The Grave - An Oxrun Station Novel (Oxrun Station Novels)

by Charles L. Grant

  He felt like squirming. This wasn't the Fel Lancaster he knew too well. Or thought he had. "Don't thank me," he said, "until you've seen the books."

  She slapped his arm. "I keep them, remember? I'm no fool."

  He laughed and she hugged his arm, and he was just barely aware of the stares they received as they rounded the corner and she released him so he could pull out the key.

  "Josh."

  He looked at her.

  "Josh, the door is open."

  "Nope." He shook his head. "I locked it, remember?"

  "I remember. But it's open."

  She stepped to one side as he pushed open the door and hurried in, seeing nothing wrong this side of the partition. He was about to call out a gag, some remark to put her at ease (and ease his own nerves), when he saw the books, the files, the papers scattered in the aisle between their desks.

  And the gleam of black paint that had been dumped over it all.

  Chapter 13

  Josh sat numbly in one of the armchairs and stared out the window. Faces peered back, moving slowly, squinting, mouths working in silent speculation. A patrol car was parked behind the Buick, and several youngsters were lounging against the fenders, arms folded, heads together. Across the street and under the trees a small group of women chatted in subdued animation, every few moments one of them breaking off to continue on her way, replaced almost immediately by another walking in off Centre Street. Twice, Karl Tanner had ambled outside to move the spectators on, and now was seated opposite of Josh, his cap in his hand, twirling it slowly. His attitude was deferential, but definitely not subservient.

  "That's about the best I can do now, Mr. Miller," he said. There was no apology in his voice—a simple statement of fact—Josh hesitated before nodding. He did not look to Felicity, who had the chair beside him and was shaking her head glumly over a list she had made.

  "Fingerprints," she suggested then, looking up at the patrolman without raising her head.

  Tanner—whose face, Josh had decided, had been crudely hacked out of chipped marble—met her gaze solemnly. "From what we can see, yours and Mr. Miller's, that's all. Either the door was picked by an expert, or he had a key. Nothing was damaged . . . there. The paint," he continued quickly, as though sensing interruption, "is simple black trim. You go over to Chase's Hardware, you'll find a zillion gallons of it have been sold since the middle of last month. It's the time of year. No way it can be traced." He looked back to Josh. "You sure nothing was taken?"

  "Pretty much." He would not look to the back office again. His hands, clasped tightly in his lap, were already stained with streaks and blotches of black, as were his trousers from the knees to the cuffs. "Whoever it was yanked all those files from the cabinet and . . . damn! It just doesn't make any sense!"

  Tanner rose, nodded to Felicity, and walked to the open door. The stench of paint was still in the air despite the crosscurrents, and he rubbed a finger hard under his nose. "I'll be in touch, Mr. Miller."

  "Yeah, but don't hold my breath, right?"

  Tanner shrugged and left, the patrol car slipping out of its space without benefit of siren or lights; and as if it were a signal, most of the onlookers vanished.

  Josh slapped at his thighs then, moved stiffly to the partition, and stared at the piles of ruined papers he and Fel had shifted to her desk. Though nothing extremely valuable had been destroyed, it would take weeks before he could put the work together again, weeks more before they would be able to replace all the addresses and telephone numbers of occasional contacts, the routes he had taken for some of the most uncommon items he'd traced and retrieved. And though each town he had visited had not offered him a treasure, there were notes he had taken on things that he'd seen, from prints to handcraft, and they were all gone. A match and a flame could not have done the work more thoroughly.

  Felicity rested a hand on his shoulder. "A mess," she said.

  Absently, he rubbed a hand up and down her spine. "I suppose we might as well salvage what we can."

  "I don't think I feel up to it."

  "It'll be worse in the morning."

  They stared for a few moments longer, then flanked the desk and began pulling the folders apart, peeling sheets, dropping those barely readable into one pile, those completely useless on the floor. At one point she noted they would have to replace the carpeting; at another he wondered aloud which gods he had offended.

  "I mean," he said helplessly, "ever since I got back I've been going crazy. The lady at the station, Andrea, Don . . . it's like I've forgotten how to do anything right. No." He held up a blackened hand to Felicity's glare. "I didn't mean that. I mean . . . well, it's like that guy in Li'l Abner, the one who walks around with the cloud over his head all the time. Joe Something. It's like I haven't shaken the storm that hit when I got here."

  "You're weird, you know," she told him. "If you think about it without feeling sorry for yourself, you've had a perfectly good explanation for all of it."

  "Except this."

  "Except this. And there's probably something here, too, only you can't see it yet."

  It was well after seven by the time they were done and had filled the trashcans behind the back door. Then, feeling a slow growing rage he could not control, Josh dragged the desks into the front and began to pull up the ruined carpet. Twice he jabbed himself with a stray tack, each time venting his frustrations so loudly Felicity was forced to close the front door. Afterward, the carpeting dumped unceremoniously out the back, he noted the time and announced he was hungry. Worse, he was starving.

  "You look like hell."

  He pointed at her own clothes derisively. "You think you'll make Miss America like that?"

  They were too tired to laugh, too annoyed to smile.

  "Fel . . ." He lifted a hand, lowered it slowly. "Fel, I'm really sorry about all this."

  "It isn't your fault, you know."

  "I know, I know, but . . ." He reached for a cigarette, changed his mind when he saw the smears on his fingertips. "This is hardly the way to start out a partnership."

  "Listen," she told him, although her attempt to sound stern failed miserably. "I didn't expect it, and I don't think you expected it, either. To make the offer, I mean. Don't say anything, I know you too well, Miller. Besides, there was bound to be trouble sooner or later. This way we get it over with, right? And so far it's only going to cost my half umpteen thousand dollars. Hell, I'll be out of debt by the time I retire."

  He smiled at her softly, glad of the effort she was making, distressed at the shimmering he could see in her eyes. But he refused to dwell on the possibility of error; it could very well be she wouldn't want to shoulder half the burden after a few months without her regular salary. It could very well be, and he hated himself for making it seem like an escape clause in a contract.

  "Tell you what," he said abruptly, clapping his hands once and shoving away from his desk. "We'll get ourselves home, change into something disgustingly respectable, and I'll meet you at the inn in, say, an hour at most. For dinner. It's only Thursday, we won't need a reservation."

  He didn't wait for her to offer an objection; instead, he hustled her outside and into his car. The early evening had taken a bronze cast through the leaves, had added a brush of dampness to the air that made him shiver in spite of the fact that the temperature remained unseasonably high. He glanced once back to the office before taking the wheel, buried a tight fist in his jacket pocket as he pulled away from the curb and took Felicity directly to her Steuben Avenue apartment. From there he drove two blocks west to Mainland Road, the two-lane stretch of highway that passed the village (and was the only road to do so) north to south. At the stop sign he waited, staring across the blacktop to the empty fields on the other side. There was no traffic.

  Go home, he ordered silently when he realized what he was doing; go home before you kill yourself, idiot.

  The response was automatic: narrowing his eyes against the sun directly ahead of him he floored the
accelerator. The cumbersome Buick shuddered, almost stalled, then swept left onto Mainland with a deep-throated howl.

  A moment, and the village was gone.

  A minute, and the Cock's Crow blurred by him on the right.

  There were no more buildings, there were no more farms, and the road curved right in gentle ascension.

  Trees crowded the verges, their shadows snapping over the maroon hood to give his vision a stop-start distortion, a momentary feeling he was trapped in a nickelodeon.

  Miller's Mysteries. A foolish name. A whim and a whimsy. But it was his whim and his whimsy, and he wondered if this was anything akin to a rape.

  He slowed at a narrow wooden bridge, turning his head from the white-bright reflections of the sun's blind dying. And in slowing did not pick up his speeding again. Rather, he drove at the pace of a reluctant child heading home. Remembered for no reason that feeling he had had in April, that he was being watched, that he was being followed. But while the former was nothing but a sensation without foundation, this . . . this attack on his living (in both senses of the word) was equally without reason. Nothing valuable had been touched, nothing worthless had been stolen. Just files and papers and that miserable carpet.

  At a cleared space centered by a chipped picnic table he turned around and headed back.

  And the intrusion had accomplished little more than the creation of a nagging inconvenience. It certainly couldn't have been meant as a warning. Against what? Finding a hand plow, a teaspoon, a piece of lousy sheet music?

  Impatience nudged the speedometer.

  Maybe one of Felicity's beaux was jealous and had struck back the only way he knew how.

  He shook his head; that explanation made as much sense as the warning.

  The Cock's Crow; Chancellor Avenue; he swung right and reentered Oxrun, in passing the police station tempted to stop to see if Karl Tanner had been successful. Shrugged it off and went home where he took a fast shower and changed into grey slacks, wine shirt, and a pale grey jacket whose lapels he didn't know were fashionable or not. Felicity, he had decided, would have all the answers.

  They sat in the upstairs dining room.

  The building had been a farmhouse two centuries before, was now divided into two primary sections for dining and dancing. Below it was noisy, catering to the younger couples with good wine and loud music; above, in a series of large, dark rooms, were scattered tall booths randomly across the polished pegged floors. Candles in amber globes were virtually the only lighting, aside from the fireplaces and the lanterns hidden deep in the exposed rafters. Here conversation was generally subdued, and even the waitresses moved as though they wore slippers. The prices were high and the food superb, and with the booths not confined to places along the walls there was a privacy not available except in one's home.

  Felicity was wearing a high-necked cocktail dress unadorned save for a pendant the same violet as her eyes.

  "I need to know something," she told him when their first drinks had been delivered.

  "Sure." He cupped his glass with his palms, the dusk of the room giving a masque to her eyes.

  "You did this thing, this partner stuff, on the spur of the moment, didn't you?"

  "You already asked me that already, sort of."

  "And you sort of didn't answer."

  There was no sense in lying, though the offer still made sense. He nodded. She nodded.

  "As long as I know."

  "I mean it, Fel."

  "I know that."

  "But I didn't tell you the condition."

  An eyebrow arched.

  "If we're going to do this, you've got to stop calling me Miller. It's bad for the image."

  "Whose—yours or the firm's?"

  Roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, thick gravy, fresh vegetables; it wasn't the fanciest meal he could have ordered, but it was his favorite for pulling himself out of the dumps.

  Sherry afterward; Bristol Cream for him, Dry Sack for her.

  "Who's after you, Miller?" she asked quietly. "I've been trying to figure it out. You do anyone dirt on a deal or something? You step on anybody's toes?"

  He poked a burning cigarette around his ashtray, shifting matches and butts into a low pile as he tried to think. "No." He stared at a point just over her head. "I doubt it. I never gave anyone anything but a fair deal. I've never stolen anything to sell it, and I've never looked for anything that was stolen, just lost. I was innocuous in the Air Force, never worked for the CIA, and though not everyone likes me, as far as I can tell I don't have any enemies." He shrugged. "You tell me."

  "Believe me, if I could I would."

  "Great."

  She smiled.

  "What's so funny?"

  She feigned umbrage. "I'm not laughing, just smiling."

  "Inside, you're hysterical."

  "Well . . ." She picked up her sherry and held it in front of her eyes. Lowered the glass and grinned. "Mrs. Thames."

  "She wouldn't dare."

  "That's not what I meant. Her file, I mean. It's the only one that was really wiped out."

  "What's so funny about that?"

  "All those maps, Miller. The ones you drew up to shade off the ground you covered looking for that dumb plow. One great big ink blotch now."

  Josh crushed out his cigarette. "I thought of that already. It doesn't really make all that much difference. I can remember pretty well where I've been, and there aren't that many places left out there anyway. I would have sworn, you know, that the Station would have something like that. Now I guess I'll have to go out of state."

  "So what else is new?"

  "York, Jersey, Haven, London—"

  "All right, all right." She emptied her glass and stifled a yawn with one finger to her lips. "So when are you leaving?"

  "Beats me, Fel. Thames doesn't want me to rush it, so I have plenty of time. I'll take one more look through the woods up above the Murdoch place, then give up if I can't find anything. You might start making a few calls to Vermont, to that minister who found us the church a couple of years ago." He stopped. Said, "Damn," softly.

  "It's okay," she told him, reaching over to cover his hand. "I remember his name."

  He almost pulled back, not at her touch, but at the sympathy in her eyes. Then he scowled. "Nuts. Remind me that Saturday is Mrs. Thames' birthday. I forget that and I'm dead."

  "Mine is the first."

  "Huh?"

  "Of July. July the first. Birthday. Can you make the connection, Miller?"

  He could, was fumbling for something to say to take the awkwardness from the moment when, without warning, she yawned again, broke into a laugh that set her to choking. A waitress immediately came up beside her, patting her back and offering her a glass of water. Josh only stared helplessly, half out of his seat with his hands pressed to the small table between them. And when she was done, wiping her eyes and sipping at the water, it was readily apparent the evening was over.

  He hovered about her solicitously, then, draping her sweater over her shoulders and leading her down the narrow staircase to the foyer below. She grumbled over his concern but did not pull away, coughed into a fist while he stood at the checkroom, chatting with the woman there—Sandy McLeod's mother. As he talked his gaze drifted, taking in the dining room immediately to his right. No booths here; captain's tables and chairs, brighter lighting, more bustle and a swifter turnover. From the larger back area he could hear the small band playing contemporary music, could hear laughter, and had turned around to Felicity to ask her if she'd like a seat at the bar to listen for a while when he saw a couple against the far wall.

  A waitress blocked his vision for a moment, a departing quintet swirling rudely around him until he pushed through it to Felicity's side.

  The man, though his back was to the entrance, was Lloyd Stanworth. The woman, holding a silver compact to her face and dusting her cheeks, was Andrea.

  "Miller, are you all right?"

  He took Felicity's elbow and ushered
her outside, down the steps of the broad porch and into the parking lot. The flesh across his face was taut, his upper lip sucked between his teeth; an acid chill worked at his stomach, the aftertaste of the sherry bitter on his tongue.

  "Miller?"

  They were in the front seat before he turned to her, his breathing falling into a rhythm he could not feel. A hand cupped her chin, and she gasped softly. He would not permit himself the luxury of thought, could not rid himself of the image that made more lean Felicity's rounded face, darkened her eyes, lengthened her hair.

  I love you, Joshua Miller.

  "Miller, what's wrong?"

  He leaned toward her, his left hand gripping the steering wheel. She tried to turn her head in his grasp, could not, frowned as he placed his lips to hers in a kiss not meant to be a gentle goodnight.

  Keep your hands off Felicity.

  He had never before believed himself capable of deliberate calculation, but when he started the engine and backed out of the lot he knew he had no intention of taking Felicity home. Not to hers. And she sensed it. She stared at his profile for several moments before shifting to face front, hands in her lap, twisting and scrubbing.

  I love you.

  So does Dad.

  He pulled into the driveway and braked gently. Slid out and opened the passenger door. Felicity hesitated until he offered her his hand, eased her out, brought her to the porch where he released her to find his keys.

  "Josh, I—"

  With a hand at the small of her back he eased her inside, flicked on the foyer light and put his hands on her shoulders. Frowned when she refused to look at him.

  "Fel . . ."

  She shook her head once, a tear skidding down her cheek untouched.

  Bastard, he thought; there's no doubt about it, you're one hell of a bastard.

  He slipped a hand down her arm, moving toward her waist. She slipped away and brushed a thumb under her eyes. Sniffed. Tried a smile and began crying silently again.