by John Shirley
I waited for a limo to pass on the highway, started across, then had to step back so a white convertible could rocket by with a bunch of drunk college students in it, howling as they went. A beer bottle went spinning out the back of the convertible, smashing on the road about five feet in front of me. A piece of amber glass landed on my right foot.
“Dumbass kids.” I shook the shard off, jumped over the rest of it, grimacing again from my bruises, and dodged across the road to the crunching gravel of the motel parking lot. The wind swirled around me, making me blink with dust, smelling of sage from the desert, and truck exhaust. Sure, Desert Wind Motel, what else.
I walked between parked cars, ignored a drunk young woman throwing up behind a Lexus, her boyfriend patting her on the back. “Be okay, babydoll. Be okay.”
“Shut up,” she said, between heaves.
I glanced at the motel office. I saw a grumpy-looking purple-haired elderly woman glaring out the window at me. I could tell she didn’t have her teeth in. She was probably thinking about asking where I thought I was going without paying at the office first, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to go to that much trouble.
The hell with her. I found the exterior stairs, of concrete and metal, and clattered up them, located room twelve.
There was a light on, inside, somewhere. I could hear a TV talking to itself in there, too. I tapped on the door, and said, “Marissa . . .” But my voice trailed off as the door swing inward. I saw it had been jimmied, forced open, and that was not good, not at all. And I could see that the lamp had been knocked off the bed.
I thought about calling the cops. This was one of those times I wished I had a gun. But if I rushed in with a gun it might get me shot.
Just do what you have to.
I pushed through the door. “Marissa? You here? I just want to see if we can work things out with . . . Lenny . . .”
I saw her feet then, one red pump on, one shoe off, where she lay on the floor between the rumpled bed and the bathroom. The TV was showing a rerun of Two and a Half Men. Charlie Sheen was smacking his forehead on the screen and saying something about how someone was just so, so, so . . .
I made myself walk over to the other side of the bed. She was stretched clumsily out, one leg drawn up, a brass lamp lying beside her head, unplugged.
Marissa’s throat was all puffed up and red around the lamp chord the hire had used to strangle her. Lenny’s hire, probably. Her eyes were bugged out, staring, her mouth open, filled up with caked blood. Her fingers were still clawed beside her neck, where she’d tried to tear the cord off. Her purse was lying beside her, open. Her wallet was half out of the purse. They hadn’t bothered to make it look like a robbery. I could see a couple of twenties sticking out of the wallet.
There was a Happy Meal lying beside her, too, spilled out of its little cardboard container. Looked untouched. A child’s meal. The little girl’s backpack, with Hello Kitty on it, was lying beside her mother’s bags, in the cone of overhead light by the bathroom door. They hadn’t been here long.
I heard the little girl snuffling from the bathroom. I tried to remember the little girl’s name, and couldn’t.
Figures, I thought. You jerk. You never bothered to learn her kid’s name. Marissa probably said it but you weren’t listening.
So the guy had strangled Marissa while her kid was in the bathroom, and . . . the kid was lucky he didn’t know she was in there. If you can call anything lucky, in that kid’s life.
I went to the phone, and dialed 9, then called 911. I told the dispatcher what I’d found. Said I’d found the door open. Heard the child . . . they needed to send Child Protection Services too . . .
I wasn’t supposed to touch anything but in case the little girl came out, I took one of her mother’s blouses, lying on the end of the bed, and covered Marissa’s face with it.
I was going to have to explain that to the cops. I was going to have to convince them I hadn’t killed Marissa, too.
What else could I tell them? Should I tell them about Lenny? Probably I was going to have to make up a story about having heard Marissa might be in trouble . . .
I sat on the edge of the bed and waited. It wasn’t long before the sirens started wailing near.
I just sat there, trying to control the expression on my face. I had to get it real neutral.
I didn’t want them to see the self-loathing.
Sirens. A little girl crying. Radio dispatch voices . . .
And then Doyle shouted at me.
“Fogg! Nicholas Fogg! I must see you!”
My eyes snapped open.
“Ho, Fogg!”
He was shouting from outside the window. I got up and looked. “Doyle?”
“Sorry to disturb you!” He was down on the sidewalk, cupping his hands around his mouth to shout up at me. He wore slippers, vest, a shirt, trousers, nothing more. The sun was just rising and his eyes were in shadow.
And I realized I was glad to see him. I wanted an excuse to leave Jocelyn. I just didn’t want to be there.
“Truly sorry!” Doyle called. “But I need your help, Fogg! My wife . . . Touie! She’s disappeared!”
Part Two
THE WAY TO THE RAINING LANDS
TENTH
“I assure you,” Doyle was saying, “Touie would not have responded to the Summons without telling me. Not without leaving a note, at the very least. In all probability she’d have discussed it with me over tea. I know her . . .”
We were gathered in the front yard—myself, Brummigen, Doyle, Bertram, and Mayor Chauncey. Garden Rest’s mayor was still in his pajamas and bathrobe. Doyle’s mustaches were askew, his hair a muss, and there were hollows under his eyes.
We’d just searched the grounds and the house, including the “storm shelter” in the basement, and the barren attic. We found no relevant sign of Mrs. Doyle.
Now we stood near Arthur Conan Doyle’s tombstone. We were trying to work out what to do about Doyle’s missing wife and I was glad to have something to do—a task of some kind to occupy my mind. I still felt haunted by the dream, the relived memory, of finding Marissa strangled in her room. Marissa’s daughter snuffling in the bathroom, the door locked. And the cops . . . And the closeness and infinite distance between me and Jocelyn . . .
“So—tell me again how you lost track of her, Doyle,” Brummigen said. “That’s surprising, in itself, I mean, seeing as you were both in the house . . .”
“I thought we were in the house together!” Doyle shook his head woefully. “Like a fool I didn’t check on her after the psychic storm. A little after the storm ended Fogg went about his business and, why, I simply assumed Touie was at her knitting down in the storm room and would be along in time. I began to pore over the journals again.” He clasped his hands together. “Got quite caught up in that, making notes, trying to think a few things out. Next thing I knew, it was well after dark. And . . . suddenly I noticed her absence in the house. I went to look for her, I called out. There was no reply.” Doyle nodded at the house. “Her knitting was in the basement room, on a chair. Her shawl was gone, but no other clothing was missing. There was no note from her, nothing! I searched the house, the grounds, went to the immediate neighbors. No one had seen her. I went back to wait, sitting in my easy chair, and I fell into a bit of a drift, remembering . . . oh, things, from my life. I was dreaming of the time of Touie’s passing, actually. When I came to, I checked again. She had not been back. Not the least sign of it! She always goes to bed. She is no night owl. So I went and looked about some more and then I rather rudely summoned Fogg . . .”
I figured he was worried we might find her remains, somewhere, like we’d found Morgan Harris . . . now and then his gaze strayed in the direction of Gretchen’s Overlook.
“Very well, then,” said Chauncey. “We shall do a general search. I shall ask for volunteers and we
will go from house to house.”
“You didn’t have a fight, or anything?” Bertram asked.
Doyle shot him a hard look. “No,” he said coldly. After a moment, he added, in a milder voice, “We have not been always at our best, lately, she and I. But we had nothing like a true row.”
“She’d been feeling sick,” I pointed out. “Could her disappearance have anything to do with that?”
Brummigen looked at Doyle, seemed about to stay something, then held his peace.
Winn Chauncey absently scratched his head, frowning. “Sick? Is that possible?”
“Oh, it was some sort of hypochondria, really,” Doyle said. “She was well enough when I came here. For years, in fact, she was quite healthy. Then this memory of consumption came upon her—and it was as if the memory made the symptoms return. But I felt it was all in her mind . . .”
It was still early morning, but the sun was up now. It could now see us more clearly, I suppose. I wanted to take in some sunlight for breakfast, but I didn’t want to turn away, seem like I was indifferent to Doyle’s anxiety. “What about the Lamplighter?” I asked. “Maybe he saw her.”
Chauncey sighed. “Diogenes left the village just after lighting the lamps, yesterday. He called on me to say he would be gone. So we can’t very well ask him till he returns—I have no idea where he’s gone off to or how long he’ll be away. You know how he is.”
Doyle grunted. “I see. Let us then . . . have some tea. I’ll make the tea. And . . . and I’ll think the matter over.”
“I think I’ll just go home and change,” Chauncey said. “Go on without me. I’ll be back soon enough . . .”
“I’ll head over to the coffee shop, ask around there,” Bertram said.
“Very good, very good,” Doyle muttered, walking into the house. His movements didn’t have his usual certainty; he seemed to weave, slightly, as he went.
Half an hour later, Doyle, Major Brummigen, and I were sitting at the wrought-iron table on the back deck of the house, drinking tea, ignoring the plate of stale scones, and looking vaguely toward the row of poplar trees and flowering bushes marking the boundary between Doyle’s house and the next property. I could just see the top of a thatched roof. Doyle had hardly touched his tea. He had combed his hair and mustache, and shaved; he had put on a blazer with leather patches on the elbows. He stared glumly into the middle distance, seeming remote—kept remote on purpose, I thought.
But at last he said, softly, “If it happened to her, I’m sure, I . . .” His voice trailed off.
Brummigen put his teacup down and clasped Doyle’s upper arm reassuringly. “You’re wondering if you’re going to find her remains the way we found Morgan Harris? No, Doyle. There are so many more likely things that could’ve caused her to be . . . to be missing.”
I nodded. “That’s what I think, too.”
But in fact, I wasn’t really sure. The missing woman, Louisa “Touie” Doyle, was the wife of the man who was investigating the murders . . .
Doyle made a grumbling sound under his breath, and said, “If it is an abductor, I don’t think he could have destroyed her afterbody without my knowing. If the abductor is a he. I think, if . . . if Touie’s soul had been torn from her afterbody, and flung into the world willy-nilly, why, I’d have known . . . Indeed I think it would have come to me. We are not ideally suited—I will not pretend we are. But we are deeply interconnected through years of association, and . . . well, I have a deep respect for her.”
“Who lives over there?” I asked, nodding toward the rooftop barely visible through the trees.
Doyle glanced at it without much interest. “Oh that’s Lottie’s cottage. My sister.”
I looked at him in surprise. “I didn’t know your sisters were here!”
“That one is. She’s quite caught up in her afterlife with her husband—he predeceased her, and they took some time finding one another, after she came. They’re making up for lost time. I don’t see her as much as I like. Any road, I went there first thing when I found that Touie was missing—that she hadn’t been to bed.” Doyle shook his head. “Lottie hasn’t seen her. And if there’s anyone I can trust, it’s Lottie.”
“Time’s come, then,” Brummigen said, his voice taking on a military tone. “We should start the general search.”
But in fact we started with the usual suspects—the handy ones. Mo and Randy, and a troublesome eccentric I hadn’t met till then, who went by the name Wind Blown and seemed to change his or her gender on an almost daily basis. Wind was harmless. Mo and Randy were clueless. Bertram spoke to Hale Bolliver, and reported back to us that Bolliver was drifting around, as usual, didn’t have Touie with him, and didn’t seem guilty of anything new.
Bull Moore wasn’t around. Doyle didn’t seem worried about him but said we’d check him later. I wasn’t so sure Moore wasn’t someone to worry about.
Scouring the village and surrounds took most of the day. We started at the top of the cliff trail, at the place where we’d found Morgan Harris, just to eliminate the possibility that, if she’d been killed, the assassin had left her there where we’d found the other remains. Maybe the guy would be a pattern-obsessed psycho killer. But there was no sign of her on the cliff, and no indication anyone else had been there. Doyle went from house to house, inquiring about Touie, his voice gentle, making it clear he suspected no one of anything. He never asked to search the house. He seemed to know the instant they opened the door that she wasn’t there.
I met Gerrano, as I went along with Doyle. Gerrano was a brawny man who nearly always went shirtless—so I’ve learned since—his broad chest covered by a black pelt. He met us at the door of his cottage, a little Bavarian–style place right out of an old Grimm’s fairy tale. Gerrano was scowling at first, his thick black brows meeting over his Roman nose. “You’re going to accuse me of something again, Doyle?” he rumbled.
“No, no, I’m just looking for my wife. She’s wandered off. Gone all night. She’d have told me if it was the Summons.”
“You think I seduced her?”
“Don’t be absurd. I thought we were friends now, Gerrano. You sound as paranoiac as Moore. I just want to know if she’s about, or if you’ve seen her at all . . .”
“Come in and search.”
“No, that won’t be necessary.”
“I insist!”
Doyle shrugged and we looked through the cottage. It was messy clothing chucked on the floor and empty bottles; every tabletop was cluttered with tools. Touie wasn’t there and we saw no sign that she’d ever been there.
We went out the back, and looked through the small barn out behind Gerrano’s cottage. There I saw the first horse I’ve encountered in the afterworld. He was a short, stocky horse, black with a white blaze, just a little bigger than a pony. He stood stolidly in a stall in the barn, chewing on some sort of green feed he probably didn’t need to eat. The horse tossed his head and looked at me, snorted, seemed distinctly unimpressed, but didn’t say anything. I hoped horses didn’t talk here.
The day was worn to a nub by the time Brummigen and I trudged through the sand by the Purple Sea, and came across Fiona, who seemed to materialize in the fog.
It wasn’t materialization, but that’s what it looked like. Or maybe the appearance of magic had something to do with her effect on me.
First I saw her dark hair, her eyes, then her shoulders, her arms; then her dress came into focus, as she strolled calmly toward us, smiling.
“Did you bring me a cigarette, yet?” she asked me.
“Not yet,” I said. “But there’s a persistent rumor of tobacco growing somewhere to the south.”
“Oooh! Go find it!”
She was confident I would do just that. I should have been annoyed. I wasn’t. I probably would go try to find it for her.
“Fiona,” Brummigen said gru
ffly, “have you seen Louisa Doyle?”
“You mean Touie? Not for days and days. Are you looking for her?”
“She seems to have gone missing and in view of the two sets of . . . of remains we’ve found . . . You do know about that, don’t you?”
“The murders? I wondered if those people, after they lost their bodies, just got transitioned again, and went to another part of the world where somebody else is greeting them by another village . . .”
Brummigen shook his head. “It’s not like that.”
“Well, I told Diogenes what I knew about that one on the cliff. Up on Gretchen’s Overlook.”
I looked at Brummigen. “No one told me this all started with Fiona.”
Brummigen shrugged. “She was the first to see it, in a way.”
“I didn’t see it really,” she said, scuffing at the sand with a bare toe. “I saw a light up there, on the cliffs, a really crazy light, bright and . . . it seemed like it was shaped like a man. He looked like he was lying on his back, and I could just see the outline of another man up there . . .”
“What man?” Brummigen and I asked, at the same time.
Fiona laughed at our saying the same thing at the same time. We didn’t.
“I don’t know who the other person was. No notion of it! The outline looked male to me but that’s all I can tell you. Just a silhouette, up on the Overlook. Not even a hat to describe! I’m not even sure of the guy’s height, seeing him from down here. But I heard a scream, that went with this light, same time, and I started toward the village to mention it to Doyle, and there was Diogenes walking toward me, frowning, and he asked me if I’d heard anything unusual, and I said, ‘Yeah I heard that glowing man on the cliff screaming,’ and he said, ‘Glowing man?’ and he went to look and that’s the last I heard about it. Except I saw you boys up there with your lanterns, later . . .”
“So that’s why Harris’s remains were left there—he was interrupted. Probably Diogenes was coming and whoever was finishing up there just . . . left.”