The Paper Grail (23 page)

“What do you think?” Mr. Jimmers asked, holding the sketch up so that the firelight glowed through it. The confusion of folds in the paper appeared almost to be Xerox reproductions—the shadows of folds—and not authentic folds at all. It was very fine work, the rice paper yellowed with age and frayed along the edges. “This,” said Jimmers, gesturing at one of the images, “is the flowering staff. And these are meant to represent secret keys. This one is a cup and this is a coin and this is a tree by a river. And if you fold the thing in half twice, what you get is …” He folded it in half twice and said, “A broken egg. Now watch.”

He folded the sketch again, warping it first and then shoving his hands together so that the center third of the paper disappeared behind the outside thirds, and then he turned it around diamond-wise and folded the top corner down. As if by magic the broken sections of eggshell became whole, and random spots and lines and shadings on the sketch formed a face on the patched-together egg. It sat now on the limb of the tree by the river and held the staff in its hand, its thin arms stretched out along smaller limbs on either side, almost as if it were crucified to the tree.

An electric thrill ran through Howard, and he was surprised to find that Sylvia had taken his hand, as if she felt that something was pending, some revelation. The firelight behind the rice paper made the images waver and jump as if they were seen through ocean water. Mr. Jimmers let go of one of the corners of the sketch, snapped his fingers, and the fire flared in the fireplace, throwing out a great wash of greenish-blue flame that seemed to consume the rice paper sketch even as he held it.

Looking dumbstruck with surprise, Jimmers shouted and waved the burning scrap dramatically, as if it were scorching his hand but he couldn’t manage to let go of it, and then with a wild flourish he threw it onto the stones of the floor and trod on it until the flames were out and there was nothing but a few black fragments left, smudging the gray stones.

“Damn it,” Mr. Jimmers said, looking morosely at the bottom of his stockinged feet. “It’s that damned cedar—throws God’s own amount of sparks.”

Howard realized that his own mouth was open. He had meant to shout, but there hadn’t been time, it had all happened so fast.

“What
a tragedy,” Mr. Jimmers said.
“What
an unbearable loss.”

“You’re joking,” Howard managed to say. He was certain suddenly that Mr. Jimmers had pulled a fast one, with all the finger snapping and the whoosh of flame. He had pitched something into the fire to cause the flare-up and had pocketed the sketch and burned up a dummy of some sort. He bent over and picked up a fragment—one that still had a bit of unburned paper clinging to the black ash. There was a slash of brown ink on it—easily identifiable as the top of the flowering staff. So Jimmers had burned a
copy
. It couldn’t have been the real one. Still, it had
looked
to be the real one. Howard waited for Jimmers to snatch it back out of his coat and laugh.

Instead he sat down heavily in a stuffed chair and buried his forehead in his hands. “Alas,” he said.

“You can’t really have burned it up …” Howard looked to Sylvia for support. She shrugged and shook her head, as if to tell him to drop it entirely.

“Not a word of this leaks out!” Mr. Jimmers said, almost frantically, jerking his head up and staring at the two of them. He wore a hunted look, the look of a man whose life was suddenly threatened by an unseen foe. He reached into his coat, hesitated, cocking his head. Howard nodded inwardly. Here it came …

But Mr. Jimmers merely pulled out a ragged old handkerchief and mopped his brow. “I believe a drink is called for under the circumstances. A strong one.”

Howard couldn’t disagree. He and Sylvia followed Mr. Jimmers back out toward the kitchen, where Jimmers pulled the cork out of the bottle of Sunberry wine that Howard had tasted two nights back. He poured out two tumblers full, nearly killing off the bottle and announcing that he never touched the stuff. Sylvia sipped at hers, but Howard couldn’t bring himself to it and set his glass down untouched, pretending to be distracted for a moment by something out the window. Then Mr. Jimmers wandered off, seeming lost and depressed, and left the two of them alone.

“What about a walk along the bluffs?” Howard asked loudly, catching Sylvia’s eye and jerking his head.

“You children go along without me,” Mr. Jimmers said from the next room. “I’ve got to think this through. I’ve betrayed my trust. I …” He fell silent, and they heard him slump heavily into a chair. Sylvia folded up the tablecloth and repacked the dishes, leaving the remainder of the food for Mr. Jimmers. When they peeked into the parlor a moment later, he was nodding in his chair, asleep.

Howard still half expected him to spring up and laugh, but that didn’t happen; instead he began to snore, his head lolling forward over his chest.

13

“W
HERE
are you going?” Sylvia asked when they’d gone outside.

“For a walk on the bluffs, like I said.”

“Now?”

“Of course now. What’s the hurry? You don’t have to be back for another forty-five minutes. We just got had, that’s what I think.”

Sylvia was silent, walking next to him with her arms folded across her chest. “It looked like a trick.”

“Sure it was. He’s got the damned thing in his coat. He’s no more asleep than I am. What he’s doing now is hiding the thing again, and I’ll bet you a shiny new dime that it’s not going back behind the rock, either.” Howard looked over his shoulder, back toward the house. They had gotten around toward the rear now. A trail led away through the berry vines, down along the edge of the bluffs where someone had long ago erected a picket fence, to keep people well back away from the edge, maybe. Howard walked down the path until they were hidden from the house by wild shrubbery. He pulled a key out of his pocket.

“What’s that?” Sylvia asked.

“A key.”

“I can see that. What’s it for?”

“Jimmers’ shed. I’m going to see what’s inside it. There were a half dozen keys on strings inside the back door. I slipped it off of the hook when he fell asleep in the chair. You were cleaning up the lunch stuff.”

“How do you know it’s the right one?”

“I looked at the lock. It’s a regular antique. This key is old enough and cut right. It’s the only one of the bunch that’s anywhere near working. The way I see it, the padlocks on all these outbuildings are probably keyed the same. It wouldn’t make sense to carry a dozen keys.”

“What did Father tell you was in there?”

“A fabulous machine, actually.”

She nodded. “It figures. What else would Mr. Jimmers have in a tin shed? You know what Jimmers told me was in there?”

“What?” asked Howard. The whole business was beginning to look pretty dubious to him.

“The Platonic archetypes.”

“All of them?”

“That’s what he said. He told me that nearly a year ago. Said the shed was packed with them—the archetypal bottle cap and chair and mustache and who-knows-what-all.”

‘The wing-tip shoe.”

“The archetypal corkboard. Everything. He said he couldn’t explain the physics, but it had to do with the sort of infinity you see in double mirrors, like in a barbershop.”

“I bet it does. I bet he did that trick in the parlor with mirrors, too. Uncle Roy called it a ghost machine. He’s pretty certain that it had something to do with the crowd that stole Graham’s car. I promised him I’d have a look at it if I could. Apparently Jimmers won’t let him anywhere near it. Tell me something—is there bad blood between Jimmers and your father?”

“Well, yes.” Sylvia stood looking out over the ocean, her hair blowing back out of her face. She looked as if she were thinking of how to continue, so Howard waited for her, even though he was itching to have a look into the shed before Mr. Jimmers woke up.

“Mr. Jimmers and my mother were lovers.”

“Jimmers?” Howard asked, trying not to sound too incredulous. He tried to consider Mr. Jimmers in that light, but it wasn’t easy.

“Long time ago—shortly before I was born. You know who she wound up marrying, though.”

“You might have been Sylvia Jimmers.”

“Very damned nearly.”

“You wouldn’t have been as pretty.”

Sylvia blushed just a little, which was encouraging. “Actually,” she said, “he wasn’t a bad-looking man when he was young. It wrecked him, though, breaking up with Mother. She’s still guilty about it—more than makes sense, really. I think she likes carrying guilt around like baggage. She wouldn’t know what to do without it. She told me once that I had Mr. Jimmers’ eyes.”

“Really? I think Uncle Roy has them, in a jar in the kitchen. There was a lot of bitterness, then?”

“I suppose so,” Sylvia said. “Nobody hates anybody, though. Same circle of friends and all—everyone winding up in the same place, finally. Mr. Jimmers had a difficult time of it, though. He was hospitalized in San Francisco at least twice for mental disorders. He was brilliant, too. An engineer until he gave it up and began living in a garage in Fort Bragg. Spent all his time working on a flying automobile.”

“He was a gluer,” Howard said flatly. “I’ll bet you.”

“After a fashion, I guess. The compulsion seems to move people differently. Anyway, he was put away, and when he got out he fell in love again. You wouldn’t believe with whom.”

“I give up. Anybody I know?”

“Heloise Lamey.”

“Not old Landlady Lamey!”

“The very one. Lasted something under two months. Father says that she wanted to use Mr. Jimmers to betray Graham, but that he wouldn’t knuckle under and she dropped him after some sort of scandal that resulted in Jimmers’ disgrace. Jimmers disappeared for a time, back down to San Francisco, and then came back and has lived here at Graham’s since. He came and went in the night, I guess, because nobody ever saw him. It was always assumed he was here, just sort of puttering around, watching the stars. Mother kept track of him. I remember coming out here with her once when I was a little girl, and her telling me that he was on a diet of sprouts and milk and vitamins. He even published a newsletter and started an organization, the Flat Constellation Society, but he was closed down for mail fraud. He was innocent, though. He believed it all.”

Howard nodded. “I like that. An authentic crank is innocent of mail fraud, but a fake crank isn’t. There’s a certain logic to the idea.”

Sylvia gave him a look. “You know what I mean.”

“Actually I do. Was this some sort of religion or something?”

“I’ve seen some of his newsletters. They were full of articles about saucers and the hollow earth and especially about machinery. He had a sort of Jungian slant, though—not your usual nut literature, except that he claimed to be in contact with hundred-year-old spirits. He didn’t capitalize common nouns or put everything inside of useless quotation marks or things like that.”

“That’s reassuring,” Howard said. “I don’t mean to be slighting or anything, but it sounds as if he and your father ought to have gotten along fine.”

“Somehow that didn’t happen. They were rivals when they were in love with my mother, and they just carried right on being rivals. They used to play pranks on each other once in a while after it was all settled and over, as if it weren’t really over at all. Mr. Jimmers would have a truckload of manure delivered out to the museum, say, as a joke, and then Father would strike back at him by printing up a fake newsletter from the Flat Constellation Society, full of crazy limericks and psychotic illustrations. Then we moved south, of course, and they pretty much gave it up until we came north again years later. It’s died down again now, but I think that Father is capable of starting it back up anytime.”

“I would have thought that Jimmers was a fan of the ghost museum. What did he think, that Uncle Roy set it up to make fun of him or something?”

“No, not especially.” She hesitated for a moment, pulling her hair back out of her face and tying it into a big knot. “I shouldn’t tell you this, since you’re such a terrible skeptic, but it’s altogether possible that Mr. Jimmers rigged up the entire ghost car phenomenon. That was his crowd of hundred-year-old spirits driving the car. Don’t ask me how. Don’t even ask me how he fooled us with the sketch just now. Right before the museum failed, Father saw a glowing creature walking through the forest after dark. He was just closing up, getting ready to head home. He followed it, but it ran off up one of the lumber roads and disappeared. Father couldn’t keep up with it. He drove straight to the newspaper office, full of excitement, and of course they treated it as a farce. The next morning a cow was reported stolen from a farm near Albion, and that same day it was found, right up behind the museum, sprayed with luminous paint.”

Howard smiled. “Did Uncle Roy paint the cow? I love the idea of that—a glowing ghost cow terrorizing the north coast. That’s good. A canny business move. It would have hauled the tourists in by the busload.”

“Of
course
he didn’t paint it. If he had, he wouldn’t have been fool enough to let it get away up the lumber road. And he would have made sure a few other people saw it, too. He thinks Jimmers did it, as a prank, to make him look like a fool. It certainly worked that way. The museum was just then going under, and the luminous cow fraud is what broke the camel’s back.”