The Green Ripper looked me over with a listless competence. And he listened to my story. “Apocrypha. Kind of rings a bell. Short dirty-white robes. Beards. Sister this and Brother that.” He dialed a three-digit number and leaned back in his leather chair and began murmuring into the phone, listening for a time while he stared at the ceiling. Then he hung up and took a sheet of yellow paper and drew a crude map.
“Where that outfit was, McGraw, they were over in Lake County. They had a pretty good-sized tract. What you do, you take Twenty East and go over past Upper Lake, maybe two miles, and there’s a little road heads off to the east, unpaved but a good surface. You go along that road, mostly uphill, and it winds around and there are little roads heading off it, smaller still, and that encampment is off at the end of one of those. You’ll have to ask around.”
“Thanks. I appreciate you taking the trouble.”
“Afraid it won’t help much. Seems they’ve pulled up and moved off someplace. Might be nobody left there at all.”
“It’s the only clue I’ve got.”
For the moment he forgot his own woes. “Listen, McGraw. There’s thousands of kids took off. A lot of them don’t ever show again. It’s a sign of the times. What I mean is, don’t expect too much. It’s a good thing to look around, to satisfy yourself you did all you could. But don’t expect too much Okay?”
“Thanks. I won’t. I mean, I’ll try not to.”
By Sunday noon I had found it. I had spent the night in a small rental trailer under giant ever- greens. I had hitched three rides, walked through two monstrous rainstorms, and climbed what seemed to be several mountains.
So now I stood where Gretel and her husband had stood. The signs were large and explicit. Red lettering on white. PRIVATE PROPERTY. NO TRESPASSING. The wire gate she had described blocked the road. Beyond the gate the road curved up and to the right, out of sight behind the trees and brush. There was a lean-to on the right, just beyond the gate. The last people I had asked, the ones who had given me the final directions, had said that they thought there were a few left up at the encampment, but that most of them had gone away. They said that sometimes they saw a van on the road. Black, with a gold cross painted on the sides.
I am Tom McGraw, looking for the traces of a daughter lost. I have a father’s bullheaded determination. So I forge ahead. Climb the fence close to the gate, drop the duffel bag, and drop down beside it. Shoulder it and walk up the muddy road.
There was a cathedral of evergreens on either side of the road, standing at parade rest on the slope, the ground silent with needles. The sun was suddenly covered again, and I heard a high soft sigh of rainwind in the pine branches. I trudged up
The Green Ripper the curve and up a steeper pitch. The stand of trees dwindled, and there were boulders among them big as bungalows. I came out at the top. Far away to the northeast I could see sunlit mountains. I was on an old rocky plateau, quite level, as big as four football fields. It sloped gently down toward valleys and gullies on every side. Off to my right, at the end of the big plateau, was a clutter of small structures. The biggest was a corrugated steel and aluminum building that looked like a pre-fab warehouse. There were several small cement-block buildings, and several trailers on block foundations. I saw one derelict truck.
There was no sign of life. I wanted to see if the road continued on the other side of the field. I hollered and waited and heard no answer. I walked across and looked. There was no road down the slope. There had been a stand of small trees there, with the biggest about three inches in diameter. They were broken off about two feet above ground level. At first I thought somebody had driven up and down there with a vehicle. Something nagged at memory. I walked down the slope. The damage was not fresh. The wood was splintered and dry. I squatted and found where slugs had creased the bark. Very heavy sustained fire from an automatic weapon would chew them off just like that. Using the bark creases for rough triangulation, I was able to go back up the slope to the approximate area where the weapon had been. I poked around and fi