Quesada was a one-hotel town pasted on the rocky side of a young mountain that sloped into the Pacific Ocean some eighty miles from San Francisco. Quesada’s beach was too abrupt and hard and jagged for bathing, so Quesada had never got much summer-resort money. For a while it had been a hustling rum-running port, but that racket was dead now: bootleggers had learned there was more profit and less worry in handling domestic hooch than imported. Quesada had gone back to sleep.
I got there at eleven-something that night, garaged my car, and crossed the street to the Sunset Hotel. It was a low, sprawled-out, yellow building. The night clerk was alone in the lobby, a small effeminate man well past sixty who went to a lot of trouble to show me that his fingernails were rosy and shiny.
When he had read my name on the register he gave me a sealed envelope–hotel stationery–addressed to me in Eric Collinson’s handwriting. I tore it open and read:
_Do not leave the hotel
until I have seen you_.
_E. C._
“How long has this been here?” I asked.
“Since about eight o’clock. Mr. Carter waited for you for more than an hour, until after the last stage came in from the railroad.”
“He isn’t staying here?”
“Oh, dear, no. He and his bride have got the Tooker place, down in the cove.”
Collinson wasn’t the sort of person to whose instructions I’d pay a whole lot of attention. I asked:
“How do you get there?”
“You’d never be able to find it at night,” the clerk assured me, “unless you went all the way around by the East road, and not then, I’m sure, unless you knew the country.”
“Yeah? How do you get there in the daytime?”
“You go down this street to the end, take the fork of the road on the ocean side, and follow that up along the cliff. It isn’t really a road, more of a path. It’s about three miles to the house, a brown house, shingled all over, on a little hill. It’s easily enough found in the daytime if you remember to keep to the right, to the ocean side, all the way down. But you’d never, never in the world, be able to find–”
“Thanks,” I said, not wanting to hear the story all over again.
He led me up to a room, promised to call me at five, and I was asleep by midnight.
The morning was dull, ugly, foggy, and cold when I climbed out of bed to say, “All right, thanks,” into the phone. It hadn’t improved much by the time I had got dressed and gone downstairs. The clerk said there was not a chance in the world of getting anything to eat in Quesada before seven o’clock.
I went out of the hotel, down the street until it became a dirt road, kept to the dirt road until it forked, and turned into the branch that bent toward the ocean. This branch was never really a road from its beginning, and soon was nothing but a rocky path climbing along the side of a rocky ledge that kept pushing closer to the water’s edge. The side of the ledge became steeper and steeper, until the path was simply an irregular shelf on the face of a cliff–a shelf eight or ten feet wide in places, no more than four or five in others. Above and behind the path, the cliff rose sixty or seventy feet; below and in front, it slanted down a hundred or more to ravel out in the ocean. A breeze from the general direction of China was pushing fog over the top of the cliff, making noisy lather of sea water at its bottom.
Rounding a corner where the cliff was steepest–was, in fact, for a hundred yards or so, straight up and down–I stopped to look at a small ragged hole in the path’s outer rim. The hole was perhaps six inches across, with fresh loose earth piled in a little semicircular mound on one side, scattered on the other. It wasn’t exciting to look at, but it said plainly to even such a city man as I was: here a bush was uprooted not so long ago.