The Deepest Water (4 page)

Traffic was slowing now as they climbed into the mountains. There were no more villages, nothing but the road with all-too-rare passing lanes and the mountains from now on. Somewhere up ahead, she knew, there would be a camper laboring up the road, with a line of impatient drivers crawling after it, darting out to pass whenever they thought they could chance it. Caldwell seemed content with the slow going, she thought with relief. Jud had always been a patient driver, too.

The mountains were beautiful at this time of year; sumac, vine maples, poison oak all blazed scarlet, and the cottonwoods were golden against the perpetual dark green of the fir forests with their deep shadows. There had been enough rain that the fire hazard was not high this year, but not enough rain and wind to denude the trees early. Not enough soaking rain to bring up the mushrooms.

Remembering again. Jud had shaken her arm to wake her up early one morning. “Time to go hunting, princess,” he said.

She had been sleepy and fearful. Hunting? They had been at the cabin two days, and that night they had to go back to Eugene. Lynne had refused to go with them that weekend. “It’s been raining all week,” she had snapped. “It’ll be cold and wet. I’ll wait here, thank you.”

But at the lake the sun had come out, and the following day Abby and Jud had gone hunting, carrying mesh bags they could sling over their shoulders, and they had filled them both with mushrooms. Then they went out in the rowboat and fished, and that night they ate lake trout and mushrooms with rice. They had taken mushrooms back to town with them, but Lynne had refused to touch them.

“You wait for a good soaking rain,” Jud had said, “and two days after it stops, the mushrooms pop up like magic. They like to hide underground but they know exactly when to come up for some fresh air.”

They crossed over Willamette Pass, and there was the sign for the ski resort off to the right, and another one for a recreation area, also on the right. Abby said, “The turn to the state park road is just up ahead on the left.” It was a dangerous turn; going downhill the traffic speed had increased again, but there were still cars, trucks, campers climbing up from the east. The problem now was not the oncoming traffic as much as the traffic behind them; stopping, waiting for the opportunity to make the turn invited a rear-end collision. They had been driving for two hours and ten minutes when Caldwell entered the road that led to the state park.

“Halburtson’s driveway is on the left, just up ahead,” Abby said. This road was narrower than the highway, but a good road with pine forest pressing in closely on both sides; it was easy to miss the entrance to Coop Halburtson’s place.

“I know,” Caldwell said. “We crossed over the lake from there last time. Today I thought I’d drive up, see what that’s like.” He glanced at her. “The road’s passable, isn’t it?”

“At this time of year it’s okay, unless it’s snowed recently. Later you’d need a four-wheel drive, but it would be crazy later even then. We never drove up in the winter. In fact, we hardly ever drove up at all. We used the boat to go across the finger unless we had big things to carry. You’ll add another forty-five minutes to the trip.”

“I thought we might,” he said. He drove past Coop Halburtson’s property, and soon after that turned at the entrance to Two-Finger Lake State Park onto a winding lava-rock road with smaller lanes that led to camp sites hidden among trees on the right. He passed them and drove to the boat launching area, where he pulled in and parked. There were canoes, rowboats, even a kayak or two on the lake, nothing motorized. Motor boats were forbidden here.

“Let’s stretch our legs,” he said, “before we attack the mountain. Why is the water so black?”

It looked as black as ink, but that was deceptive. From another vantage point it would appear to be almost as blue as Crater Lake. “It’s underlain with basalt in places,” Abby said.

They walked to a rail and stood gazing at the water, at the surrounding cliffs, the boats. Like most of the state parks, this one was well-used year round; there were a lot of people in the area that day.

“One of the things bothering us,” Caldwell said, watching the boats, “is how the killer approached the cabin. Can you see it from here?”

Abby shook her head. “You can see part of the finger, but not the cabin. It’s only a couple of miles from here actually, but the cabin is set back a bit, trees block it from view.”

“Four miles,” he said musingly. “Why couldn’t someone have launched a boat down here and paddled up?”

She had rowed across to the state park many times, and occasionally someone did row up the finger to the end, but only in daylight. She pointed. “See that cliff over there, the basalt rimrock? It goes into the water, just below the surface mostly, but there’s a place where it’s actually above the water level. You can spot it from here. But just barely. There’s a break in the rocks there, at the left of the basalt. At night, you’d need a powerful light to find your way through without grounding. There’s another break over by the cliffs, and you can’t see it at all unless you’re out on the water. They’re both hard to see in daylight, and invisible at night.”

Caldwell was peering at the lake, frowning, but Detective Varney exclaimed, “I see it. A little island, a little black island.”

Abby nodded. Siren Rock. Jud had rowed her out to it one hot summer day; about four feet long and half that wide, it rose from the water no more than six inches, black and shiny, as smooth as the back of a Loch Ness monster. She had said, “It’s a Siren rock, isn’t it? Calling you to the deep water where the fish are.” She had been reading a lot of mythology that summer, and Siren Rock the island had become. Jud’s first novel was titled
Siren Rock
.

Their finger was quite shallow, no more than eight feet deep at the deepest point, but at this side of Siren Rock the basin plunged down eighty or ninety feet, and the water was many degrees colder than in the finger. They always fished in the deep water, and swam in the warm shallow water.

There were no boats visible in the finger that day, and never any boats in the north finger, which was a spring-fed creek that had spread out fifty feet or more, and was hazardous with boulders and blowdowns, unnavigable. It was good for finding crawfish and pretty rocks, and places where she used to slide down slippery, moss-covered boulders and splash into tiny pools.

She turned her back on the lake and looked instead at the high mountains.

“Let’s move on,” Caldwell said. “We brought sandwiches and things. We’ll eat when we reach the cabin. I suspected there wouldn’t be much in the way of edibles along the way here.”

They drove out of the parking area and came to another intersection. “Where does that go?” Caldwell asked.

“East, over to Highway 97, about ten miles, another couple of miles up to Bend. That’s where people out here go shopping, rent movies, things like that. The other way goes to the cottages on the north shore of the lake. Mostly summer places or weekend retreats.”

He kept driving. Another dirt road angled off to the right and she said, before he asked this time, “That goes up to a hot spring. It’s pretty popular, but tough to get to.” It was a deeply rutted dirt road. Most visitors hiked up. The forest service road they were on, only marginally better at the start became much worse; it went up and down, back and forth, climbed steeply, then dropped just as steeply. It was sixteen miles from Highway 58 to the cabin, and it took at least forty-five minutes to drive. She had called this the rolly-coaster road and had loved it. Remembering. Looking out the back window she had seen a cloud of dust billowing after them, and she had decided it was helping out, pushing them up the mountain.

Detective Varney made a soft sound in the back seat and Caldwell slowed even more. Ahead, it appeared that the road vanished into nothingness, another outside hairpin curve.

“I sure wouldn’t want to drive this at night,” Caldwell muttered. Now and then the lake came into view, but he didn’t look down to admire the changing scene, sometimes blue water, sometimes black.

“This is why we use the boat to go back and forth,” Abby said.

They came to a one-lane bridge over the north finger, in deep forest now, with no sign of the lake or the cliffs they had traversed.

“It’s only a little farther,” Abby said. “It’s hard to see the driveway until you get right on it.”

When they reached the gravel driveway Caldwell was making the turn before she could tell him
now.
The cabin was fifty feet lower than the road with a steep approach. He stopped the car and looked at Abby. “You ever drive up here by yourself?”

Surprised, she shrugged. She had driven up many times, and down, she told him. She thought her mother had come by road only that first time; after that she had refused, although she also had been afraid of the small rowboat. “I’ve never been on the road after dark,” she admitted. “I doubt that my father ever drove it after dark.”

They got out and started toward the cabin door. There was no landscaping here; pine trees, alders, and mountain laurel pressed in close to the driveway, and only the basalt shelf that held the cabin kept the dense growth from enveloping the structure.

The cabin was made of logs, with a shed roof that sloped down low on this side, making the building appear smaller than it was. The basalt formed a walkway from the door around the side of the cabin, down to ledges that made steps to the water, ten feet lower than the cabin.

Someone had come here around the turn of the century, her father had said, and cleared some forest, used the felled logs, and built himself a hideout. The last of the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang maybe. Or a miner looking for gold. Or a runaway Chinese railroad man, or escaped convict. Over the years improvements had been added: insulation installed, knotty pine paneling, electricity brought in, appliances and furniture trucked in over that incredible road. But none of that had ever mattered to Abby, this was the hideout.

She watched in silence as Caldwell unlocked the padlock the police had put on the door. It probably was the first time the door had ever been locked.

Her father had added a loft, an aerie, he had called it, cantilevered out over the back, with stout supports anchored to the basalt. “What’s an aerie?” she had asked.

“An eagle’s nest, or a fort on a mountain, a house on a high point. That’s where I’ll work.”

And the space under it, she had decided, was hers, a fairy cave.

They entered the cabin; it looked exactly the same as always. Knotty pine paneling aglow on the walls, Indian rugs on the floor, throws of many colors on the sofa and an easy chair, a rattan chair. The living room and kitchen made up more than half of the first floor; the rest consisted of two small bedrooms with a bathroom between them, and the staircase to the aerie. There was a television and a CD player; for years all they could watch were movies, then he had installed a satellite dish. Bookcases overflowed, more books stacked on the floor, on tables… The table that divided the living room area from the kitchen had a bowl of candy bars on it, just like always. Abby caught her breath and then moved to the middle of the room.

She realized that she had braced herself, had expected to see the chalk outline of a body, blood stains, something. But there was nothing unusual to see. Everything looked natural, the same as it had been in August, the same as always. But too still, too empty. And the carpet, the stair runner, had been removed.

“I think we should have our lunch,” Caldwell said behind her.

She spun around. “Not yet. Where was he? Where did it happen?” She was trembling, and her voice was harsh.

“How we reconstructed it,” Caldwell said evenly, “goes something like this. He had been up in the loft. When he came down he was shot at the bottom; he fell backwards, partway up the stairs. It probably was between one and two in the morning. Halburtson said he got up to go to the john during the night, and his wife roused enough to hear the dog barking. Mrs. Halburtson said he usually gets up between one and two, and the coroner said that’s about right. She thought that maybe a cougar or a bear had come nosing around on this side. Their dogs didn’t bark, so she didn’t pay much attention. It was a cold night; Halburtson closed their window, and they couldn’t hear the dog any more. Not until the next morning when they got up. Then they heard it again. And they could see it from their ramp, running around the house, jumping at the windows, things like that. They tried to reach Mr. Vickers on the phone and got no answer. Finally Halburtson got his boat out and came over to investigate.”

Abby was staring at the steps to the aerie. Someone came in, and stood about where she was standing now, in the middle of the room, and when Jud reached the lowest step, shot him in the face. She jerked away from the spot and she felt the floor tilting, the walls moving inward…

Detective Varney grabbed her, put an arm around her shoulders, steadied her a moment, then took her to one of the chairs at the table. “Put your head down, all the way, to your knees,” she said calmly.

A few minutes later, sipping coffee from a thermos, they all sat gazing out the back window at the finger of water. From here it looked blue. Across the half mile to the other shore they could make out a patch of white, Halburtson’s house, and closer, the dark weathered wood of the boat shed.

“What was the arrangement with Halburtson?” Caldwell asked.

Abby was no longer lightheaded, and her hands were steady now, but her voice was different, duller, when she answered. “Dad rents—rented—space in the shed for the rowboat. We’d drive out, leave the car, and cross over in the boat. You can see his boat ramp from here. Dad would put the boat in the shed if he planned to be gone more than a day, and we both just tied it to the tree stump to go shopping in Bend, or something like that.”

“So theoretically anyone could have driven to his place, launched a small boat, and come across late at night,” Caldwell said, still gazing over the water.

“Not really,” Abby said. “He has two dogs, Spook’s mother, and a litter mate, and they’re pretty fierce, really good watch dogs. You couldn’t get near his ramp at night unless they knew you well. Dad could, and I could, but no stranger, no one else I know.”