Death Through the Looking Glass (16 page)

The tour for Lyon was a kaleidoscope of impressions: long cutting tables where moving knives shaped dozens of patterns at once, high-speed sewing machines connecting the various parts of the Wobblies, and stuffing machines which pounded fill material into the monsters at the rate of a dozen a minute. He stood before a one-way mirror watching the testing room where small children played with new toys and games.

Fingers tapped his elbow. “We're moving to the cafeteria for refreshments, sir.”

“We haven't been in the east wing yet.”

“That's the research department, where new lines are developed, but I'm afraid it's off-limits for us.”

“Secrets?”

“Oh, yes. New lines must be kept from the competition until the toys are on the market.”

“That's interesting. What are they developing?”

“I really don't know.” She handed out illustrated brochures and began to shoo the group toward the cafeteria.

“A rest room?”

“Second door to the left.”

As he walked toward the rest rooms, he saw the guide disappear into the cafeteria with her entourage. He hurried down the hall toward the east wing until he came to a heavy metal door with a red and white
RESTRICTED AREA
sign. He tried the handle, found that it turned, and stepped inside.

He found himself in a large, well-lighted workroom. “Hold it right there!” The security guard reached for the walkie-talkie snapped to his belt.

Within three minutes, Damon Snow was ushering Lyon from the east wing. “If you wanted a tour of the factory, I would have gladly given you one myself.”

“I'm interested in the east wing.”

“No can do, Lyon. You can't imagine how cutthroat toy competition is. I wouldn't let my own mother in there.”

“You've always said I was part of the Cedarcrest toy family.”

“So's my mother.”

12

Kimberly Ward sat on the ground at the edge of the stand of pines and stared morosely down from the promontory toward the river. Distant night sounds provided an appropriate background for her unease. Nutmeg Hill loomed darkly behind her. She shook her head in an attempt to break the gloom. A hot bath, milk, and a dull book to fall asleep with might do it. Or she could take the car out on country roads and drive the limit until dawn streaked the sky and exhaustion enabled her to tumble into bed.

At first she had thought her state of mind was without cause, an occasional happening that overtook her without warning. It could have been caused by the day's earlier incident at her office, when an employee had accused her of reverse bigotry—favoring blacks over whites. She shook her head violently and thought of her daughter away at school, immersed in African studies, dressed in Swahili robes, who now accused her mother of being an Oreo. “I've got to be either one or the other,” she said aloud.

She looked up at the dim figure moving toward her across the lawn and smiled. “That you, Lyon? Come talk to me. I'm in a real funk.” She stood and started toward him.

The blow startled her more than it hurt, but its force was sufficient to knock her sprawling backward against a pine trunk.

“Hey!” The running figure passed and was lost in the pines, and she yelled: “God damn it! You …” Her voice was lost in the night, and she crawled to her feet to look toward the darkened trees.

She hurried toward the main house. The back-door handle refused to budge. Locked? The Wentworths never locked the back door. She tried desperately to turn the handle back and forth, than began to knock on the windowpane. “Lyon! Bea!” They were both heavy sleepers. She ran around the house to the front door and found it also locked. It was impossible to enter the house through the combination storm-window/screens without destroying or removing the fixtures. She stood below the master-bedroom window and yelled.

Smoke curled through the living room window. Tongues of flame sputtered near the couch in the center of the room, and toward the front, fire leaped at the draperies. She knew that a large stone at the corner of the patio parapet was loose, and she threw it through the window. She put her legs over the sill and fell onto the floor. The choking smoke made her cough as she struggled for the stairs.

She fumbled with the door of the master bedroom, stumbled inside and lurched toward the bed to shake Bea's shoulder.

“Not again, Lyon,” the sleepy woman mumbled.

“Bea! Lyon! For God's sake, the place is on fire!”

They both awoke and sat up. Kim snapped on the overhead light and slammed the door shut as smoke billowed up the stairwell and into the room. Lyon coughed and reached for the bedstand telephone to dial 911. He looked at the receiver incredulously and dialed again. “The line's out!”

“Someone came from the house, hit me, and ran into the woods.”

Lyon nodded as he leaped from the bed into a pair of trousers. “We'd better go out the window.” He heaved a straight-backed chair against the window and screen, carrying glass and frame away from the house. He lowered Kim and Bea by their wrists as far as he could, then released them and let them fall to the ground. He sat on the sill a moment, trying to see the ground in the darkness below, and then pushed off. As he hit the ground, he bent his knees and fell to the side in order to absorb the impact.

“Everyone all right?”

“I'll phone from the cottage,” Kim said and took off at a full run toward her small house a hundred yards distant.

“I'm going to see if I can do anything with the fire extinguisher.”

It surprised him that the back door was locked. He elbowed a lower pane from the frame, reached through, and turned the handle. Putting a handkerchief against his face, he went into the kitchen and by memory located the extinguisher in its mountings next to the stove.

The fire seemed to have originated in the living room. He sprayed swatches of foam in front of him as he fought his way toward the flames licking their way up the draperies.

“My phone's out, too!” Kim yelled from behind him.

“Keep it from the ceiling beams or the whole place will go,” he said as he handed her the fire extinguisher and ran from the house. Although most of the instruments and equipment from the balloon gondola had been vandalized when he landed on the beach at Lantern City, the CB radio in the pickup was still intact.

He opened the truck and switched on Channel 9, the emergency frequency. Lyon had heard that Radio Emergency Associated Citizen Teams monitored the emergency channel on a twenty-four-hour basis. “This is an emergency! Can any REACT team hear me? I repeat, this is an emergency!”

When Lyon switched to receive, a voice answered immediately, “Middleberg REACT. State your problem.”

Lyon quickly gave the location of Nutmeg Hill and asked that the Murphysville Fire Department be called.

They stood on the edge of the yard lighted by the powerful searchlights on the fire trucks. The fire had been brought under control in less than an hour; two trucks had already left, and now the rubber-coated men were searching to make sure every vestige of the fire had been extinguished.

“They didn't have to chop the front door in,” Bea said softly. She stood forlornly by Lyon's side. Two large tears welled from her eyes and ran down her cheeks. She brushed them away with the back of her hand.

Lyon thought of the hundreds of hours they had worked on the house. He could see Bea, on her knees, refinishing a difficult floor by hand, or painting and scraping the widow's walk … and now half their home was destroyed.

Rocco Herbert flicked soot from his uniform as he stepped through the torn door. He stopped in front of Bea and put a gentle hand on her shoulder. “I'm sorry.”

Bea blinked away another tear. “YOU COVER THE FIRES, TOO?”

“Only when the origins are suspicious.”

“The phone lines were cut, doors were locked that shouldn't have been, and Kim was hit by someone running from the house.”

“And we found these,” Rocco said as he displayed a handful of rags. “For some reason this bunch didn't go up.”

Lyon took the rags and sniffed them. “Gasoline. Pretty obvious, isn't it?”

“Clear case of arson. We'll dust for prints, but I can't put much hope in that. What about you, Kim? Can you identify the man who ran past you?”

“I couldn't even swear it was a man. A person wearing dark clothes. That's all.”

Bea felt the rags. “Unbleached muslin. Odd material to use in setting a fire.”

“Unless you happen to have an awful lot of it,” Lyon said.

“I think the water did more damage than the fire,” Lyon said as they trudged through the shambles of the living room. They were throwing the irreparable pieces out on the front lawn for later trash pickup, and were trying to restore some semblance of order. The phone company had arrived early to repair the lines, and a crew of carpenters was already at work replacing window frames and sections of wall.

As Lyon and Bea carried the ruined divan out to the pile of trash, they saw two figures coming up the drive. Bea's fingers tightened on Lyon's arm. “I THINK YOU'VE GOT ABOUT EIGHT YARDS OF UNBLEACHED MUSLIN COMING UP THE ROAD.”

Lyon shaded his eyes. The girl was obviously a tousled and very tired Robin. He recognized the man as Winston, one of the disciples he and Rocco had interviewed in Blossom's office. Robin and Winston stopped to stare at the house. The early-morning wind whipped their robes backward in a trailing stream.

“What happened?” Robin asked as Bea felt the hem of her robe.

“I'd swear that it's the same material.”

“I'll call Rocco to have him run a match with the lab.”

“WHAT ARE YOU TWO DOING HERE?”

Winston posed as he directed his answer to Robin.

“We are apostates. I would tear these unholy robes from my body, except that …”

“I think he's bare-assed underneath,” Robin said.

“I'll find you something to wear,” Lyon said as he took the young man's arm.

At one time in the dimness of his past, Sarge had been a mess cook. He made very passable fried eggs and bacon, although the toast was scorched when he took a moment off to tipple. They had left the house, which was now swarming with workmen, to drop off the robes at Rocco's office. Realizing that it was close to ten and that they were famished, Bea and Lyon had driven to Sarge's Bar and Grill.

“They evidently do some sort of investigation on new members,” Robin said through a mouthful of egg.

“I could have told you that if you'd asked,” Winston added pompously.

She smiled at him. “Anyway, after I'd been there a few days, the great Reverend calls me into the inquisition. Winston and his cronies were there, standing behind Blossom like they were going to put me in the Iron Maiden or something. Blossom had found out that I'd been staying at your place, and he knew I was a ringer. To make a long story short, they kicked me out.”

“And Winston?”

Robin brushed her companion's cheek. “Winston escorted me to the gate and kept right on going.”

“When was all this?”

“Yesterday afternoon.”

“Why did you arrive at the house only this morning?”

“We couldn't seem to pick up a ride, not with those ridiculous robes and all, so we had to hoof it. We found some kids with a camper at the state park, and we crashed with them last night.”

“Then Dr. Blossom must have thought you returned to the house last night. He would have expected you to be sleeping here.”

“I guess,” Robin said, and started on her fourth egg.

Lyon looked at Robin's companion. Dressed in slacks and a sport shirt, he looked even younger. At all times, his attention was directed toward Robin. He stared at her with the look of a starving man, as if trying to consume every word and action. “Why did you leave, Winston?”

“Because of Robin.”

No more had to be said on that score. Winston had discovered a new religion that would be more powerful than his last. “You were one of the disciples who were with Dr. Blossom at the time of the murders.”

“No, sir. We said we were, but we weren't.”

“You lied?”

“Dr. Blossom told us that there was a plot by his enemies to get him and destroy the order. To save everyone, we had to protect each other at all costs.”

“And now you're telling the truth?”

“I swear it. Dr. Blossom was not with me those times.”

“The preliminary lab reports indicate that the cloth we found in your house and the cloth in the robes are very similar.”

“But not to the exclusion of all other cloth?”

Rocco turned the car off Route 92 at its junction with Plank Road. The mansion occupied by the Blossom people lay four miles up the twisting road. He shrugged in response to Lyon's question.

Lyon turned to look out the window. The rock-strewn fields, with their long lines of hand-built walls, stretched interminably along the tree-shrouded road. “We might prove it if we could lay our hands on more of the cloth.”

“How's that? The state lab is pretty damn efficient, and if they say it's not conclusive …”

“The robes we gave them as samples may not be from the same run.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Robin tells me that the Blossom people make their own robes, that they're running a veritable cottage industry at the mansion. Now, the robes she and Winston were wearing might have been from a different run.”

“Run?”

“They probably buy their bolts of cloth wholesale. Each bolt, each run, will have its own minutely distinctive characteristics. If we could get our hands on other robes or on some unused muslin that came from the same lot …”

“It could be conclusive.”

“Exactly.”

As they turned out of a curve they found themselves facing an oncoming vehicle straddling the crown of the road. It was obvious that there would be insufficient space for the cars to pass. With a guttural “God damn!” Rocco wrenched the wheel and spun the car into the loose rock wall along the shoulder. The police car's right wheels jounced along the low wall as the car tipped dangerously and Rocco fought for control.