Blaylock, James P - Langdon St Ives 02 (20 page)

 
          
 
A nap was out of the question. But what would
I do instead? I would go to the icehouse. There was no percentage in my
pretending to be Abner Benbow any longer. Might I disguise myself? A putty nose
and a wig might accomplish something. I dismissed the idea. That was the sort
of thing they would expect. My only trump card was that they would have no
notion of my having returned to
Sterne
Bay
.

 
          
 
Still, I wouldn't take any unnecessary risks.
I was ready for them now. I went out through the second-story door at the back
of the inn, and down rickety steps that led out past a weedy bit of garden and
through a gate, right to the edge of the bay. A half score of rowboats were
serried along a dock of rotting wooden planks that ran out into the water fifty
good yards or so before becoming a mere thicket of broken pilings. There was no
one about.

 
          
 
The tide was out, leaving a little stretch of
shingle running along beside a low stone seawall. I clambered down and picked
my way along the shingle, thinking to emerge into the village some distance
from the Apple, so that if they were onto me, and someone was watching the inn,
I'd confound them.

 
          
 
Some hundred yards down, I slipped back over
the seawall and followed a narrow boardwalk between two vine-covered cottages,
squeezing out from between them only a little ways down from where my beggar
man was shot before he could borrow any money from me. I hiked along pretty
briskly toward the icehouse, but the open door of The Hoisted Pint brought me
up short.

 
          
 
I had never discovered whether my rubber
elephant inhabited a room there, largely because I had been coy, playing the
detective, and was overcome by the woman behind the counter, who, I was pretty
sure, had taken me for a natural fool. The truth of it is that I'm too easily
put off by an embarrassment. This time I wouldn't be. I angled toward the door,
up the steps, and into the foyer. She stood as ever, meddling with receipts,
and seemed not to recognize me at all. My hearty, ''Hello again," merely
caused her to squint.

 
          
 
She pushed her spectacles down her nose and
looked at me over them. "Yes?" she said.

 
          
 
Somehow the notion of her having forgotten me,
after all the rigamarole just a few days earlier, put an edge on my tone. I was
through being pleasant. I can't stand cheeky superiority in people, especially
in clerks and waiters, who have nothing to recommend them but the fact of their
being employed. What was this woman but a high-toned clerk? Perhaps she owned the
inn; perhaps she didn't. There was nothing in any of it that justified her
putting on airs.

 
          
 
"See here," I said, leaning on the
counter, "I'm looking for a woman and her son. I believe they're staying
here or at any rate were staying here last week. They look remarkably alike,
frighteningly so, if you take my meaning. The son, who might be as old as
thirty, carries with him an India-rubber elephant that makes a noise."

 
          
 
"A noise?'' she said, apparently having
digested nothing of the rest of my little speech. The notion of an elephant
making a noise, of my having gone anatomical on her, had shattered her ability
to understand the clearest sort of English, had obliterated reason and logic.

 
          
 
"Never mind the noise," I said,
losing my temper. "Disregard it." I caught myself, remembering St.
Ives's dealings with the landlady at the Crown and Apple. Tread softly, I
reminded myself, and I forced a smile. "That's right. It's the woman and
her son that I wanted to ask you about. She's my mother's cousin, you see. I
got a letter in the post, saying that she and her son—that would be, what? my
cousin twice removed, little Billy, we used to call him, although that wasn't
his name, not actually—anyway, that she's here on holiday, and I'm anxious to
determine where she's staying."

 
          
 
The woman still looked down her nose at me,
waiting for me to go on, as if what I had said so far hadn't made half enough
sense, couldn't have begun to express what it was I wanted.

 
          
 
I winked at her and brassed right along.
"I asked myself, '
Where
in all of Sterne Bay is
my mother's favorite cousin likely to stay? Why, in the prettiest inn that the
town has to offer. That's the ticket.' And straightaway I came here, and I'm
standing before you now to discover whether she is indeed lodged at this
inn."

 
          
 
That ought to have made it clear to the woman,
and apparently it did, for the next thing she said was, "What is the
lady's name?" in a sort of schoolteacher's voice, a tone that never fails
to freeze my blood—doubly so this time because I hadn't any earthly idea what
the woman's name was.

 
          
 
"She has several," I said weakly, my
brain stuttering.
"In the Spanish tradition.
She
might be registered under Larson, with
an
0."

 
          
 
I waited, drumming my fingers on the oak
counter as she perused the register. Why had I picked Larson? I can't tell you.
It was the first name that came to mind, like Abner Benbow.

 
          
 
"I'm sorry," she said, looking up at
me.

 
          
 
"Perhaps . . .,"1 said, gesturing
toward the book. She hesitated, but apparently couldn't think of any good
reason to keep it away from me; there was nothing in what I asked to make her
suspicious, and she wouldn't, I suppose, want to insult the favored cousin
several times removed of one of her registered guests. So she pushed her
glasses back up her nose, sniffed at me, and turned the book around on the
counter.

 
          
 
Fat lot of good it would do me. / didn't know
what the woman's name was. What sort of charade was I playing? The rubber
elephant had been my only clue, and that hadn't fetched any information out of
her. If I brought it back into the conversation now, she'd call the constable
and I'd find myself strapped to a bed in Colney Hatch. I was entirely at sea,
groping for anything at all to keep me afloat.

 
          
 
I gave the list a perfunctory glance, ready to
thank her and leave. One of the names nearly flew out at me: Pule, Leona Pule.

 
          
 
Suddenly I knew the identity of the madman in
the coach. I knew who the mother was. I seemed to know a thousand things, and
from that knowledge sprang two thousand fresh mysteries. It had been Willis
Pule that had stolen my elephant. I should have seen it, but it had been years
since he had contrived a wormlike desire for my wife Dorothy, my fiancee then.
You wouldn't call it love; not if you knew him. He went mad when he couldn't
possess her, and very nearly murdered any number of people. He was an
apprentice of Dr. Narbondo at the time, but they fell out, and Pule was last
seen insane, comatose in the back of Narbondo's wagon, being driven away toward
an uncertain fate.

 
          
 
I noted the room number. They hadn't left.
They might be upstairs at the moment. The nonsense in the coach—his taking the
elephant—was that a charade? Was that his way of toying with me? Was it Willis
Pule that had shot my beggar man? I thanked the woman at the counter and
stepped away up the shadowy stairs, half thinking to discover whether from room
312 a man might have a clear rifle shot down toward the green.

 
          
 
I'll admit it: right then I was foolishly
proud of myself for being "on the case," and was half wondering about
the connection between Pule's grandfather and the elder Narbondo, which
mirrored, if I saw things aright, the relationship between Pule and the doctor.
How did Higgins fit, though? Had he discovered references to the lost
alchemical papers that had ruined Mrs. Pule's family? Had he thought to revive
Narbondo in order to enlist his aid in finding them? And now they were all
skulking about in
Sterne
Bay
, perhaps, carrying out their deadly plans
for the machine, waiting for the ransom, thawing Narbondo out slowly at the
icehouse.

 
          
 
I felt awfully alone at the moment, and wished
heartily that St. Ives and Hasbro weren't off doing whatever they were doing.
The stairs creaked. The evening sunlight filtering through the landing windows
was insufficient, and the deepening shadows above me seemed to be a waiting
ambush as I stepped cautiously out onto the dim third-floor landing.

 
          
 
An empty hallway stretched away in either
direction. Room 312 was either up or down; it didn't matter to me, for it was
clear at once that the landing window would suffice if what you wanted to do
was shoot a man. The iron hinges of the double casement were rusted. I got onto
my hands and knees and peered at the floor in the failing light. It was swept
clean, except for right along the floor moldings, where flakes of rust dusted
the very corner. The window wasn't opened very often; but it had been recently.
The varnished wood of the sill was etched with a scraped indentation where
someone had forced open the jammed casement, the wood beneath the scratch still
fresh and clean, barely even dusty.

 
          
 
I slipped the latch and pulled, but the old
window, swollen by sea air and the wet spring weather, was jammed shut. I
wiggled it open just far enough to wedge my fingers in behind it, and then it
was easy enough to work the window open, scraping it again across the sill. I
leaned out then, peering through the gloom toward the green where the beggar
had died.

 
          
 
The sounds of the village settling into
evening struck me as being very pleasant, and the rush of sea wind in my face
awakened me from the morbid reverie of dread that I'd slipped into while
climbing the darkened stairs. I could even see the lights of the Crown and
Apple, and they reminded me of supper and a pint. But then I looked down three
long stories to the paving stones of the courtyard below, and with a dreadful
shudder I was reminded of danger in all its manifold guises, and I bent back
into the safety of the hallway, imagining sudden hands pushing against the
small of my back, and me tumbling out and falling headlong . . . Being handed a
bomb in a basket has that effect on me.

 
          
 
I knew what I had to know. Confrontations
would accomplish nothing, especially when I had no idea on earth what it was,
exactly, I would discover upon knocking on the door of the Pules' room. Better
to think about it over supper. ,

 
          
 
I forced the window shut, then stood up and
turned around, thinking to steal back down the stairs and away. But I found
myself staring into the face of the ghastly Mrs. Pule, the woman in Godall's
shop.

 
          
 
I GASPED OUT a sort of hoarse yip while she
grinned out of that melon face of hers—a hollow grin, empty of any real
amusement. She pointed a revolver at me.

 
          
 
Down the hall we went. I would be visiting
their room after all, and I'll admit that I didn't like the notion a bit. What
would St. Ives do? Whirl around and disarm her? Talk her out of whatever grisly
notion she had in mind? Prevail upon her better judgment? I didn't know how to
do any of that, St. Ives wouldn't have gotten himself into this mess in the
first place.

 
          
 
She knocked twice on the door of the room,
then paused, then knocked once. It swung open, but nobody stood there; whoever
had opened the door was hidden behind it, not wanting to be seen. Who would it
be? Captain Bowker, perhaps
, waiting
to lambaste me
with a truncheon. I couldn't have that. Ignoring the revolver, I ducked away to
the left into the room and spun around to face whoever it was that would emerge
when the door swung shut.