Cape Perdido by Marcia Muller

Author:Marcia Muller [MULLER, MARCIA]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780446509800
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

JOSEPH OPENSHAW

Joseph stood in the shelter of the trees, watching the shack in the clearing. It was up a steep, mud-slick trail from the reservation road, next to a little creek that flowed freely now but in months would be nothing more than a trickle. Pines and tanbark oak encroached on the leaning corrugated-iron structure, and light—probably from an oil lamp—seeped around its poorly fitting door. Joseph had been waiting close to an hour—for what, he wasn’t sure.

The shack had been there as long as he could remember—a relic from the days when the bark of the oaks had been stripped and hauled by wagon to Signal Port, for shipment south to hide-tanning factories. In their youth, he and his friends had used the shack as a refuge from often drunken and abusive parents, smoked their first cigarettes and drunk their first beers there, and later had had their first women within its dark confines. Now there were no more young people on the rez, merely a handful of elders and middle-aged folk like Curtis, and the shack stood abandoned. Or so Joseph had thought until he’d followed Harold Kosovich there tonight.

He had recognized the odd little man after he fled the scene of the fire and climbed into an old blue Buick parked by the roadside. By the time Joseph retrieved his van and caught up with the car, it had passed through Cape Perdido and was turning into the hills toward the rez. Even though there were no other vehicles on the road, Harold didn’t appear to know he was being followed. He ditched the car at the boarded-up community center and took the trail into the woods. Joseph parked and went after him.

The night was cold here on the ridge, and the breeze brought with it the stench of the fire. Joseph tucked his hands into his pockets, gazed up through the trees at a star-shot, smoke-streaked sky. Even the night birds were silent, sensing danger.

After a while Joseph felt a stir of alarm. It was too quiet in the clearing, and the lamplight burned steadily in the shack, showing no motion. What was Kosovich doing in there? And why had he run when he saw Joseph at the mill?

He moved slowly from the trees’ shelter, the tall grass whispering around his legs, twigs and pinecones snapping under his feet. There was no sound from the shack’s occupant as he put his eye to the crack around the door and peered inside.

The lamp sat on the rotting board floor, its glow washing over the rusted walls and ceiling. Several cardboard cartons were stacked to one side, and empty liquor bottles lay everywhere. In the far corner was what looked like a pile of rags.

Not rags—a bed. Harold’s been living here. What happened to his trailer?

Joseph entered and moved closer to the makeshift bed, the hairs on the back of his neck prickling. He smelled alcohol and something else that he couldn’t identify before he saw the bottle of cheap whiskey lying on its side, liquid puddling around an empty prescription vial.

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