The Croning (8 page)
“Melodrama, day-o.” Agent Barton leaned against the door jam. A tall man, he appeared huge because the doors and halls were tacked up in the ’20s when economy of design was king. “What did he say?”
Agent Crane wiped his hands.
An antique clock ticked and clicked on an antique dresser; a bulb sizzled in a brass lamp. There were many framed pictures; generations of them, arranged by columns. The pictures existed under foggy glass, subjects made spectral by shadows, their abrupt irrelevance to any living being. Below Agent Crane’s shiny wingtips, the tattered throw rug and warped floorboards, came dim, aquatic creaks and bumps of other agents on the ground level. Men in crisp suits knocking about with flashlights and cameras.
“Hey, Tommy,” Agent Barton said.
“Yeah.”
“Did he
say
something?”
“Yeah.” Mr. Crane finished wiping his hands. He didn’t know what to do with the cloth, so he held it between thumb and forefinger. Something crashed downstairs; nervous laughter followed. A dog barked in the yard. “Goddamn it. Fifteen minutes sooner…”
“Fifteen minutes sooner he might’ve plugged you or me instead if himself. Want coffee?” Agent Barton didn’t wait for an answer; he went to the dresser and used the phone to brief Section. Section had alerted the local authorities, would coordinate the necessary details. After disconnecting with Section, he took a deep breath, visibly composed himself for the call to their field supervisor. It was a short conversation—
Yes, ma’am. No, ma’am. We’ll be back tomorrow in the PM, ma’am
. He shuddered, smiled in a perfunctory manner. “We’re done here. Want coffee? Let’s get some coffee.”
Agent Crane nodded. The techs would scour the room, ants on jelly. Maybe there was a note, a recording. Probably nothing. He followed his partner into the narrow hall, down the narrow stairs. They acknowledged the other men, the ones with the gloves and the specimen bags.
Once they were in the car and crunching slowly along the gravel lane, Agent Crane began to relax. He lighted a cigarette. Bony poplars clawed at the stars. Clouds blacked a steadily widening swath of the lower heavens. Three cruisers from the Chelan County sheriff’s office met them head on, ghosted by, trailing rooster tails of dust. Red and blue flashes wobbled through the empty fields and imprinted behind Agent Crane’s eyelids.
“What’s with you?” Agent Barton said.
“I couldn’t make it out.”
“Couldn’t make out what? What Plimpton said?”
“Yeah.”
“Looked like he had something on his mind.”
“Did it.”
“Yep. Hey, there’s that truck stop on 97. Burger and coffee.”
“OK.” Agent Crane cracked the window. Agent Barton hated it when he smoked in the car. Agent Crane lighted another. His head felt thick, felt like a lead ball. The adrenaline was seeping from his system, leaving him shaky and depressed.
They made the highway. Every mile reduced Agent Crane’s sensation of dread, until what remained curled in the pit of his stomach. It hit him this way sometimes, but not often, not in years. This wasn’t the suicide, either. Plimpton was a photo, a paragraph in a dossier. A pathology report now. Meat.
No, it was something else, some
indefinable
thing. The other team members had felt it too, judging by their flared nostrils and unhappy smiles. Agent Barton felt it as well; he drove too fast. Barton always drove fast when he was in a mood. Maybe the team
would
uncover something. Maybe there was a secret stash of chemicals, guns, incriminating documents. Bomb-making supplies. Agent Crane didn’t want to go back and hang around. He preferred to wait for the report.
He said, “You think
she
knew?”
“She called it. She must’ve known something.”
“Could be a coincidence…”
“And what do you say about coincidence?”
“Fuck coincidence.”
“Right. So she knew, she was right about that much. But, if they don’t find anything hot, it’s going to look like another circle jerk.”
Barton said, “You think they’re going to post us in Alaska, huh? Don’t worry—Alaska’s pretty nice in the fall, long as you pack some electric underwear.”
They drove in silence for a while. Then, Crane said, “I wish I could’ve made out what Plimpton was trying to say.”
“Uh-huh.” Barton’s eyes were slits in the dashboard glow.
“He…slurred. Mumbled. You know.”
“Probably didn’t see you, Tommy.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Brains all over the wall. He didn’t see you.”
“He was pretty gone.”
“That’s what I told Section.”
“Good.”
“Good. Not our problem.”
“We got enough of our own.”
“Yep.”
The men chuckled, and now it shrank to a sliver, the wedge of ice in Agent Crane’s gut. Later, after a greasy dinner at the Rattlesnake Prairie truck stop, they checked into a no-tell motel, left a 5am wakeup call with the night clerk.
Crane donned his bifocals and burned the midnight oil, scanning a briefcase load of papers, including geological surveys on the substrata of the Wenatchee Valley region and a corresponding environmental report documenting its effects on the local ecosystems. Then there was the twenty-page compilation of homicide, assault and missing persons statistics. This latter read like a segment from the
Detroit Free Press
crime insert rather than the description of an agrarian county populated by vineyards, orchards and farms. Eventually he switched off the bedside lamp, sat against the wall, sipping bottled water. Barton snored across the room. Agent Crane couldn’t banish Plimpton’s red mouth from his mind. Freezing rain pelted the roof. The wind returned, hungry. The tall lamp in the parking lot emitted a cheerless glow and at some point it wavered and snuffed like a blown candle.
Black.
Right before Agent Crane went down for the count, the night terrors of childhood rushed over his skin and paralyzed him on the cheap bed in the unlit room. A door squeaked softly as it swung to and fro, to and fro, and stopped. The blinds shivered as if beneath the faintest stir of breath. He was a child in dread of the yawning closet door, a grown man pinioned to a bed, a federal agent leaning over a dying man in a rundown farmhouse, and his personal gloaming approached from all points at once.
Plimpton whispered,
They Who Wait love you, Tommy
.
Agent Crane inhaled to scream, but the blood was already pouring in.
The Rabbits Running in the Ditch
(Now)
1.
A
utumn was around the corner after a scorching summer. Of late, the days remained dry and hot, while evenings saw starry skies and crisp temperatures. Don wandered to the yard some evenings and watched the star fields blink and burn, his heart filled with a profound sense of disquiet he couldn’t identify. The cold impassive stars didn’t bother him so much as the gaps between them did. He was old, though. Old and unsteady in mind and body. A real flakey dude, according to his loving wife.
The feeling was always gone by morning.
During the last official week of summer, he dusted off his beloved 1968 Firebird and squired Michelle into town for dinner and drinks as an early sixtieth anniversary present. Don had booked reservations at the
Inn of Old Wales
, a traditional Welsh pub and restaurant incongruously transplanted inside a refurbished Spanish mission, half an hour from their farmhouse in the Waddell Valley. Due to a combination of circumstances and her reticence to appear anywhere within a thousand yards of a tavern, this was but the second occasion he’d managed to drag her to the inn.
It was a now or never sort of proposition. The twins would arrive for an impromptu vacation in the morning: Kurt and his new wife, the princess from Hong Kong; and Holly with a girlfriend who accompanied her every summer on various adventures. Next week, Don was scheduled to moderate lectures regarding the Cryptozoic Geomorphology exhibit at the Redfield Memorial Museum of Natural History, and Michelle would leave for an anthropology summit in Turkey, the latest destination of her annual Eastern pilgrimage. Don wished like hell he could hop a ride with his wife; he dreaded moderating the panel of stuffed-shirt academic rivals, all of them with axes to grind and scores to settle, before an audience of, well, dozens, if one included the light and sound technicians, the caterers and custodians.
Don and Michelle took the impending hubbub in stride. Theirs were lives characterized by steady, placid routine, punctuated with moments of absolute anarchy. Hers was a formidable presence in the field of comparative anthropology, due in part to no mean skill at writing brilliantly flamboyant papers and securing lucrative grants through savvy and guile. Her detractors grumbled that she wasn’t likely to depart the game unless it was feet first, and probably in the belly of an anaconda, or after succumbing to some dreadful foreign scourge such as malaria. Meanwhile, Don served the Evergreen State University as a geophysics professor emeritus.
The drive went pleasantly enough, even if the Firebird’s brakes were tight and Don tended to overcorrect on the bends—he’d packed the beast away a decade past and only fired it up for a yearly shakedown cruise. His wife preferred he stuck to the Volvo or their minivan, especially now that he wore thick glasses and his reflexes were nearly shot to pieces and he tended to forget things, although that part had gone on for several decades, at least. She claimed it was against her policy to ride around in a muscle car with a octogenarian at the wheel.
We must hurry, my sweet, or the Grand Prix shall start without us
, he’d said when he zoomed up to the front door. She frowned in dismay at his prescription sunglasses, driving gloves, and the checkered scarf wrapped around his neck—which he’d worn just to get her goat. Don eventually coaxed Michelle into the car by champing a rose in his teeth and patting the passenger seat.
Oh, you old fool
, she said, tittering into her hand.
They crossed into Olympia under orange skies, and followed potholed avenues through historic neighborhoods, winding serpentine along the ridges; then, racing between the majestic shadows of one-hundred-twenty-year-old maples. The road continued until the coastline curved and separated from the city proper.
Michelle gasped happily when the inn hove into view atop a bald crest several switchbacks above their rapidly moving car. “Oh, my—I’d forgotten how lovely it is.” Her sunglasses reflected the fires of sunset. She wore a kerchief and bonnet like Vivian Leigh.
He cast sneaking glances at her, admiring the exquisite beauty she’d matured into, feeling a pang of lust that he hadn’t shaken since their first date, the first time she’d lifted her dress and wrapped her powerful legs around his waist—and he belayed that line of thought immediately lest they fly off the road into a ditch due to his amorous distraction.
At eighty-two and a half, Michelle conceded to a solitary vanity: her long, dark hair had bleached dead white and she preferred to disguise that fact in public. The scars, on the other hand, didn’t affect her self-confidence. Her face and torso bore marks from injuries suffered during a jeep wreck. Years and years ago, while on an expedition into the heart of Siberia, her driver flipped their vehicle on a muddy road in the foothills two hundred miles from the nearest town. She’d nearly died on the forty-hour trip to the hospital and no amount of surgery ever disguised the disfigurement—a jagged, white valley that slashed from her left temple, across her breast and arced to its terminus at her hip bone. Don was consulting a mining firm in the wilds of the Olympic Peninsula and didn’t receive news of the accident and Michelle’s brush with death for nearly a week. Yet another hazy interlude of his past that he’d resigned himself to never fully recollecting. Perhaps it was better to forget.
Don smiled at Michelle to disperse his sentimental melancholy and talked about their destination. He’d been meeting Argyle Arden, Robby Gold and Turk Standish and the rest of the boys here for fifteen years to drink and play at darts. In 1911, the mission had been transported, brick by brick, from San Francisco and reassembled at its current perch above the Olympia Harbor. It was soon converted to a Roman Catholic priory at the behest of local founding father and resident eccentric, Murray Blanchard III.
The building changed hands numerous times during the Depression, and again after the turmoil of the ’40s and then sat vacant until 1975 when Earlagh Teague bought it from the city for a song. The Welshman, with the assistance of a dynamo wife and five doughty sons, transformed the relic into something of a monument; a cross between fine contemporary dining and old world hostelry. Inside, it was vaulted and airy. Balconies formed a wide crescent above the oak bar and the scatter of small dining tables and booths. The darts room lay beyond an arch just off the main gallery, sporting the requisite cork targets and a set of shopworn pool tables. There, a handful of bawdy old salts and genteel ruffians congregated daily, slugging beer and laying wagers on their shooting hands or whatever sporting event might be televised on the ancient black and white.
Miller, party of two
, Don told the hostess, a mildly impatient girl with preternaturally rosy cheeks. She was new; staff came and went with regular frequency. They were escorted to a table on the northeast balcony with a lovely bay window view of the distant swath of darkening water and countryside. Tiny lights of sloops and barges bobbed on the harbor, glittered on the wooded hillsides where deep green gave way to streaks of red and gold, and approaching night.
They ordered a bottle of wine. The waiter lighted candles in elegant wrought iron sconces. A few couples drifted in, trailing murmurs of conversation and laughter. Finely dressed seniors; the men wore oversized watches and crisp silk ties; the women were decked in stately dresses, feathered hats and pearl necklaces; and everybody’s dentures snowy white and aglow with petroleum jelly. Below, on a small dais, a white-bearded fiddler in a plaid jacket and a bowler tuned his instrument and began a Celtic jig. Michelle sipped her wine. She studied the pennants and heraldic shields, and the stained glass mosaic of Mary that reflected its colors across nearby tables.