Night Relics (7 page)

Klein nodded at the phone, peering out at the hills again. “Well,” he said, “I’ll tell you what. I’ve got the particulars
if you’re interested. That’s right. Vacation home out here in the canyon, party name of Monroe. They’ve got a year-round home
in Southgate.”

Klein loved the view from the backyard, especially on a clear, windy day. The Japanese had the idea that you should build
your house so that you couldn’t see the view, so that you had to go looking for it. You wouldn’t lose your appreciation of
it that way. Sometimes the Japanese were purely full of crap.

Klein had cut, filled, surveyed, and built on the hills a hundred times in his head. It was a sort of mental exercise—creative
thinking. Up behind the house there was a gradual slope for something like two hundred yards. Put in quarter-acre lots, ranch-style
homes done right—plank floors, rock fireplaces, plenty of wood-frame windows. Nothing fake.

Call it “The Woods” or “Country Acres.” Put out a couple of billboards along the Santa Ana Freeway—a painting of oak trees,
the sun coming up, a creek, green grass, maybe a family of people hand in hand, watching the sunrise. Never mind that in ten
years there wouldn’t be any “country” left out here except for a few strips of what was sometimes called “green belt” by the
used car salesmen who passed for city planners.

But then you didn’t sell people with the truth. Not with that kind of truth, anyway. There was a bigger truth that had to
do with inevitability. The best you could do was give people something for their money. They were on their way right now,
those people were, getting out of the goddamn
city, trying to find a little bit of breathable air. That’s what the guy with the bumper sticker didn’t get. You couldn’t
leave the canyons to the lions, not forever.

Prices were skyrocketing out in the foothills. A couple of years ago you could buy up a lot with a house on it for sixty thousand
bucks. A hundred thousand would buy you a buildable acre. But those days were gone forever, and any serious real estate considerations,
even out on the fringes of the county, were strictly for high rollers.

There was a lot of federally owned land in the county, though. The Cleveland National Forest stretched across most of the
Santa Ana Mountains, and swallowed all of upper Trabuco Canyon. Most of it was wilderness. A dirt road ran back into the canyon,
open to traffic for five miles or so. Some forty cabins were hidden back up in there, in Trabuco itself and in Holy Jim Canyon,
which branched off and ran up toward Santiago Peak.

Right now you could buy one of those cabins for pocket change. The same cabin in Modjeska, or in the little town of Trabuco
Oaks, could set you back a couple hundred thousand. What accounted for that was partly that you couldn’t
buy
the land out in the canyon. You got it for twenty years, and then had to renew the lease. Built into the lease was what the
Forest Service called a “higher use” clause, which meant that the fed could buy you out at market value if they wanted to
put the land to some other purpose—like a park.

Also, there was no electricity or phone out there. Water was sketchy, especially in drought years. What was worst was the
bone-wrenching dirt road, full of potholes, that ran up into the canyon. Nobody went back in there casually. Klein would bet
money that there wasn’t one person out of a hundred in the county that even knew the place existed. Probably one in a thousand.

But it wouldn’t take much to change that. Pave the road, say, and run a wire back in there, and suddenly, very damned suddenly,
you could put your pocket change away.

In fact, Klein’s canyon enterprise operated on the brink of outright fraud. He wouldn’t have used that word in the company
of any of the consortium of investors and front men that he’d managed to peg together over the past months, but he had never
been one to fool himself.

Just as soon as the county announced its intention of turning upper Trabuco Canyon into a wildlife park, something was going
to happen to the value of the cabins back in there—something big. There were two ways it could go. The county could upgrade
the road and run power into the area, and the value of all those fifteen-thousand-dollar hovels would increase tenfold overnight,
literally. Or else the Forest Service would implement the “higher use” clause and eminent-domain the places, paying the owners
off at market value.

Klein was betting on the second scenario. There were only the forty cabins back in there, in Holy Jim and Trabuco canyons
combined—pocket money for the government no matter what happened to market value.

Somebody was going to make a piece of change, and the taxpayer was going to take it on the chin.

So far, Klein and his “consortium,” as he liked to call them, had made offers on twelve cabins and had actually picked up
six of them. It was Pomeroy’s job to hunt for more, and then, when he found a possible sale, Klein passed the name on to someone
willing to front for the consortium for a flat fee. You were prohibited by law from holding more than one lease, and that’s
why he needed the fronts— there were only a handful of investors altogether, looking to pick up something like twenty properties.
Anyway, the consortium would ante up the money to buy each cabin and pay the front a flat fee to hold the lease.

Most of the longtime canyon residents had picked the places up years ago for six or eight or ten thousand bucks. If you offered
them twice that they crumpled. Once you transferred the leases and picked up bills of sale, you sold the places back and forth
among yourselves and drove the
prices through the roof. In the end you’d divvy up, with a brokerage fee for Klein on top of his share.

If you were quick and clean and smart, you’d all walk away happy when the government bought you out. If you weren’t, then
the government would smell something— fraud, to be exact.

I
T WAS NEARLY NOON WHEN
P
ETER PARKED THE
S
UBURBAN
in the lot behind the city of Orange civic center buildings. Wishing he was anyplace else than where he was, he walked
around to the front sidewalk, past a tile-and-concrete fountain that had four painted steel egrets standing on top of it,
spitting water into the air. The water blew away in the wind, out onto the lawn and walkway. A half dozen sycamore leaves
floated like boats on the fountain pool.

He had seen the fountain a thousand times, driving and walking along Chapman Avenue, but it looked strangely alien to him
now. Abruptly he felt the urge to run—not in order to hide, but just to run, for the sheer sake of running, to make his legs
work, to justify his heart. He found himself at the door of the police station without having run anywhere. His reflection
in the glass looked back at him like a windblown ghost.

There was no one visible inside, no activity at all. A line of empty chairs sat along the windows to his left. Straight ahead
was a long, silent hallway, and to his right lay a glassed-in reception office containing three cluttered desks
empty of people. Maybe nobody got into trouble on Saturday morning. He ran a pocket comb through his hair and straightened
his collar. There was no use looking the way he felt.

A woman appeared from a back room just then, carrying a cup of coffee into the reception office. He stepped to the window
and said hello. She smiled at him, looking efficient and friendly, but her face changed when he explained what he wanted,
as if she could read something in his voice and eyes. “If you could have a seat for a moment, Mr. Travers,” she said, nodding
toward the chairs by the window. At that, she turned around and went out again.

He sat down, although he didn’t want to. Full of nervous energy, he was nearly compelled to get up again, to walk up and down
the hallway or back and forth across the carpet, as if any movement at all would hasten him toward an answer. Eventually a
man in a gray sport coat stepped into the reception cubicle. He patted his coat pocket and then paused for a moment to pull
a pen out of a desktop penholder, looking out at Peter as if sizing him up before stepping out through the door. He carried
a clipboard with several sheets of paper attached to it.

“Detective Slater,” he said, introducing himself. “Ray Slater.”

“Peter Travers,” Peter said back to him.

“What seems to be the problem, then, Mr. Travers? How do you spell that? T-R-A-V-E-R-S?” the detective asked. The pen scratched
across the paper on the clipboard. He sounded a little tired.

“That’s right. My wife and child are missing. My ex-wife. We’re separated.”

“Their names?”

Peter reeled off their names and ages. He handed the detective a pair of photographs he’d brought along from Amanda’s house
as well as an inked set of David’s fingerprints taken a couple of years ago during some sort of school safety program. After
looking the photos over, the
cop slid them under the papers on the clipboard, snapping the clip down across them.

“Missing since when?”

“A week ago,” Peter said.

“A week?” He looked up now, a puzzled expression on his face, as if he must have heard something incorrectly. “Come with me,”
he said then, turning around and walking away up the corridor. He pushed open the door of a small room, furnished with a couple
of upholstered office chairs and a desk. He gestured at one of the chairs, and Peter sat down. “Cup of coffee?”

“No, thanks,” Peter said. This was the part that Peter didn’t relish—admitting that Amanda and David had vanished last Sunday
but that Peter was only now getting around to telling anyone. Either it would make him look guilty as hell or incredibly stupid.
“As I said,” Peter started in, “we’re separated, and it was only this morning that I stopped by her house and found out that
she and David were missing.”

The detective nodded, tilting his own chair back, listening to Peter as if he were a psychologist and not a cop. Peter rolled
the story out carefully, trying to make the whole thing sound a little less lame than it was. He left nothing out, though—the
argument, Peggy, the airline tickets and traveler’s checks, the Honda still in the garage. He avoided any talk about premonitions
and hallucinations.

Partway through, the detective abruptly sat up straight, looking as if he had just then remembered something, or as if Peter,
finally, had said something that made a difference. Peter stopped talking.

“You live out in Trabuco Canyon?” the cop asked.

Peter nodded.

“Where? You mean Trabuco Oaks? Coto de Caza?”

“No, out in the canyon itself—Alder Springs area. Above the lower campground. Cabin with a Forest Service lease.”

“Where do you work?”

Peter hesitated. The seeming irrelevancy of the question forced him to stop in order to process it. “Sycamore College,” he
said. “I’m a teacher. Architectural drafting.”

“You were at school last week, Tuesday, say?”

“No. In fact I’m off right now. Lot of work to do on my house. I’m on half-pay leave until February.”

“So where were you the first of last week, then? Down at the lumber yard?” The cop stared at him, waiting for him to say something
good.

Surprised, Peter gaped back at him. He hadn’t said anything yet about having gone to Santa Barbara to visit his brother. It
had seemed irrelevant to him. “I was gone for a couple of days. Up north. Let’s see … Monday through Wednesday. I stayed with
my brother. He can—”

“I believe you,” Detective Slater said, holding up his hand. “I don’t want to talk to your brother. Wait here.” He didn’t
sound irritated or suspicious, but he didn’t look tired anymore, either. If anything, his voice held a note of compassion
now, and the tone of it filled Peter with instant dread.

The detective stood up and pushed out through the door, taking his clipboard and pen with him, leaving the door open. Peter
was suddenly nauseated. His fears and premonitions were like ghosts slowly growing visible in a night-darkened room. He closed
his eyes and waited, wondering what the news would be, trying to anticipate it, to make himself ready.

The weight of the long morning oppressed the air of the room. The seconds ticked by. He nearly stood up in order to pace around
the small room, but instead he forced himself to look out the window. Across the street people walked in and out of the savings
and loan, going about their simple business. The bushes in the flower beds blew fitfully in the wind. A hook-and-ladder pulled
out of the fire department garage, turning on its siren and swinging around onto Chapman Avenue, followed by a paramedics
truck.

Detective Slater walked back in and sat down. “Change
your mind on that coffee?” he asked.

“No,” Peter said. “Thanks.”

After shuffling through the few papers on the clipboard, the detective scanned a sentence or two. “Trabuco Canyon is out in
county territory,” he said, looking up, straight into Peter’s eyes. He spoke slowly, seeming to choose his words carefully.
“So we don’t have any jurisdiction out there. A lot of it lies inside the Cleveland National Forest, where your house evidently
is. Still, it’s the county sheriff that covers that area. If they find anything back there that might concern us, the sheriff’s
department sends out a notice.” He paused, as if to establish that Peter was taking all of this in.

“What did they find?”

“Nothing, really. Keep that in mind. What we’ve got is this. A hiker claimed to have seen two bodies out there.” He looked
at his clipboard, either reading or else pretending to read in order to give Peter time to wrestle with what he was saying.
“This was back in a place called Falls Canyon.”

“Right near my house,” Peter said, nearly unable to breathe.

The detective nodded. “It was night. This hiker was back in there with the idea of sleeping somewhere. I gather he was some
kind of transient. He claims to have heard a scream right as he came around in sight of the falls, and there were the bodies,
maybe thirty feet away. He was alone, and apparently it scared the hell out of him, and he hiked back out to the road and
all the way down to the ranger station at O’Neill Park to report it. One of the rangers called the sheriff and then beat it
back out there. When they got back into Falls Canyon, the bodies were gone. They just weren’t there anymore.”