Bill Pronzini - With an Extreme Burning

She finished the sandwich and went into the bathroom to wash her hands. She felt bloated and a little sick to her stomach from all the food. But her mind was active, and as she dried her hands something began to scratch at her memory like a cat trying to get through a door. Something about Katy … something she'd done or said. Not that half-drunk June Friday; later, quite a bit later. It hadn't had anything to do with a lover, but … what the devil was it?

There was a banging out in the kitchen. Footsteps. Ted's voice: “Eileen, where are you? Come take a look at what the old man caught this morning.”

She'd remember it sooner or later. That was the good thing about a memory like hers—she always remembered what she wanted to sooner or later. She put the towel down and hurried out to tell Ted about the awful phone calls and Katy's affair with a maniac.

EIGHT

Lone Mountain Road was narrow and not in the best of repair. Edges had crumbled away in places, making it even narrower; if two cars met at these places, one would have to back up or down to let the other pass. The road corkscrewed its way up into the hills for more than six miles, finally deadending just beyond the gate to the Chenelli ranch near the top of a piece of high ground some obscure local wag had christened Lone Mountain. Once you were on the road, there was no way to get off except to turn around and drive back down to the intersection with East Valley Road. It had been built in the twenties by the county to accommodate the ranchers whose property flanked it. The only other people who used it, as far as Dix knew, were kids on beer parties and lovers looking for a private place to park and screw.

It seemed incredible, now, that he hadn't questioned Katy's presence up there on the night of August 6. Just assumed she'd taken Lone Mountain Road on a whim, as part of her pattern of aimless driving. Blind trust. Now, though, his faith had been badly shaken. Women alone don't drive out to a remote lover's lane for no good reason; they drive there to meet a man, a lover. Park and screw. Forty-one years old and humping in the backseat of a car like a teenager.

Why?

And how did he get her earrings that night?

There were plenty of places to park off the road. Little clusters of oak and madrone, cowpaths that skirted hummocks and the boulder-size rocks littering the hillsides. Occasionally county sheriffs deputies cruised up there, when one of the beer parties got too noisy or out of hand and a rancher called in a complaint. But for the most part nobody bothered the lovers in their parked cars. None of the ranchers gave much of a damn, and why should they? A minor trespassing offense meant nothing as long as their fences weren't knocked down or their cows harmed or spooked.

This is a waste of time, Dix thought. I shouldn't have come up here. I don't want to look at the place where she died.

His hands were sweaty on the Buick's steering wheel. But he didn't brake or turn around; he continued to drive slowly uphill, through the monotonous series of twists and turns. He had gone about three miles now and there were no dropoffs or dangerous curves at the lower elevations. Just the scattered trees, the rocky fields of summer-cured brown grass, the placidly grazing cattle—Friesians, black with white harnesses, and brown and white Guernseys. And ranch buildings clustered here and there in distant hollows.

He had the window rolled down and the air was breezeless, sticky with early-afternoon heat. Dry grass and manure smells clogged his nostrils. When he glanced up at the rearview mirror he saw the valley spread out behind him, watery with heat haze. If a wind came up later, fire danger in the general area would be high. Especially in the hills to the north, behind the university, where there were more homes and fewer cattle to help keep the grass cropped low.

Four miles by the odometer. The highway patrolmen hadn't told him the exact location of the accident, just that it was “near the top of Lone Mountain Road.” Getting close; the pitch of the road had grown steeper, twisting through cutbanks, along sere shoulders. His back had begun to ache from the stiffness of his posture. He bent forward, squinting against the sun-glare.

Another half-mile, the road climbing at a sharper grade. The terrain on the south side had begun to fall away—gradually in some places, more steeply in others. Around a curve, through a stand of trees. A brush-choked ravine opened up below on his right. Another curve—

And there it was.

Sheer, rocky slope, at least twenty degrees down and a hundred yards long, from the road to the ravine. Gouges in the earth, dislodged rocks, burned grass, shards of glass and pieces of metal agleam in the sun—a trail of destruction that ended in a huge blackened section of the ravine and the higher ground on both sides of it. Dix's stomach churned. He drove past the place where she'd gone off the road, up to where there was a flat parking area half-hidden beneath a clump of oaks. For half a minute he sat there, gathering himself. Then he got out and walked back down to where it had happened.

It registered on his mind that the burned area could have been much larger, that the fire from the wrecked Dodge might have spread over hundreds of acres if Harold Zachary, the rancher who owned this property, hadn't been home and heard the crash. He'd notified the county fire department and they'd gotten equipment out as quickly as they could. The Dodge had been an inferno by the time the firemen arrived. I don't think she suffered, Mr. Mallory. Chances are she was … already gone before the gas tank exploded . At least that. It's all any of us can ask for at the end. To go fast, without suffering . Yes, but that hadn't made it any easier then and still didn't now.

They had winched up the burned-out hulk of the car, trucked it away, but the spot where it had landed and the fire had first raged stood out plainly. A blackened pit at the bottom of the ravine. In spite of himself, he imagined the stench that must have been in the air that night, and the sensory perception made his gorge rise. He turned away, stood with his back to the scarred slope.

After a time he grew aware of the road surface. No skid marks. The highway patrolmen hadn't mentioned that fact to him; neither had the account in the Herald . The road was straight here, too—a seventy-five-yard stretch from the oaks above to the curve below. Her car had gone over midway down.

The absence of skid marks didn't have to mean anything significant. Dark that night, no moon, clouds, and she might have been driving too fast or been preoccupied and not paying enough attention to the road. Wheels slid off the edge, she overcorrected or didn't correct in time … that was the way accidents happen. Still, there should be some tire skin on the road, shouldn't there? Or some crumbling along the asphalt edge. There were no marks on the slope close to the road either; the first deep gouges in the grass were at least fifteen yards down—as if the Dodge had sailed off at some speed and landed hard, nose to the ground. As if she had driven off at an accelerated speed, on purpose—

No, he thought, Cecca and I settled that issue. It wasn't suicide. Katy did not commit suicide.

And the highway patrol hadn't questioned the circumstances, had they? Trained investigators, weren't they? Yes, but every accident scene is different and it had been night and they had no real reason to suspect foul play and even trained observers overlooked things, made mistakes.…

How did he get her earrings?

It keeps coming back to that. She wouldn't have given them to him, not those earrings, not under any circumstances. They were her favorites; she wore them all the time; she'd be afraid her husband would notice they were missing.