The waiter passed by just then, carrying a load of plates. “Coffee?” he asked.
“Not me,” Donna said. “I’m done.”
“Me, too,” Calvin told him. “I guess we’ll want the check.” The waiter nodded and moved off.
“We should get back,” she said. “In order to show your uncle the photo.” She had printed out the results of Calvin’s spy work on the equipment in her mobile home—half a dozen enlarged photos of the truck and the littered work site.
When the check arrived, Calvin pulled out his uncle’s eighty dollars and handed it to the waiter. It covered the tip and all. He didn’t have to add a dime. Donna, however, fished her wallet out of her bag and tried to hand him forty dollars.
“The Lymons’ treat,” he said. “My uncle gave me the eighty bucks.”
“All right,” she said, putting the money away. “Let’s go thank him.”
They went out into the warm night and walked back toward the trailer park, both of them looking up into the starry sky. With a little more tilt, the Little Dipper would spill out an ocean of starlight, or whatever it was full of.
“I read that the cavemen used to think the stars were little lanterns burning in the sky,” Donna said.
“The cavemen had lanterns?”
“Made out of pumpkins.”
“I like that,” Calvin said. “A sky full of jack-o’-lanterns. Do you think they were right?”
“Even a caveman can’t be wrong all the time,” she told him.
The park was settling down for the night, but there were still people out and about, and even in the lamp-lit evening Calvin noticed the winks and smiles. Did Donna notice the winks and smiles? He glanced at her, but she looked away to say hello to an old woman who was sprinkling her flowerbed. The woman said hello back, and Calvin could see that she was checking him out, maybe wondering if he was good enough for their girl Donna. Was he? Did it matter? Was all of this just water under the bridge? They walked along in silence, and he could see the lights of Chez Lymon coming up on the port bow. Suddenly he wanted the moment to last, to be able to walk around forever under the stars on this warm desert evening. “Oilcan,” he said in a squeaky voice. Donna laughed.
He had never been as happy as he was now, and he was on the verge of saying so when Donna pointed and said, “What happened to your car?” It sat in the drive, looking strangely mottled. At first he thought that the cottonwoods were painting it with weird moon shadows, but then he realized that he was looking at dents. Someone had hammered the crap out of it—with boulders, apparently. When they got closer he saw that the rear windows were pulverized, and the backseat was covered with glass.
“Wow,” Donna said, gaping at it.
“Wow, indeed,” Calvin said. There wasn’t a door panel left that wasn’t dented in three or four places. The trunk had been cratered, and the hood, too. The rear bumper was smashed inward, which would have taken some work. They had run into it! Of course. The front windows were intact, and so were the tires, which wasn’t surprising. The car had to be roadworthy day after tomorrow so that Calvin could keep his appointment at the Gas’n’Go in order to sell the veil to Postum for a bag full of kapok. “What’s my insurance man going to make of this?”
“Tell him you were driving through the desert and the car was caught in a meteor shower.”
He stared at her for the moment it took for his sense of humor to switch back in. “Looks like one of the meteors is still inside,” he said, pointing through the shattered rear window at a head-size rock on the seat.
“We found it like that,” his uncle said, having come out onto the porch. “Your men were nowhere around. No sign of them, although there was broken glass and pieces of metal on the shoulder a few miles up the road, like they ran into something when they went out of control. We found your keys with the metal detector and drove her back down. It’s a mess, but it runs like a top.”
“Thanks,” Calvin said. “That’s good news.” He kept any irony out of his voice. There was no use complaining. What had happened to his car had happened to his car, and it could be that they had taken the time to pound it to pieces because he had taken the time to roll their car down the hill. Too bad it hadn’t gone off a cliff. …
“You two have a good meal?” Lymon asked. “Nice chat?”
“Yes, we did,” Donna told him. “We talked about astronomy. Thanks for dinner, by the way. Calvin told me that it was your treat.”
“My pleasure,” he said.
“Here you go,” she said, handing Calvin the photos. “I’m going to call it a night. I’ve got some work to catch up on.”
“I’ll just step inside,” Lymon told them, taking the photos out of Calvin’s hand and heading in. “You two want a moment alone.”
That’s awkward, Calvin thought, watching the door whisper shut. “That was easily the most enjoyable dinner I’ve had in years,” he said woodenly. “The food was good, but it’s the company I’m talking about.”
“Me, too,” she said. “Tomorrow morning, then?”
“Tomorrow morning?”
“You said you were coming in for the Million-Dollar Plate.”
“That’s right, I did. It’s a date.”
“I’ll see you then,” she said, casting him a big smile.
“You need a walk home?”
“This is New Cyprus. Nobody needs an escort in New Cyprus.” She leaned forward and kissed him, and he nearly lost his balance. “Maybe we can look for that oilcan sometime. See you in the morning.” And then she was gone, fading into the darkness down the driveway. He stood watching for a moment, took another long look at the stars, and went inside.
He found Miles Taber standing in the living room with Uncle Lymon, Taber squinting at a photo through Lymon’s big magnifying glass. Lymon was sitting on the couch, looking as if gravity were asleep on his shoulders. “Blasting, core drilling, wells, and excavation,” he read. “Beamon Construction Services, Needles.”
“Ned stinking Beamon,” Lymon said. “He’s a hoser of the first water. If there was any justice in the world he’d have blown himself up by now. Hoisted himself on his own petard.”
“Well, there isn’t any justice in the world,” Taber told him. “That’s why they call it ‘the world.’ It’s what men sell their souls for. There’ll be justice enough for all of us in the hereafter, and don’t we hope there’re no surprises in store for us there.”
“Amen to that,” Lymon said, sounding oddly serious. “It’s obvious that they’re getting set to blast.”
Taber set down the magnifying glass and looked hard at Lymon. “You don’t look too good,” he said. “Worse than this morning. You aren’t keeping any secrets, are you? You sneaking over to the medical center when you make those runs into Bullhead City?”
“No,” Lymon said. “I haven’t seen anyone except Doc Hoyle in the past ten years. He says I’m as fit as a draft horse. I’ve got a touch of the bug, that’s all.” He started to get up, then sat back down, then made a bigger effort, moving into the kitchen in a sort of headlong way. Taber looked at Calvin and shook his head doubtfully. After a moment Lymon came back in with three grape sodas and handed them out. “Cal knows all about the veil,” he said to Taber. “It’s no secret to anyone by now. Lamar Morris knew about it, too.”
“Good for Cal. I don’t know whether it’ll be good for Lamar.”
“What are they going to blow up?” Calvin asked.
“Probably that heap of rock where they’ve been messing around,” Taber told him.
“Just for the heck of it? They’re into explosions?” After a period of silence, Calvin asked, “None of my business?”
“Well,” Taber said, “not strictly speaking. Sorry to put it that way, especially after they worked your car over, but …”
“I’m okay with that,” Calvin said. “No need to explain. I think I know anyway. Morris tried to talk me into taking some pictures of anything that might be construed to be a passage or a tunne
l—some secret way that they used to get the stones down into New Cyprus without hauling them down the road.”
“Why don’t we just invite Lamar Morris into the club?” Taber asked. “Satisfy his damned curiosity.”
“He’d turn us down,” Lymon told him. “He’s like his old man. He’d rather stay on the outside so that he can write about it.” Then to Calvin he said, “Postum and his crowd are maneuvering to open up New Cyprus—jockeying for position. You and I talked a little about their activities back in the early fifties. They pretty much fell apart for a time after that, but they’ve regrouped, you might say. We’re not sure what they intend—how serious they are.”
“I don’t know what that means,” Calvin told him. “Open up New Cyprus?”
“We think they’re fixing to sack the town,” Taber said. “And just in case it’s true, we’re fixing not to let it happen. Greed has a lot to do with it, like it always does.”
“I thought they wanted the veil?” Calvin said. “If they intend to sneak in through the passage and steal the veil, why don’t you just hide it somewhere? Bury it in the hills?”
“Like I said, they want the world,” Lymon told him, “and they’re willing to sell their souls to buy it—although I’m beginning to think I mean ‘he’ instead of ‘they.’ The veil is the high-ticket item, like you say, but hiding it won’t put a stop to this. I’m not sure we can stop it. We have to play our part in it.”
“Speaking of Lamar Morris,” Taber said to Lymon, “you forgot about that box he sent over.”
“By golly, I did,” Lymon said. “Morris sent you a box, Cal. It’s heavy, like books. Tubby Wingate brought it up. Apparently someone left it with Ms. Jessup, but she was busy running the ferry, and so Tubby snagged it a couple of hours ago and dropped it off. I put it in your room.”
“Thanks,” Calvin said. “I’ll take a look and let you two powwow.”
“I powwowed my last powwow,” Taber said. “I’m through.”
“I’ve got a couple of things hanging fire, too,” Lymon said. “Let’s call it a night.”
“It’s a night,” Taber said. He shook hands with Calvin and went out, and Calvin headed off, caught up in this new mystery. Books? That made no sense at all, although it was a pleasant idea. The box lay on his bed, taped shut. He yanked the tape loose, and found the books—a good-size pile of them, including a dozen Fourteen Carats productions, titles that hadn’t been for sale in the shop. Morris clearly had an inventory of back issues. Calvin sorted through them, marveling at his luck. War in Heaven was in there, along with another Knights piece called Death in the Dead Mountains, which looked particularly interesting. There was another piece called The Illuminated Island, maybe the most interesting of the lot, with a woodcut illustration on the cover that was clearly the elder Morris’s work. It was a picture of the island where the Temple now sat, except there was no building yet, just rock and willows and the river beyond an open rectangular pit from which emanated an unearthly glow. Aside from the Fourteen Carats stuff there was an old, falling-apart copy of Journey to the Center of the Earth that was worth just about nothing unless someone wanted to frame the illustrations, a copy of Walter de la Mare’s Memoirs of a Midget, and what was apparently a film script that was printed on three-hole-punched paper with a single brass brad holding it together. It was titled The Last Battle, by someone named Robert P. Wolverhampton, LL.D. Calvin flipped through it, looking for something to make sense of it. It appeared to be a Crusades-era adventure story involving the siege of a walled city, and, he saw, it had several alternative endings, as if the author couldn’t make up his mind. Apparently someone had been using the script as a coaster, because the top pages were discolored with ground-in dust and coffee stains, and the whole thing smelled of stale beer and cigarette smoke.
What had inspired Morris to send him all this? Was the man going to ask him for some kind of immense favor and wanted to sweeten him up first? That had to be it. But Calvin wouldn’t be of much help. He had nothing to show for his troubles today but some photos of a pickup truck, to which Morris was welcome. Maybe the blasting paraphernalia in the truck bed was worth something as a piece of information, but it couldn’t be worth this stack of books, at least not the Fourteen Carats imprints. It was all Calvin had to offer, though, and from now on Calvin was a short-timer, and he was sticking close to home—no more photographic adventures.
On the other hand, he wasn’t interested in giving any of the books back. He wondered how he could finesse this—if he could finesse it without telling lies or making promises. He found Morris’s card in his wallet and stared at it for a moment, debating. The books were a gift from Lamar Morris, after all—no question of that. There would be nothing served by simply handing them back with a smarmy “no thank-you.” That sort of thing could be holier-than-thou and self-righteous, he told himself, and at best it committed the sin of looking a gift horse in the mouth, which every mother warned her children against. Probably it was one of the seven deadly sins.
And it was Morris who had recommended that Calvin leave town in the first place. So … what? The man tried to persuade him to leave and then had sent him a bribe to stick around for some undercover work? Possibly Morris was a schizophrenic.
Calvin sat thumbing through the books for a few minutes, reading a paragraph here and there. Abruptly he made up his mind, stood up, and went out into the kitchen to use the phone. There was no sign of his aunt and uncle, who had probably gone to bed. He considered what he would say to Morris. A simple thank-you would suffice. There was a good chance that Morris wouldn’t pick up anyway, since he was so evidently spooked, and Calvin could leave the thank-you on his voice mail. Morris could call back at his leisure and make demands if he wanted to, which Calvin could apologetically decline depending on the circumstances.
If he had to he would have Betty Jessup run the books back into Bullhead City. Morris could pick them up on the dock. He punched in Morris’s number and listened through a half dozen rings. Then a recorded voice came on, and he felt an instant relief. He could simply leave the message. …
But it clearly wasn’t Morris’s voice. It sounded a little like Bob Postum, but weirdly disguised, as if he were talking through a pile of buttered toast. There wasn’t a hint of humor in it: “Lamar Morris isn’t here anymore,” the voice said. “He’s dead.” Then there was silence.
Calvin hung up the phone fast. His heart was going like a jackhammer. A prank, he thought. It had to be a prank. Morris must have a hell of a dark sense of humor. He hadn’t seemed to have any sense of humor earlier in the day, but clearly his sending Memoirs of a Midget couldn’t be serious. …
Wasn’t here anymore? That just didn’t sound like a prank. Calvin thought again about Morris being offered eighteen hundred dollars for War in Heaven only to turn it down, and he found himself heading fast through the living room. This was something that his uncle needed to hear. Their bedroom door was slightly ajar. “Hello!” he said, rapping on it harder than he meant to. It swung open another inch, and he saw into the interior, where his aunt lay on the bed, apparently asleep on her back. His uncle sat in a chair next to her, bent over, his forehead in his hand. He was moaning softly, as if in barely sufferable pain. Over his aunt’s chest and stomach was draped the Veil of Veronica, the image on it staring up at the heavens, as if the ceiling were invisible. The veil seemed to glow with its own aura, although surely it was merely the bedside lamp reflecting off the old muslin. His uncle’s right hand hovered over the veil, glowing in the light that flickered around it. There was a weighty presence in the room, as if the air were as heavy as mercury.
Calvin was silenced by what he saw. He stood for a moment, waiting to see if his uncle had heard him, but Lymon was obviously utterly distracted, perhaps with pain, perhaps with some sort of spiritual ecstasy. Calvin turned around and walked quietly back down the hallway. Whatever he had witnessed—whatever was going on—was simply none of his business, and would never be his business. H
e badly wished he hadn’t seen it.
But his understanding of the veil had shifted now, as if the world of New Cyprus had been jolted by another earthquake and he had been dumped into the river and swept into deep water. His house back in Eagle Rock, and the comforting life he lived there, looked almost exotically plain and homely to him.
BARGE DAY
Calvin expected the barge to be the size of a freight car, maybe pulled up the river by a team of oxen, but in fact it was a moderate-size pontoon boat with a flat, open deck and with a shallow draft so that it could use most of the river to turn around in. People who didn’t drive—which was half the population of New Cyprus—could have furniture or computer equipment or a television set shipped down from Bullhead City or up from Needles, and then they could run it home on a hand truck. There were a couple of dozen people milling around now, trying to stay out of the way till the pilot shouted their names.
The ferry had come and gone during the time that Calvin waited with Miles Taber, watching boxes being off-loaded, and once again Mrs. Jessup hadn’t seen Uncle Lymon, who was perhaps lying down in the office like he apparently had been yesterday. Calvin had his cell phone with him today. After yesterday’s shenanigans he didn’t intend to be without it. It was nearly ten o’clock when he left the Cozy Diner, where he had consumed the infamous Million-Dollar Plate—more pancakes than he had ever eaten in his life or would ever eat again—conspicuously more than any other diner was eating, stacked up in a pyramid on an enormous plate. He suspected that Donna had told the chef to come as close to a million as he possibly could, and the chef had come very close. After the heroic way Donna had gone after her food last night at the steak-house, though, Calvin wanted to come off as a trencherman and not some kind of lightweight who couldn’t finish a tub of dollar-size pancakes and a side of bacon. Next week sometime he would be able to eat again.
“Thanks for giving me a hand this morning,” Taber said to him. He held on to a flatbed cart with heavy casters, which looked like it could hold about half a ton. “I hauled one load back already. There’s only one box left for us, but it’s heavy. God knows what it is—something Lymon ordered.”
The Knights of the Cornerstone Page 13