The Paper Grail

by James P. Blaylock

  Below them the water was already flowing back into the ocean, and Pudding Creek was falling toward its banks. They could see a gaping hole in the highway nearly fifty feet across. Big chunks of asphalt lay on the mud. The ridge that the railroad tracks ran along had sheltered the coast to the south, and the lights of the Gas ’n’ Grub shined as ever. There were sirens in the night, though, from fire trucks and police cars approaching along the highway.

  “Where’s the sketch?” Howard asked her suddenly.

  “Mr. Jimmers has it.”

  He nodded doubtfully.

  “It’ll be all right,” she said, and then set out at a run for the motel, Howard limping along behind. The authorities would be stopped at the flood, and it was just possible that the two of them could search the place and get out again before help arrived that they didn’t need.

  In another moment they saw the motel from end to end. It was half swept away. Sheets of stucco hung from torn-away chicken wire, windows gaped empty. A single bed, still draped in its bedspread, angled out one broken window, driven through it like a boat. The broken wave had battered the motel to pieces, and only two or three rooms at the upper end appeared to be whole. Debris from the wrecked building littered the highway and parking lot, where the Sea Spray Motel sign lay heavily across the top of a piece of roof. Bennet’s truck was gone, swept away, maybe, along with Mr. Jimmers’ tin shed.

  At a glance they could see that the wrecked rooms were empty, mattresses and tables and chairs lying in puddles of seawater and smashed against walls. Half a dozen rooms had no furniture in them at all, evidently in the process of being restored. The doors of the final few, unwrecked rooms were locked.

  Howard and Sylvia banged on the windows and shouted until banging and shouting began to seem pointless. If Roy and Edith were safe in one of the rooms, surely they would have thrown a chair through a window and gotten out long ago. Probably they had been moved, just like Mrs. Lamey had said—a development that was either good news or bad; it was impossible to say. It was equally likely that Stoat had taken them off in Bennet’s truck, deserting the sinking ship.

  They could see red lights revolving down the highway, where police and firemen tried to negotiate the flood, which was still deep enough, due to the steep walls of the creek bed, to prevent their simply wading across. Several rescuers were halfway down the little road to the dunes, though, just above the trestle, looking for a crossing. In minutes they would be at the motel, wondering what Howard and Sylvia were up to, asking questions, taking up time.

  “What do we do?” Howard asked. Roy and Edith were Sylvia’s parents, after all. He couldn’t insist that they abandon the search.

  She shook her head.

  “Break the windows out? We’d better be quick about it.”

  “No,” she said. “They aren’t here. The place is empty. I can feel it. We’re wasting time, and we can’t afford to. We’ve got to figure out where they’ve been taken.”

  They set out around the far side of the motel, heading down toward the beach so as to be hidden from the view of anyone on the highway. The sand was covered with debris, with kelp and rocks and seashells and dying fish, and they had to pick their way through it, watching the top of the trestle for a sign of anyone crossing that way. From the shadows of the trestle itself they watched the men wade through knee-deep water, not thirty feet off, making for the destroyed motel.

  Howard recognized one of them as the cop that had grilled them down at the harbor. Would he find Bennet’s wrecked truck and trace it back to them? Would he conclude that some heavy sort of mysterious crimes were being committed up and down the coast? And what if he did? The authorities could hardly blame Bennet or Uncle Roy for the storm and tidal wave.

  There were more sirens suddenly on the highway, and a paramedic unit wheeled up, lurching to a stop, the doors sailing open. “Someone’s hurt, after all,” Howard said, feeling wretched all of a sudden. For the first time this whole fiasco had injured an innocent person, maybe killed someone. Howard felt as if he himself had been swept along on a tide this last week, except that somehow, just in the past couple of days, he had become that tide in some unfathomable and not very pleasant way. That, partly, was what Mrs. Lamey had wanted for herself.

  They crouched there another moment, in order to wait until the men had forded the creek and were entirely out of sight. Then they slogged out into the current themselves, angling downstream with the flow so that when they got to the opposite shore they were near the edge of the ocean. They hiked along past weed-covered rock for some fifty yards, nearly to Glass Beach, before they cut inland, toward the little rise behind the Gas ’n’ Grub.

  “Why did you and Jimmers creep down the damned cliff like that?” Howard asked when they were safe on the beach and the going was easy. “You scared the hell out of me. I thought you were under the trestle, and then there you were, sneaking around behind Mrs. Lamey.”

  “The sketch wouldn’t work,” Sylvia said. “We were back under the trestle, something like thirty feet away. I was folding it up like crazy even before you started in on the fake. Mr. Jimmers said that we ought to get a jump on you, that Mrs. Lamey wasn’t in a mood to wait, and that he wasn’t entirely certain of the way to fold it. Anyway, nothing was happening, and suddenly Jimmers decided we were too far away from you, that you had to be right there, like in the car this afternoon. We couldn’t just walk out into the moonlight, though, where she would see us, so we came around from behind her in order to get as close as we could.”

  “She never knew she didn’t have the sketch,” Howard said.

  “That was the point, wasn’t it?”

  “I tried to save her. You saw that.”

  “She was beyond saving, I think—wave or no wave.”

  Howard shrugged. “Maybe that’s true. There was something about her, though, that wasn’t as bad as all that. Something about the way she liked to putter around that house of hers, sit out on the front porch.”

  “She should have stayed on the front porch,” Sylvia said.

  Howard put his arm around her. “You came back down the cliff to help me, didn’t you?” he asked.

  “Well, it did occur to me that you were doing a damned poor job of helping yourself, fencing with Mrs. Lamey down on the beach like that when the ocean was going nuts.”

  “Thanks,” Howard said. “I needed the help. My knee wasn’t worth a damn.”

  “Seems better now. You’re not limping as badly.”

  “Walking in the sand is murder. It helps that it’s wet, though. She kicked the hell out of me. And there’s something in that sort of storm, I think. Wet weather’s murder on it.”

  They topped the hill and walked down the other side. Howard kept making small talk, secretly worried about Uncle Roy and Aunt Edith. There was no way to tell where they had been taken. Mrs. Lamey seemed to own half the coast. She could have hidden them anywhere. Howard couldn’t bring himself to believe that anyone would have killed them without word from Mrs. Lamey, regardless of what she had threatened.

  “Isn’t that Mr. Bennet’s truck?” Sylvia asked suddenly.

  For a moment Howard was filled with the happy notion that somehow if Bennet’s truck were recovered, Roy and Edith would be, too.

  But it wasn’t Roy and Edith, or Bennet either, who stood talking to Mr. Jimmers alongside Sylvia’s car; it was Stoat.

  29

  HOWARD was suddenly tired. He shut his eyes and stood for a moment. Somehow he hadn’t bargained for this, and he admitted to himself for the first time that Stoat scared the hell out of him. Stoat was too sure of himself, too fit, too unfathomable, and Howard wondered how much of this, along with the jealousy angle, had made him misread the man. As awful and dangerous as she was, Mrs. Lamey was easier to confront.

  But it was apparently time, finally, to find out what it was that Stoat wanted. Howard hoped it wasn’t trouble, because Howard wasn’t up to it. If it came to that, though, Howard would oblige him, up to it or
not. Stoat didn’t have a pistol or any other sort of weapon, not in his hands, anyway. If Howard could get around behind him without being seen, maybe he could give Jimmers a sign and the two of them could work this out together. They had made the mistake of playing along with Mrs. Lamey, completely at her mercy and letting her order them up and down—something that had very nearly ended in disaster for all of them. They wouldn’t make the same mistake with Stoat.

  Stoat couldn’t know what had happened to the sketch, or that Mrs. Lamey was dead. Jimmers could tell him anything at all—that Mrs. Lamey had taken it, say, and driven away north, up the highway. What on earth would Stoat demand from them? Money? It was blood out of a turnip. The man would have to be a living idiot. More likely he was confronting Jimmers out of pure nastiness, thinking to cut a last-minute deal in order to glean some little trifle out of his wrecked plans. Maybe it was the machine he wanted, although apparently he already had that. Whatever his game was, it was time that Howard found out.

  He gestured at Sylvia to stay put. They were in the shadow of the building that housed the Mendo Machine Shop, and he would have to slip across fifteen yards of lighted parking lot unseen in order to sneak up behind Stoat. He moved as quickly as he could, ready to break into a full run if Stoat turned his head and saw him. Stoat was busy talking to Jimmers, though, pointing down the highway, one hand in his pocket now. Howard ducked in behind a battered old Cadillac that was nosed almost up to the rear wall of the Gas ’n’ Grub.

  If Jimmers had seen Howard and Sylvia coming up over the hill from the beach, he didn’t let on. He revealed nothing, but stood listening to Stoat talk, nodding broadly, as if the man’s speech fascinated him. Howard looked out from behind the Cadillac’s fender, then looked back at Sylvia, who stood ten yards behind him with her arms folded in front of her. Her face was doubtful, but she seemed to be determined to let Howard have his way this time. She couldn’t take the chance of interfering and then finding out that Stoat was the villain that Howard said he was all along. Her parents were at risk, and it was no time to exercise her natural generosity.

  Howard waited another moment, steeling himself. He found that it wasn’t easy, though, just stepping out into the clear and—what?—hammering Stoat senseless on the sidewalk? Throwing some sort of hammerlock on him? Putting up his dukes? It wasn’t cowardice that held him up; it was that it was so visibly idiotic. And there wasn’t any obvious reason to hit him in the head or clip him across the back of his knees. Stoat and Jimmers almost seemed to be pals. Howard stood up slowly, stepping out into the light and keeping a good grip on his cane just in case. He was ready if it came to it, but he would let Stoat make the first move—reach into his coat or something.

  “My Lord, it’s Howard!” Mr. Jimmers shouted, throwing his hand to his mouth and grabbing Stoat by the shoulders, pulling the man toward the car and out of harm’s way, clearly thinking that Howard was going to bean him with the cane.

  What kind of behavior was that? Howard wondered. Had Jimmers and Stoat struck some sort of deal? Suddenly he remembered that Jimmers had the sketch again. He had taken it back with him from the train trestle. Was he selling them out to Stoat? Had he knuckled under?

  “What’s this?” Howard said to Stoat, watching him carefully. He heard the sound of Sylvia’s footsteps, running up behind him. Stoat made no move to attack him or to run or anything else, but stood instead with a resigned look in his eyes. Puzzled, Howard waited him out, leaning against the stick now, a world of fatigue sweeping over him in a wave. Sylvia slumped against the fender of the Toyota. She looked wet, cold, and tired.

  Without hesitation, Stoat took his coat off and handed it to her. Somehow the act of kindness irritated Howard, clearly because he hadn’t been able to do it himself, and because coming from Stoat, it seemed to Howard not to be kindness at all, but a smarmy sort of pseudo-gallantry. He fumed for ten seconds before telling himself to quit being a fool—or to quit with the jealousy, just as Sylvia had told him. She had been right about that. He had to stop defining Stoat’s actions from such a dangerously off-kilter perspective.

  “I’m sorry,” Stoat said, speaking to all of them at once. He looked confused and strained, as if saying such a thing took an effort that he hadn’t been trained for. His leading-man air was gone along with the starch in his trousers, and he looked rumpled and despairing and worn out, like a man just out of the jungle and wanting to rest up in some safe haven. Stoat turned around then and walked the several steps to Bennet’s truck, opening the door and pulling out the jacket that Howard had given to Mrs. Deventer down at the harbor—when was it? Months ago, it seemed. On the instant, Howard’s fear and distrust of Stoat evaporated.

  “Thanks,” Howard said, pulling on the jacket and realizing that his fingers were too cold to work the zipper.

  “I was at Mrs. Deventer’s house when you two were down at the harbor talking to Mr. Bennet and the police. She told me she’d forgot to give you this back, and so I took it, knowing I’d see you tonight.”

  “She said it was you that saved Bennet at the icehouse,” Howard said.

  Stoat shrugged. “I guess I did. I should have done more. I didn’t know it would come to that until it was too late to stop it. That was Glenwood Touchey’s business. Heloise wanted the truck, and when she discovered that it had been seen in the back of the icehouse, and that the shed was still on it, she sent Touchey after it. I didn’t know anything about it, or about setting the place on fire, either. She didn’t trust me that far. She knew I’d balk finally. She was working to take Mrs. Deventer’s house away, too. That … that was something I did know about.”

  “I figured that,” Howard said. “By adverse possession. With you making payments for her and paying property taxes and seeming to live there off and on.”

  “Yes,” Stoat said. “The money came out of consortium funds belonging to White and her and myself and a couple of others. Touchey and Gwendolyn Bundy work for shares, although Heloise pretends that she’s a patron and is supporting the arts, or some damned thing. She’s lost touch. There’s no telling what she believes anymore. Anyway, it’s a long process. At best, adverse possession takes five years. And in this case it wasn’t working worth a damn.

  “Mrs. Deventer was too decent to let me do anything consistent about making payments. Heloise thought she was just an addle-brained old woman who wouldn’t recognize fraud when it was waved in her face, but that turned out to be wrong, and when it did, that changed Heloise’s mind about the whole thing. We’d already determined that Mrs. Deventer had no will and no living relatives except her sister, who’s as old as Methusaleh.”

  “And so Mrs. Lamey decided to kill her,” Sylvia said, with a look of anger on her face, as if she were making her own hasty reevaluation of Stoat now, and didn’t much like the result.

  Stoat nodded, looking unhappy. “I think Mrs. Deventer knew all along that there was something going on. And yet that didn’t seem to have any bearing at all on what she felt toward me. That’s the worst of it. It was me that convinced Heloise we couldn’t prevail, that we couldn’t take the place legally. I was trying to help Mrs. Deventer, but it turned out to be a mistake. I suggested we give it up. Mrs. Deventer was seventy-odd years old. She wouldn’t live forever. When the time came we could quietly buy the place from the state. Why all the rush? Heloise seemed resigned to it. I had no idea she’d hurt the old lady, let alone that she would have Touchey work the car over in order to try to kill her. He followed her up to her sister’s house in Willits. The highway back is treacherous. It’s all cliffs along the right shoulder. Heloise thought it was a good joke on old Bennet that he had worked on her brakes so recently. If there was any blame, it would be him who got it, and there’d be no way on earth for him to prove otherwise. The first I knew of it was the morning after the trouble in Mendocino.”

  Howard believed him. There was no reason not to. Here he was, admitting all sorts of nasty guilt when he might just as easily have been halfway down Highwa
y 128, running toward San Francisco. Stoat was sweeping away a lot of dust and cobweb, pitching out skeletons, and Howard wished that there were a table they could sit down at, with a pitcher of beer on it.

  “So where are they?” Sylvia asked, interrupting his apology and sounding almost as if she were tired of hearing it. Her tone surprised Howard for a moment, but it didn’t disappoint him. She seemed to have been right about Stoat. But, Howard was happy to find, that didn’t make his activities in any way attractive to her. Nor did it guarantee that Stoat wasn’t making up a grand lie here.

  “I’m thinking they’re not two hundred yards from us right now, right across there at the warehouse,” Howard said, pointing back toward Glass Beach.

  Stoat shook his head. “They’re at Roy Barton’s ghost museum. Touchey is there along with Gwendolyn Bundy.”

  “How about White and the artist?”

  “White’s too smart for this kind of thing. He prefers safer investments. Heloise Lamey was caught up in spiritualism and magic. The Reverend White’s a flesh-and-money man. Jason’s just another artist she’s carrying at the moment. She’ll tire of him when she finds a new boy. He doesn’t have any real interest in her plots.”

  “She’s dead.” Howard watched Stoat’s face for a reaction. There was nothing on it except a vague relief.

  “Then the world’s a better place,” Stoat said. “And things are easier for us.”

  ON the beach, an hour earlier, Bennet and Lou Gibb had watched Howard walk south toward the cliffs with Heloise Lamey. It was nearly impossible for Bennet to obey Lamey’s order and leave, but he had to trust Howard. They were all taking orders from Howard now, although the boy didn’t know it yet. The two men had trudged up toward the motel, carrying their poles and buckets. The parking lot was empty and the motel was dark. Bennet’s truck should have been there, at least according to Jimmers, but it wasn’t.