"Well, you're younger than I am," he said, pulling back.
"I just wanted to say how sorry I was," Ned interjected, and Lewis looked at him sharply, trying to figure out just how much trouble he was in. Hardesty was signaling to Annie, the Viking, for another pitcher. It came within minutes, slopping over when Annie set it on the table. When she walked away she winked at Lewis.
Sometime during the morning, Lewis remembered, and sometime during his drive… bare maples… he had been aware of an odd, dreamy clarity, a sharpness of vision that was like looking at an etching-a haunted wood, a castle surrounded by spiky trees-
wrong way out baby, you're on the wrong
-but now he felt muzzy and confused, everything was strange and Annie's wink was like something in a surreal movie-
you're on the wrong
Hardesty bent forward again and opened his mouth. Lewis saw a spot of blood in Hardesty's left eye, hovering below the blue iris like a fertilized egg. "I'll tell you something," Hardesty shouted at him. "We got these four dead sheep, see? Throats cut. No blood and no footprints either. What do you make of that?"
"You're the law, what do you make of it?" Lewis said, raising his voice to be heard over the roar of the band.
"I say it's a damn funny world-gettin' to be a damn funny world," Hardesty shouted at him, and gave Lewis one of his Texas hard-guy looks. "Real damn funny. I'd say that your two old lawyer buddies know something about it, too."
"That's unlikely," Ned understated. "But I ought to see if one of them wants to write something about Dr. John Jaffrey for the paper. Unless you'd like to, Lewis."
"Write about John for The Urbanite?" Lewis asked.
"Well, you know, about a hundred words, maybe two hundred, anything you can think of to say about him."
"But why?"
"Jesus wept, because you don't want Omar Norris to be the only one-" Hardesty stopped, mouth open. He looked stupefied. Lewis craned his neck to see Omar Norris across the crowded room, still waving his arms and babbling. On the bar before him sat a row of drinks. The feeling of something bad nearby which had dogged him all day intensified. An out-of-tune fiddle chord went through him like an arrow: this is it, this is it-
Ned Rowles reached across the table and touched Lewis's hand. "Ah, Lewis," he said. "I was sure you knew."
"I was out all day," he said. "I was-what happened?" A day after Edward's anniversary, he thought, and knew that John Jaffrey was dead. Then he realized that Edward's heart attack had come after midnight, and that this was the anniversary of his death.
"He was a leaper," Hardesty said, and Lewis saw that he'd read the word somewhere and thought it was the kind of word he should use. The sheriff took a swallow of beer and grimaced at Lewis, full of self-conscious menace. "He went off the bridge before noon today. Probably dead as a mackerel before he hit the water. Omar Norris there saw the whole thing."
"He went off the bridge," Lewis repeated softly. For some reason, he wished that he had hit a girl with his car-it was only a moment's wish, but it would have meant that John was safe. "My God," he said.
"We thought Sears or Ricky would have told you," Ned Rowles informed him. "They agreed to take care of the funeral arrangements."
"Jesus, John is going to be buried," Lewis said, and surprised tears came up in his eyes. He stood up and clumsily began to edge out of the booth.
"Don't suppose you could tell me anything useful," Hardesty said.
"No. No. I have to get over there. I don't know anything. I've got to see the others."
"Tell me if I can help at all," Ned shouted over the noise.
Not really looking where he was going, Lewis brushed into Jim Hardie, who had stationed himself unseen just outside the booth. "Sorry, Jim," Lewis said and would have gone by Jim and the girl, but Hardie closed his fist around Lewis's arm.
"This lady wanted to meet you," Hardie said, grinning unpleasantly. "So I'm making the introductions. She's stopping at our hotel."
"I just don't have the time, I have to leave," Lewis said, Hardie's hand still clamping forcefully on his forearm.
"Hang on. I'm doing what she asked me to do. Mr. Benedikt, this is Anna Mostyn." For the first time since he'd met her glance at the bar, Lewis looked at the girl. She was not a girl, he discovered; she was about thirty, perhaps a year or two on either side. She was anything but a typical Jim Hardie date. "Anna, this is Mr. Lewis Benedikt. I guess he's about the handsomest old coot in five or six counties, maybe the whole damn state, and he knows it too." The girl grew more startling the more you looked at her. She reminded him of someone, and he supposed it must have been Stella Hawthorne. It crossed his mind that he'd forgotten what Stella Hawthorne had looked like when she was thirty.
A ravaged figure from a low-life painting, Omar Norris was pointing at him from the bar. Still grinning ferociously, Jim Hardie let go of his arm. The boy with the fiddle swung his hair back girlishly and counted off another number.
"I know you have to leave," the woman said. Her voice was low, but it slid through the noise. "I heard about your friend from Jim, and I just wanted to tell you how sorry I was."
"I just heard myself," Lewis said, sick with the need to leave the bar. "Nice to meet you, Miss-"
"Mostyn," she said in her effortlessly audible voice.
"I hope we'll be seeing each other again. I'm going to work for your lawyer friends."
"Oh? Well…" The meaning of what she had said reached him. "Sears and Ricky gave you a job?"
"Yes. I gather they knew my aunt. Perhaps you did too? Her name was Eva Galli."
"Oh, Jesus," Lewis said, and startled Jim Hardie into dropping his arm. Lewis plunged off into the interior of the bar before changing direction and rushing toward the door.
"Glamour boy musta got the shits or something," Jim said. "Oh. Sorry, lady. I mean, Miss Mostyn."
The Chowder Society Accused
6
The Morgan's canvas top creaking, cold billowing in, Lewis drove to John's house as fast as he could. He did not know what he expected to find there: maybe some ultimate Chowder Society Meeting, Ricky and Sears speaking with eerie rationality over an open coffin. Or maybe Ricky and Sears themselves magically dead and wrapped in the black robes of his dream, three bodies lying in an upper bedroom…
Not yet, his mind said.
He pulled up beside the house on Montgomery Street and got out of the car. The wind pulled the blazer away from his body, yanked at his necktie: he realized that like Ned Rowles he was coatless. Lewis looked despairingly at the unlighted windows, and thought that at least Milly Sheehan would be in. He trotted up the path and pushed the bell. Far away and dim, it rang. Immediately below it was the office bell for John's patients, and he pushed that one too and heard an impatient clamor go off just on the other side of the door. Lewis, standing as if naked in the cold, began to shake.