The first building we came to was on the near side of the fork. It was one of the few occupied ones in the town proper, a combination single-pump gas station, garage and body shop, and general store. The garage and store buildings were weathered and unpainted, but in a decent state of repair; a sign that said Cooperville Mercantile hung over the screen-doored entrance to the latter, and the facing wall was plastered with old metal Coca-Cola and beer signs. Around back, to one side, was a frame cottage with a big native-stone chimney at one end. The folks who lived in the cottage and ran the businesses were the Coleclaws: one husband, one wife, one son.
I pulled in off the road and stopped next to the gas pump. A fat brown-and-white dog came around from behind the store, took one look at the car, and began barking its head off. No one else appeared.
"I'll go see who's here," I said to Kerry. "You wait in the car, okay?"
"Like a nice dutiful little wife?"
Here we go again, I thought. "Come on, babe, you know this is business."
"It wasn't supposed to be business. It wasn't supposed to be Ragged-Ass Gulch either."
"Kerry…"
"Oh, all right. Go on, I'll wait here."
I got out of the car, sighing a little, keeping my eye on the dog. It continued to bark, but it didn't make any sudden moves in my direction. I took the fact that its tail was wagging to be a positive sign and started toward the entrance to the store.
Just before I got there, a pudgy young guy in grease-stained overalls appeared in the doorway of the adjacent garage. "Be quiet, Sam," he said to the dog. He didn't say anything to me, or move out of the doorway. And the dog went right on yapping.
I walked over to where the young guy stood. He was in his middle twenties and he had curly brown hair and pink beardless cheeks and big doe eyes that had a remote look in them. The eyes watched me without curiosity as I came up to him.
"Hi," I said. "You're Gary Coleclaw, right?"
"Yeah," he said.
"I'd like to talk to your father, if he's around."
"He's not. He went into Weaverville this morning for supplies."
"How about your mother? Is she here?"
"No. She went to Weaverville too."
"When will they be back?"
He shrugged. "I dunno. This afternoon sometime."
"Well, maybe you can help me. I'm a detective, from San Francisco, and I-"
"Detective?" he said.
"Yes. I'm investigating the death of Allan Randall, over in Redding-"
"The Munroe guy," he said. His face closed up; you could see it happening, like watching a poppy fold its petals at sundown. "The fire. I don't know nothing about that. Except he got what was coming to him."
"Is that what your father says too?"
"That's what everybody says. Listen, you working for them? Them Munroe guys?"
"No.
"Yeah, you are. Them damn Munroe guys."
He wheeled away from me and hurried back inside the garage. I called after him, "Hey, wait," but he didn't stop or turn. An old Chrysler sat on the floor inside, its front end jacked up; there was one of those little wheeled mechanics' carts alongside, and he dropped down onto it on his back and scooted himself under the Chrysler until only his legs were showing. A moment later I heard the sharp, angry sound of some kind of tool whacking against the undercarriage.
The damned dog was still barking. I sidestepped it and went back to the car. When I slid in under the wheel, Kerry asked, "Well?"
"He wouldn't talk to me. And his folks aren't here."
"What now?"
"The Cooperville fire," I said.
2
I drove out along the road again. Just beyond the fork, two more occupied cottages sat side by side; the nearest one had a deserted look, but in the yard of the second, a heavyset woman in her late sixties or early seventies, wearing man's clothing and a straw hat, was wielding a hoe among tall rows of tomato vines. She stopped when she heard the car and stood staring out at the road as we passed by, as if she resented the appearance of strangers in Cooperville.
Kerry said, "None of the natives is very friendly, the way it looks."
"I didn't expect that they would be," I said.
I took the right fork that led through what was left of the town. It amounted to about two blocks' worth of buildings on both sides of the road, although on either end and back into the meadow you could see foundations and other remains of what had once been more buildings and streets. Most of the structures still standing were backed up against the creek. There were about fifteen altogether, all made of logs and whipsawed boards, some with stone foundations, a third with badly decayed frames and collapsed roofs. The largest, two stories, girdled by a sagging verandah at the second level, looked to have been either a hotel or a saloon with upstairs accommodations; it bore no signs, and as was the case with the others we passed, its doors and windows were boarded up. Except for faded lettering over the entrance to one that said Union Drug Store, it was impossible to tell what sort of establishments any of them had been.
Kerry seemed impressed. "This is some place," she said. "I've never been in a ghost town before."
"Spooky, huh?"
"No. I'm fascinated. How long have these buildings been here?"
"More than a hundred years, some of them."
"And there've been people living here all that time and nobody ever tried to restore any of them?"
"Not in a good long while."
"Well, why not? I mean, you'd think somebody would want to preserve a historic place like this."
"Somebody does," I said. "The Munroe Corporation."
"I don't mean that kind of preservation. You know what I mean."
"Uh-huh. It's a good question, but I don't know the answer."
She frowned a little, thoughtfully. "What kind of people live here, anyway?"
I had no answer for her. Half of the sixteen residents had been born in Cooperville; the other half had gravitated to it because they liked its isolation. It was up near the Oregon border, three hundred miles from San Francisco, and to get to it you had to take an unpaved road that climbed seven miles off State Highway 3. The tourists hadn't discovered it because it was so far off the beaten track. The residents liked that, too. What they seemed to want more than anything else was to be left alone.
The problem was, they weren't being left alone. Most of the land in the area was government protected-the Shasta Trinity National Recreation Area-but the land on which Cooperville sat was owned by Trinity County. A group of developers, the Munroe Corporation, had begun buying it up during the past year, with the intention of turning Cooperville into a place the tourists would discover: widening and paving the access road, restoring the rundown buildings after the fashion of the Mother Lode towns, adding things like a Frontier Town Amusement Park, stables for horseback rides up into the mountains, and a couple of lodges to accommodate vacationers and overnight guests.
The Cooperville residents were up in arms over this. They didn't want to live in a tourist trap and they didn't want to be forced out of their homes by a bunch of outsiders. So they had banded together and hired a law firm to try to block the sale of the land, to get Cooperville named as a state historical site. Lawsuits were still pending against the Munroe Corporation, but everybody figured it was just a matter of time before the bulldozers and workmen moved in and another little piece of history died and was reincarnated as a chunk of modern commercialism.
One of the residents seemed to have been unwilling to accept that fate, however, and had taken matters into his own hands. Four of the town's abandoned buildings had burned to the ground ten days before, including the remains of a "Fandango Hall"-a saloon-and-gambling house-that the developers had been particularly interested in restoring. The Munroe people thought it was a blatant case of arson, and put pressure on the county sheriff's office to investigate; but the law had found no evidence that the fire had been deliberately set, and the official report tabbed it as "of unknown origin."