Read Online Where Echoes Live by Marcia Muller - Free Book Online

frightened easily—or would normally admit to it. And there were the still-unexplained break-ins at Ripinsky’s home, the trailers, and the lodge. Plus the person who’d spied on me in the tufa forest, the additional break-in last night, the call to All Souls.
    Besides, the sense of wrongness was particularly strong in this little box canyon—too strong for a place whose only resident had simply gone on a gambling-and-womanizing spree in Nevada.
    I don’t believe in the supernatural, but I do believe that sometimes places can absorb the emotions surrounding events that have happened there. A house where people have been happy has a good feel. A place of misery never seems quite right. Crime scenes—especially those of homicides— are the worst of all, filled with an aura of rage and desperation and pain.
    I got up and began looking around. The area behind the cabin, between it and the cliff face, was full of rusted prospecting gear, tools, and cast-off automotive parts. I circled the building, trying the windows, but they were securely locked. I might have been able to justify going inside had one been left open, but in no way did the circumstances warrant an illegal forced entry. Turning away, I covered the surrounding area foot by foot in widening semicircles; then I crossed the stream, stepping from rock to rock, and began to search the opposite bank.
    And smelled something putrid.
    It didn’t take long to pinpoint the source of the smell: behind a pair of man-sized boulders near the cliff face. My stomach lurched as I moved closer, and I thought, Oh, no …
    Reluctantly I made myself step around one of the boulders. And felt a flash of both revulsion and relief at what I saw.
    Earl Hopwood’s garbge dump. Its mounds of refuse looked as if they’d been years in the making, and were compacting and decaying just as slowly. Flies buzzed around them. The stench was bad enough to make me breathe shallowly through my mouth. I started to turn away, sure I couldn’t stomach any further investigation.
    But something caught my eye, a few feet away on top of the rotting mass. It was a jagged piece of wood that looked as if it had once been part of a crate. With a red-lettered word on it, not at all faded by the elements: “Dynamite.”
    Above that was the bottom of another line of letters. “Red Devil,” it looked like. A brand name.
    I glanced around, found a broken broom handle, and used it to pull the piece of crate toward me. It was slimy with some kind of decayed food, so I picked it up gingerly, carried it to the stream, and washed it. I wanted to take it with me as evidence—but of what, I hadn’t a clue.
    Dynamite, I thought. Dynamite was used by hard-rock miners to blast into hillsides. Dynamite was used by high-tech commercial miners like Transpacific.
    It was not used by prospectors for placer gold— prospectors like Lily Nickles and Earl Hopwood.
    So what had Hopwood been doing with an entire case of it?
    I decided to run this one by the Tiger Lily.
    The sun had sunk behind the hills by the time I got back to Promiseville; the derelict buildings were wrapped in purple shadow that made them look like ghosts of a romantic past rather than reminders of an era fraught with hardship and disappointment. The windows of Nickles’s house showed no light, and the Jeep was nowhere in sight.
    I stood on her front porch listening to the silence for a minute, and the feeling of lonesomeness she’d described stole over me. The headstones on the barren knoll across the valley caught the rays of the rising moon, seemed to glow phosphorescently through the encroaching darkness. I thought of Nickles sitting here night after night, looking out at the place where so many dreams were buried and perhaps going a little crazy. Although I was anxious to talk with her, I was glad she’d gotten out of here, if only for a little while.
    Back at my car, I locked the