The Paper Grail (56 page)

“She said it was you that saved Bennet at the icehouse,” Howard said.

Stoat shrugged. “I guess I did. I should have done more. I didn’t know it would come to that until it was too late to stop it. That was Glenwood Touchey’s business. Heloise wanted the truck, and when she discovered that it had been seen in the back of the icehouse, and that the shed was still on it, she sent Touchey after it. I didn’t know anything about it, or about setting the place on fire, either. She didn’t trust me that far. She knew I’d balk finally. She was working to take Mrs. Deventer’s house away, too. That … that was something I
did
know about.”

“I figured that,” Howard said. “By adverse possession. With you making payments for her and paying property taxes and seeming to live there off and on.”

“Yes,” Stoat said. “The money came out of consortium funds belonging to White and her and myself and a couple of others. Touchey and Gwendolyn Bundy work for shares, although Heloise pretends that she’s a patron and is supporting the arts, or some damned thing. She’s lost touch. There’s no telling what she believes anymore. Anyway, it’s a long process. At best, adverse possession takes five years. And in this case it wasn’t working worth a damn.

“Mrs. Deventer was too decent to let me do anything consistent about making payments. Heloise thought she was just an addle-brained old woman who wouldn’t recognize fraud when it was waved in her face, but that turned out to be wrong, and when it did, that changed Heloise’s mind about the whole thing. We’d already determined that Mrs. Deventer had no will and no living relatives except her sister, who’s as old as Methusaleh.”

“And so Mrs. Lamey decided to kill her,” Sylvia said, with a look of anger on her face, as if she were making her own hasty reevaluation of Stoat now, and didn’t much like the result.

Stoat nodded, looking unhappy. “I think Mrs. Deventer knew all along that there was something going on. And yet that didn’t seem to have any bearing at all on what she felt toward me. That’s the worst of it. It was me that convinced Heloise we couldn’t prevail, that we couldn’t take the place legally. I was trying to help Mrs. Deventer, but it turned out to be a mistake. I suggested we give it up. Mrs. Deventer was seventy-odd years old. She wouldn’t live forever. When the time came we could quietly buy the place from the state. Why all the rush? Heloise seemed resigned to it. I had no idea she’d hurt the old lady, let alone that she would have Touchey work the car over in order to try to kill her. He followed her up to her sister’s house in Willits. The highway back is treacherous. It’s all cliffs along the right shoulder. Heloise thought it was a good joke on old Bennet that he had worked on her brakes so recently. If there was any blame, it would be him who got it, and there’d be no way on earth for him to prove otherwise. The first I knew of it was the morning after the trouble in Mendocino.”

Howard believed him. There was no reason not to. Here he was, admitting all sorts of nasty guilt when he might just as easily have been halfway down Highway 128, running toward San Francisco. Stoat was sweeping away a lot of dust and cobweb, pitching out
skeletons, and Howard wished that there were a table they could sit down at, with a pitcher of beer on it.

“So where are they?” Sylvia asked, interrupting his apology and sounding almost as if she were tired of hearing it. Her tone surprised Howard for a moment, but it didn’t disappoint him. She seemed to have been right about Stoat. But, Howard was happy to find, that didn’t make his activities in any way attractive to her. Nor did it guarantee that Stoat wasn’t making up a grand lie here.

“I’m thinking they’re not two hundred yards from us right now, right across there at the warehouse,” Howard said, pointing back toward Glass Beach.

Stoat shook his head. “They’re at Roy Barton’s ghost museum. Touchey is there along with Gwendolyn Bundy.”

“How about White and the artist?”

“White’s too smart for this kind of thing. He prefers safer investments. Heloise Lamey was caught up in spiritualism and magic. The Reverend White’s a flesh-and-money man. Jason’s just another artist she’s carrying at the moment. She’ll tire of him when she finds a new boy. He doesn’t have any real interest in her plots.”

“She’s dead.” Howard watched Stoat’s face for a reaction. There was nothing on it except a vague relief.

“Then the world’s a better place,” Stoat said. “And things are easier for us.”

O
N
the beach, an hour earlier, Bennet and Lou Gibb had watched Howard walk south toward the cliffs with Heloise Lamey. It was nearly impossible for Bennet to obey Lamey’s order and leave, but he had to trust Howard. They were all taking orders from Howard now, although the boy didn’t know it yet. The two men had trudged up toward the motel, carrying their poles and buckets. The parking lot was empty and the motel was dark. Bennet’s truck should have been there, at least according to Jimmers, but it wasn’t.

They had stood under the neon sign debating what to do, both of them filled with the certainty that there was no one left inside the motel, that Roy and Edith were long gone by then, along with the truck. Somewhere their friend was held prisoner. His life was threatened, and there was damn-all that they could do about it.

“Let’s see who’s home,” Bennet said, and the two of them beat on each and every motel door in turn until they had convinced themselves twice over that the place was empty. The action had
moved south. Unless it had moved north.

Feeling empty and helpless, they climbed back into Lou’s car, throwing in the fishing gear and pulling off the false beards they’d gotten out of Roy Barton’s box of dummy makeup. They drove back into town, past the warehouse at Glass Beach, which was locked tight, apparently deserted. They circled around past Roy and Edith’s house, but it was dark and empty, too. At the harbor everything was equally quiet except for the sound of thunder from the storm to the north of them and a few scattered lights still on in the trailers at the Sportsman’s RV. There was no sign of life at Mrs. Lamey’s house or anywhere else in Mendocino, where almost everything had closed for the night. They drove back into Fort Bragg and stopped at the Tip Top Lounge for a late beer, then went tiredly back out to the street to keep looking.

Sirens wailed north up Main just then, and the two followed along behind, running out of highway within half a mile. The place was a mess of fallen trees and tom-up roadway. The mouth of Pudding Creek was inundated, and the Sea Spray Motel wrecked. Even at that late hour motorists were gathering to watch, and Bennet and Gibb pretended merely to be rubbernecking, and stayed in the car.

Bennet saw the cop from the harbor talking on his car radio, and reached into the backseat to retrieve his beard. There was no use being recognized now. Firemen seemed to have found someone—a body. Where had it come from? Had it just staggered out of the woods? It was lying in the wet grass. Bennet couldn’t tell if it was dead or alive. He had to know, suddenly, who it was—or barring that, simply that it wasn’t Howard Barton. Roy wouldn’t be able to stand that. Heloise Lamey was treacherous, more than a match for the boy.

Moments later they heard the approaching siren of a paramedic unit. Cars began backing out of the way to let it in, and the crowd along the edge of the collapsed highway pushed back toward the shoulder. The paramedics went to work on whoever it was, the crowd closing in around them, people murmuring. More cars pulled up, spilling out people in pajamas and robes, who stood on the highway looking at the flooded creek and at the salmon flopping and dying on the edges of the washed-over dunes.

The cop from the harbor was long gone along with three other men, down the dirt road toward the trestle where they had waded through the shallows toward the motel. Bennet could see them poking around the wreckage now with flashlights. There was the sound of glass shattering as they bashed out a window with a
broken-off wall stud and climbed into one of the remaining rooms, probably looking for victims.

Bennet watched the motel carefully, waiting for the panicked rush that would inevitably come if they found someone, if Roy and Edith
had
been there. There was no excitement at all, though, and after a couple of minutes the cop appeared from one of the open doors and set out toward the creek again, apparently in no hurry, leaving the firemen to work the place over more thoroughly.

Bennet turned his attention back to the highway. The paramedics weren’t in any hurry, either. What did that mean, a corpse? The crowd parted momentarily, and Bennet got a quick glimpse of a leg and a foot. “It’s a woman,” Bennet said. “Someone wearing a dress, anyway. I can’t tell—”

“Hey!” Gibb shouted, nearly into his ear.

“What!”

“The truck!”

“Where?” Bennet shouted, looking back down the highway. There it went, pulling out from behind the Gas ’n’ Grub, heading south. “Let’s go,” Bennet said. “Step on it!”

Gibb backed the car around, honking his way past a dozen people. A child climbed up onto the highway right in front of them, happily carrying a three-foot-long salmon by the tail and mouth. Gibb braked hard, and the kid smiled into the windshield cheerfully, holding the fish up for them to see it. Three more children appeared, carrying fish of their own, and Gibb had to wait them out, too. Bennet drummed his fingers hard on the dashboard.

“Damn it!” Gibb said. “The damn thing wasn’t two blocks down.”

“What the hell was it doing at the Gas ’n’ Grub?” Bennet asked.

“Search me,” Lou said. He eased past the last of the children, pushing the pedal down into overdrive. The car shot forward toward town. It was late, after one in the morning, and Fort Bragg was mostly asleep. A half dozen cars headed north toward the excitement, but almost no one was southbound now. The highway was clear and straight. A pair of taillights shined about a mile down the road, and even at that distance they could see that it was Bennet’s truck, with the tin shed shoving out a foot over either side of the bed.

“Give the bastards room,” Bennet said. “Don’t let them know it’s us.”

30

I
T
was pitch-dark as Howard and Sylvia bounced along down the highway, riding in their Trojan horse, the shed creaking and moaning as it sawed back and forth with the truck’s movement. Jimmers rode up front with Stoat, who would have to make up some excuse for Jimmers being along with him. There wasn’t enough room in the shed, though, for three people and the machine, too, unless they threw out all the garden supplies, and Jimmers couldn’t see the point of that.

Howard sat on a pile of plastic nursery bags full of mulch, bracing himself with his shoulder against the cold, swaying wall. He would never have believed that a night could last as long as this one had. And it wasn’t over yet. He was caught up in the rhythm of it, though, like a long-distance swimmer, and would be all right if he didn’t think about the remaining miles. The truck swerved around an uphill curve, Stoat throttling down into second gear, and Howard tried to guess where they were on the highway, but it was useless.

Every now and then slivers of moonlight filtered through cracks, faintly illuminating the interior of the shed. In those moments he could see Sylvia sitting across from him on the aluminum lawn chair that she had managed to wedge open crookedly in the cramped space. Her eyes were closed, but Howard didn’t think she was asleep.

Perhaps it was darkness, or fatigue, or the lateness of the hour, but Howard’s emotional guard was down, and he knew it and welcomed it. Suddenly he wanted to talk. It was time to clarify things, to cast a light on elements of the mystery that were still in shadow. They had ten or fifteen minutes entirely to themselves, and he determined not to waste it, although he was equally determined not to be as clumsy and abrupt with Sylvia as he had been with Mr. Jimmers earlier.

“What else do you know about Jimmers?” he asked her finally, breaking a long silence.

“I don’t see all that much of him,” she said after a moment.

“He seems to be pretty fond of you, though.”

“He’s always treated me like a daughter. Because of him and Mother, I suppose.”

“Is that it?” Howard asked.

Sylvia was quiet for a time. “What else would it be?”

Then Howard told her about finding Mr. Jimmers’ book, with the altered—or unaltered—dedication and the screwy, too-early date. “I knew that didn’t
prove
anything at all,” Howard said to Sylvia. “Not absolutely. But obviously I had to find out more. So last night, when we went back down to Jimmers’ place after the fake sketch, I asked him outright about it. I told him that I had found the book, read the dedication, and figured out who you really are.”

“What did he say?” Sylvia asked, her voice hoarse.

“He wasn’t surprised at all that I knew. I think he was relieved. On the way back up to Fort Bragg he seemed almost
happy
about it. Maybe you didn’t notice it when we picked you up and headed down to the Tip Top Lounge, but he was about ready to pop with it. He didn’t say anything to you while you were hiding out under the trestle?”

“No.”

“Well …” Howard shrugged. “There’s the truth, though, if you want it. You’re the only daughter of Artemis Jimmers.”