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

  THE GRAVE

  Charles L. Grant

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  © 2012 / The Estate of Charles L. Grant

  Copy-edited by: David Dodd

  Cover Design By: David Dodd

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  The Oxrun Station Series

  The Last Call of Mourning

  (More Oxrun Station books coming soon)

  The Curse

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  Chapter 1

  The end of April in Oxrun Station; and the dying was reversed with the temperature's slow rise and the week's worth of rain that added to the thawing. Pavement and blacktop were washed to a shimmering, storefronts were polished, streetlamps seemed taller, and the air lost the melancholy that had turned it November grey. A faint green haze—still a promise, though no longer a winter's dream— appeared as a cloud among branches and twigs, while lawns once brown showed heartening signs of struggle. Pedestrians walked instead of shuffled, smiled instead of grimaced, and automobiles slowed for passengers and drivers to examine the change.

  The bench in front of the Centre Street luncheonette was repainted a pale blue—for the newspapers stacked there and for those who used it to wait for the bus. Patrolmen leaving their headquarters down on Chancellor Avenue tugged more confidently at their tapered tunics, set their caps at a slight angle just this side of rakish, did the same for their grins as if they had just had a raise. And in front of the Town Hall (across from the jail) the first circle of crocus broke stiffly through black soil.

  It was a stretching, smiling, we-made-it-again time when only the deepest of the snowfalls was remembered and made worse.

  The evenings were still destined to be chilly, the afternoons not quite June, and there were already muttered complaints about all the rain; nevertheless, the past was done for another nine months, and New Year's was no longer the first day of the year.

  Over the farmland valley beyond the village, however, cupped in a bowl of low and rounded hills, the greening was more prominent. Acres of it, square miles of it, blended into a freshly bright carpet; slopes of it and orchards of it luring the birds back from the South. There were newly energetic prowlings at night—small creatures looking for a leisurely meal, larger ones that refused to be driven away by progress. Motors were tuned with an ear cocked and listening, implements sharpened, gutters cleaned, cellars and attics aired without screens. For those who had lived for a time in the city it was quiet, an almost numbing silence only temporarily shattered by the passing of a train; and for those who had lived in the Station and the valley for more than one year there was no silence at all: the streams hissed, trees groaned, birds stalked and chattered, the ground itself shifting to accommodate the pattern.

  Josh Miller listened.

  He did not pretend to be a man of the soil or a huntsman more at home in the woods. He preferred, much preferred, to sit in the front of his television set and watch an old movie with Greenstreet and Lorre, or read a travel book or locked-room mystery, or do some quiet entertaining in the small house he owned down on Raglin Street (near Quentin Avenue, a block and a half south of the town park). Or even better—to find himself either here in Oxrun or in some other small community rummaging through houses and old shops at the whims (and the pocketbooks) of his old and new customers.

  On the other hand, and truthfully, he would never deny that he enjoyed Connecticut's spring and the voices it brought back after a long and hard winter, and he took a few moments to identify what he heard.

  He was sitting on a low bulbous rock just outside the first rank of trees that marked the surrounding hills' thick woodland. Behind him was the forest, ahead and sloping down nearly two hundred yards to the flatland was an open area or low shrubs and hidden rocks; beyond that was the untilled and sparsely treed acreage belonging to Donald Murdoch. In the middle distance, a mile or so away and barely seen now because of all the green, was the black streak of Cross Valley Road; and farther on, an abrupt density of trees—on the left and right the hills again, and in the center those same trees marking the small estates of the Station's wealthy, estates that stopped at a hill (better called a rise, though no one would admit it) that signaled the back of the village's huge park.

  Green no matter where he looked, and he knew that by August he would be praying hypocritically for autumn and some new color.

  For the time being, however, it would suffice, it wasn't white.

  Absently, then, he scratched at the back of his neck, the side of his jaw. He was wearing a deep blue windbreaker he had kept from the Air Force, a blue-plaid flannel shirt open at the neck, and dark blue denims tucked into high boots that had seldom seen a shining. His hands were gloved, his white-blond hair flattened over his ears by a sun-bleached baseball cap whose emblem had been torn off more than a decade ago. His face was somewhat rounded, eyes deep-set and black, his nose sharp-angled and threatening to hook. Not a handsome man, nor plain; intriguing because of the thin-lipped mouth that twitched and quivered, a consistently sardonic semaphore that added a dimension to his speaking, was somewhat unnerving when he listened.

  He sighed loudly then, and stretched his arms slowly over his head, back, clasped hands, up and around and into his lap. A grin, broad and self-mocking, at the unchallenged indolence that prevented him from leaving his perch on the rock. This was unquestionably no day to be working, he thought as the grin softened and his shoulders drooped into comfort. There were women strolling in the park with their heavy coats and sweaters off at last, and a silver Rolls at Station Motors he wanted to dream over from all possible angles. Not to mention the coeds spilling over the quad at Hawksted College, the naps he could take beneath the willow in his backyard, the short drive to the Cock's Crow on Mainland Road where he could listen to Gale Winston play her piano and conjure dreams of a past that never was. Any of that (or any of a dozen other things) would be infinitely better than sitting on a cold rock at the end of a cold April, hoping that a damned stupid plow would show itself miraculously so he could go home for to the Cock's Crow, or to the college, or to the park) and count his fee for the finding.

  Any of it would be better . . . and none of it would pay the bills.

  He fished clumsily in his breast pocket for a cigarette and, after fighting a breeze that had crept up on him from behind, lit it and coughed.

  He could also stop smoking and add thirty years to his life.

  Listen, his mother had told him once, if you absolutely have to smoke, at least smoke a pipe. You don't inhale. You know that, of course. You don't inhale a pipe. Your father smokes a pipe. Why don't you ask him how it's done! He won't bite you, you know. Why don't you ask him, and get rid of those filthy things.

  He had asked, and
he had tried, but he could never get the hang of reading at his desk without all that tobacco tumbling onto a book and burning a hole through to the end.

  Then quit altogether, you'll live longer, she'd said. His mother would not have been his mother if she did not have an answer for every problem life gave him.

  A fly buzzed toward his eyes and he swatted it away, ducking, shuddering, thinking it was a wasp.

  He wondered what his mother would say about that.

  Not, he told himself quickly (as though she were listening and shaking her head), that he had any real gripes worth mentioning. After all, he said silently to the assembled weeds and thickening brush spread before him, I have managed to create a decent life for myself, one that doesn't tie me down to an office with someone else as boss. And I certainly have enough money squirreled in the bank so I can live reasonably well for a fairly long time in case it all falls apart. No mortgage, no loans . . . what more could I want? He crossed his fingers immediately, a childhood-reaction for warding off a jinx; but he knew full well (and sometimes frighteningly well) how lucky he was, certainly more lucky than most people he knew in that he was able to do exactly what he wanted . . . and was getting paid for the pleasure.

  In her letters his mother stopped just short of calling it sinful. His father merely shrugged, smiled, and looked wistful.

  The breeze picked up, and he hunched his shoulders against it, a cold breeze suddenly that made him squint and turn away. And found himself looking back into the woods, as though someone behind him were breathing shadows at his back. It wasn't the first time he had felt it—here, even in town—and the reaction disturbed him. He wondered, then, if perhaps he wasn't trying too hard this time to get the commission. It wouldn't be the first instance he could remember when he had driven himself too hard.

  But he knew that he hated almost too much to fail.

  Just eight years ago—almost to the day, he realized with a start, and a reminder for a celebration—he had completed his hitch in the service and had decided (as much from laziness as any deep, compelling desire) that there had to be a way he could combine his love for mysteries in book form with a way to make a living. He had once considered a try at archeology— the perfect life, it seemed, to be able to roam the world in pursuit of ancient civilizations, to find a Rosetta stone of his own or the whereabouts of the true Atlantis or the untrammeled remains of Carthage in the North African desert; Stonehenge fascinated him, and Napoleon's real death; how had Rasputin actually died, and what had really happened to those poor souls at Roanoke.

  Nothing original, nothing spectacular or insightful about the way he perceived it, and he had learned rather quickly that he hadn't had the talent. But he did have the patience—and he did have what retrospect proved to be an incredible stroke of luck. The right place, and the right time, and a reception for a challenge.

  Shortly after his return to Oxrun, his parents had decided they had had enough of the Puritan work ethic. They sold their small business, gave him the house when he insisted on staying behind, and moved to Colorado. A month afterward, his conscience informing him unmercifully that he could not live forever on his discharge pay, he attended a cocktail party where, during the course of the evening, an acquaintance mentioned she was trying to locate one of the original theater posters for a Broadway show that had lasted exactly ten performances back in 1927. The Marvelous Kings, she'd thought it was called. Or something like that. But she had no idea of the playwright, the actors, or even the subject involved.

  A week later he recalled the conversation, and the title; and he could not get clear of it once remembered no matter how hard he tried. He thought about it, cursed at it, worried at it, lay awake nights and muttered about it, finally trained into New York because it was growing impossible, like shards of popcorn, to get it the hell out of his teeth.

  During his first day he sat in his hotel room and called himself stupid. Read the Manhattan Yellow Pages. Saw a movie. Read the Yellow Pages again.

  Then, the following morning, he told himself to either fish or cut bait; but the popcorn was still there, more firmly lodged than ever.

  So he bothered Equity, the Shuberts, City Hall, and the archives of the Metropolitan. He talked with doormen, ticket takers, stagehands, and old actors. He prowled museums he didn't know existed. He hunted agents and studios and theaters and bars. Within four days he had a name. In two more he was in Boston. A day later he walked up to the woman's house in Oxrun and asked her how much she was willing to pay for the poster he had found.

  She was willing, as it turned out, to pay quite a lot.

  In less than a month he had turned half of the Raglin Street house into an office, found a lawyer and incorporated himself, and began leaving word at parties, at the post office, at the shops, that he was open for business. The only things he wouldn't find were lost husbands and strayed children.

  The house, however, became too uncomfortable. There were too many other people moving through the rooms, commenting with their eyes on the furnishings, his living. A year ago, then, he arranged to take over an empty office on High Street, just off Centre, with rooms above that he used for storage. Miller's Mysteries, and the business grew, easily turning a steady and comfortable profit as word continued to spread about the curious, white-haired young man and the items he unearthed. Billboards, like the first one. Butler's tables edged in filigree silver. Letters. Gowns. A manuscript in Maine, a derringer in Natchez, a signed crock in New Hampshire, a photograph in New Jersey; and more than a few things were uncovered right in the Station.

  He hated telephone answering machines and services, and he hated working with numbers, and he hated doing anything but his job; so he took on Felicity Lancaster to keep the books and dust the shelves, fend off the unwanted and entice the hard-to-get.

  And it had taken him quite a while to realize that he was, without question, excited . . . and content. There were just enough challenges to keep him from getting stale.

  The breeze swirled again, pushing at the fringe of hair around his cap, slipping down his shirt to tighten his chest. He frowned as he stared at the agitated foliage around him. It felt as if there were a storm in the offing, but the sky was still blue, no clouds to be seen. He zipped up his jacket and lit another cigarette.

  The weather, he thought glumly; one day it's warm and summer, the next you'd think it was February and snowing. His mother called it pneumonia time, the weeks when summer colds came ahead of schedule and stayed through September, never really dying. Whatever it was, it was distressing. He didn't care for things that changed on him without warning.

  The breeze stiffened.

  He squirmed and told himself he had better get moving. There were shadows here in broad daylight that he did not like to see.

  But as soon as the thought surfaced he shook his head and dismissed it. Considered a quiet visit to a friend, Lloyd Stanworth, who would doctor him away from this unnatural reaction. And that too, he thought, was pushing the imagination.

  But he did not look behind him when he heard the leaves whisper.

  Chapter 2

  When the damp from the rock began to penetrate to his skin, Josh grunted and decided it was time to move on. The solitude here was taking chips from his sanity, and all he needed now was to see monsters in the woods.

  I've seen some things here, his father had whispered once, while his mother was out shopping and they were alone in the house. You can't live in the Station all your life without knowing the place isn't what you call your normal town.

  Josh had never believed it, never seen evidence that his father was right. But it wasn't the words that had bothered him, back when he was twelve . . . it was the sly look in his father's eyes, the wry quiver of his lips, and the fact that the afternoon was the afternoon of Halloween. It had frightened him more than seeing the masks on the children and hearing the wind in the trees; and it was almost a month before he knew he'd been kidded.

  Nevertheless, he did not look ar
ound when the breeze kicked again.

  Go, he told himself instead; go and have a drink.

  But he hesitated, hating to admit to another round of defeat. What had brought him out here had begun two weeks ago, just after he had returned from a grateful Felicity wasn't as perfect as she'd like him to believe. But neither had he discovered anything that even remotely resembled the implement he was hunting. From sketches Felicity had copied from texts in New Haven he knew the hand plow was constructed of two thick bows of wood joined at the base by a single huge blade, joined near the top by a crossbar of iron easily removable if either of the handles split or wore out.

  But knowing what it looked like hadn't helped him thus far.

  Suddenly, as he was crushing the cigarette out under his heel, the breeze exploded into a stiff violent wind that pelted him with dust and dead leaves. He covered his eyes instantly with his forearms and ducked his face toward his chest, holding his breath and waiting, thinking for no reason my god it's a tornado until the air abruptly stilled.

  The silence made him realize the wind hadn't made a sound.

  Cautiously, counting slowly to ten in case there was a resurgence, he lowered his arms and looked around him, frowning. He saw nothing amiss except a faint swirling of dust that hung darkly over the slope a dozen yards away. It hovered, scattered a moment later, and he was hard put to believe he had seen it at all.

  The sky was still blue, untouched by clouds.

  There was no breeze; the leaves were still.

  "Nice," he told the air then. "How about the next time you bring me the stupid plow."

  He pushed himself off the rock and dusted his jacket, brushed fingers through his hair. A brittle brown leaf clung to one knee, and he flicked it off, watched it fall, kicked at it and missed. Great, he thought; the wind was exactly what he needed to end one hell of a miserable day. The mud was cold, the woods were cold, in spite of the gloves his hands were cold. And all because of a lousy plow that was probably long since rotted into the side of the hill. It was, he told himself sourly, easily the dumbest thing he had ever agreed to find. If the request had come from anyone else but Mrs. Thames . . .