Joe turned to him. "I don't really want to undertake that chore. How about you?"
"No thanks."
"So, we're not going to tell Burdon and Torres any more than absolutely necessary about the nature of Mr. Tyrrell and Mr. Strangeways. That means we have to be careful how we use them."
"And how will we?"
"They can certainly help us search the Canyon. If I understood Mrs. Tyrrell properly on the phone, that's basically what she wants. Okay. Maybe she has reason to think we can do better than the hundred or so people who searched a month ago—I'll know better after I've talked to her face to face."
" 'Strangeways'?" John managed to sound the quotation marks.
"God, John, I don't know any more than you do about why he's here. But evidently our client isn't exactly a widow after all."
"I wonder if she knows?"
"Well. If old Sarah's husband is still around as a vampire, I wouldn't be surprised if she knew about it. That's why she wanted Keogh and Company, the famous discreet psychic specialists. As for her nephew, he gives me the impression of a man who has never heard of vampires in his life. Not even fictional ones. Outside of that, he's somewhat haggard and worn, as you might expect of a man whose only daughter has been missing for a month. The police have been no help to him."
John tilted his chair back so it balanced on its hind legs. "Is there a Mrs. Brainard around? The girl's adoptive mother?"
"There was, but she died three or four years ago. Since then Cathy's been spending a lot of time in boarding schools."
There came a tap at the door, and John got up to answer. The two young helpers were returning together, laden with the hardware from the car, and bringing confirmation of the fact that no additional hotel rooms were available.
When all four were seated at the table again, Joe began to share with Maria and Bill his meager stock of information on Cathy Brainard. John got out several photographs of the missing girl and passed them around, along with a terse typed description. When last seen she had been dressed for hiking, carrying a pack and camping gear.
While his assistants were contemplating this material, Joe looked at his watch. Getting up from the table, he went to peer out around the edge of the window curtain, into the slowly darkening afternoon. The next step would be to introduce his crew—with, he thought, the probable exception of Mr. Strangeways—to Mrs. Tyrrell and her nephew.
He decided it was time to set out for the Tyrrell House.
Before ushering his colleagues out of his hotel room he opened the last suitcase Bill had brought in from his car, and handed out two-way radios to everyone. Each radio was small enough to fit easily into a winter jacket pocket.
There was some other hardware in the suitcase, tools loaned by the Phoenix agency at Joe's request. After a moment's hesitation Joe decided to let it stay where it was for the time being.
Thus equipped, Joe and his colleagues put on their coats and left El Tovar by the west entrance, bypassing the lobby. Gathering darkness had begun to diminish the number of tourists on the broad, paved walk that closely followed the rim through most of Canyon Village. Joe led his people west, past Kachina Lodge, Thunderbird Lodge, and Bright Angel Lodge; all of these auxiliary hotels were decades more modern than El Tovar, built of more conventional twentieth-century materials, lower to the ground and on a less ambitious scale.
Before the crew of investigators had gone very far, they found Mr. Strangeways waiting for them, standing in the gathering gloom with the hood of his jacket pulled up. He joined them wordlessly.
Modest streetlights, widely spaced, now suddenly came to life along the esplanade, giving the area the look almost of a city park. Late daylight was fading steadily behind persistent clouds, though still the sun was not quite down.
As the investigators walked west along the esplanade, the low stone barrier was on their right. Beyond that, the Canyon fell away from a brink as abrupt as the shoreline of an ocean. Still fog-filled and all but totally invisible, this gigantic vacancy began to dominate Maria's awareness as a brooding presence, surreal as a dream.
"They say," said Bill conversationally at her side, "that it's a mile deep and about ten miles wide. Wish we could see it—what's this building, now?"
Maria was able to pass on information gleaned from her brochure: this had to be the Lookout Studio, constructed (in 1914, by the Fred Harvey Company) of unfinished limestone that blended with the cliff on which it stood.
A few paces farther west they passed the Kolb Studio. According to the brochures, Maria recalled, this structure had been put up early in the century, by a pair of brothers who were both explorers and photographers. Their studio stood empty now, preserved by the Park Service.
And then, a little past Bright Angel trailhead and its mule corral, which stood a few yards in from the brink, the four at last came in sight of the Tyrrell House.
Mr. Strangeways excused himself at this point. After a few murmured words to Joe Keogh, he seemed to fade away along the dim walk leading back toward the corral. Maria, quietly curious, watched him go.
And now the remaining four investigators had very nearly reached their goal. Actually little more than the roof of the Tyrrell House was visible from where they were now standing on the broad paved walk. Most of the Tyrrell House, like most of Kolb's Studio, was down out of sight below the rim.
Joe led his colleagues to the door of the Tyrrell House, where he knocked briskly.
Almost at once the door was opened, by an elderly lady who, Maria thought, could only be Mrs. Tyrrell herself. It was as if she had been waiting expectantly just inside. She was slender and silver-haired, her body beginning to be bowed under the weight of eighty years and more, her movements slow but still authoritative. She wore a Navajo necklace of turquoise and silver, over a purple dress.
"Mr. Keogh?" The old woman's voice, at least, was still strong.
"That's me, ma'am. These are some people who are going to be working with me. And you must be Mrs. Tyrrell." Even as Joe spoke, he could recognize his client's nephew, Gerald Brainard, hovering just inside the house. Old Sarah's nephew was fiftyish, of stocky build and pale complexion, with a neatly trimmed dark mustache. He was wearing a Pendleton wool sweater over a shirt and tie.
"Come in, then," said the old lady, with a kind of tired eagerness. She looked with interest at the people who had come with Joe. "Come in, all of you."
The entryway, of logs and stone, reminded Maria strongly of the lobby of El Tovar, though naturally on a vastly reduced scale.
Joe performed quick, businesslike introductions. The old lady shook hands with the people she had not already met; Brainard contented himself with a nod in their general direction.
The old lady's eyes rested briefly on Bill Burdon, moved on and then came back to him. It was, Bill thought, as if he might have been recognized, or perhaps was in danger of being mistaken for someone else.
The old woman turned her attention back to Joe. "Mr. Keogh, you are almost too late. I heard our Cathy's voice just now."
Chapter 3
Standing inside the mouth of the cave, in the glare of those electric floods, which were like no lights that twenty-two-year-old Jake Rezner had ever seen before, he managed to control his temper. He was certain now that the man before him was old, despite his violent behavior, and despite the fact that his hair, under its powdering of rock-dust, was still mostly dark.
Jake asked the old man, mildly enough considering, just what the hell the old man thought he knew about how long Jake's life was going to last.