Where Echoes Live Page 5

  It was possible, I supposed, that Hopwood had simply gone off on a spree, but I still intended to take a look around his claim. “Hopwood is a descendant of the people who originally owned the Promiseville mine?”

  She nodded. “Family came over here from England or some such goddamn place in the mid-eighteen hundreds, staked their claim, got rich.” Nickles’s eyes became surprisingly soft and dreamy. “The house I live in—it was theirs. Nothing fancy the way we think today, but it still looks down on the whole valley….

  “That’s why I picked it,” she added after a moment. “For luck. Figured if I lived in the rich folks’ house, maybe one of these days I’d get rich, too.”

  The woman interested me, so I deviated from my line of questioning. “What about you, Lily? How’d you come to be a prospector?”

  She finished her beer, crumpled the can, and pitched it toward the stream. It landed on the bank with a faint ping. “Wasn’t much else I could do; didn’t have much schooling. My mama, she was a dealer at one of the crummy casinos over in Reno. Never knew my dad. We lived with my grandparents, and they was always on me—stick to your schooling, get a good job, marry a nice fellow who’ll take care of you.” She grinned wickedly. “Trouble was, I liked to party too much.

  “I was just in the eighth grade when I hooked up with this guy who was working the Strip, trying to get a stake together for his prospecting gear. We took off for the Mother Lode, found a lot of gold around Jamestown, even ran our own bar for a while. Had a couple of kids, too.”

  After a long pause she continued softly, “He’s dead, years now. I don’t want to talk about that. My kids—I don’t know. The county welfare took them away from me.” Her eyes misted, and she swiped angrily at them. “Why the hell am I telling you all this, anyway?”

  I shrugged, drained my beer can. “Maybe it’s this place— Stone Valley, Promiseville. It makes you lonely for someone to talk to.”

  “It’s lonesome, yeah. Nights, it’s so quiet out here, it near drives me crazy. I sit on my porch and look out, and you know what I see? That cemetery. It’s full of people whose dreams all died. Some nights the only thing I can think of is those people who came to get rich and never got nothing but a pine coffin. And I worry that someday that might be me.”

  “But you don’t leave.”

  “I got no place to go. No place I want to be, now.” She bit her lip, looked away from me.

  I sensed she’d had all she could handle of this kind of talk, so I said, “Tell me about what you saw at the mine site.”

  Nickles had slumped against the rock. Now she sat up straighter, shook her head as if to clear it. “Up there,” she said. “Well, I’d been wondering for a while, on account of there was nothing going on. No big trucks on the access road, no blasting, nothing that told me they was taking core samples. So I thought I’d go up and have a look….”

  That had been two days ago. She’d climbed the mesa at first light, taking a circuitous route from the north, where the granite was fractured into large outcroppings that provided cover. She wasn’t sure why she felt compelled to stay hidden, but some instinct had told her it was a good idea.

  “Turned out I was right, too,” she said.

  The sun had just cleared the far mountains of Nevada that morning. In its spreading light she saw that the land had been freshly graded and terraced on the side of the mesa that faced away from town. The property appeared to be completely surrounded by a high electrified chain-link fence. Four trailers stood near the gate to the access road, and several vehicles were parked near them.

  Nickles “slithered snakelike” to a good vantage point and used her binoculars to study the property. There was no evidence of the workings of the old mine, nor did she see any equipment to suggest sampling had begun. As she watched, a man came out of one of the trailers and walked to a shed next to the gate. He called to someone inside, and another man came out and went to the trailer.

  “That’s when I realized they had guards on the land,” she said. “Why did they need to guard it when there wasn’t nothing there? I decided I better find out.”

  She’d also decided the direct approach was best, so she started around to the access road, keeping an eye on what went on at the guard station. “I figured I could wander up there and act real neighborly. Say something like ‘I was just out for a stroll and thought I’d stop in and see what a real mining operation’s all about.’ Only when I got closer I saw that the guy on the gate had a big Magnum on his hip, and a high-powered rifle besides. And—this really gave me a turn—damned if he wasn’t Chinese.”

  When I didn’t react, Nickles glowered impatiently. “You hear what I said? Chinese.”

  I remembered what Ripinsky had told us about Lily’s Yellow Peril theories. In order to preserve the rapport between us, I did my best to look shocked.

  Nickles nodded, as if we shared some special knowledge. “Haven’t been any of those in these parts since they hung the Chinaman back in the eighteen-fifties. When I saw that one, I decided I better rethink things. And while I was busy doing that, a third guy came out of the trailer and went over to the Chink. The Chink took one of the jeeps and drove off— patrolling, I guess. The other guy got out a folding chair and sat down in the sun. When I took a close look, I saw he was a Chink, too. And had a rifle.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “What any sensible person would—got the hell out of there.”

  “I thought you spoke with one of the guards.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Hy Ripinsky.”

  She looked blank for an instant, then bellowed with laughter. “Son of a bitch believed me! I told him I offered to fuck the guy if he would tell me what was going on, and Ripinsky believed me!”

  “Why did you say that?”

  “Because Ripinsky hands me a pain. I kind of like to shock him. Besides, it made for a better story.”

  “And why were you yelling at him when I saw you leave the trailer?”

  Her mouth pulled down and hardened. “Son of a bitch called me a bigot.”

  “Because of what you said about the guard being Chinese?”

  “Uh-huh. Something weird’s going on up there, and for all we know it could be a commie plot. You’d think Ripinsky would worry; he’s been out in the world, he knows how things are. But no, all he says is that I’m talking stupid and that I shouldn’t be calling them Chinks.”

  I was silent for a while, thinking over what she’d told me. Nickles took it as disapproval, said defensively, “I’m not a bigot. I just don’t like Chinks—or Japs or slopes. Indians, now—I can see in your face that you got some Indian blood. I grew up with Indians, think they’re just as good as me.”

  “But you didn’t grow up around Asians.”

  “Shit, no.” But she smiled. Lily Nickles was bright enough to have long ago figured out for herself what I was hinting at. I wondered how much of her racist talk was a put-on, of the same sort she’d pulled on Ripinsky.

  I thought some more about the situation with the land on the mesa and isolated a fact that had been bothering me. “Lily, since Earl Hopwood’s a prospector, why didn’t he mine that acreage he owned on the mesa rather than sell it?”

  “You got to know Earl to understand that. First of all, what he prospects for—when he bothers—are placer deposits, like me. That’s gold that’s been moved away from its source by erosion. But to get at what veins are left up there”—she gestured at the mesa—“you got to do hard-rock mining. Dig, blast, tunnel. Costs more. And it’s damned hard, dangerous work. Earl Hopwood’s lazy as they come.”

  “Okay, I can understand why he didn’t mine it, but why sell it for a price so far below market value?”

  “Sold it cheap, did he? Well, what can I tell you?” She shrugged. “Earl’s stupid. All the brains in that family got used up generations ago. It probably looked like a lot of money to him.”

  “He must have realized—”

  “Earl don’
t realize nothing. I tell you, we’re talking stupid here. That cabin of his? He went and built it on land where there hasn’t ever been so much as a nugget.”

  “Ripinsky said the stream runs through there. Isn’t that where you find placer gold?”

  “Sure, but it runs too fast. You need slow-moving water— where there’s a bend in the streambed, deep pools, gravel bars—for the gold to settle.”

  “Is looking for signs like that what you meant when you talked about ‘reading the stream’?”

  “Partly. It’s simple; any fool can do it. But not Earl Hopwood. Instead he goes and builds his cabin on land he can’t ever claim, much less own.”

  Early that morning I’d read the file Anne-Marie had put together for me on staking claims to mineral rights; one of the requirements was proof of discovery of the mineral within the boundaries of the claim. To purchase land from the federal government under the patenting process, the requirements were even more stringent. Maybe we were talking stupid here; Hopwood certainly hadn’t shown good sense in building his cabin on federal land where at any time the government could insist he demolish the structure.

  Nickles said, “What’s your name—McCone?”

  I nodded.

  “McCone, what do you think is going on up there?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Me neither. But whatever it is, it scares the shit outta me.”

  Five

  Two of the prospectors I tried to locate after I left Nickles weren’t around; a third ran me off with a shotgun. By the time I reached Hopwood’s so-called claim, it was late afternoon and the temperature— thank God—had dropped slightly.

  The claim was at the far end of the valley, in a boulder-clogged box canyon where the stream cascaded over a high granite ledge. I’d had to walk the whole way—better than three miles by my estimation—and was glad I was in even better shape than usual, thanks to the long vigorous walks on the beach George and I had been taking. Still, I was weary and parched, and it was with considerable relief that I spotted Hopwood’s cabin.

  It was fairly substantial, set back from the streambed under a jagged overhang. From the weathered look of the pine and the wavy window glass I guessed that Hopwood had scavenged his building materials from Promiseville. The reinforced plank door was secured by a hasp and padlock, but I went up to it and knocked anyway. After the unsurprising lack of an answer, I checked the windows; like those at Nickles’s house, they were draped in cloth. The cabin—in fact, the entire little canyon—held that hushed stillness that said no one was there, had not been for a while now.

  Before taking a more thorough look around, I went to the stream’s edge and cupped up some of the icy water in my hands to drink; it had a pleasant metallic tang. My thirst slaked, I took off my shoes and socks and dangled my feet in the eddying coolness. I closed my eyes for a bit and listened to the rush of the falls. Thought of the long walk back to my car and sighed.

  What had I found out today? Only that there was a perfectly reasonable explanation for why no one in the town or valley had seen Earl Hopwood for more than two weeks. I’d confirmed that Lily Nickles had never heard of Franklin Tarbeaux, and that the Transpacific people weren’t sampling the ore on their land but were cautious to the point of employing armed guards. Well, what of it? The company was under foreign management who didn’t understand this part of the country. In the locations of most of their other operations guards were probably a routine necessity. My day’s work had told me nothing helpful.

  So why did I have this heightened sense of wrongness?

  Well, for one thing, Nickles had said she was afraid, and she didn’t strike me as a woman who frightened easily—or would normally admit to it. And there were the still-unexplained break-ins at Ripinsky’s home, the trailers, and the lodge. Plus the person who’d spied on me in the tufa forest, the additional break-in last night, the call to All Souls.

  Besides, the sense of wrongness was particularly strong in this little box canyon—too strong for a place whose only resident had simply gone on a gambling-and-womanizing spree in Nevada.

  I don’t believe in the supernatural, but I do believe that sometimes places can absorb the emotions surrounding events that have happened there. A house where people have been happy has a good feel. A place of misery never seems quite right. Crime scenes—especially those of homicides— are the worst of all, filled with an aura of rage and desperation and pain.

  I got up and began looking around. The area behind the cabin, between it and the cliff face, was full of rusted prospecting gear, tools, and cast-off automotive parts. I circled the building, trying the windows, but they were securely locked. I might have been able to justify going inside had one been left open, but in no way did the circumstances warrant an illegal forced entry. Turning away, I covered the surrounding area foot by foot in widening semicircles; then I crossed the stream, stepping from rock to rock, and began to search the opposite bank.

  And smelled something putrid.

  It didn’t take long to pinpoint the source of the smell: behind a pair of man-sized boulders near the cliff face. My stomach lurched as I moved closer, and I thought, Oh, no …

  Reluctantly I made myself step around one of the boulders. And felt a flash of both revulsion and relief at what I saw.

  Earl Hopwood’s garbge dump. Its mounds of refuse looked as if they’d been years in the making, and were compacting and decaying just as slowly. Flies buzzed around them. The stench was bad enough to make me breathe shallowly through my mouth. I started to turn away, sure I couldn’t stomach any further investigation.

  But something caught my eye, a few feet away on top of the rotting mass. It was a jagged piece of wood that looked as if it had once been part of a crate. With a red-lettered word on it, not at all faded by the elements: “Dynamite.”

  Above that was the bottom of another line of letters. “Red Devil,” it looked like. A brand name.

  I glanced around, found a broken broom handle, and used it to pull the piece of crate toward me. It was slimy with some kind of decayed food, so I picked it up gingerly, carried it to the stream, and washed it. I wanted to take it with me as evidence—but of what, I hadn’t a clue.

  Dynamite, I thought. Dynamite was used by hard-rock miners to blast into hillsides. Dynamite was used by high-tech commercial miners like Transpacific.

  It was not used by prospectors for placer gold— prospectors like Lily Nickles and Earl Hopwood.

  So what had Hopwood been doing with an entire case of it?

  I decided to run this one by the Tiger Lily.

  The sun had sunk behind the hills by the time I got back to Promiseville; the derelict buildings were wrapped in purple shadow that made them look like ghosts of a romantic past rather than reminders of an era fraught with hardship and disappointment. The windows of Nickles’s house showed no light, and the Jeep was nowhere in sight.

  I stood on her front porch listening to the silence for a minute, and the feeling of lonesomeness she’d described stole over me. The headstones on the barren knoll across the valley caught the rays of the rising moon, seemed to glow phosphorescently through the encroaching darkness. I thought of Nickles sitting here night after night, looking out at the place where so many dreams were buried and perhaps going a little crazy. Although I was anxious to talk with her, I was glad she’d gotten out of here, if only for a little while.

  Back at my car, I locked the fragment of the dynamite crate in the trunk before I started for Vernon. When I passed Hy Ripinsky’s ranch house, I saw the lights were on and the Morgan parked next to the Land Rover. On impulse, I pulled off the road and knocked on his door.

  Ripinsky answered at once, a book in hand, his tall figure clad in faded jeans, a badly frayed sweater, and scuffed moccasins. He blinked in surprise, but seemed glad to see me.

  The house’s living room was more attractive than its exterior suggested: Woven Indian rugs covered the pegged-pine floor, the sectional sofa and chairs were deeply
cushioned and comfortable looking, on shelves flanking the stone fireplace sat hundreds of colorfully jacketed books, and on the wall above the mantel was a display of antique rifles. Ripinsky offered me a beer and went to fetch it. I crossed to one of the bookcases and studied the titles.

  Justice Rides Alone; Horses, Honor, and Women; Wear a Fast Gun; Hell on the Pecos; Bitter Sage; The Last Days of Horse-Shy Halloran. Westerns, apparently. I picked up a volume that lay horizontally on top of some others: Hopalong Cassidy and the Trail to Seven Pines, by someone called Tex Burns. Leering wickedly, Hoppy crouched over the recumbent figure of a man while Topper gazed on placidly. Hoppy was—so help me!—dressed prettily in lavender. This book, I thought, could easily become a hot collector’s item in San Francisco’s predominantly gay Castro district.

  Ripinsky returned and handed me a Bud. “I see you’re interested in my westerns.”

  “This in particular.” I held up Hopalong.

  He grinned. “Bet you never suspected about old Hoppy. I bought that one strictly for the dust jacket—the book is unreadable. Actually I bought a lot of my collection for the jackets; they were wonderful, particularly on westerns, in the thirties and forties.”

  He spent a few minutes showing me some of the better ones, many by an artist named Nick Eggenhofer. Then he took me to the shelves on the other side of the fireplace and pointed out a book on Eggenhofer’s life and art—appropriately titled Horses, Horses, Always Horses—as well as other reference works on the Old West.

  “I’ve got to confess I haven’t read half the nonfiction,” he said. “I prefer fiction. My wife claimed the little boy in me was trying to make up for never getting to be a gunfighter.”

  But according to local gossip, I thought, he had become a gunfighter of sorts. I wanted to ask him about his rumored connection with the CIA, but his face had grown melancholy after he spoke of his dead wife. This was not the time to question him about personal matters. I sensed there might never be a good time for that.