Nightshades

CHAPTER NINETEEN

It was a quarter to seven when I came down between the cliffs and back into Musket Creek. The sun had dropped behind the wooden slopes to the west; evening shadows lay across the valley, giving it a soft, peaceful look. Even the ghosts along the creek seemed less decayed, less forlorn than they had during yesterday’s thunderstorm. Funny how light and weather conditions changed the atmosphere of the place. I wondered if the people who lived here noticed it too, or if they only saw it one way, in one light.

The car rattled along the road toward the Musket Creek Mercantile. When I got close enough I could see two men standing on the apron near the single gas pump; they were looking in my direction. I could also see that half a dozen cars were parked near the frame cottage in back, among them Paul Robideaux’s jeep. The way it looked, the residents were having some kind of town meeting.

The two men on the apron were both Coleclaws-Jack and his son. Gary must have recognized my car, and the imparted knowledge seemed to flare up an argument between them: Gary pointed, jumping around a little in an excited way, and his father made an angry shooing gesture toward the store. When I was maybe twenty yards away Coleclaw shoved the kid, hard enough to stagger him, and then wheeled around and waved a beckoning arm to me. For some reason he wanted me to swing in there-he wanted to talk.

I hesitated, touching the brake. Then I thought: All right, see what he wants-and I cut the wheel sharply and brought the car around to a stop near where Coleclaw was standing. Gary had gone inside the mercantile, but as I got out I could see him behind the screen, watching.

Coleclaw said, “What’re you doing back here?” But there was no heat in his voice or in his eyes. If anything, he sounded even more worried than he had the last time I’d seen him, outside the sheriffs department.

“I’ve got business here,” I said.

“What kind of business?”

“You know what kind, Mr. Coleclaw. Besides, I don’t like to be threatened. Or didn’t Gary tell you about the little meeting he arranged yesterday?”

“He told me,” Coleclaw said. “Listen, he’s slow, he don’t know what he’s doing sometimes. He didn’t mean anything bad. He wouldn’t hurt anybody, not on purpose.”

“He had a gun,” I said.

“That old Colt? It don’t shoot; firing pin’s rusted and the cylinder won’t revolve.”

“I didn’t know that at the time. And I still don’t like to be threatened.”

“You want me to, I’ll get him out here and have him apologize.. ”

“No, there’s no point in that.”

“You got to understand,” he said, “feelings been running high around here. The fight with those developers, Randall getting killed, now O’Daniel dead too, and county deputies all over the place asking questions… we’re all stirred up.”

“Is that the reason for the summit meeting?”

“The what?”

“It looks like you’re entertaining everybody in town tonight,” I said. “Or do you all get together regularly for coffee and cake?”

“What we do of an evening is our business,” he said. Something had changed in his manner, and not so subtly; he sounded both secretive and defensive now.

“Okay,” I said, “feelings are running high and you’re all stirred up. Why not cooperate with me and with the authorities? Why not get to the bottom of what’s been going on?”

“All we want is to be left alone, mister.”

“Sure. That’s what I’m saying to you. Cooperate, get to the bottom of things, and you’ll be left alone. Northern Development’s just about finished, now that Randall and O’Daniel are dead. Unless somebody with the same ideas buys them out, the plan to develop this area is dead too. It’s in your own best interests to help put an end to all the trouble.”

He shook his head in a stubborn way and didn’t say anything.

In the dusk’s stillness I heard the sound of an approaching car, and when I glanced out at the road I saw a Land Rover coming toward us from down by the fork. Hugh Penrose’s, probably, I thought. And it was: it came rattling in on the other side of the pump, and Penrose hopped out and hurried to where Coleclaw and I stood.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” he said to Coleclaw. “I was writing and I lost track of the time.” Then he took a good look at me; recognition put a stain of anger on his tragic face. “You!” he said, and the word was a bitter accusation. “You lied to me the other day, you were just trying to get information out of me. You and that woman you were with. ”

“I’m sorry about that, Mr. Penrose,” I said. “I didn’t intend-”

“Liar. Liar!”

Coleclaw said, “Hugh, why don’t you go on inside. Tell the others I’ll be in directly.”

“The meeting hasn’t started, then?”

“No, not yet. You go on. ”

“All right,” Penrose said. He glared at me again with his mean, unhappy little eyes and then stalked off toward the house.

“Anybody in particular you’re here to see tonight?” Coleclaw asked me.

“No. Nobody in particular.”

“They’re all inside, you were right about that.”

“I’m not here to see anybody,” I said.

“Why’d you come then?”

“If you don’t confide in me, Mr. Coleclaw, why should I confide in you?”

We exchanged silent stares for a time in the fading daylight. Then, abruptly, he turned and went off after Penrose and disappeared around the far corner of the mercantile.

I glanced over at the store entrance. Gary Coleclaw wasn’t there anymore behind the screen. Somewhere out back I could hear a dog yapping-the fat brown-and-white one, no doubt. Otherwise I was standing there in silence, in a ruffly little night wind that had sprung up and that raised a few goosebumps on my bare forearms.

Or maybe it wasn’t the wind at all that had raised the goosebumps. I did not like the feeling that was rustling around inside me. There was too much hostility here, and it was too intense. I thought I finally had a handle on what lay at the root of it, but I needed proof, and getting proof meant staying on for a while now that I was here. But not too long. Do what I’d come to do and get out quick and let the authorities handle the rest of it.

I got back into the car and swung it in a loop past the mercantile’s facade, so I could take another look at Coleclaw’s house. Nobody was visible outside. And if any of them were watching me from inside, the curtained front windows hid them.

When I got to the fork I took the branch that led in among the ghosts. I parked in front of the building that carried the UNION DRUG STORE sign, got my flashlight out of its clip under the dash, and locked the doors. For a moment I stood beside the car, listening. The heavy stillness remained unbroken except for small murmurings and whisperings in the high grasses nearby. The buildings themselves loomed up black and grave-silent-and again I fancied them as waiting things, shades embracing the cloak of night. Then I thought: The hell with that, don’t make it any worse than it is. And I went down a narrow alley between the drug store and the meat market, along the path at the rear.

The back door of the hotel still stood hanging open on one hinge. I walked inside. The place had a murky, eerie feel to it; hardly any of the twilight penetrated through the chinks in the outer walls. I switched on the flashlight, followed its beam across the rough whipsawn floor.

The light picked up the skeletal remains of the sheet-iron stove, the steel safe door, some of the other detritus, then finally found the collapsed pigeonhole shelf and the door in the wall behind it. I depressed the latch and swung the door open. Mica particles and iron pyrites and flecks of gold gleamed in the flash beam when I played it across the tier of shelves and their collection of arrowheads and random chunks of rock.

I moved over there. Some of the rocks had designs in them, just as I remembered. Bryophyte fossils like the ones in the stone cup I’d found.

With my left hand I picked up one that looked to be the same sort of mineral as the cup-travertine, Treacle had called it-and pocketed it. Then I swept the room with the light, looking for something that might confirm the rest of my suspicions. The Coleman lantern, the stacks of National Geographic, the cot with its straw-tick mattress told me nothing. But under the cot I found a small spiral notebook, and when I fished it out I saw that it was all I needed. It had a name in it, and a crudely drawn map, and together they were hard evidence.

Putting the notebook into another pocket, I turned and started out. The light, probing ahead, showed me nothing but the edge of the desk and the pigeonhole shelf and dim shadow-shapes beyond. I took one step through the doorway — and something moved to my right, rearing up out of the gloom behind the desk.

That was the only warning I had, and it wasn’t enough. He came rushing toward me with something upraised in his hand, something that registered on my mind as a length of board, and he swung it at me in a sweeping horizontal arc like a baseball bat. I dropped the flashlight, threw my arm up too late.

The board whacked across the left side of my head, and there was a flash of bright pain, and I went down and out.