On the Rocks: A Willa Cather and Edith Lewis Mystery (17 page)

Matthew Johnson was absolutely certain about when he noticed the button missing. That happened when he untied the sleeves and rolled the shirt up to put it in his backpack. By that time, he had achieved a pleasant mood again. The missing button threatened to destroy it. Johnson was not in the habit of purchasing ready-made clothes, but having forgotten his sweater when they set out, he asked Claude Gilmore to stop long enough for him to run in to get something warm. The fog had taken its time burning off and the air felt raw well into the afternoon. The tiff with his wife began when Johnson asked Gilmore to make the stop at Jackson’s Drygoods and picked up steam when Maggie caught sight of what he bought. She did not like the color red. Johnson did. She thought the workmanship shoddy and had a great deal to say about the garment workers who produced it. Johnson found himself in the ridiculous position of defending his purchase by upholding the general standard of quality in the garment industry over the last twenty years. The missing button not only brought back the whole quarrel, it served to affirm Maggie’s opinion of the garment industry.

The hands on the clock on Daggett’s office wall said eight forty-five. So much to do, Daggett glanced again through his notebook. He hadn’t yet managed to talk to Rob Feeney. Well, nothing there that couldn’t wait another day, Daggett reached for his pipe. The sun would go down soon.

“H
UH
,
HUH
,
HUH
, huh,” Edith could barely distinguish the sound of her own from Willa’s breathing, Willa was that close, running near Edith through the quiet night air. Silent except for regular explosions of breath and an occasional crunch of rock underfoot, they ran with measured pace in the moonlight.

Thank God for moonlight, Edith glanced ahead to where the trail etched its way through a meadow, then cut into the darkened woods beyond. Sharp as the part in a person’s hair, Edith described the scene to herself, then found her mind roaming and pulled it up short. She did not want to think about what lay ahead. She would force herself to concentrate on the moment. The throb of her lungs, the huh, huh of their breath, the rushed fall of each foot, the scene around, the surround. Edith caught herself. She was slipping into an old habit of repeating words and sounds in her head, nonsensical words, serious words, words for the sake of their sounds. Sibilants, consonants, vowels. From here she would slide into scenes and imaginings.

Edith shook herself back to the moment, to wonder how moonlight could so blur the familiar yet sharpen detail. The wildflowers off to her left Edith knew by day to be a mass of blazing purple, but to her night eye they registered as individual and distinct, shadowy spikes with particular twists and solitary heads. Not a mass at all, but hundreds, even thousands, of individuals. It took moonlight to show them that way, moonlight to see, Edith chuckled to herself, lunar lucidity. Thank God for moonlight and for their knowledge of the trail, Edith glanced up to investigate a bank of encroaching clouds, then jumped a tiny rivulet emanating from the spring she knew to be near but could not discern.

Willa set the pace when they came to the woods. Edith picked it up again at Seven Days Work, and they snaked their way in and out along the cliffs, almost without thought daring the edge, racing always toward a pinpoint of light. A pinpoint that moved. A pinpoint they had noticed and wanted to reach because it moved, because it bobbed and bounced and flashed and yet stayed put.

The bobbing light had been stationary for a long while now. They had first seen it from the edge of their cliff. Home alone for the evening, Edith and Willa had been out on their lawn chairs watching the sun set and the moon rise. Everyone else had gone into North Head to see the latest film showing at the Happy Hour Theatre. After Edith spotted the light, they watched it for a moment together, then Edith stood sentinel while Willa ran to the main house to phone Daggett. He was on his way now in the Chevrolet. He planned to meet them where the trail headed inland near the waterfall, but he would have to come in from the road and use a torch because he didn’t know the trails the way they did. Willa had told him they would try to reach the waterfall without using a flashlight, for the surprise factor. You shouldn’t go at all, he had said. But he supposed he couldn’t stop them. Be careful, was all he said at the end, you know the danger.

Care-ful, dan-ger. The words ran through Edith’s mind like a mantra, pairing the fall of her feet. Care-ful, dan-ger.

A plosive for landing with a hold on the
n
, soft
g
for rocking to take off again. Care-ful, dan-ger. The words entered her consciousness in quite the same way, Edith remembered with a start, as they had years before when, as a child, she had touched a match to a firecracker for the very first time. Her father had called out the warning at a large garden party. Everyone had come, even William Jennings Bryan, who was about to run for president of the United States. He was just one of their neighbors as far as Edith was concerned, but she remembered that Fourth of July because of the way he roared his approval, louder than anyone, when Edith succeeded. A display of fireworks had followed. Boom. Boom. Boom. Huge, sparkling displays and the shooting flares of Roman candles. Edith saw them all again and heard the long ahhhhs that came after.

A forest fire began to roar through Edith’s lungs. Repeated, searing pain, flame after flame after flame. Her head ached. She had only her mind to hold on to her stride, willing her legs to keep pumping, arms to keep moving through air. Care-ful, dan-ger, her feet continued to fly down the trail.

There it was again. Close now, that light. Very close. Two more bends in the trail, an eighth of a mile, no more. Edith reached back to signal Willa to an abrupt stop, then dropped to her knees and at the same time clamped a hand over the lower portion of her face. She was dimly aware that Willa had halted beside her.

Edith’s chest heaved fire. Fierce pains shot through her shoulders, legs, the soles of her feet. Her ears pounded. She hoped the hand gripping her mouth would quiet the sound of her breathing. She could no longer hear and had no time for her body. Not now, not with the light right there.

It was more than a pinpoint now. It was a beam, a large beam. It stroked the trees inland from the cliff. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Then it halted and turned, as they had seen it do earlier from the cliffs by their cottage, to shoot down the rocks and rake across the shore to the sea.

Edith felt rather than heard Willa crouch beside her, but they both heard the stone Willa’s shoe dislodged. It made three sharp pings in a vertical drop to the rocks below. No cascade, no great rush. Just three sharp pings.

Edith caught her breath and felt her abdomen pressed hard against her spine. The beam suspended its progress, hovered momentarily, and then swung violently upward to hit Edith directly in the eyes.

Edith felt herself lurch and Willa’s hand clutch her shoulder. Then she reeled backward and down, falling out of the light. She felt the sudden warmth of Willa’s hand on her arm and heard a muttered damnation. Her elbow scraped rock. Her feet slipped toward the edge of the cliff. They slid off.

Involuntary
, that was the word that presented itself. Edith’s hands clutched the earth. A sharp pain shot through her left palm. Then she felt Willa’s arm cross her waist and hold firm. Safe. Saved.

Had that been what happened to Mr. Brown, an involuntary slip? But there had been no arm to catch him, only the red-shirted arm that flung itself out before he went off the cliff.

Edith blinked at the halo of brightness just ahead. But the beam had vanished, she knew that. And with it, the person who held the light.

“Identify yourself.”

Willa’s words boomed across the void. They exploded and reverberated but drew no other sound.

“Which way did he go?” Willa tightened her grip.

Edith shook her head.

“Did you hear anything?”

“Nothing.”

“See anything?”

“No.”

“Damnation.”

“W
HOEVER
it was saw Edith, that’s for certain,” Willa glanced around the dining room until her eyes came to rest again on Daggett’s face.

“And parts of you as well,” Edith laughed.

“The two of us were all stirred together like scrambled eggs,” Willa’s laugh was deep and rich. “Edith was just about to go over the cliff.”

“You must have been frightened half to death,” Margaret Byington’s eyes showed her concern.

“Only about a quarter to death,” Willa chuckled and turned her attention back to the steaming cup of Sanka Jacobus shoved toward her across the blue-checkered oilcloth.

“The truth is it didn’t occur to either of us to be really frightened until it was all over,” Edith reached across the table to take Willa’s hand, “and then we were terrified.”

Edith’s left hand, the jagged cut on her palm swathed with gauze, lay still in her lap.

“Neither of us moved for at least five minutes after he’d gone.”

“The light had been so bright,” Edith nodded, “I couldn’t see to move.”

“Yes,” Daggett leaned back in his chair and contemplated Edith’s face, “let’s go back to that point.”

Daggett’s notebook lay open next to the empty cobbler dish on the checkered cloth. He flipped back through the top few pages, coming to rest on the third, his finger tracing a line midway down.

“Just how big was that light?”

“I have no idea,” Edith shrugged.

“Big,” Willa set down her cup and retrieved her hand, then spread her fingers and drew her hands back and forth in the air until they settled on creating a circle about eight inches in diameter.

“What made it so bright do you think?”

“Number of batteries? Size of bulb?” it was Willa’s turn to shrug.

“How high off the ground was it?”

“How high did the person hold it? Good question,” Willa frowned. “Three feet, maybe three and a half,” she turned to Edith, “What would you say?”

Edith closed her eyes to return to the cliff. Before its glare hit, she had been able to see the light. When they rounded the curve, it was trained on the twisted trunks of cedars near the edge. It spent several moments caressing the base of each tree, flooding the large outcropping of rocks nearby. From there it had inched back into the pines that formed the woods beyond the trail. It would pick out one pine, then another, and starting about midway up, move slowly down and around, until it had embraced each pine the way it had the cedars. Then suddenly, abruptly, in the seconds before Willa’s foot disturbed the stone, the beam had swung away from the trees and shot down the rocks toward the waves below.

But that’s not what Daggett asked. Height, that’s what he wanted, height. Edith refocused her mind and saw again the backlighted legs, loosely trousered, with laced boots, pants tucked in at mid-calf, legs spread, one planted slightly ahead of the other. A strong stance, but relaxed. No plan to run there. The light had moved but not the legs until … Edith caught her mind wandering again and looked up.

“Three and a half feet at least,” Edith paused to watch Daggett write the figures, their lines straight, curves firm, then she glanced at Willa.

“Yes,” Willa drew the word out, “I believe Edith has it right.”

“The person had to be a good six feet,” Edith moved on to the real point of Daggett’s question, still looking at Willa, “wouldn’t you say?”

“Six feet and comfortable in his socks,” Willa nodded.

Daggett’s pen moved quickly.

“All we could see were his legs, of course. The outline of his legs,” Edith corrected herself, “and a faint hint of his torso.”

“But he was easy in his body,” Willa was thinking aloud again. “Almost nonchalant in the way he held the flashlight,” she extended her left hand and held it, wrist relaxed.

“Until he heard the stone fall,” Edith interjected, “then he moved fast.”

Willa’s hand jerked up and swung dramatically to the left, “Extraordinarily fast,” she agreed, “and quiet.”

“Amazingly quiet,” Edith’s voice had dropped almost to a whisper.

Jacobus pulled out a chair and sat down.

“Left handed, was he?” Daggett’s pen hovered above the page awaiting their answer.

“He?” Jacobus wanted to know.