CHAPTER 32

Susanville is a small town, at four thousand feet elevation on the edge of the Nevada border. Originally a lumber town, now its biggest employers are the two prisons on the outskirts of town. I found a small cottage behind an old Victorian house, and the woman in her seventies who lived in the house was happy to rent her cottage to me for what would have been a pittance in Marin County, “A hundred and fifty dollars a month,” she said. “Is that too much?”

“No,” I replied, and pressed the cash into her hand.

“So you’re a carpenter?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll find work here. What we need is a good handyman, somebody who can put up shelves and replace a window and build some steps. Can you do those sort of things?”

“You bet.”

I moved into the cottage, had a telephone installed and made a small advertisement that I pinned up on the bulletin boards at the grocery stores, a coffee shop and the hardware store. EXPERIENCED CARPENTER. NO JOB TOO SMALL. There were strips to tear off with my new telephone number. Everything was cash for me. No bank account, and I found an old truck rusting behind a service station that still had license plates. I took them, fashioned what looked like a current sticker on the corner of the plate and drove carefully.

It was the second week when Mrs. Carlson cornered me. I had already done two jobs as a handyman, neither one of them paying much, but it was a start. “A man was looking for you,” she said.

“He wanted me to do a job for him?”

“He didn’t say so. He said he was looking for the owner of your Toyota. He had the name wrong and I told him so. I caught him snooping around your cottage. He was a big man, maybe the biggest I ever saw, and I saw a lot of big men when my husband was alive and the mills were working. But this man was built like a truck, if you know what I mean.”

“When was he here?”

“You must have gone down to the grocery store. Your car was still here, but there was no sign of you, so I guessed that you walked to the store. Yesterday afternoon.”

Somebody looking for me. How could anyone know I was in Susanville? I was seven hours from Marin, and nearly three hundred miles. Then I remembered that I had gassed up the car in Chico and again that first night I was in Susanville, using my Standard Oil credit card. It was the only noncash purchase I had made, and Winslow was the CEO of an oil company, and a few phone calls was all it would take for him to get the history of my card use. And he had somebody sniffing around. I would have to move again. And this time I would have to be more careful.

“If he comes around again, would you let me know?” I said.

“By all means. He didn’t look like the kind of man who was up to any good. I had half a mind to call the sheriff.”

“No, don’t call the sheriff. And thanks for letting me know.”