Michael Dibdin - Dark Specter

“I’ll bear it in mind.”

On my way back to the hall, I discovered that Andrea was not the only one who made things up. Sam had told me that Rick was “taking a look” at the boat, but as I passed one of the prefab houses he and Mark emerged, along with a group of other men, all arguing loudly. I caught the names “Andy” and “Dale” before they saw me and fell silent. They stood staring at me in mute hostility as I walked past.

“Are we having fun yet?” I inquired sarcastically.

I’d given up trying to ingratiate myself with these jerks. I didn’t even care whether Rick was working on the boat or not. Whatever happened, I was leaving that afternoon. If the boat wasn’t fixed, I’d use Sam’s cellular phone and call a water taxi from Friday Harbor. Screw the cost. All I wanted was out.

Back in the hall, the blond was still sitting at the dining table with her three charges, but she had now given up all pretense of keeping order, still less teaching them anything. I wondered why Andrea had been replaced. Sam had given the impression that she was their regular teacher. The children were shouting and throwing things and teasing each other and generally carrying on the way children do. They paused for a moment when I entered, but immediately resumed their racket. Like everyone else, they had evidently realized that I was a person of no consequence in the life of the community.

Back in my room, it was immediately obvious that my belongings had been searched. No attempt had been made to disguise this fact. My clothes lay strewn all over the floor, my overnight bag had been emptied and the contents scattered across the bed. I did a quick check. Except for the videocassette, nothing seemed to be missing. In fact something new had appeared. A pair of jeans and a matching denim shirt in a child’s size were draped over a wire hanger suspended from a hook behind the door. I repacked my bag and stashed it away in the corner. Then I took the child’s clothing and walked out, leaving the door open. There were no locks or bolts on any of the doors, anyway. Presumably the Theosophists had thought such things beneath them.

“Any of you kids belong to this?” I asked, holding up the jeans and shirt.

They stared at me blankly. The blond affected not to notice my presence.

“Pardon me, ma’am!”

Her cool eyes traveled a seemingly considerable distance to my face.

“Are you Melissa?” I said with a suave smile.

“Uh huh.”

My smile broadened.

“I’m Philip. Sam was talking about you. He told me about your gorgeous cat.”

A peevish look crossed her sharp features.

“I don’t have a cat.”

I frowned exaggeratedly.

“Really? Gee. Well, maybe he used some other word. Do you happen to know anything about these clothes? I just found them hanging on my door, and they weren’t there when I left. You’ve been sitting here the whole time, I figured maybe you saw who went into my room and put them there?”

Melissa gave a facial shrug.

“I didn’t see anyone.”

I tossed the clothes on the table.

“Well, they sure as hell don’t fit me. I guess I’ll just leave them here, let the rightful owner claim them in the fullness of time.”

Outside, the clouds had thinned and perforated like a wet blanket worn thin in places. Rich blue sky peeked through, and the invisible sun chiseled the edges of the cloud masses into sculptural forms. I set off down the broad trail leading to the pier, watching out for the path which Sam had taken the day before. It was only then that it occurred to me how strange it was that Andrea had taken it for granted I would know where the meeting place she had named was, and above all how to reach it. But even now I failed to make the obvious inference.

I somehow managed to miss the path and found myself back at the pier. The boat was still there, securely moored. Wanting to check out Sam’s story, I climbed aboard and had a look around. There was no sign of any mechanical work in progress. In a locker in the wheelhouse I found a chart which covered most of the local archipelago, known as the San Juan Islands.

I recalled that Sam had referred to the landmass across the strait as Orcas, and by working back from that I was able to identify where I was, a mere blip on the chart named Sleight Island. I also found the town of Friday Harbor on San Juan Island, the biggest in the group. I was dismayed to see how far away it was. As for the mainland, that was considerably farther. In fact, the outlying islets of Vancouver Island across the Canadian border were a lot closer. If Sam and his buddies wanted to get away from it all, they’d picked the right place.

I returned to the pier and walked back up the trail, inspecting the undergrowth to my right for signs of the path. In the end I found it, a mere smudge leading off through soaring Douglas firs and yellowish cedars, interspersed here and there nearer the shoreline with madronas. Soon the ocean itself came in sight, heaving listlessly over the rocks. I walked to the brink of the bluff overlooking the cove. The tide was higher than it had been the day before, and the pool was almost entirely submerged.

There was no sign of Andrea. At the far end of the strait, a car ferry was passing on its way to or from somewhere. I was heartened by this evidence of life going on in a world that neither knew nor cared about Sam’s half-baked, half-smart flimflam. Soon I would rejoin it, and all this would be a fading memory.

Over twenty minutes had gone by before I heard sounds on the hillside above and saw Andrea making her way down the path toward me. I’d had plenty of time to decide what approach to take with her. Sam had implied that Andrea was a brain-damaged fantasist, and while that wasn’t necessarily true, there might well be something to it. If she had something definite to tell me, or some specific favor to ask, I was prepared to listen, but I wasn’t going to stand for any more prevaricating or mystification.

She was wearing the same outfit she’d had on the evening I arrived, a baggy hand-knitted gray sweater and khaki slacks with a battered pair of brown work shoes. She had the kind of body that looked great in anything, but it was her face which stood out. With its regular features, good bones and flawless skin it must have looked almost tiresomely pretty when she was young, but age had rendered that banal bounty down to a lean, distinctive beauty with great character and just a hint of residual sweetness. Now, though, she mostly looked scared.

“Let’s go down there,” she said, pointing to the rock ledge at sea level.

“Why?”

“Someone might see us.”

I looked around. We were surrounded by woods on one side and ocean on the other.

“That’s bullshit. Anyway, what if they do?”

She looked down, shaking her head.

“You don’t understand.”

“That’s what Sam’s always saying. I guess I’m just not up to the intellectual demands of living here. Fortunately I’ll be back with my own kind soon. Now then, have you got something to tell me or what?”

She grabbed my hand and pulled me over to the jumble of rocks leading down from the bluff.

“Just come with me. Please!”

I decided to humor her. Below us, the sea swell slushed and slurped on the underside of the smooth basalt ledge. When we reached it, I turned to Andrea and smiled tightly.

“OK, lay it on me.”

She shrugged.

“I don’t know where to begin.”

“Try the beginning.”

“It’s … I mean, how do I know if I can trust you? Sam said that you were friends. You might tell him everything …”

I gestured impatiently.

“I won’t. You have my word on that. Besides, we’re not really friends. He’s just someone I knew years ago, at college. Like I told you, I’m leaving soon and I won’t be back. And the only regret I have about that is that I would like to have spent more time with you, Andrea.”

She pushed back her hair distractedly.

“Me? Why?”

I smiled at her.

“I thought women weren’t supposed to ask that. Anyway, I don’t know. I can only say that out of all the people here, you’re the only one who seems completely real.”

She narrowed her eyes, as though suspecting some trick.

“You mean you think the others are specters?”

I gave an expressive sigh.

“Please, Andrea! Don’t give me that crap.”

“You don’t believe in it?”

She seemed amazed.

“What’s to believe?” I demanded. “The gospel according to Billy Blake? You don’t buy into that, do you?”

A sea gull flew by, emitting sounds like a squeaky gate. Andrea swung around as though someone had touched her. She seemed to be getting more agitated by the moment.

“We all do,” she murmured. “We have to.”

“But supposing you don’t? Supposing you lose your faith, what happens then?”

She did not reply.

“Do you want to leave?” I suggested. “Is that what this is all about, Andrea?”

Her head shook in a spasm.

“You don’t understand!”

I turned and started to climb back up the rocks.

“Stop!”

It was a cry of desperation.

“You mustn’t go yet! Please come back!”

She looked so helpless I found myself taking pity on her. Maybe she really was crazy, I thought. If so, she was in good company. I climbed back down.

“You’re absolutely right!” I told her sharply. “I don’t understand a fucking thing. I don’t understand why you asked me to meet you. I don’t understand what you’re so afraid of. I don’t understand what you’re doing here in the first place.”

She sidled past me, putting herself between me and the bluff.

“It’s no use trying to cut off my escape,” I said. “If you want me to stay and listen to you, you’d better start talking sense. Fish or cut bait, Andrea.”

She looked up above my head, as though seeking inspiration.

“You know about Lisa, right?” she said.

“Sam’s wife, the one who drowned?”

“The one who drowned.”

She continued her circular movement, ending up back in her original position. I turned to face her.

“Lisa was a friend of mine. She invited-me here when she bought the place. There were a bunch of us. Most of them left. I stayed.”

A movement caught my attention. Behind Andrea and slightly to one side, someone had appeared on the rocky outcrop high up at the other side of the cove.

“Someone’s watching us,” I murmured.

I couldn’t make sense of the perspective at first. The figure seemed to be farther away than the rock it was standing on. Then I realized that it was not an adult but a child, dressed in the clothes I had discovered in my room earlier, the denim shirt and jeans. The outfit now looked strangely familiar.

Andrea had turned to look.

“I don’t see anyone,” she said with a puzzled frown.

I hardly heard. A terrible madness had gripped me, a senseless certainty I knew was impossible, but which I could not shake off.

“David!”

“There’s no one there,” said Andrea.

The child stood rigidly still. His face was expressionless.

“David! It’s me, your father!”

There was no reaction. I shoved my way past Andrea, sprinted across the cove and hurled myself at the rock face.

15

The day after the double slaying in Carson Street, Charlie Freeman came by Grady to check on the surviving white victim. It was a routine follow-up to a case which another detective had initiated, and in which he himself took no particular interest. Freeman was a good old boy of thirty-seven from a remote stretch of Wilkes County who had never pretended to take much serious interest in anything except fishing, hunting and his dog, Reb.

He parked his pickup in a gimp slot right in front of the main door of Grady and walked on in. After lingering a little longer than was strictly necessary with the receptionist, a bottle blond with buns of steel and alluring eyes, Freeman took the elevator up to the twelfth floor. The duty nurse on the ward he’d been directed to was one of those Germanic types, as broad as she was tall, and looked like she could plow the upper forty without the help of a mule any day. She told Freeman that the patient’s condition had improved somewhat, but that he was still critical and could not be questioned.

“You get a name, anything?” asked Freeman.

“He hasn’t opened his lips except to take a sip of water.”

Charlie Freeman looked around him vaguely.

“Stuff he had on him, where’s that?”

“His personal belongings will have been bagged and taken to the depository.”

Freeman rode down with an extended black clan, all of them in tears except for one man who was fixating on something far beyond the modest dimensions of the elevator. Down in the basement, Freeman traversed a grid of aggressively lit corridors. On the far side of a pair of open double doors, a woman was mopping an empty operating theater.

“Hey, that place’s so clean you could do major surgery in there!” Freeman shouted, barking a succession of abrupt laughs.

The woman shrugged and said something in Spanish. Freeman continued on his way, scowling. Reason the country was going down the tubes, you couldn’t share a joke no more. They either didn’t get it or they disapproved. Pretty soon you’d have to run every gag past a committee of previously battered lesbians of color or risk a lawsuit. Well, he didn’t give a rat’s ass. Live free or die.

The depository was presided over by a black guy tall enough to have been a basketball player maybe ten, twenty years ago. Charlie Freeman flashed his ID and asked for the belongings of Patient #4663981.

“You got a warrant?” the clerk asked.

“This here is a murder case and the guy is a suspect.”

“I can’t release nothing without a warrant.”

It would take at least half a day to get a warrant, by which time Freeman would be off duty. Fine, it weren’t no sweat off of his balls.

“I can let you look at it, you don’t open the bag,” the clerk added, apparently intimidated by Freeman’s silence.

He disappeared into a room lined with lockers. Freeman stood whistling tunelessly and staring at a photograph on the wall, some forest scene. Saturday, he’d go to Pete’s, have supper, tie one on. They’d both get half a bottle of rye in the bag, then go jack-lighting Bambi’s mother in the woods.

The clerk returned to the window with a large transparent plastic bag sealed with a sticker labeled 4663981. Freeman picked it up and inspected the contents: a Smith amp; Wesson revolver, a wad of twenty-dollar bills, some small change, a bus ticket and a flat metal key crudely stamped CENTRAL. He mauled the plastic, trying to turn the key over.

“You break that seal, you’re in violation,” the clerk told him.

Freeman agitated the bag like a hound dog shaking a possum until the key flipped over. On the other side, the number 412 was engraved in the metal. He dropped the bag on the counter.