The Grave - An Oxrun Station Novel (Oxrun Station Novels)

by Charles L. Grant

  "You're in no position to laugh, you know."

  He held up a hand and turned its back toward her. Exposing, displaying the healing scars of his wounds. "I have nothing to laugh about, nothing at all."

  She nodded. "And I want you to promise to hear me out before you strangle me."

  "Don't push it, Fel. Don't push it."

  Immediately he said it, he regretted the threat and the effect it produced on the color of her cheeks. But he could not take it back, and he would not. Blown back and forth like a balloon on the wind, he was tired of turning around and every time finding someone had reorganized his world. If Fel had any clue, any clue at all, he wanted to know it because someone was going to pay for his fear.

  "I've said this once before, Miller," she whispered. "I'll say it again—who's after you? No. Wait. Don't say anything. It's more than that now. Miller . . . who's trying to kill you?"

  Chapter 22

  A trembling dizziness drifted over him, and he closed his eyes against it. It was not so much the question itself that bothered him as it was the assurance that both of them understood she had asked the right one. Nothing about the train, nothing about the accident and how it might have been caused, but the acceptance in spirit (if not yet in fact) that no matter what Tanner's report said, it wasn't an accident at all. It was an attempt. A clear and deliberate attempt to take his life. And worse: for no reason that he could understand. If he were an important banker, stockbroker, any one of the hundreds of financially and politically powerful men in the village, he would be able to take hold and comprehend it. But he wasn't. He ran a small specialty business on a side street, known to only a handful of people; he had no enemies except those in similar pursuits, and they would hardly lease locomotives to run him down; he had wronged no husbands and had impregnated no women, never cheated at cards or baseball, didn't owe loan sharks, and never bet on the horses. He was dull. He was ordinary. And someone, it seemed, didn't think of him that way.

  "I don't know," he said, appeal in his voice.

  "Neither do I," she told him.

  "But you have a suspicion, don't you. And I don't have to guess who, do I?"

  She shook her head.

  "Fel, the obvious thing would be for me to accuse you of being spiteful, jealous, all those cute little explanations that fill up bad movies." He looked down at his hands, flat on the sheet over his thighs. "The trouble is, too, I know you too well to dismiss them out of hand while, at the same time, I know you've probably fought like hell to neutralize them." He looked up; she was staring, her lips pale in indignation. "I know. A hell of an assumption."

  "I'm trying to save your life, you bastard."

  "Convince me," he said. "I mean, convince me there's someone out there who wants it."

  They didn't speak for several minutes. A nurse interrupted to take blood pressure and temperature, an attendant to take away the remains of his lunch and fluff his pillow and caution Felicity not to stay too long. Then Dr. Anderson came in, too cheerful by half, and told Josh he could leave anytime after tomorrow, left him with an appointment to come back for the stitches' removal.

  Alone, they watched the sunlight white through the Venetian blinds, the oak that barely reached here to the top, fourth floor. When a summons chimed faintly in the corridor, Felicity shook herself as though out of a dream and pulled the chair closer, using the bed to punch out her emphasis.

  "While you were in dreamland, partner, I did some more checking, this and that, and thought a lot about what you told me the day you hit the tree."

  "I didn't—"

  She hushed him with a scowl. "We can argue that later, okay? Right now, we've got too much to get straight. You going to listen, or am I going to walk?"

  She grinned, and he grinned back, lifted a hand imperiously toward her. She snapped at it and he snatched it back. The tension was still there, but the animosity was gone.

  "What I did was," she said, "I put to the test all the lessons I thought I learned from the guy who's trying to teach me this silly business of pop archaeology. What I did was, I made lists—of all the things I could remember about your having trouble. Not just with the office, but with your personal life, too. I don't know what you haven't told me, but I could make some pretty good guesses, I think. Anyway, I did anyway . . . and I have a theory."

  "You found the hand plow."

  She grimaced at him. "Funny."

  "You found Mrs. Thames."

  "Maybe."

  He stared.

  "Listen. Just listen. You promised not to interrupt, remember?" She waited. He couldn't stop staring. "You know, when you told me what Dr. Stanworth said to you the morning Mrs. Thames took off, it rang a bell. I thought about that first, and I realized he was right. You haven't been yourself lately, Josh, you really haven't. There are days when you're the same sweet old son of a bitch I used to know, and days when you act like someone dropped a fog over your head. So I made the list.

  "Josh, please don't think I'm crazy, but I think everything that's happened to you over the past couple months has been deliberate."

  He looked up to the ceiling, but kept his expression as blank as he could. There were any number of sarcastic replies he could have offered, but all of them suddenly seemed petty and untoward. Instead, he waited, already traveling along the lines she had suggested.

  "It's like someone out there doesn't want you to do the things you do best, Josh."

  He heard her, felt the moisture break on his palms as he believed her.

  "I mean, you get going on the hand plow and something comes along to distract you. Then something else comes along to distract you from that. And then something else. And something else. Like you were being herded around in a corral or a circle, and you never have time to stop and really think. Your head gets filled, Josh. You know that. You get a bug and you don't let it go, you worry the damned thing to death, and more if you're not satisfied with the corpse.

  "So every time you get close to one thing, you get turned around to something else. And it was the hand plow, Josh. It was the hand plow that started it."

  He nodded. She continued to speculate, to apologize for the speculations, and he nodded through it all because she was right. He had felt it once before, and the feeling now returned: one of quiet, unobtrusive, long-range manipulation. Events orchestrated to keep him in line, but events spaced out over days and weeks so that discovering the connection was virtually impossible. Until Melissa had given him the clue, the clue he hadn't known until it was too late.

  Felicity had gone to the Thames house, had searched through the old woman's desk until she'd found an address book. She called some of the numbers and learned that none of the other women in the group had left town unexpectedly. Then she reminded him of the four manuscripts he had unearthed in New York, searches that had come in after he had left the Station to look for Dale's sheet music It was obvious now, she told him, that the idea was to keep him away as long as possible, away from the village so his curiosity wouldn't inadvertently lead him to someplace where he didn't belong. At least not yet.

  "The office, your place . . . it was all what they call a plant. Something like that. Smokescreen. Keep you off balance. Keep you from thinking, Josh. Keep you from thinking!"

  The greatest invention man had yet devised was not the wheel, he thought, or the printing press or the automobile or spacecraft or television; it was hindsight. A hell of a thing that made experts of fools . . . especially fools like him.

  No. He frowned at himself. No, not a fool. Only if he had known from the beginning what was happening and had ignored it. Dupe. Not much more elegant, but better than fool. He had been a dupe.

  "Thinking about what?" he asked, refusing to meet her gaze.

  "About . . ."

  He looked at her, hard, reached out, and took her wrist. "Felicity, it's Andrea, right? It's all right, I'm way ahead of you."

  "I don't think so," she said. "I think it's her father." She rushed on. "Look, he's no
t there when you want him, he can't be found when he's supposed to be in the city, he's got Andrea prancing around like a goddamned trained horse, and when I talked to her it was clear she's scared to death of him. I don't know what he's doing, but he has something to do with all the people who aren't around anymore. They leave, not officially missing because there's no sign of trouble, and it's all on their birthdays. Significant, Sherlock, significant. Don't ask me why, but it is. You already know that. What you don't know is that King—the garage guy?—he had a guy working for him last fall, just walked off the job. A drifter. Lived on Devon Street, one of the boardinghouses like mine. Never took his stuff. Gone. Poof. A waitress at the inn, young and sexy—poof. A young guy who used to work in the park, cleaning up after the kids—poof.

  "Poof, Miller. Nine of them. Poof."

  He chuckled, covered his mouth with an apologetic hand . . . and let it drop slowly into his lap. "Nine."

  She nodded.

  "Felicity, there were . . ."

  "Right," she said. "I didn't have the nerve to go out there myself, but I remembered what you told me. Nine people nobody would miss, nine graves that aren't supposed to be where they are. I thought of that. I made some calls."

  "I'll bet." But his admiration increased a hundredfold as he smiled.

  "Vandalism in almost a dozen cemeteries across the state. Graves marked up, torn up, monuments toppled, stuff like that. Also, headstones stolen. Old ones. Ones nobody really cares about because they're too damned old and the names on them have been practically worn off."

  The nurse returned, gently adamant that visiting hours were over and no dispensation would be given. They both protested so loudly a small crowd gathered at the door, but the head nurse would not be budged. She glowered, and gestured, and Felicity picked up her purse.

  "Think some more, Miller," she said as she left. "I'll see you tomorrow. Rain or shine it'll be a nice day."

  He waved dispiritedly, fell into a silence that not even the doctor could shatter.

  Sunset, and he stared at the opposite wall. Everything Fel had told him made a foul kind of sense, though neither of them had yet ventured to clear up the why. Off balance; that much he could accept, but he didn't know why. Felicity said the hand plow was behind it, and he thought she meant because his searching would have eventually led him to the new/old graveyard. As it had when he had gone out there with Andrea.

  His hands gripped the sheets, ready to toss them aside. His clothes, if he had any left from the accident, must still be in the closet. He would have to get out to the farm somehow, tell her he knew what her father was doing. Her father obviously in league with Lloyd Stanworth. A conspiracy of killing. A collection of murder.

  Off balance. Why him?

  Supper came and was eaten, was taken away. Shortly after nine the night nurse came in and stood by his head, her hands behind her back. "I guess you're not going to sleep, are you."

  "Can't," he said, a disingenuous shrug. "A lot on my mind."

  "There's no medication prescribed for you."

  "Don't want any, thank you."

  She wasn't young, but she carried middle age well. She exposed her hands, and in them a telephone. "I talked with my friend before I came on. She's in charge of days. She told me about your heavy meeting with your . . . friend." Her eyes crinkled into a smile. She plugged in the phone. "I'm going to come back in fifteen minutes and I'm going to discover that you have an unauthorized phone. Naughty." And she left.

  Josh wasted no time. He tried first for Andrea, but there was no answer and he pounded at the mattress until his arm tired. Then a futile attempt at the Stanworth's residence before he called Felicity.

  "I don't have much time," he said, "but don't ask me why. Is there anything else you have to tell me?"

  "The dreams," she said. "The wind."

  "What about them?"

  "They were caused."

  "Felicity, you're crazy. I'm sorry, love, but you've been great until this. What the hell do you mean, they were caused?"

  "Somebody is doing something to you, Miller. I don't know what, I don't know how. Think about it. You feel watched, you have these dreams, you think you've been hit by a train when there wasn't any train on that track that night . . . all of it. Damnit, Josh, it was caused!"

  He could hear the fear in her voice, draping her words, catching her breath until she sounded ragged. "How?" he whispered harshly, with one eye at the door, an ear picking up footsteps heading for his door. "How, Fel, how?"

  "I don't know!" Hysteria, then, unbidden, uncorked. "Hypnosis, the supernatural . . . how the hell should I know? Drugs, maybe, in your food. I can't answer that, Josh. I wish I could, but I can't."

  "Fel," he said urgently, "you've got to try to get hold of Andy. Make her leave that house if you can. I've tried once and no one answered. If you have to stay up all night, for god's sake try to get her."

  "Josh . . . I'm scared. If her father finds out . . ."

  "Yeah. Damnit, yes, you're right." He put a fist to his teeth and chewed hard on his knuckles. He couldn't think. Nothing made sense, and everything did. And he almost screamed when the nurse returned with an orderly to take out the phone.

  Feigning sleep wasn't difficult; he was exhausted without having to move a muscle. Twice, three times, he went over their conversation and attempted to find out where the new clue lay. There had to be one. He couldn't miss it as he had the others—telling himself he hadn't known there was a mystery, so don't blame yourself, idiot—but the attempt was futile. And probably would be until he discovered what Murdoch and Stanworth were up to. And how they had managed to invade his mind to produce those hallucinations, how they had timed them so precisely, how they had learned where he would be and when so they could exploit him when he was vulnerable. Like in the bathtub, and in the car.

  Felicity knew. Felicity had called him while he was bathing. He almost accepted it until he remembered the call prior to hers, the call he had cursed because there was no one at the other end.

  Something, then, that stalked him? That watched him? That knew him? He wanted to dismiss it as patently idiotic, but he could not deny that the windstorms had been real.

  He trembled and held tightly to the edges of the mattress. He trembled and shut his eyes against the helplessness he was feeling. First there was fear that he could almost believe there was something in the Station that was supernatural and real: I've seen things here; you can't live in the Station all your life without knowing the place isn't what you call your normal town; then there was the molten-white rage that his life could be so altered, be tampered with, with such arrogant impunity. He could almost follow the reasoning, almost admire its planning: let him get his teeth into something, then shake him off. Use dreams, use friends, use Andrea and her sex. Use anything we can, but let's keep him hopping. Tired. Until he doesn't want to think anymore, until he just goes where we take him.

  What they hadn't counted on, obviously, was his love for Melissa Thames. He hadn't known what it was before, but he recognized it now—a love of respect and of revering, a love that breeds loyalty no matter how late it's known. He saw the graveyard; that made him dangerous. He saw the old woman; that made him risky. He fell in love with Andrea, and she fell for him, and that made them both most likely expendable.

  Feigning sleep, then, was easy. He waited until the nurse had made her rounds, checked his pulse, fussed with his covers, then slipped painfully, stiffly out of bed and stumbled over to the closet. A clean shirt and pressed jeans hung on a hook, his boots stuffed with a pair of socks were set on the floor, underwear and a belt on the narrow shelf above. He closed his eyes and blew a kiss to his partner, shed the hospital gown as quickly as his ill-used muscles and tender skin would allow, and dressed. Slumped on the bed to catch his breath. Listened to the sounds of the hospital sleeping.

  Five minutes later he was at the door, peering through a crack at the station near the elevators. The night nurse was there, reading a magazine. An
intern wandered by, leaned on the counter, and began blatant flirting. The round-faced clock on the wall behind them told him it was eleven. It was ten past midnight when they both wandered off. He waited, slowly rolling his shoulders in an attempt to loosen them, shaking each leg in turn to get them to work. Then, with a deep breath and a whispered prayer he pushed into the corridor, did not bother to look around but headed directly for the fire stairs and made his way down.

  Once outside and encased in the shadows of well-tended shrubs, he leaned heavily against the wall and gulped at the night air. It was cool, the heat wave passed, and insects slammed suicidally against the globes of the lampposts. A car rushed by, an ambulance with red lights flaring. He expected an alarm to be raised, but he needed to rest, needed to think of how he could get a car. His own was out of the question, and Felicity didn't drive. But when his mind cleared of the throbbing that cloaked him as he'd descended, he recalled one place he would have to see sooner or later, one place where they wouldn't dare refuse him admittance.

  When he was ready, then, he pushed off the wall and hurried across King Street, keeping to the shadows until he reached Fox Road. He turned right and counted four houses down, stood in a short driveway and nodded at the Jaguar parked out of the garage.

  Stanworth was a coward. He would tell him everything he wanted to know. Josh knew he would. Josh knew, too, he would strangle the bastard if he tried anything funny.

  A breeze chilled him, reminding him of the wind, as he walked around the ranch house to the back door. Knocked. Knocked louder. Stared at the windows where he knew the bedroom to be. Dared not make too much noise and tried the knob. It turned and he held his breath, pushed the door open, and sidled inside.

  The stench was overpowering. He whirled around and collapsed against the kitchen wall, gagging, clamping a hand to his mouth and nostrils as he fought to keep his stomach from churning more bile. His free hand rested on the wall switch, but he didn't move it. He didn't have to. There was moonlight. It was grey. It sifted across the fake brick floor and highlighted the table, the freestanding oven, the chairs, the utensils in their copper racks on the wall.