The Spook Lights Affair

23

Alone in the parlor, Quincannon smoked his stubby briar and waited for the hands on his stemwinder to point to 11:30.

The Meekers had all retired to their respective bedrooms in the end cars sometime earlier, at his insistence; he preferred to maintain a solitary vigil. He also preferred silence to desultory and pointless conversation. There were ominous rumblings in his digestive tract as well, the result of the bland and watery chicken dish and boiled potatoes and carrots Mrs. Meeker had seen fit to serve for supper.

The car was no longer overheated, now that the fire in the stove had banked. Cooling, the stove metal made little pinging sounds that worked in counterpoint to the snicking of wind-flung sand against the car’s windows and sides. As the time for action approached, he checked the loads in the Navy Colt. Not to be used against the Carville ghost, if there was such a hunk of ectoplasm; no one had ever succeeded in plugging a spook, no matter what its intentions. As a precaution, rather, because he was fairly well convinced that a human agency was behind these manifestations. He even had a notion, now, as to why, though the how of it still eluded him.

Another check of his watch showed that the time was two minutes shy of 11:30. No purpose in waiting any longer. He holstered the Navy, donned his greatcoat, cap, scarf, and gloves, and slipped out into the darkness.

Icy, fog-wet wind and blowing sand buffeted him as he came down off the walkway. The night was not quite black as tar but close to it; he could barely make out the shed and corral nearby. The distant jumble of abandoned cars was invisible except for brief rents in the wall of mist, and then discernible only as faint lumpish shapes among the dunes.

Quincannon slogged into the shelter of the lean-to. His rented plug and the two horses belonging to the Meekers, all blanketed against the cold, stirred at his passage and one nickered softly. He removed his bull’s-eye lantern from beneath the seat of the buggy, lighted it, closed the shutter, then went to the side wall and probed along it until he found a gap between the boards. Another brief tear in the fog permitted him to fix the proper angle for viewing the cars. He dragged over two bales of hay, piled one atop the other, and perched on the makeshift seat. By bending forward slightly, his eyes were on a level with the gap. He settled down to wait.

He had learned patience in situations such as this by ruminating on matters of business and pleasure. Sabina occupied his mind for a time. Then he sighed and turned his thoughts to the Wells, Fargo robbery and his pursuit of the reward. The pieces of the crime and its connection to the murder of Bob Cantwell had begun to fall into place; it would not be long before he had turned up the missing ones to complete the picture. He smiled his dragon’s smile in the darkness. Yes, and at the same time he might well be able to supply an explanation for the puzzling disappearance of Virginia St. Ives from the Sutro Heights parapet. It all depended on how well his hoped-for confrontation with the Carville ghost turned out.…

Time passed slowly. In spite of his heavy clothing the cold seeped through and his body began to cramp. A constant shifting of position helped some, though after a while it seemed as if he could hear his bones creaking and cracking every time he moved.

Midnight.

Twelve-ten.

Twelve-fifteen —

And finally there was light. A faint shimmery glow from the direction of the jumbled cars.

Quincannon strained forward, squinting closer to the gap. Gray-black for a few seconds, then the fog lifted somewhat and he spied the eerie radiance again, shifting about behind the windows in one of the cars. The longer he looked, the more distinct the glow became — and he glimpsed the shape it seemed to emanate from, the outlines of an unearthly face.

He snatched up the bull’s-eye lantern, hopped off the hay bales, and went out around the corner of the lean-to. The glowing thing continued to drift around inside the car, held stationary for a few seconds, then moved again. Quincannon was still moving himself, over into the shadow of the cistern. Beyond there, flattish sand fields stretched out for thirty or forty rods on three sides; there was no cover anywhere on its expanse, no quick way to get to the cars, even by circling around, without crossing open space.

He waited for another thickening of the restive fog. When it came, he left the cistern’s shadow and ran in a low crouch toward the car. He was halfway there when the radiance vanished.

Immediately he veered to his right, toward the line of dunes behind the cars. But he could not generate any speed; in the wet darkness and loose sand he felt as if he were churning heavy-legged through a dream. There were no sounds except for the wind, the distant pound of surf, the rasp of his breathing. Not until he reached the foot of the nearest dune and began to plow upward along its steep side, at which point the night erupted in a series of weird tortured moans and banshee shrieks.

A few seconds later, the wraithlike figure appeared suddenly at the crest and then bounded away in a rush of shimmery phosphorescence.

Quincannon shined the lantern in that direction, but the beam wasn’t powerful enough to cut through the streaming fog. He leaned forward and with his free hand punched holes into the sand to help propel his body upward. Behind and below him, he heard a shout. A quick glance over his shoulder told him it had come from a man stumbling awkwardly across the sand field — Barnaby Meeker, alerted too late to be of any assistance.

When he’d reached a point a few feet below the crest, a wind-muffled report reached Quincannon’s ears. The ghost shape twitched above, seemed to bound forward another step or two, then abruptly vanished. Two or three heartbeats later, it reappeared farther along, twisted, and was gone again.

Quincannon filled his right hand with the Navy as soon as he struggled, panting, to the dune top. When he straightened, he thought he saw another phosphorescent flash in the far distance. After that, there was nothing to see but fog and darkness.

He made his way forward, playing the lantern beam ahead of him. The grassy surface of this dune and the next in line showed no marks of passage. But down near the bottom on the opposite side, the light illuminated a faint, irregular line of tracks that the wind was already beginning to erase.

The light picked out something else below as he climbed atop the third dune — the dark figure of a man sprawled facedown in the sand.

Gasping sounds came from behind him; a few moments later, Barnaby Meeker hove into view and staggered up alongside. Quincannon didn’t wait. He half-slid down the sand hill to the motionless figure at the bottom, anchored the lantern so that the beam shone full on the dark-clothed man, and turned him over. The staring eyes conveyed that he was beyond help. The gaping wound in his chest told that he had been shot.

Meeker came sliding down the hill, pulled up, and emitted an astonished cry when he recognized the dead man. “Young Whiffing!”

Lucas Whiffing, alias the Kid.

“What happened here, Quincannon?”

Quincannon gave no response. The victim’s identity was of no surprise to him; it was only the suddenness of young Whiffing’s demise that had caught him unawares, and the circumstances in which it had happened that bothered him now. Still, he might have foreseen that the situation here was volatile enough for violence to have erupted as swiftly as it had, particularly after the way he had goaded Whiffing earlier.

He cast his gaze back along the dunes. The line of irregular footprints led straight to where the dead man lay. There were no others in the vicinity except for those made by himself and Barnaby Meeker.

With a minimal amount of help from his client, Quincannon dragged and then carried Lucas Whiffing’s corpse back to the lean-to, deposited it in the Meekers’ spring wagon, and covered it with a tarpaulin. No purpose would have been served in allowing the body to remain where it had fallen. Meeker’s daughter had a fit of hysterics when she saw the body; evidently her feelings for the deceased had been stronger than her family believed. Mrs. Meeker seemed more disturbed by this and by the prospect of a murderer on the loose in the night than the youth’s death — hardly a surprise, given her feelings about Lucas Whiffing. She hurried her daughter inside the main car, where she went about lighting every lamp until all four cars were ablaze.

Meeker kept muttering, “Murdered virtually before our eyes. And by whom? Or what? It couldn’t have been a … a malevolent spirit from the Other Side, could it?”

“Not unless ghosts have learned how to fire a handgun loaded with real bullets.”

“But what I saw on the dunes … what you saw before we found poor Whiffing…”

“Illusion. A clever trick that backfired.”

“I don’t understand.…”

“Nor do I, yet,” Quincannon said. “But it won’t be long before I do.”

Meeker wanted to immediately transport the youth’s body to the Whiffing home, but Quincannon talked him into waiting until dawn. The dead of a fog-raddled night was no time for such a grim chore. It would be better if not easier done by daylight. There was another reason, too, that he kept to himself. The Whiffings would surely insist on summoning the city police and coroner; there being no telephones in Carville, this would require a drive into the city proper to the nearest line. The longer it took for the bloody bluecoats to arrive, the more time he would have to investigate without interference.

When Meeker had gone inside, Quincannon searched the dead lad’s clothing. An old Remington single-action, top-break revolver was tucked into one deep coat pocket. He sniffed the barrel; it had been fired recently and not cleaned afterward — the weapon used in the panicked shooting of Bob Cantwell in the print shop, no doubt. And it was fully loaded; Whiffing hadn’t been given a chance to use it tonight.

From the other coat pocket Quincannon fished a second item of interest: a twin of the heavy lead sinker he’d found below the parapet retaining wall on Sutro Heights. It confirmed his suspicions of a link between Virginia St. Ives’s disappearance and the Carville ghost business, and gave further credence to his notion of how both mysteries had been perpetrated and why.

At dawn Quincannon helped his distraught employer hitch up the spring wagon. He had managed nearly three hours of sleep sitting in the chair before the banked fire; Meeker, red-eyed and gaunt, seemed not to have slept at all. Evidently neither had Mrs. Meeker, who came out heavily bundled and grim-visaged to join her husband on the ride to the Whiffing home. She made it plain that she was only doing so because it was her “painful duty.” Patricia was “prostrated in her room, poor child,” which suited Quincannon.

When the Meekers had driven away, he embarked on the morning’s first order of business. As early as it was, the fog had not yet begun to recede, but the wind had died down and visibility was good. The dunes lay like a desert wasteland all around him as he trudged down the left fork at an angle between the abandoned cars and the one occupied by E. J. Crabb, who had failed to put in an appearance at any time after the ghost business began.

No smoke rose from the stovepipe jutting from the roof of Crabb’s car, nor did lamplight show behind any of the windows. But Crabb was in residence. A knob-kneed horse, apparently the man’s sole means of transportation, munched hay inside a makeshift pole corral nearby.

Quincannon made his way past the jumble of deserted cars, around behind the line of dunes where he’d seen the white radiance last night. A careful search of the wind-smoothed sand along their backsides turned up nothing. Opposite where he had found Lucas Whiffing was another high-topped dune; he climbed it and inspected the sparse vegetation that grew along the crest.

Ah, just as he’d suspected. Some of the grass stalks had broken ends, and a patch of gorse was gouged and mashed flat. This was where the assassin had lain to fire the fatal shot — and a marksman he was, to have been so accurate on such a foggy night.

Quincannon searched behind the dune. Here and there, in places sheltered from the wind, were footprints leading to and from the abandoned cars. Then he began to range outward in the opposite direction, zigzagging back and forth among the sand hills. Gulls wheeled overhead, shrieking, as he drew nearer to the beach. The Pacific was calmer this morning, the waves breaking more quietly over the white sand.

For more than an hour he continued his hunt. He found nothing among the dunes. The long inner sweep of the beach was littered with all manner of flotsam cast up during storms and high winds — shells, bottles, tins, pieces of driftwood large and small, birds and sea creatures alive and dead. Last night’s wind had been blowing from the northeast; he ranged farther to the south, his sharp eyes scanning left and right.

Some two hundred rods from where he had emerged onto the beach, he found what he was looking for, caught and tangled around the bare limb of a tree branch.

He extricated it carefully, examined it, then tucked it inside his coat. A satisfied smile stretched the corners of his mouth as he retraced his path back along the beach and through the dunes.

The Meekers had not yet returned from their unpleasant duty. Quincannon considered the rented rig, decided it was too much trouble to hitch up. He led the plug out of the corral, slipped a halter he found in the lean-to into place, and swung up onto the horse’s swayed back. The animal seemed less than pleased to be carrying so much weight, but after a few balky movements Quincannon succeeded in urging it along the dune lanes and out across the highway to the Whiffing home.

Lucretia Meeker answered his knock. Her husband had gone with a distraught James Whiffing, she told him, to summon the police and the coroner. Mrs. Whiffing was prostrate with grief in their bedroom. Lucas Whiffing’s remains had been consigned to his private car to await the arrival of the coroner and the bluecoats.

“Before they come,” Quincannon said, “I’ll need a few minutes alone in the dead lad’s car.”

Mrs. Meeker narrowed her eyes at him. “What for?”

“For purposes of my investigation.”

“Your investigation, indeed. If you were worth a fig as a detective you would have kept poor Lucas from being slain.”

“A regrettable occurance, though there was nothing I could have done to prevent the shooting. But I won’t fail in apprehending his murderer.”

“That is a matter for the police, now. You are no longer employed by my husband, so don’t expect to be paid for your services. He was a fool to hire you in the first place.”

Quincannon had had enough of this human sourball. He stepped close, rising up on his toes so that he loomed above her like Blackbeard above a prisoner on the plank, and fixed her with a basilisk eye. “No matter what you say, I will continue my investigation until this matter has been resolved to my satisfaction. Now will you point me to Lucas’s car, or would you prefer that I wake Mrs. Whiffing and trouble her for her permission?”

“You … you can’t talk to me like that! I won’t stand for it—”

“I can, I did, and you will. Well, my good woman?”

His piratical loom-and-glare withered her resistance. She muttered, “You’ll pay for your rudeness, I’ll see to that,” but she no longer met his gaze as she showed him the way into Lucas Whiffing’s private car.

He shut the door after him and turned the latch bolt. Curtains had been drawn over the windows, but enough daylight filtered in for Quincannon to see by without lighting one of the lamps. The body lay on the bed, completely covered by a blanket. The rest of the spacious room contained a stove, a few pieces of furniture, a steamer trunk, a framed photograph of contestants in a bicycle race, a poster advertising hot-air balloon rides, and little else.

Quincannon searched the dresser drawers first, then the wardrobe, but it was in the steamer trunk that he struck paydirt. Hidden underneath a layer of miscellaneous cloth items were several hand tools, a ball of twine similar to the one he’d found in the abandoned “ghost” car, a jar of oil-based paint, a board with four ten-penny nails driven through it, and half a dozen lead sinkers that matched in size, shape, and weight the other two in his possession.

Now he had proof positive of how Virginia St. Ives had “disappeared” from Sutro Heights and how spooks had been made to glow and prance and suddenly vanish in Carville-by-the-Sea.