We had been there five minutes or so when Walt Bascomb put in an appearance. He saw us on the porch as he came past, but he did not say anything to either of us; he just went straight over to the parking circle and got into the '72 Ford. I noticed then that Cody had not returned with his Italian sports job, and that the new Cadillac was also absent.
As Bascomb took the Ford up onto the county road, I said to Harry, “That Caddy I saw when I came in—does it belong to the Jerrolds?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Why?”
“Well, it's gone now, and I'm wondering if they went out together or one of them alone. He wasn't in much condition for driving, but I'd like it better if he went by himself. If she went, and stays out late, one of us ought to be around to check up when she gets back.”
He nodded grimly. “We could take a walk over to their cabin now and see if anybody's home.”
“That's probably a good idea. If Mrs. Jerrold is there alone, I'll pull an excuse to leave the two of you together and you can get that talk over with.”
But when we got over to Six, there was nothing for either of us to do. The place was deserted.
Harry said as we started back to the lake, “This whole thing is playing hell with my nerves.”
“It'll work out,” I said.
“I'm trying to believe that. Listen, I don't feel like sitting around again, waiting. What do you say we take one of the skiffs for a run around the lake?”
“Sure,” I said, “I'm for that.”
We went out onto the pier and climbed down into a skiff, Harry taking the tiller. I untied the painter and got the bow turned and pushed us out while he cranked up the outboard. Then I sat facing him on the bow seat, and we planed away to the north at quarter speed, running in close to shore.
It was the time of night that is especially fine in mountain country like this. The air was cooler yet on the water—the deep stillness broken only by the hum of the outboard and the occasional buzz of a mosquito. Bass jumped desultorily near the rule grass shoreward; the red colorations had faded out of the sky and been replaced by the kind of peach-hued glow that presages another hot one for tomorrow; night shadows gathered in the denser sections of forest. The air smelled of pine resin and cold fresh water and, faintly, gasoline.
I could feel myself relaxing somewhat as we followed the rim of the lake, north to northwest to west, headed directly toward the falling lip of the sun like moths toward the dying flame of a candle. I put my hand over the side and let it drag through the water and kick up spray, the way kids do. Harry gave me a wan smile, and I gave one back to him, and I thought then of a night on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, Harry and me and two nurses from Hickam Field out on a borrowed sailboat off Diamond Head a few days after the Japanese surrender, drunk on warm beer and the end of the war, capsizing when a stiff breeze came up and then getting rescued by a Navy patrol boat—and I mentioned all of that, raising my voice over the sound of the engine. He laughed and nodded, and we began to jog our memories aloud, and for a few short minutes it was as if both of us were back in our twenties, those good carefree postwar years.
Only then, suddenly, Harry stopped talking in mid-sentence and jerked a little on his seat and stared past my left shoulder at something behind and above me. He said “Jesus Christ!” and the past lost itself again and I turned on my seat to follow the direction of his gaze, saw instantly what he had seen.
It was a car—no, a van, a big one—and it was up on the bluff that rose off the southwest shore, maybe five hundred yards from where we were in the skiff; but not just on the bluff, coming forward and
off
the damned thing, coming right off the edge as I looked and sailing out straight as an arrow until its back wheels cleared the earth and then dipping, nose slanting down, falling at a forty-five-degree angle. The front bumper hit the hard bare slope and turned the machine in a loose somersault, and a second later the sound of impact reverberated on the dusky air; then the van crashed down on its top on the water and rule grass at the base of the bluff, spray geysering up twenty feet or more, the sound of that impact carrying hollowly across the lake. Finally it bobbed in the disturbed lake and tilted over on its passenger side and floated there like a badly wounded animal.
Even before the last echoes of the crash died away, Harry had the outboard open full-throttle and we were skimming and bouncing toward the van. I grabbed onto the skiff's gunwales with both hands, glanced back at him and saw his mouth set hard, the same astonishment in his eyes that must have been in mine. The van kept rocking gently back and forth in the swells, but the water looked too shallow at that point for there to be any immediate danger of it sinking. It was floating nearly upright now, and as we came in on it I could see that there was printing on its wet white body.
The printing said
Vahram Terzian—Fine Oriental Rugs and Carpets:
it was the same van beside which I had parked in The Pines that afternoon.
Harry brought the skiff up to it on an angle across the driver's door, cutting power, throttling into reverse to hold us steady. I stood up with my feet spread wide for balance and reached out and caught onto the door handle. When I tugged down on it, nothing happened; it was jam-locked from the fall. The window was rolled up, too, and I had to lean my body forward, bracing it against the door, to get a look inside.
What I saw put tracers of cold between my shoulder blades. There was one person inside the cab—a small nut-brown man with black hair that was dyed now a bright ugly crimson along the top of his skull. He was lying down on the floorboards, wedged between the steering column and the seat, and pressed in against his left shoulder was the upper half of an iron lug wrench.
Behind me Harry said, “Anybody in there?”
“Yeah, one guy.”
“Can we get him out?”
“Door's jammed. But it doesn't matter.”
“Why doesn't it?”
“Because he's dead,” I said.
“Jesus,” Harry said. “You sure?”
“I'm sure.” And I was thinking that both of us had been half-expecting violence to break loose at any time here in the bucolic quiet of Eden Lake; had been as prepared for it as anybody ever is. But neither of us had been prepared for it to come like this, from a totally unexpected, unrelated source, and in a way even more brutal than any we might have anticipated.
“He was dead before the van went off that bluff up there,” I said. “Somebody caved in his head with a lug wrench.”
We beached the skiff at the foot of the slope and climbed up and went over onto the bluff. It was graveyard-still up there; nothing stirred anywhere in the hot, windless dusk. You could see the tracks made by the van's tires in the grassy earth, and they started back where a rutted trail hooked away through night-shadowed pine forest. There were no other tracks of any kind.
I said, “Where does that trail lead?”
“Connects with a fire road about a hundred yards back,” Harry said. “That one loops around the lake and picks up the county road into The Pines.”
“Used much?”
“Some. Tourists and local kids, mostly.”
“But not around this time of day.”
“Not usually, no.”
“So whoever did it probably got away without being seen.”
“If he isn't still around here somewhere.”
“Not much chance of that, as much noise as we've made.”
“What the hell could it be about?”
I shook my head.
We walked to the trail and followed it a short way into the woods. The ground there was hard-packed, covered with pine needles, and you could not tell if another vehicle had come along it or parked on it recently. The only indications of human presence—and human folly—seemed to be a scatter of rusting beer cans and the paper wrappings from fast-food chicken and hamburgers and at least two used condoms tied off like deflated carnival balloons. Lots of things lost here, I thought grimly. Virginity, hours and nights, laughter, another unspoiled piece of nature. And now you could add a man's life to the list.
I stopped to listen, but there was still nothing to hear; the area was deserted now, all right. Then my eye caught and held on something multicolored lying on the grassy hump between the ruts a few yards ahead. I went up there and sat on my haunches and looked at the thing without touching it. It was a couple of feet long, iridescent green and gold ornamented with eyelike markings in rich dark blue—and it had no more business being there at Eden Lake than a murdered dealer in Oriental rugs and carpets.
“Peacock feather,” Harry said beside me.
“Yeah.”
“Funny thing to find in a place like this.”
“I was thinking the same.”
“Could it've belonged to whoever did for the guy in the van?”
“Maybe,” I said. I leaned down close to the feather, still not touching it. Free of dust or pine needles or water stains; colors sharp, vane smooth and new-looking. “One thing's sure—it hasn't been here very long.”
Harry frowned as I stood up, “Doesn't make much sense,” he said. “Why would anybody carry around a peacock feather?”
“Yeah,” I said, “why?”
When we came out onto the bluff again, the last reflections of sunset were gone from the lake and the water had turned a dusty gray color. The sky was a velvety purple, studded with hard un-winking stars and the fingernail slice of a gibbous moon. You could tell that it was not going to get any cooler than it was now until the hours just before dawn.
I said, “You'd better take the skiff back and report this to the county sheriff.”
“What about you?”
“I'll stay here and keep watch.”
“You sure? It'll take a couple of hours.”
“I don't mind if you don't.”
“Whatever you say, buddy.”
I went downslope with him and held the skiff while he got in, and then shoved it off. When he jerked the outboard to life, mosquitoes and gnats gliding through the heavy stillness seemed to dart away in all directions, like shards of the suddenly broken quiet. I stood at the water's edge and watched until he had the skiff turned and the throttle opened up; then I sat down in the grass to wait and think a little.
The dead man in the van, and the Oriental rug angle, and the peacock feather, made the whole thing a can of worms—the county sheriff's, not mine or Harry's. Guesswork wouldn't buy me anything, then, and I had enough on my mind as it was: the results of the sputum test, and Harry's troubles at the camp. The thing to do was to stay aloof from what had happened here.
Sure.
At the base of the bluff, fifty yards away, the van sat motionless among the rule reeds, canted forward slightly onto its passenger side; all four wheels were submerged. The white body gleamed cold and pale in the gathering darkness.
Like marble, I thought. Marble slab, marble crypt.
A feeling of uneasiness began to creep over me, and it had nothing much to do with sitting alone in the dark. I could not stop thinking about the small nut-brown man lying over there with the top of his head shattered; in my mind I could still see his face, the staring eyes and the waxy features void of life force.
I had seen death before, too much of it—kids with their bodies torn open and limbs blown off by grenades and mortar shells, a woman with forty-two stab wounds in her face and torso, the living room of a house in San Francisco's Sunset District in which a man had gone berserk and taken an axe to his wife and family. I had never become immune to the sight of it, as some cops did—that was one of the reasons why I had finally resigned from the force—but I
had
learned how to block it out of my mind after a while, how to keep my attitude totally objective. Death was an abstract, death was a natural phenomenon, death was inevitable; accept it, and don't think about it because it might just interfere with the living of your life. Sound psychology, the only kind that made any sense for a man in my profession.
Only now that I was in its presence again, touched by it, I could not seem to erect the old objective barrier. Death had become personal, an immediate threat, a specter with which I had to deal directly. In what was left of the small nut-brown man I saw myself in a few months, or at best a few years, lying dead somewhere, nothing but an empty shell that had once contained a man.
And what of the soul?
All of us are conditioned from childhood to believe that the souls of the righteous will live on in an afterlife and be given immortality in a corner of some inexplicable non-place called heaven. So you go along for fifty years, calling yourself a Christian even though you don't much hold with organized religion, and you hide behind your objectivity, and you tell yourself that when your time comes you'll be ready. But then the time sneaks up on you, looms suddenly and dismayingly imminent, and you realize you're not ready at all—nor maybe will you ever be ready—because when you come face to face with your own mortality your beliefs no longer seem so simple and strong and certain.
Without the unshakable faith of the True Believer, you begin to wonder. And the prospect of a disembodied, unaware drifting through eternity becomes somehow more haunting and even less appealing than the other alternative—that death is the end, and when you die your soul dies with you. Nothingness is comprehensible; every time you go to sleep you experience some of what nothingness is like. But how can you begin to comprehend the mystical concepts and rewards of the Judeo-Christian ethic?