Oren remembered that small sofa. Once, he had thought the plush velvet upholstery and gilt frame were too grand for this rustic setting. Now the old love seat seemed tired and sad in the lean and the sag of it, and the woman who sat upon it had also gone this route, less recognizable now than her furniture. Even by the kindness of candlelight, he could not find Evelyn Straub in this older woman's face.
Inside the circle of candles, all but one of the people rose up in a body and yielded their chairs. As players from the sidelines took their seats, Oren had a clear view of the table and an uncommon Ouija board. This was nothing bought in a store. The numerals and the alphabet appeared to be handmade. He recognized the small object at the center of the board. Made of rough carved wood, the three-legged heart had a hole at its center to display single characters from the painted lines of letters and numbers.
The sheriff had been right about one thing: the Ouija board was an anomaly. None of the grifters that Oren had encountered ever used one. And tonight he did not draw on his experience as a CID agent. This was a game from his childhood, played in secret places, dark cellars and deep woods. His little brother had loved the game-at first-calling it by its older name, witchboard.
A stick-thin woman, who had kept her chair, now gave instructions to the second shift of players. "Place your fingers on the planchette," she said, and, by fingertips, the other five people touched the heart-shaped piece of wood. "No pressure, mind you. It moves by other forces."
This could only be Alice Friday. Her face had a gaunt, starved look, and her eyes were sunken and heavy-lidded. The woman's voice had a nasal twang of the Midwest and a no-nonsense tone. She might well be giving a lecture on aluminum siding when she said, "Now we'll ask my spirit guide to answer your questions." She raised her head and raised her voice, calling out, "Joshua Hobbs! Are you here with us tonight?"
So Alice Friday used his dead brother to earn her living. Oren would not lay any blame upon Evelyn Straub. It had always been her nature to make money off of everything that moved and everything that did not. Why not the dead?
The planchette jumped on the board, startling people who must be new to the Ouija board. The more seasoned players only smiled. The psychic dryly chanted above the noise of crickets and the sounds of small animal paws scurrying across the ceiling. Six people leaned into the center of the table, and their heads bowed over the board each time the planchette stopped over a letter, and together they spelled out a chant, "I-A-M-N-E-"
Starlight could be seen through the mortar chinks in the upper walls, but Oren stared at another light, small as a star and electric green, and this one was in the floor. A cable fed out of one baseboard and traveled up a wall. He looked up to the ceiling, but it was too dark to find a camera lens in the rafters.
"A-R-S-O-D-A-R-K."
Evelyn Straub rose from the love seat and walked toward the kitchen, moving with the limber grace of a woman who had not grown old and stout. This vestige of her younger days fascinated him. It took a moment to collect his wits, to back out through the open door and softly pull it shut behind him.
Good night, pretty woman.
Mercifully, he was gone before the chanters spelled out, "O-R-E-N-H-E-L-P-M-E."
11
High up where the roof joined walls of glass and walls of plaster, a circular bookshelf ran around the tower room, and Isabelle Winston climbed a ladder on wheels to reach it. Since returning home, it had become her nightly custom to covertly replace a borrowed bird-watchers log and pull down another one. She shifted the remaining volumes on the shelf to fill in the space so that the absence of a single book would not be noticed.
What was the point of worrying over this?
Her mother had drunk herself into oblivion, and, on the rare occasions when Addison visited here, he probably never looked past his own reflection in the glass. The man would have no interest in records of bird sightings, though these were not the typical birder's journals. And, even if he should peruse a book or two, he would never crack the code.
Crafty Mom.
After kissing her sleeping mother, Isabelle carried the purloined journal downstairs to her bedroom, hiding it in the folds of her robe, knowing all the while that her parents would care nothing about her reading habits.
When had she become so paranoid?
An hour later, propped up by pillows, the ornithologist was still reading by the light of a bedside lamp, utterly engrossed in a book that had little to do with birds, though feathered characters were drawn on every page.
Once upon a time, with a child's egocentric view of the universe, Isabelle had believed that these volumes were created for her. The fanciful illustrations better lent themselves to children's books than a birder's journals. And there were story lines and lines of dialogue in song. Before learning her ABCs, Isabelle had learned the human phrases used to identify a hundred birds, words that mimicked rhythm and the rise and fall of notes. As a little girl, her favorite song belonged to the pewee, and she had sung it all day long, "Ah di dee, pee a wee, ah di dee, pee oh," because it had driven Addison crazy.
Her mother's logbooks made departures from traditional notations, though the songs could still be recognized. Upon returning to Coventry, Isabelle had read many of the old volumes again with a new understanding: Some of the birds drawn here did not appear in northwestern climes- nor anywhere outside of her mother's fragile mind-and these were not fairy tales.
It had taken six weeks to work through the early years of life in Coventry. With the exception of the birthday balls, Addison had discouraged his wife from mixing with the residents. Isabelle, always away at boarding school, had felt abandoned and resentful in those days, but now she realized how lonely her mother had been. Yet Sarah Winston appeared to know a great deal about the town and its people, secret things gleaned by three telescopes and a pair of binoculars.
Hannah Rice had been the Rosetta stone, pictured here as an elf owl in constant company with a tall thin bird that had lost its crown of long feathers over the years-the balding Judge Hobbs. And, thanks to this morning's sighting of Ferris Monty, Isabelle now knew the identity of the black-capped chickadee. The man's bad toupee resembled the bird's cap, and the yellow feathers of the breast matched the color of his Rolls-Royce. The gossip columnist did not sing, "Chicka dee dee dee." He sang, Look at me, me, me," to the lark, who paid him no attention. And everywhere the lark went, the black-capped chickadee was sure to follow. Sometimes the lark would follow another bird, and they made a procession of three through the streets, the chickadee always at the rear, singing his hopeless song.
Her mother seemed to like Evelyn Straub, who was portrayed in colored pencil as an exotic pink heron with a graceful wingspan, long legs-and two nests, one in the town and one in the woods. In this volume, the lovely heron's mate was still alive. Isabelle could not mistake the gray and shriveled starling for anyone but Millard Straub. He rode on the heron's back.
Throughout the state of California, television viewers were annoyed by interruptions in their prime-time viewing hours. The late-breaking news was always the same image of the Coventry Library bathed in bright electric lights. The story was periodically updated by a manic anchorman's message that the sheriff had still not responded to the emergency of a strange smell emanating from the premises.
Patrons of the Coventry Pub considered walking down the street to view the unfolding events of the sheriff not responding to a 9-1-1 call. However, upon being told that they would not be allowed to take their beers with them, they elected to stay and watch a picture of the library on television.