Madeline Carter - 01 - Mad Money (29 page)

I had a vision of her perched in her Honda
at the top of the cliff, keeping an eye on Tyler’s driveway.

“That was two days ago. You mean you were
watching me at home in Malibu? You were there that whole time?”

“Pretty much. I have a friend I work with
sometimes who spelled me for a few hours here and there. So I went
home once, ate, showered, you know. But mostly I was there,” she
grinned. “I didn’t want to have to give up too much of my fee.”

I felt violated, somehow. Exposed. I thought
about what she might have seen me do. Not much, when I considered.
Then I thought of something else.

“You’ve been watching me pretty much ever
since I met Arianna — Mrs. Billings — in Brentwood?”

Rand nodded.

“Did you happen to see a kid — a teenage
girl — leave the house at a funny hour?”

She nodded again and crossed her arms over
her chest, saying nothing.

I got the point. “What’s it going to cost
me?”

She considered. “Another two-fifty?”

“Two,” I countered.

“Done.”

I looked at her. She looked at me. “You’re
waiting for the money,” I said finally.

“That’s correct.”

I sighed. “Wait here.”

When I got back she was sitting down
properly again, a plate of teriyaki chicken and rice in front of
her. It looked like a lot of my money was going to go for food.

“OK,” I said, plunking myself down opposite
her. “I’ve got the money.”

She held out her left hand, palm up, while
not breaking her eating stride. I put five twenties into it, and
held the other five within her view. She rolled her eyes but
started to talk.

“Now the times won’t be perfectly accurate
because I didn’t take notes on this stuff because, since it wasn’t
you, it didn’t matter to my report,” she looked at me and I nodded.
“The first night I was out there, about three o’clock in the
morning a van pulled up, and a girl got out. Went in the
house.”

I stopped her. “Like a delivery van?”
Jennifer drove an SUV.

“Well, yes and no. It wasn’t marked for
deliveries or anything. And it had a pretty distinctive paint job
and funny cut out windows. Like what we would have called a
shaggin’ waggin’ back in my day.”

Not wanting to hear her Woodstock stories, I
moved her on.

“Anything else?”

“Sure. About a quarter of an hour later, the
girl came back, carrying a little pack, you know, like for
school?”

“A backpack.”

“Right. Looked quite full, too. She gets in
the van — passenger side — and drives away.”

“Did you see what she looked like?”

“Not really. It was dark. Slender, that’s
for sure. And long dark hair. And she moved like a kid, you know,
like a youngster.”

“Who was driving the van?”

Anne held our her other hand — she’d
finished eating by now — and looked at me expectantly.

“Oh, all
right
,” I said and gave her
the rest of the money.

“I don’t know who was driving,” she
shrugged, pocketing my cash. “It was too dark to see.”

I didn’t say anything, just looked at her.
She smiled. “I like you. You’re a smart cookie. I piss you off, you
don’t shoot your mouth off, make me mad. The van, it was green
gold, kinda pretty. And,” she started rummaging in a voluminous
bag, “I got the plate.”

“I thought you said you weren’t taking
notes.”

She smiled, obviously pleased that, despite
the fact that I’d caught her on the freeway, she could still take
credit for some stealth. “I was bored. And I
always
get a
plate. Just in case.”

After we left the mall, I waited around long
enough to see Ms. Rand stuff herself back into her car and head
towards the freeway then found a phone booth. Tyler wasn’t home. I
was going to leave voice mail, then thought better of it. Taken
alone, what Anne had told me really didn’t add much to what we
already knew. And, though it was interesting, taken out of context
in a voice mail message it might give Tyler false hope. Plus
explaining why a private detective had been watching me in the
first place was more than I felt like tackling in a one-way
conversation.

Tycho and I poked around the parking lot for
a bit while I pondered things further — I figured he needed
emptying — and I wasted time making sure Anne was well and truly
gone. Once we were both empty and then refilled — cool water, all
‘round — we got back on the road.

When I was driving, I thought again of the
private detective. I imagined Arianna pouring over the Yellow
Pages, trying to find an investigator on extremely short notice:
one who was available. I could just see her making the literary
connection in her mind, then hearing the cultured voice on the
phone and thinking: Sure, she’ll get the job done. Never suspecting
the reality of this particular Rand.

“Anne Rand,” I said aloud as I drove. And
then I laughed. Hired to watch one person, inadvertently getting
information on another. Sometimes it’s just such a funny old
world.

Chapter Eighteen

Camp Arrowheart turned out to be tougher to
find than even the Hestman School had been. It had looked pretty
simple, but that was only because my map hadn’t reflected unpaved
mountain roads. In real life, things twisted when they’d merely
looked curved, they were rocky when I’d expected them to be paved.
And the camp itself was nowhere near where I’d thought it would be.
Sure: fifty miles from Lake Arrowhead, but as the crow flies. As
the Chevy bounces, it was an hour and a half. Tycho and I fell out
of the car with joy when we found the overgrown entrance to Camp
Arrowheart. And both of us found private places in the undergrowth
to relieve our driving buildup. I think we both felt lighter when
we reunited.

I’d planned to leave the car at the road and
sort of skulk, sort of wander towards camp even before I’d gotten a
peek at the drive, but that peek clinched things. The track that
led to the camp wasn’t precisely grown over, but my car was less
than a month old and my experience as a driver wasn’t much richer
than that, I didn’t want to risk getting stuck or scraping some
important bits. Plus, even though part of me was certain that this
whole exercise was a wild goose chase, the other part was sure this
particular driveway would lead to an outraged Ernie asking me what
the hell I was doing there. Not giving too much warning of my
approach seemed like a good idea.

Tycho, of course, refused to respect the top
secret nature of our mission. He thought this was heaven. The way
he was acting, our trip to the wilderness was a doggy fantasy come
to life. He ran around like crazy, snuffling at new and wonderful
smells and peeing on everything growing like he was shouting “Mine!
Mine! Mine!”

As we trudged up the track that I assumed
led to the camp, I tried to think like a Girl Guide in order to
tell if the road had been recently used or not. Trouble is, I never
was a Girl Guide and the road held no hints for me: just a couple
of twin depressions with grass growing on either side and between
them, trees ranging into the forest at either side.

It was beautiful country that would have
done Ed/Ted/Ned’s soul good. There was no way you could trudge and
trudge and trudge along here in the deepening wilderness —
evergreens towering and forest scents freshening — without feeling
your heart lighten. I imagined him falling on his knees and
shouting, “I believe.” The dense quiet — filled with bird and bug
calls, the occasional animal noises and the sounds various
collected vegetation make when in their natural habitat (creaks,
groans, rustles) — reassured you if required: there was no way
anyone could think they’d come over the next rise and find a
Seven-Eleven.

After what seemed like quite a long trudge —
perhaps a half mile — I began to make out the shapes of the
buildings ahead of us in the distance. I took them to be various
lodges and cabins. The closer I got, the less occupied everything
appeared. At a distance the camp looked like a rustic beacon of
humanity. As I approached, I could begin to see hints of things as
they were: a shutter missing here, a window boarded over there, a
chimney at a funny angle, an overgrown tennis court, the fence
surrounding it sagging sadly: all of these things collectively sent
a message of loss. I could almost sense the spirits of children
running by me in Y T-shirts, little voices raised in the mindless
hilarity of childhood. I felt sad and, to be honest, a little
frightened.

If a tree falls in the forest, does
anybody hear?
This was like that, with a twist. The camp was
being reclaimed by the forest and it didn’t feel right to listen.
There were no cars — abandoned or otherwise — to be seen and I had
a very strong suspicion that no one was here, but that didn’t make
me feel any easier.

I called Tycho to me quietly. His
softly-padding presence beside me was reassuring if not
particularly threatening. Another living soul, he kept me company.
Companion dog. The classic canine occupation since time out of
mind. I understood better now and stopped to scratch his head
appreciatively, noticing how he watched me carefully with his
liquid amber eyes.

“Good boy,” I said softly. And we walked on,
exploring the perimeter of Camp Arrowheart while I worked up my
courage to have a peek inside the buildings.

We skirted around a deep swimming pool,
empty but for a thick covering of green sludge at the bottom, and
entered what might have once been a counselor's meeting house, or
maybe even a lifeguard’s office or storage for sporting equipment.
It was hard now to tell: everything that gives a room context had
been stripped from it, leaving the mildewing walls bare, the room
devoid of any clues about what sort of human goings on might have
gone on here. But it was a good starting point. Finding the small
hut completely empty gave me the courage to try some of the bigger
buildings. A few other cabins and what might have once been a small
lodge — a big fieldstone fireplace at one end was my clue here —
didn’t show signs of recent human occupation. As we entered the
largest of the lodges I was starting to breathe easier. I hadn’t
seen anything thus far that indicated recent signs of either human
or ghostly life.

The big lodge looked as though it had also
been the cookhouse. We passed through a pantry and into what had
clearly been the kitchen: I guessed that the best of the cooking
equipment had been salvaged, but the remnants of a big industrial
kitchen could still be seen. The place would have been capable of
serving hundreds of meals at every sitting.

It was as we moved from the kitchen into the
main lodge area — a big empty room with a large center hearth and
doors to what I took to be smaller rooms to my left and right —
that I noticed that Tycho was behaving oddly. He was moving very
carefully, his ears at full attention and his nose snuffling
anxiously.

“What is it, boy?” I said softly.

As if in answer, he padded cautiously
towards the exit. I felt like the doomed heroine in one of those
stupid horror movies: Where the girl is in her bedroom or maybe the
bath and she hears a funny noise — or her dog starts acting funny —
and she’s scared but she goes to see what it is anyway. And all the
time you’re sitting at home watching it on the Late, Late, Late
Show simply because there’s nothing else on, and you’re screaming
at the television: Don’t do it! Go back to bed! Get the hell out of
there while you still can! But she never listens, just keeps right
on tripping into the mouth of danger while you can do nothing but
sit there and say: If that were me...

And now it
was
me. As strong as any
gut feeling that ever told me to sell or buy a stock, every part of
my sharply-honed instincts were now screaming: Never mind what’s
out there.
Don’t go through that door
.
You don’t need to
know. It doesn’t matter. Just get back to your car.

If my car had been right outside, maybe I
would have gone for it. But if danger truly
was
lurking on
the other side of the door, there was no way I’d make it back to my
car anyway. And if what was out there was so scary it made me
scream, no one would ever hear.

I told myself to get a grip. There was
nothing
out there besides a rodent or maybe a coyote. And
then I heard something that I couldn’t write off as sounds created
by Mother Nature. It was a human voice. Not right outside the door,
but not far away, either. Definitely within the camp’s immediate
vicinity. And then I heard another, different, voice. This one
softer — pleading? — but no closer to where I was.

“Tycho, heel,” I said softly, pointing to
that part of my anatomy. The last thing I wanted was the
occasionally boisterous canine to go romping up to whatever humans
were out there. I told myself that there was nothing odd about
people being here. This was beautiful country. Hikers probably came
this way all the time.

But it hadn’t sounded like hikers. And my
instincts told me that it wasn’t hikers, either. I thought about my
car — my safe little automotive haven — too far down the road for
me to get there quickly. Still, I thought, if we went back the way
we had come, and made a big circle around where I felt whatever
human activity was coming from, there seemed a good chance we’d get
back to the car undetected. And suddenly the undetected part seemed
important.

We retraced our steps — Tycho seeming to
understand that he needed to stay close and quiet — back through
the main lodge, past the smaller lodge, the cabins we’d walked
through not long before, past the pool and the tennis court. Relief
flooded through me like a live thing when we made the cover of the
trees that followed the track into camp, but we weren’t clear quite
yet. I hadn’t heard the voices again, so maybe it
had
been
hikers, after all. And then I saw a flash of white, and focusing
even as I ducked behind a little stand of trees and made sure all
of Tycho was out of sight, I could make out a human male, in
business dress heading in my direction. Could he see me? I didn’t
think so. But then another man — this one in garb suitable to the
terrain — and I understood: the first man, the well-dressed one,
was in flight. He was heading, naturally enough, for the road out
of camp which, unfortunately, was exactly where I was standing.