The Paper Grail (16 page)

“Want anything to drink?” Sylvia asked from the bar.

“A beer,” he said. “Anything local, thanks.” He turned back to the dart game. He might as well leave the rest of the wine to Sylvia.

She sat back down, smiling and with his beer and a glass. “The bartender’s a friend of mine,” she said. “His name is Jean Paul. He’s a martial arts expert and owns—what do they call it?—a dojo up in Fort Bragg. He has to moonlight here four days a week in order to keep the dojo open. Martial arts is a spiritual thing with him, a way of life.”

Howard decided to say nothing. He couldn’t tolerate Jean Paul. Clearly it was a fake name. The subject of Jean Paul would just get him into trouble. The man had probably been a ninja assassin during the Ming dynasty. Wasn’t a dojo some sort of aquarium fish? Martial arts stank on ice. It was another New Age phenomenon pretending to have lived exotic past lives.

“Say,” he said. “I ran into Stoat down at a tavern in town.”

She was silent on the subject of Stoat.

“What’s he up to these days along artistic lines? Does he still paint, or is he mostly a financier?”

“He paints pictures of complicated-looking microcircuitry, with bits yanked out of it. It looks sort of … physiological.
Fleshy, I guess you’d say, but it’s cold and empty and nasty. Very nasty. To my eye it’s just dead on the canvas. He’s heavily into cybernetics.”

“You two aren’t …”

“Aren’t what?”

“Seeing each other.”

“I saw him this afternoon. You drove past, remember.”

He nodded. “Of course. I just …” Howard let the subject die. Somehow the jovial bartender had made him jealous, and the jealousy had reminded him of Stoat. He had caught himself, though. There was no percentage in taking that line. “So anyway, this paperweight…” Howard started to say.

“Oh, yes,” Sylvia said, interrupting. “You were worried about getting it back.”

“Well, no. Not exactly. You see, I remembered back when you used to have a couple. Remember that French one that you had—the St. Louis weight with the little running devil in it?”

She nodded, but the conversation was interrupted by the arrival of the food—two plates, a tray full of potato skins, and a wire rack full of condiments and a couple of spoons. Sylvia studied her wineglass, her eyes distant, her mind troubled again. The paperweight subject had evaporated.

On the theory that desperate times called for desperate measures, Howard picked up the two spoons and wedged one into each eye so that the handles thrust away on either side of his head like dragonfly wings. He stared in her general direction, his face screwed up to keep the spoons from falling out. He swore to himself that he wouldn’t relinquish the spoons, no matter what, until she did something—hit him, walked out, asked to use a spoon, anything.

She let him sit for a long minute, until he began to think about the other people in the bar and the spectacle he was making of himself. He started to wish he could see something past the edges of the spoons. What if she had left—gone to the popcorn machine or the rest room? What if she slipped out and drove home? Finally she laughed, though, as if she couldn’t help herself, and shoved the end of a potato skin into his mouth when he tried to say something.

“Cheer the hell up,” he said, swallowing the thing.

“You
cheer up. Better yet, don’t talk. You keep getting into trouble when you talk.”

“I won’t. I promise. I mean I will. Anyway, this paper-
weight …” He wanted more than ever for her to know that he had brought it as a gift.

She pursed her lips and nodded. “I’ll see what I can do. I can see that it’s really bothering you. Like I said, if it’s still around, maybe Father can get it back. You’ll just have to be patient about it. It’s really got you worked up, hasn’t it? That’s probably why you’re on edge, why you’re so catty about things.”

It was hopeless. Giving her the paperweight now, even if he had it, wouldn’t work. He had made too big an issue of it. He decided to cut his losses and drink his beer. He poured the rest of the bottle of wine into her glass.

“I’m warning you right now,” she said, “that if I drink that, you’re going to have to drive home.”

“Fine. I’m sober as a judge. It’s still early, though.”

She checked her watch. “Just nine o’clock.” She drank her wine meditatively for a moment. Then she said, “You know, for a minute there I thought you were going to tell me that you’d brought the paperweight up to give it to me.”

His eyes shot open. “That’s what I did,” he said. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

She laughed. “That’s okay,” she said. “You don’t have to say that now. I know what the thing means to you. You were like that when you were a kid, too. Remember?”

“I guess I was.” He wondered what she meant, what she was up to. “Like what?”

“Remember you had that one marble, the one with the red and blue swirls? That favorite one? What did you call it? ‘Martian Winter.’ Remember that? You were sure cornball sometimes.”

“I …” He shrugged. He
had
actually made up names for his marbles, but how on earth had she remembered them?

“You went absolutely stark when it disappeared. Remember? You cried for about a week.”

“Me? I never cried about that.” He’d been about eight at the time. He could still remember it clearly. It was one of those disasters that loom monumental in the mind of a child. He certainly hadn’t cried about it, though—not in public, anyway.

“Did you ever figure out what happened to it?”

He shook his head. “Lost it under the couch or something.”

Now she shook her head. “Nope. I stole it. I gave it to Jimmy Hooper.” She smirked at him, finishing off her wine.

“I knew you did.”

“You
liar!
You never knew anything about it.”

“And I never drew bird men in the dirt, either, and had my trance therapist scope them out.”

“Neither did I. I was lying about that. I knew it would about kill you. I really didn’t steal your marble, either.”

“I knew you didn’t,” he said. “And I really did bring that paperweight up here to give it to you.”

“You’re sweet,” she said, still not believing him. “I know what let’s do, let’s go out to the museum.”

“Now? In the dark?” Suddenly he regretted letting her finish the bottle of wine by herself.

“I’ve got a flashlight in the car. Don’t forget that I’m pretty familiar with the place. I grew up there, nearly.”

“Would tomorrow be better? Tomorrow afternoon—I’m supposed to work on the haunted house tomorrow with Uncle Roy, but not all day.”

“You’re scared,” she said. “Just like when you lost the marble. Tell me your pet name for it again. I’ve forgotten. I want to hear you say it just once, just for the sake of old times.”

He sat like a stone idol, smashing his mouth shut, and then made the motion of turning a key in front of his lips, locking them tight.

“Remember when you set marbles all over the floor and said they were the ‘ice planetoids,’ and then you went to the bathroom and I brought Trixie into the house and played ‘deadly comet’? I think that’s when the Martian one disappeared, don’t you? It went down the heater vent in the floor.”

“No. Forget the marble. We were talking about going down to the museum. I can’t believe you’re serious about that.” He found himself hoping that she was, though. He could picture them hand in hand in the moonlit museum, waiting for the arrival of the ghost car. It was something they might have done in high school.

“Why not?” she said. “What are you afraid of, ghosts?”

“What the heck,” he said. “Not me.” Not for the first time, it struck him that Sylvia looked astonishing in her sweater. It gave him a new appreciation for the overpriced clothes in her shop. “Let’s go,” he said. “I’ll drive.”

9

T
HANK
God for the moonlight, Howard said to himself as they wound their way down the highway, south through Little River. The road was empty save for one set of headlights a half mile behind them. Howard was ready to pull off the road and let the car pass rather than drive with its lights shining into his rearview mirror, but it stayed well back—always one or two bends behind them, pacing them evenly.

Without the moonlight it would have been utterly dark. As it was, there were patches of silvery light, illuminating here and there a bit of road or beach cut by the shadows of rocks and trees. The wind and the darkness had sobered Howard up quickly, but Sylvia leaned against his shoulder with her eyes closed, softly humming. The wine had relaxed her and she had managed to forget the day’s troubles. Howard wished that it had been something else that had relaxed her—him, specifically. But he hadn’t been able to.

This was home to her, this wild stretch of twisting ocean highway. He was in strange territory, though, and it made him nervous. No, that didn’t entirely explain it—even as kids she had twice his sense of adventure, half his sense of fear. He watched for the headlights behind them. There they were, right on track. He couldn’t see the car, even with the moonlight. “Slow down,” she said, sitting up straight in the seat. “Here it comes.”

He turned off the highway, past the picket fence with its cow skulls and across the weedy gravel parking lot where he pulled up against a wooden berm and shut the engine off, leaving the keys in the ignition. The windows in the building were tightly covered with plywood shutters, and even in the darkness, maybe especially so, the place had a long-disused look about it that somehow made him skeptical about going in.

Sylvia climbed right out, though, pulling a parka out of the backseat along with a flashlight. Howard reached for his corduroy coat, wishing he had brought something warmer. The
ocean wind rushed straight up at them from across the road, and he could hear the crash of breakers, unnaturally loud in the silent night. They scrunched across the gravel toward the rear of the building, back into the shadows of the forest. The smell of eucalyptus leaves was heavy in the air along with the smell of the sea.

Sylvia shifted a little pile of granite rocks beneath an electrical circuit-breaker box, carefully lifting the grapefruit-sized rocks, as if wary of bugs, and shining her light in among them. “There’s a key here somewhere,” she said. Beyond, at the end of the building, was a padlocked door.

On an impulse he stepped back around into the parking lot and waited. Nothing. There wasn’t a car in sight. He thought without meaning to of the gluer microbus on the highway and of the Chevy in the parking lot at Sammy’s. Where was the car that had been following them? It should have gone past while they were fishing out their coats, but it hadn’t. It had vanished.

There were driveways off the highway, of course, dirt roads leading down to houses on the bluffs or else up into the hills, up to the land of the cultists and dope gardeners. That would explain it. The car had turned off. It was as simple as that. It wasn’t the fabled ghost car making a run down the coast. Graham’s Studebaker was smashed to scrap on the rocks, anyway. Even ghosts wouldn’t care to drive a wreck like that.

Cutting off the urge to whistle, Howard walked hurriedly around back, to where Sylvia ought to have been searching for the key. She was gone.

“Syl!” he whispered, suddenly terrified. There was no answer. He looked around wildly for a rock, a stick, anything. He hunched down and scuttled across to the pile of rocks she’d been messing with, picking one up and hefting it. Then he stood still, listening, and very slowly edged toward the building to get his back to a wall. He gripped the rock. There was nothing—no sound at all.

Until the door swung open and Sylvia stepped out onto the little wooden stoop, shining her flashlight into his face. He shouted—something between a scream and a groan—and threw the rock straight at the ground, as if he wanted to pulverize a lizard.

“What on earth is wrong with you?” she asked in a normally pitched voice. It sounded insanely loud. “What were you going to do with that rock?”

He stood blinking at her, his heart pounding against his ribs. “I thought you were gone,” he gasped out. “I thought there was some sort of trouble.” He whispered this last bit, knowing that there was no reason to and that it made him seem twice as terrified.

“Aren’t you gallant?” she said, laughing. “Coming to my rescue like that. There’s nothing out here.” Then she was silent, listening, as if to let the night provide its own evidence. There was nothing but the low rumble of breakers from across the road and the sound of the wind sighing in the trees.

The stillness didn’t make Howard feel any better. That was just the trouble, wasn’t it?—that there was nothing at all out there. He would have been more comfortable surrounded by the familiar noises of a southern California suburb.

He picked up the rock and tossed it back into the pile, calming down enough to be embarrassed at having thrown it like that. Sylvia went back into the darkened museum, playing the flashlight around on the walls. Howard followed, expecting—what?—ghosts, maybe, the Studebaker crowd in their top hats playing chess.

The place was dusty and deserted. It looked as if even in its heyday it had never amounted to much. He had expected some kind of fun house—with a mysterious cellar, maybe, and with different rooms and passages—but there was only the one big room and what looked to be a tiny office and bathroom off to the side.