Jake was sobbing. Absently, he tugged at the robe, trying to smooth it, and stroked her hair, trying to coax it back out of her unseeing eyes. All the while, tears trickled silently into the furrows of his craggy face.
I had a feeling down deep inside me that Jake Madden, a man who didn't claim much for himself in this world, had just lost something more precious than he dared to admit. Finally, he slumped back against the side of the trailer, buried his face in his hands and sobbed like a schoolboy.
Even in emotionally charged times, my mind has the disturbing tendency to logically chronicle facts. It bothers some people, but over the years I've learned to accept it. Such was the case now. Vernice Hutchins was dead, but as far as I could tell there wasn't a mark on her. And for some reason I was already convinced she hadn't died of natural causes.
It took Jake several minutes to regain his composure. When he did, he leaned over, picked up Vernice's lifeless body and carried her out to the four-by-four. He covered her with a blanket and crawled in the cab without saying a word. His face was drained of color, and there was a discernible tremble in his lower lip. A tremor dominated his voice when he finally spoke.
"Never knew that woman to be sick in all the years I've known her," he managed.
"Call it anything you want to, Jake," I said uneasily, "but I've got a feeling this is tied in with the rest of this weird stuff."
"You think somebody killed her?"
"I don't know what I think, but we'd better have a look around."
Jake still paused, transfixed by the lifeless form stretched out under the worn plaid blanket. "Who would want to harm her? She didn't have an enemy in the world. Everybody liked her."
While Jake tried to cope with the ebb and flow of his emotions, I began looking around. Something was bothering me, but I couldn't put my finger on it. Maybe it was the fact that she was wearing a robe and was outside. Maybe it was the fact that she hadn't gone into town as she was instructed to do. Or maybe it was simply the fact that Vernice looked like one of those wiry little women that would seem to live forever.
I gave the rutted gravel drive the onceover and went back up to Vernice's trailer. There was no sign of blood on the porch, and once inside, it was evident that there were no signs of a struggle. The tiny quarters were immaculate. A pair of men's white boxer shorts and two white crew-necked tee shirts had been laundered, carefully folded and stacked on the end of the bed. They were obviously Jake's. The bed was still made, and a full cup of coffee was sitting on the kitchen table.
It was easy to conjure up a scenario. Vernice Hutchins was ready for bed, decided to have one last cup of coffee, heard a sound in the drive, thought maybe Jake had finally arrived, went out to greet him, and…
I was on my way out the door when I glanced up at the top of the cabinet in the tiny kitchen area. I stopped dead in my tracks, a cold chill racing down my spine.
There it sat — a small vase with a sprig of pine, a single tapered candle and a statuette of the sarcophagus of Sate.
One thing was now painfully clear. Vernice Hutchins hadn't died of natural causes. The only questions now were — who, how and why?
By midafternoon all teams had completed the sweep and come up empty-handed. Hawkins's crew had worked their way east to the Carson farm road, concentrating their efforts along the coastline. They had intercepted Kendall s group at what had become known in the last few hours as the rendezvous point — the spot where Percy Kramer had died.
Madden, in a state of shock over Vernice's death, had taken her body into the old schoolhouse and solicited B.C.'s help. I joined up with what would have been Madden's team and hooked up with Caleb on the sweep effort. All the reports sounded the same — saw nothing, heard nothing, no creature, no nothing.
The men milled around the area in a kind of robot-like daze; most of them hadn't slept in 36 hours. They were operating on coffee, cigarettes and frayed raw emotions. What little banter there had been earlier had now disappeared completely.
Kendall was aware of the situation. He clustered the 20-odd men around him and signaled for silence. "It's a little after three," he began in a voice worn thin by the mounting hours of strain, "and most of us are out on our feet. I intend to initiate the same security plan tonight that we had last night. Everyone who isn't assigned to one of the patrol efforts will be restricted to the village."
Kendall's speech mirrored his own growing uncertainty. The situation was deteriorating. He knew it and the men knew it. The repeated failures to find and capture the wounded creature only compounded the problem. The men were losing confidence in both the man and his plan.
The trek back to the marina gave me some time to think. I didn't know how or why, but I was convinced that both Kelto and the old Austin woman knew a great deal more that could help us. The trick was going to be to find out what. There were all kinds of questions bouncing around in my mind — questions like, where did Kelto go when he disappeared for hours at a time? What did he know that he wasn't telling me? What was his relationship to the Austin woman? Maybe even more importantly, where were they last night? And why didn't they feel obliged to come into the village like they were ordered to do?
The questions continued to rattle around. No one single element seemed to be related to another. I was still harboring the uneasy feeling that Bert and Polly hadn't wanted to come into the village where they would have had the protection of the patrols. Why? And Angie — why had she stayed there with them? True, it had taken a little coaxing to start the van, but there was a gaping hole in all of it and I wasn't finding it. By the time the sweep teams had returned to the marina I was still muddling through the same seemingly simple questions. Finally, I decided to chalk off the lack of answers to nothing more than being too tired to think clearly.
By the time we worked our way back to the old schoolhouse and checked in, I had decided to venture back out to the Chambers Bay Motel and grab a couple of hours of much needed sleep I retrieved the survival kit and conned one of the locals into dropping me off at the now deserted motel.
I had no more than dropped the kit on my bed and poured myself a drink when there was a knock on the door.
"Come in," I snarled, still savoring the warm surge the B and W was bestowing on my chilled innards.
The door opened, and Kelto stood there with that damnable sullen look on his face.
Suddenly all my pent-up emotions snapped.
Battered body and all, I took one ballet-like leap that carried me across the room. Just like that I had him by the front of the jacket, brought the knee up, and chopped down. He was on the floor, beside the bed, half-propped against the wall, a dazed expression replacing the perpetual sneer. All of this would probably have elicited some kind of response if I had given him time.
I didn't.
Pissed-off gesture number two was the old knee to the belly shot. It slammed into his flat stomach, and he was pinned to the floor. The air belched out of him, and he went through the age-old agony of a man who has had the wind knocked out of him and who truly believes he'll never breathe again.
"Okay, sonny boy, have I got your attention?"
Kelto stared back at me, dazed and gasping for breath.
I got off of him, swaggered to the dresser and poured myself another drink. I was secretly wondering how Mike Hammer or Travis McGee would have improved on my little routine.
It was destined to take him another four or five minutes to marshal his scrambled senses. In the meantime, I slumped down on the edge of the bed, casually reached into my survival kit and fished out the Mauser. For effect, I exercised the nine-cartridge clip and rebolted it. Kelto's eyes were as big as golf balls.