The Paper Grail (19 page)

His footsteps were noiseless on the soft, weedy ground as he slipped past two curtained windows, neither one of which gave him any view at all of the interior. At the comer of the house there began a broad, wooden front porch, and the ground ran away downhill steeply there, so that in the very front of the porch there were four or five wooden steps. He would have to clump across the porch in order to see in.

He crept back down to the woodpile and from there back down the hill toward the pond, so as to approach the house from some little distance. It wouldn’t do to seem to have been snooping around. Should he whistle? He squashed the idea as too theatrical. He would yell “Hello” instead, a couple of times, and
then head up onto the porch and knock heartily so that no one on earth could think him a sneak.

Putting on his best look of pleasant surprise, just for the sake of anyone looking out the window, he cupped his hands over his mouth and stopped cold, cocking his head to listen. He had heard the sound of a door slamming. There wasn’t any doubt. It must be well after six now. He had been mucking around in the woods forever. He jogged away in a crouch again, back toward the woodpile. Inside of three minutes, here came Aunt Edith, carrying a foil-covered plate of food and a pot of coffee. She hurried along, although she didn’t look ill at ease; she looked attentive, as if she wanted to arrive with hot food.

She passed out of sight, and then momentarily he heard a screen door slam shut and then another door shut more softly. This time he hurried around the opposite side of the house, the side that fronted the deep woods, so that if his aunt went back out directly, she wouldn’t catch him in the open.

A red wheelbarrow stood tilted against the house, surrounded by garden tools and piles of mulch and stakes and pots. The nearby garden was made up of moldery little rows of withered cabbages and anemic onions, all of it blighted somehow. He pulled the wheelbarrow away, settling it down onto its bed, and silently climbed up onto it so as to see in through a window just beside the edge of the front porch. Luckily the curtains hung a couple of inches apart—plenty far enough for him to get a quick glimpse inside.

There stood Aunt Edith next to an old black potbellied stove. Her plate of food sat on the table. Sitting in a chair, just getting ready to tie into the food, was old Michael Graham, thoroughly alive, although incredibly old and frail-looking. A walking stick leaned against the back of an adjacent chair.

Howard clung to the windowsill, lost in thought. What did this mean? The old man was hiding out here, certainly. That was clear. So he wasn’t murdered and he hadn’t committed suicide. The car-over-the-cliff business had been a ruse, a red herring to confound Stoat and his associates. Who knew that, besides Uncle Roy and Aunt Edith? Jimmers? Sylvia, clearly. Why hadn’t they told Howard? Because he was from out of town—a casual guest. For his own good, obviously, they would attempt to keep it secret. There was no use him getting involved. So where was the sketch? It was a good bet that the old man had it. His mind spun, trying to add things up, to work out the mathematics of the puzzle.

Aunt Edith turned to leave, and Howard dropped off the wheelbarrow and scuttled back toward the rear of the house, hunching along past the woodpile again. In a couple of minutes, after she had plenty of time to get home, he would follow her. There was nothing more to learn—not without breaking into the cabin and searching it, which was utterly out of the question. He was sliding into deep waters, to be sure, and his best bet would be to wade ashore while he still had his feet under him, and give up any notions of being an amateur detective. He didn’t owe the museum anything, anyway, and no one, certainly, owed him the Hoku-sai sketch.

He crouched there for one more moment, just to be safe, and in that moment he felt a tap on the shoulder.

11

F
OR
a moment Howard crouched silently, knowing that trouble stood at his elbow, but asking the universe for another ten seconds of relative comfort before he had to look doom in the face. He tensed himself and turned around. Doom had taken the form of Uncle Roy, who stood there in a heavy jacket, holding a field guide to West Coast mushrooms and a little basket covered with a handkerchief. He shook his head as if advising Howard not to talk and then nodded back toward home. Howard followed him down the path, feeling sheepish and still shaking a little from the fright.

Uncle Roy ambled along, stopping every now and then like an Indian tracker to examine the ground. He picked up a limp little mushroom and dangled it there for Howard to see.
“Panaeolus campanulatus
,” he said. “Don’t eat this one.”

“I won’t,” Howard said.

Roy pitched it into the bushes, wiping his hands on his pants. “I’ve got a bunch of crap at the house that I’ve got to haul down to Bennet’s. I figured you’d want to come along. You seemed keen on it last night. We’ll run it over to his house this morning.”

“Sure,” Howard said. “I was out for a walk. You don’t get this sort of opportunity down south. There’s no place to walk to, really.”

“That’s a fact. That’s why we got out of there. These woods, though … You’re lucky you didn’t just disappear into the fog, wander up into the coast range somewhere. It’s a dangerous place. They’ve found the bones of hikers up there, picked clean.” He said nothing for a moment and then, matter-of-factly, said, “You’ve found the cabin.”

This took him by surprise. “Yes, I guess so.”

“I knew you would. I knew it yesterday afternoon in the truck there, when you brought up the subject of the sketch again. “There’s no hiding anything from a lad like Howard,’ I said to myself. And then when I couldn’t find you around the house this morning even though your truck was still out at the curb, I waited for Edith to go out with the old man’s breakfast and I came along after her. Sure enough, there you were. ‘Howard’s a shrewd one,’ I said to myself. ‘We’ve got to come clean with him.’ Look here. Look at this.”

He bent over and pointed at a brown, corky-looking fungus coming out of a rotted stump. “That’s a pretty specimen, isn’t it?”

“Nice color at the end there,” Howard said, pointing to the pale blue edge of the thing and waiting for Uncle Roy to come clean with him.

“That’s one of the pore fungi. What they call ‘artist’s fungus.’ Believe it or not, it’s tough enough to carve. You can make attractive household articles out of it—matchboxes, candlesticks. Not much market for it, though.”

“Lots of mushrooms out here in the woods, aren’t there?”

“More than you’d suppose. You can just eat the hell out of most of them, too. You wouldn’t want to, maybe. Half of them taste like rotten dirt. Take a look at these.” He lifted the cloth from the top of the basket. Lying in the bottom was a handful of small purplish fungi, misshapen and evil-smelling. “I’ll bet you a silver dollar that these are uncatalogued. Never seen or heard of them. I’ve been finding them over the last few days, growing out around the cabin. I call them witch flowers. Look at the shape.”

Howard peered closely at them. Sure enough, they looked like little disfigured lilies, as if someone had set out to make imitation flowers out of crayons and snail slime but hadn’t seen enough real flowers to get the shape right. “Smell like hell, don’t they?”

Uncle Roy looked shrewdly at him. “You don’t know how close you are to being right,” he said, putting the cloth back over them.

The two of them set out down the trail again, still going slowly, Uncle Roy on the alert for mushrooms. “About the cabin,” he said. “We’re putting up a guest there.”

“Right. Michael Graham. That’s where Aunt Edith goes with the food.”

“Breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”

“I guess that means he’s not dead, then.”

“No, he’s not dead. That was a ruse that didn’t work worth a damn. Might have gained us a week.”

Us? Howard wondered about that. Maybe Uncle Roy was coming clean at last.

“He’s lame, though. He’s old. Do you know how old he is?”

“No,” Howard said, and the phrase “older than the woolly mammoth” sprang into his mind.

“Ninety-something. He has the right to be lame.”

“Lame, though,” Howard asked. “From the accident? The car going over the cliff?” He felt abruptly foolish for having said such a thing. He hadn’t been in the car at all. Maybe he was lame from some old war wound.

“He can hardly get around any longer without his cane. Does a little fishing when he’s up to it, but most of the time it’s all he can do to eat. He and I are old friends, you know.”

“Are you?”

“Oh, yes. Old friends. We go way back, to before Edith and I married. When it got bad for him … Well, he was too easily gotten at, if you see what I mean, out there on the bluffs and all, with no one around but Jimmers. We thought we’d better hide him. The woods are full of our people, too, coming and going.”

“I saw some evidence of that. But what do you mean ‘gotten at’? More creditors?” That was a safe word, one of his uncle’s favorite euphemisms.

“Worse than that, actually. This sketch that you’re keen on. You aren’t the only one, you know.”

“Is that right?”

“Yes, and it’s not just the money, either.”

“I can see that,” Howard said. “The piece can’t be as valuable as all that.”

Uncle Roy stopped for a moment. They were in sight of the house now. “There’s value and then there’s value,” he said,
nodding back uphill in the direction of the cabin. ‘It’s a rare piece, all right. I know why you’ve come out here, but let’s not bother the old man as early as this. He’s tired. Spends his time just holding his own. He usually comes down to fish around dusk. If we can swing it, we’ll bring down a couple of poles and stop off for a chat, maybe this evening. I’m going to level with you, though. Your being here is a liability, of sorts. Don’t mistake my meaning, either. I want you here. I think maybe you
have
to be here. It’s entirely possible that you don’t have any choice in the matter. You better brace yourself for that. But you’re a suspicious character, aren’t you, riding in like Perceval on a horse. What’s his game? they’re thinking.” He looked hard at Howard, clearly waiting for an answer.

“I don’t know what my game is,” Howard said truthfully.

“I believe you. Maybe you don’t have one. Maybe you do. No matter what we like to think, we don’t always get to choose what games we play in this world. Sometimes they choose us.”

Uncle Roy set out again, and said nothing more until they were out of the woods. When he stopped again in the backyard in order to finish their talk in private, he had the look of a man who was choosing his words carefully.

“Anyway, you’re something of a liability. What I mean is that word’s out that you’ve come north, after the sketch, looking for Graham. Who are you, they’re wondering, one of us or something new? It’s pitched the balance all haywire, hasn’t it? Now, we supposed that they thought Graham was dead, but from what Stoat was saying yesterday afternoon, they didn’t fall for the wrecked-car trick. Stoat could as easily have been fishing, of course. But he’s gone through your truck, hasn’t he? And through Sylvia’s car, too—undoubtedly because she was with you. He’s onto you, then, and no denying it. What I’m saying is that I don’t want you leading him or any of his people into the woods. That’s paramount. You understand that, don’t you?”

“Sure,” Howard said. “I didn’t know …”

“You couldn’t have. I should have told you, but I didn’t want you dragged along, either. I’m beginning to think it’s a whirlpool, though, with all of us in the same boat, going round and round together. We’ll pull through if we look sharp, all engines full. Maybe you’re the captain of this damned tugboat—the dread Captain Howard from down south. Time will tell. We’re not alone in this, either. We’ve got confederates.”

“What did you mean ‘his people’? Is there a whole crowd of them, then, trying to put their hands on the sketch?”

“Too many of them for my taste. Stoat’s not the most formidable of them, either. It’s Heloise Lamey that we’ve got to watch. Say, I’m half starved. Let’s hit the Cap’n England for breakfast—some of those million-dollar pancakes and bacon. You can buy. Edith cooked the old man a couple of eggs, and she’ll want to fix us up, too. But I want to talk a bit—set you straight on some of this, if you know what I mean. Secrecy is paramount.”

“Surely Aunt Edith …” Howard made a stab at protesting, but Uncle Roy cut him short.

“True enough. She’s a party to this, but not in the way you and I are. She’s been looking after Graham, and so has Sylvia. I like to call them the ‘tent maidens.’”

He grinned at Howard, finding this clever. Howard didn’t get it, though.

“Like in the Grail romances.”

“Ah,” Howard said. “Sorry. I’m ignorant of most of that.”

“Well, no matter,” Uncle Roy said. “Live and learn, as the old saw goes. Anyway, they’re both on the boat, too, but they don’t come out on deck very often, and so maybe they haven’t taken a good look at the sky lately. It all makes Edith pretty seasick, is what I’m trying to say, so we’ll let her rest in her stateroom for the moment. But you and I can’t sleep, boy. Not a wink. The barometer’s dropping, and it’s up to lads like us to haul on the bowline. That’s paramount. We can’t be slackers, or they’ll catch us out.”