Maddie Ellis and the Malibu Movie Colony is an old-fashioned mystery serial set during the end of the silent movie era. In chapter 16, Maddie Ellis takes a break from the story’s growing mystery with a trip to Topanga Canyon. Join us as we travel back in time to February 1928.
The gray weather perversely arrived every weekend for the rest of the month just in time to rain on one’s plans, but Maddie was determined not to let it dampen her spirits. She had lived in London for five years. This winter weather was positively balmy in comparison. She was not going to spend another Sunday chained to her typewriter or doing the dusting, just on account of a bit of drizzle. The dust could wait. Topanga Canyon was, by all accounts, a beautiful drive. She would drive it, and see for herself. She packed a sandwich, an orange, and a thermos of coffee, put the top up on the little red Nash Roadster to keep the rain out, grabbed her coat, and set out down the road.
Maddie’s first car had been a battered Ford, the kind called with derisive affection a “Tin Lizzie.” She had often driven out on the coast in the days when Las Flores Canyon had been the end of the road and motorists could go no farther, but she had never explored Topanga Canyon out of concern that the old car wouldn’t survive a trip up the steep and winding road.
Traffic was light on the highway that day, and her little red car purred smoothly along the road, ready for adventure and as unlike its faithful but claptrap old predecessor as anything could be. Maddie felt a surge of delight as she turned onto the canyon road. This was someplace new, someplace she had never seen before. Not a big adventure perhaps, but a lovely pocket-sized one, and she meant to enjoy every minute of it, rain or no rain.
The clouds clung to the coast, but as soon as she had driven a little way up the canyon road, the sun began to break through. It was beautiful. The narrow road wound through the deep canyon with towering cliffs on either side and enormous boulders below. It was a good road, paved and smooth. The air was filled with the scent of rain-washed sage and sumac. Willows and sycamores grew by the side of the road in profusion, a few yellow autumn leaves still clinging to their branches, even though it was now February.
Maddie was fascinated by the rock formations. They were pocked with holes and small caves that looked like eyes and open mouths. In some places the sandstone was filled with small, round cobbles that made the cliffs resemble the crumbling walls of an ancient fortress, but this was the work of nature, not human endeavor.
She stopped at a small turnout shaded by a stand of California bay trees where a couple of other motorists were gathered and found a spring flowing from a pipe in the wall of the cliff into a basin made from what looked like an old cattle trough. An elderly man and a boy were filling bottles. Another motorist waited with a vinegar jug. By the spring was a scrap of wood that bore the message:
“Let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely—Revelation, 22:17”
“Is it good water?” Maddie asked.
“The best,” the old man said. “Pure and sweet, and good for the body and the soul.”
Not having anything to fill with water except her thermos, which was still full of coffee, Maddie drew off her driving gloves and put them in her pocket. When it was her turn at the spring, she cupped her hands and drank. The water was cold and clear, with no hint of brackishness. The aromatic bay trees filled the air with their sharp, bright scent. Once the other automobiles departed it was very still. A hummingbird, like a living jewel, darted into her vision. It was so close she could hear the whir of its wings and see each iridescent feather. She watched it hover by the spring and saw the bird’s thin tongue emerge to drink. The bird appeared motionless, its wings moving so quickly they were a blur. A second later, it was gone. Maddie realized she was holding her breath.
She got back in her car and drove on. Soon she arrived in the inhabited part of the canyon. There were houses and shacks by the road, and mailboxes that showed where other homes, farms, and ranches were hidden out of sight.
She stopped at a roadside farm stand and bought eggs and honey. A little farther up the road she stopped again, this time at a small shack with a sign in front that proclaimed “art for sale.” She bought two small oil paintings from the artist, a tall, thin man in his shirtsleeves with paint on his cuffs. One of the paintings was of the ocean, a swirl of peacock-blue as clear as glass, streaked with pale seafoam; the other was a swatch of mountainside, dusty gold with shadowy mountains in the distance against a heartbreakingly blue sky. She paid the artist what seemed a ridiculously small sum for such beautiful things and asked if he could recommend a good place for a picnic. He could and did.
Maddie ate her sandwich perched on a large boulder above a rain-swelled creek that rushed loudly among the rocks below her. High above, a pair of hawks glided in lazy circles above her, calling to each other with piercing voices.
It didn’t take long to reach the summit at the top of the canyon. The view was worth the drive, but Maddie was dismayed to find a ramshackle collection of buildings there, including a rickety two-story viewing deck—“five cents, and the kiddies are free!”—that blocked much of the view, and an enormous billboard advertising “Arrowhead Ginger Ale.”
A representative selection of ginger ale bottles and other beverage containers littered the ground. The parking lot was crowded with motorists, queuing up to pay five cents, buying—and eating—ice creams and candy bars, and admiring the view. The spell cast by the beautiful drive up to the summit was broken.
People have the most amazing knack for ruining things, Maddie reflected to herself, as she waited for an opportunity to turn around and drive out of the parking lot. She thought about continuing down into the valley, but decided it was time to head for home. The clouds were gathering again, threatening more rain.
She stopped by the spring at the side of the road on her way back down the canyon and rinsed and filled her now-empty thermos with water, sprinkling a little at the base of the cliff as a libation for the genius loci—the spirit of the place.
Maddie pulled into the filling station at the bottom of the hill just in time to see a big, black, Cadillac sedan turn off of the highway, cross the canyon road, and head into a narrow lane behind the station. She wondered where the Cadillac was going. A ritzy vehicle like that seemed incongruous on a muddy road miles from anywhere. That lane used to be the coast route, Maddie remembered. Now the much wider highway, and the bridge over Topanga Creek, were right at the coast, and the old lane was a thoroughfare no longer.
Less than a minute later, a sleek and powerful sports car roared off the highway and turned into the lane. Maddie was interested in cars, and took a close look at this one. She hadn’t seen anything quite like it. With a shock of recognition, she realized it was driven by Johnny Roberts with Lulu Desmond in the passenger seat. Maddie, filled with curiosity, asked the attendant where they were going.
“Gentlemen’s club,” he grunted. He was a taciturn man in a shabby fishing hat and oil-stained overalls. “Back there. No place for ladies. You don’t want to be there when the sheriff shuts it down, miss, and they will, sooner than later. That’s what happened to the last place like that. Came in with guns drawn and the works, better than one of them cowboy movies. That’ll be two dollars and twenty seven cents, miss.”
“Do you mean it’s a speakeasy?” Maddie asked, handing him the money for the gas.
“You didn’t hear it from me,” he said, and would say no more.
Maddie had only been back in the States for a little more than a month, after five years away from arbitrary laws regarding alcohol consumption. The whole concept of a speakeasy was as much a fairytale in London or any major European city, as anything she had written for Sands of Afar. She had, of course, heard of the illegal trade in alcohol that had sprung up in the wake of Prohibition. Speakeasies, blind pigs, gin mills, blind tigers, whatever name they went by were already around when she left for Europe in 1923, but the law had not affected her directly. She hadn’t the time, money or inclination to imbibe.
Now she was filled with curiosity. Instead of heading home, she turned onto the lane and drove slowly down it. There was a surprising number of shacks, cabins, and houses hidden among the willows and sycamore trees. No one seemed to be around, but there was a row of cars parked in front of a dilapidated building. This must be the speakeasy.
It seemed unlikely that Roberts would come all this way just to drink bathtub gin when there were probably dozens of more citified locations in town. Perhaps he was on his way to the Colony and merely stopped to refresh himself. But why go to Malibu on a rainy Sunday evening, when any of the weekenders who had braved the weather would have already headed back to town? And why was he here with Lulu?
Who knows why Hollywood people do anything? Maddie told herself, but she resolved to find out.
