The Wolf Gift (19 page)

This was the room above the master bedroom, the one that Felix had sealed off. Indeed he saw the square of replaced flooring where the iron stairs had once been.

There were big old sagging comfortable chairs in the center of this room beneath an old black iron chandelier.

On the arm of one chair, he found a small dusty paperback book.

He picked it up.

P
IERRE
T
EILHARD DE
C
HARDIN
How I Believe

Now this was most curious. Had Felix been a reader of Teilhard de Chardin, one of Catholicism’s most elegant and mysterious theologians?
Reuben didn’t really have a mind for abstract philosophy or theology, any more than he did for science. But he loved the poetic dimension of Teilhard and always had. So did his brother, Jim. Reuben found a kind of promise in Teilhard, who’d been not only an ardent believer in God but a believer in the world, as he had often put it.

Reuben opened the book now. The paper was aged and brittle. Copyright 1969.

Well, bully for Teilhard, he thought bitterly. He felt a deep sadness suddenly, a bit of anger and then something akin to despair. Despair wasn’t in his nature really. But he knew it in moments like this. He was about to put the book back when he saw there was something scribbled in ink on this page:

Well, this was his now.

He shoved the small relic into his coat pocket.

Far to the back of the room, he saw the discarded iron stairs, all of a circular piece lying on its side in the dust. There were boxes there, boxes he wouldn’t try to search just now.

For the next hour, he roamed, finding two other isolated gable attic rooms like this first one, and another that was empty. All were reached by closeted staircases from the front hall below.

Then he went back down to Felix’s old room that he would occupy tonight, and he felt a little panic that he’d been here so far away from
the television news that had sustained him since he’d been old enough to turn it on at the age of four. But then he had his computer, of course. And maybe it was all just as well.

It was the night that the power went out in Berkeley that he’d finished Joyce’s
Finnegans Wake
by the light of a candle. Sometimes you need to be forced to study what’s right in front of you.

He surveyed Felix’s shelves. These items in his bedroom must have been the most important to him. Where would he begin? What would he examine first?

Something was missing.

At first he thought, No, I’ve just made a mistake. I’ve misremembered. But as he quickly scanned every shelf in the room, he realized he was right.

The tablets, the tiny Mesopotamian tablets, the priceless tablets covered in cuneiform, were gone. Every single one of them, every single fragment of them, was missing.

He went down the hall and examined two other storerooms. Same result. No tablets.

He went back up to the attics.

Same thing. Treasures galore but no tablets.

And now in the dust he could see where things had been that were no longer there.

Everywhere he searched he found evidence that small items—the tablets—had been carefully collected and removed, leaving shiny blank places in the dust.

He went back to the room he knew best and double-checked. The tablets were indeed gone, and the dustless places were clearly visible and he could see here and there fingerprints.

He panicked.

Someone had come into this house and stolen the most valuable parts of Felix’s collection. Someone had taken the most significant finds he’d brought back with him from years of traveling in the Middle East. Someone had raided the treasure that Marchent had wanted so to protect and to bequeath. Someone had …

But that was ridiculous.

Who could have done that? Who could have done that and left so very much here utterly undisturbed—statues that were surely worth a fortune, even old scrolls that must have been priceless to scholars and
curators? Who would have left the little boxes of ancient coins and, look there, a medieval codex in plain sight, and he’d seen others upstairs, books that libraries would have paid a fortune for.

He couldn’t figure this out! What sort of person would have known what the tablets were, when in fact some of them had looked like pieces of dirt, or plaster or even dried cookie or biscuit?

And imagine the care of this august thief, ferreting out these precious fragments from amid so much valuable clutter and slipping away leaving all else undisturbed.

Who would have had the knowledge, the patience, the skill, to do this?

Didn’t make sense, but the tablets were gone. There was not a fragment left in the house with the precious cuneiform writing.

And just maybe a lot of other things were gone and Reuben simply wasn’t aware of it.

He began to rummage through items on the bedroom shelves. Here were books from the seventeenth century, pages soft and disintegrating, but still turnable, readable. Yes, and this statuette was genuine, he could see and feel that as he set it back down.

Oh, there was so much here that was worth a fortune.

Why, on one shelf he found an exquisite necklace of soft, pliable gold worked into engraved leaves that was surely ancient.

He was very careful to put it back exactly as he had found it.

Reuben went down to the library and rang Simon Oliver on his home phone.

“I need some information,” Reuben said. “I need to know if the police photographed every single thing in this house when they investigated, I mean did they photograph all the rooms they didn’t disturb. Can you get me those photographs?”

Simon protested that that wouldn’t be easy, but the Nideck law firm had photographed everything right after Marchent’s death.

“Marchent took photographs of all of it, she told me,” said Reuben. “Can you get those photographs?”

“I honestly don’t know. I’ll see what I can do. You’ll get the law firm’s inventory, of that I’m quite sure.”

“The sooner the better,” said Reuben. “Tomorrow, e-mail me whatever photographs of the place you can.”

He rang off and called Galton.

The man assured him: no one but him and his family had been in the house. He and his wife had been in and out for days, and yes, his cousin and his stepson, along with Nina, the little girl from the town who had often helped Felice, okay, yeah, she’d been in there too. Nina liked to hike the woods back there. Nina wouldn’t touch a thing.

“Remember the alarm,” said Galton. “I set that alarm as soon as the investigators left.” That alarm never failed. If Miss Nideck had had that alarm set the night she was attacked, why it would have gone off the minute those windows had been smashed.

“Nobody’s been in that house, Reuben,” he insisted. Galton said he lived just off the road ten minutes below the point. He would have seen or heard any traffic headed up that way. Yes, there had been reporters and photographers, but that had only been in those first few days and, even then, he’d been up there most of the time keeping an eye on them, and they couldn’t have gotten past the alarm.

“You have to realize, Reuben,” said Galton, “that place is hard to get to. Not many people want to drive up this road, you know. Except for the nature lovers, you know, the hikers, well, nobody goes around there at all.”

Right. Reuben thanked him for everything.

“If you’re getting uneasy up there, son, I’ll be glad to come back up and sleep in the back.”

“No, that’s fine, Galton, thanks.” Reuben rang off.

He sat at the desk for a long time, looking across the room at the big photograph of Felix and Company over the fireplace.

The draperies had not been drawn, and he was surrounded with dark mirrorlike glass. The fireplace was laid with oak logs and kindling but he didn’t want to light the fire.

He was a little cold, but not too cold, and he sat there pondering.

There was a distinct possibility here. One of these men, one of Felix’s old friends, that is, had read of Marchent’s murder in this house, read it somewhere far away, maybe on the other side of the globe, where such news would never have penetrated in pre-Internet days—and that person had taken time to research the whole story. And having researched the whole story, that person had come here, entered surreptitiously, and collected those priceless tablets and tablet fragments.

The story of Marchent’s murder had gone viral all right, no question of that. He’d checked that last night.

Now if this was so, it could mean a lot of things.

It could mean that Felix’s precious tablets were in good hands, collected and saved by a concerned fellow archaeologist who might soon return them to Reuben when he learned of Reuben’s honorable intentions, or who might take better care of the tablets than Reuben could.

It gave him a little peace to think of this.

And furthermore: this person, this person might very well have some information about what had happened to Felix. At least it would be a connection, wouldn’t it, to somebody that knew Felix.

Of course that was about the most optimistic and reassuring spin that could be put on this little mystery, and if Reuben had still been in the habit of hearing Celeste’s critical voice in his head, which he wasn’t, he would have heard her say,
You’re dreaming!

But that’s just it, Reuben thought, I’m not hearing her voice every minute, am I? And she’s not texting me or calling me. She’s at the movies with Mort Keller. And I’m not hearing my mother’s voice either, and what the hell do either of them know about it? And Phil wasn’t listening when I told him about the tablets, he was reading
Leaves of Grass
, and I didn’t tell Mort, did I? I’d been too groggy with painkillers and antibiotics to tell Mort anything when he came to the hospital.

Reuben went upstairs, unpacked his laptop computer and brought it down to the library.

There was an old typewriter stand to the left of the desk, and he set up the computer there, verified the wireless connection, and went online.

Yes, before the Man Wolf of San Francisco had ever attacked, Marchent’s story had made headlines as far away as Japan and Russia. That was clear enough. And he knew enough of French, Spanish, Italian, et al., to see that the mysterious beast who’d slain the killers had been given substantial play everywhere. The house was described, even the forest behind the house, and the mystery of the beast of course had been part and parcel of the appeal.

Yes, a friend of Felix could have seen the entire configuration: the house, the coast, and the mysterious name: Nideck.

He left off tracking the story. He checked on the Goldenwood kidnapping. Nothing had changed except parents were breaking faith with the sheriff’s office and the FBI and blaming them for the little girl’s death. Susan Kirkland. That was her name. Little Susan Kirkland. Eight
years old. Her smiling face was now available in full color—a sweet-eyed little being with blond hair and pink plastic barrettes.

He checked his watch.

It was already eight o’clock.

His heart started to pound, but that’s all that happened. Closing his eyes, he heard the inevitable sounds of the forest, and the incessant song of the rain. Animals out there, yes, things rustling in the dark. Birds in the night. He had a strange, disoriented feeling that he was falling into the sounds. He shook himself awake.

Apprehensive, uncertain, he got up and closed all the velvet draperies. A bit of dust was stirred, but it soon settled. He turned on a few more lamps—beside the leather couch and the Morris chair. And then he started the fire. Why the hell not have the fire?

He went into the great room, and built up that fire too, with a couple more short logs. He banked it well. And made sure the screen in front of it—which had not been there that first night—was secure.

Then he went into the kitchen. The coffeepot had long ago gone off. It didn’t take a genius to figure out how to make another pot.

And within a few minutes, he was drinking a tolerable brew from one of Marchent’s pretty china cups, and pacing the floor, soothed by the crackling noises from the fireplace, and the steady song of the rainwater flowing in the gutters, and down drainpipes, and over roof tiles, and down windows.

Funny how he heard it now so distinctly for the first time.

Trouble is, you’re not paying enough attention to all these little details. You are not being scientific
.

He set the coffee down on the library desk and started pounding away on the matter in a password-protected document that nobody could have made head or tail of anyway.

A little while later he stood at the back door, looking out into the darkness. He had killed the big lights, and he could see the trees now very distinctly and beautifully, and the high slate roof of the servants’ wing, covered in tangled ivy and flowering vine.

He closed his eyes and tried to bring on the transformation. He pictured it, evoking those dizzying sensations, letting his mind go blank except for the metamorphosis.

But he couldn’t bring it on.

Again, there came that sense of aloneness—that he was in a truly deserted place.

“What are you hoping for? What are you dreaming?”

That somehow it’s all related, the creature that changed you, the name Nideck, even the theft of the tablets because maybe, somehow, the ancient tablets contained some secret that has to do with this, with all this?