Sleuths (24 page)

So where had he gone? If he was hiding somewhere in the rushes I couldn't tell the location by looking from here, or even where he had gone into them; tule grass is pretty resilient and tends to spring back up even after a man plows through it. He could also have gone to the eastern end, beyond the high ground in the middle. The one thing I was sure of was that he was still on the islet: I could see out into the wide channels on the north and south sides, and if he had gone swimming again he would have been visible.

I pulled up the collar on my pea jacket and headed into the rushes on a zigzag course, calling out as I went, offering help if he needed it. Nobody answered me. And there was no sign of any red hair as I worked my way along. After a time I stopped, and when I scanned upward toward the higher ground I saw that I was within thirty yards of the line of blackberry bushes.

I also saw a man come hurrying up onto the hump from the opposite side, between the two willow trees.

He saw me, too, and halted abruptly, and we stood staring at each other across the windswept terrain. But he wasn't the red-haired guy. He was dark-looking, heavier, and he wore Levi's, a plaid mackinaw and a gray fisherman's hat decorated with bright-colored flies. In one hand, held in a vertical position, was a thick-butted fishing rod.

"Hello up there!" I called to him, but he didn't give me any response. Just stood poised, peering down at me like a wary animal scenting for danger. Which left the first move up to me. I took my hands out of my coat pockets and slow-walked toward him over the marshy earth. He stayed where he was, not moving except to slant the fishing rod across the front of his body, weapon like. When I got past the blackberry bushes I was ten feet from him, on the firmer ground of the hump; I decided that was far enough and stopped there.

We did some more looking at each other. He was about my age, early fifties, with a craggy outdoorsman's face and eyes the color of butterscotch. There was no anxiety in his expression, nor any hostility either; it was just the set, waiting look of a man on his guard.

Past him I could see the rest of the islet—another sixty yards or so of flattish terrain dominated by shrubs and tules, with a mistletoe-festooned pepper tree off to the left and a narrow rock shelf at the far end. Tied up alongside the shelf was what looked to be a fourteen-foot outboard similar to my rented skiff, except that it sported a gleaming green-and-white paint job. There was nothing else to see along there, or in the choppy expanses of water surrounding us.

Pretty soon the craggy guy said, "Who are you?"

"Just another fisherman," I said, which was more relevant and less provocative than telling him I was a private investigator from San Francisco. "Have you been here long?"

"A little while. Why?"

"Alone?"

"That's right. But I heard you shouting to somebody."

"Nobody I know," I said. "A red-haired man I saw drag himself out of the slough a few minutes ago."

He stared at me. "What?"

"Sounds funny, I know, but it's the truth. He was fully dressed and he looked hurt; he disappeared into the tules. I put my boat in and I've been hunting around for him, but no luck so far. You haven't seen him, I take it?"

"No," the craggy guy said. "I haven't seen anybody since I put in after crayfish an hour ago." He paused. "You say this red-haired man was hurt?"

"Seemed that way, yes."

"Bad?"

"Maybe. He looked dazed."

"You think he could have had a boating accident?"

"Could be. But he also seemed scared."

"Scared? Of what?"

"No idea. You heard me shouting, so he must have heard me, too; but he still hasn't shown himself. That might mean he's hiding because he's afraid to be found."

"Might mean something else, too," the craggy guy said. "He could have gone back into the water and swum across to one of the other islands."

"I don't think so. I would have seen him if he'd done that anywhere off this side; and I guess you'd have seen him if he'd
done it anywhere off the other side."

"He could also be dead by now if he was hurt as bad as you seem to think."

"That's a possibility," I said. "Or maybe just unconscious. How about helping me look for him so we can find out?"

The craggy guy hesitated. He was still wary, the way a lot of people are of strangers these days—as if he were not quite
convinced I was telling him a straight story and thinking that maybe I had designs on his money or his life .But after a time he said, "All right; if there's a man hurt around here, he'll need all the help he can get. Where did you see him come out of the water?"

I turned a little and pointed behind me. "Back there. You can see part of my boat; that's about where it was."

"So if he's still on the island, he's somewhere between here and your boat."

"Seems that way," I said. "Unless he managed to slip over where you were without your seeing him."

"I doubt that. I've got pretty sharp eyes."

"Sure." I thought I might as well introduce myself; maybe that would reassure him. So I gave my name, with a by-the-way after it, and waited while he made up his mind whether or not he wanted to reciprocate.

"Jackson," he said finally. "Herb Jackson."

"Nice to know you, Mr. Jackson. How about if we each take one side and work back toward my skiff?"

He said that was okay with him and we fanned out away from each other, me into the vegetation on the south side. We
each used a switch-backing course from the center out to the edges, where the ground was boggy and the footing a little treacherous. Both of us kept silent, but all you could hear were the keening of the wind and the whispery rustle of the tules as I spread through them with my hands and Jackson probed through them with his fishing rod. I caught him looking over at me a couple of times as if he wanted to make sure I intended to stay on my half of the turf.

Neither of us found anything. The only things hidden among
the rushes were occasional rocks and chunks of decaying driftwood; and there was no way anybody could have concealed himself in the sparse offshore grasses. You're always hearing about how people submerge in shallow water and breathe through a hollow reed, and maybe that's a possibility in places like Florida and Louisiana, but not in California. Tule grass isn't hollow and you can't breathe through its stalks; you'd swallow water and probably drown if you tried it.

It took us ten minutes to make our way back and down to where my rented boat was. I got there first, and when Jackson came up he halted a good eight feet away and looked down at the empty beach, into the empty skiff, across the empty slough at the empty levee on the far side. Then he put his butterscotch eyes on me.

I said, "He's got to be over where you were somewhere. We've gone over all the ground on this end."

"If he's on the island at all," Jackson said.

"Well, he's got to be." A thought occurred to me. "The outboard on your boat—do you start it with an ignition key or by hand?"

"Key. Why?"

"Did you leave it in the ignition or have you got it with you?"

"In my pocket," he said. "What're you thinking? That he might try to steal my boat?"

"It could happen. But it wouldn't do him much good without power. Unless you keep oars for an emergency."

"No oars." Jackson looked a little worried now, as though he might be imagining his boat adrift and in the hands of a mysterious redheaded stranger. "Damn it, you could be right."

He set off at a soggy run, bulling his way through the rushes and shrubs, slashing at them with whip-like sweeps of the rod. I went after him, off to one side and at a slower pace. He reached the blackberry bushes, cut past them onto the hump and pulled up near the drooping fan of branches on one willow. Then I saw him relax and take a couple of deep breaths; he turned to wait for me.

When I got up there I could see that his boat was still tied
alongside the empty rock shelf. The channels beyond were a couple hundred yards wide at the narrowest point; you could swim that distance easily enough in fifteen minutes—but not on a day like this, with that wind whipping up the water to a froth, and not when you were hurt and so unsteady on your feet you couldn't walk without stumbling.

"So he's still on the island," I said to Jackson. "It shouldn't take us long to find him now."

He had nothing to say to that; he just turned toward the willow, spread the branches, looked in among them and at the ones higher up. I went over and did the same thing at the second tree. The red-haired man was not hiding in either of them —and he wasn't hiding among the blackberry bushes or anywhere else on or near the hump.

We started down toward Jackson's boat, one on each side as before. Rocks, more pieces of driftwood, a rusted coffee can, the carcass of some sort of large bird—nothing else. The pepper tree was on my side, and I paused at the bole and peered up through pungent leaves and thick clusters of mistletoe. Nothing. The shoreline on this end was rockier, with shrubs and nettles growing along it instead of tule grass; but there was nobody concealed there, not on my half and not on Jackson's.

Where is he? I thought. He couldn't have just disappeared into thin air. Where is he?

The eerie feeling came back over me as I neared the rock shelf; in spite of myself I thought again of O'Farrell; the murdered Gold Rush miner, and his ghost that was supposed to haunt Dead Man's Slough. I shook the thought away, but I didn't feel any better after I had.

I reached the shelf before Jackson and stopped abaft the boat. She was a sleek little lady, not more than a year old, with bright chrome fittings to go with the green-and-white paint job; the outboard was a thirty-five-horsepower Evinrude. In the stem, I saw then, was a tackle box, a wicker creel, an Olympic spincast outfit and a nifty Shakespeare graphite-and-fiberglass rod. A heavy sheepskin jacket was draped over the back of the naugahyde seat.

When I heard Jackson come up near me a few seconds later I pivoted around to face him. He said, "I don't like this at all." Neither did I, not one bit. "Yeah," I said.

He gave me a narrow look. He had that rod slanted across the front of his body again. "You sure you're not just playing games with me, mister?"

"Why would I want to play games with you?"

"I don't know. All I know is we've been over the entire island without finding this redhead of yours. There's nothing here except tule grass and shrubs and three trees; we couldn't have overlooked anything as big as a man."

"I guess not," I said.

"Then where is he—if he exists at all?"

"Dead, maybe."

"Dead?"

"He's not on the island; that means he had to have tried swimming across one of the channels. But you or I would've seen him at some point if he'd got halfway across any of them."

"You think he drowned?"

"I'm afraid so," I said. "He was hurt and probably weak—and that water is turbulent and ice-cold. Unless he was an exceptionally strong swimmer and in the best possible shape, he couldn't have lasted long."

Jackson thought that over, rubbing fingertips along his craggy jaw. "You might be right, at that," he said. "So what do we do now?"

"There's not much we can do. One of us should notify the county sheriff, but that's about all. The body'll turn up sooner or later."

"Sure," Jackson said. "Tell you what: I'll call the sheriff from the camp in Hogback Slough; I'm heading in there right away."

"Would you do that?"

"Be glad to. No problem."

"Well, thanks. He can reach me on Whiskey Island if he wants to talk to me about it."

"I'll tell him that."

He nodded to me, lowered the rod a little, then moved past
me to the boat. I retreated a dozen yards over the rocky ground, watching him as he untied the bowline from a shrub and climbed in under the wheel. Thirty seconds later, when I was halfway up to the willow trees, the outboard made a guttural rumbling noise and its propeller blades began churning the water. Jackson maneuvered backward away from the shelf, waved as he shifted into a forward gear and opened the throttle wide; the boat got away in a hurry, bow lifting under the surge of power. From up on the hump I watched it dwindle as he cut down the center of the southern channel toward the entrance to Hogback Slough.