The Paper Grail (53 page)

Howard slid through, ducking toward the bed as a man stepped out from behind the door. The light blinked on suddenly. It was Stoat, looking tired and haggard. Mrs. Lamey sat at a table, her hair pulled back in a tight bun that made her head seem unnaturally small and skeletal. “Produce it,” she said.

He pulled out the print, still in its case, and laid the case on the table, one by one pulling out the clips and opening it up to reveal the sketch. He hadn’t wanted to bring the case, but Jimmers had insisted. It would lend the fake sketch a certain credibility.

“There it is,” Howard said. “It’s yours, and you’re welcome to it.”

Mrs. Lamey picked up the copper case and examined it carefully, running her fingers over the cut-in picture and the words beneath it. Her hands shook, and she seemed to forget entirely that Howard was standing there.

“Where are they?” he said finally, losing patience with her. “I want to see them now, this instant. I have friends on the beach. You can see them out the back window if you look. They’re timing this whole thing. I’ll call them off when I see Roy and Edith together, here and now.”

She blinked at him, almost in confusion, as if she were pulling her mind back from some distant place. “They aren’t here, are they?” she said. “I told our friend Jimmers that over the phone. And if the friends you refer to are the two men in false beards pretending to surf-fish on the beach above the trestle, then we’ll go out together to confront them. I
thought
one of them looked a bit like our Mr. Bennet.
Very
artistic. I love the idea of your confederates masquerading as bearded fishermen. There’s nothing like a touch of the dramatic to make death seem idiotic rather than tragic. Come along, then.” She stood up and removed the sketch from its case, squinting hard at it. “If this is a false copy …” she said.

“It’s authentic,” Howard said. “I’ve … made use of it once already. If we’re going out, anyway, I’ll demonstrate it.”

“Wait here,” Mrs. Lamey said to Stoat. “And leave the television alone. Keep your ears open and watch out the window
for foul play. You can’t trust men in false beards.” Then to Howard she said, “If there’s treachery, remember that your aunt and uncle will die. Their lives depend on my making a phone call and uttering a certain phrase that you can’t hope to guess. So you can’t compel me. Violence is useless to you. I’m going to appeal to your common sense here, and say that if this works smoothly, when the sun rises in the morning Heloise Lamey will be gone from your pitiful lives.”

“I understand,” Howard said. “Let’s get to it.”

She nodded, picking up a leather satchel from the floor beneath her chair. A bad odor wafted up from it, as if it contained a dead animal. She hung the strap around her neck and shoulders, unlocked the door, and stepped out into the parking lot. Howard followed, hearing the sound of the door catching behind them and then of neon buzzing from the overhead lights. A truck roared past, fouling the air with diesel exhaust. “Fetch the stick,” Mrs. Lamey said. “Mr. Jimmers assured me that you wouldn’t be so foolish as to arrive without it.”

Howard opened the truck door and pulled out Graham’s walking stick. “Let me get the feel of it,” Mrs. Lamey said, taking it from Howard and hefting it. He was tempted to snatch it back, but there was no use pushing her, no use taking chances—not yet. She set out through a stucco breezeway, carrying the cane and with the leather satchel pushed around behind her back. Howard followed along like an obedient servant, the path being too narrow for them to walk side by side. Whacking the ground now and then with the cane, she angled across a weedy sort of back lot and down a sandy path toward the beach, walking hurriedly. The dark trestle loomed overhead to the left of them.

Howard could hear the breakers now, and could see Lou Gibb and Mr. Bennet fifty yards north, their fishing poles thrusting up from holders jammed into the sand. The two men stood still, watching the ocean. Pretending to meddle with his fishing pole, Mr. Bennet turned to look at Howard and Mrs. Lamey. “Wave the fool down this way,” she said.

Howard waved. Bennet stood still, waiting, pretending not to understand, then waved back, as if merely being cheerful. Howard waved again, gesturing him down the beach. The two men talked back and forth, and then Bennet trudged down toward them, wearing an Amish-looking beard not connected by a mustache. It made his face look like a hair-fringed egg, disguising him thoroughly. “Stop!” Mrs. Lamey commanded when he was ten feet away. “Howard wants to tell you to go home. Reel in your
lines and go. Be quick about it, because Howard and I have a bit of an experiment to perform, and you’re inconvenient. Isn’t that so, Howard?”

Howard nodded at Bennet. It was clear that Mrs. Lamey was serious. She was talking in a brittle, forced-facetious tone that seemed about to crack. Howard was pretty sure she was on the edge, running cold and sharp, but with all her margin used up. She didn’t have time to waste. Her whole twisted life had come to a focus on this moonlit beach, and everything about her seemed to suggest that this was no time for false talk or false beards. “We’ve got to trust her,” Howard called, knowing that the word “trust” wasn’t what he wanted, really.

“Like hell we trust her,” Bennet shouted back. He scowled, standing solidly, his boots sinking in the wet sand. Mrs. Lamey said nothing, but stared at him like a desert lizard until, with a dismissing wave of his hand, he turned and headed back up the beach, apparently having made up his mind. Mrs. Lamey waited in silence until the two men had reeled their lines in, picked up their buckets and tackle boxes, and started up the rise that led to the highway. She stood watching them go, until a wave broke high up on shore, and the ocean swirled in around their feet, sending Mrs. Lamey high-stepping toward dry sand.

The night was clear and starry and cold, and the wind off the ocean whipped beach sand across Howard’s pant legs as he followed Mrs. Lamey farther down toward where Pudding Creek trickled into the ocean, nothing but a few little rills a couple of inches deep. She seemed to be using the cane now, as if she were truly tired, and she headed straight toward a big driftwood log, where she could sit down and let Howard work.

The trestle stretched far overhead and threw an immense Crosshatch moon shadow across the beach. Somewhere back in that shadow Jimmers and Sylvia stood ready to play their part. Howard wanted to search the shadows with his eyes, to find a familiar and friendly face even if it was hidden in darkness, but he didn’t dare.

Right now they would be trying simply to keep him in sight, to forecast his movements. All Howard had to do was make a show of folding the sketch up. Sylvia would work over the real sketch in secret, hidden back under the trestle.

Mrs. Lamey tiptoed across Pudding Creek, where they would be partly sheltered from the wind. She stopped at the far side of the trestle, sitting down on a big driftwood log. She looked out over the ocean, listening to the night wind. Behind her, the cliffs
rose forty feet or so, nearly vertically, the trestle connecting them with the smaller, sandy bluffs at the opposite side of the creek bed, behind the motel. Howard looked hard at the rocky cliff face, cut out of dark sandstone and hung with tough shrubs. A fringe of ice plant grew down from the top. It wouldn’t be hard to climb the side of the cliffs if it came down to it …

“Convince me,” Mrs. Lamey said, startling him and settling herself on the log.

Howard nodded. “You want a storm.”

“I want two inches of rainfall in the next three hours.”

“I can’t …” Howard began.

Mrs. Lamey interrupted him. “I know you can’t. You can’t do anything at all. You’re an ignorant, passive instrument, is what you are. Just do
something
. You called up a storm this afternoon, probably by mistake. Do it again.”

“I’m warning you that I can’t control it very well.” The truth of this statement occurred suddenly to Howard, and for the first time he began to doubt Mr. Jimmers’ plan. The storm that afternoon had nearly washed out the road, and in the space of only a few minutes. What would it have become if Howard hadn’t stopped it?

“Of course you can’t control it,” Mrs. Lamey said, abruptly losing patience with him. “It takes a stronger hand than yours. Use the sketch—whatever it is you did to it this afternoon. You didn’t follow me out here to argue about it, did you? Think of your uncle, your aunt.”

Howard shrugged. “All right.” He turned to face the trestle, his back to the ocean, trying to look as if he were summoning some sort of mystical power. “Here we go,” he said to himself, and then kneeled in the sand, laying the sketch out on his thighs. Carefully, as if he were following some sort of method, he folded the paper from corner to corner, making a triangle. Then he folded it again, joining the opposite corner, cutting the size of the thing in half. He waited, squinting at it with an artist’s eye.

Out over the sea the sky remained clear. There wasn’t even the hint of a fog. Rain was impossible on a night like this. He folded it again, turning each of the corners into the middle, and then cocked one corner across and down to make a little tab of it, which he tucked into the opposite corner, creating a sort of circular pointy-fronted crown that might have fit a chicken. Still there was nothing. Mrs. Lamey watched him dubiously. The look on her face suggested that they didn’t have all night, that her temper was wearing thin.

“All part of the process,” Howard said. He looked up just then, having seen movement at the very top of his vision. There was Jimmers and Sylvia. They weren’t under the trestle at all. They were edging along the cliffside, picking their way through the shrubbery, from rock to rock, and hidden from Mrs. Lamey only because her back was turned. Howard lowered his eyes casually, wondering what in the hell they were up to. He studied the ridiculous hat. Then, laboriously, considering every crease, he unfolded it, opening it up to a full square before folding it in half again, lengthwise this time.

He risked a look toward the cliffs. Why on earth had the two of them come out of hiding like that? He couldn’t see them now, but he knew they were crouched like cats behind the only bush big enough to hide them both. What did they intend to do, leap out and grab her? They couldn’t be that stupid. Howard was struck with the notion that Sylvia had failed, that her folding of the print hadn’t done anything at all, and he wondered how much power lay in the sketch and how much in himself.

“What are you up to?” Mrs. Lamey asked ominously. And then, seeing something in his face, she turned suddenly around, scanning the hillside and then peering into the shadows beneath the trestle. The night was silent and empty, and the only thing that moved was the wind and the ocean. “You have thirty seconds,” she said, looking at her watch. Her voice was pitched too high, as if she were about to come unhinged, to start shrieking.

“I’ve got it now.” Howard opened the rectangle into a square again and then folded it perpendicular to the first fold. He tucked the corners in, working as accurately as he could to make one of those finger-manipulated Chinese fortune-telling devices, remembering back to the fourth grade. He didn’t dare look at the cliffside again, but he listened hard for telltale sounds. Mrs. Lamey watched his face rather than his hands. He met her eyes once, and her face was filled with suspicion. The corner of her mouth twitched badly, as if it were being yanked by an invisible thread. She looked as if she knew she had been taken, that Jimmers had slipped her another fake, the old fool …

Howard barely breathed. The paper, delicate from age anyway, had been so overfolded that it was beginning to come apart. A crease line tore along the edge, and quickly he folded it at the tear in order to hide it, folding it over again on top of itself, and then again, abandoning the Chinese fortune-teller. The thing rapidly became a lump of paper, too thick to fold again without
turning it into a mere wad. There was nothing to do but unfold it once more and start over, try to brass it out, maybe utter some mumbo jumbo. One way or another, though, the charade was about over.

The paper tore again as he was unfolding it, through three creases at once this time, leaving it webbed with two-inch-long slits. Quickly, before she saw that it was shredding, he folded it back in half, following no pattern at all, but merely covering up the sad fact that soon it would be worth nothing outside of a hamster cage.

She looked at her watch. “Seven seconds,” she croaked. She was breathing heavily, as if hyperventilating, her eyes nearly shut with rage, and she pounded his cane into the sand between her feet, thumping out the seconds one after another. This will be it, Howard thought. Better to throw it in her face right now and run. Better to grab the cane and hit her with it, tie her to the trestle, then sneak back up to the motel and beat the truth out of Stoat, find out where Roy and Edith were being held. Bennet was right. They had been fools to play along with Mrs. Lamey this far. She wasn’t going to let them get away with anything.

“Well!” she said, as if she had just that moment been insulted. She stood up, making her pickle face at him, looking like a withered corpse in the ivory moonlight.

And just then the air was full of the smell of ozone, and a bolt of lightning and nearly simultaneous crash of thunder slammed out of the sky, illuminating the ocean in a yellow-blue flash. Mrs. Lamey staggered against the driftwood log, going down onto one knee in the sand, and then pushing herself upright, her face stretched in an amazed mask of greed, satisfaction, and surprise.

“Give it to me!” she shrieked, pulling the still-folded paper out of his hands and shoving him pointlessly on the chest with the cane, as if to get the first blow in just in case he tried to fight her for it.

“Better unfold it!” Howard shouted, although it didn’t matter a bit what she did with it. It was best to play the fraud out to the end, though. Raising the storm was only the beginning. Roy and Edith were still held prisoner somewhere, and it would have to be Mrs. Lamey who released them.

She stood gaping at the stars now, ignoring him as if he were an insect that she had already destroyed. Stopping the storm wasn’t conceivable to her. She
wanted
a storm—a storm to end all storms,
a sky full of rainwater that would illustrate her newfound power. That afternoon she had dried out Inglenook Fen; now she would fill it again.