He waded straight out into a big tide pool instead, gasping at the cold water that swirled around his ankles and stepping up onto a dark shelf of rock that was a garden of limp, exposed sea palms. He slid on the slippery leaves, slamming his foot against a jagged bit of rock and then sliding sideways into a deeper pool, soaking his right leg up to the waist. His breath jerked up out of his throat, and he nearly shouted as he pulled himself out of the freezing water and scrambled in behind a table-sized angle of stone, gripping two handfuls of sea palm to hold himself steady.
Right then the two men appeared at the mouth of the passage, looking around themselves warily. One of them carried a stick—a table leg or something—and he held it out to the side, ready to bash someone. They turned to look above them up the bluffs just in case Howard was up there. Seeing nothing, they stood murmuring to each other, one of them shaking his head.
Howard kneeled in the shadow, hidden behind his rock. The ocean swirled in just then, rising to his waist, trying to push him forward. His breath shot up out of his lungs with the numbing cold of it, and he was nearly washed off into deeper water. The ocean rose higher, and his legs slowed around as he kicked to try to find a purchase against the rocks.
Then the ocean receded, leaving him sodden and hanging. He got his knees up under him, creeping toward higher ground, crouching to stay hidden while the two on shore still looked around themselves dumbly, surveying the cliff face once more and then looking hard out into the ocean—straight past him. They edged out onto the rocks, trying to get a glimpse across to where the Studebaker sat. But that meant taking a swim, or at least a wade out into the ocean, and their tiptoeing around made it seem as if neither one of them wanted to get wet.
They pointed Howard’s footsteps out to each other and looked across the little bay. Howard stayed put, watching them between the rocks, thankful that the sun was low and the shadows were long. But if they came his way, they would see him, and he would have no choice but to turn and run—head for deep water and swim straight out to sea. The water was cold, but not cold enough to cause him any serious trouble, not for a little while, anyway.
They stood arguing now. One of them pointed oceanward, and Howard heard the other one say, “Who cares?” very loud, and then turn and walk away, back into the tunnel. The other stood there for another minute, evidently considering things.
The water swirled up around Howard’s waist again, pushing him up the rock, spinning him in a lazy circle. He held on, waiting it out, cursing the man who still stood there hunting him. The ocean was colder than he had realized, and with the wind blowing now he would be colder yet before he was out of it. Then the second man was gone suddenly, back into the darkness.
Howard held on. What if they were crouched in the shadows, waiting for him to make his move? They might be more desperate than he thought. It was possible of course, from their point of view, that Howard had the sketch with him, that he had found it in the attic and taken it. He suddenly regretted all the tough talk in the hallway when he had confronted the man in the wig. He shouldn’t have mentioned the sketch at all.
Minutes passed. The ocean rose and fell. Howard’s feet were like blocks of heavy, numb sponge, wrapped in soggy socks that bagged around his ankles. He could see the silhouettes of the two men now, far above him, moving around in the attic, back and forth across the windows. There was no going back up the tunnel, not unless he wanted to hand himself over.
Without wasting any more time, he stood up, balancing carefully. Starting to shiver, he picked his way seaward from rock to rock, his wet pants sticking to his legs. It struck him that the cove must be impossible to navigate, even in a small boat at high tide. Far outside he could see the white tumble of breakers.
He looked over his shoulder, back at the little bit of beach, where the tunnel mouth lay dark and silent. He could see only a black crescent of it now, and in a moment it was lost to sight completely beyond intervening rocks. He was safe. They would see him from the attic window if they cared enough to look, but by then he’d be too far off to chase. He had only to keep moving. In a half hour, he told himself, he would be in Jimmers’ parlor; the fire would be roaring, and he would have his shoes back. By then, he hoped, the two men would be gone.
His socks were a ragged mess, pulled apart on the rough rocks. He couldn’t feel much at all because of the cold water, which was just as well, because there were a couple of bleeding cuts on the bottom of his feet. He stepped along gingerly, forcing himself to slow down. He was tired and wobbly, and if he hurried he was sure to slip and fall. A twisted ankle would plunge him into deep trouble.
The tide seemed to be creeping higher, too. If he didn’t want to find himself swimming against it, he would have to get out and around the long, rocky promontory that formed the south edge of the cove. It wasn’t much farther to the tip of it—fifty yards, perhaps.
He could see where the water rushed out, leaving the low, kelp-covered shelf of the promontory high and dry, and then rushed back in again to cover it, slamming up against the vertical face of the upthrusting rock cliffs. He would have to avoid that, somehow—wait for a lull in the waves and run for it across the rocks; to hell with his feet. In ten minutes, probably, there would be nothing but ocean there, breaking waves, and getting past it would mean a long swim in rough water.
He set out across a bed of mussels and barnacles, hobbling gingerly on the things like a South Sea Islander across hot coals, his feet pressing them down. A broken shell knicked the soft arch of his foot, and he said “Ouch!” out loud, not caring who might hear him anymore, which was no one. The house sat on the cliff far above and behind him now, lit up from top to bottom. A faint wisp of smoke rose from the stone chimney.
He skirted the tip of the promontory finally, crawling up and onto a dark, stone shelf. The ocean washed through, deeper with each succeeding swell. Waves that had been breaking farther out in shallow water rolled right through now to smash against the ledge that he picked his way across, and he was knocked off his feet and had to scramble to keep himself from being swept back out with them.
He wasn’t certain where the rock shelf ended and the next cove started but he knew there was another cove there, visible to the south of where he and Sylvia had talked on the bluffs that afternoon. He pictured it in his mind, as if to make it exist for him by sympathetic magic. There was a trail that led down to it from above, switchbacking along the bluffs, through the wildflowers and tall grass, and he imagined himself staggering up that trail, out of the water at last.
Another wave washed through, humping up over the ledge and quartering toward him across the now-submerged kelp and smaller rocks. He braced himself, but it slammed him over backward, pushing him helplessly toward the cliff face where the water roiled and leaped and blasted into the air in heavy geysers. He flailed with his arms, trying to turn himself around, waiting to be knocked senseless. His head scraped sickeningly across a mussel-covered rock, and he could hear his scalp tear for a stinging-cold moment. Then the face of the wave smashed against the cliff, and the wave’s energy turned on itself as the sea rushed back, dragging him along, surging away from the rock wall and hauling him off the edge of the reef and into deeper water before relaxing its grip on him.
He struck out hard, swimming parallel to the shore, his sodden clothes dragging at him. They had saved him a thousand cuts and scrapes, though. Pulling any of them off now would be madness. They would do something to cut the sea wind, too, when he got to shore.
He kept that in mind—getting to shore—as he kicked over the top of a wave and down the back side of it, still swimming. Again he pictured Mr. Jimmers’ stuffed chair in front of the parlor fire, and the fire itself, heaped with cedar logs, leaping and popping, orange sparks rushing up the stone chimney.
His arms and legs felt weighted, and he found that he couldn’t easily open and close his hands, which he pulled through the water like frozen bricks. A wave broke, catching him by surprise and washing over his head
. He fought to stay on the surface, coughing up ocean water and gasping for air, kicking his legs tiredly. He forced his arms to move, plodding along in a sodden crawl stroke and paying attention to the waves and to the rocks along the shore.
He could see that the cliffs moved slowly past him now. He was making headway—more than he ought to be making. He was being swept along in a current. Suddenly frightened, he began to swim straight in toward shore with fear-induced power, trying to pull a little energy out of the waves washing past him.
When he rose on one swell, he saw that he was straight off the next cove, which stretched lovely and flat and sandy for something like fifty yards. He kicked furiously into an onrushing wave, which sped him forward, picking him up and hurtling him past the black humps of exposed rock. He held his hands out in front of him and tucked his head against his chest, expecting to be slammed against the rocks as the wave jumped and foamed around him, carrying him shoreward now in a wild rush.
Then the wave abruptly dwindled, dumping him thirty feet from shore and washing out to leave him on his knees in the shallows. He tried to stand, but couldn’t, and another wave tumbled through, sliding him in across the sand before rushing back out and leaving him there on the beach, sodden and gasping.
He rested for a moment before crawling farther up, the ocean licking at his feet. Then he lay there again, thinking that as the tide came up, the waves might easily submerge the whole beach, which was almost flat. He could see flotsam and seaweed scattered in the rocks above him, advertising the high-tide line. The sight of it compelled him to stand, and he staggered away toward where the dirt path joined the beach, trying to dust the sand off his hands against the side of his pants.
He plodded tiredly up the path some twenty or thirty feet before sitting down in the dirt to rest. His feet had started to thaw out, and it wasn’t any sort of pins and needles tickling; it was a slow burning and itching, and the painful realization that they were cut up, and that he was walking now nearly barefoot through dirt. He still wore his socks, but there wasn’t anything left of the bottoms of them except a few stretched bunches of thread. He stopped long enough to turn his socks over, so that the heel stretched across his ankle. At least his head, miraculously, was whole. There was a wash of watery blood across his hand when he touched his cut scalp, but the mussels, blessedly, had been just a little bit spongy, happy just to slice him up and tear out clumps of hair.
Twice again he stopped to rest, looking down on the cove and at the ocean that had both saved him and tried to drown him. Then he trudged upward, finally topping the rise and finding himself on the meadow, skirting the wooden fence where he had talked to Sylvia only a few hours earlier.
He was suddenly in dangerous territory, and he slipped along warily, boosted by the adrenaline rush of confronting the two robbers again. He couldn’t afford to do that. But what would he do instead? Pitch their distributor cap into the weeds and drive like hell down the highway? Wait for them to leave peaceably and then go in after Jimmers?
He pushed through the vines at the side of the house, crouching behind the cement mixer and peering past it.
They were gone. The red Camaro simply wasn’t there. Cautiously he hunched across the yard in the shadow of the house. The front door was shut, the house dark. Fearing that they’d moved the car and that he would blunder into them, Howard edged along the wall toward the garden. There was nothing—just the tin shed standing lonely in the moonlight.
He retraced his steps to the front door, opened it slowly, and listened for a moment before pulling off his socks and stepping in out of the sea wind. The house was silent, the fire nearly burned down. Mr. Jimmers sat in his chair yet, just as Howard had left him. He was breathing evenly, obviously asleep.
Without a backward glance, Howard eased the stone out of the face of the fireplace, reaching into the dark recess. The hidey-hole was empty, the sketch gone.
“Move and you’re a dead man,” a voice said, and Howard believed it, and stood very still, his nose six inches from the granite wall of the fireplace.
16
A MINUTE passed in complete silence. Howard was aware of the cold stones of the floor and of the pitifully burned-down fire and of the stomach-wrenching truth that someone right now was deciding calmly what to do with him—shoot him, maybe, in the back, or merely beat him senseless with a club. He began to shiver again, violently now. Whatever energies had fired him when he was sneaking back into the house had waned, and it was with a growing sense of horror that he realized he was in no condition at all to put up a fight.
Still nothing happened—no blow, no further orders, not even a poke in the ribs. He risked standing up out of the semi-crouch he was in. No one protested. There was nothing but silence. He turned his head slightly. No one said a word. He had moved, and he wasn’t a dead man. He had the eerie notion, though, that someone was standing directly behind him.
He couldn’t bear it any longer, and he turned to look, ready to throw himself onto the floor, into the fireplace if need be. There stood Mr. Jimmers, wide-eyed but otherwise deadpan and staring at his pocket watch as if counting off the seconds. He had cleaned the blood from his forehead and wore a big, rectangular bandage on the cut. Howard hadn’t noticed it, sneaking around as he had been.
“A little experiment in human behavior,” Mr. Jimmers said, putting the watch away. “Taken a swim, then?”
“Yes,” said Howard. “That’s right. They chased me down to the cove, and I got away across the rocks.”
“And came back around to rob me?”
“Not at all. I wanted to know if they’d got it. What were we fighting about, after all, if it wasn’t to keep them from getting it?”
“I burned it this afternoon. You saw me. Disbelieve your own eyes these days?”
“I thought it was, you know—a prank, a trick.”
“Ah! That’s it. A prank, a trick, a cheat.” He smiled suddenly. “They’re gone. Empty-handed. I told them it was in the attic, after they locked you in. They came back down to rough me up. I’m not the sort, though, to be pushed around like that. I’ve got friends, and I warned them of it. Clever of me, wasn’t it, telling them it was in the attic, hidden under the drawer in the library table? You should have heard me.”
Mr. Jimmers waggled his eyebrows at Howard, and then said, “Ouch,” under his breath, and touched his forehead gingerly, his face clouding over for a moment. Then he grinned again. “It could be they think you’ve got it now—that you found it and fled. I said you were a skunk, a thief, a poseur from down south. I’m free of them. They’re yours now. Here, sit down.” Mr. Jimmers gestured toward the chair, but then seemed to see for the first time that Howard was soaked through, and he shook his head, as if withdrawing the offer. Instead, he threw two logs onto the fire and blew at them with a bellows.
“You’ll warm up faster standing up,” he said. “Cup of Postum?”
“No thanks. You’re all right, then—no ringing in the ears or faintness?”
“Not at all. I’m tip-top. They didn’t want trouble, assault charges. You know what they wanted. How about you, though? You’ve taken a nasty scratch on your head.”
“Assault charges?” Howard said. “You called the police?”
“No,” said Mr. Jimmers. “Nor will you. You’ll disappear south, back to the warrens of Los Angeles. I’ve thought this through, and I’ve come up with a plan that might save you. You’ll leave your truck and all your belongings. They aren’t worth anything, anyway. We’ll smuggle you up to the Little River airport and fly you out in a private plane—to Oakland, where you can catch a commercial jet into Los Angeles. You can’t return to work, of course, or to your living quarters, but I can’t imagine that you’ll suffer any for that. It’s possible that we can arrange some little stipend to see you over. I have a cousin in the cordage industry down there. He could probably find you a position.”
Mr. Jimmers paced up and down, his hands behind his back. Howard stood cooking before t
he fire, listening in astonishment. “Anyway, straight off you’ll send someone in to steal your dental records. And when you don’t reappear at Roy Barton’s place, our thieves will be certain you’ve drowned with the sketch. Meantime, somehow we’ll get a cadaver and soak it in a tide pool for a few days, let the crabs and fish have a go at it, then tow it a quarter mile out to sea and set it adrift. By the time it washes up on shore there’ll be no one alive who can say it’s not you if they don’t have the dental records, which they won’t, of course, because you’ll have destroyed them. No, cancel that. Forget the dental records. We’ve got a corpse, don’t we? We’ll break its teeth out. Wait! Better than that, and easier, we’ll cut off its head! To hell with dental records. Don’t bother yourself with them. This is foolproof! We’ll pull the wool straight over their eyes. You won’t have anything to fear from these men. I had to pitch you into the soup there with the shotgun and all, which I notice you ruined somehow, but I’m hauling you out again with the ladle. Dry yourself off and get back to the business of living. That’s my last word on the subject, and it’s a good one.”
Howard said nothing during this appalling speech. The fire leaped behind him, throwing out a wash of heat, and he stepped forward and brushed at the back of his legs. He had no earthly idea whether Mr. Jimmers was serious or playing Tom Fool. He didn’t have the strength to ask and certainly not the strength to play along. Of course he wouldn’t disappear south. If these thieves accosted him, he’d tell the truth—that he had seen Jimmers burn it. They could turn him upside down, empty his pockets, give him the third degree. What good would it do them? They hadn’t killed Jimmers tonight. It stood to reason that they wouldn’t kill him, either.
“Wait here,” Mr. Jimmers said, hurrying away. He was back within minutes with a set of dry clothes, and Howard, suddenly, was itching to be out of there. Mr. Jimmers was safe. Howard could catch Uncle Roy at the haunted house. He would know what Jo do next. In fact, Uncle Roy and Sylvia might easily be the next victims. There was no time to stand and chat with Mr. Jimmers.
The Paper Grail Page 21