The Dark Door (6 page)

Charlie ordered a bucket of steamer clams and they went to work on them and a loaf of hot bread that was included. Neither spoke for several minutes.

“Look, Charlie,” J.C. said then, “the insurance guy who came down after the fire, he was a jerk, you know?”

Charlie shrugged. “Actually he’s pretty good.

He’s got a nose for arson.”

“Maybe so, but he’s a jerk. That was too soon after all the trouble here. People who could talk just wanted to talk about the trouble. People who couldn’t talk about that just plain couldn’t talk about anything. He thought they were being evasive. Evasive, hell! They just didn’t give a shit.”

“What trouble was that?” Charlie asked and knew immediately that this was what J.C. wanted to talk about,
all
he wanted to talk about.

“See? That’s how you’re different from that other one. People’d bring it up and he’d close his notebook, say thanks, and go away. It was in the papers. You probably saw it and forgot already. They haven’t forgotten here.”

His voice had become low, almost menacing. He looked up from his bowl of clam juice and bread, cast a quick, wary glance about the room, and lowered his voice even more. His story was interrupted repeatedly by the busboy removing shells, the woman in red slacks bringing more clams, other customers who greeted him, the arrival of more beer, his own long silences as he pondered what to say or stopped to eat again. It took him over an hour.

Two sisters, Beth and Louise Dworkin, had moved to the coast ten years ago, he said. Beth was fifty-three, Louise forty-three. Neither had ever married. They had been schoolteachers in Sacramento until they moved to Orick to start their own boarding school for children up to the sixth grade. Some children were left with them for a week at a time only, some for a season, some a year.

“They hired a music teacher, another teacher to help out, a bus driver for field trips—just like any school. And they made out like bandits, that’s for sure. Then the trouble started.” J.C.’s dark blue eyes looked black and dull.

“Around Christmas most of the kids went home, but a bunch of them stayed on up there over the holidays. A week before Christmas, four years ago, one of the little girls, eleven years old, was found wandering in the woods stark naked and crazy as a bedbug. Gibbering, screaming. A bunch of college kids spotted her. Two of the guys took off after her. She was really crazy, fighting, screaming. Anyway, she got loose and ran to the cliff and went over the side.”

The college kids had gone to the police, and about the same time the Dworkin sisters had called to report the little girl’s disappearance. Their shock at hearing about the death was complete, and they talked about sending the rest of the children home and closing down the school for a while, or maybe even forever, but people talked them out of it. Other children were acting strangely, but the doctor called it hysteria. Beth had developed severe headaches, and he said that was stress related. With Christmas at hand, sick kids, a sick teacher, it was more than the doctor could cope with, and he was due for a couple of weeks in Hawaii, so he tended to dismiss all the symptoms as hysteria, effects of the unfortunate death that no one was responsible for. It would pass, he reassured Louise, as soon as the new term began and things got back to normal, and he left on his planned vacation. Another doctor in Orick was on call for the school, but no one knew him well, and somehow no one ever got around to calling him. Christmas came and went; the disturbances continued, maybe got worse. From then on the entire affair was too cloudy to make sense of, J.C. said.

The young teacher the sisters had hired returned, the music teacher came back, children began arriving for the new year, and to all appearances things were getting back to normal. Then the music teacher vanished. She went to the school on a Wednesday as usual, took a walk in the woods, and was never seen again. A groundskeeper vanished. A few days later a deliveryman went to the police to report that there had been terrible screams coming from the upper floor of the school, and that Louise had acted so crazy that he had been afraid of her. She had started to pull off her clothes, was talking obscenities, crazy.

J.C. Crandle sat up straighter when he neared the end of the story, as if telling it had relieved him of a great burden. “So,” he said, “when they got up there, the sisters were both batty. One kid was dead, beaten to death. Two were missing and never did show up. The music teacher never turned up. The other young teacher was found smothered to death. Out of twenty-six kids who had either returned, or hadn’t gone away, eleven had locked themselves in one of the upper rooms for three days, the rest were all molested, beaten, tortured, missing, crazy, or dead. That was our trouble, Charlie. And two weeks later when the hotel burned, your guy thought it was funny that no one wanted to talk about
that
!”

“You weren’t here then?” Charlie asked.

“No.” He took a deep breath. “You’ll find out about this, too. Tonight, tomorrow. As soon as I leave, if you’re still here in the restaurant. The doctor who went on to Hawaii came home from his vacation and went up to the school and hanged himself. He was my father.”

Charlie remained after J.C. left. He drank two cups of coffee and finally went back to the Seaview Motel. He had been able to get a room there, the same motel that Byron Weston would stay at the following night. Post crisis therapy, he thought, parking at the motel. Post crisis therapy. He was not ready for bed; it would be hours before he would be ready. He went to his room, placed a call to Constance, and was glad that she was not yet back from dinner. He left a message and went out to walk on the beach in the cold dark night.

Chapter 6

The next afternoon
Charlie walked to the
highest reach of the point, the site of the burned-out
hotel. He preferred to view the ocean, its vast expanse spread out before him. Actually, there was nothing to see of the hotel. The fire had been thorough in its destruction, and wrecking crews had bulldozed the debris and filled in the cavity that had been a basement and subbasement. Now saplings were growing in the driveway, in gaps in the brickwork of a former winding path. He stood at the edge of the cliff, leaning on a chest-high stone wall capped with smooth limestone.

The hotel had boasted extensive formal gardens, paths, trails to the beach below—it must have been something in its day, he thought, offering as it had this view of the sun vanishing into what looked like a snowdrift on the horizon. Fog moving in. Dense fog the night it burned, he remembered. The whole point must have glowed like an aurora. And no one had come until it was too late. He scowled at the ocean, which was turning gray now, decorated with ruffles of white foam.

“Mr. Meiklejohn?”

He started, and turned to see an old man at the end of the driveway. At his nod the old man advanced. He wore a baseball cap, a heavy sweater, what looked like sailor pants, and boots. His hair was white and long, hanging out from under the cap, blowing in the wind. His face was deeply seamed and brown.

“Burry Barlow,” the man said as he drew near, extending his hand.

His hand was as hard and dry as driftwood, his grasp firm. Charlie leaned against the wall and studied him. Barlow was studying him just as intently.

“Heard you were looking for me most of the day,” he said finally and turned to gaze out at the ocean.

“That’s right,” Charlie said. “I’m investigating the hotel fire. Why’d they let it burn, Mr. Barlow?”

The old man glanced at him, then chuckled. “Don’t beat around the bush, do you?”

“Might be the only one in the whole damn county who doesn’t,” Charlie admitted.

Barlow’s chuckle sounded again and he nodded. “We use your little book down at the station, you know. The manual. Pretty good stuff in it. Good training manual.”

Charlie waited.

“You talked to J.C.,” Barlow said after a moment. “Course, he wasn’t here until after his dad hanged himself, so he doesn’t know what it was like. Bedlam, Mr. Meiklejohn. It was like Bedlam.”

“The hotel didn’t burn until a couple of weeks after the trouble,” Charlie said bluntly. “No connection.”

“Maybe, maybe not. But the trouble hadn’t stopped yet, either. Mildred Searles ran her car off the cliff, and Carey Duke went for a walk in the ocean and never came out. That was after the sisters were put away. Maybe we still had trouble, Mr. Meiklejohn.”

“Tell me about the night of the fire,” Charlie said harshly.

“Right. I was dispatcher, as they must’ve told you around town. Haven’t gone out myself for maybe ten years, but I keep a hand in. Know every road in the county like it was my back yard.” He continued to study the ocean as if searching for whales. “Four in the morning got a call from Michael Chubb. Said the school was on fire. That’s all. He could see it on his way down to the docks. No one knew if they’d be able to go out fishing—the fog, you know—but they went down to the docks to hang around, see if it lifted when the sun came up.” He took a deep breath. “I went out with my glasses and looked over the point here, just a little glow, no more than that, and I thought it was the school, too. We all did. And we wanted it to burn, Mr. Meiklejohn. We surely did want it to burn. In fact, we took it for granted that one of us, someone hurt real bad by all the trouble, put the torch to it. Someone like Joe Eglin, maybe. Poor Mrs. Eglin screamed for three days. You hear about that? She stopped screaming finally and hasn’t said a word or made a sound that anyone knows about ever since. If Joe had put the torch to it, there wasn’t a one of us who’d blame him. That’s how it was.”

“When you found out it was the wrong building, you lied about it anyway,” Charlie said bitterly. He felt tired, the way he used to feel in New York after prowling through ashes and ruins, even if only for a few minutes. The thought of fire made him weary.

Burry Barlow shrugged and looked over the site of the hotel. “Don’t know that it was the wrong building,” he said slowly. “The trouble stopped after it burned. Couple of people said they slept for the first time in weeks; we all felt like something heavy and bad had been taken off our backs. Besides, by the time the men got up here, it was too far gone. About all’s they could do was watch.”

‘”Trouble with a hose; electric outage silenced the alarm; you stumbled and were winded for another ten minutes, delaying the calls… .’ You committed perjury, you know. All of you did. Why are you telling me now?”

“You’re one of us, Mr. Meiklejohn, a fire fighter just like us. Didn’t seem right, when you knew anyway. But, of course, the record doesn’t change, and I’m an old man with a senile mind, memory shot to hell and gone. But you should know.”

Charlie grunted; he was one of them, all right. “See any strangers around that night?” Barlow shook his head. “Did you come up for the fire? What was it like when you got here?”

“I came,” Barlow said. “It was set, all right, and a good job too. Started up on the second floor, interior room, burned up and down a long time before it reached the outer walls. Funny thing, Mr. Meiklejohn, you know how things sort of lean out with an explosion, point to the center by pointing away is how I think of it.”

“An explosion?” Charlie said. “What was in there to explode?”

“Not an explosion,” Barlow said meditative
ly. “I’d say an implosion. A vacuum formed and
just sucked stuff into itself. Big beams, things like that pointed all right, leaned in toward the middle.” He looked at Charlie shrewdly. “Any explanation for something like that?”

“No. What else? You might as well tell me all of it.”

“Yep, there’s more.” He slouched against the wall, his back to the sea. “I stood right here when it burned. No wind, no rain, just the fog and the fire. Pretty. You know how that is.”

Charlie nodded. Fires were the most beautiful things in the world; every fire fighter knew that.

“Yep. Pretty in the fog. Next day, when it cooled off, me and J—me and another guy came up and went in. Found most of two skeletons. Not all, just most.”

Charlie felt a chill that could have come from the ocean; a steady wind was now blowing in hard, it was very cold. “Go on,” he said harshly.

“Uh huh. We talked, started to call the sheriff, talked some more, decided to call in the state police instead. Then the other guy got sick and we talked some more and finally we buried them again. They’re in there. I said a few words, and that was that. No more trouble, we decided, no more trouble. They were good and dead. For all we could tell they could’ve been dead for years. So we buried them.”

“Males? Females? Children? Who were they?”

“A male, six-footer. A woman, five five maybe.”

“Could anyone have driven up here before the fire?”

“We had to cut the chain across the access road the night of the fire. Rusted together. Well, that’s all I know, Mr. Meiklejohn. That’s the whole story now. And I’ll deny every word of it if it gets out. Thanks for listening.” He hunched down against the wind and started to walk away.

“Barlow,” Charlie called after him, “thanks.”

The old man waved his hand, but did not look
back.

In his motel room Charlie poured a drink, turned on the television news, and sat staring at it without seeing or hearing a thing. He had driven past the school on his way to the hotel site and had paid no attention to it; he reconstructed the trip. The school grounds and hotel grounds shared a common fence, the buildings a little over a mile apart. In the fog it probably
had
seemed as if the school were burning, especially to people in town who desperately wanted the school to burn. At least he understood now why the volunteers had been in no rush. He reviewed the various accounts of the “trouble.” The music teacher had vanished, and a groundskeeper. The skeletons in the hotel? Why? He drank deeply and put the empty glass down. It was nearly seven and he knew he would get very drunk if he did not eat soon. He wanted to call Constance, but decided she probably had gone to dinner by now. He missed her.

He had left his window open a crack; the wind moaned as it entered. He got up and closed the window. The problem was, he decided, he had let them mix up his fire and their “trouble” in his mind, and he couldn’t separate them again. And that was because he was too hungry. Abruptly he left his room for the motel dining room. If Byron got there before he finished, fine; if not, that was also fine. He stopped at the desk to leave a message, and at that moment Constance and Byron Weston entered.

His laughter was as spontaneous and unguarded as a child’s when he saw her, ran to hug and kiss her. Ten minutes later the three of them were seated in the dining room.

“I finished by one and we were both ready to leave, so we left. This afternoon and tomorrow the feelies are in control of things,” Constance said, holding his hand on the table.

“And touchies and yellers,” Byron said gravely.

“And yowlers and pacers and leaders,” Constance added, laughing. She and Byron had played a word game describing various therapies during the last hour of the trip. She gave Charlie’s hand a squeeze and let go to pick up her menu. “Enough of this levity. I’m starved.”

Eventually, they had their food and Charlie was content to listen to Byron talk about his post crisis therapy.

“Are you treating J.C. Crandle?” Charlie asked.

“You know him?”

“Just met him.”

“The answer is no. Actually he wasn’t here, you see, until the crisis was over. His father might have been a candidate for our therapy, but not the son. He came home mad as hell, wanting to hit someone. Still does, I bet. But he’s not the victim we’re out to find and help.”

“How about Burry Barlow?”

Byron shook his head. “I don’t even know him. What was his connection?”

“Damned if I know. Just wondered.” He ate in silence for a moment, then asked, “What about the sisters who went wonko? And poor Mrs. Eglin?”

“You’ve been getting around, haven’t you?” Byron asked. His gaze was a bit less friendly than it had been minutes ago. “Look, our whole purpose is to help those who were affected by the outburst, not those who committed the crimes. They’re in a hospital, the state hospital I assume, although I don’t know. They probably had electroshock therapy, drug therapy, God knows what all. Not my province, any of that. As for Mrs. Eglin, her condition has nothing to do with any of this affair. She must have been a prime candidate for a schizophrenic break for years. It just happened, the way it does sometimes for no reason that we can ever find. But it is unrelated to the matter we are concerned with.”

That was when Charlie began to listen with his public face on, Constance realized. He looked bland—maybe even a little dull—made the right sort of comments at the right times, and was using the greater part of his mind on his own thoughts. And Byron did not suspect a thing, she also realized, with more than a little dismay.

Over coffee Byron asked her to meet with his group the next day, sit in on their discussion of the past month’s achievements. She started to turn him down with regrets, when Charlie said, “Why don’t you do it, honey? I’m going to be tied up most of the day. Maybe you’ll even get an article out of it.”

Byron looked flustered for a second. Disingenuously, Charlie asked, “Would you mind if she wrote something about your work here?”

“Not at all,” Byron said then. “Of course, you understand that I have written about our work in some detail myself.”

“No doubt, but her work does get published in the damnedest places.
Harper’s
,
The New Yorker
, places like that.” Constance kicked him under the table and he smiled sweetly at her. “Would you like a brandy?”

“Just what was all that about?” she demanded later in their room. “He’s not a charlatan, for heaven’s sake! The work they’re doing is important and worthwhile!”

“I expect it is,” he said, taking her into his arms. “I missed you. Your hair smells good. Anyway,” he said, when she pushed him away, still glaring at him, “I wanted to let you ask questions, and if he thinks there’s a chance of publicity, he’ll welcome questions. Publicity is money, right? Grant money, state money, whatever. Otherwise, he might have wanted to steer by himself, the way he did at dinner. I just got out of the way and let him take over, and that’s what he did. Right?”

She took a deep breath, then nodded. “Right. He does that.”

“So he thinks I’m the dumb cop and you’re the brains of the family. And he’s right, of course. Get him to show you the records, if you can. Find out who’s on his patient list, and what their connection was with the school, and if there was any connection with the hotel at all. Does anyone have nightmares about the hotel, the fire, anything to do with it, that sort of thing. Okay? What made him choose some people and not others for his list? Why not poor Mrs. Eglin or J.C., for example.”

She was watching him closely. “Do you think there’s a connection between the madness at the school and the hotel fire?”

He shook his head. “No. I don’t think anything yet. Too early. I’m just damned curious. And your hair does smell good. Let’s go to bed.”

Joe Eglin was twenty-eight; his wife Maria was twenty-five. She had not spoken, had not made a sound, had not moved of her own volition in four years. This much Charlie had learned from various people in town that morning. He had driven up into the hills and down a steep road, and had come to the fifteen acres that Joe farmed. It was a pretty setting, with redwoods high on the surrounding hills, pine trees in the valleys, ocher colored grasses, and a fast running stream. It appeared that there were millions of chickens and turkeys, geese and ducks, all running loose, most of them on the narrow gravel road. Joe admitted Charlie to his living room with reluctance. The noise of the fowls outside made it impossible to speak and be heard until the men were in the house with the door closed. Charlie had called, had said he wanted to talk about an insurance claim. Apparently that was all Joe Eglin had needed to hear.