The School of Night (21 page)

“What are you doing here, Alonzo?”

He poured another capful. But his aim was off this time, and a tiny cataract of vodka fell to the floor.

“Case of nerves,” I suggested.

“Everyone gets them.”

“Certainly.”

“No disgrace. I mean, it'd be one thing if
Amory
were home.”

“Where is he?”

“How should I know? He's a night crawler. Naps by day, putters through the evening. Impossible to find. Unless, of course, you don't need him, at which point he sticks to you like nettles.”

Alonzo stared at the bottle for a while, then set it gingerly on the floor.

“What can I say, Henry? I was lying in that purgatorial shack of his, I was—I was
trying
to sleep, and I couldn't. Even with help. Also, there were noises.…”

He paused, as if expecting me to hear them, too.

“Nothing out of the way,” he hurried on. “I just thought I might benefit from a little human propinquity. And you were the best I could find.”

“I'm honored,” I said. “You won't mind if I go to sleep.”

“Do as you like,” he said airily.

I didn't bother to undress, just fell headlong into the first double bed I saw.

“Feel free to take the other one,” I mumbled.

“Oh, yes.”

But when I awoke the next morning, a little before eight, he was still in that chair, groggy but awake. I couldn't tell you if he'd even closed his eyes. The only detectable change was the amount of air inside that bottle.

“Morning,” I mumbled.

Alonzo said nothing. I heaved myself up and went in the bathroom and threw on a pair of shorts I had worn two days earlier and, without another word to my roommate, went down to the veranda.

The day was heating up already, and the beach was just as empty as it had been last night. Except for a barefoot figure passing south in slow procession. Tall and built. He wore a fishing hat and a white T-shirt with
SURF
'
S UP!
in hot-pink letters and knee-length shorts that, on anyone else, would have qualified as trousers. His tread was rhythmic, pacific. He never once looked my way.

Ten seconds later, I was back in my room. Alonzo's eyes widened at the sight of me.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Trouble.”

And even as I spoke, I was remembering what Clarissa had said on the beach, just a few hours earlier.

We're all dead.

*   *   *

Amory Swale's shack looked even more porous than usual. The front door was unlocked. When we called upstairs, we heard no answer, and when we inspected Amory's room, we found a fully made bed.

“I don't like this,” said Clarissa.

Scowling, Alonzo led us back down to the living room, then executed a slow 360-degree scan.

“Tell me something, Henry. When you saw Halldor this morning, did he see
you
?”

“I don't know.”

“You don't
know
?”

“Well, it doesn't matter, does it? If Halldor's here, your buddy Bernard Styles knows where we are.”

Alonzo lowered himself onto the chintz couch. Tied another knot in his kimono sash.

“It doesn't matter so much if Styles knows where
you
are, Henry. You can always make a plausible case that you're here on his business. As for
me
 … well, to the best of his knowledge, I'm still part of the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Why would he think otherwise?
You
two wouldn't tell him.
Amory
wouldn't—”

And then something snagged in Alonzo's brain.

“Where. The. Hell. Is. Amory.”

“Aren't those
his
?” asked Clarissa.

She was pointing to an area just to the left of the couch, where a pair of eyeglasses lay strewn like an old magazine. Oversized aviator frames, thickly ground, speckled with dust and pollen. One of the temples had been half wrenched from its frame.

“He must have stepped on them,” said Alonzo. “Clumsy soul.”

“Can he see without them?” asked Clarissa.

“Not a lick.”

I picked up the frames. Weighed them in my hand. It was as easy to imagine Amory without skin as without glasses.

“Alonzo,” I said. “When did you last see him?”

“I don't know, seven
P.M.
-ish? We had cocktails, we ate French-bread pizza … I had some reading to do. Amory just—
left.
Said he had errands.”

“He didn't say where?”

“No.”

“Maybe he left a note,” Clarissa suggested.

But a quick canvass of the house's first floor found only take-out Korean menus and Food Lion coupons and a raft of credit card solicitations, doodled almost beyond recognition, and an old book jacket for
Shakespearean Negotiations
(minus the book), and, the one surprise, a brochure for Anguilla: two beach umbrellas on empty white sand.

“The document,” I said. “The Ralegh letter. Where is it?”

Alonzo's eyes went absolutely still for a few seconds. Then, kneeling on the floor, he rapped on a piece of moldy wainscoting, until it puffed away from the wall. He drew out the FedEx envelope, pressed his eye against the opening.

“Thank God,” he breathed.

“Yeah, except Amory's still missing,” I said. “What about his friends? Is there anyone he might have paid a visit to?”

“There's Mrs. Poole. Older than God. Lives in Whalebone, a few miles down the road. Raises chinchillas. Amory's been spooling her along for years with May Sarton first editions, waiting for her to…” He paused. “He's been cultivating her.”

“Maybe Amory went to see her?”

“No, no, she always sends a car.”

“Any other friends?”

“God, I don't know. How can I think when it's this cold?”

I was the one who moved to close the oceanside window. But it was Clarissa who glanced past my arm and saw what was lying just outside.

“Jesus.”

I was the second to see it, and what struck me most was its surreal normality. Amory Swale's backyard was already a graveyard of butts and bottles and cans and string. To discover a hand protruding from the sand … well, that was just another found object, wasn't it?

From behind me, I heard the sludgy low-fi sound of Alonzo's voice.

“Henry. There are a couple of shovels in the back.”

27

T
HE SAND
,
FRESHLY
loosened, flew off in spadefuls. The hand gave way to an arm, spindly and larval. The arm gave way to a shoulder. A neck. And at last came the face, shellacked with grit, weirdly young without its eyeglasses.

We were the only witnesses. For we were standing in a great bowl of sand, screened on every side by dunes and shrubs and sea oats—and by that sad, sad house, which would be even more vacant now than I ever thought possible. Even now, in broad daylight, a hundred people could walk by us—more than a dozen already had, I guessed, in the last twenty minutes—no wiser as to what had gone on here.

I stood up slowly. I slapped the sand from my hands.

“What are you doing?” snapped Alonzo.

“I'm calling nine-one-one.”

“And just what are you planning to tell them?”

“I hadn't, you know, rehearsed it. Something like there's this guy. Who was alive and now is not.”

“And hence is beyond our help.”

The hair on my skin actually shrank.

“Guess you're mourning in your own way, huh, Alonzo?”

“I'm very sorry, but right now, mourning is an indulgence.”

“
I'll
make the call,” said Clarissa. “Alonzo won't need to be a part of this.”

“Oh, and how could I not be?” he snapped, rounding on her. “Amory was
my
friend, wasn't he? And you came here on
my
account, did you not?”

“We can't
leave
him here,” I said.

To which Alonzo said nothing—or, rather, his silence said as much as speech. In that instant, two things became abundantly clear. Leaving Amory was something that could be done. Leaving Amory was exactly what he intended to do.

The same conclusions must have dawned on Clarissa, for I saw her blanch, even as her irises blackened.

“We can
not
. Leave this man here.”

“Did I say anything about forever?”

“Oh, my God.”

“Did you hear me say forever?”

“He was your friend.”

“A couple of lousy days!” shouted Alonzo.

His own vehemence stunned him briefly into silence. He cast his eyes down and, in a more appeasing tone, added:

“Forty-eight hours. That's all I'm asking. Just to crack things open.”

Clarissa opened her mouth, but he had already put out a hand to stop her.

“By my reckoning, we have exactly two choices. We finish what we started, or it will be finished for us. Just ask Amory.”

An agitation in Alonzo's throat … a nod in the direction of the body.

“If it's all the same to you,
I'm
going to choose my final resting place, not Bernard Styles.”

“Alonzo,” I said. “If you're right about who did this—”

“
If
I'm right?”

“Then, among other things, we're letting a murderer walk these beaches.”

“Don't be penny dreadful. The field of potential victims is quite shockingly small. In fact, you're looking at all of them. Shall we examine the facts? Amory Swale was murdered. Why? For Harriot's map, of course. If Amory had actually
known
where it was, they would have it in their hands right now. Believe me, he'd have given it up in a heartbeat. He'd have given
me
up if I'd been here.”

Only Alonzo
wasn't
here, I thought. He was bivouacked in my motel room, drinking himself half blind. An attack of nerves, that's how we'd diagnosed it. Today, it looked like a fit of prescience.

“Okay,” I said. “If Amory didn't know anything, why would they kill him?”

“Because they wanted to send a message.”

“And what exactly is this message? Please translate.”

Alonzo waited a few seconds.

“Bernard Styles wants us to know that
he
knows.”

“Knows what?”

“Everything we're up to. Styles knows about Harriot's treasure and he wants it every bit as much as we do. And, as we've now seen, he's willing to go to any length to find it. Believe me, Amory wouldn't have lasted five minutes without spilling.”

As if in confirmation, my phone began to ring.

UNKNOWN.

I flipped open the lid.

“Mr. Cavendish!” came the familiar reedy voice. “I fear I have become the proverbial squeaky wheel, but I'm most curious to hear about your progress.”

I stared at that pale torso, granulating before my eyes.

“May we first talk about Amory Swale?”

“
Swale
,” said Bernard Styles. “I don't believe I've had the pleasure.”

“See, I believe you have.”

“Well, then, you must refresh my memory. Who exactly is he?”

I waited for the surge of heat in my skull to pass. But it wouldn't.

“I saw Halldor this morning,” I said.

“What a lovely surprise that must have been. He's been pining for salt air, and we were told the beaches in North Carolina were rather nicer than the ones in Delaware.”

“So his turning up here would be on the order of coincidence.”

“Well, yes, it would. Because, of course, you never told us where you were, Mr. Cavendish. Or with whom.”

“I know what you're doing,” I said.

“That makes two of us, Mr. Cavendish. Nevertheless, I continue to repose the greatest confidence in your abilities, and I remain hopeful that we may conclude our business on the happiest of terms.”

And then he delivered his postscript.

“The best of luck to you and your companions. And please send my regards to Alonzo.”

28

“
N
OW
,”
SAID ALONZO.
“
Now
do you believe me?”

We were sitting, the three of us, legs akimbo, in Amory's great ashtray of a yard. The wind had picked up, and a fine layer of sand-silt was stinging our eyes, and a squadron of no-see-ums was sucking the sweat from our necks.

“He didn't confess,” said Clarissa. “Exactly.”

“Why would he confess?” said Alonzo. “Would
you
?”

She drove a twig into the sand.

“So to save ourselves from Styles, we need to find Styles's treasure.”

“Excuse me. The treasure does not belong to Styles, it never has. It's Harriot's.”

“Styles doesn't seem to think so,” I pointed out.

“Which is why I prefer to regard the whole affair as an Elizabethan comedy. The happy outcome being just one or two acts away.”

A comedy
, I thought, staring at the Ozymandias head of Amory Swale, disappearing under the blowing sand.

“We should call the police,” I said.

“May I once more ask why?”

“So we can be
safe
,” said Clarissa.

He regarded us singly first, then in tandem.

“And what do you want to be safe from? I can assure you—given the fact that I'm not even approximately dead—once you call the police,
I
will be arrested in short order for fraud.
You
—and I am using the plural pronoun—will be arrested as my accomplices. And, by the way, does the phrase ‘suspicion of murder' carry any resonance for you?”

As theatrical effects go, it was more Victorian than Elizabethan. Which is to say, greasily effective.