Beatrice looked disbelieving. She shook her head. “It doesn’t make any sense. Why the
hotel? Why not the town as a whole? Why now?
They’ve been working on the place for two years. People have been in and out of every building there hundreds of times without seeing anything out of the ordinary.”
Charlie nodded approvingly at her. She’d do, he told himself again. “All good points. Points I have no answers for. But in every case I’ve mentioned there is an old hotel that’s been closed for many years. And in every case troubles ended when it burned. Sorry, that’s all I have to go on, but that’s how it is.” He turned to Byron whose eyes were narrowed in concentration, all traces of shock gone now. “Is there electricity over there?”
“No. That’s one of the things they argued about in the beginning. They decided to keep it the way it was back in 1880 hereabouts. There’s a generator unit in a truck for power equipment they’re using for construction.”
“Another similarity. None of the places was wired, or else the electricity was turned off and had been off for years.” He grinned at Beatrice. “You can see how I’m clutching at any straws I can find. You want to think about it awhile?”
She looked at Byron and stiffened at the expression on his face, the intense look of concentration that furrowed his forehead, tightened his mouth. “We can’t turn our work into an investigation for an insurance company!” she said sharply.
Byron started and opened his mouth to respond, but Charlie stood up and beckoned Constance. “Let’s go for a walk,” he said. “Cold or not, there’s a bright moon, and they say the desert in moonlight is a rare treat. Game?”
She nodded, as troubled now as Beatrice was. They got into warm coats and started to leave. At the door they were stopped by Byron’s voice.
“If we don’t help, what then? What will you do?”
“Oh,” Charlie said, “talk to the sheriff, the state police, whoever’s in charge. See if they’ll have a go at it. I think they might.”
“That’s despicable,” Beatrice said. “You don’t know what shape those people are in. They need help, not harassment.”
Charlie shrugged. “Maybe I know, maybe not. I do know there’ll be more just like them if we don’t get to the bottom of it. See you in a little bit.”
They walked on a dirt road that led away from town. The wind was light now, and the air was fragrant with strange smells, not of leaf mold, but more primitive odors of exposed earth and rocks and the most primeval of plants. Behind them a dog howled, another barked sharply, and in the distance a creature answered, or taunted—a fox or a coyote. The desert glowed in the moonlight. The shadows were the black of the abyss and the light was silver, cold, and alien.
“You’re upset with me,” Charlie said after they had walked several minutes in silence.
“A little. She’s right, you know. Therapist-patient—that’s a relationship that should not be subverted for any reason. But you’re right too. That’s the dilemma.”
He grunted, his hand on her arm warm and full of strength.
“As soon as you catch the arsonist, you’re through with the job you were hired to do.”
This time he didn’t bother to grunt. He knew.
“And what difference will it make just to confirm what you already suspect, or even know? That the hotel has something in it that does that to people? An invisible, untraceable, portable something that makes people crazy? I mean, you already have accepted that much.”
“Yep. But why not everyone? Why just some people?” His hand tightened on her arm, but his voice was light and easy when he continued. “You haven’t said the other thing. I’m out of my depth here. I have to go to the police eventually—why not now?”
She was relieved that he had brought it up. And it was true, that was the other thing that had to be discussed. “Charlie, what if it’s a gas? You can’t sample it or analyze it. What if it’s a ray of some sort? What if it’s a mad scientist’s escaped discovery? People have searched those buildings and found nothing. What can you do alone?”
“Don’t know,” he admitted. “But picture the scene. I go into the police station and say: by the way, there’s something weird in that hotel. And the kind captain says, I’ve been over every inch of it, pal. So have the FBI, or the ATF people. Nothing’s there. I say, yeah, but look at how those poor people go nuts. And he says, you look at my statistics, pal. Thousands of people go nuts every month. And I take my hat in hand and go home.”
“You were convinced,” she pointed out.
“I know. But I don’t have to state my case to a police captain, or a commissioner, or a mayor, or anyone in a position to tell me I need a rest leave. That helps. Talking to people in Orick, reading all those papers, seeing Polly, it all helps. But, honey, I’ve had over a month to think about it. Unless and until I get John Loesser with the gas can all I’ve got is a theory that I don’t even believe in yet. So I’m playing it alone for now. But you’re right. Eventually we get help. Eventually.”
They had been walking downhill for several minutes, a gentle slope that was hardly apparent, but suddenly they both realized that the lights of town had been eclipsed by rocks. Now there was only the silver moonlight, and an uncanny silence. Constance shivered.
“Right,” Charlie said briskly. “Back to the house, hot coffee, people.”
It was amazing how fast that had happened, he thought with gloom. He had wanted to investigate, see if his idea had any possibility of success. He now doubted that it did, doubted that he could catch his guy with the gas can out on the desert on the way to the hotel. The damn land was just too treacherous.
“You know what makes it so hard, why you’ll
have trouble convincing anyone else?” Constance said. “Fear. You’re touching on two such basic fears. First, fear of insanity. Everyone’s afraid of it even if they don’t admit it. And fear of the walking dead. Our myths and nightmares, our horror movies are full of that one. Accepting that such a terrible thing could happen shatters every belief system we hang onto. If that’s possible, anything is, and that’s too frightening to deal with.”
The lights of the town returned to view. A dog howled, another barked, and from a vast distance a more primitive creature answered. Its voice sounded mocking.
Chapter 10
Things were happening
, Charlie thought the next afternoon, just not the right things. A helicopter flew in circles for a time, searching for the missing people; officially four in all, he had learned, including Mike. None of them had been found. A parade of automobiles, jeeps, trucks wound out onto the desert, into Old West, and wound out again. The sheriff returned to ask Byron questions, the same questions, eliciting the same answers, and they were of no help. Byron and Beatrice went to Doctor Sagimore’s office, where they were interviewing people. Polly begged off. The sun came out and the day was too warm. The dogs did not bark.
Constance had started listening to the tapes made over the past two days by Byron and his team. In real time, she said with an eloquent shrug. Beatrice returned for lunch, glanced at Polly, and insisted on taking her to Las Vegas, where she put her on a plane headed for home. Polly had become a patient overnight; she had wept in her room all morning.
Most of the day Charlie wandered around the town talking, listening, asking a few questions. He drove over to the new hotel nearing completion—an opulent high rise that looked incongruous on the desert just across the Nevada state line. It was luxurious, with gaming rooms on the first floor, a mammoth swimming pool, playground. Welcome to Nevada, he thought, surveying it. He wandered out back and saw where the train loaded passengers, climbed aboard and walked the length of the train, as richly finished as the hotel, with red plush seats, and gleaming brass fixtures. He chatted with some of the men who had returned to work here. No one was working down at Old West. And finally he returned to the house where Constance was at the kitchen table, still listening to tapes and making notes now and then.
“Package from Hoagley,” she said, pointing to a manila envelope. She rubbed her ears.
He had ordered a complete rundown on John Loesser, and here it was. His school days through college, the death of his wife in an airplane accident, the attack that put Loesser in the hospital and evidently killed the Danvers family. Charlie sat down heavily as he read.
“I’ve got the son of bitch,” he muttered after a moment. He stared past Constance. “Today, tomorrow, he’ll show up. Soon now.”
After another second or two, she said, “Charlie, it’s time to bring in the local authorities. You’ve done your job.”
He looked up. His eyes were just like the little pieces of obsidian she had seen for sale at the airport. Apache tears, they were called. He grinned, but it was meaningless; he wasn’t even seeing her, she knew.
Constance caught his arm. “Listen,” she said quietly. “All day I’ve been hearing these people talk about the horror down at that place.” She picked up a tape and put it down again hard. “Charlie, there are degrees of madness, different manifestations, varying levels of homicidal impulses, or suicidal impulses. The ones affected by whatever is down there are extreme examples. It’s as if every repressed murderous thought is activated, set loose. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
They heard the front door open and close; Byron and Beatrice walked into the kitchen. He looked haggard, very pale; even his elegant beard had started to look unkempt. Beatrice was shaking.
“We just heard,” Byron said. “One of the sheriffs men who was in the search party today went home and beat his wife senseless. She was five months pregnant, lost the baby. She’ll recover, probably. Neighbors subdued the guy, and he curled up and started to cry and hasn’t stopped.”
“When will it end?” Beatrice cried.
“When the hotel burns,” Charlie said.
“For God’s sake! Let’s tell the sheriff what you know and let them burn the thing down!”
“And then it will just start up somewhere else,” Charlie said wearily. “Next month, in three months, next year, sometime.”
Beatrice ran to the telephone near the back door. “I’m calling the sheriff. We have to warn people to stay out of there even if we don’t do anything else.”
Charlie shrugged. “I say we sit tight until we have the firebug and then decide.”
“I don’t give a damn about the fires and the insurance!”
“Neither do I,” Charlie said in a low voice. “But this firebug has something we need. Two things. Information, and immunity. Apparently he can walk in there and set his fire and walk out again unscathed, or else he’s so crazy he can’t be driven any further. I say we need him before we do anything else. If the sheriff or his men close in on him, there’s going to be shooting. Chances he’ll survive are practically nil considering the state of everyone’s nerves around here.”
She stood with her hand on the telephone, meeting his gaze unblinkingly. Then she drew a deep breath and turned away. “One more day,” she said. “Tomorrow at this time I won’t let you talk me out of telling everything you’ve told us.”
Byron went to make them all drinks and returned to the kitchen with a tray of glasses, which he handed out. “Charlie, have you considered that your man might register in a motel over in Vegas? It’s just an hour away. You’d need an army to keep track of who goes in and out at night over there.”
Charlie sipped bourbon hardly diluted at all with ice and water. Just right. “He’s a city man,” he said then. “Same as I am. I’ve been all over the area today, just trying to get a feel for it, where you can drive in it, how fast. He’ll need to do much the same. That’s his pattern; it never has varied. He goes in and scouts the area a day ahead of time, then lights his fire and vamooses. I don’t think he’ll change this time.” If Loesser did change this time, lit his fire, made his getaway, it could be years before they got this close again. If Byron hadn’t called, he wouldn’t have known about Old West until too late, after it became another arson statistic.
Beatrice and Byron left for dinner in Las Vegas soon after this. “I want to get away from here for a few hours,” he had said. “And I want to get you away with me.”
Constance and Charlie walked to Jodie’s. He dropped in at the motel for a chat with the desk clerk, came back, and shook his head. Nothing yet.
The restaurant was filled again, and more subdued than the night before. The conversations were lower, the expressions on the faces of the customers darker. Constance and Charlie sat in a booth near the rear of the restaurant, where he had a good view of the place. They would shoot first, he thought again glumly, and he knew he couldn’t blame them a damn bit.
“Well, we might as well talk about it,” Constance said after they had sat silently for several minutes. “You or me?”
He grinned, and this time meant it. “You.”
“Right. The people on the tapes are all locals, construction workers, or people who were hired to run the shops. You know, the dry goods store, the saloon, all those people. They were out there one other time for an orientation, but it was noisy and filled with the construction crews that day, the saws going, and so on. Again and again they say it was very different on the day of the shooting. Apparently the generator makes a lot of noise, and when it was turned off that day, the quiet was eerie; the town seemed haunted. Many people mentioned that period of stillness, how strange it was. Something frightened them during that short time. Most of it you have to discount as after-the-fact rationalizing, but not all. At least four people complained of dizziness and headaches. The dizziness passed, but the headaches lasted for most of the time, at least until they were all so frightened that they simply forgot about them.”
She took a deep breath, considering, remembering the terrified voices, the shrillness and incoherencies and babble. “Anyway, the train blew its whistle on the butte before it was actually in sight, and they turned off the generator, and the few construction people ducked back behind the hotel. They moved the truck that housed the generator so it wouldn’t be in view and spoil the effects. That’s when, they say, there was the eerie silence, when Trevor Jackson must have got his rifles from his truck. They all seem to have at least two rifles in their trucks.”
She shook her head in wonder, then went on. “No one mentioned seeing him do it, but they don’t know when else he could have done it. He went inside the saloon through the back door. The train pulled in making a lot of noise, blowing the whistle, and people began to spill out, all laughing, having a good time. The plan was for a few speeches, a welcoming ceremony or something like that. The guests were all shareholders and friends who had gathered in Las Vegas, had a party the night before, and were going to wrap it all up at Old West. Then Trevor began to shoot.”
Charlie had listened intently. He relaxed a bit now. “Pretty much the same story I kept hearing from various people who aren’t patients. Also, what I got is that the guests on the train have all scattered back to their various homes. If any of them are nuts the family probably won’t mention it.”
She looked pained at the expression, but she did not protest. “Charlie, there are other implications here. In some cases the insanity and violence seem to come on together, but Trevor had time to get his weapons and ammunition. He must have looked normal to anyone who noticed him. And the sheriff’s deputy who went home and beat his wife, he must have appeared normal. They aren’t all like Mike, who reacted with instant violence. You don’t know what to expect from John Loesser. He may appear to be as rational as… as an insurance agent, and be as homicidal as Mike.”
“You think Loesser’s crazy?”
“Well, of course. I mean, making a career of setting fires, giving up his profession, his entire life apparently in order to do it. Why? You don’t?”
“You’re the expert,” he said with a slight grin. Actually he thought John Loesser was behaving in a totally reasonable way: he searched for and found a nest of vipers and burned them out, then searched again, and again.
They had eaten their meal and were ready for coffee when a waiter dropped a tray with several glasses. Instantly half a dozen men were on their feet, their hands under their coats, or in pockets, in a way that made Charlie hold his breath until someone laughed and they all resumed their seats. The laughter was not picked up, and it had sounded artificial, more a sob than mirth. The waiter had frozen in place. Carefully he moved away from the mess at his feet when a busboy appeared and started to clean it up.
“Let’s go home for coffee,” Charlie said in a voice that had gone flat and tired.
The next morning Byron called from the doctor’s office immediately on his arrival there. “Charlie, I thought you’d better know this. Some forensic people are coming in this morning to take air and dirt samples from Old West. The sheriff’s escorting them out around nine.”
Charlie felt relief mixed with regret. If Loesser turned up today, this might make him take off again, go to Vegas and wait out the official types, or leave the area altogether. On the other hand, if there was something that could be analyzed and countered, Loesser could wait. They’d find him. He gnawed his lip, frowning at the wall map of the triangle that was made out of the points Old West, Grayling, and the new hotel.
Slowly he narrowed his eyes and moved in closer to the map. He traced a ranch road that wound around rocks, up and down steep inclines, meandered on south. But it was within a mile of Old West at one place, accessible from a dirt road that left the state road there. Another four or five miles. It was possible, he thought.
“Let’s go watch,” he said to Constance.
She was startled. “I don’t think that’s a good idea at all.”
“Not with them, over here.” He pointed to the spot he had picked out, more than a hundred feet higher than Old West, separated from the site by a deep ravine. There was no way to reach the town from that road, he had decided, but that was fine with him. He had no desire to get close to the hotel yet. Not yet. Maybe never.
She studied the map and nodded with some reluctance. Was a mile far enough away? She hoped so. “I’ll get the binoculars. We should take the Land Rover, don’t you think?”
He followed her to the bedroom and opened the suitcase, brought out his old Police Special, and loaded it. Then they were ready.
The first part of the drive was fast, on the state road. The next section was six miles long and it took nearly an hour. “It’s not even a road,” Constance cried out once when the Land Rover tilted precariously as the left wheels rode up and over a boulder. The land was gray; the sage was gray green; the sparse grasses were gray. Boulders, dirt, vegetation were all camouflaged the same color, hiding from what? Rimrock was black here and there, and in a sheltered spot or two where winter runoff nourished more growth, straggly trees huddled close together. They were gray also.
The track curved sharply around outcrops, dived down slopes, climbed other slopes at a steep angle, turned back on itself around a deep gouge in the dirt. There were cacti here, dwarfed and thick, with wicked looking needles. Finally Charlie stopped the car, shaking his head at the next turning place. It was pointless to pretend he could maneuver it. A goat track, maybe, he thought. He visualized the map again. That was supposed to be the road that would take them to the edge of the ravine where they could hide behind rocks and have a clear view of the Old West scene.
“How far do you suppose it is?” Constance asked.
“Maybe a mile. Walk?”
She nodded. “I sure don’t want to drive on that.”
They walked the last stretch, and came around a turn to see the tourist attraction off to the left. Through the clear air, the buildings were sharp, the railing on the boardwalk visible even without the binoculars. They looked around for a good spot to wait and observe. In the sun, they were too likely to be seen from over there, Charlie decided, but in the shade it was cold. Finally they walked around a boulder to sunlight where they would wait until there was something to see.
“At least it’s too cold for snakes,” Constance said after they were settled.
Charlie shuddered. Snake country. Scorpions. Black widows. What else had he read about it? Gila monsters? He thought so. In the summer it could reach well over a hundred degrees by this time in the morning, so arid you could dehydrate and die within a couple of hours. And yet, he marveled, it also had a beauty of its own. The air was so clear, the shadows had such sharp edges, were so deep and black, the sky so distant and blue, it was like being in country not yet used, not corrupted somehow.