“Mister, I asked you who you are and what you’re doing here.”
“Having a look around. My name’s Quincannon. And you, I expect, would be Artemus Crabb.”
“How the devil d’you know my name?”
“Barnaby Meeker mentioned it.”
“Is that so? Meeker a friend of yours?”
“Business acquaintance.”
“That still don’t explain what you’re doing poking around these cars.”
“I’m thinking of buying some of them,” Quincannon lied glibly.
“Why?”
“For the same reason you and Meeker bought yours. You did buy yours, didn’t you?”
Crabb’s glower deepened. “Who says I didn’t?”
“A curious question, my friend, that’s all.”
“You’re damn’ curious about everything, ain’t you?”
“It’s my nature.” Quincannon smiled. “Ghosts and goblins,” he said then.
“What?” Crabb jerked as if he’d been struck. The hand hovering above the holstered Bisley shook visibly. “What’re you talking about?”
“Why, I understand these cars are haunted. Fascinating, if true.”
“It ain’t true! Ain’t no such things as ghosts!”
“It has been my experience that there are. Oh, the tales I could tell you of the spirit world and its evil manifestations…”
“I don’t want to hear it. I don’t believe none of it,” Crabb said, but it was plain that he did. And that the prospect frightened him as much as Caleb Potter had indicated.
“Mister Meeker tells me you’ve seen the apparition that inhabits these cars. Dancing lights, a glowing shape that races across the tops of dunes, and then vanishes, poof, without a trace…”
“I ain’t gonna talk about that. No, I ain’t!”
“I find the subject intriguing,” Quincannon said. “As a matter of fact, I’m hoping there is a ghost and that it occupies the very car I purchase. I’d welcome the company on a dark winter’s night.”
Crabb said something that sounded like-“Gah!”-and turned abruptly and scurried away. At the end of the car he stopped, looked over his shoulder, and called out: “You know what’s good for you, you stay away from these cars. Stay away!” Then he was gone into the swirling mist.
Quincannon finished his canvas of the remaining cars. Two others showed faint footprints and scratch marks on the walls and floor. In the second his keen eye picked out something half buried in drifted sand in one corner-a small but heavy piece of metal with a tiny ring soldered onto one end. After several turns in his hand, he identified it as a fisherman’s lead sinker. He studied it for a few seconds longer, then pocketed it and left the car.
Before he quit the area he climbed up to the top of the nearby line of dunes. Thick salt grass and stubby patches of gorse grew on the crests; the sand there was windswept to a tawny smoothness, without marks of any kind except for the imprint of Quincannon’s boots as he moved along. From this vantage point, through intermittent tears in the curtain of fog, he could see the white-capped ocean in the distance, the long beach and line of surf that edged it. The distant roar of breakers was muted by the wind’s wail.
He walked for some way, examining the surfaces. There was nothing up here to take his eye. No prints, no mashing of the grass or gorse to indicate passage. The steep slopes that fell away on both sides were likewise smoothly scoured, barren but for occasional bits of driftwood.
Wryly he thought: Whither thou, ghost?
The Meeker property was larger than it had seemed from a distance. In addition to the domino-styled home, there were a covered woodpile, a cistern, a small corral and lean-to built with its back to the wind, and on the other side of the cars a dune-protected privy. As Quincannon drove the buggy up the lane, Barnaby Meeker came out to stand, waiting, on a railed and slanted walkway fronting the two center cars. A thin woman wearing a woolen cape soon joined him. Meeker gestured to the lean-to and corral, where an unhitched wagon and a roan horse were picketed and where there was room for the rented buggy and livery plug. Quincannon debouched there, decided he would deal with the animal’s needs later, and went to join Meeker and the woman.
She was his wife, it developed, given name Lucretia. Her handshake was as firm as a man’s, her eyes bird-bright. She might have been comely in her early years, but she seemed to have pinched and soured as she aged; her expression was that of someone who had eaten one too many sacks full of lemons. And she was not pleased to meet him.
“A detective, of all things,” she said. “My husband can be foolishly impulsive at times.”
“Now, Lucretia,” Meeker said mildly.
“Don’t deny it. What can a detective do to lay a ghost?”
“If it is a ghost, nothing. If it isn’t, Mister Quincannon will find out what’s behind these…will-o’-the-wisps.”
“Will-o’-the-wisps? On foggy nights with no moon?”
“What ever they are, then.”
“Your neighbor believes it’s a genuine ghost,” Quincannon said. “If you’ll pardon the expression, the incidents have him badly spooked.”
“You saw Mister Crabb, did you?” Meeker asked.
“I did. Unfriendly gent. He warned me away from the abandoned cars.”
“Good-for-nothing, if you ask me,” Mrs. Meeker said.
“Indeed? What makes you think so?”
“He’s a squatter, for one thing. And he has no profession, for another. No licit profession, I’ll warrant.”
“According to the counterman at the coffee saloon, Crabb told your son he was in construction work.”
“Jared, you mean?” Her mouth turned even more lemony. “Another good-for-nothing.”
“Now, Lucretia,” Meeker said, not so mildly.
“Well? Do you deny it?”
“I do. He’s yet to prove himself, that’s all.”
“Never will, I say.”
The Meekers glared at each other. Mrs. Meeker was victorious in the game of stare down-as she would be most times they played it, Quincannon thought. Her husband averted his gaze and said to Quincannon: “Come inside. It’s nippy out here.”
The end walls where the two cars were joined had been removed to create one long room. It seemed too warm after the outside chill; a potbellied stove glowed cherry red in one corner. Quincannon accepted the offer of a cup of tea and Mrs. Meeker went to pour it from a pot resting atop the stove. He managed to maintain a poker face as he surveyed the surroundings. The car was a combination parlor, kitchen, and dining area, but it was like none other he had ever seen or hoped to see. The contents were an amazing hodge podge of heavy Victorian furniture and decorations that included numerous framed photographs and daguerreotypes, gewgaws, gimcracks, and what was surely flotsam that had been collected from the beaches-pieces of driftwood, odd-shaped bottles, glass fisherman’s floats, a section of draped netting like a moldy spider web. The effect was more that of a junk shop display than a comfortable habitation.
“Your son isn’t home, I take it,” Quincannon said. The tufted red-velvet chair he perched on was as uncomfortable as it looked.
“Thomas is a sergeant in the United States Army,” Mrs. Meeker said. “Stationed at Fort Huachuca. We haven’t seen him in two years, to my sorrow.”
Meeker said-“Thomas is our eldest son.”-and added wryly: “My wife’s favorite, as you may have surmised.”
“And why shouldn’t he be? He’s the only one who has amounted, or will amount, to anything.”
“Now, Lucretia”-with bite in the words this time-“the way you malign Jared is annoying, to say the least. He may be a bit wild and irresponsible, but he…”
“A bit wild and irresponsible? A bit!” The teacup rattled in its saucer, spilling hot liquid that Quincannon barely managed to avoid, as she handed him the crockery. “He’s a young scamp and you know it…worse today than when he was a kiting youngster. Up and quit the only decent job he ever held just last week, after less than a month’s honest labor.”