The Grave - An Oxrun Station Novel (Oxrun Station Novels) Page 5

  He stepped to the middle of the pavement and glanced west along High Street, narrowing his eyes against the red setting sun, half hoping he might catch Fel still walking the pavement; then east across Centre Street to the indented gates of the park a block away, smiling softly at an abrupt barrage of children bursting out of the shadows ahead of a trio of harried, hurrying adults. His laugh was more a grunt, and he moved over to the curb to check the Buick's locks. His left hand absently dusted a leaf from the roof. His gaze searched for the violation of a scratch. And when he caught his reflection in the passenger window—ghostlike, the shop blank behind him, through him—he grabbed the cap off and folded it, opened the door and tossed it onto the front seat, relocked the door, and tried to flatten his hair into a semblance of neatness. Brushed the dried mud from his jacket as best he could and walked away.

  He moved slowly, then, his shoulders slightly hunched against the feathered chill that had settled with the day's dimming light. There was little vehicular traffic on Centre Street, even at this hour; most of the people who worked here lived in the Station and they preferred, as he did whenever possible, to walk from place to place. It had little to do with conservation or economics; there was simply too much to see at the change of seasons for those whose seasons were numbered by the score.

  He nodded to those he knew, smiled at those he didn't, and by the time he had gone the two blocks south to Chancellor Avenue he realized he hadn't made up his mind where he was going to eat. He could always head back for the luncheonette, but the fact that he hadn't eaten all day made him decide in favor of something, if not better, then at least more substantial. Without the car, then, he had no choice: it was the Mariner, or home.

  And that, he knew with a grin, was no choice at all.

  The Mariner was a Monticello miniature divided into the Lounge and the Cove. The latter was essentially a family restaurant, the former a pleasant place for a quiet drink and an uncomplicated meal. Heads or tails, and again there was no choice. Despite all his years in the Station he had only once been in the Cove, with a family of young Scots fresh across the water who had somehow latched onto him during a walk through the park. The parents had been pleasant enough, but the children had been horrors, and he could not pass the Cove's white door without a shuddering memory of the smallest girl-child having a red-faced tantrum when the waitress suggested a vegetable instead of ice cream.

  A quick look in both directions—and a glance at the police station behind him—and he hurried across the avenue, waved at someone who honked at him, and ducked through the right-hand door.

  A quiet, tall booth on the left. Dark wood wainscoting and posts. Silence. Deep wine walls textured and comforting. Amber lanterns. Curved mahogany bar. Carpeting so thick it was difficult to maintain a normal walking stride.

  He sighed himself into place and gave his order at a whisper: Boston scrod and Irish potatoes, a salad, the house vegetable (he grinned suddenly and the waitress stared) and a Bloody Mary to start.

  He took his time, eyes half closed, the conversations around him like the summer drone of sun-driven bees.

  He had just about finished, ordering himself a Bristol Cream for dessert, when a shadow darkened his hands resting on the table.

  He waited.

  When the shadow didn't move he said, without looking up, "You going to stand there all night, or are you going to join me?"

  It had been the aftershave that had warned him, a pungent and liberal application of spices that wafted ahead of Lloyd Stanworth no matter what direction the wind had taken. The surgeon chuckled appreciatively—as he always did at the same tiresome jibe—and took the bench seat opposite. He was, Josh thought without condemnation, the perfect, medium nothing; an unexceptional face, normal width to shoulders and chest, his clothes carefully apropos for the profession and the town. Only the scar tissue a dead and dull grey where eyebrows would have been made him memorable . . . if at all.

  "Heard you had quite a day," Stanworth said jovially.

  Josh didn't ask for source and page number; it was one of Stanworth's unnerving abilities—to know more about people's daily lives than the people sometimes knew themselves. Instead, he sat back and watched the sherry twist languidly in its glass. "You must have had a hell of a time trying to find a place to tack on that arm."

  Stanworth shrugged. "A freak," he said, as though freaks were something he dealt with every day. "They'll find the body by morning, back in the woods. It happens, what can I say. The body's dead, but the mind refuses to believe it. The guy—it was a guy's arm, you know—was in tremendous shock, and he wandered. As soon as the pain, or the blood loss, makes itself known he'll collapse, and that's where they'll find him." He shrugged elaborately.

  Josh was glad he had finished his meal. "But how far can he get?"

  "Who knows?" The tone said: who cares!

  The waitress drifted past to take the man's order and moved on almost without a pause, an effortless rhythm that Josh admired. Like lifting the brass ring on a slow-moving carousel.

  "You have a purpose," he said then, and made a show of snapping his fingers in disappointment. "Oh, darn! You're here to tell me our date for lunch is off tomorrow."

  "As a matter of fact, I am," Stanworth said, suddenly fascinated by the backs of his hands. "Josh, I'm really sorry, but a man's coming to town tomorrow I haven't seen in years. A good friend from med school who had the audacity to chose pediatrics instead of surgical research." He smiled hopefully. "I hope you don't mind."

  "Hell, why should I mind?" he said truthfully. "As a matter of fact, I might not even have shown up myself the way things are going."

  "Oh, really?"

  Josh picked up his drink and sipped at it, saw a streak of sherry slip down the side of the glass and licked at it unashamedly. "Mrs. Thames," he said.

  "Good god, Josh, are you still looking for that idiot plow?"

  He nodded.

  Stanworth clasped his hands on the table, leaned forward, closed his mouth when the waitress returned with his scotch and soda. After she'd gone, he sniffed once and closed his eyes tightly for a brief moment. "Josh . . . Randy and I were talking last night, and—"

  Josh set his spine flat against the booth's wall. "Lloyd, do we really have to do this. Today of all days?"

  "No, not really. But Randy is genuinely concerned about you, you know. She feels—"

  "Don't you dare say 'responsible,'" he said flatly. "Randy is a lovely woman, and I commend you for being snared by her. But Lloyd, please . . . she isn't my sister, you're not my brother. The way I spend my life is my business." He held up a hand quickly to forestall interruption, saw Stanworth's disgust at the dirt still there. "Besides, it isn't as if I were starving, is it? I don't hang around the gutters, I don't molest little children, and I don't spend Saturday nights in the drunk tank. I do what I do best—I find things."

  "But what's the purpose of it all, Joshua," Stanworth said, almost pleading. He blinked slowly, pushed a forefinger over the scar above his right eye. "And while it may be fine now, you know as well as I that the public can be awfully fickle. Here one day, gone the next."

  "Eight years is hardly fickle, Lloyd."

  "Well, if it was me," the surgeon said quickly, back-pedaling, "I wouldn't care, you know that. But you also know how Randy is when she gets a bug up her ass."

  He did. He knew all too well. Randy Stanworth was a redheaded, surrogate parent for the world, if not the universe; a parent who knew precisely what her children ought to do with their lives, how they should go about it, and when they should start. She had also had an affair with him a half-decade before, short-lived and tempestuous, emotionally draining and nearly succeeding. When they'd parted; instinct had him pull the telephone out of the wall so he would not call her ten minutes after she'd returned home. He kept it disconnected for a week. And he had stayed away from the office for two. She was lovely, she was caring, she was the perfect one to drive Stanworth on to his Nobel Prize or die in the
attempt.

  In a way that was less disturbing than he would admit, he loved her still.

  "Listen," he said gently, to ease the man's embarrassment at a task obviously presented to him as a no-win ultimatum, "tell Randy I understand and appreciate her concern. Tell her too that I'm getting pretty good at salting things away for my old age." He grinned. "And I promise I will not die without her express permission."

  Stanworth bridled. "Hardly called for, Josh. That was a low blow, a low blow."

  "Yeah, I suppose it was." He did not offer an apology, however, and was startled when the doctor grabbed his glass, drained it without taking a breath, and slid out of the booth with a strained farewell smile.

  Josh gaped after him, wondering in confusion what he'd said that had driven his friend away. He must have missed something, he decided, though it had been a conversation well echoed in the past and one they usually ended with a laugh and hearty shaking of hands—conspirators against the familiar failure of a well-meaning meddler. This time was different. This time, somehow, something was wrong.

  "Hey!"

  Stanworth slowed at the door, though he did not turn. Josh immediately scrambled for his wallet and dropped some bills on the table, pushed out from the booth, and caught up with him on the pavement outside. They stood uneasily in the twilight, Josh with his hands in his jacket pockets, Stanworth trying not to clasp his lapels. Diagonally across the street and to their left a trio of young men stalked angrily into the police station, a granite and marble copy of someone's idea of a Grecian temple. Behind them were three patrolmen, laughing among themselves. The pedestrians on the sidewalk barely gave the scene a glance, not even when one of the men had to be eased none too gently through the doors.

  Spring, Josh thought, is the prime season for fools and other children.

  "Well . . ." Stanworth looked about as if expecting to be picked up. At that moment, however, there were no cars on the street.

  Josh touched his arm, unwilling to let him go, saying the first thing that came to mind: "Hey, listen, do you know . . . have you heard of a patient down there at the hospital, a Thelma Saporral?"

  "I have."

  "Well, look, she's got a friend who's a client of mine. As a matter of fact, it's Mrs. Thames." He smiled at Stanworth's suddenly pained and comical expression. "She really isn't that bad, Lloyd."

  "So you say."

  "Anyway, she called me earlier this afternoon. Mrs. Thames, that is. It seems that her friend, this Thelma, apparently she took off without telling anyone. Mrs. Thames got herself all bothered about it, and though I don't know how close you—"

  Stanworth quieted him with a look. "She was my patient, Josh. And she did not take off." He stared over at the police station, a palm smoothing his broad tie against his chest.

  "She didn't? But Mrs. Thames—"

  "She's dying, Joshua," Stanworth said, "and I'm sure Mrs. Thames is well aware of that." He took a long breath, thrust his chin up and out to stretch his neck. When he spoke again, the irritation was gone. "Dying. I wish I could tell you differently, but there was nothing I could reasonably do for her here so I had her transferred over to a place I know in West Hartford. It's one of those cases where you pray for a miracle—some guy in a cellar lab with toy test tubes and the like—and I really didn't feel like watching her go."

  "Oh . . . brother," Josh muttered. "Open mouth, insert foot."

  Stanworth clapped him on the back. "Don't be silly, you weren't to know. It's just that . . . well, I see it all the time, Joshua. These old women tend to be clannish. Anything that affects one of them manages to affect them all. I don't know her as well as you do, but I'd bet Mrs. Thames is that way, right?"

  Reluctantly, Josh nodded, and barely kept from wincing at the sudden, professional tolerance the doctor slipped over him.

  "It's no secret about Saporral, her dying. I imagine Mrs. Thames was rather flustered and just didn't ask the right people. You can tell her everything I've told you, I don't mind, but it might be a good idea to go easy on the death part. They all know it, you see. They sense it. But they'll be damned if they'll admit it. In a way they're just like kids, teenagers—they think they're immortal because they've lasted this long. It's almost like a bit of self-hypnosis that only gets jarred when one of their own betrays them. The time you really think about dying is . . ." His grin was as mischievous as he could make it. "Your age, Josh. Just about your age."

  He laughed deeply, explosively, and walked away shaking his head. Josh watched him for a long moment, shrugged without moving his shoulders, and headed across the road, back up Centre Street toward his car. He wasn't at all sure the elderly actually did view death in the manner Stanworth described: it certainly wasn't the way Mrs. Thames thought or it. She wasn't at all resigned to her eventual passing; and if she had anything at all to say about it, she would go on forever, if only because her house was never quite complete, the lawn never quite right.

  He paused, then, and stared at his reflection in a jewelry shop window. What would it be like, he wondered, simply not to be anymore?

  He shuddered and moved on, shifting his hands from his jacket to his trouser pockets, realizing how the sun had left him while he'd been eating, how the streetlamps in the new foliage were still bright enough to cast double shadows on the sidewalk, flatten the brick and clapboard fronts of the stores, the banks, deepen the mouths of the alleys between. It was the middle of the week, shopkeepers gone home early, leaving behind them blind plate glass and a curious sense of desertion. Shades had been pulled down on narrow doors, only a handful of neon displays buzzing like flies trapped in a paper cup. The turret clock over the First National's doors chimed the hour. Directly opposite, someone was forcing a grey sack into the night deposit slot of the Savings and Loan.

  He could feel it, then, creeping up on him as he turned the corner and headed for the Buick: the temptation to begin a short bout of self-pity. Here he was, in the middle of a village whose day had ended without the world ending around it, where peace and not loneliness was the commandment bestowed, and instead of enjoying it he was using it to speculate on the depth of the misery he would feel when he got home.

  It was not only sinful (he thought with a sardonic nod to his mother), it was ungrateful.

  But he was nevertheless helpless before it, could not resist slamming a fist lightly against the Buick's fender as he jabbed the key into the lock and pulled the door open.

  And froze. Stiffened. Looked to his left toward the park, to his right down High. There were trees, parked cars, lights, darkness. Sounds, not noise, of people in houses, of children still in backyards, of pets on the prowl. Scents, not odors, of new grass and young leaves, fertilizer on lawns, polish and leather from the car, earth on his clothes. The touch of the key in his bare hand, the feel of the tarmac under his boots, the denim against his legs, a straggle of hair across one ear.

  He frowned.

  Everything was as it had been for the past thirty-three years, and something was different.

  He looked up over his office, to the blind windows of the second floor. They once had belonged to the apartment of a man who'd run a security agency, whose office was where his was now. Before that a psychologist worked there. Before that ... he could not remember. On the left, a teen boutique, mannequins in the window blind and rigid; on the right, a shop that sold pianos and organs, a spinet on display with a floral elaboration sweeping up its side.

  Everything was as it had been.

  Except the air had gone sharp, had gone clear, had gone cold; except the angles and the bricks and the shadows and the curbs had suddenly grown edges that would have sliced him had he touched them. He put a hand on the car's chilled roof, expecting at any moment to lose his balance. Listening. Sensing. Attempting to convince himself that despite the light meal the two drinks he'd had had gone to his head.

  He didn't believe it.

  There were signs, familiar ones, when he'd taken in too much liquor: he would feel t
ired, lethargic, falling into a silence that more often than not led directly to sleep. None of this had happened. The sudden clarity of vision and the vague wash of disorientation had nothing to do with what he had drunk.

  Again he scanned the streets, the facades of the buildings in front and behind; he peered into the closest trees, into the doorways, moved sideways and checked the car's back seat. Perspiration broke along his hairline and his palms felt moist. Tension stiffened the muscles in his thighs, across his stomach, made him rub the back of his neck as though a cramp had lodged there.

  An attack, he thought suddenly against an impulse to panic; he was having an attack of some sort. He stared down at his hands, spreading the fingers and watching them tremble; he swallowed hard and concentrated on his body, trying to take measure of his heart, his blood, an abrupt sullen ache blossoming at his temples.

  An attack.

  Slowly, he opened the door and eased himself behind the steering wheel. He gripped the beveled rim until his knuckles were bloodless, his elbows locked, his back pushed hard into the seat.

  He waited. Staring blindly at droplets of sap on the windshield.

  He waited. And in a minute he would have sworn had taken an hour he knew he was wrong. There was no attack, nothing wrong with his head or his heart. It was something else entirely, something outside. He jerked his head around toward the office—there was no one there; checked the rearview mirror—saw only the empty street pocked by houselights; looked straight ahead—two cars drifting by silently, a lumbering red-and-silver bus, two men in plaid hunting jackets with arms about each other's shoulders.

  No attack. But someone was watching him.

  And the hand that gripped his shoulder almost made him scream.