“That’s exactly the way I see it. Solly, who can we get to do an analysis of this thing? Somebody discreet?”
“I have a friend,” he said.
“In Seabright?”
“Yes.”
“Take it to him tomorrow, will you? Swear him to secrecy, but see if you can get confirmation. How long do you think it’ll take?”
“Hard to say. Depends how busy he is. How much we’re willing to pay.”
“Okay. Make it worth his while. Call me when you get a result.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Hang around here for a bit. See what else I can find out.” She opened a line to the desk and canceled her reservation on the morning train.
14
Many demons are in woods, in waters, in wildernesses, and in dark pools…
“Of course I remember you.” Jorge Gould smiled pleasantly and held out a hand while she watched him try frantically to recall her name. “You’re the sister of Markis Kane’s model.” He waved an index finger at her as if to say who could forget?
“Kim Brandywine,” she said. “I wanted you to know how pleased I was with the Kane you sold me.”
“Oh yes. Yes, that was quite a good buy, Ms. Brandywine. You did well for yourself.” He came out from behind the counter and glanced around at the stock. “Were you interested in looking at more of his work?”
“Perhaps another time,” she said. “There are one or two others that I’d like to add to my collection.”
“No need to wait.” He rubbed his hands together. “We have a very liberal payment plan. Which ones did you want to see?”
“Yes,” she said, ignoring the question, “Kane does marvelous work.”
“He does indeed. Did I tell you I knew him personally?”
“You mentioned that.”
“So what can I show you?”
“Jorge, I don’t plan to make a purchase today. I don’t like to pile up debt. Buy outright, I say. Wouldn’t you agree?”
“Well—”
“I’m sure you do.” She mentioned Autumn and Night Passage, and implied that she would shortly be in the market for both. “Marvelous compositions,” she said. “He’s a genius.”
“Sometimes it takes time before the world recognizes this level of talent.”
He insisted on showing her more of Kane’s work. Candlelight depicted a couple having dinner on the observation deck of an interstellar. A candle glitters beside a bottle of wine, thick violet drapes cover the wall, and a waiter stands over them with a tray. The couple are handsome and absorbed in each other. Above, through a sheer overhead, the orange and red ring of a recent supernova casts an eerie light across the scene.
In Passage, a survey ship is silhouetted against a pulsar, caught in the moment that the star’s beam sweeps past.
“These would be excellent additions to any collection,” Gould said.
She agreed. “How marvelous it must be to have known him.”
“Yes. He and I were quite good friends, as a matter of fact.”
“I envy you.” She delivered a smile of pure innocence. “What sort of home did he have? I think when I was here before you said he lived in Severin?”
Gould offered her a chair and they both sat down. “Yes,” he said. “That’s right. That’s where he lived. My wife also lived there at the time.” He repeated the details while Kim listened patiently. Finally he asked whether she knew he was a war hero.
“I know,” said Kim. “Tell me about the villa.”
Gould recalled that the living room had been coldly formal; that Kane had lived in his den, had entertained his friends there. “Sometimes,” Gould said, “people he’d served with, in the fleet, came to town.” He shook his head. “Kane and his friends knew how to party.”
“It’s beautiful country,” said Kim. “He must have had a lovely view.”
“He had a deck on the side of the house where you could sit in the evenings and watch the sun go down behind the mountains—”
They continued in that manner for several minutes until Kim felt ready to ask the one serious question she’d brought with her. “Did I hear you say there was a secret room?”
“Secret room?”
“Yes. When I was here before, you told me that during his last couple of years there, he sealed off part of the house. Wouldn’t let anybody see it.”
“Oh yes. I’d forgot. That was the den. After the Mount Hope business, he stopped using it for guests and switched to the living room.”
“Why do you think he did that? Was he restoring it, maybe?”
“No, I don’t think so.” He made a face, signifying he was thinking hard. “You could see Mount Hope from the den. Maybe he didn’t want to look at it anymore. Or maybe he’d just developed an eccentricity. Artists are like that.”
“I suppose,” she said. “He wouldn’t let anybody in there?”
“Not as far as I know.”
“I wonder if it might have been that he’d begun to work there? To paint?” Or whether he’d hidden something he didn’t want anyone to get near. Like the Hunter logs?
“I doubt it. He had a workroom toward the front of the house.”
“Where was the den?”
“At the rear.”
“You never saw it again after he sealed it off?”
“No. Never did.” He looked at her and at the two Kane’s. “Now, why don’t we arrange for you to take one of these little beauties home?”
Kim had to pay the Rent-All Emporium for both the wet suit, which had been torn, and for the mask and converter, which were still in the river. They asked no questions, but snickered at her when she told them she wanted to rent a rubber boat and another wetsuit. It would require, they explained, a substantially heavier deposit.
An hour later, in her rented flyer, she lifted off the Gateway pad into a cold gray afternoon and once more turned south. For a few minutes she ran above a train, but it quickly distanced her and lost itself in the craggy countryside.
She had not told Solly what she intended to do because he would have insisted on coming. That would have been comforting, but she was anxious to have the results on the Hunter logs. And she felt a compunction to confront her fears about the local demon. After her experience in the river, she told herself, she feared nothing that walked.
She looked up the train on the schedule. The Overland. Hauling dry goods, electronics, lumber, and machinery from Sorrentino to the coast. She liked trains. Always had. She’d have preferred at the moment to be aboard one.
She’d circled the location of Kane’s villa on her map of the village. It had been on the north side, in an area now in deep water.
She traced bearings from the Kane home to the dam, to the city hall (which was in fifteen meters of water, but whose tower still rose proudly out of the lake), and to a onetime flyer maintenance facility atop a low hill that had become an island when the dam came down.
The river looked cold in the somber light. She glided out over the lake and, minutes later, descended on Cabry’s Beach.
The flyer came to rest with one of its treads in the water. She watched the edge of the forest while changing into her wet suit. The tree branches swayed gently in the wind coming off the water. No blue jay fluttered through that sky; no deer came down to the shoreline to drink.
She opened the hatch and eased down onto the sand. It crackled underfoot. The wind was cold. She turned up the heat in her suit and tugged a woolen hat down over her ears. The sky was heavy and overcast.