Bennett Carver's face darkened, and his pale green eyes glittered with anger. "I can't believe they would hire my son and put him in such an important position without at least extending me the small courtesy of informing me."
"Believe it, Mr. Carver. Check it out. Incidentally, I can't help but note the fact that you haven't objected to the notion that your son might be capable of trying to kill somebody."
His face darkened even more, but I somehow sensed that his anger was no longer directed at me. "How do you know Charles is in Rockland County?"
"He tried to insinuate himself into the lives of Garth and Mary, come between them. But now I think he was only doing that to pass the time after he learned that Mary, an old girlfriend, lived in Cairn. He was already here on business. He's calling himself Sacra Silver, and he seems to fancy himself some kind of master of the occult who can cast evil spells. It appears to be an old schtick with him, an act he puts on to intimidate and control foolish and impressionable people." Like my sister-in-law, I thought, but didn't say so.
"If this man is calling himself by another name, how do you know he's. . Charles?"
"He forced the issue, and I took steps to find out who he really was. I managed to get a set of his fingerprints. He has a police record, he's spent time in prison. He may also have done a stint as a juvenile in a mental hospital. But I'm sure you're aware of that."
"Charles always wanted to be a chief before learning how to be an Indian," Carver said softly, slowly shaking his head back and forth as if he were suffering from some neurological disorder. Suddenly his lips compressed, and he shot out of his chair. "I'll be goddamned if somebody is going to make him a chief in the company I started without at least extending me the courtesy of telling me about it! I'm going to find out what's going on here!"
It sounded good to me. I rose from my chair, then stepped back out of his way as he stormed past me to a telephone on a desk set against the opposite wall. He snatched up the receiver, punched at the buttons.
"Enough!"
I jumped, thoroughly startled, and turned around to see the stooped figure of a woman, presumably Mrs. Carver, standing between the open, louvered French doors leading to what appeared to be, now that the lights in the room had been turned on, a small study off the library. Mrs. Carver had obviously been sitting in the room, in the dark, listening to everything that had been said. She was a slight woman, frail-looking, leaning now with both hands on a silver-tipped cane. Age had bent her body, wrinkled her flesh, and thinned out her white hair, but I could see that she had once been beautiful, with high cheekbones, full lips, fine features. She wore a hearing aid, a kind of mechanical redundancy at the moment, for she had obviously heard enough already and didn't intend to do any more listening. There was nothing frail about her regal bearing, or her voice.
"Hang up the phone, Bennett!"
After a few moments' shocked hesitation, Bennett Carver-multimillionaire, church official, pillar of the community, and general all-around big-time mover and shaker-did what he was told. I'd have done the same thing. Having supervised this, the woman made her slow but majestic way across the room to the small, glass-topped coffee table next to the chair in which her husband had been sitting. She picked up the photographs Carver had placed there, threw them at me. It was a physically feeble gesture, and the photos only made it half the distance to where I was standing before fluttering to the floor, but her fury and strength of will were an almost palpable force, and I felt as if I'd been slapped in the face.
"Get out of here, you nasty little man!" she screamed at me in a hoarse voice that cracked at the top of its range. "And take your stupid pictures with you! Do your worst with them! But know that if you do anything to hurt my boy, you will regret it for the rest of your life!"
I stayed where I was, considering it a very real possibility that she would start beating me over the head with her cane the moment I walked forward and bent down to retrieve the photographs. I had no training whatsoever in how to defend myself from assaults by enraged octogenarian women.
"You," Bennett Carver said in a shocked, breathy voice as he stared at his wife. He sounded a little like an owl. Both his tone and face amply demonstrated his surprise and disbelief. "Carla, you've been in touch with Charles? You got him this job?"
"Yes, I got Charles this job, you old fool! Somebody in this family has to act like a parent, and you gave up on that responsibility twenty years ago! Did you think I was going to disown my own son the way you did?"
"Carla-"
"Don't you 'Carla' me!" the stooped woman shrieked at her husband, her voice rising even higher. "If you'd been a decent father, none of the things Charles has suffered would have happened! He loved and admired you so much! All he ever wanted was to be like you, and you turned your back on him!"
Bennett Carver extended his arms imploringly toward his wife, but he stayed where he was. "Carla, don't you remember the things he would do? Don't you remember all the money we spent for doctors and hospitals? None of it made any difference. He wouldn't change. He was never happy unless he was making somebody else unhappy. He couldn't stay out of trouble."
"I don't care what he did! I don't care what people say he's done now! He's my son! I want-!"
I'd been trying to make myself even smaller than usual, but now Carla Carver once again took cognizance of my presence at this little family tete-a-tete, and exception to it. "I told you to take your filthy pictures and get out!" she keened in a high-pitched, breathy scream, and came toward me, brandishing her cane in the air.
I got out, fast. Since I did have copies of the photos I had brought to show Bennett Carver, as well as the negatives, I thought it a wise decision to leave the ones on the floor behind.
It was raining hard when I came out.
I drove back along the river, just to make sure that the tanker that had almost certainly killed Tom Blaine was where I had left it. It was, although it took some heavy-duty squinting to make out the dark shape across the river in the wind and rain of the summer storm. I had brought no raincoat, so I ducked inside the house to get one of Garth's umbrellas before going back to the hospital.
Garth was still unconscious. The doctors were at once happy to see me back and a bit miffed that I had left without their permission. I told them I was all right, that I had survived worse knocks on my head, and that I would rest and take aspirin for my headache, which had become so persistent I had almost, if not quite, gotten used to it. I was going home. The doctors didn't like that idea. We negotiated, and I agreed to let them take some X rays. They did, confirming their initial diagnosis of a mild concussion, and agreed it would be permissible for me to go home as long as I didn't engage in any strenuous activity for two or three weeks; I was to come back if the headache persisted for more than twenty-four hours. I signed a release form, then went back to Garth's room to sit with Mary for a while. I checked with the nurse on duty to make certain Garth's condition was stable, then went back to the room once more to say good night to Mary. The day's doings had caught up with me, and I was thoroughly exhausted; I badly needed the rest I had promised to take, and if the information Bennett Carver had given me was accurate, I still had better than twenty-four hours to decide how to attack the problem of the tanker and its killer captain before the ship set out for the sea.
Wrong. When I got back to the house and used Garth's binoculars to check once more on the tanker, it was gone from its mooring.