The Body in Bodega Bay (17 page)

Our first stop, the crime scene, was easy to locate. There was a ditch behind a stand of Monterey cypresses on the dune side of the road about midway between the Spud Point Marina and the entrance to the Bodega Marine Laboratory's dorms. The sheriff's department had cordoned off the site with yellow crime-scene tape clearly marked “Do not cross.” Within the taped area, the long grass of the ditch had been matted by trampling feet. Looking out to the harbor, I saw the marooned sailboat still tilted on its side. It was in our direct line of sight. According to Dan, the murder had taken place here, and then the killer had rowed Charlie's body out to the boat. Yes, it could have happened that way. The rowboat was gone now. Out on the mudflats, a lonely heron stood on one leg and eyed us impassively.

Toby hunched his shoulders. “I guess Dan's squad went over this ground with a fine-tooth comb. I don't see anything here, do you?”

I didn't. The lab tests might have revealed bloodstains, or fibers or what-not, but nothing of interest was visible now.

“Let's look for traces of the movie set,” Angie suggested.

“Or anything that might tell us there was once a house nearby,” I added. “A foundation, maybe, or a fireplace or something.”

We spread out and meandered up and down the road, along the fringe of land at the water's edge, and back from the shoreline into the dunes. But there was no sign of any remains of a house. “Colleen said she thought the place was near a group of cypress trees,” I said. I was standing in front of some.

“The trouble is,” said Toby, “from where we're standing, there are groups of cypresses all up and down this road a half mile in either direction, so that's not much help. They all look the same. Anyhow, I think we're too close to town here. Let's go out toward the head a little farther.”

We walked on well past the driveway to the marine lab housing, stopping at every promising clump of cypresses, rummaging through the grass and scuffing along the sandy ground, but if there had ever been a movie set here, its traces were long gone. “We'll never get anywhere this way,” I grumbled.

Toby was frustrated too. “And even if we did locate the spot where the house once stood, what exactly are we looking for?”

“That's just it, I don't know. It's only a hunch. We know Charlie bought the icon. We know he also bought some storyboards depicting the set for the Brenner house. I'm looking for a thread, a tie-in to the case, but this could be a wild goose chase.”

“Don't give up so easily,” Angie said. “Why don't we rent the movie and see whether we can figure out where they built the set? You know, use the film as a guide. The house may be gone, but the land is still the same.”

“That's not a bad idea,” said Toby. “It might help. Besides, I haven't seen
The Birds
since I was a kid.” My thoughts exactly.

When we got back home, I started dinner while Toby went out to get the DVD. The Surf Shop in the Pelican Plaza has several racks of DVD rentals. Given Bodega Bay's link to cinematic history, they were sure to carry a copy of the Hitchcock classic.

Dan called while Toby was gone. “I hear that your sister is pretty good at golf,” he began. Colleen had given him a full report on our game. We exchanged a few more words of banter. I hesitated reporting that I'd spent the afternoon searching fruitlessly for a movie set. After all, what real new information did I have besides a hunch that there was some connection between Rose Gaffney's place and Charlie's murder? I had no evidence there actually
was
a connection, so I held back.

Meanwhile, Dan had news about the crash. “Looks like you were right about who the driver was. The corpse we recovered from the vehicle was badly burned. But get this—he was a big man and he had a gold front tooth. But that's not all. There was a briefcase in the car that was thrown clear of the fire. We've got a Russian passport, so we've got a name, and some other stuff. I'll know more about him when I hear back from Interpol, I hope tomorrow. His name was Ivan Mikovitch. He's been in the country for about a month.”

“Do you think he's the one who killed Charlie?” I asked.

“It's too soon to say.”

“But I'm right that he was stalking us.”

“Looks like it. I do think he was following you. He's involved in this one way or another. I think he broke into Toby's gallery and searched it, then did the same with your house, and then, when he didn't find what he was looking for, he tailed you up to Fort Ross and back.”

“But why try to run us off the road? If he was hoping we'd lead him to the icon, it doesn't make sense that he'd want us dead before he found it.”

“Maybe he wasn't trying to kill you. Look, the fog was bad, he didn't want to lose you, he was following too close. Then, bam! He hits the cow. All I'm saying is what looked like an accident may have been an accident. Give me another day or two and I'll know more.” Dan promised to call again when he had solid information. He reminded me that Charlie's funeral was tomorrow and confirmed where it would be held. Meanwhile, his advice for us was to try to take our minds off the accident.

O
ver dinner I relayed Dan's report, and Toby thought it made sense. In any case, watching a film tonight with my husband and sister would be a good distraction. While Angie and I did the dishes, Toby popped the disk into the player and cued the DVD. A short time later, we were sprawled on the L-shaped sofa in our living room, settling in for the show. I even made popcorn.

“Look, there's Hitchcock,” Toby pointed out in one of the early scenes in the film when Tippi Hedren, who plays Melanie, goes into a bird shop in San Francisco. “He always gave himself a walk-on. That was his trademark.” Sure enough, we spotted the portly director coming out of the shop, leading a couple of dogs on a leash. In the film's setup, Melanie meets Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) inside, where he's shopping for a pair of lovebirds as a birthday gift for his kid sister. In a variation of the boy-pursues-girl scenario, Melanie decides to follow Mitch up to Bodega Bay, where his mother and sister live, and to deliver the birds as a surprise. A nice touch, I thought. The only innocent birds in the movie are the caged lovebirds, since all the free birds turn vicious and attack the town.

When she gets to Bodega Bay, Melanie asks the postmaster where she can find the Brenner house. He sends her to the dock at The Tides Restaurant and points straight out across the bay. It's near those “two big trees,” he says. Toby paused, reversed, and played the scene again. The postmaster was pointing in the direction of where we had searched that afternoon.

Melanie hires a small boat with an outboard motor and chugs across the harbor (dolled up in a fur coat, for some reason). As she approaches the opposite shore, we get our first good look at the Brenner house, which is close to the water, nestled behind a stand of cypress trees. There's a white fence surrounding the property, which contains several outbuildings, including a red barn. The house backs up against the dunes, and there's a little dock in front of it, where Melanie ties up the boat.

How familiar it looked. Yes, we must have passed the spot this afternoon, but where exactly was it? House, fence, barn, dock, were gone, of course; only the trees remained—but which trees? As Toby had noted, there were multiple stands of trees all along the road, a road that hadn't been there at the time of the filming, and several places where trees stood near the dunes.

The next important scene for our purposes was the birthday party for Cathy (Mitch's little sister). Mitch and Melanie climb one of the dunes and look down at the house from above, watching the kids playing under a grape arbor in the yard. There's a split-second vista looking back toward the marina, and then, as the camera pans, a glimpse of the mudflats in front of the house at what must have been low tide. Toby paused, reversed, and froze the shot. The view was tantalizing but inconclusive. We couldn't match it with any place we'd been in the afternoon.

The children's party is interrupted by a bird attack, and from this point, the pace and violence pick up. The children are attacked at school, and Annie, the schoolteacher, is killed. There's an explosion at a gas pump outside the restaurant, a neighboring farmer has his eyes pecked out, the birds continue to go berserk, and Melanie and the family hole up inside the Brenner house. But the remaining scenes are shot inside, which provides no clues as to the site. The climax occurs when Melanie decides to investigate some sounds coming from the attic. She goes up alone (was she crazy?) and is badly bloodied by the avian zombies. The final frame was probably a shot done in the studio against a painted backdrop. It shows dawn breaking as the survivors drive off surrounded by thousands of perched and gathering birds, massing for the next attack.

By the end of the film, we were no closer to pinpointing a location for the house than we were at the beginning. I enjoyed seeing the movie again, though. Some of the special effects looked cheesy compared to today's computer-generated images, and a few of the birds looked fake. Even so, fifty years later, the film stirred primal fears.

T
hat night I had a disturbing dream. It wasn't about being attacked by birds; it was about Charlie. I was standing in a grassy clearing ringed by a circle of low cypress trees. It was getting dark. Rain was threatening. Out of the trees, something gray and low to the ground started coming toward me. At first I thought it was a wolf. But as it got closer, I saw that it was a human head carved out of stone, like the head of a statue that had fallen off—and it was moving under its own power. It was upright and tipping from side to side, walking, except it had no trunk or legs. It was Charlie, or rather, it had Charlie's face. It advanced to the center of the clearing and then rocked back and forth. When it stopped, the face was looking straight at me. It seemed to be trying to tell me something, but its stone lips couldn't move. Suddenly the gray eyes came to life. They gazed into mine and then looked to the ground.

Then I woke up.

L
EAVE IT TO TOBY
to have a rational explanation for everything. It sometimes bothers me that there's so little room in his makeup for the mysterious side of life. In this instance, though, he probably was right.

“You're going to the cemetery today for Charlie's funeral. The grave will have a headstone. Get it? That's your unconscious dreaming self at work. Head. Stone. You're upset that he's really dead. So am I.” Toby spooned out a helping of scrambled eggs and poured another cup of coffee.

Yes, that was it. I was steeling myself for Charlie's funeral.

“And the bit about the headstone walking upright, tipping from side to side? Remember the documentary we saw on
Nova
a few weeks ago about Easter Island? They tested a theory about how those giant stone heads could have been transported from one side of the island to the other.”

I did remember. An archaeologist had a theory that teams of men could have moved the statues by beveling the bottoms and attaching ropes to either side. As each team pulled in turn, the big stone moved along in an upright position, tipping from side to side, like an awkward giant walking.

“There you have it,” Toby concluded. “And the trees? Well, that's from last night watching the movie and trying to figure out where the house was. Charlie was trying to tell you something, but he couldn't.”

It made sense to me, but my mood stayed gloomy. I wasn't going to feel better till the funeral was over. I poured a second cup of coffee. Angie was still asleep. I'd promised to take her out to lunch and shopping when we got back from the service.

Bad funerals are dull and painful. Good ones are original and cathartic. Charlie's friends saw to it that he got a good one. Annie arranged to have the gathering at the Guerneville Tavern, where many of Charlie's friendships had been made and nurtured. She was serving coffee at the bar. The closed casket was right in the front window. From nine to nine-thirty, people poured in the door, paused before Charlie's coffin, and shook hands in the short receiving line—Charlie's brother, Jim Halloran, and his wife, and beside them, Tom Keogh. Tom was standing up as the bereaved partner, in spite of the rift before Charlie's death.

Among the crowd, I recognized the two friends who had been sitting with Tom at the bar at River's End, as well as the owners of art and antiques galleries all around the Russian River Valley. Our friends Ken and Gloria were among them. Some of the staff from River's End were there, along with workers from the Cape Fear Café and the Applewood Inn. The majority were men I didn't know, chatting together in friendly knots. I spotted Dan Ellis in the back of the room. He waved, and I walked over.

“Interesting to see who's here,” he observed. “For instance, see that guy over there in the suit? That's Arnold Kohler.”