The Paper Grail (26 page)

It was easy to tell which room they were in. The door was open and the light on, and he could see through it when he’d taken three steps up the hallway. He would duck into an adjacent room, one already torn up, and follow them down when they left. That way he could see who they were, identify them. And if they tried anything further with Jimmers, Howard could stop them.
Better to let them get away clean, though, than to provoke any stupid confrontation.

“Shit!” a voice said suddenly. “It’s not here.”

“Can’t be.”

“What now?”

“Upstairs,” the other voice said. “The attic.”

Howard leaped toward the nearest bedroom door, but it was six paces away, and one of the two thieves was halfway out of the room and stepping into the hallway before Howard had his hand on the knob and was pushing it open. “Hey!” the man shouted, as if half in surprise and half to alert his friend, who was still hidden in the room behind.

The man in the hall wore a disguise, a cheap shoulder-length woman’s wig and a black Lone Ranger mask. There was makeup on his cheeks—putty that was piled up and then cut with gouged-in scars. He wore a black T-shirt and blue jeans. Howard froze where he stood, trying to put on a steel-edged smile. It wasn’t Stoat. “He’s got a shotgun,” the man said evenly. His companion was silent.

Stepping forward slowly, the man in the wig gestured at Howard, who shuffled back into the center of the hall, putting another yard between them. He set his feet, squinted, and aimed the shotgun straight at the man’s chest. His hand shook on the gunstock, though.

The man stopped, not liking the look of Howard’s shaking hands. He threw his arms into the air, grinning with false surprise. “Down, boy!” he said, laughing. “Chill out. You’ve got us.”

Howard tensed, ready for him as the man took another step forward, gesturing with both hands and shaking his head as if trying to make Howard see reason. Howard didn’t look like a killer; that was the problem. The man could smell it, like a wolf. Howard didn’t have the instinct, and there was no way in the world to hide it. He should have made his move long ago; now it was clear he had no move to make.

“Give me the sketch,” Howard said suddenly.

“What?”

“Give me the sketch. I want it. I’m taking it.”

The man glanced hesitantly over his shoulder, but there was still no sight of his companion. “Sure,” he said then. “Aim the damned gun at the floor, though. It’s not worth killing anyone over. What are you? Friend of the old man downstairs?”

“To hell with the old man downstairs. He’s out cold. He’ll think you have it, won’t he?”

The man grinned. “Smart,” he said. He leaned forward, staring into Howard’s face. Howard stepped back again, tightening his grip on the trigger and slide. Sweat ran down his forehead, and he told himself that it wasn’t supposed to have gone this far. People were supposed to live in terror of shotguns. He pushed the stock tighter against his stomach, clicked the safety catch forward with his thumb, and jacked the shell into the chamber. There was a throaty
kshlack-shlack
as the gun levered away from his stomach with the force of the slide slamming forward.

And then, as if in a cartoon, without any warning at all, the stock simply fell loose from the rest of the gun, dangling for a moment on the end of the pulled-loose duct tape before clattering to the hallway floor.

At the sound of the gun being chambered, the man in the wig had jumped backward toward the bedroom door, which right then was slamming shut. The door clipped him in the back, and he sat down hard, knocking it open again. Howard got a brief glimpse of someone’s backside, crawling in behind a pulled-apart bed. Howard gripped the end of the barrel in his right hand, threw his arm back, and flung the useless piece of steel wildly at the open door. The man in the wig ducked against the doorjamb, throwing his hand across his face.

The piece of metal whirled like a boomerang, slamming into the plaster wall three feet past the open door. By then Howard was running hard, back down the hallway. He heard the steel thud against the wall and then the explosion of the gun going off. He pitched forward, onto his chest on the floor, and slid out onto the landing. Chunks of plaster clattered against the walls behind him, peppering the back of his neck, and something sharp hit his hand and bounced away, leaving a bleeding cut—a fragment of green bottle glass. With a hasty glance behind him, he was up and running before he had time to think about it.

Howard leaped up the stairs two at a time, toward the attic, thinking that he should have gone downstairs instead, but at the same time wanting to lead them away from Mr. Jimmers for reasons that he didn’t bother to think about until it was too late to change his mind. He heard a shuffling behind him and the thud of a knee hitting the stairs when one of them fell. Then he pushed through the attic door, slamming it shut and bolting it from the inside. He fastened the little panel window shut, too, before he began hauling furniture across in front of the door, panting and
gasping and yanking on the chairs and the library table. He threw his shoulder behind a stack of lawyer’s bookcases and inched the heavy cases across the floor, too. Then he heard the outside bolt snap shut.

He was locked in. For fifteen seconds he had wanted desperately to be locked in, but now that he was, from the outside … He stood up and leaned against the stack of bookcases, trying to breathe evenly. He forced himself to think, willed himself to calm down. He was struck with the blind ignorance of what he had done—capering around with the ludicrous gun, nearly killing someone, himself maybe, out of stupidity. He should have got Mr. Jimmers out of there while the others were occupied upstairs. They wouldn’t have guessed anything fishy was going on below. He could have helped Jimmers to the truck and been gone in minutes, and to hell with them—unless they had come down the stairs and surprised him at it …

He made himself stop. He had tried, anyway. Dwelling on mistakes wouldn’t help now. When this sort of thing happened in the future, he would remember. Live and learn. If nothing else, at least these people would get the impression that Howard wanted the sketch as badly as they did. He had brought a gun along, after all.

The quilt still lay on the floor. There was the casement window. Hadn’t he just determined that very afternoon that a man might risk climbing down? If the cloth ripped, of course, or if he couldn’t hold on … well … there was precious little chance that he would fall straight down onto the little rocky ledge, merely to break his ankle, say. What he would do is tumble a hundred-odd feet down onto wave-washed rocks.

They were talking outside the door now, low and indistinct, arguing. The wigged man was accusing the other man of something—chewing him out for having tried to shut the door, probably, back in the hallway. Soon they would unbolt Howard’s door and force their way in. They would deal with him as they had dealt with Jimmers. Probably worse. He was in the way, a dangerous obstacle, and competition to boot. That’s what they were doing outside—deciding his fate.

He thought again about the quilt and the window. He picked the quilt up and tugged on it, unable to rip it. It was strong enough, certainly, and there was a scissors in the library table drawer. He could cut the quilt into six strips, tie them together. That ought to give him what?—thirty-five feet or so. He’d have to make it eight strips. What would he fasten the whole mess
to? Something that couldn’t be jerked through the window, that wouldn’t come apart. The library table would do in a pinch. It would jam up against the open window, and its heavy oak legs would hold up fine.

It would work. He had determined that. But there was no way on earth that he wanted to try it.

The two outside were silent now, or had left. He hoped to heaven that there were other rooms for them to rout through, or that better yet they’d made their getaway, content to save the attic for another day. It was possible, too, that they had gone downstairs to murder Jimmers, or to rough him up, to make him talk.

Thinking hard, Howard strode across to the closet and threw the door open. He was struck again with the strange construction of the thing, built, as it was, into an odd little bit of outward-curving wall. The strangeness of it seemed to signify now, far more than it had two nights ago, when he was comfortable in his chair and eating a sandwich and there were no potential murderers lurking outside the door.

Clearly the rounded bit of closet wall that faced him now stood adjacent to the stairwell. He thought abruptly of the Humpty Dumpty window. What had been the point of that fishy section of window and wall? It had needlessly narrowed the stairs. Perhaps that window let out onto a room or passage behind the closet, a hidden turret. Clearly it was all part of the same secret structure. The closet itself wasn’t more than twenty-four inches deep. The curve of the wall argued that the turret it formed was something much larger—eight or ten feet across.

He couldn’t recall having seen it from outside the house, from the vantage point of Jimmers’ garden or from where the back of the house was knit into the cliff. It was a secret room of some sort, and no doubt about it.

At once he began pulling stuff out of the closet—a boxed telescope, portable file boxes, dusty books, paper bags filled with receipts and scraps, cardboard boxes with the tops woven shut. He pushed it all behind him into the room, working frantically, warming up again with the exertion. He scooped out the last of the litter on the floor, so that the closet was utterly empty, and he stood staring at the walls of the thing, catching his breath.

There was nothing to see. It was just a closet, set in a round piece of wall. It was plaster on the inside, just like any other closet—dirty plaster streaked yellow with water stains.

If there was a secret passage of some sort beyond it, it must be accessible from some other part of the house. What was on
the opposite side this far upstairs, though? Nothing. There was only the one attic room. He was certain of that.

Except there was the exterior door, the one you
could
see from Jimmers’ garden, the one in his dreams that opened out onto nothing, with the broken stone stairs leading almost to it. That was it. There
was
a door, all right, and so arguably there was a secret passage, and it was an even bet that this was it.

But what good did it do him? Even if he was free and standing down on the meadow, without a twenty- or thirty-foot ladder he could get nowhere near the door, which was padlocked, anyway, just like Jimmers’ shed—probably the same key.

He stepped out into the room again. The exertion had calmed him down. It was the quilt, apparently, or nothing.

Resolutely he found the scissors and hacked away, cutting as straight and clean as he could along the vertical seams and wondering whether the stitching would hold a man’s weight or would ravel into threads when he was halfway to the ground. Cotton batting fluffed out from between the panels, deflating them, making the strips look flimsy and weak. He would roll it up and knot it in order to fake a little extra strength. He went on with it, growing more and more doubtful, each passing minute increasing his anxiety, the silence outside the room becoming more ominous.

When the quilt was cut apart, he stood up and stepped across to the casement, throwing it open, steeling himself before looking down. The tide was low, and the hulk of the Studebaker sat high and dry. The kelp-covered reefs were half dried out in the afternoon sunlight. There was a movement below, on the edge of Jimmers’ garden. It was the man with the wig, working feverishly, digging up the Swiss chard with a spade.

Damn it, Howard thought. That might be it. What if they’d tortured Jimmers and he’d confessed to burying the sketch and covering the thing’s grave with vegetables? If that was the case, maybe they would take it and leave. Maybe not. One way or another, Howard would be spotted in a second Rapunzeling down the wall. They would wait below and just give him a gentle push with the end of the shovel when he touched down.

The scissored-up quilt looked like hell to him, lying there on the floor. He stared at the closet again, thinking, for some strange reason, of Mrs. Lamey and her dyed flowers. What was it? The closet still intrigued him, still drew him. He shoved into it again, rapping against the plaster this time, knocking methodically. It echoed thin and hollow beneath his knuckles.

15

I
T
was a piece of wallboard is what it was, thin and flimsy, not plaster at all. Dollars to doughnuts it wasn’t original. Graham wouldn’t have had anything to do with wallboard back when he built the place, even if it had been available, which it probably hadn’t been. Shoving his face nearly against it, Howard could smell the musty, dried mud odor of the recently applied joint compound and the chemical odor of new paint. There were brush marks where someone had painted-on the stains, probably with rusty water. It might have been done yesterday, last week. Whoever it was—Jimmers, probably—had made a thorough job of it.

Howard knocked again, listening close—rap, rap, rap along the entire length of the thin wall. There were studs at either end, with three feet of unsupported wallboard in the center, pretty clearly where a door used to be. It pressed inward half an inch when he pushed on it.