Voodoo Ridge by David Freed Read Free Book Online Page A

back. Decided to give it another go.”
    He said nothing, his dark, expressionless eyes fixed on the road ahead.
    I asked him if he was married.
    “No.”
    “Girlfriend?”
    “No.”
    “Boyfriend?”
    Long silence.
    “You always this chatty, Deputy Woo?”
    The right side of his mouth turned upward a couple of millimeters into what I gathered was a smile. That was all I got out of him for the next ten miles or so until the cliffs to the north gave way to dense stands of lodge pole pines on either side of the highway. Woo flipped a switch, activating the flashing red and blue police lights atop his Wrangler, as we came up on a break in the trees, then pulled off the road, onto the shoulder. From under his seat he produced a pair of binoculars.
    “Where you pointed to on the map,” Woo said, “it’s up there.”
    He checked his mirrors for oncoming cars before getting out. I joined him on a low berm just off the road, affording an unobstructed view of the mountainous terrain to the north. The air was crisp, approaching brisk. I wished I’d thought to bring a warmer coat.
    “That’s Mount San Carlos on the left and Chalmers Peak on the right,” the deputy said, pointing, “and that area between is where you said you saw whatever it was you saw.”
    He handed me the binoculars. It wasn’t difficult to orient myself. Through the magnified lenses, I clearly recognized the bow of craggy, barren rocks linking the two mountains, below which I’d first spotted from the air what I was increasingly convinced were the remains of an airplane. Beyond that, I could make out nothing identifiable other than trees; the forest was too thick.
    Woo estimated we were about six miles from the site as the crow flies. He knew of an unpaved logging road that wended about halfway there. The remaining miles would have to be negotiated on foot.
    “It’ll be sunset in a couple of hours,” he said. “Search and rescue can head up first thing in the morning. I’m sure they could use your company.”
    “Why not fly? Doesn’t the sheriff’s department have a helicopter? There could be injured people up there.”
    The sheriff did, in fact, have a helicopter, Woo said, but the conditions of its use in tight budgetary times were extremely restrictive. Unconfirmed reports of downed airplanes apparently fell outside those limits.
    “That’s all I can do, Mr. Logan.” He turned and trudged back down the slope toward his Wrangler, his hands stuffed in the pockets of his jacket.
    I scanned the mountainsides with the binoculars one last time. There was really nothing to see beyond those towering peaks and a forest so deep and silent as to be almost unreal.
    I’m not a big believer in extrasensory perception. People who claim powers of clairvoyance are con artists half the time, by my experience, and the other half, fruitcakes. But I couldn’t shake the powerful sense that something was up there, beneath those trees, waiting for me, and that whatever it was, it wasn’t good.

FOUR
    J ohnny and Gwen Kavitch operated Tranquility House, the meticulously kept, Victorian-style bed-and-breakfast where Savannah had booked us a bungalow. They were unbelievably nice in a laid-back, Grateful Dead kind of way. I was immediately suspicious of them.
    It was late afternoon. The four of us were commiserating in their parlor. A full-sized concert harp was propped in one corner. The Kavitches had laid out a spread of cheeses on an antique sideboard, paired with bottles of what I assumed was good wine. So far as I could tell, we were their only guests. At 300 bucks a night, there was no mystery as to why.
    Gwen was a gaunt blonde gone gray with a world-class overbite and a pair of those shaded, prescription glasses that are supposed to lighten indoors but never quite do, leaving the vague impression that the wearer is either high or hung over. She’d spent nearly thirty years as a special education teacher in San Jose, she told Savannah and me, before budget