I poked my head inside.
“Hello?” I called out. “Anyone here?!”
There was no answer but the drumming of the rain on the roof.
I stepped into the darkened cabin and took a dreaded breath. There was no scent of death in the air.
“Anyone home?” I shouted. “Hello!”
Still no reply.
The section of the cabin I was in was a living room area. On the left was a compact kitchen and dining room. I found a light switch, which produced no light, but drawing back the curtain over the sliding-glass door gave me enough light to move without knocking into things.
Which I probably would have done because of the mess.
Tables and chairs overturned; drawers pulled out and dumped of their contents; the floor carpeted with various household items, books, newspaper, and assorted junk as if a small tornado had spun into the house.
Damn, I thought, feeling an adrenaline charge.
I moved to the front of the cabin and found a bedroom in the same disordered state, and another room set up as a studio with an easel smashed in a corner amid the remains of various photographic equipment, canvases — some with the start of something on them, some without — crumpled, torn sketches, and photographs of landscapes, of people, of Carole.
I checked the bathroom and all closets, where I found clothes still hanging, and I checked the pantry, which was well stocked, if turned inside out.
But no Carole.
I headed back out onto the porch, wondering what my next move should be, when I caught some movement — peripherally, back up in the thick woods to my right. When I focused I saw Dirty Hairy sitting on the root base of a large tree, looking at me.
Which is when the wind suddenly calmed around me, and flies began buzzing my head, and I heard the clatter of tiny feet scuttling somewhere to my left.
That’s when I finally noticed the fresh wildflowers placed on the hot tub lid, and I smelled the smell I hated, and knew I’d found her.
And it was she — I knew — as soon as I raised the hot tub lid and saw the body. Enough was left of her face and hair to know, and because her wrists and ankles were taped together, I also knew my friend Carole Dragnich had been murdered.
I felt so suddenly tired I just sat there and watched the storm around me. The shock and lack of sleep the night before had combined to knock me out on my feet, so I just stayed put and watched the world grow dark.
Too tired to move. Too tired to think. Too tired to even grieve. I sat there like a uniformed zombie, doing nothing.
Until Dirty Hairy reappeared.
He wasn’t far away at all — down, just across the creek, semi-hunkering behind a large rock, peering at me, a bunch of wildflowers clutched in his hand.
Which got me off my feet quickly.
“Hey!” I called out to him, coming off the porch. “You!”
He hunkered down further as I trotted down to the creek, but then he stood back up and started running.
“Wait a damn minute!” I shouted.
But he didn’t, so I chased him.
In the rain, in the dark, across the rocky creek bed, then up into the woods.
“Wait, dammit!” I shouted. “Come back here!”
But he ran on, and he was fast and afraid and knew where he was going. After about ten minutes of stumbling around in thickening woods, I couldn’t see him anymore, so I gave it up.
Gave it up and went back to the cabin — soaked to the skin, tired, dirty, and miserable — and finally made the call.
Which brought the police — sheriff’s deputies from Eatonville at first, then state police investigators and a forensics crew, and finally the county sheriff himself, a morose but capable-seeming young man named Stender. I told the story of how I’d found Carole about a half dozen times to most of the officers — the rest of that day, and into the night and morning of the next day.
I told them about Carole’s paintings, told them about Jess Collier and her concerns, told them about Phil Dorin and his bad attitude, told them about Dirty Hairy and the wildflowers. Told them everything — over and over — there at the cabin and later, after poor Carole’s body had been removed, at the sheriff’s station in Eatonville.
Until, in the early hours of the next day, they decided to let me go.
By then, around four A.M., I was past exhaustion. I’d had two hours’ sleep in the past forty-eight, and I was running on fumes; so rather than drive all the way back to Seattle, I chanced driving to Ashford and the Ashford Trading Post.
It wasn’t open, naturally, but a small diner was, so I had breakfast and waited.
I dozed over coffee until six, when I called the number on the card that the woman with the red hair had given me. She answered — thank God — and an hour later rented me a cabin.
Small, one room, but with food in the fridge, and a comfortable bed, where I just managed undressing, before sleep overwhelmed me.
I slept the day through, dreamt of nothing, remembered waking up around two A.M. the next morning. I was stiff, sore, hungry enough to eat my shoes, and feeling like death, but after a long hot shower, a few aspirins, some coffee and muffins, I felt human again.
Moving myself and more coffee out onto the back porch, I passed a couple hours sitting on a ratty canvas chair, watching the black mountain above me, framed by a blacker sky, lord it over the world.
And I grieved, finally, at the loss of a friend.
Until dawn, when I realized I wasn’t done catching up on sleep. Despairing of getting my routine to normal any time soon, I went back to bed and slept less soundly this time, with cold-sweat dreams of high places and falling — until my cell phone rang at noon.
It was Sheriff Stender. He said, “Town prosecutor wants to take your deposition tomorrow. Can you be in town?”
Rubbing my face awake, I told him I would be, then asked, “Have you located Dirty Hairy yet?”
“Not yet,” he admitted, “but we got a small army out shagging the eastern foothills.”
“Have you identified him?”
“Oh, sure,” he said. “Name’s actually McGowan — John McGowan — and he’s got a minor record.”
“Oh?”
“Vagrancy, trespass, attempted burglary — no crimes against persons, though. He’s lived up in those woods for years.”
“I see,” I said, first sitting up, then getting up and moving out onto the porch. “Have you spoken with Dorin?”
“Yesterday afternoon, and he’s made a statement.”
“And?”
“Said he didn’t kill her.”
“Really.”
“Well, he has a fair alibi,” he told me. “Date of your friend’s death has been more or less fixed as September fifteenth. There was a newspaper found with her blood on it in the cabin. Later issues were still wrapped and out by the front door.”
“I saw them.”
“Newspaper boy quit delivering after a week, and according to the ME, the condition of the body is consistent with that date of death.”
“So what’s Dorin’s alibi?” I asked, not following him.
“Dorin was arrested for drunk driving by Eatonville sheriff’s men on the fourteenth — a Friday. Drunk driving, resisting arrest — he was jailed and didn’t make bail until Monday, the seventeenth.”
“That’s not ironclad,” I pointed out. “She still might have been killed after that.”
“That’s true.”
“And what did he say about those paintings?”
“Same as he told you,” Stender said. “His ex-wife gave him the paintings as payment for his share of the cabin that he co-owned with her.”
“So he knew where she was all along.”
“He did,” he agreed. “We’re not ruling him out, Mr. Virginiak, he’s got a record for assault against women, and the victim herself made several complaints in the past...”