The Grave - An Oxrun Station Novel (Oxrun Station Novels) Page 6

Chapter 7

  There was nothing Josh could think to do but laugh at himself. It was, he decided, about the only sane thing left to him after a day like today.

  The house on Raglin was a small, white-clapboard and black-shutter saltbox on a piece of property nearly as tiny. The front porch was not much wider than the door, the triangle roof above it virtually no protection from any sort of weather, an addition made by his father in preparation for a project that was (as was his father's wont) abandoned just after the conception. Its saving grace, as far as Josh was concerned, lay in its privacy—a thick screen of poplar separated the house from its neighbor's side and back, allowing him prowling rights through the rooms without having to pull the shades. Within, a living-room to the right of the foyer, a study that had once been the dining-room on the left and extending to the back, and a kitchen behind the living room made up the first floor; upstairs were two bedrooms and a bath, an attic above that was too low for standing, too inaccessible for convenient storage. The whole was furnished primarily Victorian, only because he had never felt the need to replace what his parents had left behind. Besides, having grown up with wood-rimmed couches and armchairs, side tables with raised scalloped edges, and lamps with fringed shades, he knew and understood all the idiosyncrasies of each piece—to get rid of any would have been very much like fratricide.

  Now, with the Buick safely bastioned in the garage, with the house key in its slot and the tumblers already groaning over, he was struck by an image of his face as it must have been when Peter Lee had reached through the open car window and had taken light hold of him: mouth agape, nostrils flared, eyes wide and popping, flesh tight and pale across his cheeks as the blood drained down to his heart which, he was positive, had relocated itself somewhere in the vicinity of the top of his constricted throat. He had recoiled violently, had been ready to thrust himself across the seat and out the passenger door, and would have done so had he not heard his name called out through the sudden explosion of panic.

  Lee, the new owner of the Chancellor Inn, had (he explained once things were calm and flight aborted) seen Josh sitting there at the curb, unmoving, rigid, and had thought there was some sort of cardiac attack in progress. Josh, unable to stop himself, had babbled, excuses and explanations tumbling out before he had a chance to expand or discard them. He had made little sense, if any, and Lee had been reluctant to leave. Finally, he managed to convince the man that he was, in fact, just fine, thanks, and I won't forget your kindness. It served. Lee moved on, though he had paused for a second at the corner to stare back suspiciously.

  "Jesus," he said as he stepped inside and closed the door behind him. "Jesus H." He laughed again, giddy, relieved, stripping off his jacket and boots and leaving them at the foot of the mirrored coat rack; later, if he felt like it, he would brush them off and put them away where they belonged. For the moment, however, in the house's full and comforting dark, he did not want anything to stand in the way of a long hot shower, a tall iced bourbon, and the couch in the living room where he would attempt to figure out exactly what was coming over him.

  The shower was perfect. Muscle strain and nerves loosened under the pummeling, the needle-strings, leaving him feeling as though he would survive until morning.

  The bourbon was slightly less successful because he took too much in the first welcome swallow and choked so hard he almost dropped the glass.

  The couch was a failure.

  He wore nothing but a tattered, cowled tan robe with hanging sleeves, his uniform for relaxing when he had no expectation of the world intruding. It also served to soothe him, so soft it was even after all these years and familiar to the demands of his body. The couch, on the other hand, somehow managed to develop a perversity: lumps, depressions, pockets of concrete that had him shifting in irritation, standing, sitting, standing again and pacing the small room as if he were due to leave on a long, eagerly expected trip early the next morning. Watched. How in hell did he get the idea that he was being watched?

  And who would want to bother with someone as innocuous as he was?

  Yet he could not deny the sudden heightening of his senses, the crawling sensation between his shoulder blades, the sucking in of his stomach in preparation for a blow.

  It wasn't the drinks, and it wasn't an attack, and why the bloody hell would someone want to watch him?

  He paused at the front window and held back the curtains, flicked a thumb at the shade's oval pull; he knelt in front of the television and clicked around the dial, images blurring and the color drifting close to black-and-white; the faded oriental carpet was large enough to appear wall-to-wall, and he sat cross-legged with his back to the foyer, trying to untangle a knot in the two-inch frayed fringe—a task, he recalled with a wry grin, that had been his father's single source of exasperated defeat.

  When he realized he was seriously considering taking a pair of scissors to the problem and was no closer to an answer for the problem that beset him, he rose and strode into the study, switched on the overhead light, and stared at the walls now lined with glass-fronted bookcases that barely fit under the ceiling. He stood in the center of the room's worn brown rug, squinting at titles, at piles of magazines, at filing cabinets, at the rear window and the darkness beyond. He walked to the back, to the swinging door that led out to the hallway, past the back door to the kitchen, and shook his head: no food now, nothing more to drink. He looked down at a jigsaw puzzle half-completed on a card table (a polar bear, the Arctic, brilliant blue sky) and picked up a piece, turned it, aimed it, placed it back on the side for discovery later on. Then he walked slowly toward his desk, a massive oak trestle set below the room's only other window, facing the street. He touched a finger to the correspondence yet to be answered, to the envelopes, to the books scattered across the back, looked up to the window, suddenly leaned forward and pulled aside the curtains to stare at the red MG parked at the curb.

  He almost made it to the staircase before the doorbell rang.

  Andrea Murdoch took the couch's center cushion, leaving him the option of either sitting beside her or using the armchair to the right of the window. He took the latter, not because he wanted to but because he was suddenly and acutely aware of his nakedness beneath the robe. He sat almost primly on the edge of his seat, legs pulled back, hands clasped loosely in his lap.

  Andrea grinned at him. Her midnight hair was pulled back into a ponytail, her blouse dark and snug, her jeans the same. Her face was still wind-flushed from the ride to the village, and the color served to accentuate the deep red of her lips and the lines of her high cheeks. She nodded at the robe: "You were expecting me?"

  He shook his head and squirmed. Annoyed at himself because he had no brilliant retort, no devastating explosion of Noel Coward wit that would be at once innocent and diabolically promising.

  "You didn't come by the house." Almost an accusation.

  "I wasn't hungry today." Something inside him winced, and would have kicked his ankles if it had had legs.

  She leaned back and stretched her arms over the couch's back. "I would have fed you anyway, you know that. Dad missed you. He wants to ask you some questions about Oxrun."

  "Is he writing a book about it?"

  She shrugged, and looked slowly around the room. "He might. He doesn't like what he's doing now, so he thought he'd pump you for some local gossip. He figures, doing what you do you must know just about everything and anything that goes on around here."

  Her voice was manlike: deep, resonant, smooth as the black that lines a night cave.

  "I missed you, too. You should have come."

  Pulling the ties more snugly around his waist, he reached to the side table and took a cigarette from a monogrammed, cork-lined box. Picked up a silver lighter and stared for a moment at the flame. "I promised Fel I'd do some work in the office today. She threatened to leave me otherwise."

  "You should marry her."

  It was his turn to grin. "She has a cat. I hate cats."

 
"I don't. Have a cat that is." She stopped her tour of the room and let her gaze linger on his face.

  He didn't know how to answer.

  There were only two lamps in the room: a standing one behind and to the left of his chair, a table model beside the couch—both were tall-shaded and created fogs instead of pools of light. A bright enough glow to see by, a shadowed glow that deepened Andrea's eyes when she narrowed them.

  "I take it you haven't found the plow yet."

  He shook his head ruefully. "Nope. Not even close, I think. I was about ready to give up today, if you can believe it."

  "I can."

  He frowned, forgetting the robe as he leaned forward slightly.

  "I mean, you always take on the worst cases, don't you," she said. "If you were a private detective, you'd be living down in Mexico, hunting for Judge Crater and Ambrose Bierce. By the end of the third week you'd want to commit suicide if you hadn't found them, but you wouldn't give up until you were either dead or someone else found their bodies." She took a deep breath, and smiled. "You never give yourself a choice, Josh."

  He crushed out the cigarette, reached for another and changed his mind. "I've failed before. You know that, right?"

  She nodded. "But only when somebody sits on you to stop. You've as much as told me that yourself."

  "Yeah, well . . ."

  Though it was flattering, he thought, that Andrea had taken such obvious pains to learn so much about him, he could not quite shake the feeling that he was being stripped, in the coldest way possible. And then she smiled, fully and brightly, and the stirrings of his objections were smothered, were forgotten.

  "You came all the way in here to do a profile on me?"

  "No," she said. "I wanted to know why you didn't come out to see . . . us. And to ask you if you wanted to come to dinner on Saturday. Dad'll be in New York for the next couple of days, and he definitely wants to talk with you when he gets back. You do know the gossip, don't you?"

  "I don't know, I guess so."

  "Is it good?"

  He laughed and settled himself again. "I doubt it. At least it probably isn't the kind that your father would want to write about. You forget, Andy, Oxrun is a small town. A village. What scandals we have had don't run to very much when you compare them to bigger places."

  "Really?" Her disbelief was evident, and her mockery soft.

  "Really." He waited. She said nothing, nor would she shift her gaze away from him. This time, however, he met it with a ghost smile he knew she would eventually find infuriating. "And why don't you tell me why you really came here. You could have called about both things, you know. And your father has a fit whenever you leave the house alone."

  "I told you the truth."

  "No, you didn't." Her hands flopped palms up to the cushions, bounced, and came to rest on her legs. She rubbed her thighs slowly, thoughtfully, and she sucked her lower lip between her teeth. "I don't want you to laugh at me."

  She'd said it so softly he asked her to repeat it; when she did, he was astonished. Laughing at Andrea Murdoch would be one of the world's greatest absurdities—everything she did, she did deliberately, intensely, never (as far as he knew) given to frivolity or whim. She was not always serious, but neither was she flippant; carelessness was alien to the way she took her living.

  "You promise you won't laugh at me."

  He almost laughed. As he had watched her, as he had listened, she seemed to shrink out of her age and back into her teens, when one of the pains of adolescence was the fear of behaving as though one were an adult. The fear of doing it all wrong, and being caught.

  "I promise," he said, sketching an X across his heart with two fingers and kissing their tips. "Come on, what's the problem?"

  "It's not a problem, really. Well, yes it is, damnit." Her expression hardened. "I . . . am . . . bored, Joshua. I am so fucking bored I could scream."

  The announcement did not surprise him. He had never been able to understand why, exactly, she had allowed herself to be brought out to the Station in the first place; she was too much a city woman, an energetic woman who needed and demanded the time-consumers a metropolis afforded her. Not that she would be out every single night, to this nightclub and that gallery, this premiere and that quiet dinner for two in a booth behind a tacky beaded curtain . . . but it all had to be there for the asking, and for the taking, if she wanted it. It had to be at her disposal for the advantage to be taken. Eliminate even the possibility, and sooner or later she would be padding the walls of her room. Apparently, her father's work was not giving her all she had hoped for when she had agreed to stay with him.

  It was then, as he watched her moisten her lips for whatever was coming next, that he wondered (with a start that almost had him out of his chair) if her interest in him had been all the time simply a way to forestall impending ennui. If he had been the least objectionable of those others she had met in Oxrun, the one to escort her off the farm to the glories of what passed for nightlife in the valley. If he were the surrogate, the temporary patch, the diversion.

  "Joshua, I want to help you."

  The tone answered his question for him, erased the doubts, and brought him close to blushing with guilt. The eagerness was there, but there was no pleading; interest, and the tenderest hint of fear at rejection.

  But he said: "I don't know, Andy. Fel—"

  "I don't mean in the office." She left the couch and knelt in front of him, folding her hands over his knees. They were warm. They were heavy. He couldn't help but feel the touch of a breast against his calf. "I mean outside." She gave him an exaggerated shudder. "If I have to stay inside one more day, I'll start doing something stupid, like redecorating."

  "You should meet Melissa Thames."

  "Who?"

  He waved it away. "If you mean, coming with me on trips—"

  She slapped his leg; it stung, but he did not rub the spot. "Josh, are you being deliberately dense?"

  His smile was inane.

  "I mean, fool, like going out to help you find that plow. The way I did the last time. Remember that?"

  Only, he thought, two or three times a day. Mother, you have raised yourself one miserable Don Juan.

  "Look, I've been doing a lot of walking since the weather broke, maybe I can help. I don't know the land around here that well, but four eyes are better than two, right? What you miss, I might be able to find." Her grip on his knees tightened. "Come on, Josh, what do you say? You don't even have to pay me."

  "I should think," he said loftily, "my company would be ample pay enough."

  "Oh really?"

  "Oh really."

  She shifted closer, her right forefinger tracing tight circles over his knee. The robe felt heavy across his shoulders, and he slipped a hand inside to rub lightly at his chest. Warm, he thought; I should open a window.

  "Josh?"

  "Yeah, I'm still here."

  "I, uh, I had to go to the police today. Had to pay a stupid speeding ticket that was sort of overdue."

  "Sort of?"

  A shrug, a grin. "A little. Anyway, I heard . . . well, I heard some of them talking in there. They said there was an accident out near our place. Well, on Cross Valley, anyway. They said, someone said you were there." She looked up at him, though her finger did not stop. "It must have been horrid for you."

  "It was," he said. There was nothing of the vulture in her eyes, though, no search for vicarious carrion; sympathy only, and he reached out to brush a thumb over her forehead. "It wasn't the accident so much. It was all over by the time I got there. But the way that poor guy—"

  "All right," she said softly. "I heard about that, too."

  "Christ, they talk a lot in there."

  Her smile was deliberately wicked. "I manage a good vamp now and then, when I'm nosy and I can't get it any other way. What I got, though, was two attempted pickups and a slap on the ass. I think it was Stockton."

  He grinned at the idea of the old chief turning randy, pleased too that the
mention of the accident was less disturbing than it had been. "I'll feel a lot better, though," he admitted, "when they find the poor guy."

  "They did."

  He stared at her, frowning. "What?"

  "That's what I wanted to tell you. I was just leaving, and some guy came in and said they found the body about a mile from the intersection. In the woods north of the pike."

  He drew a hand hard over his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose. "The blood. There was no—"

  "I don't know," she said quickly. "All I know is what I heard—the body was found and it was already picked up."

  "Andy—"

  She straightened, her face drawing level with his. "Josh," she warned, "it'll all come out in the paper, right? Someone, one of the doctors, will have an explanation, okay?" She stared at him. "Okay?"

  He didn't want to nod; he did it anyway.

  "Okay. Now. Your next worry, now that the crime of the century has been solved, is how to use me when we go out tomorrow to look for that plow. I'll have to know exactly what to search for, why, how, and all that good stuff."

  "Hey," he said, palms up, "I didn't say you were coming, did I?"

  The smile returned. "Sure you did."

  "No kidding."

  "Coffee."

  "What?"

  "Coffee," she said. "Aren't you going to offer me coffee?"

  He shook his head, bewildered, did not protest when she pulled him from the chair and took him into the kitchen. He sat at the table and watched her, astounded and not knowing why, while she moved from stove to refrigerator to cabinets as though she had designed the old-fashioned room herself. Nothing missed her critical eye, not the arrangement of canned foods nor the floral wallpaper nor the double sink nor the fact that he didn't have a dishwasher.

  "You really do that stuff yourself?"

  She laid out cups and saucers, found the bread and made them ham-and-Swiss sandwiches, sat opposite him and had him talking about the business before he realized what he was doing. And when he did, glancing at the clock on the wall over the door, he pushed back from the table and swiped at a breadcrumb clinging to the corner of his mouth.