The Wanting

by Campbell Armstrong

  The voice in San Francisco had been extremely polite. And insistent. Louise shut it out of her mind.

  It’s going to rain, she thought.

  She stared in the direction of the Summers’ property.

  It’s going to rain.

  Check it again, please …

  She placed the palms of her hands flat together. The voice from San Francisco rolled inside her mind.

  You must be talking about my grandfather.…

  Louise roamed the deck. Denny was out there in the forest someplace. She wished he was home, standing right beside her at this very moment.

  Some of his pictures are collector’s items.…

  But but but

  Are you absolutely sure it says J. Durstewitz on the reverse of the photograph?

  absolutely

  J. for Jeffrey?

  yes, yes i’m sure, jay for jackass

  Well, he died in 1914.…

  nineteen fourteen

  He had a stroke, which really put an end to his career …

  a stroke

  He took his last pictures …

  his last pictures

  Louise held her breath and the landscape turned over. Down there, between the pines, somebody was moving. She leaned forward over the rail, narrowing her eyes, staring hard.

  He took his last pictures around …

  yes? Yes?

  In the summer of 1899 …

  that was the last year of the last century

  Louise saw a figure emerge from the trees.

  Eighteen ninety-nine, she thought.

  A mistake. That’s all. She’d been fed the wrong information by the voice in San Francisco.

  Because if what she’d heard was true, then …

  Then …

  She swayed lightly, her hands gripping the rail.

  The figure below, its face turned up to the sun deck, was Denny.

  And yet it wasn’t.

  45

  Jerry Metger thought it might rain because the flat washed-out sky was filling with clouds to the west, great dark masses that moved inexorably toward Carnarvon. He drove down the central strip where the big tour buses were emptying the usual herds of visitors into the street, people who’d wander from one small store to the next with all the unhurried innocence of the casual sightseer.

  He stopped at the only red light on the street, staring through his windshield at two Asian women crossing in front of him. They were jabbering together, making expansive hand gestures and laughing. When the light changed to green he slid the car forward slowly, edging past the buses and the campers and the Winnebagos that crowded the curbs.

  Tourism, he thought. Carnarvon’s sustenance. The thing that kept it alive, made it grow. If these people stopped coming, if the buses stopped running, if everything quit, then Carnarvon would break down and disintegrate into a ghost town the way it almost had in the past when the silver mines no longer produced and the earth had been stripped and the shafts emptied.

  A ghost town. A dying place. Nothing but maybe a solitary decrepit gas station, such as one saw alongside the forsaken highways of America, and a general store where old men whittled on sticks or drank beer and traded stories of the Good Old Days.

  No overpriced boutiques, no classy restaurants. No expensive real estate. He turned along Delaney Street. It swarmed with tourists, cars with out-of-state plates. Wisconsin. Nebraska. Arkansas.

  All of this—the streets, the stores, the tourists, which had been familiar to Metger for so many years—now seemed completely strange to him. It was as if what he saw around him was nothing more than a surface, that there existed on some other plane a second Carnarvon, a town where prominent men zealously guarded old secrets, where they lied and cheated and obfuscated, where they distorted history and concealed truths and buried all their corpses silently and without regret.

  And for what? So that Joe Smith from Hot Springs, Arkansas, could buy his kids Carnarvon T-shirts? So that Adeleine Bloggs out of Des Moines, Iowa, could spend her tourist dollars on funny little souvenirs of the old silver mines or pay top dollar for a shrimp cocktail at La Chaumière? So that the smart money could pour in from L.A. and San Francisco and Vegas and inflate the price of real estate?

  Metger gunned his car hard, making the tires squeal as he turned out of Delaney Street. He glanced up at St. Mary’s Cemetery as he drove and he thought, Poor Florence Hann. Poor fucking Florence. His anger had changed now to something that resembled loathing. This whole town and those men that ran it contaminated him.

  He went out several miles past the nursing home, stopped, pulled over to the side of the road. He got out of his car and smoked a cigarette and he looked up at the sky—it was about to become another rainy day and he was pricked by the tiny needles of memory. The way his sodden cigarette had fallen apart in his fingers on that terrible day. The way the redwood house had seemed as lifeless as any morgue.

  And that dead child who had taken a shotgun to her own face because …

  Because she couldn’t stand the thing she was turning into.

  He tossed his cigarette away. A solitary drop of rain, cold and unwelcome, struck the back of his hand.

  He looked back the way he had come. The loneliness of this stretch of road disturbed him now, the gray sky filling with cloud, the first smears of rain on his jacket, his dark shoes, the roof of his car. And now there was a slight wind hurrying the clouds over Carnarvon, darkening the landscape.

  He got back in his car and swung it around toward town again. He drove fast, hard, carelessly.

  When he reached Miles Henderson’s house he stopped the car, left the engine running, stared out through his windshield at the way rain made a drizzling shroud around the facade of the house.

  He squeezed his eyes shut. Think think think. Imponderable things.

  Those cabinets in Henderson’s study. They had to contain records. And he was filled with a hard urge to know how long this thing had been going on and what was causing it to happen and why it happened the way it always did. And perhaps Miles Henderson would have all the answers stuffed away in those cold gunmetal cabinets.

  He stepped out of his car and moved toward the house.

  Halfway up the path he stopped and he thought, What good would it do to know? It couldn’t bring those dead children back. And how could knowing anything prevent it from ever happening again?

  And then there was Florence Hann and his own father—what good could he do for them now?

  He knocked on the door.

  Miles Henderson answered, standing there in shapeless gray slacks and a short-sleeved plaid shirt. So goddamn ordinary, Metger thought. It was this perception that appalled him—all these men were so goddamned commonplace with their Bermuda shorts and their alligator shirts and their gray flannel pants—how could anything evil spring out of such utter banality?

  “Why, it’s Sheriff Metger,” Henderson said, with mock surprise. “Come to shelter from the rain?”

  Metger stepped inside the hallway. His shirt was already damp, sticking to his skin.

  “Or have you come for a medical consultation?” Henderson bowed slightly, the way an ingratiating butler might. “I ought to tell you, though, I don’t know a whole lot about psychiatry, Sheriff, and if you want the name of somebody who might help you with your graveyard obsessions, hell, I might come up with something for you.”

  “Your information network’s outstanding, Miles,” Metger said.

  At the end of the hallway Henrietta Henderson appeared, carrying a basket of dirty clothes on her way to the laundry room. She nodded in Metger’s direction, then was gone.

  “It’s a small town,” Miles Henderson said. “Word gets around.”

  A small town, Metger thought. It was a phrase that covered a multitude of sins. He followed Henderson into a room that was located off the hallway. It was a big unused room—you got the impression that the furniture was normally covered with dust sheets, that you’d never find a fingerprint anywh
ere here.

  “Last time, I asked you not to come back, Jerry,” Henderson said.

  “I don’t remember any agreement on my part, Miles.”

  Miles Henderson shrugged. He sat down in a wing-back chair and crossed his legs and looked at Metger with an expression of amused tolerance.

  Metger watched rain slide down the window a moment.

  “I want to see your files,” he said.

  “What files?”

  “The ones you keep upstairs, Miles.”

  Henderson smiled and said, “You get a sudden interest in medicine, Jerry? Being a cop not good enough for you these days? Huh?”

  Metger stuck his thumbs in his belt. He was tired of it all now, all the lies, the games. He was tired of feeling that he was the butt of an enormous joke.

  He had the feeling now, as he stared at Miles Henderson, that he was trying to look through an opaque window inside a secret chamber where a bizarre freemasonry assembled, a cloaked sect who spoke in a jargon he’d never understand.

  “I’m only interested in seeing what you’ve got on the kids, Miles,” he said.

  “Kids, kids, kids. You’re still ranting about those damn kids. Look, if there are any records, go see Lou Pelusi, he’s the local medicine man these days. I retired, Sheriff. I quit.”

  “Pelusi doesn’t have them.”

  “Then he’s a goddamn liar.”

  “He says you left the whole record system in such a mess he can’t find anything these days—”

  “Asshole,” Henderson said. He got up out of his chair and for the first time Metger realized the man wasn’t exactly sober. He gave a passable impersonation of sobriety but now Metger noticed the indecisive movements and the slack motions of the lips. “I knew he was an asshole first time I ever saw him.”

  Metger listened to the rain. A quiet drumming on glass.

  “Well, Miles. You going to let me see these records of yours or do I need to get a court order?”

  Henderson threw his head back and laughed. “A court order? Here? In Carnarvon? You’re in Disneyland, Jerry. You’re way up there with the cuckoos, sonny.”

  Maybe, Metger thought. Maybe the conspiracy went everywhere, like a sequence of subterranean tunnels, all of them linked, all of them dark.

  “You know, I just realized I don’t need a court order. I could walk up the stairs right now, Miles. And I could tear your private little room apart. What could you do to stop me? Call the cops?”

  Henderson flapped his arms in the air. “You’d find nothing. Not a goddamn thing.”

  Metger moved toward the door. He wasn’t sure how serious he was about tearing anything apart, he wasn’t certain if he was bluffing. But he let the threat hang on the air inside this pristine room and waited to see how Henderson would respond.

  The physician looked up at the ceiling a moment, hands in his pockets, body swaying. “Let me ask you a question, Jerry. Let me ask you what you expect to find in my cabinets up there. Okay? Answer me that.”

  Metger said nothing. He was thinking of lost children, thinking of the burned-out man who’d been his father, thinking of Florence Hann, who was wandering down the same avenues his father had been forced to walk.

  “I have some choice tidbits tucked away, Sheriff. Some real ripe material. I have medical records that might be embarrassing to some of our more illustrious local residents, past and present.” Henderson wandered around the room now, chair to window, window to bookcase. “There’s a wealth of material up there on certain social diseases. You’d be surprised—”

  “None of that would interest me,” Metger said.

  “I have intriguing information on scandals. Abortions. Bastard offspring. Who brought what kind of disease back from a trip to Vegas. Who knocked up whose fourteen-year-old daughter. That kind of thing. Just some of the stuff I happened to save to spare some people a lot of embarrassment.…”

  “Like I said, I wouldn’t be interested.” Metger opened the door now and looked along the hallway. There was the ordinary domestic sound of a washing machine running, clothes tumbling in water. He moved in the direction of the stairs, conscious of Miles Henderson following him breathlessly.

  Henderson grabbed him by the arm as Metger put his foot on the bottom step. “Don’t do this, Jerry,” he said. His voice was unexpectedly grim, hushed. “Play their game. Go along with them. Just don’t look any harder. You stop now, turn around, run along home, everything’s going to be okay. Nobody will know you’ve ever been here. You go any farther up those stairs, Jerry, then you take the consequences yourself. You understand me?”

  Metger brushed the physician’s hand away. He climbed to the third step.

  Miles Henderson said, “Your wife’s expecting a child, Jerry. She could have a real nice easy delivery. Or there could be complications.”

  Metger stopped. He looked back down at Miles Henderson.

  “I’m getting tired of threats, Miles.”

  “All you have to do is mind your own goddamn business. Go home. Just go home. Put all this shit out of your mind.”

  Metger hesitated a moment longer, then he continued to climb and Henderson came scrabbling up after him. When Metger reached the landing he paused. Henderson, out of breath now, his chest heaving hard, caught at his sleeve.

  “They’ll put you away, Jerry. They’ll lock the door and forget the key. They’re good at that. They’re goddamn experts at misplacing people.”

  Metger moved toward the door of Henderson’s study.

  Nora. The baby.

  They’re goddamn experts at misplacing people.…

  Scared, he pushed the door and stepped into the room. He wasn’t going to be afraid, though—he wasn’t going to let his fears distort his purpose.

  “Which cabinet, Miles?”

  Henderson said nothing. He followed Metger into the room, where he collapsed in the chair behind the desk. He was gasping and his face was red.

  “Which fucking cabinet? Didn’t you hear me, Doc?”

  Henderson said, “I can’t, I can’t …”

  Metger surveyed the cabinets a second, then he turned to look at the physician.

  There was a long, awkward silence, and Metger wondered if he’d really use force if it came right down to it.

  Henderson opened the middle drawer of his desk and took out a bunch of keys, which he tossed down on the blotter. As Metger picked them up he watched Henderson rummage deeper in his desk for a bottle and a glass.

  “The last cabinet,” Henderson said. “The one that’s unmarked. Go on. Pick up the key. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  And Henderson picked up the keys and tossed them through the air at Metger, who snatched them nimbly in the palm of his hand.

  Henderson poured his glass full of gin.

  He raised it in the air before he swallowed.

  “Go ahead, Sheriff. Go look for yourself. They ever ask me I’ll tell them you had a gun, I’ll tell them you threatened me with it, that’s what I’ll say. They’ll believe that.” There was doubt in his voice.

  “Tell them anything you like,” Metger said, and he stared a second at the physician, who sat with his glass in hand, eyes shut, face drained of color—a sorry specimen.

  Metger fitted one of the keys into the lock and slid the cabinet drawer open. A stale dusty smell rose up from inside.

  Max stood in the Ace of Spaces, where he drank his third martini. The alcohol wasn’t having any effect on him—it seemed not to obfuscate, but instead to clarify, as if his brain were afloat in pure, clear liquid. He had been on his way back to the redwood house, but then he’d stopped, drawn inside the bar, and with each drink he consumed the house appeared to drift farther away from him, like a very thin memory. He studied the attractive woman who served him, albeit in an absent way, because what kept coming back to him was the confrontation with Connie.

  Somewhere, he knew, there had to be sense to it all. Somewhere, if he could find it. If he had a map.

  The wom
an saw his empty glass and asked if he needed a refill, and he nodded. He turned, staring across the big bar to the door that hung open. Outside, slanting through the grim trees, there was rain. It fell over the forest in the fashion of a misted shroud. Everything shook, vibrated, pine-cones trembled and branches stirred as the rain came down.

  “Nasty day,” said the woman.

  Max didn’t entirely hear her. He drummed his fingers on the side of his glass.

  “We’re getting into the rainy season,” the woman said. She was silent a moment. “Aren’t you the tenant of the old Joe Lyons house?”

  Max nodded. Why did this woman want conversation now? He wasn’t up for it.

  “Nice place. Too lonely for my liking, though. Isolated.” She was leaning against the bar, smiling at him.

  Dick and Charlotte Summer and Professor Zmia, Max thought. Why would there be a connection between these three people? He played with the notion that Connie Harrison had been lying to him, that she wanted the relationship to end so she’d simply made a whole story up—but this didn’t convince him. If she’d been lying, how would she know about the Summers down there in the forest?

  And why had she run a seemingly pointless errand for Zmia? Why had she done that?

  Max turned to the woman behind the bar.

  “You like it down there?” she was asking.

  Like it? he wondered. What could he possibly say to that? A sense of urgency assailed him. He should leave this place, get inside his car, hurry down the dirt road.

  But … I’m afraid, he thought. It scares me.

  “It was okay at first,” he heard himself say.

  “But now it’s not?”

  He shook his head uncertainly. “It’s too …” And he let his sentence go. Too what?

  The woman was watching him with sympathy. “I think I know what you mean. You going to stay for the whole summer?”

  Max gazed back out at the rain. “Do you know the old people?” he asked.

  The woman shrugged. “I know they’re down there somewhere.” She laughed a moment. “But I’ve never actually seen them. I don’t think the Ace is the kind of place where they’d hangout.”