THE HAUNTED CAR
As SHIELDS had assumed, the accident blocked the road. At least three vehicles had been involved, he decided: a rusted-out Ford, a van, and a farm truck. The truck had apparently been carrying cattle—crestfallen black steers appeared from time to time in the headlights of the ISP cars and firetrucks, only to be shooed away by state troopers. One of the steers was hobbling on three legs.
“Willie, it’s her!”
“It’s who?” he asked.
“Lisa, the girl from the camp. The counselor. That’s her, on that horse. I wonder what she’s doing here.”
“Rubber-necking, I suppose.”
“Well, I ought to say hello to her. My shoes got all muddy getting Wrangler into the car anyway.” Ann was opening her door as she spoke. She got out and waved.
“Yoo-hoo!
Lisa!”
Lisa looked toward her, waved, and neck-reined Boomer, who came trotting over. His mistress leaned from the saddle. “Mrs. Schindler? Is that you?”
“Yes, and I’ve got news for you. Willie, aren’t you going to come out and say hello?”
Lisa dismounted and offered her hand. “Lisa Solomon, Mr. Schindler. Pleased to meet you.”
“Will Shields,” Shields muttered.
“Lisa, we just took Wrangler to the hospital. Not Willie and I—”
“To the hospital, Mrs. Schindler?”
Shields could not see her well in the glare and darkness of the accident scene, but he thought she looked very small to ride such a big horse. As she voiced her question she became smaller still, or so it appeared.
“He was lying alongside the road—just lying there. We saw his horse running away, then I saw him in my lights. I couldn’t tell what had happened to him, but he bled
horribly.
We put him in back and brought him to the Trauma Center, and they put him right into intensive care. The doctor said he just about bled to death and it was a damned good thing I drove so fast. Willie taught me. Willie wanted to be a race driver once. Actually, he
was
, he raced his stock car and won some money that way, but when Mercedes was born he decided it was too dangerous and sold it.”
Lisa whispered, “He‘s—Wrangler’s—still alive?”
“Oh, yes. I’m sure—” Ann paused and gulped. “Lisa, he’s going to be fine. They’ll give him blood and everything.”
“I have to see him—I’ve got to!” Suddenly, Boomer’s reins were on the ground, and Lisa was in Ann’s arms.
“She does, Willie. Can’t we drive her to the hospital?”
Shields nodded. “We may be going there anyway after we get Bob.”
“I mean right now. There’s all this mess, these cars and so on, and we can’t get through. But we could turn around and go back like those other people.”
“I’m afraid not,” Shields said.
“Will-ie!”
He shook his head. “I understand why she’s concerned, and if I were in her shoes I’d be worried too. But Wrangler’s in a hospital under treatment. Bob’s our employee.” Shields paused. “And he’s my friend. I don’t know how badly he may be hurt, and there’s no doctor with him—a couple of teenagers are trying to take care of him. I shouldn’t have waited to eat;
but because I was hungry and tired, and worried about you and Mercedes, I did. I’m not going back now.”
Lisa had lifted her head from Ann’s shoulder. “This is my car. You’ve got my old Cherokee.” Her voice quavered, and her eyes shone with tears.
“That’s what Lucie said,” Ann told her gently. “Willie took it—we own the dealership.”
“Lucie? Have you seen Lucie?”
Shields said, “She’s in back—asleep, I think.” He opened the rear door to show her, but the back seat was empty. So was the cargo area.
Ann stood on tiptoe to peer over his shoulder. “Lucie’s gone. She must have gotten out to look.”
Lisa said, “But she was with you? She was all right?”
“Certainly she’s all right. She helped me with Wrangler. Lisa, isn’t there any way we can get to Meadow Grass? That’s where Willie’s precious Bob is. Sissy told us.”
“Is Bob that man I found? Mrs. Schindler, I don’t want to go back to the lodge—not even if we find Lucie. I have to see Wrangler.”
Shields nodded. “Of course you do, and you will. And we haven’t even thanked you yet for taking care of Bob. But what about your horse?”
For a moment Lisa stared. “Boomer?” She pulled herself together with a visible effort. “You’re right—I can’t leave Boomer here.”
“Then ride him back,” Shields told her. “We’ll meet you there, pick up Bob, and go to the hospital.”
Ann said, “Except that we still can’t get through this God-damned accident, Willie.”
Lisa touched her shoulder. “Listen to me, both of you—you don’t have to. See our fence? I jumped it on Boomer, but it’s easy to take down the rails. You can put the car in four-wheel and drive through, then follow the fence to our private road.”
Shields helped her lift out the white rails and lay them to one
side, while Ann turned the Cherokee and eased it through the half-flooded ditch; they were taking away the last rail when a state trooper directed his light toward them. “Afraid I can’t allow you to do this, folks. This is private property.”
Lisa told him, “It’s
my
property, officer, and I’m letting them go through.”
“That’s good of you, ma’am. But we ought to have a couple of hooks here before much longer.”
Ann gave the Cherokee more gas, and it heaved itself out of the ditch as though playing tank. “We can’t wait,” Shields told the trooper, and climbed in beside her.
“Is that your horse, too, ma’am?”
The Cherokee rolled through the break they had made in the fence, swung to the right, and drove away at what Lisa estimated was a sensible ten miles an hour. She felt a bitter pride: it was still a wonderful car. “Yes, he’s mine. Please don’t shine your light in his face—you might spook him. I’ve got him tied to the fence.”
“Don’t worry, ma’am.” Rather to her surprise, the trooper switched his flashlight off.
“Would you help me put these back up now? There’s a horse loose, and I wouldn’t want him to get out onto the road.”
“Sure will. This’s that camp, isn’t it? Sweetmeadow?”
“Meadow Grass. Yes, it is.” Lisa had taken one end of one of the white rails. “Was it a bad accident?”
He took the other, and together they set it back in place. “Real bad. Little boy killed in that van, ol’ Chick Dickenson in his truck.”
They replaced another rail.
“We got them in body bags now. Then there was four injured that went in the ambulance—four’s all it holds. There was six people from Minnesota in the van.”
“I see.” Lisa bent to pick up another rail.
“And we’ve got three more that’s not hurt so bad waiting up there with the paramedic for the ambulance to get back. Want to hear something funny?”
“Go ahead,” Lisa said as they worked the rail into place, “what is it?”
“I was going up this road on patrol when that old Ford went by me like a bat out of hell, so I radioed. You know where the Turner place is?”
“Certainly I do. They’re our neighbors.”
“Well, I pulled in there to turn around, and that’s when I heard them hit, a mile, maybe a mile and a half, down the road. It couldn’t have been more than two, three minutes before I got there. One more rail, ma’am.”
Stooping for it, Lisa nodded.
“And I’d a’ swore that ol’ car was full of people—couple in front and a couple more in back anyway. But I was the first on the scene, and there was only two. Couple of teenagers.”
Lisa nodded, wiping her hands on her jeans. She found that she was sweating, despite the cool autumn night.
“The boy was in front, and the girl in the back seat. You ever hear of a couple of kids riding like that?”
Mercedes lay on a blanket on the ground; someone had spread another blanket and an orange plastic sheet over her. It seemed probable that there was another plastic sheet under her, beneath the first blanket. Dimly, Mercedes wondered whether doctors and nurses did not have some other name for the sheets, some special medical name like drop cloths.
Her head hurt and her arm hurt. There was a bandage on her head, she knew, another holding something cold and stiff against her arm. She thought they gave you something to stop the pain, but no one had given her anything, or she could not remember it. She had never used dope. Just say no. She wondered if she had told the doctor no. No, I don’t want any, just go away. Take me home.
The blonde lay upon her back on the ground beside her, but if Mercedes had ever known her name it was gone now. Yet it was nice to have company, somebody she knew. She had no blanket, no sheet, Mercedes decided. Just lying on the wet grass
smiling at her. The blonde was a great deal smaller than she was. Petite, Mercedes thought, really petite. “Am I going to die?” she asked the blonde.
“No. Would you like me to sing to you?”
Mercedes said yes, and the blonde sang, still lying on her back. Mercedes could not understand the words, but all seemed to rhyme, each word sister to the rest. The tune was something that should not have been a tune at all, chords she could never, nobody could ever, finger on a guitar. It was as if there were another universe of “other” music shimmering invisibly among the notes she knew. For as long as the song lasted, she could hear that other music in her head—then it was gone.
“I can’t do that,” she said humbly when the song was over. “I sing a little, but there aren’t any strings there, and those keys aren’t on our piano.”
The blonde laughed.
Everything jumps, Mercedes thought, and that’s the wrong way. Harmonicas, organs …
Pictures drifted behind her eyes: somebody with a polished black beard blowing a horn that really was a horn, the horn of a sheep or goat; a boy on a lonely Florida beach blowing a winding shell. The shell was broken at the tip and had lost its color—she had not been interested. While the boy had bathed it in the breakers, dipping it into the Atlantic and revolving it between his palms to get out the sand, she had left him. When she had gone a long way down the beach, she had heard the shell calling behind her, filled with a horrible, forever-unsatisfied longing for something that was not woman, the bugling of a beast whose mates all were dead, whose consorts do not yet exist.
She had not gone back.
“Perhaps someday you will hear them,” the blonde said, “our horns blowing.” It sounded important, but the thought dwindled and vanished; thoughts were a sleek train to Chicago that roared past her, never stopping beside her platform because she had no platform and the windows of all the cars were dark.
A woman in a white jacket bending over her. “The ambulance is here. Think you can walk?”
“I think so,” Mercedes said. “Can my friend come, too?”
“He’s already gone,” the woman told her. “He went in the first load.”
She helped Mercedes up. The blonde draped Mercedes’s good arm over her shoulders, and they helped her into the ambulance.
There were narrow cots on each side in back, one above the other. The woman in the white jacket and the blonde put her in one of the lower ones, cramped and very firm, only a few inches off the floor. The woman in the white jacket laid her bandaged arm beside her and warned her not to move it, then covered her with a blue blanket and tucked her in.
“You’re doing just fine,” she said. “You’re going to be okay.” For the first time, or thus it seemed to Mercedes, she noticed the blonde. “You’ll have to leave now,” she told her. “This will be going back in a minute or so. Don’t worry, we’ll take good care of her.”
“All right.” The blonde nodded.
The man in the cot above Mercedes groaned; for a moment she thought he might be Seth, but his hand hung over the edge of his cot where she could see it, and it was not Seth’s—somebody from the van, she decided. She hoped he would not bleed on her.
A man in a white jacket like the woman’s stooped to ask if she was all right. She said she was.
“You don’t have too much pain?”
The ambulance was moving, slowly and smoothly, then faster and faster. The siren wailed.
Somewhat to her own surprise she said, “No, I’m in pretty good shape. Where’s Seth?”
But the man in the white jacket had turned away.
The blonde said, “He and Jim have gone already. They’re at the hospital.”
WRANGLER’S HAT
AFTER FIVE minutes, they swung onto a gravel road. “I’ll show you where we found Wrangler,” Ann promised.
Shields scratched his chin, peering through the Cherokee’s window into the night. “I’d a lot rather know where that girl found Bob. I wish I’d asked her.”
Ann glanced across at him. “What for, Willie? Besides you can ask him yourself when we get to the camp. Sissy didn’t say he was unconscious or anything, did she?”
“No, just confused. They put him to bed—he was sleeping when I called.” Shields hesitated. “You’re right, maybe he’ll be able to tell us where that girl found him. But she knows this place; I doubt that Bob does.”
“Then you can ask her as soon as she gets to the camp. She waited to put the fence back—I saw her in the mirror—but once she has it done, she should get there on her horse about as fast as we can drive it.”
Shields nodded. “And I will.”
“You’re worried about something, aren’t you, Willie? I can always tell.”
“Suppose the people who took Bob want him back? They must have grabbed him for a reason, and they can’t have had him for much more than a couple of hours, so I doubt that they got what they wanted. How do we know they’ve given up?”
Ann laid her hand on his. “Be reasonable, Willie. How do you know that anybody took him? If you ask me, he just ran off. Probably he remembered something he had to do.”
“And ended up way out here in the rain?”
“I know!” Ann snapped her fingers. “Didn’t you say he was old? How old, Willie?”
“Over sixty-five; I don’t remember exactly, but it’s in his employment record. Remember the woman in that house we looked at today?”
“Mrs. Howard? Sure.”
“She’s Bob’s daughter, I think the older one. She’s got a son Merc’s age, so Bob’s no spring chicken.”
“Exactly.” Ann was triumphant. “So he had a stroke—not a big stroke that leaves you paralyzed or blind, but a little one. People who have strokes forget, and get confused. You said that Sissy said he was confused, Willie.”
Shields nodded again.
“Well, there you are. No, here
we
are.” Ann touched the brakes. “Wrangler was lying right around here someplace. Right along here. What are you muttering about?”
“Bob’s stroke—the one that made him go down the back stair while I was coming up the front stair, and play ‘Valse Triste’ on the calliope in the carriage house.”
“But don’t you see, Willie—”
“What I see is that there’s something going on around this place, this summer camp. It’s where that girl found Bob. It’s where somebody knocked this cowboy of yours on the head—”
“Wait a minute! If you can interrupt me, I can interrupt you. Wrangler probably fell off his horse, and right up here’s the place. See that little tree close to the road? I remember it.”
“Stop,” Shields told her. “I want to get out and have a look.”
“At where we found him? All right. But, Willie, you never want to see anything I want to show you.”
“Ads in the paper, you mean. I want to see this.”
They halted, and Shields got out. “Where was he, exactly?”
“About halfway under the little tree, on the other side. Should I come along and show you?”
Shields shook his head. “See if you can aim your lights at it.”
For a minute or more he circled the tree, keeping his back to the headlights and stooping to study the sodden ground. When he had returned to his place beside Ann, he asked, “Was it still raining when you found him?”
“Only a little bit. It had nearly—blood! That’s what you were looking for, wasn’t it, Willie?” Abruptly, Ann opened her door and climbed out. “Wrangler bled just terribly all over our back seat, but there wasn’t really much blood when we picked him up—I remember I was pretty proud of myself for noticing that he was bleeding at all. And I gave that kid my good hankie to hold against the place. Didn’t you find any blood?”
“Not a drop. I’m not saying there isn’t any, but if there is, there isn’t much.”
“Maybe this is the wrong place. You know, I was going the other way when I saw him. This could be the wrong tree.”
“I don’t think so.” Shields held up a wide-brimmed, low-crowned hat. “Is this his?”
“I guess so. It looks like his.”
He switched on the dome light. “There are initials on the band. They look as though they were printed with one of those waterproof laundry markers: AD. Are those his?”
“I don’t know—everybody called him Wrangler. But, Willie, I think there’s something else missing, besides the blood.”
Shields tossed the hat into the cargo compartment of the Cherokee. “What’s that?”
“His gun. Don’t you remember, I told you he had a gun? He pointed it at me! It was a rifle, the kind that looks like a BB gun, with a thing underneath you pull down? If he fell off his horse, it would have to be here someplace, Willie, like the hat, because we didn’t take it.” Ann paused, thinking. “And his gun should be easier to find. It was bigger, and kind of shiny.”
Shields had moved behind the Cherokee’s wheel. “It’s not there.”
“Are you certain, Willie? We could look around some more.”
“Not completely; I suppose I could have missed it, but I don’t think I did. I would probably have tripped over it or stepped on it, if nothing else. Anyway, if it’s here we won’t find it at night without better lights.”
Ann seated herself on the passenger’s side. “He must’ve had it, Willie. He was going to ride around the camp again—that’s what they told me. And I don’t believe he’d have gone without his gun.”
As the Cherokee picked up speed, Shields said, “In cowboy movies they have holsters for their rifles on their saddles—long straight leather affairs like the top of a boot. Wrangler didn’t have one of those?”
“Not that I remember. When I stopped at the back gate and he came riding up, he had the gun in his hand. He kept it when he got off his horse.”
Ann fell silent, but Shields said nothing.
“Willie, wouldn’t that holster thing be on the right? So that the cowboy could pull out his rifle with his right hand?”
“I suppose so. Why?”
“Because I saw Buck when he ran in front of the car. You know, before we found Wrangler lying beside the little tree back there? Buck was Wrangler’s horse, and I don’t remember seeing the gun, or a holster thing either.”
They drove across the rain-born stream Ann had forded with Lucie, traced the road down the same narrow valley, and at last climbed a hill from which they could see the lodge and the barn.
Ann pointed. “The lights are still on, that’s good. I was afraid they’d be in bed—though I don’t suppose they’d go to bed early with their counselor away, now that I come to think about it. Look, Willie. There’s one of the girls.”
She was walking, running in fact, back from the barn to the lodge. Someone inside opened the front door before she reached it, and stepped out as Boomer cantered into the bright lit area around the barn.
“Lisa beat us,” Ann announced. “I guess because we stopped at the tree.”
Shields nodded. “And she cut across country. Isn’t that Bob—the one who just came out?”
“I wouldn’t know Bob if he bit me, Willie.”
“I think it is. That’s a man with gray hair, right?”
“Light-colored, anyhow. Willie, they’re having an argument or something. Lisa’s got her face in her hands.”
Lucie presented her hand to von Madadh, who bowed over it.
“Enchanté, mademoiselle.”
“Vous avez bon mine, Docteur.
But I was departing. If you will permit … ?”
He smiled.
“Eh, oui, le train pour Paris.
Go, child, by all means.”
Lucie turned at the door. “Be careful, Mrs. Howard.”
Sally said, “Good-bye.”
As the door closed behind Lucie, von Madadh smiled again. There was a warmth in his smile that made Sally Howard like him at once. “A charming girl. I take it you don’t know her well?”
“No, and she’s not French, not really. She was as American as you and I are when she came, then after a while she put on an accent. Won’t you sit down, Doctor?”
“On the sofa? You don’t object? No, of course she’s not French. Her pronunciation’s fairly good, but she wouldn’t take in a real Frenchman for a moment.” He chuckled. “Did you see her blush when I asked if she was catching the train to Paris?”
Sally realized that she was still holding Tom’s pistol, and laid it on the coffee table. “I didn’t notice.” Her shoulders drooped; it seemed to take too much effort to square them again. “I’m just so tired, doctor. There’ve been all sorts of people here—so many I’ve lost count.”
“And there was trouble. So you said a moment ago, and you have that.” Von Madadh gestured toward the pistol. “I confess I don’t like them; they’re far too noisy. If you use it, please
make very sure you’re shooting at what you think you are and not at me.”
Sally shivered, realized she was still holding von Madadh’s card, and laid it beside the pistol.
“Fatigued though you are, Mrs. Howard, can you spare me ten minutes? It will take no longer than that to tell you who I am and what I want.”
Sally nodded, smiling. “Do you know, Doctor, I feel better just having you in the house. I don’t think I’d get much rest if you left, anyway.”
“Excellent.” Von Madadh stroked his red-gold beard. “I’m glad you feel like that, Mrs. Howard—very glad. I’m going to make a little proposal to you in a moment, but first you should know who I am. Are you familiar with the work of our institute?”
Sally shook her head.
“Our province is the investigation of folklore in process.” He paused as though waiting for her to object. “Suppose, simply as an example, that we receive reports of a dragon; this dragon, we shall say, lives someplace in Africa, where he feasts on the princesses of a local tribe. We’d try to get our agent to the spot before the dragon used his napkin, so to speak.” His warm smile appeared again.
She could not help smiling in return. “I don’t imagine you do a lot of traveling.”
“More than you might think. Our records at the institute list dozens of virgins devoured by dragons since nineteen forty-five; most were in Asia, actually. Unfortunately, none of them has fallen to me. I have my practice to attend to; I can assist the institute—I’m a volunteer—only during vacations. I allow myself one month a year.”
Sally said, “You’ve come about the giant, or whatever it was.”
“Precisely. You saw him yourself, Mrs. Howard?”
“Only for a minute. No, it wasn’t really that long. For a second or two. But I couldn’t see him very well at att—it was
too dark. Just a sort of outline in the dark. Do you know what I mean, doctor?”
“Perfectly,” von Madadh said. “Did he have a horse?”
“A horse?” Sally stared at him. “Why no. But he did have—I heard—”
Von Madadh waved a hand negligently. “Please excuse that. I’ve learned not to lead my patients, but it seems I’ve still to learn not to lead my witnesses. It was merely that some reports we’ve received describe him as a rider. Now I’ll hold my peace, and about time too, and let you describe exactly what it was you saw tonight.”
“Well, now,” Sally said slowly, “the man who called, he was from some paper in Chicago, had a name for it. A … a sasquatch, was that what he said? I’m not sure I know what it means.”
“A sasquatch? This is very interesting. Please go on.”
“It was a great big thing, that’s all. Like a man, but it must have been almost twice as tall. Its eyes were red. They glowed, you know how an animal’s do? And it smelled horrible, like something dead.”
Von Madadh nodded encouragingly. “Please continue.”
“That was all. I saw it, and then it was gone. The deputy shot at it—three times, I think. I suppose it must’ve been him who called the newspaper, or at least somebody in the sheriffs office.”
The telephone rang.