I was prepared for a fist-fight on the spot, under the eyes of Beardsley’s dark-haired lady. But Seifel was truly unpredictable. He said:
“I want to apologize. I’d had too much to drink, and Helen had been rather rough on me. What’s more, you were right. I remember Kerry Snow – the name at least; I never saw the man. I turned him in for desertion in ’46.”
“Without ever seeing him?”
“Right. I told the F.B.I. where to find him.”
“Where did you get the information?”
He hesitated, swallowing shame. “I have to tell someone, I guess. It might as well be you. Helen gave me the man’s address. She asked me to have him apprehended. Just don’t tell her I told you.” He smiled dismally.
His mechanism seemed obvious. Helen had turned him down, and he was retaliating. An urge to hit him rushed up into my head and almost blinded me. It ebbed like a wave, leaving me chilly. Yet I didn’t doubt the truth of what he had said.
I thrust it out of the foreground of my thoughts and went outside, with Seifel at my heels. The wind had risen higher. Above the sighing trees the whole sky seemed to be swaying, threatening to topple.
The black Lincoln that had killed Kerry Snow was purring in the drive. Helen was at the wheel. She moved over to let me take it, and explained to Larry Seifel where we were going.
chapter 22
The big car was clumsy on the hillside. I drove it angrily, punishing the brakes and tires on the hairpin curves. The wind died down as we descended. The road uncoiled in a long curve that joined with a two-lane black-top. This ran ruler-straight to the middle of the inland valley, where it met the north-south highway. I pushed the car to ninety and held it there.
Seifel was in the back seat, hunched forward close to my shoulder, watching the road dart backward through the narrow gantlet of the orange groves. Helen held her shotgun in her lap. No one spoke.
Before we reached Pasadena and the foothills of the mountains, dawn had begun to outline their crags and peaks with an etching-tool. We ascended through fading night into gray day. In the summit of the pass, I switched off the headlights. The sky was a dull green, like stagnant water. Every wrinkle of the cliffs was distinct. Great patches of dirty snow lay at their bases, and along the sides of the road. Their chill edged the wind.
Helen shivered, and drew her leopard-skin coat closer around her shoulders. The gun rolled off her knees and rattled on the floor.
“Be careful with that,” I said sharply.
“I am being careful.” She retrieved it from the floor.
“Keep it out of sight when we get there. I have a gun in my pocket, but I’m not planning to use it if I can help it. This is a situation where violence might backfire.”
She didn’t answer. I glanced at her face, and saw how pale she was. Her eyes, dull and heavy like a reflection of the sky, were gazing far ahead and down across the desert. Its whitish earth, scrawled with winding dirt roads and drifts of brush, stippled with Joshua trees, lay perfectly distinct a mile below. Twenty miles of mountain driving brought us down to it, and into its dust.
I slowed for a crossroads ahead.
“We turn left here,” she said. “It’s only another five miles… God, how I despise this place, this unholy, empty place. It was never meant for human beings at all. It’s the abomination of desolation.”
“I understood you came here for winter vacations.”
“We did. Abel always had. I couldn’t deny him his pleasure. He loved it here, it took him back to his deer-hunting days.”
“Fred Miner couldn’t take it, is that right?”
“That’s true, the dry air bothered him. It’s strange he should have chosen this place, under our very noses in a sense, and yet it’s the back of beyond. What was it you said at the house, that he was operating on the least-likely principle?”
“We all should have thought of it before. You’ve read Poe’s ‘Purloined Letter.’ ”
“A long time ago, when I was in school.”
“Was that so terribly long ago?”
“Æons and æons.” She murmured softly and ruefully, to herself: “The purloined boy.” Her hands were gripping the stock and barrel of the shotgun.
Marked by a row of country mailboxes, a side road meandered off to the right. One of the mailboxes was stenciled with the name ABEL JOHNSON. Helen touched my arm: “Turn here.”
I turned. At the top of a rise, she cried: “Look, you can see the cabin.”
I caught a glimpse of the building, a low-roofed stone structure hugging the flat top of a knoll, perhaps a mile away. Straight up from its squat stone chimney, a narrow blue ribbon of smoke was being unreeled onto a transparent green-glass sky. The air was so clear that I could see the light-gray mortar between the moss-dark chimneystones.
We went down into a shallow arroyo, losing sight of the cabin like a ship in the trough of the waves. The road followed the arroyo bed for half a mile, then climbed the other side. At the top of this second rise, the incredible happened.
“I see him,” Helen said. “I see my boy. He’s safe.”
Seifel leaned forward between us across the back of the seat. “Where is he?”
“See him? He’s playing ball. He’s all right, Larry. Look.”
The boy was on a concrete terrace at the front of the cabin, tossing a rubber ball against the door and trying unsuccessfully to catch it. His red head flared like a tiny beacon.
“Hurry,” his mother said beside me. She flung her body forward urgently, as if her movement could increase the speed of the car.
The gun fell across my right foot on the accelerator. I snatched it up and handed it back to Seifel. Helen was oblivious, fixed on the figure of the boy, which appeared and disappeared and appeared again.
At last he saw the Lincoln and recognized it. With a joyful yelp, he dropped his ball and came running out to the road. I braked, but not quickly enough. His mother staggered out of the moving car and fell on her knees in the dust. Then the boy was in her arms.
The door of the cabin opened outward suddenly. Fred Miner came out in his shirtsleeves, an automatic in his hand.
“Mrs. Johnson!” he called on a loud note of surprise. “Is everything okay?”
Almost simultaneously, the shotgun roared from the back seat. One of Miner’s arms moved as if it had been pushed backward by an invisible hand. The automatic clanked on the terrace. Miner ran inside.
I turned on Seifeclass="underline" “Don’t be a fool. You’ll draw his fire.”
“I winged him,” he said excitedly.
The boy disengaged himself from the leopard-skin arms. “Why are they shooting at Fred, Mummy? Did he do something wrong?”
“It’s only a game, Jamie.”
I swung the door wide. “Get into the car, both of you. We’re all getting out of here.”
But Miner had anticipated us. There was a rapid burst of explosions. The bronze Jaguar shot out of the carport beside the cabin. The top was down, and I could see Miner’s face intent over the wheel. The sports car crossed the road in front of us in a flurry of dust, skidded into a turn at the foot of the slope, and turned back to the road a hundred yards behind us. Before I could get the Lincoln turned and straightened out, the Jaguar was a mile or more away, an invisible comet with a winding tail of dust.
I turned to the boy. “Is anybody else out here?”
“No, sir. Just me and Fred.”
“Did he treat you all right?”
He looked puzzled.
“He didn’t hurt you, Jamie?” his mother said.
“Fred wouldn’t hurt me. Fred and me are shipmates.”
I said to Seifeclass="underline" “You stay here with Helen and the boy. Call the police, et cetera.”