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  I roused myself and turned from the view to examine the dusty make-believe Indian village where Jim had died. Had I expected that being here would tell me something—help me understand in some way? I only knew that I was glad to be here alone on my first visit. There would be other times, of course, when I would come here with Gordon and he would tell me exactly what had happened, though this was something I’d begun to dread.

  All around me were small indications of the movie that had been made here. A multitude of extras must have swarmed about this place, springing to life at the call for “action.” The remnants of cigarette butts lay in the white dirt, never to appear on the screen. A discarded twist of faded red and green cloth might have been a headband. A scrap of aluminum foil caught the sun—a definite reminder of the twentieth century.

  A sound startled me, quickly bringing me out of my reverie. I stiffened, listening in disbelief to the faint thumping of a drum. This was not my imagination. The sound was real, and it grew in volume as I listened, insistent in its beat, pervasive as it rose from beyond the farthest longhouse.

  A drum sounding in this very real Indian village! The curtain had gone up and the play had begun.

  3

  I swung about, listening, suddenly lost again in my own imagining. For a moment, the village around me belonged to a real past, so that the sound I heard came down to me from another century.

  But my common sense told me these were not ghostly hands playing a drum. I listened intently. The first beat came down hard, followed by two lighter taps on a different note—the whole repeated over and over, as though it might go on forever. I slipped from my perch and started along the path of white dust that led past the stake and on among the huts.

  As I moved, the drumbeat changed to a steady booming—first on a low note, then shifting gradually up the scale to something higher. I had never heard a drum as versatile as this and I wanted a glimpse of the player before he saw me. Somehow, I knew it was a man playing the drum, though a woman could have held those sticks just as well.

  The sounds seemed to come from one of the smaller huts at the far end of the village. As I drew near, I noticed that part of the bark had been stripped away, or perhaps had disintegrated, from this hut, so that I could stand outside and look through open basketwork to the interior. A man sat cross-legged before the drum, which was a large oblong wooden box. Thick gray hair, shaggy as a mop, tumbled over his forehead, joining eyebrows equally thick and shaggy. A beard so tangled that it was almost neat in its matting started below a full lower lip and hid his chin. His eyes were closed and brown gnarled hands held the drumsticks with loose wrists, so that they seemed to move of their own volition.

  Since he didn’t see me, I had time to examine this strange spectacle. He wore corduroy pants, colorless from many washings, and his brown shirt had seen a good many mendings. Though he was unkempt, he didn’t seem dirty, and I suspected that he bathed in mountain streams.

  Increasingly curious, I moved around to stand below the open space of the door, where I could view him without the interference of basketwork squares.

  The drumbeat grew more monotonous now. While he couldn’t have seen or heard me, he knew that I was there. Suddenly, he paused with both drumsticks in the air and tilted his head back so that he could see beneath a fall of hair that was as rough as the gray bark outside the hut. I found myself staring into sharp blue eyes that didn’t welcome the sight of me.

  After the drum, the ensuing silence seemed to reverberate with accusation, and I broke it hesitantly. “Hello. Your playing is wonderful.”

  His two drumsticks had round orange plastic heads, and he dropped the sticks into holes at the front corners of the drum. Then he jumped up and rushed toward me so swiftly and unexpectedly that I might have been knocked over if I hadn’t jumped out of his way. I watched in astonishment as he dashed off between huts and disappeared into the woods—a scarecrow figure with extraordinarily long arms and legs. The forest wall looked solid as he hurled himself into the green barrier, but he must have known where a path lay, for in a moment it was as though hardly a leaf had stirred. He simply disappeared, leaving his drum behind.

  “You frightened him,” said a voice behind me, a voice I had never been able to forget.

  I turned to face the man who watched me. All the defenses I had built up against a first meeting with Gordon vanished. I felt as though someone had wiped away the years and I was nineteen again—with no sense at all and my wounds out in the open for anyone to see.

  “Hello, Lauren,” he said. “I didn’t know you’d arrived.”

  “I—I was suddenly able to get away, so I just booked a flight and came. I stopped in your mother’s shop, but she didn’t know where to find you.” As I spoke, I was trying to get myself in hand. I hadn’t dreamed that I would be so shaken by the sight of him.

  This was an older Gordon, and I sensed an inner stillness about him that hadn’t been there before—a stillness that seemed to wait and listen.

  I found myself almost chattering to conceal my reaction. “A few minutes ago, I thought I was the only inhabitant of this movie set. Now it appears to be populated. Who is the wild man who was playing the drum?”

  He accepted my lead. “That’s Grandpa Ty. He’s what folks used to call a mountain man, though he hasn’t always been one. Nobody knows exactly where he lives now—probably in one of the many caves around here. He’s harmless unless you upset him. Which you seem to have done.”

  “He almost knocked me down.”

  “Almost is the key word. He didn’t even graze you. He’s probably developed almost an animal sense about the physical world.”

  This conversation seemed totally unreal. I wasn’t even thinking about the old man anymore. Suddenly, we both stopped talking and stared at each other. I didn’t know what either of us was looking for, but I was the one to drop my eyes first. Neither of us was the same person we’d been in San Francisco. We were strangers all over again—people who didn’t know each other at all. Or could we ever really be strangers?

  He was smiling, though I didn’t understand the source of his amusement until he spoke.

  “Ty was Victoria Frazer’s younger brother. Which makes him—what?—your great-uncle?”

  I tried to hide my surprise at this information. “Then Gretchen Frazer, who runs the lodge, is also his sister?”

  Gordon nodded, losing interest in the Frazers. “What took you so long to come here after Jim died?”

  Gordon was the main reason I’d never come, but I could hardly tell him that, so I went off on a tangent. “Your wild man left his drum behind.”

  “It’s not his drum—it’s mine. I keep it up here for him to play, since the sound seems to belong to the mountains.”

  He stepped past me into the hut, picked up a large canvas square, and started to cover the drum.

  An impulse seized me. “I’ve never seen a drum like this before. Do you mind if I try?”

  I didn’t give him time to mind, but joined him inside the hut and picked up the two sticks with their round orange heads. When I bounced these lightly, the sounds were dissonant. I stopped to study the surface of the wood more carefully.

  “The drum is hollow,” Gordon told me. “The top—all those small sections—have been carved from a single piece of wood and then fitted to the rest. Each one carries its own tone.”

  He took the drumsticks from me. “Let me show you,” he said, and tapped the wood more lightly than the old man had done. The sound was almost hypnotic in its repetition. Now he seemed aware only of the drum, so I was able to watch him openly.

  His faded blue jeans and gray work shirt, unbuttoned at the throat, were outdoor clothing. His rather square face with its determined chin had never fit any obvious category of male good looks. To me, he had always seemed individual—different—a complete contrast to Jim Castle. His hair was straight and thick and slightly reddish—an inheritance from his mother, undoubtedly.

  Watching him, I
felt increasingly shaken, far more disturbed by this meeting than I cared to be. Needing to be farther away from him, I stepped down outside the hut and looked around.

  “This is such a beautiful spot—peaceful,” I said when he stopped playing.

  “It wasn’t quiet while the movie company was here.” He dropped the sticks into their slots and covered the drum. Then he lifted the large block of wood and stepped down beside me.

  “Why did you come now?” he asked.

  I didn’t answer for a moment. “You wrote me that Jim’s death was an accident. Please tell me what happened.”

  That air of inner calm was still there and his movements seemed unhurried as he turned toward another part of the village, speaking to me over his shoulder.

  “I’ll need to put this out of the weather. The wood is sensitive to temperature changes.”

  He hadn’t answered my question, and I followed him to the longhouse that had been used to serve the movie company. Inside, he went directly to the abandoned refrigerator and opened the big door, storing the drum inside. An ingenious solution.

  “I’ll show you where Jim died,” he said as he rejoined me, and we started across the village.

  “Why did you come here now?” he repeated.

  “I didn’t mean to come at all. It always seemed too painful after Jim died. Perhaps I never would have, but someone wrote me a note asking me to come. The note implied that Jim had been murdered. After talking with your mother and learning about Natalie Brandt, I began to suspect that this had come from her. The person who wrote me signed the letter with the initial N. But why wouldn’t she have suspected foul play sooner?”

  We walked on toward an unfinished longhouse and I found myself all too aware of his nearness, of wanting to look and yet not daring to. “You may be right about Natalie,” he said. “She didn’t know what I suspected until recently. From the first, I’ve had a strange feeling about what happened, but I had no proof.”

  “Why didn’t you write to me about this?”

  “What good would that have done? I don’t know what Natalie thinks you can do now. A short time ago, she came up here with me and I sounded out my suspicions because they were troubling me. Natalie can be pretty emotional, so she must have embellished what I said in her own imaginative way and then written to you.”

  “If Jim’s death wasn’t an accident, I need to know what happened.”

  We walked past the ominous stake, which gave me the creeps, even though it was only make-believe. White dust spurted from beneath our feet and I wondered how long it would take for green growth to reclaim its own right to the land.

  Gordon stopped and I stood beside him. “That’s where the log that killed him fell.” He spoke quietly, sadly.

  Slender saplings curved over the unfinished roof of the longhouse. I puzzled aloud: “Nothing here seems heavy enough to do any damage.”

  “Look around at the finished longhouses and you’ll see that they’re all propped up by strong tree trunks. There’s one missing here—the one that fell.”

  “But if it wasn’t an accident—how could anything like that be planned?” None of this seemed real to me—especially not my husband’s death in this place. Or that I should be standing here beside a man I’d once loved—and given up.

  “It couldn’t have been planned, but perhaps someone simply waited for an opportunity. If a tree that formed a support was pried loose from its lashing and Jim happened to be standing beneath it, someone could have pushed it down easily. Someone who came here with him and whom he trusted. But who? That’s the part that stumps me; I can’t think of anyone who didn’t like Jim Castle.”

  “I don’t understand why he was up here in the first place. An Indian village wouldn’t belong in a documentary about Roger Brandt, would it?”

  “I think Jim was trying to think of a logical way to lure Roger up here. The village fascinated him and he wanted to find a way to use it in his film.”

  “That would have been like Jim. When did you begin to suspect that it wasn’t an accident?”

  “Ty figured it out. His instincts run deep and he was obsessed by Jim’s death. They’d struck up a friendship because Jim accepted the old guy as he is, warts and all. So Ty is the one who finally made me believe that what happened was deliberate.”

  I was still questioning, reluctant to believe. “Perhaps the wood rotted and it was Jim’s bad luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time?”

  “Ty thinks that log wouldn’t have come down on its own for years—that it had to have had help. But what he believed and my gut feelings aren’t any sort of proof. The police were satisfied at the time that it was an accident. Somehow, though, it wouldn’t let me be. Finally, I had to talk to somebody about Ty’s claim. Natalie was deeply troubled by Jim’s death, so I brought her here to talk it all out with me. I wanted to show her what might have happened, see if we could both believe it. What I told her put her into high gear, apparently, though I think it was foolish of her to get you involved in this.”

  Natalie and Jim, I thought. Logical, of course—that was the way Jim had been with pretty women. The movie village seemed to close in around me with its sense of a wilder, more primitive time. Or had it been, really? Today, violence was an everyday affair in many places. So why not here?

  “Natalie has done some sketches of this place—pretty haunting stuff,” Gordon said, watching me. “She’s tried to sell them, but she doesn’t have much luck. I think they scare people.”

  I remembered the painting of the spaceship coming down in the vivid lightning of a storm. Natalie Brandt would have even more to tell me.

  Gordon moved off away from me, walking the length of the nearest longhouse. I watched him, wishing I could rid myself of my memories, my old feelings. We had both married other people. I had been the first to make that choice. Since then, he had been divorced and my husband had died. Whatever attraction he had felt for me was surely over long ago. I must remember that.

  Suddenly, Gordon turned to look at me. “Natalie had a feeling that Jim wanted you to come here. She thinks he’s been trying to reach her since his death and that you might be a catalyst.”

  This startled me. “Do you believe that?”

  “I don’t disbelieve.” He looked off toward distant mountains, and I was reminded again that he’d sometimes revealed a mystical side in the past.

  He came back to me abruptly. “Anyway, you’re here, and Natalie seems to have brought this about.”

  A deepening sadness filled me. A sadness that a woman I had never met had felt my husband’s death more profoundly than I. Sadness for Jim’s lost gifts. Sadness, too, for the love Gordon and I had allowed to slip out of our hands, a lost love that would never come again. If I had chosen a different fork in the road—what then? But that didn’t bear thinking about.

  I walked to where a big tree trunk, stripped of its limbs, lay on the ground. It was the one that might have supported a side of the longhouse that was beginning to sag.

  “Is this the log that killed Jim?”

  He nodded, not wanting to tell me. “Lauren, I’m sorry—”

  “What can I do?” I spoke the words aloud, but they were addressed only to me. I didn’t expect him to know.

  He spoke abruptly. “Let’s get out of here. This isn’t a good place for us to talk.” He looked around as though the trees themselves might be listening, and I wondered whether Ty Frazer still lingered out there. “It’s nearly noon, so let’s go down to Chimney Rock for lunch. Then we can try to sort things out. Natalie should never have brought you here, and perhaps you shouldn’t stay. I don’t think there is anything you can do, and as Jim’s wife you may not be entirely safe.”

  I didn’t want to accept that idea and I didn’t want to leave; there was still my connection with Victoria Frazer to hold me here. I didn’t mean to be frightened away, whether I could do anything about Jim or not. And there was still the matter of a grandfather I couldn’t help being curious about. I
needed more time.

  “Lunch will be fine,” I told him.

  “Good. Then let’s get back to our cars and you can follow me down the mountain.”

  I went with him, turning my back on the ghostly Indian village. I didn’t think I would come here again—which is an example of how little we can ever foretell the future.

  Once I was behind the wheel, Gordon loped down the road ahead in a long-legged stride that I remembered. By the time I drew up beside his Jeep, he was ready to lead the way.

  The bumpy road seemed shorter going down. When we reached the open area around the tiny chamber of commerce building, he parked nearby and I left my Ford beside his Jeep. Below us, the highway narrowed, forming the bottleneck for which there was no cure.

  On foot, we followed the narrow verge at the side of the road for a short distance and then crossed to a small restaurant where Gordon was greeted as a friend. We took the one remaining booth and were given flatware wrapped in paper napkins. When the waitress had taken our orders and gone, I asked a question that had been troubling me since I’d seen the place in the village where Jim had died.

  “Are you sure Jim didn’t make any enemies while he was here? I know he could be pretty pushy in order to get what he wanted, so I wondered—”

  “Not enemies—as I told you, everyone seemed to like him. Of course there were a lot of people who were curious about what he would do with the Roger Brandt story—especially when it came to Victoria Frazer. But I don’t think he stirred up any real resentment. Natalie told me that Roger actually relaxed and talked to him. And even Camilla Brandt, Roger’s wife, seemed to accept what Jim was doing, though she was against it at first. She guards her husband’s well-being carefully.”

  I sensed an uneasiness—something Gordon wasn’t saying. When the waitress arrived with a sizzling hamburger for him, along with my chef’s salad and two glasses of iced tea, I changed the subject.