The Bookwoman's Last Fling (18 page)

“He tells me nothing about his business. This is God's truth now, I swear it is.”

“You ever known him to traffic in books?”

“Books? What the hell kinda question is that?”

“You know what a book is, Rudy. I don't expect you've ever read one on your own, but I think you've heard rumors of their existence.”

“Man, you're outta your mind. Are we talking about the same guy?”

“Don't lie to me, Rudy. I know you boys tried some grab-ass stuff with Sharon's crew in Idaho, and I know you were looking for a book. This may be your last chance to level with me.”

“So he was looking for some old damn book. So he's weird. Am I supposed to know what that's about?”

“He didn't tell you?”

“Hell, no. Just said it was worth some dough.”

At the doorway, I turned and said, “Naturally, if you're lying…”

He turned his hands up, a picture of helpless innocence, and I left him there.

I walked over to the saddling paddock with Bob and stood outside the ring and watched while Sandy saddled his horse. To make the wait interesting I dropped my entire winnings on Erica's Eyes. She went off at only four-to-five but won in a breeze by six lengths. Her jock never had to touch her with the whip. He just waved it at her, she blew away the field at the top of the stretch, and was still pulling away under a tight hand-ride to the wire. If they had gone around the track, I thought, she'd have lapped them.

This was more than two grand back to me on my $1,200 bet. Again Ms. Patterson came out to the shedrow with Sandy, this time without her husband. Hmmmm, I thought evilly. She had to be impressed: If she was looking for a new trainer, Sandy's record the past few days was persuasive. They said nothing about this within my hearing, but Sandy was charming and apparently funny; they laughed it up and looked to be old backslapping pals by the time Erica's Eyes was cooled out. Hmmmm, I thought. Again he passed out money from a roll of twenties. I shook my head but he pushed it on me. Suddenly he was chummy again: the man had more faces than Lon Chaney. I had been upgraded to Cliff, so the hell with it, I took his twenty dollars. He left early with Ms. Patterson in tow; I walked our winner and Bob checked her cooling-out periodically as we came around. By quarter after four I was able to break away and walk back through the stable area. I stopped at the mail room, where I had an Express Mail package from Sharon. Two keys and a short note—just what I needed to get in trouble all over again.

That night I met Erin in the café on San Pablo Avenue. She'd had an uneventful day tramping through bookstores on both sides of the bay. This had left her no time to go up to Blakely, but “that's what tomorrow's for.” She asked about my day and I told her all except the arrival of Sharon's note and the keys. I was uneasy keeping this from her—I had never been able to lie to her effectively—but there was no way I was taking her down there and I knew she wouldn't sit still for having me go alone. We watched a boring television show in our room, retired early, and in the morning we struck out again on our separate ways. I got to the track at five o'clock: by then they all knew I was not just a hot walker, I had too much leeway, I must be doing something for Sandy, but no one asked what. I tried to do my share of the work, walking six horses before I bailed out and headed south at eight-thirty. It was a far better trip without the rain. I made good time, turning into that graveled road just before eleven. The road was like a still painting in oil, at first unchanged and unchanging, and suddenly this had all the earmarks of a wasted journey. But as I got closer I could see that the gate was open. I stopped the car and sat with my motor idling: tried to remember how it had been left. I had been in the trunk and he had stopped to open the gate; then he had gone on through and stopped again to close and lock it. I was almost certain this was what had happened. He was a careful killer, and the gate had been left locked.

He had a key. It had been on his key ring.

I pulled off into the trees and got out of the car. I got my .38 and walked back up the road to the gate. I could see the road continuing beyond the open gate, the place where it turned back toward the house. Even the trees were eerily still: not a breath of air to stir them. From the gate I could almost see the house, and when I walked along outside the fence I could see that somebody was home. Whoever was there had lit the fireplace. Smoke curled conspicuously from the chimney. Standing under a densely leafed tree, half hidden by the shade and half by the tree trunk, I could make out the shape of a man out at the edge of the front porch. He had lit the fire and then come out to stand in the cold.

I shifted the gun around till it was hidden on my rump under my coat. I moved away from the tree and soon I could see around the porch—that part of the backyard where Cameron had parked his Buick, where now there was a pickup truck. I stood there for at least ten minutes. There was no more movement from the porch: The man, whoever he was, was gone. I came as close as I dared; then I stepped back into the underbrush and stood there watching, but it was like trying to peer through a fluttering green curtain. Occasionally I could see someone walking inside, past a window, but no more than that, just a flashing change of color. I looked at the sky, which was white through the trees.

I moved slowly now, and the house took on a darkly familiar shape beyond the flutter of the trees. I heard a door slam and I got behind a tree as someone came to the door and opened it. Minutes passed in near silence. Only the rustle of the leaves as I squirmed back against the tree trunk. Then the door opened wide and Baxter Geiger came out onto the porch.

He didn't seem to be doing much of anything: just in and out of the house with an antsy restlessness. I stood still until he went inside again; then, impulsively, without making any conscious decision to approach him, I hustled along the road toward the house.
Up the porch steps on the balls of my feet, across the porch as quietly as I could go, but that didn't matter now, he must hear me coming.
I knocked on the door and I heard his heavy footsteps. He stopped suddenly and spoke through the door. “Who's there?”

A tense voice: nervous, loud.

“My name's Janeway. I'm looking for Cameron Geiger.”

The door opened a crack. I saw one eye and a beard, part of his heavy plaid shirt; a big fist gripped the door, and across the room, a rifle leaned against a wall. “Join the club,” he said. “What do you want with him?”

He didn't seem to know me by sight: If he had seen me across the tow ring, my face hadn't made any lasting impression. “I'd like to talk to him,” I said; “see where it goes from there. But nobody seems to have any idea where he might be.”

“So you came down here on a blind, is that it?”

Now he did begin to put my face together with something. I could hear his slight intake of breath, but enlightenment came slowly. His eye roamed up and down the crack in the door and at last he opened it wider until I could see the pistol in his right hand.

“Janeway. I've heard that name somewhere.”

I let him play with it and then he remembered. “You're the guy who almost got turned to toast in Cameron's car.” He looked in my eyes. “I saw you in Sandy Standish's barn yesterday.” I nodded slightly, just the barest movement, and he said, “What the hell were you doing here? What are you doing here now?”

I looked down at his hand. “Put the gun away and I'll come in and tell you.”

I saw a flicker of a smile on his face. “Afraid I'm gonna shoot you?”

“You never know, the way things have been going.”

He gave a little laugh. “Guess I'd worry too if I was in your shoes.”

He opened the door but he didn't give up the gun. I stepped in anyway. He backed away from the door and I moved with him, nothing quick or threatening but I was close enough that I had a chance against him if he went suddenly crazy. He looked damned unstable. His eyes darted from me to the corner of the room and back again. I said, “I've got a letter from your sister, giving me permission to look through the house.”

“My sister?”

“Sharon.”

“I know her name. I just never heard it said…quite that way.”

“Would you like to see the letter?”

He nodded and, without taking my eyes off him, I fished out my wallet and got him the paper: handed it to him and stood still, hardly breathing until he had read it.

“Sharon's always been a good kid,” he said.

And that was how we came together on that extraordinary day.

 

Now came a quick surprise: He apologized for having no manners or food in the house. At that point he did put away the gun and I breathed a little easier. I moved back, slightly out of immediate striking range, and we sat at the kitchen table over coffee that must have been five hours old. I told him what had happened to me earlier, how I had gotten out of the trunk, and some version of why I had come here in the first place. He poured more coffee and said, “You must think we're all a bunch of lunatics. Have you met Damon yet?”

“He was out at the ranch in Idaho.”

“What are you, some kind of cop?”

I told him what kind of cop I had been. But for now I told him as little as possible.

“I guess you're wondering what I'm doing here,” he said uneasily.

“If you feel like telling me. But you're family, I assume you've got a right.”

He drained his cup and stared off into space. “Don't assume anything with us,” he said after a long pause. “I've got a set of keys but that doesn't mean squat. We all know this place is going to Sharon if they can ever get the will figured out, so I guess you've got as much right here as I have.”

I didn't push him on that point. I'd had all I could drink of his coffee, but we were still fencing, feeling each other out. “Hell, I'm doing the same thing you're doing,” he said. “Groping around. Looking for Cameron.”

“You got reason to think he's here?”

“There were places we went together, years ago,” he said quickly, “before bad temper and other things drove us all apart.”

“What places?”

“There's a canal that cuts along the edge of the farm, and a stand of trees across the back road where the woods are thick. We used to shoot birds there a hundred years ago.”

“You really think he's there now?”

He blinked and took his time. “I don't know what I think. But I thought he might be.”

“And that's why you came out here?”

Almost a full minute passed before he said, “Maybe I'm the crazy one. I came here thinking he might show up, and I've been shivering in the house for three hours. What do you make of that?”

“Jitters…everybody gets 'em at some point in life.”

“This is more than any jitters. I told you I've got a hunch.”

“About what?”

He didn't answer—just looked at me hard across the table, said, “You wanna take a walk?” and suddenly I shared his hunch, that something had happened even if we didn't know what. I said, “Sure, I'll take a walk with you.” Then, to my own unease, he picked up his gun and motioned me ahead of him through the door to the porch.

Out in the yard he tucked the gun into his belt and draped his coat over his shoulders. “Your lead,” I said, and he struck off at once, through the fence and across the field. He walked with long decisive strides, eating up the ground, and I kept pace a step behind him. His breath floated out of him in small white puffs, swirling and disappearing into the air. We started up the hill. The place had an air of eternity, as if it had been sculpted out of the plain in some former lifetime. I said as much but he only grunted a response. We had gone halfway up the hill when he said, “Yeah, they were always workin' on it when Candice was alive: hiring landscape people, having trees planted along the road; shrubs and stuff.” I wanted to ask what he thought of Candice. The moment didn't seem right but I backed into it anyway. “Candice sounds like a fascinating woman.”

Again he took his time answering. We had almost reached the top when he said, “Oh yeah, she was a doll,” as if his brain had slipped into some kind of slow-motion mode, almost as if he had been taking a hallucinatory drug. We crested the hill and on the other side was a long downward-sloping pasture that ended in a wall of trees. “That's the canal,” he said. “You can't see it yet, but it goes there through the trees.” He was walking fast now and I had to hustle to keep up with him. I could hear his breath coming hard; I could see it clearly in the frosty morning, puffing around his head like smoke from a train. Suddenly he said, “Yeah, Candice was a living doll,” and he veered left toward the woods. I could see a small building there in the trees, and off to the left of that, a number of corrals and another smaller house. “They used these for feed houses when she was alive,” he said. “The house straight ahead was to store hay in.” We were now on a rutted road, which cut through the field to the feeding area. He stepped nimbly for a big man, dancing around the water-filled potholes, slipping once but getting his footing without missing more than a step. “Candice would be proud if she could see it now,” he said.

He stopped suddenly, I came up on his flank, and we collided gently. He cocked his head and again had that strange time lapse in his thinking. “She brought new life to the old man and that had to be a good thing. This place cost her a pretty penny even then, but she didn't care. Nice having money like that, huh?”

“Seems like she used it well.”

He nodded and I said, “How well do you remember her?”

This time he answered immediately: “I remember everything about her.” He looked at the sky over the hay house. “I remember everything.” He watched a flock of birds circling over the woods. “Like it was yesterday,” he said.

I doubted that but I let him talk. He started walking again, slower now. “I heard she took this walk every morning when she was here. She loved the fields and the trees. She put up with Idaho, but she liked it best of all down here.”

He opened the door and we went inside. It was a four-room house, the rooms still had hay residue on the floors, and there were a few old bales of straw, smelling dry and stale. “Like it was all yesterday,” he said as we crossed into the back rooms. We went out the back door and looked inside the smaller house. “So much for hunches,” he said.

He turned and started back up the hill. But we had only gone a dozen steps when he whirled around and said, “Wait, I want to see the canal,” and he doubled back past the corrals into the trees. There was an old path, mostly overgrown now, but he found it as if he had never left here, “like it was all yesterday,” he said again. I followed him by about ten yards, and soon I saw the water running slowly in its bank just ahead. We came into a clearing and he went to the edge and stood transfixed, looking at the water. “Don't know what's wrong with me,” he said. “I feel cold.” I told him it
was
cold, but I knew that wasn't what he meant. “That crazy bastard,” he said, striking off along the bank. We went two hundred yards and he stopped and wavered in the gentle breeze.

“Oh, God,” he said, covering his face with a handkerchief. “Oh Christ, I'm gonna puke.”

Then I smelled it too, a rotten stench that hung over the cut like a shroud. I came out to the edge and there was Cameron, draped over a piling, half in and half out of the water. The birds had been at his eyes and his head had been blown open, the wound full of maggots. His body swayed in the water, his hand making a macabre little ebb-and-flow greeting, like a man saying hello to people he barely knew.