Roosevelt stood in front of the tape player, frowning. “When do we leave?”
“First dark,” I said.
“Which is coming down fast,” Sasha said, glancing at the window blinds, against which the press of daylight was less insistent than when Bobby and I had first listened to Delacroix.
“If those kids are in Wyvern,” Roosevelt said, “they might as well be at the gates of Hell. No matter what the risk, we can’t leave them there.”
He was wearing a black crewneck sweater, black chinos, and black Rockports, as though he had anticipated the covert action that lay ahead of us. In spite of his formidable size and rough-hewn features, he looked like a priest, like an exorcist grimly prepared to cast out devils.
Turning to Mungojerrie, who was sitting on Sasha’s composition table, I said, “And what about you?”
Roosevelt crouched by the table, eye-to-eye with the cat.
To me, Mungojerrie appeared to be supremely disinterested, much like any cat when it’s trying to live up to its species’ reputation for cool indifference, mystery, and unearthly wisdom.
Apparently, Roosevelt was viewing this gray mouser through a lens I didn’t possess or was listening to him on a frequency beyond my range of hearing, because he reported, “Mungojerrie says two things. First, he will find Orson and the kids if they’re anywhere in Wyvern, no matter what the risks, no matter what it takes.”
Relieved, grateful to the cat for its courage, I said, “And number two?”
“He needs to go outside and pee.”
21
At twilight, I went into my bathroom, failed to throw up though the urge was there, and instead washed my face twice, once with hot water, once with cold. Then I sat on the edge of the bathtub, clasped my hands on my knees, and endured a siege of the shakes as violent as those that reportedly accompany malaria or an IRS audit.
I wasn’t afraid that the mission into Fort Wyvern would result in the storm of death that our prescient pussycat had predicted — or that I would perish in the night ahead. Rather, I was afraid that I would live through the night but come home without the kids and Orson, or that I would fail in the rescue and also lose Sasha and Bobby and Roosevelt and Mungojerrie in the process.
With friends, this is a cool world; without friends, it would be unbearably cold.
I washed my face a third time, peed to show my solidarity with Mungojerrie, washed my hands (because my mom, would-be destroyer of the world, had taught me hygiene), and returned to the kitchen, where the others were waiting for me. I suspect that, with the exception of the cat, they had been through a ritual similar to mine, in other bathrooms.
Because Sasha — like Bobby — had noticed fishy types all over town and believed something major was soon to go down, she had anticipated that our house would be under surveillance by the authorities, if for no other reason than our connection with Lilly Wing. Therefore, she had arranged for us to meet Doogie Sassman at a rendezvous point far beyond prying eyes.
Sasha’s Explorer, Bobby’s Jeep, and Roosevelt’s Mercedes were parked in front of the house. We would surely be tailed if we drove off in any of them; we would have to leave on foot and with considerable stealth.
Behind our house, beyond our backyard, is a hard-packed dirt footpath that separates our property and those flanking it from a grove of red-gum eucalyptus trees and, beyond the trees, the golf course of the Moonlight Bay Inn and Country Club, of which Roosevelt is half-owner. Surveillance probably extended to the footpath, and there was no chance that the watchers assigned to us could be bought off with invitations to Sunday brunch at the country club.
The plan was to travel backyard to backyard for a few blocks, risking the attention of neighbors and their dogs, until we were beyond the purview of any surveillance teams that might have been assigned to us.
Because of Manuel’s confiscation celebration, Sasha possessed the only weapon, her.38 Chiefs Special, and two speedloaders in a dump pouch. She wouldn’t relinquish the piece to Roosevelt or Bobby, or to me — not even to Mungojerrie. She announced, in a tone brooking no argument, that she would take the risky point position.
“Where do we meet up with Doogie?” I asked as Bobby stowed the sole remaining cinnamon bun in the refrigerator and I finished stacking cups and saucers in the sink.
“Out along Haddenbeck Road,” Sasha said, “just beyond Crow Hill.”
“Crow Hill,” Bobby said. “I don’t like the sound of that.”
Sasha didn’t get it for a moment. Then she did: “It’s just a place. How could it have anything to do with those drawings?”
I was more concerned about the distance. “Man, that’s seven, eight miles.”
“Almost nine,” Sasha said. “With all this new activity, there’s nowhere in town we could meet Doogie without drawing attention.”
“It’s going to take too long to cover that much ground on foot,” I protested.
“Oh,” she said, “we’ll only go a few blocks on foot, just until we’re able to steal a car.”
Bobby smiled at me and winked. “This here is some moll you’ve got, bro.”
“Whose car?” I asked her.
“Any car,” she said brightly. “I’m not concerned about style, just mobility.”
“What if we don’t find a car with keys in it?”
“I’ll hot-wire it,” she said.
“You know how to hot-wire a car?”
“I was a Girl Scout.”
“Daughter’s got herself a car-theft merit badge,” Roosevelt told Mungojerrie.
We locked the back door on the way out, leaving blinds drawn and some lights dialed low.
I didn’t wear my Mystery Train cap. It no longer made me feel close to my mother, and it certainly didn’t seem like a good-luck charm anymore.
The night was mild and windless, bearing a faint scent of salt air and decomposing seaweed.
An overcast as dark as an iron skillet hid the moon. Here and there, reflections of the town lights, like a rancid yellow grease, were smeared across the clouds, but the night was deep and nearly ideal for our purposes.
The silvered-cedar fence surrounding this property is as tall as I am, with no gaps between the vertical pales, so it’s as solid as a wall. A gate opens onto the footpath.
We avoided the gate and went to the east side of the backyard, where my property adjoins that of the Samardian family.
The fence is extremely sturdy, because the vertical pales are fixed to three horizontal rails. These rails also would serve us well as a ladder.
Mungojerrie sprang up the fence as if he were lighter than air. Standing with his hind paws on the uppermost rail, forepaws on the top of the pales, he surveyed the backyard next door.
When the cat glanced down at us, Roosevelt whispered, “Looks like no one’s home.”
One at a time, and with relative silence, we followed the cat over the fence. From the Samardians’ property, we crossed another cedar fence, into the Landsbergs’ backyard. Lights were on in their house, but we passed unseen and stepped over a low picket fence into the Perez family’s yard, from there moving steadily eastward, past house after house, with no problem except Bobo, the Wladskis’ golden retriever, who isn’t a barker but makes every effort to beat you into submission with his tail and then lick you to death.
We scaled a high redwood fence into the yard behind the Stanwyk place, leaving the thankfully barkless Bobo slobbering, wagging his tail with an air-cutting whoosh-whoosh, and dancing on his hind paws in bladder-straining excitement.
I had always thought of Roger Stanwyk as a decent man who had lent his talents to the Wyvern research for the noblest of reasons, in the name of scientific progress and the advancement of medicine, much as my mother had done. His only sin was the same one Mom committed: hubris. Out of pride in his undeniable intelligence, out of misplaced trust in the power of science to resolve all problems and explain all things, he had unwittingly become one of the architects of doomsday.
That was what I’d always thought. Now I wasn’t so sure of his good intentions. As Leland Delacroix’s tape had revealed, Stanwyk was involved in both my mother’s work and the Mystery Train. He was a darker figure than he had seemed previously.
All of us two-legged specimens dodged from shrub to tree across the Stanwyks’ elaborately landscaped domain, hoping no one would be looking out a window. We reached the next fence before we realized that Mungojerrie wasn’t with us.
Panicked, we doubled back, searching among the neatly trimmed shrubs and hedges, whispering his name, which isn’t easy to whisper with a straight face, and we found him near the Stanwyks’ porch. He was a ghostly gray shape on the black lawn.
We squatted around our diminutive team leader, and Roosevelt switched his brain to the Weird Channel to find out what the cat was thinking.
“He wants to go inside,” Roosevelt whispered.
“Why?” I asked.
Roosevelt murmured, “Something’s wrong here.”
“What?” Sasha asked.
“Death lives here,” Roosevelt interpreted.
“He keeps the yard nice,” Bobby said.
“Doogie’s waiting,” Sasha reminded the cat.
Roosevelt said, “Mungojerrie says people in the house need help.”
“How can he tell?” I asked, immediately knew the answer, and found myself repeating it with Sasha and Bobby in a whispered chorus: “Cats know things.”
I was tempted to snatch up the cat, tuck him under my arm, and run away from here with him as if he were a football. He had fangs and claws, of course, and might object. More to the point, we needed to have his willing cooperation in the search ahead of us. He might be disinclined to cooperate if I treated him like a piece of sporting goods, even if I had no intention of drop-kicking him to Wyvern.
Forced to take a closer look at the Victorian house, I realized the place had a Twilight Zone quality. On the upper floor, windows revealed rooms brightened only by the flickering light of television screens, an unmistakable pulsing radiance. Downstairs, the two rooms at the back of the house — probably kitchen and dining room — were lit by the orange, draft-shaken flames of candles or oil lamps.
Our Tonto-with-a-tail sprang to his feet and sprinted to the house. He went boldly up the steps and disappeared into the shadows of the back porch.
Maybe Mr. Mungojerrie, phenomenal feline, has a well-honed sense of civic responsibility. Maybe his moral compass is so exquisitely magnetized that he cannot turn away from those in need. I suspected, however, that his compelling motivation was the well-known curiosity of his species, which so frequently leads to their demise.
The four of us remained squatting in a semicircle for a moment, until Bobby said, “Am I wrong to think this sucks?”
An informal poll showed a hundred percent agreement with the it-sucks point of view.
Reluctantly, stealthily, we followed Mungojerrie onto the back porch, where he was scratching persistently at the door.
Through the four glass panes in the door, we had a clear view of a kitchen so Victorian in its detail and bric-a-brac that I would not have been surprised to see Charles Dickens, William Gladstone, and Jack the Ripper having tea. The room was lit by an oil lamp on the oval table, as though someone within were my brother in XP.
Sasha took the initiative and knocked.
No one answered.
Mungojerrie continued to scratch at the door.
“We get the point,” Bobby told him.
Sasha tried the knob, which turned.
Hoping to be thwarted by a dead bolt, we were dismayed to learn that the door was unlocked. It swung open a few inches.
Mungojerrie squeezed through the narrow gap and vanished inside before Sasha could have second thoughts.
“Death, much death,” Roosevelt murmured, evidently communicating with the mouser.
I wouldn’t have been surprised if Dr. Stanwyk had appeared at the door, dressed in a bio-secure suit like Hodgson, face seething with hideous parasites, a white-eyed crow perched on his shoulder. This man who had once seemed wise and kind — if eccentric — now loomed ominously in my imagination, like the uninvited party guest in Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death.”
The Roger and Marie Stanwyk I had known for years were an odd but nonetheless happy and compatible couple in their early fifties. He sported muttonchops and a lush mustache, and was rarely seen in anything but a suit and tie; you sensed that he longed to wear wing collars and to carry a pocket watch on a fob, but felt these would be eccentricities in excess of those expected of a renowned scientist; nevertheless, he frequently allowed himself to wear quaint vests, and he spent an inordinate amount of time working at his Sherlock-ian pipe with tamp, pick, and spoon. Marie, a plump-cheeked matron with a rosy complexion, was a collector of antique ornamental tea caddies and nineteenth-century paintings of fairies; her wardrobe revealed a grudging acceptance of the twenty-first century, although regardless of what she wore, her longing for button-top shoes, bustles, and parasols was evident. Roger and Marie seemed unsuited to California, doubly unsuited to this century, yet they drove a red Jaguar, had been spotted attending excruciatingly stupid big-budget action movies, and functioned fairly well as citizens of the new millennium.
Sasha called to the Stanwyks through the open kitchen door.
Mungojerrie had crossed the kitchen without hesitation and had disappeared into deeper reaches of the house.
When Sasha got no answer to her third “Roger, Marie, hello,” she drew the.38 from her shoulder holster and stepped inside.
Bobby, Roosevelt, and I followed her. If Sasha had been wearing skirts, we might have happily hidden behind them, but we were more comfortable with the cover provided by the Smith & Wesson.
From the porch, the house had seemed silent, but as we crossed the kitchen, we heard voices coming from the front room. They were not directed at us.
We stopped and listened, not quite able to make out the words. Quickly, however, when music rose, it became apparent that we were hearing not live voices but those on television or radio.
Sasha’s entrance to the dining room was instructive and more than a little intriguing. Both hands on the gun. Arms out straight and locked. The weapon just below her line of sight. She cleared the doorway fast, slid to the left, her back against the wall. After she moved mostly out of view, I could still see just enough of her arms to know she swung the.38 left, then right, then left again, covering the room. Her performance was professional, instinctive, and no less smooth than her on-air voice.
Maybe she’s watched a lot of television cop dramas over the years. Yeah.
“Clear,” she whispered.
Tall, ornate hutches seemed to loom over us, as if tipping away from the walls, porcelain and silver treasures gleaming darkly behind leaded-glass doors with beveled panes. The crystal chandelier wasn’t lit, but reflections of nearby candle flames winked along its strings of beads and off the cut edges of its dangling pendants.
In the center of the dining-room table, surrounded by eight or ten candles, was a large punch bowl half full of what appeared to be fruit juice. A few clean drinking glasses stood to one side, and scattered across the table were several empty plastic pharmacy bottles of prescription medication.
The lighting wasn’t good enough to allow us to read the labels on the bottles, as they lay, and none of us wanted to touch anything. Death lives here, the cat had said, and maybe that was what had given us the idea, from the moment we entered the house, that this was a crime scene. Upon seeing the tableau on the dining-room table, we looked at one another, and it was clear that all of us suspected the nature of the crime, though we didn’t speak its name.
I could have used my flashlight, but I might have drawn unwanted attention. Under the circumstances, any attention would be unwanted. Besides, the name of the medication wasn’t important.
Sasha led us into the large living room, where the illumination came from a television screen nested in an orna
te French cabinet with japanned panels. Even in the poor light, I could see that the chamber was as crowded as an automobile salvage yard, not with junked cars but with Victorian excess: deeply carved and intricately painted neo-rococo furniture; richly patterned brocade upholstery; wallpaper with Gothic-style tracery; heavy velvet drapes with cascades of braided fringe, capped with solid pelmets cut in elaborate Gothic forms; an Egyptian settee with beaded-wood spindles and damask seat cushions; Moorish lamps featuring black cherubs in gilded turbans supporting beaded shades; bibelots densely arranged on every shelf and table.
Amidst the layers on layers of decor, the cadavers almost seemed like additional decorative items.
Even in the flickery light of the television, we could see a man stretched out on the Egyptian settee. He was dressed in dark slacks and a white shirt. Before lying down, he’d taken off his shoes and placed them on the floor with the laces neatly tucked in, as though concerned about soiling the upholstery on the seat cushions. Beside the shoes stood a drinking glass identical to those in the dining room — Waterford crystal, judging by appearance — in which remained an inch of fruit juice. His left arm trailed off the settee, the back of the hand against the Persian carpet, palm turned up. His other arm lay across his chest. His head was propped on two small brocade pillows, and his face was concealed beneath a square of black silk.
Sasha was covering the room behind us, less interested in the corpse than in guarding against a surprise assault.
The black veil over the face did not bellow or even flutter. The man under it was not breathing.
I knew that he was dead, knew what killed him — not a contagious disease, but a phenobarbital fizz or its lethal equivalent — yet I was reluctant to remove the silk mask for the same reason that any child, having pondered the possibility of a boogeyman, is hesitant to push back the sheets, rise up on his mattress, lean out, and peek under the bed.
Hesitantly, I pinched a corner of the silk square between thumb and forefinger, and pulled it off the man’s face.
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