Greely's Cove (9 page)

Carl Trosper ran down Frontage Street, leaving behind Lindsay Moreland, who sat alone and mystified at a table in The Coffee Shoppe of the West Cove Motor Inn. He had snatched up his credit card where their hysterical waitress had left it, dug hurriedly into his wallet for cash to toss onto the table, and, before Lindsay could remark about the suddenly ashen color of his face, dashed out the door of the restaurant.

It was less than five blocks to the Old Schooner Motel. Half an hour earlier, Carl had walked from the Old Schooner rather than drive to his meeting with Lindsay, but now he ran. Propelling him was a curious urgency, a need to comfort Sandy, perhaps to help her if he could;
curious
, because the night before he had seen her for the first time in two decades.

Yet, in the lobby of the Old Schooner the previous night, she had shared with him her fears and apprehensions about the dark things that had happened in Greely’s Cove over the past eight months—the disappearances of good and decent people who lacked good and decent reasons to disappear—and her worry over Teri. Sandy had opened up to Carl as though he were more than a fondly remembered face from childhood, but rather a real friend who was entitled to hear these deeply personal worries. And he had listened like a friend, had tried to comfort by pooh-poohing the notion that the disappearances were connected in some way.

Maybe that was the source of his urgency, a crawling sense of guilt for having comforted and pooh-poohed instead of grabbing Sandy by the shoulders, shaking her until her teeth rattled, and demanding that she chase down her daughter and drag her back to the safety of hearth and home. Now he damned himself for having discounted the danger. Eight people had vanished from the face of the planet, for the love of everything holy! How could he have failed to be afraid for Teri, having heard the story?

The rain had relented temporarily, and the fog had begun to thin. A sprinkling of pedestrians hurried purposefully up the block or down, some on their way to church, others out for Sunday breakfast.

Carl drew stares as he loped through the mist, his boat shoes flapping on the wet pavement, his raincoat flopping crazily, but he didn’t care. The sights of the main drag danced by his eyes in rhythm to his strides—the Mariners’ Bank, the Fox Theater, the Masonic Temple, old sights that conjured visions of his youth.

Three boys, ages twelve or thirteen, all wearing baseball caps backward, thundered past him on skateboards, careless of the mist or the rain or the puddles. For a twinkling he saw himself a quarter-century ago, together with a pair of boyhood pals, Renzy Dawkins and Stu Bromton, not on skateboards but on Schwinn Continentals, weaving through the traffic en route to nowhere in particular. Predictably, their acquaintances had called them the Three Musketeers, because they were seldom seen apart. Privately they’d called themselves the Triumvirate, a term Carl had picked up in a Roman history text of his father’s. With childish exuberance, the Triumvirate had plotted to rule the town one day, the state and perhaps even the country. To the Triumvirate, nothing had seemed impossible.

Not all the sights were old ones. Sandwiched among the familiar buildings were freshly trimmed storefronts and façades, rebuilt or restored to reflect changing times, changing people, changing wants. A sign lettered in flowery cursive announced
Hannie’s, A Carefree Ladies’ Boutique
. The old drugstore had become a chiropractor’s office, the old grocery an accountant’s.

Carl stopped cold, as though slamming into an invisible wall. Directly across the street from Hannie’s, between the Mariners’ Bank and the Fox Theater, was a storefront with bright green window lattices and a Dutch door to match. Tucked under a well-worn awning was a wooden sign with the name of the establishment carved in stylized relief:
Lorna’s Little Gallery.
Barely visible behind the lattices, obscured by mist and the shadow of the awning, were displayed perhaps half a dozen paintings, most resting on short easels.

Carl’s feet began to move of their own volition off the sidewalk, over the cracked gutter, across the street. An oncoming motorist slowed and swerved to avoid hitting him, then gave him an angry blast of the horn. He found himself standing with his nose inches from the latticed window, squinting through the smudgy glass at the paintings within.

Watercolors, mostly—some Lorna’s, some by other artists. Seascapes, islandscapes, a study in oils of cormorants leaving their webbed footprints on a wet beach.

Lorna’s Little Gallery. Lorna’s Little Dream. Lorna’s Little Means of Eking Out a Living after her husband forsook her and their child for the glitzy world of political consulting and power-brokering.

This was where his ex-wife sold her watercolors, where she displayed the works of her few artist friends, where she dispensed occasional art supplies to local painters and sketchers who ran out of brushes or paper or gum erasers and were too pressed to catch the ferry to Seattle for a visit to a real artists’ supply store. Carl had seen the gallery before, but he had never seen it like he was seeing it today.

What troubled him were the cobwebs that festooned the pictures and the easels, the layer of dust on the inside of the glass, the general dinginess. During their marriage Lorna had shown an artist’s indifference to housekeeping, but with works of art she had been tyrannically fastidious. A painting had to hang just so. Dust could not be allowed to collect on the frame or mounting. The light had to be perfect. To Lorna
all
art—no matter how amateurish or crude—had been sacred, a gift from God that required keeping up.

She had died less than two days earlier, yet the filth on and around the displays was obviously months old. Carl swallowed hard, feeling empty and cold. Lorna would never have neglected art in this way. Not the Lorna
he
had known. A worry formed and hung in his chest like a stone: Maybe she had started the job of dying long ago, long before her heart actually stopped pumping.

He turned away from the window and headed down Frontage Street again, walking with long, quick strides toward the Old Schooner Motel, hurrying but not running.

Ianthe Pauling shouldered home the massive vault door and, in accordance with Dr. Craslowe’s standing orders, locked it. The comparatively fresh, unbefouled air was a blessing, though a hint of chael reek had wafted up from the chambers below while the vault had stood open. It hung in the dark passages of the basement like the lingering memory of a nightmare. She hoped intensely that the horrible smell would never creep into the house above. Though she was well accustomed to discomfort, the stench was simply too much to live with, an impossible hardship that she lacked the strength to suffer for more than a few minutes at a time.

Having made her way to her room on the second floor of the mansion, she flung open the velvet curtains and sank into the padded settee that filled the bay window, tired beyond words, too drained even to produce tears in which to bathe her sadness. She tried to be grateful for the morning, gray and damp though it was. The morning had brought an end to the night, which was reason enough to be thankful. But the sadness was a veil that doused even the tiniest joys before they could spark into full-fledged feelings, and blackness once again engulfed her soul.

The taking of children always affected her this way. In the faces of the really young ones, like little Cindy Engstrom—behind their contorting horror-masks and the fearfully glistening eyes—she saw the faces of her own dream-children, whom she and Warren had hoped to bring into the world someday, the sons and daughters who would never be born, thanks to Hadrian Craslowe. Better for Cindy Engstrom if she could have somehow traded places with one of Ianthe’s dream-children, the ones who had never known life.

How simple and wonderful everything would have been, had Craslowe never existed, had his predatory magic never found its way to Ianthe Pauling’s native Sumatra, where, on the shores of Lake Toba long ago, it had corrupted and enslaved her family. How beautiful life could have been on the fringe of the steaming jungle, where the aromas of rubber trees and wild-growing spices tickled the senses, where the roars of tigers could sometimes be heard in the night, where grown people played joyful children’s games and worshiped innocent old gods to the crashing of gongs and cymbals.

Beautiful and simple, indeed. And utterly impossible.

Teri Zolten and Jennifer Spenser were only sixteen, the very age at which Ianthe had become a young Englishman’s bride and flown off with him to his home in London. She remembered how much like a little girl she had felt then, how unlike a grown woman or wife. That Jennifer and Teri would never know the fulfillment of real womanhood was an incredible sorrow. But Ianthe Pauling had no tears left—not for them, not for herself.

In the face of the fifteen-year-old boy, Josh Jemburg, she had seen her younger brother, Lionel, who had been just that age when she and Warren had sent for him so he could live with them in England. Despite their different racial backgrounds, both boys were dark and slim. Both were gangly, sweet-faced lads who could have grown up to become strong, handsome men.

And what great dreams Ianthe had dreamed for Lionel. What wonderful things she had dared to hope for him. In England there were good schools and bright prospects, the opportunity to achieve joys beyond the wildest imaginings of the Batak tribesmen from whom Ianthe and Lionel’s family had originally sprung. In England there had been the hope of escaping the taint that had afflicted Ianthe’s family from the moment its blood commingled with that of an American sea captain named Tristan Whiteleather, her great-grandfather.

This man had burdened his offspring with a curse that could never be shed, one that demanded unimaginably vile sacrifices and deeds. It had enslaved her as it had every Whiteleather child of old Tristan’s line; had already taken her husband, Warren. It had made a hostage of her brother, Lionel, who languished in a padded cell of a mental institution in Wales, a seemingly incurable lunatic. Only because of him did Ianthe stay on in service to Craslowe, for Craslowe’s magic had made Lionel the howling, jerking, vomiting animal that he was. Only Craslowe’s magic could lift the spell.

Someday soon, the doctor had promised, he would restore Lionel to a normal state, to the merry and good-hearted young man he had once been. But only if Ianthe continued to serve awhile longer with selfless, unflinching loyalty. The quality of her service would determine whether Lionel would ever really live again.

How much longer?
she asked herself for the trillionth time, and deep within her aching heart lurked the unspoken dread that a cretaure as foul as Hadrian Craslowe could not be trusted to keep a promise.

The Zoltens lived in a two-story, white stucco house that shared an alley with the motel they owned and operated, a convenient anangement that saved time going to and from work. Their large living room was filled with middle-of-the-line Early American furniture, which in turn was filled with people—neighbors, friends, Sandy’s relatives, all on hand to comfort, encourage, and help.

The news of Teri Zolten’s disappearance had traveled fast, sped on its way by a sick sense of expectancy that the people of Greely’s Cove had acquired during the past eight months. They had
expected
to lose another of their own, and when the expectation became reality, they were ready for it. Despite the early hour on a Sunday morning, they had descended on the Zolten household with hot casseroles, urns of coffee, and ample supplies of reassuring smiles and words. Many would stay with the Zoltens until the vigil was given up, until Police Chief Stu Bromton announced that it was pointless to stay, until hope for little Teri had evaporated like steam from an empty coffee urn.

Stu Bromton sat in a corner of the crowded living room, taxing a spindly-looking love seat with his bulk. Huddled near him were Ken and Sandy Zolten, who sat on folding chairs brought up from the family room downstairs. This was the part of his job Stu hated most—the initial interview with the horrified family of a missing victim: taking down the victim’s full name; the color of her eyes and hair; her height and weight; any peculiar identifying marks; the description of the clothing she wore at the time of the disappearance; the names of kids she ran with.

Had she been behaving strangely? Did she have any enemies? Had she been having trouble in school? Any trouble with drugs? And on and on, as though any of this excruciating trivia would help.

Ken Zolten was a tall, lean man in his late thirties, built like the tight end he had been in college, a man who cared about staying in shape. His blond hair had started to recede badly, but he kept it short to avoid drawing attention to it.

“Is that about it?” he asked Stu during a pause in the questioning. “Shouldn’t we be organizing the search party?” His steely eyes radiated agony.

“My people are already talcing care of that, Ken,” said Stu. “The party’s forming up in the parking lot of your motel right now.”

“Then let’s get on with it. I don’t want to waste another damn minute.”

“I’ve got to ask just one more question: Can either of you think of any reason—and I mean
any
reason, no matter how ridiculous it might sound—why Teri might want to run away from home?”

Sandy spoke up, her voice barely under control. “Come on, Stu, we all know she didn’t run away. She didn’t have anything with her other than the clothes on her back and twenty-odd dollars. Besides, she was happy here. She was just a normal, happy, healthy—” Sandy’s voice cracked as she realized that she was referring to her daughter in the past tense. Tears gushed from the corners of her green eyes and flowed down the sides of her nose, leaving muddy trails of yesterday’s mascara. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she sobbed, while blotting her eyes and cheeks with a pink Kleenex.

Ken reached around her shoulders and enfolded her in his arms. “It’s okay to cry, Sweets. It’s okay.” His own voice was dangerously thin.

“It’s
not
okay,” said Sandy, after blowing her nose into the Kleenex. “We should be out there looking for her, not sitting in here chatting. I’m done crying. Now I want to go out and find my daughter.”