Fever Dream p-10

by Douglas Preston;Lincoln Child

  D'Agosta followed. The vast, dim space smelled faintly of hay and motor oil. As his eyes adjusted, he made out three tarp-covered objects that could only be automobiles. Pendergast strode over to one and yanked off the tarp. Beneath lay a two-seat red convertible, low-slung and villainous. It gleamed in the indirect light of the converted barn.

  "Wow." D'Agosta gave a whistle. "A vintage Porsche. What a beauty."

  "A 1954 Porsche 550 Spyder. It was Helen's." Pendergast leapt in nimbly, felt under the mat for the key. As D'Agosta opened the door and got into the passenger seat, Pendergast found the key, fitted it to the ignition, turned. The engine came to life with an ear-shattering roar.

  "Bless you, Maurice," Pendergast said over the growl. "You've kept it in top shape."

  He let the car warm up for a few seconds, then eased it out of the barn. Once they were clear of the doors, he stomped on the accelerator. The vehicle shot forward, scattering a storm of gravel that peppered the outbuilding like so much buckshot. D'Agosta felt himself pressed into the seat like an astronaut on liftoff. As the car swept out of the driveway, D'Agosta could see Maurice's black-dressed form on the steps, watching them go.

  "Where are we going?" he asked.

  Pendergast looked at him. The despair was gone, replaced by a hard glitter in his eye, faint but noticeable: the gleam of the hunt. "Thanks to you, Vincent, we've located the haystack," he replied. "Now let's see if we can find the needle."

  23

  THE SPORTS CAR BOOMED ALONG THE SLEEPY byways of rural Louisiana. Mangrove swamps, bayous, stately plantations, and marshes passed in a blur. Now and then they slowed briefly to traverse a village, the loud, beastly engine eliciting curious stares. Pendergast had not bothered to put up the convertible's top, and D'Agosta felt increasingly windblown, his bald spot chapping in the blast of air. The car rode low to the ground, making him feel exposed and vulnerable. He wondered why Pendergast had taken this car instead of the far more comfortable Rolls.

  "Mind telling me where we're going?" he yelled over the shriek of the wind.

  "Picayune, Mississippi."

  "Why there?"

  "Because that's where Helen telephoned Maurice."

  "You know that?"

  "Within ninety-five percent certainty."

  "How?"

  Pendergast downshifted, negotiating a sharp bend in the road. "Helen was having an egg cream while she waited for the auto club."

  "Yeah. So?"

  "So: egg creams are a Yankee weakness I was never able to cure her of. You seldom find them outside of New York and parts of New England."

  "Go on."

  "There are--or were--only three places within driving distance of New Orleans that served egg creams. Helen sought them all out; she was always driving to one or another. Occasionally I went along. In any case, using the map just now, I inferred--based on the day of the week, the time of day, and Helen's proclivity for driving too fast--Picayune to be the obvious choice of the three."

  D'Agosta nodded. It seemed simple, once explained. "So what's with the ninety-five percent?"

  "It's just possible that she stopped earlier that morning, for some other reason. Or was stopped--she attracted speeding tickets by the bushel."

  Picayune, Mississippi, was a neat town of low frame houses just over the Louisiana border. A sign at the town line proclaimed it a PRECIOUS COIN IN THE PURSE OF THE SOUTH, and another displayed pictures of the floats from the previous year's Krewe of Roses Parade. D'Agosta looked around curiously as they passed down the quiet, leafy streets. Pendergast slowed as they rumbled into the commercial district.

  "Things have changed a bit," he said, glancing left and right. "That Internet cafe is of course new. So is that Creole restaurant. That little place offering crawfish po'boys, however, is familiar."

  "You used to come here with Helen?"

  "Not with Helen. I passed through the town several times in later years. There's an FBI training camp a few miles from here. Ah--this must be it."

  Pendergast turned a corner onto a quiet street and pulled over to the curb. The street was residential except for the closest structure, a one-story cinder-block building set well back from the road and surrounded by a parking lot of cracked and heaving blacktop. A leaning sign on the building front advertised Jake's Yankee Chowhouse, but it was faded and peeling and the restaurant had obviously been closed for years. The windows in the rear section had muslin curtains, however, and a satellite dish was fixed to the cement wall: clearly the building served as residence as well.

  "Let's see if we can't do this the easy way," Pendergast murmured. He pursed his lips, examining the street a moment longer. Then he began revving the Porsche with long jabs of his right foot. The big engine roared to life, louder and louder with each depression of the accelerator, leaves blowing out from beneath the car, until the vehicle's frame vibrated as violently as a passenger jet.

  "My God!" D'Agosta yelled over the noise. "Do you want to wake the dead?"

  The FBI agent kept it up another fifteen seconds, until at least a dozen heads were poking out of windows and doors up and down the street. "No," he replied, easing off at last and letting the engine rumble back into an idle. "I believe the living will suffice." He made a quick survey of the faces now staring at them. "Too young," he said of one, shaking his head, "and that one, poor fellow, is clearly too stupid... Ah: now that one is a possibility. Come on, Vincent." Getting out of the car, he strolled down the street to the third house on the left, where a man of about sixty wearing a yellowing T-shirt stood on the front steps, staring at them with a frown. He clutched a television remote in one meaty paw, a beer in the other.

  D'Agosta suddenly understood why Pendergast had taken his wife's Porsche for this particular road trip.

  "Excuse me, sir," Pendergast said as he approached the house. "I wonder if you'd mind telling me if, by chance, you recognize the vehicle we--"

  "Blow it out your ass," the man said, turning and going back inside his house, slamming the door.

  D'Agosta hoisted up his pants and licked his lips. "Want me to go drag the fat fuck back out?"

  Pendergast shook his head. "No need, Vincent." He turned back, regarding the restaurant. An old, heavyset woman in a flimsy housedress had come out of the kitchen and stood on the porch, flanked by a brace of plastic pink flamingos. She had a magazine in one hand and a cigarillo in the other, and she peered at them through old-fashioned teardrop glasses. "We may have flushed out just the partridge I was after."

  They walked back to the old parking lot and the kitchen door of Jake's. The woman watched their approach with complete taciturnity, with no visible change of expression.

  "Good afternoon, ma'am," Pendergast said with a slight bow.

  "Afternoon yourself," she replied.

  "Do you, by chance, own this fine establishment?"

  "I might," she said, taking a deep drag on the cigarillo. D'Agosta noticed it had a white plastic holder.

  Pendergast waved at the Spyder. "And is there any chance you recognize this vehicle?"

  She looked away from them, peering at the car through her grimy glasses. Then she looked back. "I might," she repeated.

  There was a silence. D'Agosta heard a window slam shut, and a door.

  "Why, how remiss of me," Pendergast said suddenly. "Taking up your valuable time like this uncompensated." As if by magic, a twenty-dollar bill appeared in his hand. He held it out to the woman. To D'Agosta's surprise, she plucked it from his fingers and stuffed it down her withered but still ample cleavage.

  "I saw that car three times," the woman said. "My son was crazy about them foreign sporty jobs. He worked the soda fountain. He passed away in a car crash on the outskirts of town a few years back. Anyhow, the first time it showed up he just about went nuts. Made everybody drop whatever they were doing and take a look."

  "Do you remember the driver?"

  "A young woman. Pretty thing, too."

  "You don't recall what she ordered, do you?
" Pendergast asked.

  "I'm not likely to forget that. An egg cream. She said she'd come all the way from N'Orleans. Imagine, all that way for an egg cream."

  There was another, briefer silence.

  "You mentioned three times," Pendergast said. "What about the last time?"

  The woman took another drag on the cigarillo, paused a moment to search her memory. "She showed up on foot that time. Had a flat tire."

  "I commend you on your excellent memory, ma'am."

  "Like I said, you don't forget a car--or a lady--like that any time soon. My Henry gave her the egg cream for free. She drove on back and let him get behind the wheel--wouldn't let him drive it, though. Said she was in a hurry."

  "Ah. So she was going somewhere?"

  "Said she'd been going in circles, couldn't find the turnoff for Caledonia."

  "Caledonia? I'm not familiar with that town."

  "It ain't a town--I'm talking about the Caledonia National Forest. Blame road wasn't marked then and it ain't marked now."

  If Pendergast was growing excited, he didn't show it. To D'Agosta, the FBI agent's gestures--as he lit another cigarillo for the old woman--seemed almost languid.

  "Is that where she was headed?" he asked, placing the lighter back into his pocket. "The national forest?"

  The woman plucked the fresh cigarillo from her mouth, looked at it, masticated her gums a few times, then inserted the holder back between her lips as if she were driving home a screw. "Nope."

  "May I ask where?"

  The woman made a show of trying to remember. "Let me see now... That was a long time ago..." The excellent memory seemed to grow vague.

  Another twenty appeared; once again, it was quickly shoved down into the same crevasse. "Sunflower," she said immediately.

  "Sunflower?" Pendergast repeated.

  The woman nodded. "Sunflower, Louisiana. Not two miles over the state line. Take the Bogalusa turnoff, just before the swamp." And she pointed the direction.

  "I'm most obliged to you." Pendergast turned to D'Agosta. "Vincent, let us not waste any time."

  As they strode back to the car, the woman yelled out, "When you pass the old mine shaft, take a right!"

  24

  Sunflower, Louisiana

  KNOW WHAT YOU'D LIKE, SUGAR?" THE WAITRESS asked.

  D'Agosta let the menu drop to the table. "The catfish."

  "Fried, oven-fried, baked, or broiled?"

  "Broiled, I guess."

  "Excellent choice." She made a notation on her pad, turned. "And you, sir?"

  "Pine bark stew, please," said Pendergast. "Without the hush puppies."

  "Right you are." She made another note, then turned away with a flourish, bouncing off on sensible white shoes.

  D'Agosta watched as she wiggled toward the kitchen. Then he sighed, took a sip of his beer. It had been a long, wearisome afternoon. Sunflower, Louisiana, was a town of about three thousand people, surrounded on one side by liveoak forest, on the other by the vast cypress swamp known as Black Brake. It had proven utterly unremarkable: small shabby houses with picket fences, scuffed boardwalks in need of repair, redbone hounds dozing on front porches. It was a hardworking, hard-bitten, down-at-the-heels hamlet forgotten by the outside world.

  They had registered at the town's only hotel, then split up and gone their separate ways, each trying to uncover why Helen Pendergast would have made a three-day pilgrimage to such a remote spot.

  Their recent run of luck seemed to sputter out on the threshold of Sunflower. D'Agosta had spent five fruitless hours looking into blank faces and walking into dead ends. There were no art dealers, museums, private collections, or historical societies. Nobody remembered seeing Helen Pendergast--the photo he'd shown around triggered only blank looks. Not even the car produced a glimmer of recall. John James Audubon, their research showed, had never been anywhere near this region of Louisiana.

  When D'Agosta finally met up with Pendergast in the hotel's small restaurant for dinner, he felt almost as dejected as the FBI agent had looked that morning. As if to match his mood, the sunny skies had boiled up into dark thunderheads that threatened a storm.

  "Zilch," he said in answer to Pendergast's query, and described his discouraging morning. "Maybe that old lady remembered wrong. Or was just bullshitting us for another twenty. What about you?"

  The food arrived, and the waitress laid their plates before them with a cheery "Here we are!" Pendergast eyed his in silence, dipping some stew out with his spoon to examine it more closely.

  "Can I get you another beer?" she asked D'Agosta, beaming.

  "Why not?"

  "Club soda?" she asked Pendergast.

  "No thank you, this will be sufficient."

  The waitress bounced off again.

  D'Agosta turned back. "Well? Any luck?"

  "One moment." Pendergast plucked out his cell phone, dialed. "Maurice? We'll be spending the night here in Sunflower. That's right. Good night." He put away the phone. "My experience, I fear, was as discouraging as yours." However, his alleged disappointment was belied by a glimmer in his eye and a wry smile teasing the corners of his lips.

  "How come I don't believe you?" D'Agosta finally asked.

  "Watch, if you please, as I perform a little experiment on our waitress."

  The waitress came back with a Bud and a fresh napkin. As she placed them before D'Agosta, Pendergast spoke in his most honeyed voice, laying the accent on thick. "My dear, I wonder if I might ask you a question."

  She turned to him with a perky smile. "Ask away, hon."

  Pendergast made a show of pulling a small notebook from his jacket pocket. "I'm a reporter up from New Orleans, and I'm doing research on a family that used to live here." He opened the notebook, looked up at the waitress expectantly.

  "Sure, which family?"

  "Doane."

  If Pendergast had announced a holdup, the reaction couldn't have been more dramatic. The woman's face immediately shut down, blank and expressionless, her eyes hooded. The perkiness vanished instantly.

  "Don't know anything about that," she mumbled. "Can't help you." She turned and walked away, pushing through the door to the kitchen.

  Pendergast slipped the notebook back into his jacket and turned to D'Agosta. "What do you think of my experiment?"

  "How the hell did you know she'd react like that? She's obviously hiding something."

  "That, my dear Vincent, is precisely the point." Pendergast took another sip of club soda. "I didn't single her out. Everyone in town reacts the same way. Haven't you noticed, during your inquiries this afternoon, a certain degree of hesitancy and suspicion?"

  D'Agosta paused to consider. It was true that nobody had been particularly helpful, but he'd simply ascribed it to small-town truculence, local folk suspicious of some Yankee coming in and asking a lot of questions.

  "As I made my own inquiries," Pendergast went on, "I ran into an increasingly suspicious level of obfuscation and denial. And then, when I pressed one elderly gentleman for information, he heatedly informed me that despite what I might have heard otherwise, the stories about the Doanes were nothing but hogwash. Naturally I began to ask about the Doane family. And that's when I started getting the reaction you just saw."

  "And so?"

  "I repaired to the local newspaper office and asked to see the back issues, dating from around the time of Helen's visit. They were unwilling to help, and it took this--" Pendergast pulled out his shield. "--to change their minds. I found that in the years surrounding Helen's visit, several pages had been carefully cut out of certain newspapers. I made a note of what the issues were, then made my way back down the road to the library at Kemp, the last town before Sunflower. Their copies of the newspapers had all the missing pages. And that's where I got the story."

  "What story?" D'Agosta asked.

  "The strange story of the Doane family. Mr. Doane was a novelist of independent means, and he brought his extended family to Sunflower to get away from it all,
to write the great American novel far from the distractions of civilization. They bought one of the town's biggest and best houses, built by a small-time lumber baron in the years before the local mill shut down. Doane had two children. One of them, the son, won the highest honors ever awarded by the Sunflower High School, a clever fellow by all accounts. The daughter was a gifted poet whose works were occasionally published in the local papers. I read a few and they are, in fact, exceedingly well done. Mrs. Doane had grown into a noted landscape painter. The town became very proud of their talented, adopted family, and they were frequently in the papers, accepting awards, raising funds for one or another local charity, ribbon cutting, that sort of thing."

  "Landscape painter," D'Agosta repeated. "How about birds?"

  "Not that I could find out. Nor did they appear to have any particular interest in Audubon or natural history art. Then, a few months after Helen's visit, the steady stream of approving stories began to cease."

  "Maybe the family got tired of the attention."

  "I think not. There was one more article about the Doane family--one final article," he went on. "Half a year after that. It stated that William, the Doane son, had been captured by the police after an extended manhunt through the national forest, and that he was now in solitary confinement in the county jail, charged with two ax murders."

  "The star student?" D'Agosta asked incredulously.

  Pendergast nodded. "After reading this, I began asking around Kemp about the Doane family. The townspeople there felt none of the restraint I noticed here. I heard a veritable outpouring of rumor and innuendo. Homicidal maniacs that only came out at night. Madness and violence. Stalking and menace. It became difficult to sift fact from fiction, town gossip from reality. The only thing that I feel reasonably sure of is that all are now dead, each having died in a uniquely unpleasant way."

  "All of them?"

  "The mother was a suicide. The son died on death row while awaiting execution for the ax murders I spoke of. The daughter died in an insane asylum after refusing to sleep for two weeks. The last to die was the father, shot by the town sheriff of Sunflower."