Madden was a silent observer while I made my routine first weather assessment of the day. Brenda was right; it was still foggy. I could see across the motel parking lot, but that was about it.
Jake tugged down on the brim of his hat and started for his four-by-four. "I'm headed back to the market to see what them Mounties are gonna do with that thing in Palmer's cooler. If you find that Kelto kid, let me know what you learn." As he crawled into the cab, he gave B.C. one of his big affable smiles and drove away.
When I looked at Brenda, she had a perplexed "what's our next move?" look.
It was easy enough to check Kelto's room. I did, and he wasn't there. There was a brain game in all of this, a variation on the old logic riddle, but I wasn't sure I was up to playing it. A quick check at the motel office revealed that Bert had relieved Kelto at seven o'clock. Instead of going back to his room and getting some sack time like most sane citizens who work the graveyard shift, Kelto had taken off. It was a half-hearted effort, but I started working my way through the riddle — boy gets off work, boy doesn't go to his room, boy hikes into village, boy tells the local gendarmes they should burn the body of the beast, boy implies that bad things will happen if they don't, boy disappears. Where has boy gone?
Nothing.
The riddle fell flat on its face. There was nothing logical about any of my conclusions. Boy goes for another hike in the woods? Dumb in this fog. Boys goes to…?
As Cosmo used to say, when logic fails, follow that little voice that comes up at you from the gut. The voice from the gut was telling me that I ought to talk to the Austin woman, but that was nothing new. It had been telling me that for some time now, and maybe that was reason enough to do it.
Brenda was waiting for me when I got back to the unit. The transition was complete. We had converted from bumbling, half-awake tourists to bumbling, half-awake researchers. With no small amount of urging, I convinced her that we had to go back into the village and promised to stop just long enough at the diner to get us some coffee. The bribe worked.
When she crawled back in the Z carrying two oversized styrofoam cups, she had an announcement. "Remember the gal that waited on us the first night we were here?"
I pried the lid off the cup and greedily went after the contents. "Uh-huh."
"Her name is Vernice."
"Nice name," I grunted, trying to get the Z's cranky old gearbox into first.
"Jake Madden is sleeping with her."
"That's nice. Everybody ought to sleep with somebody," I declared.
"Oh," Brenda replied, arching her eyebrows, "and who does the infamous Elliott Grant Wages sleep with?"
"None of your business," I snarled.
About that time, the Z relented, leaped into first and we were back on the road headed into town. I didn't say anything, but the question bothered me. It had been a long time since Gibby. Images were starting to materialize, and I didn't need that now.
Despite the fog, the journey from the diner to Palmer's Market took no more than five minutes. Again I had B.C. do the legwork. While she went into the store to check on Kelto, I grabbed a cigarette and polished off the coffee. When she crawled back in the car, I already knew what the answer was.
"No sign of him, huh?"
"No, but you ought to see the hunk that relieved Kendall this morning." She let go with a decidedly feminine expression of pleasure that again brought back memories of Gibby. I ignored it and asked the inevitable.
"What's his name?"
"Tom. Tom Gregory. Officer Tom Gregory." There was a note of reverence in her voice.
"Tommy? That's a helluva name for a Mountie!"
"I didn't say Tommy," she said, pouting. "I said Tom, very masculine, like in primitive jungle drums."
It's a struggle in the low-slung seats of a turbocharged 280 ZX, but somehow I managed. I fished a quarter out of my pocket and once more relied on the oldest decision maker known to man.
"Heads we set sail for the Austin woman's pad; tails we go back to the motel and I call Lucy to see what she's dug up on what you so quaintly term 'a lesser deity'."
The alternatives only intensified B.C.'s pout. "Can't I just stay here and talk to Officer Gregory? I might come up with something new."
Heads.
We headed for the widow's house with B.C. slumped in the passenger seat. The whole situation was rapidly developing into one of the weirdest entries in all my years of keeping journals. A 44-year-old puzzle had been destroyed the previous night without a solution. The way it stood now, the whys and hows of the riddle were about to disappear into the dusty annals of time without ever seeing the light of day.
The drive gave me time to reflect. We live in a bottom-line world — and the bottom line on Chambers Bay was simply that the killer had killed again and now the killer had been killed. What was it all about? If I was ever going to make any sense out of all this, I had to know a great deal more about it.
"Why don't we just go home?" Brenda pushed. "What you don't know, you can hypothesize. Isn't that what it's all about?"
"My curiosity has been tweaked," I admitted. "Besides, you don't have enough to write your dissertation — or have you forgotten about that?"
The all too blunt reality of my assessment only served to drive her further down into her seat. Her sensuous lower lip was now protruding a good quarter of an inch. "So why won't you talk about your love life?" she mumbled.
In front of the delapidated old gray house again, I began having second thoughts. What if Glenna Hoyt Austin was nothing more than what she appeared to bea pathetic, dislocated bag lady. Maybe I was making too much of her cackling mumbo jumbo about the sarcophagus of Sate.
Maybe I wanted nothing more than a second look at that grotesque little figurine. Maybe I wanted nothing more than to dispel the nagging little suspicion that had haunted me since I got a good look at the creature stretched out in Palmer's cooler.
After I parked the Z, we trooped up the hill, threaded our way across the sagging porch and knocked — not once, but three times. I did it loud enough that if the old girl had actually had neighbors, they would have been fearfully peeking out from behind their curtains to see what kind of creature was making all the racket.
"Obviously, no one's at home," B.C. offered, a bit testily.
"Obviously," I agreed — and twisted the knob.
"What are you doing?"
"I think the technical term is 'trespassing' — or is it 'breaking and entering'?"
"You can't do that."
"Now look," I snapped back, "don't start developing lofty ethics on me. We need information, and if the old girl isn't around to answer our questions, maybe we can poke around and find it on our own."
"For what reason?" Brenda insisted. "What could an old woman like Glenna Austin have to do with that… that thing down in the meat cooler?"
To me, the answer was obvious.
I grunted, butted the door gently with my shoulder, and it flew open. The trick has nothing to do with leverage, power, or even technique. It was simply a flimsy, half-rotten door.
Apparently Glenna was still too busy to tend to her chores. The house was a mess. We sifted through the clutter until we uncovered the table with its starkly simple shrine. "There it is," I muttered, pointing to the brooding sarcophagus.
B.C. watched while I picked it up and rotated it in my hands. It was surprisingly heavy and intricately detailed.
"Elliott," she hissed, "are you going to tell me what this is all about?"
"Look! Look closely. What do you see?"
Brenda sighed. "Oh, all right, I'll play your little game. I see the same thing I saw the other day — an ugly little chunk of carved stone that's supposed to represent some sort of second-rate, half-forgotten deity. Okay?" B.C.'s voice was getting testier by the minute.