The Mural Read online

  Shining the light around, he saw nothing of value inside, except for a stack of wood that was obviously for the fire, and a white object on the floor. Training his light on it, Jack saw that it was a ruined child’s doll, a baby figure dressed in a filthy, ragged cloth nightgown. Had it been in better shape, he might have rescued it, cleaned it up and had it appraised. It was not everyday that one stumbled over a 1930s era toy. But this one was in such a state of decay that it could not possibly have any value. Jack’s thoughts shifted to the doll’s original owner, whoever she was. Living in this glorified lumber camp couldn’t have been easy for a kid.

  After circling the house and dictating a few more notes, Jack Hayden slipped the microcassette back in his jacket pocket and from another one pulled out his digital camera, and photographed the place from each side. He had sat in on only one client meeting with the unsmiling wealth monkeys from Resort Partners, LLC, the Las Vegas firm that was committed to the notion of turning the ghost town of Wood City into a new getaway resort, but it was enough to know that they would never believe that the existing buildings could not be salvaged without photographic proof.

  Once finished, he slid the camera back into his pocket (and even though people had been bugging him to get a camera phone, which took up much less pocket space, Jack preferred a separate camera) and went off in search of the other buildings. What he found were mostly footprints and artifacts, a collapsed fireplace here, a foundation block there, even a small sink at one site. Five cabin-sized houses still retained walls though their roofs had fallen in. For all his diligence in trudging through the dirt and pushing through tangles of brush, Jack had come upon nothing that was salvageable for future use. Nothing. The entire site would have to be razed.

  His phone rang again, and this time he answered it immediately, fearing that it might be Elley calling to tell him that Robynn’s spots were not simply hives.

  “Hi, Jack, it’s Yolanda.”

  Damn. “Hey, Yoli, what’s up? Or do I want to know?”

  Yolanda Valdera was Marcus Broarty’s personal secretary. She was a pleasant, professional, and highly competent young woman with the patience of a horse and the kind of beauty that stopped traffic, even in L.A.. The latter, Jack knew, was the primary reason she was hired, despite her efficiency as a worker and ability to get along with anyone inside Crane Commercial Building Engineering, even assholes like Marcus. Jack sometimes wondered if it was not really Yolanda who kept the company running.

  “I have Mr. Broarty for you.”

  “My empty life is now complete,” Jack said, and at the other end of the line was the sharp snort that meant Yolanda was stifling a laugh.

  “I’ll put him through,” she said.

  You can put him through the sewer line to clean it, Jack thought.

  Marcus Broarty’s voice came on the line. “I’m a busy man, Jack, so don’t keep me in suspense. Tell me what you’re finding up there in our central coast paradise.”

  “Not much, I’m afraid.”

  “Those are discouraging words, Jack. I don’t want to hear any negativity.”

  Christ. “I know, but believe me, Marc, it isn’t good.” Jack Hayden gave his boss a rundown of the notes he had recorded. When he was done, Broarty asked: “Can’t anything be fixed up?”

  “When I get back to the motel, I’ll email you the pictures and you can see for yourself.”

  “And you inspected each building, right?”

  “I haven’t found the commercial area of the town yet, but the residential structures can’t even be called buildings anymore.”

  “Shit. Those are what Emac was most hoping to rehabilitate.”

  Emac was Egon McMenamin, the director of expansion for Resort Partners, and the man who was responsible for Jack’s firm being brought in on the project. That nickname was what McMenamin insisted with forced joviality that all his acquaintances call him. If Jack’s parents had been so sadistic as to saddle him with a name like Egon, he’d probably be insisting on a pseudonym too.

  “These are wood structures, Marc, and they don’t look like they were made very well to begin with. They’ve been exposed to the elements for more than seventy years, so you can’t expect them to hold up. Emac has to understand that.”

  “That kind of attitude is not being helpful, Jack.”

  Jack closed his eyes, feeling a headache coming on. “I’m not giving you attitude, Marc, I’m giving you the truth. I’m standing here looking at unsafe, unsound ruins. I wish I could change that fact, but I can’t.”

  “Well, then, Jacko, I guess you’d better start thinking about how you’re going to break the news to Emac.”

  “How I’m going to break the news?” Jack said, a little more sharply than he had intended.

  “You’re the one who’s seeing the conditions of these buildings, not me. You’re the one with the first-hand knowledge.”

  Right, and if someone has to take a hit for telling the truth, it’s certainly not going to be Mr. MBA, which within the company stood for Marcus Broarty, Asshole. “All right,” Jack sighed. Right now, all he really wanted was to get Broarty out of his ear. “Maybe I’ll find something more encouraging closer to the business district.”

  “That’s the spirit. I want to hear good news when you call back, as I’m sure Emac does. I don’t have to tell you that this is a big client for us. We can’t screw it up. Bye, Jack.” The line cut off.

  Jack exhaled loudly. “If a man contemplates killing his boss in a forest, and no one is around to hear it, can he still be charged with criminal intent?” he asked the woods. Slipping the phone back in his shirt pocket, Jack trudged on to find if anything at all was left of the tiny commercial area of Wood City. He could see nothing ahead of him that could be construed as shops or office buildings. In fact, a quarter-mile or so up from the last house foundation, the road appeared to stop at a small grove of uncut trees and brush. The mist now seemed to be heavier, wetter, and Jack lifted up the collar of his jacket in a futile attempt to keep the cold air from going straight down his neck.

  Leaving the identifiable path, Jack began hiking through the brush, squeezing through the tangle wherever he could. I should have brought a frigging machete, he thought. It was hard, tiring work, particularly in the chill and dampness, and Jack was on the verge of giving up and going back, at least for the day, when he saw it.

  Through the foliage he could make out a high, square, official looking stone building, looming out of the green like a lost Incan temple. As he fought his way to it, traces of the old road once more became visible beneath his feet. According to the surveyor’s map, there should have been eight structures in the downtown district, though he could only see this one. The closer he came to it, though, the more visible the ruins of the others became; they were mostly foundation blocks poking up out of the ground every here and there like a wino’s smile.

  Apparently, every other building except this one had been constructed of wood, like the houses, which meant they suffered the same fate, though the skeletal remains of iron playground apparatus identified one of them as a school. The stone building, which had managed to defy the decades of neglect and punishing weather, was identifiable by the carving in the granite lintel above the arched front door: City Hall. The doors themselves were gone, and the portal in which they had once hung gaped blackly like a cave entrance.

  Retrieving his recorder as he walked around the structure, Jack Hayden said into the mike: “City hall building appears to be largely intact, with no visible cracks in exterior walls. Windows and doors are gone, not surprisingly, though as near as I can tell through visual inspection, the foundation looks sound.” Clicking the pause button, Jack trained the beam of his flashlight into the opening and, taking careful steps, walked into the dark building.

  The interior was a complete mess. The floor was covered with layers of dirt and chunks of plaster that had fallen from the ceiling. A ruined chandelier hung down like a forgotten criminal’s body from a gibbet. Amid
st the rubble were fragments of broken furniture and partitions, which once defined offices in the building. Some of the interior walls had fallen away to reveal the outer stone layer while others still retained traces of wood paneling.

  After making as thorough an inspection as was possible under the circumstances, Jack switched his recording back on and said: “Interior of city hall in an extreme state of distress, but cannot see anything that indicates structural instability. With enough people dedicated to the effort, and enough cleanser, this building probably could be rehabilitated for use again.” But Jesus, he thought, I’d hate to be responsible for cleaning this place up.

  Clicking off the recorder, Jack set the flashlight down on a heap of plaster chips and pulled out his camera, checking it against the light bema to make certain it was set for flash. Pointing it at one side wall, he clicked the button and waited until the flash went off, then checked the screen to see if anything had been captured. It had: the picture showed the stained, moldy paneling quite clearly. He took a few more shots from different angles and then turned to the other wall the floor and the ceiling. Last to be shot was the back wall, which oddly appeared to be made of poured concrete. Training the camera on it he clicked the button and peered through the viewfinder as the flash went off.

  What Jack Hayden saw in that lightning second through the camera made him jump back and cry out, involuntarily. Tripping on a pile of rubble, he fell backwards, landing hard on his backside. He did not even notice the pain, however. He was still too shaken.

  He had seen a face in the momentary flash. A human face, looking back at him.

  Struggling to his feet, Jack rushed back to the open door, his heart pounding, and cried, “Who’s in there?”

  There was no answer.

  “If you’re there, show yourself. I’m not going to do anything to you.”

  No one responded.

  Jack called out again, and then began to wonder if his imagination had not gotten the better of him. There was one way to find out. He pulled up the last shot he had taken. Staring into the small screen, tilting it back and forth to catch the best light, Jack Hayden once more saw the face, though this time it was clear that it was not the face of a living being. Its stylization revealed it for what it was. “Oh, good god,” he laughed.

  Moving back into the dark building, he picked up his flashlight and held it up to the wall. The face he had seen was a painting, though it was not inside of a frame. It seemed to be painted directly onto the wall. As he approached it, he could see that it was the face of a woman, one that stared out from behind a curtain of gray, and for the first time Jack realized that the wall was not made of concrete, but plaster that had been painted over with heavy gray paint. A chunk of the ceiling sat on the floor directly in front of it, and Jack guessed that it had fallen in just the right place as to shave away the paint on the way down. With his fingernail he chipped away at the gray covering, enough to reveal more painted surface underneath. After a minute’s worth of chipping, this time using his keys, he uncovered a portion of another face.

  “I’ll be damned,” he whispered. The style of the artwork was the kind he had seen in Depression-era public works projects. Into the tape recorder he said: “The back wall of the city hall building is decorated with what appears to be an old WPA mural, which at some point in time was painted over. From what I can see of it, this mural appears to be in good enough condition to warrant restoration. Note...be sure to bring this up with Emac since this definitely adds a few new wrinkles to things. Get the preservation people involved and maybe they’ll pay for the restoration.”

  Who knew? Maybe there was some potential life in Lost Pines Resort after all. Maybe once word got out about the discovery of the mural artwork, if it’s really something special, Resort Partners could obtain grant or foundation money to build the resort from scratch, with minimal out-of-pocket expense. Wouldn’t they love that! Suddenly Jack was no longer dreading having to confront Emac McMenamin.

  Clicking the machine off, he slipped it back into his pocket and picked the camera back up, taking several additional shots of the revealed mural. Maybe he should get his marketing whiz of a wife involved to get her take on how to hype this thing. An historic, lost icon of California’s progressive past; a masterpiece newly discovered and brought to you by Resort Partners, LLC! And now you can own two weeks of this miraculous discovery every year—

  “Who am I kidding,” Jack said, laughing. Even though Elley had the marketing ability to sell abstinence brochures to sailors on shore leave, Resort Partners would never pay for her.

  Surprisingly, it had not been a bad day’s work. The buildings were still rubble, but at least he now had an angle, and Jack knew from experience that angles were also acceptable in lieu of reality, particularly if Marcus Broarty was involved. Not bad at all, and he was already tasting the cold beer waiting for him at the hotel.

  As he was making his way out of the city hall building, Jack Hayden also realized that he was hungry, too. The trek back to his truck made him even more so, despite the fact that it was much easier to walk downhill out of the woods than it had been to fight his way in. The fog had lifted, too, warming the day considerably, and even the thicket across the road seemed less of a problem to get through. His only discomfort came when slid behind the wheel and realized how much his tailbone still hurt from his pratfall back at the city hall.

  Turning the truck around in the woods was a challenge, but once he had managed, Jack made it back to the highway in no time. From there it was only six miles to his motel, a comfortable, if slightly sterile, place called the Tide Pool Inn, which was on the beachside tourist strip of San Simeon, a couple of miles from the original tiny village that had once serviced William Randolph Hearst and the creation of his legendary palace of opulence high above the ocean.

  After bolting down a burger and a few beers in the motel restaurant, Jack returned to his room and set up his laptop on top of the bed. After powering it up, he plugged in his camera in order to download the photos. While waiting for the two digital devices to do their thing, he phoned Elley at her work number.

  “How’s the patient?”

  “Impatient is more like it,” she replied. “It was hives, just as I suspected, but we had to wait forever before we saw the doctor. Half the day was shot.”

  “Well, she probably enjoyed having a surprise morning with her mom.”

  “Look, I have to go into a meeting. Is there anything else?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Okay. Bye.”

  “Bye,” Jack said to the disconnected phone line. Turning back to his computer, he saw that the download had been completed. Setting it for a slide show, he watched one picture after another, still somewhat amazed that the lighting was so good, only through flash illumination. When he came to the first picture of the back wall, he laughed all over again at how frightened the sight of the painted face had made him, and gave thanks that Broarty, or anyone else for that matter, had not been there to hear him scream like a girl and fall on his ass. But when the closer pictures of the mural figure’s face came up, he paused the slide show, stopping it to study them carefully. Jack frowned. The face in the photos did not look quite the same as it had when he looked at it in the building. It was still a woman’s face, but the expression now appeared slightly different. The figure’s eyes now seemed to bore into his. It had to be a trick of the light flash, but it was a damned weird one. Even weirder was the fact that even the feature seemed to have subtly changed. They looked a little more refined, a little sharper; certainly different than before.

  The picture now changed to the next sequential image in the slide show, and Jack leapt backward off of the bed.

  It was a painting of Elley, his wife, staring back at him from his laptop, her eyes wide and insane, her mouth twisted into an evil grin.

  “My god!” he panted, covering his eyes, groping his way backward until he collided with the wall. A moment later he felt like a fool. Th
is is stupid, Jack though. There had to be a photo of her already on the memory stick and it just popped up.

  Then why did she look so thoroughly evil?

  My mind; or else fatigue; or maybe too many beers; or maybe not enough; I don’t know.

  Slowly Jack cracked open one eye, then the other, and forced himself to look at the laptop. The woman’s face remained on the screen, but it was not Elley. It was the face in the mural, altered, if at all, only by the combination of the flashlight and the camera flash, being used simultaneously. “God,” Jack muttered. He was a pussy. For the second time that day, he was glad to have been alone in his moment of supreme cowardice.

  Going back to the bed, Jack closed the slide show, put the pictures in a file, and as quickly as he could, emailed them to Broarty. Then he powered off the machine and vowed to leave it off for the rest of the night.

  It was not even six o’clock yet. Jack had already eaten, and nothing on the television appealed to him. He decided to go down to the motel shop and see if they had a pair of swim trunks in his size (they would probably be exorbitant, but he’d find a way to expense them), and then check out the pool area. Maybe what he needed most right now was to soak his aching butt in some warm water. Maybe it would relax him enough so that he could get a good night’s sleep.