All The Bells on Earth (7 page)

W
ALT UNLOCKED THE PADLOCK
on the garage door and pulled it open, taking Bentley’s tract out of his pocket and tossing it into the galvanized bucket he used as a trash can. His hand shaking, he switched on the space heater and then filled the coffeemaker at the sink, spooned ground coffee into the filter, and plugged it in. He found his work sweater and put it on, only now realizing how cold he was, and for a long time he stood in front of the heater, letting the warm air blow across him while he listened to the sounds of the coffeepot and the rain on the roof.

The two policemen had listened closely to his story, which had taken all of forty seconds to recount. They nodded, writing down maybe two sentences along with his name and address. Neither of them seemed to see anything shameful in any of it. One of them, though, seeing that somehow this had wrecked Walt, had tried to make him easier about it. Even if they’d sent a squad car to the church, he said, they’d have found nothing. The prowler wouldn’t have shown himself—even if he were still hanging around—and there was no way the officer would have climbed onto the roof in the pouring rain. And it certainly wouldn’t have dawned on anyone that the bells might have been sabotaged. Sherlock Holmes couldn’t have guessed it.

“Give yourself a break,” the cop had said, squeezing Walt’s shoulder. And his being kind about it had turned out to be the hardest part.

Walt looked around the floor now, thinking suddenly that it was high time to get to work. Pouring a cup of coffee, he looked at the boxes on the floor. Random odds and ends had been hastily unwrapped and set around, as if the burglar had tried to be neat, and didn’t want to break anything. Nothing about it made any sense. If the burglar wasn’t after quick cash, then what was he after, one of the plaster-of-Paris tiki god mugs that sat now on the concrete floor? There were sixty or seventy cartons stacked up in the garage, maybe more; had the burglar meant to work his way through every blessed one of them?

He took a long sip of coffee, listening to the rain on the roof and wondering what Ivy would make of the break-in, if you could call it that; more like the walk-in. Then abruptly he saw that he couldn’t tell Ivy about it at all. What was the use? They’d never been broken into before. The idea of it would only frighten her—intruders snooping around in the night, then breaking into the garage in midday. Every little noise would set her off. She’d wonder out loud if this was another one of the risks of doing business out of your garage. Walt wasn’t making enough money at it yet to justify any kind of risk at all. From now on he’d keep the place locked up, just like you’d lock up any business when you went to lunch. And besides, this wasn’t looking much like a real burglary anyway; it was certainly more curious than threatening.

It dawned on him then that the burglar had no idea what he was after; he had apparently opened a couple of boxes, discovered that the stuff wasn’t valuable enough to steal, and then, hearing Walt come outside, had gone out through the back door in such a hurry that he didn’t even see the stuff on the desk. This was some kind of random incident, the sort of thing that probably happened in dozens of garages every afternoon….

He turned a snow globe over in his hand. Silver glitter cascaded around a washed-out pink flamingo standing on one leg. There was no way the base of the thing was deep enough to be hollow. All of the stuff in the boxes was Chinese—from mainland China, but shipped out of Hong Kong—and somehow that suggested opium to him, heroin, whatever. But what sort of dope smuggler would be so dainty about retrieving his contraband? That theory just didn’t figure.

Rewrapping the flamingo, he put it back in the box, then weaved the top of the box shut and scribbled the contents on the side with a felt marker. It was a crude system of organization, but there was no way he had enough space in the garage and in the sheds to unpack any boxes. Someday, when the business was humming, he’d open up in a small industrial building or in one of the old turn-of-the-century houses that were zoned for commercial use along Chapman Avenue. Meanwhile he’d make do with a garage and a couple of sheds.

In the second box there were bags of rhinestone-studded sunglasses, a dozen umbrella hats, and a gross of boxes of Magic Rocks, which were big stocking stuffers at Christmastime. All of the boxes were sealed, the bags were stapled shut. Nothing, apparently, had been tampered with.

One small box had been opened but not emptied; no doubt the burglar hadn’t had time for it. It was stuffed tight with some kind of primitive, coarsely cut packing material that looked like the fiber from coconut husks. There was a bag visible at the corner of the box, folded up out of heavily waxed paper, as if someone had melted a candle over unbleached butcher paper. The ends were twisted tight and tied off with strips of the coconut-husk fiber. Puzzled, Walt untied the little parcel and folded it open. There was a bundle of sticks inside—sticks about six inches long, carefully stripped of bark. The glistening wood was a fleshy-looking pink, and the wood and paper both smelled of something—creosote, maybe. He parted the packing material and looked beneath it. There were three little bundles of wax-soaked cloth, tied off with string. He squeezed one, trying to determine what was inside, but it was impossible to say; it felt like a beanbag full of human teeth. The whole box, now that it was opened, smelled vaguely rancid, as if there was a dead mouse inside.

He sure as hell hadn’t ordered any twigs, or sacks of teeth either. This was some kind of mistake. He looked at the invoice he’d razored off the cover flap of the first box, but there was nothing on it that sounded even remotely similar to this. He pulled out more of the packing material, exposing a box full of small vials with crimped-on metal lids. Inside each vial was a jumble of small seed pods and quartz crystals and colored beans packed in oil, as well as an inch-long segment of what might have been alabaster, crudely painted with the depiction of an elongated human figure the color of dried blood.

There was something awful about the vials—the discolored oil inside, maybe, or the yellowed alabaster that might as easily have been bone or fossil ivory. There were other boxes of vials in the carton, too—unsymmetrical, hand-blown bottles made of clouded glass and filled with amber-colored liquid, corked and then dipped in wax.

Nearly at the bottom lay a cloth bag with something inside—a small jar, maybe an ounce, sealed with a piece of canvas like a stiff fragment of an old ship’s sail, tied off with twine and again dipped in wax. Despite the wax, the jar stank to high heaven, which explained the rancid smell, and Walt could see that ointment of some sort had oozed out from where the layer of wax was cracked. There was writing on the bag—two Chinese ideograms above a short phrase that might have been in English, except that it was so ill-written that Walt could barely make it out. He held it under the light, trying to puzzle through the words letter by letter.

After a moment it struck him, not one word at a time, but the whole phrase at once, and he dropped the bag onto the countertop. “Dead mans grease” was what it said. There was no apostrophe, and the writing was mostly loops and slashes, but once he saw it, the meaning was clear.

Some kind of joke gift? A starter kit for suburban witches? He picked up the jar, slid it back into the bag, and tied the top shut. Then he pulled the rest of the packing fiber out of the carton. At the bottom lay a painted tin box. Stamped on the lid of the box were the words “Gong Hee Fot Choy,” and beneath them was the painting of a bluebird on the wing, towing a banner that read “happiness.”

Vaguely relieved, Walt pried the lid off the box. Inside lay a tiny folded pamphlet that reminded him immediately of the kind of thing the Reverend Bentley passed out. Under the pamphlet, protected by a ring of corrugated paper, lay a jar, this one smelling weirdly of gin and containing what appeared to be a dead bird. It looked awful, as if it had been dead a week before it was pickled in the gin. Abruptly, as if he had shaken the jar, the bird moved, or seemed to. He set it on the bench and stood back, shivering with a sudden chill. He must have imagined it. The bird floated there, turning slowly in the moving liquid until one of its open eyes seemed to be staring right at him, as if in contemplation.

He picked the jar up again and slid it back into the tin, then opened the pamphlet, which was written on some sort of parchment. It looked like instructions in about ten languages including Korean, French, Spanish, and German, two or three lines each, and a couple of other languages that were unidentifiable Arabic-looking swirls and dots. The English was illiterate—the kind of thing you’d find on badly translated directions for assembling a foreign-made toy.

“Best thing come to you, ”
it read.
“Speak any wish. ”

It was a good-luck charm, some kind of wish-fulfillment object that was apparently meant to bring happiness to its owner—although not, presumably, to the bluebird itself, which was as unhappy an object as he had ever seen.

He decided suddenly that the whole works disgusted him. How it had gotten mixed up in his order he couldn’t say. There was something nasty and primitive about it, even without the jar of “dead mans grease,” whatever the hell that was. He started to shove the stuff back into the box, cramming the packing fiber back in around it. His first impulse now was to throw it into the trash can, but then he decided he wanted it out of there altogether—better to pitch it into the bin behind the medical buildings on the corner. Probably it would be even better to incinerate it and bury the ashes.

It dawned on him then—surely this must be the stuff that the burglar had been after, this box of diabolical trash.

Walt turned the box over and looked for the first time at the mailing label on the bottom side. He saw at once that it had been misdelivered. It was addressed to a party named Dilworth at a residential address a block away. The number was the same as Walt’s own, but the street was wrong. This had happened before. The address numbers on the downtown streets, both north and south, repeated so often that it was a mailman’s nightmare. What was puzzling about this was that 225 North Cambridge wasn’t owned by anyone named Dilworth; it was owned by a man named Robert Argyle—the one man in the world with whom Walt was not on speaking terms.

At one time he and Argyle had been close friends and business partners. And it wasn’t just because Argyle had been in love with Ivy, either, back when they were both just out of college. Walt couldn’t hold that against the man; it was almost the only thing about him that was sane. Argyle had turned out to be a corrupt, cheating son-of-a-bitch. Ultimately, he had ended up with the business, and Walt had ended up with almost nothing, except Ivy, of course, and the rotten realization that he’d been betrayed by a man whom he had once considered a friend. Hell, who had been his friend.

Argyle, gratifyingly, had gone broke after falling into some sort of trouble, and for years Walt had lost track of him. Then he had reappeared, buying the house at 224 North Sycamore—the most ostentatious house in Old Towne. It was built on a half acre—three stories, leaded glass windows, a wrought-iron elevator and detached servants’ quarters. With his money Argyle could have moved up Chapman Avenue and bought one of the big homes on Orange Hill, but then he would have been just one more Orange County millionaire among the teeming masses of them. Here in his hometown he could be a tin god, a man who had made something of himself by working like a pig and behaving the same way.

And now fate had misdelivered to Walt a box meant for Argyle. Surely, he thought, there was some way to put this happy coincidence to use….

Clearly the name “Dilworth” was a fraud, unless Argyle was renting out the servant’s quarters these days. More likely it was some kind of blind—a way of protecting himself from being charged with improbable postal crimes if the contents were discovered.

Was it
Argyle
that had broken into the garage? The idea struck him like a stone. It was almost funny—a millionaire reduced to looting garages.

With his felt pen he crossed out the name “Dilworth” and wrote “Robert Argyle” above it. He picked up the tape roller and held it over the box. Then he put the tape down, opened the box again, and pulled out the bluebird of happiness, replacing it with wadded-up Chinese newspaper. He would keep the bluebird for a few days; he wasn’t quite sure why.

Well, he
was
sure why. He’d keep it in order to make Argyle unhappy, mystified, and irritated. At the end of the week he would throw it down the storm drain at the end of the street.

There was the sound just then of a horn honking, and he looked out through the barely open door. There were Henry and Jinx, pulling into the driveway, right on time. Walt went out through the back door carrying the bluebird tin with him. Hurrying, he crossed the lawn to the garden shed, already having made up his mind. He found the trowel, then stepped across the muddy garden to the tomato vines, where he scooped a hole in the dirt, shoving the tin into the ground and covering it nearly to the top. Then he arranged the vines over it so that unless you looked right at it, from a couple of feet away, you couldn’t see a thing.

“Bring me a decent tomato,” he said to the bluebird. Then he tossed the trowel into the shed and trotted back out toward the front of the garage. In the driveway, Aunt Jinx and Uncle Henry were pulling shopping bags full of wrapped Christmas presents out of the rear end of the motor home, which looked like a soda-cracker box on wheels.

H
ENRY’S HAIR WAS NEARLY
pure white, and he kept it trimmed in a brush cut that gave him the look of a retired military man who would be going in for a haircut within the next day or two. He wore a polyester polo shirt, buttoned up, with a sports jacket and Sansabelt slacks and black loafers. He was short—shorter than Jinx—probably five-two or-three, but he made up for this by having the attitude that there was nothing a man couldn’t do if he put his mind to it, and Walt always got the notion that Henry had put his mind to a thousand things in his life and had accomplished them all, even though it wasn’t really clear what those things were. He was somewhere in his middle seventies, but it seemed as if he’d been retired forever.