by Lynne Murray
Violet smiled. “Call if you need anything. Bail, wooden stakes, anything at all. If Hal really does hang out with vampires, they’ll be asleep in daylight. So just get out of there by dusk.”
Chapter 17
Kristin Marlowe’s typed notes
August 5th continued
My last client appointment ended late in the afternoon and I headed for Hal’s house. I could have walked the distance in half an hour, but I took my car in case I needed a quick getaway. I had only been there once, late at night after drinks at The Cliff House nearby. In daylight it was even more dramatic the way the trees of Sutro Heights Park suddenly gave way to a cliff-side view of the ocean as I drew near the house.
The flat ocean stretched an opalescent pearl color under the late afternoon haze. Wind shook the branches of the trees surrounding the house. A wind-scoured, pale green house, three stories tall, divided into three flats. A big hole gaped in the exterior wall on the third floor. Probably dry rot. No wonder Hal closed off the top floor.
Standing on the front steps, I started to put my key in the lock, but the door was jerked inward before I could put my key in the lock. A stooped, elderly woman stood in the doorway, her wrinkled face contorted and flushed with rage. Hal’s aunt’s caretaker. She spit some verbal venom at me and told me not to go in the shed.
But she let me slip past her. Why would I go in the shed anyway?
I don’t know why I shivered.
While the afternoon faded into evening outside I searched Hal’s apartment. Looked over the photos on the wall—memories of a childhood spent in transit.
Hal as a beautiful youngster. I felt a pang of tenderness for his dark-haired, eager, youthful image, then the anger rose up in my throat to choke me. He has his pictures, why did he have to take mine? Plaques and honors of the parents that died before their son graduated high school. Recent souvenirs from Istanbul, Sarajevo and Kabul. I looked first on every table, mantelpiece and even the kitchen counter. No sign of my mother’s picture.
A board creaked and I jumped, landing on another board that creaked even louder. I laughed uneasily, telling myself that if Mina or Hal or anyone showed up I had every right to demand my mother’s picture back.
I went through all the drawers, putting everything back the way it had been. My heart was hammering so hard I could feel the blood pounding in my head. I had to force myself to concentrate and look.
I looked everywhere he might have stashed a framed photo. Then I realized the sun was setting. Time to go.
I let myself out of the flat empty-handed. Still frustrated, I kept the key, thinking that it might open one of the other locked doors. I went up to the next landing, but the stairs were blocked with a wrought iron gate. I didn’t even try the key, because the space was crammed to the gate and stacked to the ceiling with odds and ends of furniture. The gate appeared to be the only thing keeping them from tumbling down the short flight of stairs to the landing in front of Hal’s apartment. Everything visible up there was liberally coated in dust undisturbed by any new additions.
The old building and the fading light outside wore away at my nerve. I walked down to the foyer, and on past the ground floor apartment where Hal’s aunt had lived. I couldn’t see Hal putting my mother’s picture in there with the old lady and her hostile caretaker.
So, the shed in the back yard was the very last remotely possible hiding place. I went down the hall bathed in red light of the sunset. A few minutes later I was standing in the shed under the glare of the electric light bulb, watching the lid rise on a crate that should have been empty.
Chapter 18
Kristin Marlowe’s typed notes
August 5th continued
A pudgy hand followed by a large, rounded arm appeared in the gap, raising the lid until it rested against the wall and revealing a huge, white-bearded man. He sat up, still coughing.
I watched, frozen in shock.
The man was old, fat and also broad-shouldered, with unruly white hair and beard. Santa Claus? Not quite.
His face seemed startlingly pale when paired with the reddened cheeks and nose of a serious drinker. He wore an ancient, old-fashioned long underwear shirt that might have been World War II army surplus. He gave one last wracking cough, then took a deep breath. He turned to regard me with eyes that were bleary but bright blue, not bloodshot. No shaking from alcohol withdrawal, as some drinkers have on arising. No, he was totally still, his eyes sharp and piercing as the eyes of a hawk, but with a most unhawk-like twinkle.
Turn and run. But I stood frozen. Not so much terrified as stunned, like a small mammal suddenly confronted with a large snake.
“A vision of womanliness,” he said in a thick, English accent. Even with all my public television viewing I couldn’t place its location in the British Isles. Definitely not a BBC announcer generic English accent. Not a Scottish burr, or an Irish lilt. Not Eliza Doolittle Cockney or Liverpool Beatles either. Maybe a little closer to the Yorkshire accents on that series about the country veterinarian. It could have been Welsh. Everything I know about Welsh accents I learned from actors playing Fluellen in Shakespeare’s Henry the Fifth.
“You can’t be a dream. It’s dusk and I’m awake.” The exotic flavor of the words and his deep rumbling voice didn’t fit at all with a crate in a garage, yet he seemed perfectly at home. “Fair mistress, what name shall I call you?”
“I’m Kristin,” I managed to say. “And you are?”
He cleared his throat. “Jack Falstaff with my familiars, John with my brothers and sisters, and Sir John with all Europe. At your service, my lady.”
Chapter 19
Hal Roy’s spoken notes
silver flash drive/voice recorder
undated
The mystery of the shed consumed me. I set out my own surveillance patrol, keeping in the shadows and the bushes so no one would see me watching. The only person who came in the back yard was my aunt, and she went straight for the shed without looking right or left. She removed the padlock and went inside, leaving the door slightly open. I crept closer, but didn’t dare risk getting close enough to look in. The sounds I heard then startled me.
Some time later she emerged and made her way unsteadily up to the house. Almost immediately after that a huge bear of a man came out and glanced around. I drew back into the bushes and tried not to breathe. For a moment he seemed to look right at me and chuckle. Then he walked to the end of the yard and, with unexpected speed and agility, elbowed his way into the bushes.
I mentally marked the spot he went though to check later, but never found any signs of any gap in the bushes, let alone an opening big enough for such a big man.
Nothing more happened for a few hours. Eventually I got cold even in my sleeping bag, and stiff and sore from lying on the ground waiting. I went inside. When I checked the next morning, the padlock was back in place.
I usually ate lunch with my aunt. This involved nothing more complex than opening cans and buttering bread, but we both did that at the same table at the same time. I cleared my throat to get her attention away from her magazine for a moment and asked her why the shed was locked in the daytime but not at night.
Aunt Reba looked at me full on for several seconds. Her hand went to her throat, always covered by a turtleneck sweater. She played with a short gold chain that hung around her neck. I had never noticed before that the key on the chain was not an ornamental jeweled pendant, but a small steel padlock key.
“My—special guest stays there,” she finally said. “I open the door at night so he can get out, and I close and lock it in the morning to protect him. He’s got a kind of medical condition. It would kill him if he saw the sun. I’m telling you this, because he is a responsibility you will eventually inherit.”
“Is he like a crazy relative or something?” I asked, trying to put this together with the sounds I’d heard coming from the shed. They didn’t sound like any family I’d want to know about.
“Not a relative.”
For a moment Aunt Reba almost shuddered, but I couldn’t tell from what. “I’ll introduce you tonight. But Hal—”
“Yes?”
“This has to remain secret between us. If you reveal his existence to anyone, or if you harm him in any way, I will see to it that you never inherit a penny under my will, and if you think my lawyer can’t do that, think again.”
“Yes, ma’am—I mean, no ma’am, whatever you say.” I was fifteen and I had no idea what she was talking about.
That night my aunt told me to wait in the living room of the ground floor flat while she went into what was then her bedroom upstairs with a huge, shadowy figure in what looked like the world’s oldest greatcoat.
They stayed up there for about half an hour and the sounds filtering down seemed even louder than the ones from the shed. Then my aunt came down with a dreamy expression on her face, leading a huge, fat old man with brilliant blue eyes, pink cheeks. He was wiping his hand across his mouth when he came out. For a moment I thought I saw blood on his lip, but that seemed unlikely.
“This is Jack.”
The old man made a surprisingly fluid, old-fashioned bow.
“Jack?”
“Just remember this, Hal—you take care of Jack, he will take care of you.” She gave him a little shove toward me and ended up almost losing her own footing. He caught her around the waist and held her up. She giggled like a naughty toddler.
My face must have shown my shock. The old man steered Aunt Reba over to a chair and gently set her down in it. Then he came over to stand before me. “So it’s Hal, is it?”
I nodded.
“Can you drive, young Hal?” He had a deep, commanding voice with a strong British accent.
“I’ve got my learner’s permit, but I haven’t been able to take lessons yet. My Dad used to let me drive the golf cart when we played golf.”
Mentioning my dad brought an unexpected sob to my throat. I had been trying not to think of my parents.
“Mistress Reba, may we have your keys?” Jack leaned close to her. She stared at him with a dazed smile and nodded.
“Lad, would you fetch her purse?” Jack raised an eyebrow at me, completely certain I would know where she kept her purse. I brought it to my aunt and she fumbled her car keys out and handed them to me.
“Mark how we ask permission, lad, before we take what we need. There may be tolls to pay—have you enough coins?”
“Coins?”
“Money, lad. We may need to ask your lovely aunt for more.”
“I’ve got some.”
My aunt was now clutching her purse with a death grip. Did she know that the money in my pocket had come from her wallet?
Jack nodded. “Well enough, then. We bid you farewell, my lovely Reba. Come, Hal. I’ll show you sights that I’ll warrant you’ve never seen, even though you’re born and bred here.”
What teenaged boy could resist that?
That night was a ride that went further into pure debauchery than I could have imagined possible. I was hooked.
When it got close to dawn I followed his and Aunt Reba’s instructions and locked him in the shed.
It took a few nights for me to understand just what Jack was. The first time I asked him, he laughed and said, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
“Who’s Horatio?” I had to ask.
Another fit of laughter. “We may meet him up at Land’s End, or mayhap at Devil Slide to the south. Let us see what the night will bring.”
Chapter 20
Kristin Marlowe’s typed notes
August 5th continued
“Sir John—sorry—I didn’t catch your last name?” I had, I just didn’t believe it.
He examined me with eyes that were bloodshot but showed no sign of yellowing from the jaundice of liver disease. He seemed to come to some kind of decision. “The Bard dubbed me Falstaff, and many know that name. But in your fair city most call me Sir John. I was born John and won my knighthood on the field of battle.”
Falstaff did seem appropriate to his age and girth. But he had picked an unusual figure to impersonate, or fixate on—not Napoleon or Elvis—but Shakespeare’s Falstaff, a character from literature!
No harm in talking to him. Had there ever been a journal article on delusions of being a fictional character? I would look it up as soon as I got to my computer. A flicker of self-interest ran through me at the thought of writing a journal article on this subject. I must have showed it in some way because he leaned toward me.
I tensed up, remembering the months when I worked in a full-fledged mental hospital. You thought you could tell the dangerous ones, but you could make a fatal mistake. I knew a psychiatric nurse who guessed wrong. The patient she misjudged had always been so quiet—right up until he nearly fractured her spine.
This man bowed in such a courtly way that all my misgivings melted away and I took his outstretched hand. He bent over my knuckles to kiss them in that European fashion that always causes consternation in American women. He released my hand and stayed a safe arm’s length away. I relaxed a little.
Despite his hair sticking up in all directions, and his track suit pants with the stripe along the side that he clearly had slept in, he smelled faintly of pine shavings with perhaps a hint of wood smoke, newly cut grass, and a faint, not unpleasant, overtone of fresh mushrooms.
The man in the box began to cough again—at length. “Beg pardon. The dust. A quintessence of dust, as the poet would have it.”
“Right, from Hamlet. Are you an actor who played Falstaff on stage?” I started to edge backwards towards the door, but I didn’t dare look back to check my progress.
“One man in his time plays many parts,” he said with a chuckle that became a cough.
I stopped backing up. “That’s from As You Like It.”
“Indeed. Remarkable. Few in this age find time to read the Bard. A gifted gentleman. His homage caught my attention, as well it might. I have had centuries to study him, since our chance meeting when he studied me.”
I ignored the part about meeting Shakespeare. He seemed harmless. A deluded lover of theater. “Have you been staying here?” I gestured to the shed around me.
“Since it was new. Now, like myself, the old building’s sadly fallen off.”
I blinked. Delusional or flat out lying, of course. The shed looked as old as the house itself, which must have been built in the 1930s. He would have had to be in his eighties to have been living here that long. His hair and beard were white, his cheeks and nose mottled red, but for all his coughing and groaning he moved with a fluid grace that didn’t advertise advanced age.
“Surely you weren’t born here.” His strong English accent sounded genuine.
“No, the old girl in the main house brought me over here when she was young, poor gal. Hold on a moment. Mistress Reba?” He raised his head, nostrils flared as if scenting the air, head tilted as if listening. “A sea change. She’s gone from here. Must have taken her off while I slept the daylight away.”
“The nurse said they’re changing the locks.”
“The nurse! A nun in deed, if not profession. All in black with vinegar for blood.”
I laughed and nodded. An odd turn of speech, but it did describe her well. “You might want to get your stuff out first.”
“And so I must.” His eyes narrowed as he focused on me.
Oops. I took another step backwards with one hand behind me to feel the door knob. “Do you need me to call someone for you?”
“No.”
“Any family in the area?”
“All dead. Long dead.”
“Have you tried the Veterans Hospital just up the hill? They have resources. Are you a veteran?”
He gave me a rueful smile. “Yes. But that was in another country.”
“And besides, the wench is dead.” I finished the quote without thinking.
He examined me again carefully. “Not only the Bar
d. You also know Chris Marlowe.”
“I am Kris Marlowe,” I said, again without thinking. Damn. I hadn’t meant to give him my whole name.
“That cannot be. Christopher Marlowe was a man, and dead 400 years.”
“No, my name is Kristin Marlowe.”
“Ah.” He lurched forward and stood with difficulty, hanging onto the edge of the box. He held out his hand to me. “Pray you help me get out of this box then, Mistress Kit? Just a hand from you for leverage.”
Against my better judgment I went over next to the box and held out my hand, which he gripped strongly. He clambered up and out of the box, still holding it.
“I’m sorry, sir—” I let go of his hand.
“A thousand thanks. Your servant, ma’am.” He sketched a bow, short-circuited when he staggered sideways and had to grab the edge of the box to stay upright. This brought on another coughing fit.
“Would you like some water? I’ve got bottled water in the car.”
“Water!” he gasped between coughs. “Would you kill me, girl?” He shook his head, “Thank you, but no.”
I noticed a faint twitch go through him at the word “car.” Uh-oh, he was going to hitch a ride. I decided to see if I could make a dent in his delusion. “I remember now. In the plays, Falstaff drinks sack.”
“Sack and sugar, so he did, and so did I once.” He sighed so gustily that the light bulb on the string above us shifted, casting huge shadows.
Maybe he had quit drinking. From his looks he should have reeked of it, but there was no scent of liquor around him. “By your speech you must be English—”
“Yes, as you say now, I am an export of that sceptered isle, the other Eden.” He turned his piercing blue eyes on me. “Shall we go, then?”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I just realized that if you’re English, the Veterans Administration here wouldn’t be able to help you, unless you’ve served in the United States military.”
Sir John bent over the open crate and hauled out an enormous greatcoat that looked as if it had survived the Battle of Waterloo. He put the coat on with surprising agility, closed the lid of the crate without so much as a creak. Then he turned to examine me with entirely too much interest. “You wouldn’t have a basement or even a dark corner of a shed—” he gestured eloquently to the space around him, “for an old solider to lay down a bedroll for a day or an evening.”