"I realize that must be so, Miss Bartlett, but perhaps . . ." and she shrugged while Dale smiled without mirth. "Do you remember who it was who purchased them?"
"Sure I do. It was Ed McPherson."
Flora hissed in a deep breath, swayed, and caught hold of the counter. Dale was too amazed to move to help her.
"McPherson," the old woman said, struggling for a smile. Then, almost to herself: "I should have thought.'
"That's right," Dale said. "He saw them through the window and nearly trampled a couple of girls. In fact, I was over there the other night and saw them displayed on his mantel. He's quite proud of them."
"And he should be," Flora insisted. "And he should be." She pressed a withered hand to her breast and nodded. "Thank you, Miss Bartlett. I appreciate your help."
Dale opened the door for her, stared after her as she moved slowly to the sidewalk. Her steps were forced, her balance unsteady, and Dale wondered if she should call a taxi, dismissed it and closed the door to cut off the afternoon chill. And when she turned, she almost bumped into Mrs. Inness who was standing directly behind her.
"Imagine that," Bella said, craning to follow the old woman's slow progress.
"Imagine what," Dale said.
"She was so angry at whatever you two were talking about, she forgot her accent."
Dale nodded absently.
"And here." She pressed a slip of paper into Dale's hand, then tapped it sharply when Dale didn't respond. "I thought you might still want it."
She looked down, opened her fingers.
"The note," Bella said "I was straightening up your so-called office and found this thing in the bill file. Remember it? It was . . ." and she put two fingers to her temple in an attitude of concentration. A moment later she smiled. "Of course! It was the day poor Dave Campbell had his accident right out there in the street. Don't you remember, Dale? It was on the spindle when we came back. You were the one who found it, remember?"
Dale, reaching for a cardigan to drape over her shoulders, remembered.
CHAPTER IX
On Devon Street, one block in from Mainland Road, was a brick-and-stone Georgian bastardization that had once belonged to Oxrun's only Washington representative. After his defeat at the start of the Depression, he sold the house to an enterprising family who knocked out walls, rearranged wiring, and affixed small balconies here and there to the second and third stories. The resulting apartment warren generally housed teachers, tellers, and the occasional instructor at the local junior college. Climbing, then, to Vic's second-floor-front quarters—two large rooms he'd divided into four with Chinese screens—Dale expected to find islands of dirty clothes begging for the laundry, a sink buried in dishes and frozen dinner trays, ashes ground into the unwaxed floor, and a thousand other horrors permanently attached to the bachelor living image.
But what she saw when Vic admitted her was a living room furnished in glass and chrome, and a wall-to-wall oriental carpet in beige and royal blue; the kitchen alcove was spotless, the bedroom and bath clean enough for a nurse. Taken speechlessly aback, she spent the first few minutes prowling, craning at bookshelves that brushed the ceiling, admiring the oils he'd picked up in the city. Even the panes in the french doors were clean, she thought with a shake of her head; amazing.
"Disappointed, aren't you?" he said, guiding her to a corner of the thickly upholstered sofa. "You thought I'd be a slob and you could trot out your mothering instincts."
She shook her head numbly, and he laughed, poured her white wine from a crystal decanter and toasted her silently. Yet, in contrast to the room, he was wearing a worn plaid bathrobe over equally worn pajamas, and a pair of slippers she thought should have been discarded a decade before. He hadn't shaved in two clays, and the shadow on his cheeks made his beard and mustache seem heavier and more unkempt. The head bandage was gone, only a small gauze patch remaining at his temple; and though she admitted that he looked better than he sounded, there was still a wan ghost at his face that suggested strain not yet shaken.
"Come on," he urged, "let me know what you think"
"I am impressed," she said slowly. "Man, but I'm impressed." She looked disdainfully at the cartons of Chinese food she'd carried with her, and stared at the ceiling. "Brother."
"Hey," he said, "let's not get ridiculous. I eat on paper plates, mostly. Who has time for dishes anymore?"
Even after he'd fetched the paper plates and spooned out the meal, she doubted he had been telling the truth—but if that was what he wanted her to believe, then she would—for this night, at least.
They spoke little, eating slowly as if deliberately putting off the reason for her visit. But when the meal was done and the plates stashed in the garbage compactor, when the wine was poured in the soft light of a Tiffany lamp on the far corner, Vic lit a cigarette, leaned back and punched lightly at his stomach.
"The first stuff I've been able to keep down all day. And now, Miss Bartlett, let's hear what you were babbling about this afternoon."
She opened her mouth, the prepared speech ready to fill the room and convince him of her fears. But it wouldn't come. It stuck, choked her, and she took a quick swallow of her wine. He kept silent when she pushed a nervous hand through her hair, said nothing when she slipped off her shoes and paced the length of the room to stop at the balcony doors and gaze out at the lights of the homes across the street.
"I thought I had it all down," she said finally, softly, without turning around. "So many things have been running through my head that I've given myself a dozen headaches." She told him of her visit to McPherson and the incident in the park the night before. She described the dream and its slow change, detailed her visit to the analyst's office and her abortive attempt to play the detective. "It was all so dumb, Vic. You should have seen me on the street today. People must have thought I was losing my mind, for God's sake."
"You're not, you know. That's for sure."
She moved from the doors and stood with the coffee table between them. Then she sank to the floor, crossing her legs and holding onto her ankles while she rocked rhythmically on her buttocks.
"I had even gone so far as to convince myself that Abe was right and the fire was only a freak accident. I almost did. But it wasn't."
"I know."
"You know it, and I know it, now. But for the life of me I couldn't be sure this afternoon, not until Bella handed me this."
She reached into her blouse pocket and tossed him the note. He read it, eyebrows raised as he remembered, then folded it carefully and placed it on the table. "It was like a click in my head," she said, struggling not to whisper. "You know what I mean. It's so easy in the movies when the good guys can pull together a few simple facts and trot out their world-saving solutions. It's so easy, and so backward. Well . . ." and she rubbed the back of her neck, "maybe not that exactly, but close enough. The trouble was, see, I'd been taking all these things as isolated events. This and this belonged over here, and that and that belonged over there. No connections, no tie-ins, nothing like that." She frowned, ran the next words carefully through her mind while he watched, not staring, only waiting. "You see, they are connected. All of them. And they started with that first note."
Vic glanced at the paper, then looked up in surprise. "What? How did you come to that marvelous conclusion?"
"Well, pal, it was you who suggested the notes were written by some high school dopes who had a crush on me."
"Oh, it wasn't?"
"No," she said. "It wasn't. At least, not those kids." She reached out and jabbed at the paper. "This one was probably written by Jaimie. The other one was done by Willy Campbell." Vic lighted another cigarette and puffed out a cloud they both followed to the ceiling.
"I don't have any real proof of this," she said, "but I think now this wasn't part of a love-note thing. I think . . . I think Willy wanted to tell me something, and he died before he could. I think this other one is a warning that had I gone to the park there would have been tro
uble. I don't know what this trouble is, or was, but look—Willy sends me the note, and dies; the second one comes, Dave gives me a strange chess set and, after McPherson nearly kills himself getting it out of the shop, Dave's car burns him up and we are nearly broiled in the orchard. And while all this is going on, you're getting fired, I'm getting dreams, and Ed goes on a stupid leave of absence for which there's no rational explanation." She rested her elbows on the table, shook a cigarette out of the pack and pointed it at him.
"There's a lot of time between all this, nearly five months, but if you take away all those days when nothing went on . . . well, there's some kind of a connection."
"Somebody tried to murder us, Vic. We keep forgetting that, don't we? Like, maybe because we don't really want to believe it. But somebody tried to kill us."
He stared as an ember of tobacco fell onto the smoked glass. "And those visits from old—"
"Ridiculous!" she exclaimed. "I hardly know them at all. There was no feeling at all behind Flora and Milly coming to see me. Just like that time in the luncheonette, I get the feeling I'm being checked up on, that's all. I think . . . I think they're trying to see if I know something. Maybe something Willy told me. That conversation I heard last night? I think you and I are the `other troubles' they were talking about."
"Okay, Dale, granting you that much, what are they doing that we're not supposed to know?"
She barked a laugh. "If I knew that, teach, I'd be camped in Abe's office right now. But listen, this is what really scares me."
And as soon as she said it, she knew it was true. She was frightened—not for her life, but of whatever it was that was after it "This afternoon Flora wanted to know if Dave said anything to me when he handed over the chess set. I told her he only explained what the pieces meant. It was a lie, Vic. He did say something else." She took a deep breath. "After Dave finished explaining everything, he said I should sell it to someone who was a traveler. Okay. Then, on the way out—and he was ready to cry, Vic—he said . . . 'I wish I knew, fire or water. '"
She waited, her hands clenched, nails sparking into her palms. Vic crushed out the cigarette, rose, and walked a little unsteadily to the balcony doors. He opened them, and the night chill ghosted in. A car's horn, someone running, a slammed door and a young boy's whistle. He closed them, leaned against them.
"If I understand you, Dale, you're saying that what he said has something to do with the way he and his son died, and the way we were almost killed."
She let out a breath, sagged, and nodded gratefully. "I've thought about Dave's accident. Hitting that telephone pole shouldn't have set the car blazing like that, not ordinarily, not so soon. And Abe himself told me Willy shouldn't have drowned so fast. And . . . Elinor McPherson, drowned in the tub."
"My God, Dale," he said, dropping to his knees in front of her, "do you know what you're implying?"
She nodded again. "Willy was dead before the kids started their screaming. They, or someone else murdered him."
"No! That can't be. I won't believe that, even if I swallow everything else. They're only kids, Dale. Kids, for crying out loud!"
"I will bet you," she said firmly, evenly, "that if you check with some of your friends on the grade-school faculty, you'll find the complaints about you did not originate with them. I'll bet you . . . I'll bet you my store to that ashtray that one or more of those kids deliberately kept mentioning your name when they showed off their new knowledge. Vic," she shouted, "they're doing something! I don't know what it is, but they are doing something."
Vic shifted until he was sitting back against the coffee table, and she knew the incredulous feeling he was suffering while he tried to grasp what she'd already known to be true.
"Vic, the chessman I found in the field near your coat . . . again no proof, but I'm sure both Willy and Dave were holding something like it when they died."
His eyes narrowed, widened, and a hand played nervously at his mustache. She watched as he set up the facts and suppositions one at a time for his examination, and when he finally shook his head in reluctant, fearful admiration, she smiled. Broadly.
Because she was no longer alone.
"Five days," she said quickly. "That's what I heard last night, Vic. They're going to do something in five days."
"All right," he said. "Let's see . . . five days is what, Halloween? Thursday? What's that supposed to mean? Ghosts and goblins and a few Campbell witches?"
"No, that's not right. It's not Halloween, Vic, it's the first of November. It's Friday. This Friday."
Vic started to nod, then shook his head. "Now wait a minute. That's All Saints' Day, and there's nothing sinister about that that I can think of. Maybe what we ought to do is get hold of Abe or Fred and let them know what we've got. I mean, we've got some admittedly wild accusations here, but they do seem to hold together."
"Don't be stupid," she said. "They only hold together because we've made them do it. What do they call it . . . circumstantial evidence? You couldn't convict Jack the Ripper with what we have."
"Okay, boss, so what do we do, then?"
She stared at him. "Do? That's what you're supposed to figure out. I'm too tired to think any more."
"Maybe they're midget revolutionaries. Kidnap the village and hold all us millionaires for ransom."
"Vic, will you please be serious?"
"Well how can I be? I mean, really, Dale . . . all we—"
"The library," she said, snapping her fingers. "Maybe we can find out about the date in the library."
"Great," he said with little enthusiasm. "And after we pick up something—assuming there's anything to pick up—we'll march right over to Ed's and tell him his kid is trying to bump us off because he's having a kindergarten witches' Sabbath in a few days and we know it and he thinks we’ll try to stop it. Dale, do you know what he'll say?"
"I can imagine," she said sourly.
"So can I."
"But what about the chessmen?"
"What about them?"
"If Flora was so upset about not finding them, they must have some significance in this thing. Maybe it'll give us something more substantial to work with. Anything," she added, "will be better than just sitting around shouting at each other."
Bless you, Natalie Clayton, Dale thought as they stepped into the warmth of the library's late hours. The main floor was a spacious two stories high and lighted by great white cylinders that held back the night from the gray glass wall that fronted the building. She and Vic stood hesitantly by the door, rubbing hands and arms until the cold vanished, scanning the vast room carefully. The children's section on the right was colorful and deserted, the new fiction and magazines area on the left held a few college-age browsers. At the horseshoe counter in the center that divided the reading sections from the stacks was a middle-aged woman struggling with a series of computer print-outs apparently reluctant to separate from the attached sheets of carbon.
"Where?" Vic whispered.
Dale shrugged, then pulled him toward the card catalogue. "Dave called them the Children of Don and the Children of Llyr. That must have something to do with it." She pulled out several file drawers and, with a nudge to his ribs, began flicking through the cards. She let her cold-numbed fingers move slowly to allow her more time to think of what she was doing. Once she'd passed some of her fear to Vic she felt as if she was becoming more and more a part of some vast production in which time was meaningless, the moves she made and the speeches she uttered less of her own volition than devices leading her somewhere on a stage considerably more vast than the village she lived in—an uneasy sense of manipulation she could not shake off.
Either that, or she was becoming a mindless hysteric.
"Nothing," Vic muttered, slamming a drawer back into place. "This isn't going to get us anywhere at all."
"Sure it will," she insisted, grabbing at his sleeve when he turned away. "Come on, Vic, we can't drop it now. Let me think a minute." Dave, the chessmen, the names . . . the name
s . . . "Wait a minute! He said something about their being from his Highland background. That's not the way he put it exactly, but maybe we can look up something there."
"You're nuts," he said. "Highland isn't going to get us anything but travel books and pretty pictures. What we need are some mythology books." He snapped his fingers. "Sure! Celtic mythology."
Success had them in and out of the stacks in less than five minutes. They took one of the circular tables scattered between the counter and the entrance, and spread the half-dozen volumes in front of them.
"First one with the goods wins a prize," Vic said.
"Which is?"
"Me."
She sat back in the wooden chair and folded her arms. "I'm not playing."
"Suit yourself, lady. I'm the best there is."
She watched him as he bent over a large open book. His hair, blown askance by the wind, fell over his face, veiling it. His hands moved swiftly through the pages, stopping to point, tapping in a margin as he read. Victor, she thought suddenly, why do I feel so damned protective of you? God knows you're a grown man. He glanced up once, frowned mockingly, returned to grab another book and set it atop the one already before him. And despite the others milling about the floor, the woman slapping paper down on the counter, they were alone. Warm, and alone. As they were in the store, signaling to each other across the aisles, anticipating complaints, comments, customer needs. No wonder Bella often felt as though she was a third wheel. Vic's coming had created an axis from which the older woman had been excluded, spinning in her own orbit with only the toys and the people for anchors.
She blinked.
"Vic, I love you."
He looked up again, grinned, and suddenly looked away.
This is insane, she told herself; this is incredibly insane. I’m supposed to be frightened out of my wits. I'm supposed to be hunting for a clue to something that could blot me out like some minor error in my ledgers; and I’m so idiotically happy I feel like tearing off my clothes they're so tight, screaming and shouting and playing the fool! It's insane!
The Sound of Midnight - An Oxrun Station Novel Page 13