Free Scenarios - A Collection of Nameless Detective Stories by Bill Pronzini

morning for supplies."
    "How about your mother? Is she here?"
    "No. She went to Weaverville too."
    "When will they be back?"
    He shrugged. "I dunno . This afternoon sometime."
    "Well, maybe you can help me. I'm a detective, from San Francisco, and I—"
    "Detective?" he said.
    "Yes. I'm investigating the death of Allan Randall, over in Redding—"
    "The Munroe guy," he said. His face closed up; you could see it happening, like watching a poppy fold its petals at sundown. "The fire. I don't know nothing about that. Except he got what was coming to him."
    "Is that what your father says too?"
    "That's what everybody says. Listen, you working for them? Them Munroe guys?"
    "No.
    "Yeah, you are. Them damn Munroe guys."
    He wheeled away from me and hurried back inside the garage. I called after him, "Hey, wait," but he didn't stop or turn. An old Chrysler sat on the floor inside, its front end jacked up; there was one of those little wheeled mechanics' carts alongside, and he dropped down onto it on his back and scooted himself under the Chrysler until only his legs were showing. A moment later I heard the sharp, angry sound of some kind of tool whacking against the undercarriage.
    The damned dog was still barking. I sidestepped it and went back to the car. When I slid in under the wheel, Kerry asked, "Well?"
    "He wouldn't talk to me. And his folks aren't here."
    "What now?"
    "The Cooperville fire," I said.
     
    2.
     
    I drove out along the road again. Just beyond the fork, two more occupied cottages sat side by side; the nearest one had a deserted look, but in the yard of the second, a heavyset woman in her late sixties or early seventies, wearing man's clothing and a straw hat, was wielding a hoe among tall rows of tomato vines. She stopped when she heard the car and stood staring out at the road as we passed by, as if she resented the appearance of strangers in Cooperville .
    Kerry said, "None of the natives is very friendly, the way it looks."
    "I didn't expect that they would be," I said.
    I took the right fork that led through what was left of the town. It amounted to about two blocks' worth of buildings on both sides of the road, although on either end and back into the meadow you could see foundations and other remains of what had once been more buildings and streets. Most of the structures still standing were backed up against the creek. There were about fifteen altogether, all made of logs and whipsawed boards, some with stone foundations, a third with badly decayed frames and collapsed roofs. The largest, two stories, girdled by a sagging verandah at the second level, looked to have been either a hotel or a saloon with upstairs accommodations; it bore no signs, and as was the case with the others we passed, its doors and windows were boarded up. Except for faded lettering over the entrance to one that said Union Drug Store, it was impossible to tell what sort of establishments any of them had been.
    Kerry seemed impressed. "This is some place," she said. "I've never been in a ghost town before."
    "Spooky, huh?"
    "No. I'm fascinated. How long have these buildings been here?"
    "More than a hundred years, some of them."
    "And there've been people living here all that time and nobody ever tried to restore any of them?"
    "Not in a good long while."
    "Well, why not? I mean, you'd think somebody would want to preserve a historic place like this."
    "Somebody does," I said. "The Munroe Corporation."
    "I don't mean that kind of preservation. You know what I mean."
    "Uh-huh. It's a good question, but I don't know the answer."
    She frowned a little, thoughtfully. "What kind of people live here, anyway?"
    I had no answer for her. Half of the sixteen residents had been born in Cooperville ; the other half had gravitated to it because they liked its isolation. It was up near the Oregon border, three hundred miles from San Francisco, and to get to it you had to take an unpaved road that climbed seven miles off State Highway 3. The