Greely's Cove (30 page)

“Zounds!” exclaimed Carl after taking a sip. “What did you do—throw a shot of coffee into the cognac?”

“Shut up and drink it,” ordered Renzy, sitting down opposite his visitor. “Good for the glands. Puts hair on your man-thing.”

At just under six feet tall, Renzy Dawkins was slightly shorter than Carl and nearly the opposite in complexion. His long hair was thick and coarse and nearly black, combed straight from his high forehead. His green eyes attested to his mother’s “black Irish” heritage, as did the heavy stubble that gave his angular jaw a bluish look. His face was permanently wind-browned from many days at sea, and his hands—which seemed always to be in motion, either torturing a hank of rope in the practice of nautical knots or rolling burnt-out cigarette butts into little balls that he eventually flicked away—had the leathery look of a sailor’s. He wore a dark red sweater of raw wool over tacky beige trousers and frayed leather Topsiders.

“This is some boat, my friend,” said Carl, taking another jolt of the spiked coffee and glancing around the elegant saloon. Adorning the glossy teak bulkheads was a collection of ancient ferrotypes, all with nautical subjects: old schooners and clippers under billowy sail, long-dead skippers and traders, panoramic views of nineteenth-century harbors. “If I had something like this—not to mention your money—I’d be out on the blue water somewhere, probably heading for Papeete or Bora Bora.”

Renzy laughed loudly then grew abruptly silent a moment. “No, you wouldn’t, Bush,” he said. “You’d be right here in Greely’s Cove, same as I am, same as you are right now.” Then: “Speaking of
money
...” He jumped up from his seat and went to the navigation station, where he pulled open a drawer and fumbled through books of charts, compasses, and grease pencils. He returned with an envelope, which he tossed into Carl’s lap.

“It’s all there—seven hundred and fifty dollars, cash-money. Old Subarus just aren’t worth a grand anymore, Bush.”

During Carl’s absence in Washington, D.C., Renzy had handled the sale of Lorna’s old station wagon, the one in which she had killed herself. Carl had been glad to have his help in the matter, for he doubted that he could ever have brought himself to touch the car, much less drive it.

“Thanks, Renzy. I’ll drive into Seattle next week and put this down on another car. I can’t drive a rental forever, I guess. Anyway, I appreciate your help with this thing.”

“No sweat, amigo. Sign this title transfer and drop it in the mail to Olympia, and you’re all set. I’m just sorry I couldn’t get the grand you wanted. Hey, what do you say we have a little toast?”

“I’ve already had breakfast.”

“Not that kind of toast, ass-breath.
This
kind.” Renzy held his coffee cup in the air. “To new beginnings!”

“To new beginnings!” said Carl, raising his cup.

They both drank. And Renzy refilled Carl’s cup.

“Since you’ve already had breakfast,” he said, “I won’t offer you any. You wouldn’t like what’s on the menu. I’m sure.” He had returned from the galley with a giant bag of Whoppers malted milk balls, which he began to crunch down vigorously after taking his seat.

“Very nutritious,” said Carl, snickering.

They bantered for another half-hour, catching up on old times, remembering past faces and places and friends and enemies. They had not really gotten an opportunity to talk since Lorna’s memorial gathering in the park.

“So what have you been doing with yourself for the past six years?” Carl wanted to know. “I’ve only gotten vague details from Stu, and you yourself really didn’t tell me much before I left for D.C. What has your life been like?”

“Very good lately. I’ve been doing what I do best—nothing. Oh, I’ve done some offshore sailboat racing, a lot of cruising—both on and off the water.” He threw a lewd wink at Carl. “Tried my hand at teaching philosophy in a community college in California, but it didn’t work out. Even wrote a pornographic western novel that nobody wants to publish. In short, I haven’t contributed much to the world recently.”

“Well, you’re probably wondering why in the hell I’m here at this ungodly hour,” said Carl, feeling warm with the glow of cognac and liking it. “Would you believe that I just needed a little good, old-fashioned friendship?”

Renzy smiled and popped a Whopper into his mouth. “That’s what I’m here for. I may not be good for much, these days, but if it’s good, old-fashioned friendship you’re after, I’m your man.”

“It’s about Jeremy,” said Carl.

“I’m not surprised.”

“I just dropped him at Dr. Craslowe’s. Have you heard the latest?”

Indeed, Renzy had. The story of Jeremy’s arrest and his alleged involvement in the harassment of Hannie Hazelford had spread throughout the village like wildfire. But Carl’s revelations about Jeremy’s treatment of his grandmother seemed to take Renzy completely by surprise. Carl recounted to him what Lindsay had revealed in the wee hours of that very morning in the station house of the Greely’s Cove Police Department: the collection of stray animals, the nighttime escapes from the house on Second Avenue, the verbal abuse, the “mind-reading,” the incantations and the array of mysterious books in the boy’s room.

Most troubling to Carl were Jeremy’s sudden and complete changes of personality. With Nora he was a little hellion, and with Lindsay or Stu a sullen mope. But with Carl he was cheerful and considerate, a loving son.

Kirk Tanner and Jason Hagstad had described him during their police interrogations as a kind of mesmerist who could plant urgent desires and schemes in their minds.

“You should’ve seen those guys on the videotapes,” said Carl of Tanner and Hagstad. “Scared shitless, both of them. Whenever Stu asked them to describe exactly how Jeremy forced them to do what they did to Hannie, they started sweating bullets. Their faces turned white, they started shaking and blathering about spells and spirits...

“But you said yourself they were on drugs, right?”

“The cops gave them blood tests, which were negative.”

“Hell, that doesn’t prove anything. If they’re chronic crack users, their brains are full of bruises, and they can be totally wigged even if they don’t have it in their blood. Trust me. Bush: I know about these things. Crack is cocaine, and cocaine can eat up your mind, make you see and feel things that aren’t there.”

“That’s what I’ve been telling myself,” said Carl. “And that’s what I intend to tell the prosecutor if he presses the case against Jeremy.”

“Good man.”

“Did you notice anything wrong with Jeremy when you were with him?”

“He seemed perfectly normal to me. His attitude was downright sunny, in fact.”

Carl got up to stretch his legs and wandered around the wood-paneled saloon of the boat, absently eyeing the brassframed pictures that hung on the bulkheads. One, a ferrotype hazy with age, wrinkled and cracked here and there beneath its protective glass, was a portrait of two men. On the left was a grizzled seaman dressed in the dark, bunchy uniform of a ship’s captain. On the right was a taller man with a long face, wearing a somber suit and thick, steel-framed spectacles that exaggerated his watery eyes. Something about the taller man’s face disturbed Carl, though he could not say what it was. He leaned close to the bulkhead and studied the picture closely. “Who’s this?” he asked Renzy. “Looks kind of familiar.” Renzy’s mood seemed to darken just a little, as though a cloud had scuttered over the sun, except that the sun was irrelevant here in the saloon of the
Kestrel.

“That, my friend, is no one other than the redoubtable Captain Tristan Whiteleather,” he said, “the builder of Whiteleather Place. That picture was taken in 1895, according to the writing on the back. I’d show you, except it’s screwed to the bulkhead and I’m too lazy to dig for a screwdriver.”

“Where did you get it?”

Renzy hesitated, as though sorting through discarded memories.

“My parents’ estate,” he answered finally. Carl winced. “There was an old trunk in the basement of the house, full of documents and files that had apparently belonged to White-leather. After Mom and Dad—” He stammered and cleared his throat, causing Carl to regret having noticed the picture at all. “After they died, I donated it to the Greely’s Cove Historical Society but kept out a few things. This was one of them.”

“I’m sorry, Renzy,” said Carl. “I didn’t mean to rip open—”

“Hey, don’t worry about it. I’m a big boy now, and I can talk about it without choking up—most of the time.” He took a drag on his cigarette. “Remember that old vault in the basement of the house, the one my father always told us to stay away from?”

Carl remembered. Renzy’s father had adamantly warned the boys never to play near the locked steel door in a dark, musty corner of the basement of Whiteleather Place. But, of course, they
had
played near it, had tested its massive lock and pressed their ears against the cold metal, listening for hints of the creeping dangers that surely lay on the other side.

“The trunk was next to it, along with a lot of other junk from the last century. There’s a rumor among the local history buffs that Whiteleather had built a secret passage off the vault, but nobody has been able to figure out whether it really exists. Anyway, the whole question became moot when I sold the place to Mrs. Pauling. I doubt whether she and Dr. Craslowe would let anybody poke around in the vault, secret passage or no secret passage.”

“What about the other guy in the picture?” Carl wanted to know. “Was he a friend of Captain Whiteleather’s?”

Renzy narrowed his eyes on the picture. “There was a name written on the back along with Whiteleather’s, but the ink was faded out, like somebody had spilled coffee on it. All I could make out was the word
merchant
, which I suspect is what the guy was. The picture was taken in Sumatra.”

“As in Southeast Asia?”

“For all I know, it could have been Sumatra, Okalahoma,” said Renzy slyly.

“But wasn’t Captain Whiteleather one of those dauntless traders who plied the South Seas?”

“That’s what the legends say. And he must’ve made a handsome living at it, too. The mansion he built is certainly no shack, as you and I well know.”

Renzy retreated to the gallery to fill their coffee mugs yet one more time. “What do you say we get down to serious business?” he said, after returning and handing over Carl’s mug. “First thing we’ve got to worry about is getting you back into the groove here in good old Greely’s Cove. Let’s see, your living arrangements are taken care of, right?”

They were, answered Carl. He and Jeremy would live in the bungalow on Second, where Carl and Lorna had begun their married life. The red tape of probating Lorna’s estate was a mere formality.

“Good,” said Renzy. “Now, what about a law office? You can’t nail your shingle to thin air.”

True. Carl’s plan was to convert Lorna’s gallery on Frontage Street, which entailed yet more red tape in probate court—a hassle, but not an insurmountable one. Lorna’s remaining inventory of paintings, sculptures, and art supplies would have to be auctioned off, a task that Carl did not look forward to. Then carpenters and painters would have to be brought in to undertake the necessary remodeling.

Renzy offered to ramrod the auction, to lend his hands and talents to tying up all the other loose ends.

“You said you wanted a little old-fashioned friendship, didn’t you?” he said, countering Carl’s protest over imposing his burdens on someone else. “Besides, I have nothing but time until the weather clears up. You can repay me by serving as first mate on a long cruise to the San Juans. We’ll shanghai that kid of yours and teach him how to sail, so you and I can sit down here in the saloon and drink. Maybe we can even coax Stu along, provided we can load enough beer aboard. Sounds good, doesn’t it?”

It did sound good. But Carl wanted more from his new existence than relaxation, he told Renzy. He intended to involve himself in worthy projects and causes, visiting old people in rest homes, perhaps, or volunteering to help teach illiterate adults to read. He wanted to give something of himself to the community, as much to set a worthy example for his son as to find self-fulfillment.

“Good God!” exclaimed Renzy. “You might even set a good example for
me
! You’d better watch out, though: If you do too many good things around this town, someone might try to get you back into politics.”

“Never! I’m through with politics forever.”

“Never say never, Bush. The fact is, this town could use a new mayor.”

“Would you stop? The thought of going into politics makes me nauseous, and besides that, we have a perfectly good mayor.”

“Yeah, if you like Bible-thumping bigots. Chester Klundt is one of those unctuous types who thinks that anyone who disagrees with him is an apostate of Hell or an agent of Moscow. We need to be rid of him, and you just might be the man.”

“Renzy, for the last time: I’m not going back into politics!”

“Not even if there’s an honest draft?” Renzy’s face beamed as he needled his old friend. “Hell, I’d run your campaign for you. I can see the slogan now, plastered all over town on billboards and telephone poles, on bumper stickers and yard signs:
Carl Trosper: Flexible but Not Flaccid
.”

Suddenly, Carl could not hold back the giggles, and they squirted out between his scowling lips. Seconds later he was laughing loudly with Renzy, feeling better about himself and the world than he had in weeks, or maybe even months, or maybe even years.

Robinson Sparhawk finished his Belgian waffle in The Coffee Shoppe of the West Cove Motor Inn, gathered up his metal crutches, and hobbled back to his room. Katharine welcomed him as though he had been away for a decade and not a mere forty-five minutes, dancing around the room with worshipful joy, making great thuds on the carpet.

“Calm down, darlin’,” Robbie told the Great Dane while scratching the area between her pointed ears. “You didn’t really think you’d been abandoned now, did you?” She jiggeted her tail and raised a paw to shake hands, telling him that this was exactly what she had thought.

After putting on his sheepskin jacket with the white-fleece lining, a garment he seldom if ever needed in El Paso but that he kept for winter trips to northern climes, Robbie hobbled to the mirror and checked himself for presentability: Except for his puny, link-sausage legs, he didn’t look half-bad for fifty-one. His salt-and-pepper hair was still thick and wavy, his jaw still square, his brown eyes bright and lively despite the squint lines at the corners. Like most west Texans, his face was sun-bronzed and healthy-looking. He straightened his string tie with its slide of hand-tooled Mexican silver and headed for the door, ready for a day’s work.