The Knights of the Cornerstone (17 page)

“I thought they wanted the veil?” Calvin said. “If they intend to sneak in through the passage and steal the veil, why don’t you just hide it somewhere? Bury it in the hills?”

“Like I said, they want the
world
,” Lymon told him, “and they’re willing to sell their souls to buy it—although I’m beginning to think I mean ‘he’ instead of ‘they.’ The veil is the high-ticket item, like you say, but hiding it won’t
put a stop to this. I’m not sure we
can
stop it. We have to play our part in it.”

“Speaking of Lamar Morris,” Taber said to Lymon, “you forgot about that box he sent over.”

“By golly, I did,” Lymon said. “Morris sent you a box, Cal. It’s heavy, like books. Tubby Wingate brought it up. Apparently someone left it with Ms. Jessup, but she was busy running the ferry, and so Tubby snagged it a couple of hours ago and dropped it off. I put it in your room.”

“Thanks,” Calvin said. “I’ll take a look and let you two powwow.”

“I powwowed my last powwow,” Taber said. “I’m through.”

“I’ve got a couple of things hanging fire, too,” Lymon said. “Let’s call it a night.”

“It’s a night,” Taber said. He shook hands with Calvin and went out, and Calvin headed off, caught up in this new mystery.
Books?
That made no sense at all, although it was a pleasant idea. The box lay on his bed, taped shut. He yanked the tape loose, and found the books—a good-size pile of them, including a dozen Fourteen Carats productions, titles that hadn’t been for sale in the shop. Morris clearly had an inventory of back issues. Calvin sorted through them, marveling at his luck.
War in Heaven
was in there, along with another Knights piece called
Death in the Dead Mountains
, which looked particularly interesting. There was another piece called
The Illuminated Island
, maybe the most interesting of the lot, with a woodcut illustration on the cover that was clearly the elder Morris’s work. It was a picture of the island where the Temple now sat, except there was no building yet, just rock and willows and the river beyond an open rectangular pit
from which emanated an unearthly glow. Aside from the Fourteen Carats stuff there was an old, falling-apart copy of
Journey to the Center of the Earth
that was worth just about nothing unless someone wanted to frame the illustrations, a copy of Walter de la Mare’s
Memoirs of a Midget
, and what was apparently a film script that was printed on three-hole-punched paper with a single brass brad holding it together. It was titled
The Last Battle
, by someone named Robert P. Wolverhampton, LL.D. Calvin flipped through it, looking for something to make sense of it. It appeared to be a Crusades-era adventure story involving the siege of a walled city, and, he saw, it had several alternative endings, as if the author couldn’t make up his mind. Apparently someone had been using the script as a coaster, because the top pages were discolored with ground-in dust and coffee stains, and the whole thing smelled of stale beer and cigarette smoke.

What had inspired Morris to send him all this? Was the man going to ask him for some kind of immense favor and wanted to sweeten him up first? That had to be it. But Calvin wouldn’t be of much help. He had nothing to show for his troubles today but some photos of a pickup truck, to which Morris was welcome. Maybe the blasting paraphernalia in the truck bed was worth something as a piece of information, but it couldn’t be worth this stack of books, at least not the Fourteen Carats imprints. It was all Calvin had to offer, though, and from now on Calvin was a short-timer, and he was sticking close to home—no more photographic adventures.

On the other hand, he wasn’t interested in giving any of the books back. He wondered how he could finesse this—
if
he could finesse it without telling lies or making promises. He found Morris’s card in his wallet and stared
at it for a moment, debating. The books were a
gift
from Lamar Morris, after all—no question of that. There would be nothing served by simply handing them back with a smarmy “no thank-you.” That sort of thing could be holier-than-thou and self-righteous, he told himself, and at best it committed the sin of looking a gift horse in the mouth, which every mother warned her children against. Probably it was one of the seven deadly sins.

And it was Morris who had recommended that Calvin leave town in the first place. So … what? The man tried to persuade him to leave and then had sent him a bribe to stick around for some undercover work? Possibly Morris was a schizophrenic.

Calvin sat thumbing through the books for a few minutes, reading a paragraph here and there. Abruptly he made up his mind, stood up, and went out into the kitchen to use the phone. There was no sign of his aunt and uncle, who had probably gone to bed. He considered what he would say to Morris. A simple thank-you would suffice. There was a good chance that Morris wouldn’t pick up anyway, since he was so evidently spooked, and Calvin could leave the thank-you on his voice mail. Morris could call back at his leisure and make demands if he wanted to, which Calvin could apologetically decline depending on the circumstances.

If he had to he would have Betty Jessup run the books back into Bullhead City. Morris could pick them up on the dock. He punched in Morris’s number and listened through a half dozen rings. Then a recorded voice came on, and he felt an instant relief. He could simply leave the message. …

But it clearly wasn’t Morris’s voice. It sounded a little like Bob Postum, but weirdly disguised, as if he were
talking through a pile of buttered toast. There wasn’t a hint of humor in it: “Lamar Morris isn’t here anymore,” the voice said. “He’s dead.” Then there was silence.

Calvin hung up the phone fast. His heart was going like a jackhammer.
A prank
, he thought. It had to be a prank. Morris must have a hell of a dark sense of humor. He hadn’t seemed to have
any
sense of humor earlier in the day, but clearly his sending
Memoirs of a Midget
couldn’t be serious. …

Wasn’t here
anymore
? That just didn’t sound like a prank. Calvin thought again about Morris being offered eighteen hundred dollars for
War in Heaven
only to turn it down, and he found himself heading fast through the living room. This was something that his uncle needed to hear. Their bedroom door was slightly ajar. “Hello!” he said, rapping on it harder than he meant to. It swung open another inch, and he saw into the interior, where his aunt lay on the bed, apparently asleep on her back. His uncle sat in a chair next to her, bent over, his forehead in his hand. He was moaning softly, as if in barely sufferable pain. Over his aunt’s chest and stomach was draped the Veil of Veronica, the image on it staring up at the heavens, as if the ceiling were invisible. The veil seemed to glow with its own aura, although surely it was merely the bedside lamp reflecting off the old muslin. His uncle’s right hand hovered over the veil, glowing in the light that flickered around it. There was a weighty presence in the room, as if the air were as heavy as mercury.

Calvin was silenced by what he saw. He stood for a moment, waiting to see if his uncle had heard him, but Lymon was obviously utterly distracted, perhaps with pain, perhaps with some sort of spiritual ecstasy. Calvin turned around and walked quietly back down the hallway.
Whatever he had witnessed—whatever was going on—was simply none of his business, and would never be his business. He badly wished he hadn’t seen it.

But his understanding of the veil had shifted now, as if the world of New Cyprus had been jolted by another earthquake and he had been dumped into the river and swept into deep water. His house back in Eagle Rock, and the comforting life he lived there, looked almost exotically plain and homely to him.

C
alvin expected the barge to be the size of a freight car, maybe pulled up the river by a team of oxen, but in fact it was a moderate-size pontoon boat with a flat, open deck and with a shallow draft so that it could use most of the river to turn around in. People who didn’t drive—which was half the population of New Cyprus—could have furniture or computer equipment or a television set shipped down from Bullhead City or up from Needles, and then they could run it home on a hand truck. There were a couple of dozen people milling around now, trying to stay out of the way till the pilot shouted their names.

The ferry had come and gone during the time that Calvin waited with Miles Taber, watching boxes being off-loaded, and once again Mrs. Jessup hadn’t seen Uncle Lymon, who was perhaps lying down in the office like he apparently had been yesterday. Calvin had his cell phone with him today. After yesterday’s shenanigans he didn’t
intend to be without it. It was nearly ten o’clock when he left the Cozy Diner, where he had consumed the infamous Million-Dollar Plate—more pancakes than he had ever eaten in his life or would ever eat again—conspicuously more than any other diner was eating, stacked up in a pyramid on an enormous plate. He suspected that Donna had told the chef to come as close to a million as he possibly could, and the chef had come very close. After the heroic way Donna had gone after her food last night at the steak-house, though, Calvin wanted to come off as a trencherman and not some kind of lightweight who couldn’t finish a tub of dollar-size pancakes and a side of bacon. Next week sometime he would be able to eat again.

“Thanks for giving me a hand this morning,” Taber said to him. He held on to a flatbed cart with heavy casters, which looked like it could hold about half a ton. “I hauled one load back already. There’s only one box left for us, but it’s heavy. God knows what it is—something Lymon ordered.”

“I kind of thought I’d find him here.”

“Apparently he expects me to unload the goods myself. Whitey didn’t show either, but I expected that. He went on up to Laughlin to have breakfast with his daughter. She’s a blackjack dealer at the Riverside.”

“I’m worried about my uncle.”

“He’s too damned stubborn and tough for his own good,” Taber said. “He should get himself a real checkup, over across the river.”

Or something
, Calvin thought, replaying in his mind the strange scene he had witnessed last night. There was no way he could mention it to Taber, although he would have liked to have his take on it. His own take on it involved things that he didn’t have the capacity to believe.

“He didn’t put on the coffee this morning like he usually does, so I figured he was still in bed when I went out about eight,” Calvin said. “Nettie was up, though. She’s having another good day. She had me get her sewing machine out of the cabinet and set it up on the kitchen table. She was actually talking about going into town to buy yardage.”

“Good for her,” Taber said. “If you’d have seen her last week, you’d call it a miracle. Probably it
is
a miracle.”

The man from the steakhouse finished loading up a little Pullman electric cart, small enough to navigate the footbridge, and whirred away, and so Taber and Calvin walked up the gangplank, Taber pushing the cart ahead of them. Calvin was struck with the intensity of the heat rising from the deck. He was already sweating like a pig. “Bear a hand with this crate,” Taber told him. “Lymon must have ordered a couple of sacks of concrete and some fence block. No wonder he left it for me.”

With the pilot’s help, they muscled the box onto the cart and set off, maneuvering down the gangplank and along the dock with Taber hauling and Calvin steadying it. It was a tight squeeze through the door of the bar, and Calvin had to heave on the cart to bump the rear wheels up over the threshold. There were half a dozen other boxes sitting in the middle of the floor, waiting to be opened. One of them had already been emptied out, and there was a pyramid of toilet paper rolls and other paper products sitting alongside.

“Suds?” Taber asked, drawing himself a glass of beer.

“Sure,” Calvin said. “Should I open this thing up?”

“Be my guest. Might as well empty it out right there on the cart. It’s a little like Christmas, isn’t it?”

Calvin picked up the box cutter and slit through the several layers of tape, folding back the cardboard and exposing
a heap of foam popcorn. Taber came around from behind the bar, setting the glasses on a table and hauling the emptied-out carton alongside.

“Shovel it into this,” he said. “We recycle the packaging material down at the Bullhead Mailbox.”

Calvin dipped out a double handful and then another, but when he shoved his hands into the box for a third, his fingers bumped into something that made him jerk his hands back out—what felt like human hair, attached to a human head. “Jesus,” he said faintly, nodding at the box. “I don’t know what it is, but …”

Taber took over, bailing out foam. He stopped for a moment when they saw what it was, and then he kept bailing until the man’s head and shoulders were exposed. It was Lamar Morris, stuffed into the crate, hunched over in a sitting position. Shakespeare looked up at them from the back of his T-shirt. Probably they had gotten to him yesterday, Calvin thought, after he had babbled to Postum about being a Fourteen Carats collector.

“Poor son of a bitch,” Taber said.

“What do we do?” Calvin asked. “Call the cops?”

“Yeah, we’ll phone out to Essex. There’s a substation out there. Shirley Fowler’s son. He’ll take care of it.”

Calvin stared at him. The implications of “Shirley Fowler’s son” were enormous. It meant that this would be covered up, and he’d be complicit in it. Did he care?

“That would be your girl Donna’s uncle.”

“Okay.” His
girl
? There it was again.

Calvin stared at the dead man. Right now the smartest thing he could do was get out—climb down off this merry-go-round before it picked up any more momentum. “You know those books that Morris sent over yesterday?”
he asked. Taber nodded. “Well, I called back to thank him, and there was a strange message on his phone.”

“Let’s hear it,” Taber said. “Ring the number right now.”

Calvin fished out Morris’s card again and made the call on the bar phone. He handed Taber the receiver, and Taber listened for the moment that it took, and then hung up again. “Sure,” Taber said. “I could have figured it out for myself. Bob Postum murdered Morris and then sent the books along as a message to you—kind of a double-barreled incentive.”