Fire Evacuees Return, Hoping to Find Homes Instead of Ashes : Aftermath: Two charred bodies are found in Malibu, bringing the apparent death toll to three. Meanwhile, residents take stock of damage and begin making plans to rebuild.

The cycle of fire that has carved a wicked path across some of Southern California’s most resplendent terrain subsided further Thursday as weary firefighters came close to containing the smoldering Malibu blaze and scores of residents returned to find nothing of their charred homes but a spectacular ocean view.

In a scene that has been repeated with disturbing regularity, canyon dwellers spent the day sifting through ashy rubble in search of keepsakes while others marveled at the capriciousness of an inferno that spared their homes but left them without neighbors.

Late Thursday, two charred bodies were found in a burned-out car in Malibu, apparently raising the death toll to three.

The bodies were found near Rambla Pacifico, in a remote area of Starlight Ranch behind Carbon Canyon, by a sheriff’s helicopter pilot on patrol. He was assisting firefighters in checking burned-out areas when the car was seen, a Los Angeles County sheriff’s spokesman said. The pilot landed to investigate and found the bodies, which were so badly burned that he was unable to determine the sex of the victims.

The remains were discovered as firefighting crews were on the verge of containing the Calabasas/Malibu blaze.

Throughout the rugged hillsides above the fabled beach town, in enclaves both exclusive and rustic, friends greeted one another in the streets with tears and hugs. Now that the worst seemed to be over from Tuesday’s explosive firestorm, which scorched 18,000 acres, destroyed 350 homes and claimed one life, there was succor amid the debris.

“Roasted lemons!” exclaimed Robyn Morgan, 55, as she picked through the blackened garden of her leveled Carbon Canyon home. “Lemon meringue pie!”

Meanwhile, investigators searching for clues at the flash point of the fire announced that they have officially ruled that the blaze is an act of arson, but do not have any suspects.

Several witnesses said they saw two men in a blue pickup speed away from the fire’s first flames. Investigators confirmed that the two men were in the area, but said Thursday that they are considered witnesses, not suspects.

“We interviewed them. We let them go,” said sheriff’s Detective Jerome Beck, one of the investigators assigned to the case. “They’re not considered suspects.”

In an interview with The Times, one of the men in the truck said he and a friend were driving from the Malibu area toward the San Fernando Valley on Tuesday morning when they spotted a small brush fire on the hillside and tried to put it out before moving the truck farther down the hill. He said they returned on foot to help firefighters. He said he and his friend are volunteer firefighters.

“We were some of the first people on the scene,” the man said. “We smelled smoke.”

A day after dramatic fire battles were often thwarted by wind-whipped flames, the roller coaster Calabasas/Malibu blaze was 70% contained by Thursday morning and officials predicted it would be completely encircled by today.

One more home was consumed in Fernwood late Wednesday night, but the fire’s eastward march was halted by water-dropping helicopters before it could climb beyond Topanga Canyon. As a precaution, strike teams remained stationed about 2 1/2 miles away in the communities of Palisades Highlands and Castellammare.

“With the wind doing what it is doing right now, we don’t anticipate a problem,” Los Angeles City Assistant Fire Chief Tony Ennis said. “But since we don’t control the wind, we’re going to be ready.”

As forecasters predicted that moist ocean breezes would continue to replace the blistering Santa Ana winds, a sense of normality slowly returned to the picturesque community, which two days before had been engulfed in a tornado of searing embers and flying ash.

Blond, ponytailed surfers plunged into the sea. The message machine at Malibu Mammas, a domestic and nanny agency, was full of requests for weekend baby-sitters. Just as Catherine Alford, 27, returned to her beachfront apartment with her treasured collection of 700 Swatch watches, a UPS deliveryman pulled up in his truck.

“Alford?” he asked. It was a large package with another load of watches to add to her cache.

In an epilogue to the fire’s first known fatality, Elsa, the Siamese cat that 41-year-old filmmaker Duncan Gibbins gave his life trying to save, was found huddled beneath his Topanga Canyon guest house by a sheriff’s deputy on the lookout for looters and trespassers.

The cat, named after the lion in the movie “Born Free,” was taken to an Agoura animal shelter, where her singed paws were bandaged.

“I heard this cat underneath the house, meowing. It looked like a little kitten,” Deputy Steven Robinson said. “It wouldn’t come to me so I went to get some water to coax it out. Finally it came out and jumped on top of my head.”

Gibbins died Wednesday night in a burn center in Sherman Oaks. Earlier, the body of a woman who disappeared a year and a half of ago was uncovered by a brush fire near Point Mugu.

A sheriff’s spokesman said authorities are assuming that the two bodies found Thursday are fire victims. But the bodies were left at the scene overnight so that investigators can examine the scene this morning, authorities said.

A Toss of the Dice

The return to Malibu was nothing if not confusing.

Amid conflicting instructions, Los Angeles Police Department officers allowed some residents to travel up Pacific Coast Highway, but they were promptly turned around several miles later by Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies. California Highway Patrol officers said they were unsure who was to be let in and who was to be kept out.

As they were throughout the fire, when they managed to evade police blockades by hiking up and down the beach, residents continued to be resourceful. Three attorneys who live near the Pepperdine campus were so anxious to check on their homes that they tried to rent a helicopter for $1,000, but the pilot refused.

Two of the attorneys jumped in a kayak near the J. Paul Getty Museum and paddled nearly 10 miles up the coast.

On PCH, there was some light traffic, although most of it was still dominated by fire engines and police cars. A young boy wearing a mask over his nose pedaled his bicycle. A hot-rodder driving a rare, exotic sports car took advantage of the nearly deserted road to zoom up and down for about an hour. At one point, a big red McDonald’s mobile restaurant rumbled up the highway.

The Bambu restaurant at Pacific Coast Highway and Cross Creek Road--a trendy place often serving the rich and famous from the nearby Malibu Colony--has been catering to a different crowd for the last few days.

The Bambu’s patio was crowded with tired, grimy, unshaven firefighters Thursday afternoon--men and women who had come from as far as Northern California and Montana to battle the Calabasas/Malibu fire.

The restaurant’s co-owner, Jeanette Farr, said that by noon Thursday she had provided firefighters with about 1,200 free meals--among them swordfish and steak.

Farr said she had been away when the fire broke out, and when she returned she was amazed to find that firefighters had saved her restaurant and nearby home.

“We decided to say ‘thank you,’ ” she said.

Her only problem was that supplies were running low because food trucks had not been getting through. A friend who runs a nearby cafe--which was closed because of the fire--stopped to ask how she could help.

“Meat,” Farr said.

Up in the hillsides, there was humor, guilt and tears.

When 40-year-old Georgia Goodman arrived at the twisted remains of her family’s home on Paseo Hidalgo, she sat in her car for 15 minutes and cried. When she walked through what had been the front door, her knees buckled and she had to sit down.

“Where do we go first? How do we pick up and start all over?” she asked. “You just think about all those memories you created and that age-old question of why. Was I a bad person? I tried to clean up my karma.”

In hard-hit Las Flores Canyon, one man shouted to a woman whose house had escaped unscathed: “What did you do, stand there with a cross?” Another man walked down Calle del Barco, handing out business cards. “I’m a contractor,” he said. A neighbor, clearly perturbed, called back: “I’m an attorney.”

Nearby, Caroline Barry inspected what was left of her home of 26 years. Between two chimneys, she saw the white ash that she imagined was her book collection, which had stretched from floor to ceiling. Her piano was a skeleton of metal strings and a sounding board.

“Little things flash through your mind,” said Barry, 64, who recently retired as an English teacher at Venice High School. “I was going to get the piano tuned for Christmas and I hadn’t yet. I’m glad I saved that couple of hundred dollars.”

Sitting in his garage not far away, Tony Shafer’s eyes filled with tears. Shafer, a county fire captain, had spent Tuesday night defending his own home with a single hose while property all around him burned.

“I feel guilty that I am here and all my friends and neighbors’ houses are not, but it’s a grand and glorious feeling to stand against a fire and win,” said Shafer, a 31-year veteran who saved for 16 years to buy the land on which he built his home in 1981.

“People think Malibu is filled with movie stars and screenwriters,” he added. “It’s not. People come out to a neighborhood like this to get a little bit of Malibu, and this is what they can afford. These are retired teachers, firemen, lifeguards. This is real Malibu.”

In many cases, neighbors found the unexpected. Some of those who feared that their homes were lost discovered them still standing. Those whose homes were destroyed took some delight in imagining how they would look when rebuilt.

For Frank Morgan, a 72-year-old retired petroleum engineer, it looked even better than before. “We’re going to have all the little touches we wanted--maybe more deck, walk-in closets,” he said. “We’ll have it all in a year. Come back in a year.”

Building contractor Linda Patrick had spent Tuesday night with her husband at a Holiday Inn, sketching plans for a new house on a cocktail napkin after watching TV footage showing the fire station on their corner burn.

But when Patrick returned to Rambla Vista, she discovered her home was one of only two houses in the area still standing. She noticed that the note she had left for her husband when she evacuated was even pinned to the front door.

As she opened the door--which she had left unlocked when she fled--her telephone was ringing. “We certainly are the lucky ones,” said Patrick, who has lived in Malibu for 25 years.

Children’s book author Susan Rubin was not as lucky. All that was left of her home on Paseo Serra were two chimneys, still smoldering in the ash, and her mailbox. The letters inside it were unscathed.

Rubin, 54, was at a writers’ group meeting in Pasadena when the fire started and never got a chance to take anything from her home. All of her current writing, with the exception of some chapters faxed to her publisher earlier, was destroyed. She wasn’t sure about her dog, Maxie, who was nowhere to be found.

“Of all the days I wasn’t home,” Rubin said. “I’m just heartsick.”

Standing at the driveway of her home, where firefighters were still spraying water, Rubin made a list of what was still here. The note said: “The ocean is still here. The beach is still here. Some of the neighbors are still here and the jack-o-lanterns down the street.”

The scene was much the same up on Live Oak Road in the north end of Las Flores Canyon, where two neighbors saw their homes, and each other, for the first time since the flames chased them away in fear for their lives.

First to arrive was Stu Radstrom, 66, a retired math teacher, who sneaked past roadblocks to reach the ground on which his 3,200-square-foot ranch-style home once stood. He had lived here, among what had been lush greenery, since 1978. Now all he had to show for that life was a blackened satellite dish and a small stone and concrete goldfish pond.

As he surveyed the damage, his next-door neighbor, Scott Sigman, a clothing company executive, drove up with his wife, attorney Jill Berliner. They discovered their house intact thanks to firefighters, who had chopped down some burning trees, destroyed part of a white fence that was aflame and even moved their children’s plastic “Sesame Street” playhouse out of harm’s way.

The couple embraced Radstrom, gave him a beer, and offered to let him and his wife, Miriam, stay in their house while they rebuild.

“Stu’s been here 20 years,” Sigman said. “We’ve been here two years. Right at this second, I feel totally guilty that our house survived and his didn’t.”

Radstrom said there was no reason to be. “It’s a toss of the dice. You never know which way the wind’s gonna blow, or what’s gonna catch fire.”

A Real Basic Science

In the command posts that had buzzed like war rooms in recent days, the pace was slower, the voices were quieter.

“This thing is definitely coming to a close,” said Los Angeles County Fire Inspector Lee Gregory. “I just drove the whole perimeter of the fire and there were units all over the place--mostly just sitting around.”

The only remaining battle was around Fernwood and Tuna Canyon, where helicopters were trying to douse hot spots while strike teams kept watch in front of a few threatened homes. Most them appeared to have survived, but the canyon walls resembled a moonscape, covered with the charred remains of scrub oak and manzanita.

“It’s basically an air operation,” Los Angeles County Fire Capt. Larry Kirkham said. “It’s pretty quiet today. All we have are hot spots. We are still in the area just in case.”

With some of the commotion gone, fire officials were also able to get a better look at the charred terrain, significantly downscaling their estimate of burned land from 35,000 acres to 18,560. Capt. Steve Valenzuela, a county Fire Department spokesman, said officials had been deceived about the blaze’s size by the heavy smoke and rugged hillsides.

He added that there were no significant flames anywhere except for the eastern flank, although fire crews were also having difficulty setting up a containment line along the northern peaks because of the inaccessible terrain.

To control the fire, which would require enough buffer on all sides to assure that it could not spread, Valenzuela said fire crews would still need several days and favorable weather.

“Mother Nature has been the main reason we’ve been able to get a handle on it,” he said. “Firefighting is still a real basic science. You put the wet stuff on the red stuff.”

Although the scene was considerably calmer in Malibu, it was clear Thursday morning that edgy fire officials do not want to take any chances. When a small brush fire started burning in the Hollywood Hills near Mt. Olympus about 4 a.m., three water-dropping helicopters were dispatched along with about 40 firefighters, who had the blaze stomped out in about a hour.

Not far from there, a transient had been arrested Wednesday after neighbors complained about the smell of smoke from a charcoal campfire under a Hollywood Freeway overpass. On Thursday, the man was sentenced to 10 days in County Jail for setting an illegal fire.

Arson investigators looking for the cause of the Malibu blaze said the final determination that it was the work of an arsonist came only after officers eliminated every other possibility. No incendiary device has been found at the area where the fire started, near a small rock bluff on a hillside overlooking Old Topanga Canyon Road.

“There is no evidence of an accidental fire or anything to indicate that the fire was accidentally started,” Sheriff’s Department arson investigator Ron Ablott said. “There’s only one thing that could cause that to ignite . . . and that’s an open flame.”

One of the occupants of the blue truck, who witnesses said were acting suspiciously at the scene, said in an interview that he and his friend were heading north along Old Topanga Canyon Road, destined for the Valley, where they were supposed to be building a fence for a friend.

As they neared the top of the ridge, the man said, they smelled smoke and stopped. At first they could not see any signs of fire, he added, though he did recall seeing a car speed by them.

With that, he said, he and his friend clambered back into their truck. As they drove off, he said, they saw flames along the hillside and headed up a dirt road leading to a water tank.

He said he and his friend grabbed the hose attached to the tank and tried unsuccessfully to douse the blaze. Their effort was joined, he said, by a construction worker.

As the fire spread, he said they jumped back into their pickup truck and sped down the hill to get the truck out of the fire’s path, returning on foot to offer more help. Several witnesses remember seeing the two men speeding away in the truck, prompting at least one witness to conclude that the men might have set the fire.

As sheriff’s deputies continued to seek clues in the Calabasas/Malibu fire, two unusual arrests attracted the interest of Southern California authorities searching for the arsonists responsible for lighting other fires throughout the region during the past 10 days.

In Ventura County, sheriff’s deputies and Fire Department investigators spoke with Joseph Patrick Wescott, 37, who was arrested in Westlake after authorities received word of a suspected arson in progress. They found Wescott in the branches of a tree that was on fire, and they flushed him out of the tree using fire hoses.

Wescott suffered minor injuries in the fall. He was booked at the East Valley Sheriff’s Station jail on suspicion of arson. But Detective Dennis Reed, an arson investigator for the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department, said investigators there did not have any evidence to link Wescott to any fire other than the one he allegedly set in the tree.

The Toll

All of the wildfires that cut across six Southern California counties over the last nine days were largely under control by Thursday evening. As of 5 p.m., authorities reported the following figures:

* FIRES: 18 total. The Calabasas/Malibu fire was declared 70% contained. The Altadena, Banning and Thousand Oaks fires are 100% contained, and the 14 others have been extinguished.

* ACRES BURNED: About 219,543 in six counties.

* DAMAGE: At least 1,084 homes and structures damaged or destroyed.

* DEATHS: One burn victim; two other bodies found.

* INJURIES: 111 firefighters and residents, including one critically burned.

* EVACUATIONS: More than 30,000.