The Paper Grail (36 page)

“He left?”

“There’s some question about where his bones ended up. There was more than one attempt to get at them—a couple just recently. But they haven’t been in Coniston for years. Never were, for my money.”

Uncle Roy studied his fingernails for a moment, then said, “I got most of this from Jimmers, of course. And we both know what that’s worth. Could be end-to-end nonsense.”

“Do we
want
the sketch, you and I?” Howard asked.

“Best not to think in terms of ourselves.”

“Fine. Practically speaking, though—do we want it? Do we need it?”

“Not me, certainly. I wouldn’t touch it with a pole.”

“How about me? I seem to have been invited up here to find it or take it or help protect it or something. I don’t know what.”

Uncle Roy shrugged. “The old man might know. He’s probably fishing in the pond right now, trying to hook a salmon.

Just as he said this, Howard became aware that his chair was moving. The air seemed full of a vague rumbling, and for an instant Howard thought that a truck was passing outside. Then there was the sound of the house creaking and of objects rattling in cupboards. The curtains tossed and coffee sloshed in a wave out of Howard’s still-full cup.

“Earthquake!” Uncle Roy shouted, and he was up and out of his chair, weaving toward the nearest doorway as plaster dust rained down onto his head.

20

H
OWARD
stood up, testing his knee, and at that instant there was a second jolt, as if something huge had struck the earth. Howard sat down hard, holding on to the arms of the chair and expecting the roof to cave in. He staggered to his feet and tottered into a doorway, bracing himself against the frame. The old house swayed and creaked, crack lines shooting ominously across the ceiling plaster. Glasses clinked together furiously in the kitchen cupboards, and there was the sound of a cupboard door banging open and of something shattering on the countertop.

Then it was over, and there was a dreadful, still sort of silence during which neither he nor Uncle Roy dared move. But the earth was solid. The morning had started up again. Outside, there was the sound of birds calling. A dog began to bark down the street. Howard stood up again and limped across to steady the chandelier, which was still swaying back and forth, dropping plaster dust from around the ceiling fixture.

The dog quit barking. Howard and Uncle Roy stood still for a few moments, waiting for it to start up again, but there was nothing. Together they went into the kitchen. Lying on the countertop, having fallen out of the thrown-open cupboard, was Aunt Edith’s porcelain Humpty Dumpty, broken to pieces.

“Hell,” Uncle Roy said softly, picking up the top of the thing’s head.

“Super Glue?” Howard asked.

“Could be useless in this case. Let’s keep the pieces, though, just in case Sylvia wants to have a go at it.” Silently they put all the pieces in a paper sack. “That was a good one,” Uncle Roy said, referring to the earthquake. “I bet it was a five or six. Epicenter was close, too. You can tell when they’re sharp like that. A real jolt.” They walked back out into the living room and sat down again, both of them edgy. For the space of a minute neither one of them spoke, then Uncle Roy said, “What the hell were we talking about?”

“Fishing,” Howard said. “You told me that Graham spends his time fishing for salmon. How can there be any salmon in that little mud hole?”

“There’s not now. In wetter years the pond connects by a tributary to Pudding Creek. Used to run the year round, and the odd trout could find its way back there. That was before all this drought. Anyway, that’s what he’s doing, whether there’s any salmon in there or not. He’s got used to fishing off the rocks below his place. Plenty of salmon out there in the ocean, or used to be. Fishing industry’s slow now, and going to get slower if all this offshore-oil nonsense starts up. That’s Lamey, too, and your man Stoat. She’s a hell of a squid, like I said—got a finger in every pie conceivable.” He shook his head, getting mad at the idea of Mrs. Lamey. “Anyway, used to be that the creeks were full of fish, back when they were full of water. Things change, though. Graham’s the man to answer your questions. He asked me just yesterday whether you were a man who liked to fish. Ain’t that something? Same question I asked you.”

“Quite a coincidence,” Howard said.

“Well, he seemed to guess that, about you being a fisherman. I’ll warn you, though, that talking with him is rough. He’s in and out, you know. Sometimes the light’s on and sometimes there’s nothing inside but a little flashlight bulb, sometimes outright darkness.”

“In the cabin?”

“Not in the cabin. In his head. He’s been going downhill pretty quick. He’s frail, like old cobweb. That’s one of the reasons he moved back into the woods, out of the họuse on the bluffs. His days had begun to look numbered. He was tired, worn out. The struggle had got too much for him. Just getting up and pulling on his boots had got too much for him. There was nothing left for him but fishing. Could be he caught something when he wrote that letter back to you. It took a while, but he’s finally reeled you in. He’s set the hook.” Uncle Roy winked at him.

“Anyway, he’s been living in the cabin off and on for more than a year, although we tried to make it look like he was still in his house, out on the bluffs. They caught on that there was something up, and so Jimmers pulled the suicide gag. It wasn’t worth much. I would have done it different. Graham just wants some rest, and he deserves it, too.”

Uncle Roy yawned and stretched. “I’m going to put in a couple of hours sleep,” he said, standing up and heading for the stairs. “Later on I’m going down to the harbor. Probably be there all
day. Now that you’ve, ah … come to all these decisions, maybe you ought to mosey out to the cabin and have a confab with old Graham. You might get some answers. Then again, you might not.” With that he shuffled away up the stairs, but had gotten just out of sight when the back door slammed open, banging into the clothes dryer.

“Father!” It was Sylvia, shouting. She ran into the living room, breathing hard.

Howard jumped up thinking of the stolen car, the police, gunfire. He flexed his game knee. He could walk on it fine—a little stiff-legged, maybe, but …

Uncle Roy appeared at the bottom of the stairs, ready for action. “What is it?” he asked, breathing hard. “What’s wrong?”

Sylvia caught her breath. There was fear and grief in her eyes. “Graham’s dead.”

Howard stood paralyzed, struck with the notion that the world had stopped spinning, that time stood still. He knew that on the instant everything had changed. A door had shut. Another had opened.

“How?” Uncle Roy said, breaking the spell. “Foul play?” He pulled on his coat while striding toward the back door. Howard followed along behind. “Graham’s dead”—the words played through Howard’s mind like a closed-loop tape. He had heard the words more than once over the last few days, but now they signified—not only because this time it was true but because the truth had changed things.

“No. I don’t think so,” Sylvia said. “We found him on the grass, sort of trying to sit up. He’d been fishing. We called to him, and he just … went. There was an earthquake; did you feel it? It might have been that, I guess. Maybe he was frightened by it. Except that he looked like he was in trouble before the earthquake, faint or something. I think he was dying when we saw him. That’s what it looked like. We tried to revive him—everything we could think of—but it wasn’t any good.”

They hurried down the path, into the woods. The sun was up, but still below the tree line, and the woods were dark and dense. At least there was no fog. Within minutes they were there, at the clearing in front of the cabin. Howard must have gone far off course the other morning to have wandered for so long in the woods. The old man lay now at the base of the grassy hill, down by the pond. Aunt Edith knelt beside him as if guarding the body.

“The king is dead,” Uncle Roy said quietly, standing over him. Clearly there was nothing anyone could do for him. His
face was relaxed, as if he’d died in his sleep and was finally truly at rest. It was deeply lined, the face of a man who had spent his life on a sea cliff. Howard hadn’t realized that Graham was so old. He remembered him at something near eighty, still hale and hearty, sawing out rough planks with his chain-saw mill, running wheelbarrows full of cliff rock across the meadow. He looked frail now, and thin, although the lines cut into his face gave him a craggy sort of chiseled-out look, the face of a man sculpted by wind and ocean.

Uncle Roy nodded grimly at Howard. “Let’s get him up to the cabin.” He bent over and latched on to the old man’s feet. Howard picked him up beneath his arms, surprised at how light he was. Gravity seemed to have given up on him already.

They moved off, Howard walking backward and Uncle Roy redfaced and breathing hard with the exertion of it. Beneath where the body had lain there was an unseasonable scattering of white daisies, growing up through the stiff grass of the hillside as if a little fragment of spring had risen to the surface of the land where the old man had died. It smelled briefly like spring, too—like wildflowers on a breezy, sunlit meadow in April.

Aunt Edith carried Graham’s cane, a gnarled piece of manzanita, polished to a deep bloodred and wet with dew from where it had lain in the grass.

Slipping and sliding on the damp hillside, they finally reached the rear of the house and got onto level ground. The old man was heavier than Howard had thought. “Hold it,” he said. His knee felt like rubber, throbbing with pain beneath the Ace bandage.

Sylvia stepped in and supported Graham’s shoulders.

The three of them carried him around and onto the porch, setting him down carefully. Howard waited, wondering what was next. Old Graham looked so peaceful that there was nothing very different in it than if he had been merely asleep. Except that Howard felt a weird sort of affinity to him that he couldn’t explain, as if this were his father lying dead at his feet. He could remember almost nothing about his own father aside from what he had gleaned from photographs—strange images of a man who was forever distant, lost to him.

He was struck suddenly with the uncanny feeling that he had been there before. He had stood just like that on a wooden front porch, looking down at a dead man. Then it was himself in his memory, lying on his own back, dead, looking up into faces of people who lived in a world that no longer contained him, a make-believe landscape on a movie screen. For one jolting
moment he didn’t know who he was, the living Howard Barton or the dead Michael Graham. He shook his head, nearly falling over. Uncle Roy clutched him under the arm in order to steady him, but Howard was already himself again, his confusion gone. He was dizzy, probably from the exertion.

“Couple of spades around back,” Uncle Roy said, collapsing into an armchair. Aunt Edith composed the old man’s clothes, pulling his jacket straight and buttoning it up and then combing his hair with her fingers. With Sylvia alongside, Howard limped around after the shovels, and together they began to dig the grave in the center of the garden, careful not to disturb the few rows of lettuce and onions, even though they were discolored and blighted-looking.

After a few minutes, Uncle Roy offered to dig for a spell. Howard gave him the shovel gratefully. His knee was stiff as heavy cardboard, and he hobbled across to sit down by Aunt Edith on the porch again. His senses were strangely acute, as if every sound and smell were picture-framed, separate from every other. Something had happened to him. And it wasn’t simply that a man had died.

Somehow the notion of burying Graham at once struck him as right and natural. Whether it was legal didn’t matter. There wasn’t any practical reason to wait. In fact, there was a sense of urgency in the air, as if the land were hungry for the body—not in any horrific sense, but in a dust-to-dust sense.

Dreamily, feeling vague and removed, he looked again at the resting corpse, and in that moment it looked to him to be made of dark loam, of forest debris and mulch, sprouting with oxalis and moss and weaved into shape with tiny roots. The porch floor around him was littered with acorns and oak leaves. Tendrils of berry vine grew up between the wood slats, winding across Graham’s arms and chest like fibrous muscle.

Howard stood up, shaking the image out of his eyes. He was acutely aware of the sound of the forest around hint, of the wind in the treetops and the stirring of undergrowth, as if the woods suddenly were full of life—of crawling things, of creatures slipping up out of hidey-holes and thickets. The sun edged into view through a sort of avenue in the trees that led off toward the eastern horizon. The garden was stippled with sunlight, and the heat of it fell on his face, angling beneath the porch roof, bathing old Graham in golden rays. There wasn’t any moss on the body, not really—no berry vines—just an old man who was dead, lying on the scuffed floorboards of the porch.

It was time to have another turn at the shovel. Exercise would help—physical exertion. Uncle Roy wasn’t built for it, and was sweating freely despite the morning chill. He had taken off his coat and thrown it over the back of the wheelbarrow. Sylvia worked steadily, standing in the grave now, shoveling out loose dirt while Uncle Roy skived away at the side, widening it out. Howard found that he was suddenly too faint to dig, and he tried to pull himself together. Graham’s death coming on top of the earthquake must have unnerved him.