the Shadows - Marcia Muller [15]
Of course, the roses had been a constant reminder. Every Tuesday morning a single perfect rose arrived at my office, by Hy’s arrangement with a neighborhood florist. Yellow roses: pink was too sentimental, red too traditional for me, he claimed. On one of those Tuesdays, when the tug of longing was particularly strong and the snow was melting on the mountain passes, I’d gotten into the MG and driven back to Tufa Lake and we’d become lovers. After that, the roses were an exotic tangerine—a tangerine, Hy said, that was the exact color of our passion.
Now, standing there beside the pasture fence in the gathering dusk and silence, I strained to feel a connection to Hy. Tried hard, but fell far short. Nothing.
No, I decided, he had not come to this lonely place, not ever. If he had, I would have known. It was that simple.
* * *
I was about to turn north on 101 when the clearing in among the boulders and eucalyptus caught my attention. I waited for a semi to rumble past, then accelerated across the highway. The clearing was fairly large—about twenty feet in diameter— and tire-marked. Farther back, in a circle of stones near the base of a huge tree, were the remains of a campfire. I shut the MG’s engine off, got out, and went over there.
An odd place for a campfire, I thought, and a dangerous one. Dry eucalyptus ignite easily and can turn a spark into a conflagration in a matter of minutes—witness the tragic fire that destroyed twenty-five lives and hundreds of homes in the East Bay hills close to two years ago. But people seldom learn from such examples and will camp or picnic anywhere—gas stations, parking lots, the middle of shopping malls. This place, even though they’d be sucking up exhaust fumes with their hot dogs, was more scenic than most.
I went up to the improvised fire ring and peered around into the deepening darkness. The picnickers—many groups of them—had been careless; trash covered the ground amid the boulders. I glanced down, saw that the circle of stones had been broken and scattered; there were tire tracks through the cinders and ashes.
Ashes. I thought of the damaged rental car, the fine ashlike dust coating its exterior.
The tracks pointed toward the boulders where the trash was strewn. I went that way, taking my small flashlight from my bag and shining its beam over the ground and rocks and tree trunks. One of the boulders had a prominent white scar some two feet off the ground. I shone the light closer and saw blue paint scrapings on the pale stone. Squatting down, I shone the flash on the ground. Broken glass that looked as if it might have come from a headlight lay scattered there.
So this was where Hy had come—and where the car had gotten damaged. But why? And how?
I felt in my bag for one of the envelopes I keep there, then scooped up some of the glass fragments and placed them inside. Took another out and used my Swiss Army knife to scrape some of the blue paint into it. Then I stuck the envelopes in the bag’s’flap pocket and stood, began going through the trash on the ground item by item.
Potato-chip bags and fast-food containers; paper plates and plastic forks; used condoms and beer cans; candy wrappers and Styrofoam cups; pop bottles and soiled disposable diapers. God, people could be pigs! At least Hy, devoted environmentalist that he was, had tossed his cups on the floor of the rental car. If they were Hy’s …
The accumulated garbage disgusted me, but I determinedly waded through it. Newspapers and plastic bags; gum wrappers and matchbooks and cigarette butts; assorted scraps of paper.
Including one bearing Hy’s bold handwriting: “RKI mobile unit—777-3209.”
Car phone. Whose? RKI. What—a person or a company? Mobile unit—it sounded more like a company.
I kept searching, but found nothing more that I could link to Hy. Finally I gave up and went back to the car.
So what had happened here? I wondered. Hy must have had good reason to search this place out.