CHAPTER ONE

The last body the search crews found was that of the porcine elderly Colonel Unger. He'd been buried under the mud for a week. Despite the look of death, the enormous belly, thin gray hair and bulbous nose could belong to no other. It was not unusual to find a drowned nude body but the big surprise came when the coroner discovered the back of the skull had been smashed in.

The Colonel was the owner of the mobile home park Maggie and I lived in along with fourteen hundred ninety-eight other people. That is, up till a week ago when it'd been trashed by a flash flood of mud and debris laden water from the surrounding hills. Three others died in the disaster but their bodies had been found much earlier in the search. Nobody missed the Colonel. It was thought he had left the day before on a vagabond trip with his young wife in their RV. They intended to call in from time to time en route so hadn't left an itinerary. Considering the remote places one could go with a self-contained RV, it was not unusual.

I'm Joe Bailey, 5' 10" light brown hair going grey, green eyes, 59 years old, going on 45, and in robust health. Maggie keeps me that way. Maggie's my silver-haired wife. She's 5' 2" and pretty as the day I married her. Most men are best at recalling the image of their wives on the day they were married. I always remember the day I first saw Maggie. Her parents home was on my paper route. I delivered a Star Ledger there.


A canvas sack of folded newspapers across the handlebars of my bike, I had just pumped my way up the steep hill at the beginning of Lake Street. My shirt was stuck to my skin. Sweat seeped into my eyes. I stopped to mop my forehead and throw a paper on the porch of the Brown's home. Maggie was standing on the sidewalk in front of the house. Three other kids were with her. I didn't know her name then. All were in swim suits. Hers was a two-piece solid chestnut color but it was hard to tell where the flesh began and the suit ended. Her skin was as brown as the material and her jet black hair stood out on her head like a 1960 Afro-American cut. She was taller than the other kids, slender as a willow reed and with only a hint of the body bumps that were to come later. I was only fourteen myself, but I knew immediately those curves were all in the right places. I also knew she lived in the lakeside house, although I couldn't ever remember seeing her before. Instead of throwing the paper, I handed it to her. Her dark brown eyes looked full into mine. She said, "Thank you Mr. Bailey." I was hooked. I don't remember throwing the papers to the next two or three homes. All I could think of for days was Maggie Brown. But that was another time.

I shudder to think back to that week of rain when the catch basin above the park overflowed and let go. The accumulated runoff from the excessive rain rumbled down the side of the mountain and into the bottom of Cactus Valley. It turned the beautiful and luxurious Mountain Shadow Mobile Home Park, once the pride of Tucalota, into history in less than an hour. A few of us, with our mobiles on higher ground, escaped damage. The whole park ended in a tangled mass of twisted metal and strewn household furnishings, all under three feet of red mud.

To the east, the stoic peaks of Mt. San Jacinto, looked down unmoved. Forty miles on the opposite side of the mountain, Palm Springs, plush and serene on the desert floor, hardly knew a catastrophe had happened.

Maggie and I arranged to have our home moved to Capricorn, a park closer to town. While the tearing down and setting up was taking place, we rented rooms at a local motel. The newspaper story about finding the bludgeoned body of Unger appeared in the local paper the day we moved back into our modular. Unger's wife, Dixie, twenty years younger than he, and attractive as a movie star, still hadn't been located. Searchers had given up thinking she might be buried under the mud.

"What do they mean, bludgeoned? Maggie squinted one eye and grimaced. "How do they know he wasn't clobbered with a chunk of debris, or the roof fell in on him?"

"Nature of the wound. Forensic's says it was administered with precision and focused force. Had to be by a person or persons unknown. Might even have been Dixie? Maybe she did it and flew the coop."

"You sound like a private eye in a cheap mystery novel. How'd you get so smart so fast?"

I tapped a forefinger to my temple.

"More likely you read it in the paper," Maggie poohed. "But don't worry, it wasn't Dixie. She's too nice a lady to do such a thing. She couldn't."

I shrugged. "The police will get to the bottom of it."
. . .
Capricorn was a new mobile home park. It wasn't nearly as elaborate as Mountain Shadow had been. Ollie Furt, among our old friends from Mountain Shadow, had already located there. Ollie was still as prissy-assed as ever. Despite his marriage to Mabel Gibson and his unflagging assistance to others during and after the disaster, he still reminded me of Bugs Bunny.

Maggie tried to get things reorganized inside our modular. Outside, I sweated over a new landscape. The phone rang. Maggie stuck her head out the door and hollered. I brushed the loose dirt from my trousers, pulled off the work gloves and went inside.

"Who is it?" I mumbled as I lifted the phone and put it to my ear. Little did I guess how my life was about to change.

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