Max Idol - THE CHEAP RUBY RING

I always felt I owed this fact - at least to some extent - to my doorplate. So I cleaned the plate at least twice a day.

Some repainting and wallpapering would have been quite a good idea too, but I thought I shouldn't give my clients the feeling that I wasted their money.

Well, it had been a long while since somebody could have had this feeling.

I had a shower and was ready to see Olivia Jackson.

Olivia Jackson lived in the east of Carlsbad, not far away from Lake Calmora. So I went northward on the I-5.

As a rule, early spring is the best time in the region around San Diego. The weather is rather mild and temperatures can rise up to the mid-60s.

Well, actually spring hadn't started yet, though we were very close to it - February had one more day to go. But even for February it had been quite cold for the last three days. Temperatures tried to jump over the 50s, but didn't succeed. The sky was gray and overcast and now and then it began to drizzle. On the other hand this also was the time of year when the meadows and pastures were lush and green. As the year continued, the landscape then decided there had been enough green and bade farewell to it for the rest of the year and said hello to a rather nondescript brown.

I took the highway exit 48 and drove eastward on Cannon Road.

It was quite a nice property, where Olivia Jackson was supposed to live. There was a pool, a pond and a little orchard. A place you could feel at home, not quite as posh as Abigail Coleman's estate, but you wouldn't get depressed if you had to stay here for a longer time. No car parked outside in the parking lot, somehow nobody seemed to be at home.

I guess it was my negative aura which scared off all the people I wanted to talk to.

I stopped my car and approached the entrance. Before I could ring the bell, the door was opened by an elderly thickset man.

"Hello, my name is Lawdon, Jacob Lawdon, I wonder if Mrs. Jackson is at home."

I all at once realized that he didn't like me or maybe it was only my name he wasn't fully satisfied with. He eyed me suspiciously and didn't say a single word. So I decided to supply him with some more food for thought.

"Well, you see, Mr. Coleman, her boss, needs a document she took home to work on. He already tried to get in contact with her. But she didn't answer his call. He intended to see her this morning, but unexpectedly he had to go on a business trip. I'm his colleague and he asked me to see Mrs. Jackson in his place."

This caused a lot of scrutinizing. You could watch him weighing up the pros and cons. The pros won.

"We had a lot of riffraff roundabout here in the last weeks. I'm one of Mrs. Jackson's neighbors. She asked me to keep an eye on her property as long as she was away. Walden is my name."

"Of course, Mr. Walden, you were perfectly right to treat me the way you did. So Mrs. Jackson isn't at home?"

"No, I'm sorry she isn't. She wanted to meet up with her husband in the hills. They've got a cabin near Lake Calmora and they intended to pretty and prepare it for spring time. You know, they spend quite a time up there. Actually, she wanted to be back yesterday, but obviously the clean-up took more time as they expected."

He gave me a short description how to get to Mrs. Jackson's cabin. He seemed to like me now.

You could call Lake Calmora a hidden pearl amidst Carlsbad. The lake is not for swimming, but it is a nice hiking area with different trails from easy to difficult. I wouldn't call the view on the lake breathtaking but the surroundings are quite idyllic. During summertime you should start your hiking tour early in the morning, because it's likely to get sweltering hot in the afternoon. Quite a strenuous trail leads you up to the crater of a former volcano. From the edge of the crater you have a beautiful overview of Carlsbad.

There are several entrances to this area. Mr. Walden recommended me a parking lot in the park. He told me to leave my car there and to take a 30-minute walk to get to the cabin of Olivia Jackson and so I did.

When I approached the cabin, I realized that a dirt road lead to the cabin from the north-east. It struck me that none of the shutters was open and there were neither a car nor any human being. The place was absolutely deserted - at least I thought it was.

I knocked and rattled at the front door. Then I tried the back door. There was a rustle in the undergrowth behind me. Could have been a California pocket mouse or a ground squirrel, both of them were fairly common in this part of Southern California.

In a split second I noticed an enormous shadow to my left. According to the size of the shadow it would have been an enormous oversized ground squirrel. It gave off a distinct, strong odor.

I felt a dull pain that rushed through my head. The ground squirrel had knocked me down.

3

The squirrel was talking to me and what a miracle - I understood it perfectly. I could even recognize that typical Californian vowel shift so common in this area.

I opened my eyes. It was a human face; the squirrel had disappeared. The human face bent down to me and shouted,

"Hey, mister, are you okay?"

Oh yeah, I was really fine. I'm fond of being socked and knocked down. I pondered whether I should tell him the whole story and my nice chat with the ground squirrel, but I wasn't sure he would appreciate it. So I decided not to give my secret away and simply said,

"Who are you and how come you are here?"

A good question, I thought. In the scale of all the questions I've ever asked it was ranking quite highly.

"Well, I was walking my dog and let him run off-leash. When I followed him, I found you lying on the ground and blood trickled out of your head."

"Where's your dog?"

"Oh, he lost interest in you and pursues again his favorite hobby. He is chasing ground squirrels. You know, they bustle about here in large numbers. I guess you should have come across some of them before you took a nap."

"I tripped over one of them. The result you know."

He got slightly peeved.

"You are kind of a smart-aleck, aren't you? I should have listened to what my mother said some forty years ago. She used to tell me over and over again not to talk to strangers. Actually I wanted to ask you if I could give you a lift with my car, but I won't."

He rather rapidly disappeared. I got up, still a bit dizzy, but the bleeding had stopped. Oh, what a tough guy I was. I even managed to balance on both legs.

I tried the back door a second time. Nobody socked me, hit me, punched me, but again the door didn't yield. But I spied a rather small window without a shutter. I suppose it belonged to the bathroom. It took me some efforts, but in the end I managed to open it and to wriggle through the opening.

It was quite dark inside. However, after a while my eyes got adapted to the darkness. I opened two more windows and now had enough light to search the cabin.

Somebody had been here before and had taken out all personal items. No photo, no notice, no evidence at all. When I was just about to leave, I spotted a scrap of paper jammed in a joint of the corner seat, easily to be overlooked.

It was part of an invoice of a car repair shop. Name and address of the car owner could be clearly read. Mike Young was his name.

It might be a good idea to see Mr. Young. Actually he was my only clue to find out where Mr. Coleman was and why he didn't contact his wife. Something was fishy about Mr. Coleman and all the people involved. Not even I was knocked down for nothing.

I set out for the way back to my car.

It was in the early afternoon when I got back to my car. The drizzle and all gray had gone. The sun broke through the sky and the temperature now clearly exceeded the 50s. If you disregarded the rest, it had been a perfect day up to now.