Unfortunately, the thing that I learned from the map was where other similar places could be found. The family at the homestead was afraid of something. They had found places around the area to hide the things that really mattered to them and Agnes was on a hunt to find their jewelry. I was going to have to proceed very carefully. If one stash was watched the others could be too. They might have been long forgotten pockets of history, like the homestead. Or they might have been discovered and cleaned out long ago. Only finding them one by one would tell me. In my search I wasn’t really looking for the stash itself. I was looking for Agnes. I wondered a bit what I would do if I found her but I’d have to worry about that when the time came. I set rules for myself. I would always go to a map location armed, with handcuffs and cell phone. If I found Agnes and I had a chance I would call Rusty. If not, there was the gun and cuffs option.
Something bugged me about the guy on the dirt bike, though. If he was interested in the things under the floor of the homestead, why didn’t he get them out? And if he wasn’t, why did he care at all who poked around the ruins of the house? So many questions and so few answers. It seemed like the more answers I got the more questions popped up. The more questions popped up the more my mind fiddled with it. It would be a never-ending cycle until Agnes was caught. I had senior citizen events to watch over, places to track and stake out, and one diligent husband trying to stay one step ahead of me.
I scanned the map on the computer and then I cropped off pieces of it so I had little pocket-sized maps with only enough information on them to take me to one place. If I only had one map on me at a time and I got caught I could only give them something they already knew. So, one little map in hand, I headed for the car and took Palm Drive all the way west until it nearly hit the foothills. After that a long-dead dirt road went off through a fenced off field. I parked the car.
The brush was thick in the field. I was sure I could disappear easily in there, if needed, so I crouched and slipped through the barbed wire and followed the barely discernable road up into the hills. The road ended and I got the map out. I’d seen no sign of tracks going in but I wanted to find out if this place had hidden secrets, too. If each family had hidden things before ill fate had befallen them Agnes might have an extensive jewelry hunt on her hands. Knowing what was hidden at each location would tell me if they held any interest for Agnes. So I searched. The map simply showed the two roads with a dot off to the side. There were some symbols on the map. One I took to be a building and another appeared to mark a natural landmark. There was a symbol next to the building. The hillside was covered with thick brush so I decided finding the building first might help me pinpoint things better.
Even the building was hidden by brush. Again, it was simply a foundation. This one didn’t even have a chimney and what few pieces of the structure remained looked like burned wood. I walked the edges of the foundation, pulling brush away to see if there was space underneath. I couldn’t see any way under it. The symbol near the building on the map turned out to be an old well. I tossed a rock down it and was rewarded with a splash. Hmm, the well seemed like a death trap for a youngster out exploring. It also seemed like a place I should remember if I was ever stranded in this area without water.
I stood on the foundation looking for the natural landmark on the map. What was it? A large tree? A rock? A ridge? Nothing jumped out at me so I headed in the direction of the landmark on the map. As I hiked, the hillside became steep. It was rough going and I began to question the symbols on the map. Maybe there was no significance to the dots but the foundation and the well told me otherwise. The building symbol had meant something and the well symbol had meant something. Now, what did a sideways Y stand for?
As I walked I naturally watched for tracks, but I didn’t see any tracks here, not even old ones. It was too far off the beaten path. No one would think to follow a road that had been fenced off and dead for fifty years. I’d only been able to tell it was a road from the ruts. It was covered over with weeds and only a person used to noticing changes in the ground would see it at all.
I spent the whole day trudging through a small cleft in the hills looking for a landmark or a hiding place of some kind. I knew a hiding place could be small, a pile of rocks over an animal den, some valuables bound in fabric and stuffed in a hollow tree, a box buried. It could take a long time to find even one stash and there were six of them. I didn’t even know if Agnes was following her map. She may have just noticed something very old and taken an interest in it just like I had. But even if I never saw Agnes this was interesting and keeping me out of trouble. I enjoyed the hunt. The puzzle of finding the place and seeking something hidden displaced the puzzle of finding Agnes. Agnes was Rusty’s job. I had gotten interested in it because of our similar natures but Rusty would be glad I had something else to pursue, as long as he didn’t know it involved a map from the homestead.
Animal tracks distracted me and I found myself nose to the ground up a game trail with a young doe just ahead. She stayed out of reach of me and climbed farther up into the hills. I shook my head to clear it. I wasn’t out tracking, I reminded myself. I was searching for something. I turned around and made my way back to the foundation.
I stood at what I thought would have been the front door of the house. I looked at the countryside around me. If I were living here, the natural thing for me to do to go up in the hills would be to follow that little wash where the two hills met. It wasn’t as steep and was easy walking. It led somewhere. It was the path of least resistance, especially before the land had gone wild, so that’s the natural direction people would have walked. I looked at the map and it sort of matched. I’d have to follow it to be sure.
I didn’t find anything that day. I looked in burnt out trees. I poked my head in animal dens. I walked for miles watching for anything that looked like a place a person would choose to hide something. I watched for anything man made. I came home empty handed but cheerful. I’d been out in the hills. I’d put miles beneath my feet. I had a goal and everything seemed right, if not productive. It was something I was enjoying and if something interesting happened along the way so much the better.
“You look cheerful today,” Rusty said after work.
“I do? I had fun today. I went tracking. I saw a doe. She was on the move though so I didn’t bother stalking her.”
“Where’d you go?”
“Out on the west side of town, in the grassy foothills. There are lots of game trails through the grass.”
He was satisfied with my answer and I thought, “Whew.”
I decided to search one map area per day. Hopefully I’d run into Agnes’s tracks and that would send me in another direction but until then the plan was to locate as many places on the map as I could in six days.
The next map took me to the west side of town again. It was out in the open in the middle of farmlands. Out here in the desert you don’t see miles and miles of green fields like you might back east. Out here the farms are spread apart and separated by miles of desert. There will be a hundred acres of alfalfa or onions or carrots, surrounded by cactus, mesquite and Joshua trees. That’s the way this farmland was. Dirt roads ran along side of the fields allowing me to get closer to the area on the map, but I was uneasy. The car would be discovered and my actions questioned. I decided it was too risky and backed out of that one. I went home and chose a different map.
This map took me way out west, almost to Gorman. I had to guess at the roads. The street signs had names now, unlike when the map was made. The map only showed lines. I’d brought up a modern mapping program on Rusty’s computer and matched up the patterns to get an idea of where this place was, but it was only a guess. As I drove I saw fields of poppies and I thought I could play the dumb tourist if somebody asked me what I was doing out there. People from all over the country came out there to look at the poppy fields. Of course most of them didn’t carry a 45 across their back. Hmm, maybe I should have gone for the 9mm. One road led to another and with each turn the roads got smaller and smaller. I really needed my Jeep. This rental car was designed for businessmen to drive from their hotel to meetings or from Joshua Hills to the airport. Dirt roads off in the boonies were foreign to it. It bumped and lurched and I worried about getting stuck. When the car had gone about as far as I thought it would go I got out and walked. Had I known about the poppies in this area I would have traded the rifle in for the pistol and brought a camera so I’d blend in with all the other people wandering around semi lost in the hills.
I got out the map again and tried to guess where I was on it. It wasn’t a topo map and it wasn’t necessarily to scale so it was all guess work. The road got rougher and rougher until I decided walking beside it was easier than walking on it. Poppies grew on the shoulders of the road, a bright orange path through the desert. When the road ended I looked for a building or a ruin but I didn’t see one. There was farmland to the west and north, desert to the south and east. I decided the building would be more likely to be near the fields, a homestead abandoned after a bigger house was built. I searched the outskirts of the land, not wanting to venture onto private property. I compared the land around me to the map, then set boundaries that looked logical. The area that matched the building on the map was surrounded by barbed wire fences. Every quarter mile or so a sun-bleached sign hung. The signs facing south and west were faded beyond recognition but the ones facing north and east were still barely readable. They said, in red lettering: Danger! Keep out! I had to park on the south end of the field so I didn’t read the signs until I’d already crossed the field. I ducked under the barbed wire fence and began my search.
I crisscrossed the land watching for any signs of a building or a hiding place. The terrain here was low rolling hills, with miles of dry grassland, brush, cactus and Joshua trees. It looked like it might have been good grazing land way back in the 1920’s but one match and the whole place would go poof. It was dry as a tinderbox. The area seemed to have an unusual number of bones, bleached white by the sun and half covered by sand.
As I walked I kept noticing odd wires down in the brush. I stepped over them wondering where the rest of the fence was. Then I noticed that the wires were not lying loose on the ground. They were placed about ankle high.
When the thoughts about the wires niggled at my brain long enough, my trouble radar started going off. The next time I had to step over a wire I knelt down and looked more closely at it. Without touching it, I followed it to its starting point. I didn’t have far to go. It was connected to a cyanide gun hidden down in the weeds. Yikes! The field was booby-trapped!
Cyanide guns were usually used to control nuisance predators around ranches. A piece of meat was attached to the top and when a coyote tried to take the meat the poison would explode into its mouth The powder would hit the saliva and a chemical reaction produced cyanide gas, eventually killing the animal.
Damn! I’d been stepping over these wires for hours! I was lucky I kept an eye on the ground. Then I thought about what might happen to Agnes if she were to try the same thing. I looked for the car. It was a half-mile away. Half a mile of booby-trapped field. I was torn. On one hand, if the thing hidden in this field was worth guarding with booby traps I wanted to see what it was. On the other hand, I could die doing it. It wasn’t a death I looked forward to. I should carefully exit the field as soon as possible, and alert somebody. I did not want Agnes to stumble on this field the same way I had. I pulled out my cell phone.
“Hey, there, how are you?” Rusty said pleasantly.
“Fine, for now,” I said uneasily. “I’ve got something here that needs investigating.”
He didn’t like the sound of that. “What is it?” he asked.
“It’s a field. I’ll give you directions but don’t let the guys step off the road. It’s booby trapped with cyanide guns. Do you know what a cyanide gun is?”
“Yeah,” he said grimly.
“So far I’ve only seen one but I’ve been stepping over trip wires for hours. I’m going to head for the car and I’ll check out the trip wires on the way.”
“Cass, where are you?”
“I’ll see you at the car. Don’t let the guys leave the road.”
“Cassidy! Don’t move.”
“I’ll be careful, you know I will.”
“Please, just wait. You have everything with you that you’d have at the car. There’s no reason to risk it.”
“I can show you what to look for.”
He tried reasoning with me and I listened, then I gave him directions and, after we hung up, I picked my way carefully to the car. I found three more trip wires, also attached to cyanide guns. How much of an area had they covered? It was impossible to find them in all that brush. Only my natural habit of watching the ground for tracks had saved my skin. When I reached the car I retraced my steps to the last cyanide gun I’d found. One end of the trip wire was attached to the cyanide gun, the other to a stake in the ground. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble. There must have been a dozen of the things scattered in the field.
A single patrol car drove up the dirt road, lights flashing. Rusty leaped out as soon as the car stopped.
“We really need to get me another Jeep. This car is useless,” I said.
“I told you to say put,” he said.
“I’ve got one of the guns marked so you can see what’s out there.”
I started into the field and he jerked me back.
“Rusty, I’ve been out there for hours. Walking twenty feet down a path I’ve marked isn’t going to trigger anything.”
“For hours? What were you doing out here?”
“Looking for something. Look, here’s one of the traps. It’s attached to a stake on this end and a cyanide gun on the other. Usually these things are stuck down into the ground. Someone wanted to keep people out of this field. These guns are positioned specifically to target people. Someone is in big trouble.”
“Yeah. You. Cass… this wire is invisible in amongst the weeds.”
“You forget. I can see invisible things. I saw the wires; I just assumed they were part of a fence until I thought about it and looked closer. By the time I knew what they were I was a half mile that way,” I said pointing. “That’s where I was when I talked to you.”
He ran his fingers through his hair and counted to twenty. He wasn’t angry, not yet, but he wasn’t sure how he should respond to this little adventure of mine.
About a half hour later a HAZMAT team arrived and pulled on protective suits making them look like tacky astronauts. Rusty talked to one of the men who approached me and asked to see the trap I’d marked.
“How many are there?”
“I have no clue. I’m guessing I stepped over a dozen or so trip wires but I was crisscrossing the area so I may have missed a lot.”
“What area have you covered?”
“About half this fenced off area,” I answered, pointing. “The eastern half.”
“So we’ve got a square mile of cyanide guns to find?”
“I don’t know about the land past the roads. Oh, and I found more of them towards the center of the area than I did on the sides.”
They went into an alien looking huddle and Rusty jerked me out of there and took me back to town before I could try anything else. He took me to his office and slapped the report on the desk that I needed to fill out.
“Why that field?” He demanded.
“I reasoned it out that that field had what I was looking for.”
“What made you think that?”
“A map. And I looked up the location on your computer.”
“What did you expect to find there?”
“I didn’t know. That’s one reason I was having a hard time finding it.”
“You went twenty miles out of town to look in some random field for some random object and you just happened to find the one field in the whole valley that is booby trapped?”
“Semi random, but yeah.”
“Cassidy, do you know how close a call that was?”
“Yeah, that’s why I called it in. I didn’t want somebody else to stumble on it.”
“And I suppose, if it had only been a danger to you, you would have just written it off as another adventure.”
“I knew somebody might be coming there and I didn’t want them to get hurt.”
“And who might that be? What other person did you expect to target that particular field?”
“Agnes.”
That baffled him for a bit but he chose to ignore it.
“Did you leave a note on the fridge? Would I have been able to find you if something had happened? Babe, cyanide is nothing to play around with!”
“I wasn’t playing around with it. I stopped what I was doing and I called you as soon as I realized what was going on. And I did leave a note on the fridge but I ended up with a change of plans because the first place I tried looking seemed too dangerous.”
“What in the world was more dangerous than cyanide guns?”
“People.”