"More than that. Look again!"
The young woman must have detected something in my voice. She retrieved the sarcophagus and looked at it again, this time a little more critically. "All right, I'll admit I'm obviously missing something. Just what is it I'm supposed to be seeing?"
"But you were fascinated with it yesterday," I reminded her.
"That was yesterday. Now I just want to get out of here before that old lady comes marching in here and finds us trespassing. For all we know, that little old lady could be carrying a very big gun."
I put the statuette down, carefully positioning it just as I had found it in proximity to the tapered candle and the sprig of pine. That same gut voice was talking to me again. Glenna Austin very well might not be able to find her kitchen in all this clutter, but I had the distinct feeling she would know immediately if someone had been tinkering with her little altar.
"Can we get out of here now?" Brenda pleaded.
"Let's hit the road."
We didn't head directly back to the motel. In fact, we didn't make it back there until midafternoon. From the Austin widow's decrepit old house perched on the hill, we headed for Caleb Hall's marina to find out what, if anything, he knew about the old woman. While Caleb professed that it was his wife who kept him tuned in on the local gossip of Chambers Bay, I figured he knew more than our friend Madden. Jake knew who people were, but Caleb seemed to know what they were doing.
We found Caleb huddled by an old kerosene heater in an unpainted clapboard shanty at the far end of the public pier. He was bent over some charts, knee deep in conversation with a heavily whiskered old-timer in bib overalls and sloshers.
There was no pretense at social exchange. Caleb looked up, acknowledged us, finished his business with the man and walked wearily over to us.
"Figured that now that the excitement is over, you and the little lady would be pullin' out."
B.C. was standing somewhat behind me; nevertheless I could feel her stiffen at the reference to "little lady."
"We've got a few loose ends to tie up before we can say we're done."
"I think it's a shame we had to kill that creature before we found out what this was all about," B.C. offered.
Caleb nodded. "I was tellin' Mary Beth this mornin' at breakfast that it may take a while before I can eat anything that I know has come out of old man Palmer's meat cooler. Why, I've seen him makin' hamburger on that very block where we got that thing stretched out."
"Caleb, there's just a couple of things I still want to get straight."
The skipper wasn't any different than the rest of the locals; he took his own sweet time, loading, tamping and relighting his pipe. "Don't know as I can add anything to what you already know, but I'll be more than happy to try."
B.C., shoulders slumped and hands clasped behind her back, wandered over to a dirty little window and stood looking out at the foggy bay. Caleb watched her intently. There was a look of consternation on his lined face, as though there was something he wanted to ask her.
"Do you remember when that woman you call the Austin widow arrived in these parts?"
Caleb rolled his eyes, then closed them momentarily. "Can't say as I do. Spring maybe… maybe early summer. Strange old lady. Sorta seems like part of the local scenery now, though."
"Who knows her? Does she have any friends? Does she attend one of the local churches?"
"Ya know, it's funny you should ask me those questions. Them's the same questions Jake told me that strange young fella works for Bert asked him about the old woman."
"You mean Kelto, the Johnsons' night man?"
"That's the one," Caleb confirmed.
There wasn't much doubt now that Kelto and I were racing toward the same conclusion. The difference was, at this stage, he knew a little more about it than I did. It was becoming clearer all the time that Kelto was the one who had the answers I was looking for. I had to pin him down and find out what he really knew. Otherwise I had a story with a beginning and an end but no middle, nothing that tied the two together.
Beyond that, Caleb was reticent. I had to remind myself that even though B.C. and I had been a part of probably the biggest story to ever unfold in Chambers Bay, we were still outsiders and newcomers.
We thanked Caleb, crawled back in the car and, with the fog intensifying again, crawled back to the motel. B.C. got out again at the diner to get us sandwiches, and I drove on, hoping to catch Kelto in his room. Once again it proved fruitless — no Kelto. A check with the Johnsons confirmed that they still hadn't seen him since he got off work. I declined Polly's offer of a cup of coffee and decided to take a gamble. Since the motel was deserted and there were no other guests, since Bert was preoccupied with adjusting his television and Kelto hadn't responded to my first knock, I figured the risk was small.
I used the old ice ploy again. While Bert went to get me a bucket, disappearing behind the curtain and down the dingy hallway, I slipped around behind the desk and rifled through the drawers until I found the master passkey. With that little gem securely tucked in my jacket pocket, I slipped back around to the front of the desk and waited. When Bert returned, he handed me the ice bucket and went back to his chore. I tried to exchange one or two more pleasantries, but he was too engrossed to do much more than respond with a couple of cursory grunts.
I went to the room, desposited the ice on the dresser and quickly slipped back up to the opposite end of the complex. This time I didn't even bother to knock. I just unlocked Kelto's door and went in.
Another surprise. The room was immaculate.
But there, right in the middle of his dresser, just like the one sitting on the small shrine in the old woman's house was a sarcophagus of Sate. The old woman's description came back to me" Ancient of Ancients." I picked it up and confirmed my darkest suspicions; it was an exact replica of the one in the house on the hill.
The pieces suddenly tumbled into place. The statues owned by the old woman and Kelto and the beast lying on the chopping block in the back of Palmer's market were all one in the same.
I returned the passkey with the feeble excuse that it must have been left in the room by the cleaning lady, and I went back to my room with the express purpose of calling Lucy.
B.C. arrived with the sandwiches, and we spread the three-by-fives out on my bed while we ate. Somehow the whole thing seemed anticlimactic and yet, deep down, I was getting a gut-wrenching signal that the worst was yet to come. I tried telling B.C. how I felt, but it was obvious she didn't understand. She hasn't as yet learned to listen to that silent, secret and all too often painfully accurate signal emanating from somewhere deep within her. She'd learnin time.
I still had a mouthful of ham salad when I dialed. Lucy answered on the third ring. "Where the hell have you been?" she snarled.
Leave it to Lucy. "Can I tell you that's an unacceptable way to answer the telephone. How do you know it wasn't someone important like the President of the United States, maybe?"
"You're the only one who ever calls in on your unlisted number," she grumbled. "In fact, you're so damn secretive about it you're probably the only one besides me that even knows you've got it."
As usual, I chose to ignore her. "Look, this whole thing is winding down, but I've still got my hands full."
"Full of what?" she shot back. She still hadn't let go of the fact that I was traveling with someone she considered to be a threat to my morals.
I ignored her again. "What were you able to dig up?"
"You're referring to Sate, I take it?"
"No," I snapped back, "let's talk about how damn difficult it's going to be for you to get another graduate assistant's job if I don't give you a good recommendation."