Quincannon cocked a questioning eyebrow at his employer.
“It was a clerk’s job downtown, and poorly paid,” Meeker said. “He’s a bright lad and he’ll find a more suitable position one day…”
“You won’t live long enough to see the day and neither will I.”
“That’s enough, Lucretia.”
“Oh, go dance up a rope,” she said, surprising Quincannon if not her husband.
Meeker performed his puffing-toad imitation and started to say something, but at that moment the door burst open and the wind blew in a young man swathed in a greatcoat, scarf, gloves, and stocking cap. His lean, clean-shaven face-weak-chinned and thin-lipped-was ruddy from the cold. Jared Meeker, in the flesh.
His parents might have been two sticks of furniture for all he had to say to them. It wasn’t until he opened his coat and yanked off his cap, revealing a mop of ginger-colored hair, that he noticed Quincannon. “Well, a visitor. And a stranger at that.”
“His name is John Quincannon,” Mrs. Meeker said. “He’s a detective.”
The last word caused Jared’s eyes to narrow. “A detective? What kind of detective? What’s he doing here?”
“Your father hired him to investigate the supernatural. Of all things.”
“…Ah. The ghost, you mean?”
“Whatever it is we’ve seen these past two nights, yes,” Meeker said.
Jared relaxed into an indolent posture as he shed his coat. Then he laughed, a thin barking sound like that of an adenoidal seal. “A detective to investigate a ghost. Hah! That’s rich, that is.”
Quincannon said: “I have had stranger cases, and brought them to a satisfactory conclusion. Are you a believer or a skeptic, lad?”
“I believe what I see with my own eyes. What about you?”
“I have an open mind on the subject,” he lied.
“Well, it’s a real ghost, all right. Likely of a man who died in one of the cars, or in a railway accident. Couldn’t be anything else, no matter what anybody thinks. You may well see it for yourself, if you’re planning to spend the night.”
“I am.”
“If it does reappear, you’ll be a believer, too.”
“We’ll see about that.”
Jared grinned and loosed another bark. “A detective. Hah!”
Alone in the parlor, Quincannon smoked his stubby briar and waited for the hands on his stem-winder to point to 11:30 p.m. The Meekers had all retired to their respective bedrooms in the end cars some time earlier, at his insistence; he preferred to maintain a solitary vigil. He also preferred silence to desultory and pointless conversation. There were ominous rumblings in his digestive tract as well, the result of the bland chicken dish and boiled potatoes and carrots Mrs. Meeker had seen fit to serve for supper.
The car was no longer overheated, now that the fire in the stove had banked. Cooling, the stove metal made little pinging sounds that punctuated the snicking of wind-flung sand against the car’s windows and sides. As 11:30 p.m. approached, he checked the loads in his Navy Colt. Not that he expected to need the weapon-the Carville ghost seemed to have no malevolent intention, and no one had ever succeeded in plugging a spook in any case-but he had learned long ago to exercise caution in all situations.
It was time. He holstered the Navy, donned his greatcoat, cap, scarf, and gloves, and slipped out into the night.
Icy, fog-wet wind and blowing sand buffeted him as he came down off the walkway. The night was not quite black as tar but close to it; he could barely make out the shed and corral nearby. The distant jumble of abandoned cars was invisible except for brief rents in the wall of fog, and then discernible only as faintly lumpish shapes among the dunes.
He slogged into the shelter of the lean-to. The two horses, both blanketed against the cold, stirred and one nickered softly at his passage. He removed his dark lantern from beneath the seat of the rented buggy, lighted it, closed the shutter, and then went to the side wall and probed along it until he found a gap between boards. Another brief tear in the fog permitted him to fix the proper angle for viewing the cars. He dragged over two bales of hay, piled one atop the other, and perched on the makeshift seat. By bending forward slightly, his eyes were on a level with the gap. He settled down to wait.
He had learned patience in situations such as this, by ruminating on matters of business and pleasure. Sabina occupied his mind for a considerable time. Then he sighed and shifted his thoughts to the other cases currently under investigation. The missing Devereaux heiress should be easy enough to locate; like as not she had gone off for an extended dalliance with one of her swains, since no ransom demand had been received by the family. Sabina needed no help from him in yaffling the pickpocket at the Chutes amusement park. The Wells Fargo robbery was more his type of case, and a challenging one since city bluecoats and rival detective agencies were also on the hunt for the two masked bandits who had escaped with $25,000 in cash. He had to admit that he’d made little enough headway over the past two weeks, but the same was true of his competitors for the reward Wells Fargo was offering.
Light. A faint shimmery glow through the mist.
He strained forward, squinting closer to the gap. Gray-black for a few seconds, then the fog lifted somewhat and he spied the eerie radiance again, shifting about behind the windows in one of the cars. More than just a glow-an ectoplasmic shape, an unearthly face.
He snatched up the dark lantern, hopped off the hay bales, and stepped out around the corner of the lean-to. The thing continued to drift around inside the car, held stationary for a few seconds, moved again. Quincannon was moving himself by then, over into the shadow of the cistern. Beyond there, flattish sand fields stretched for thirty or forty rods on three sides; there was no cover anywhere on its expanse, no quick way to get to the cars, even by circling around, without crossing open space.
He waited for a thickening of the fog, then stepped out in a low crouch and ran toward the car. He was halfway there when the radiance vanished.
Immediately he veered to his right, toward the line of dunes behind the cars. But he couldn’t generate any speed; in the wet darkness and loose sand he felt as if he were churning, heavy-legged, through a dream. There were no sounds except for the wind, the distant pound of surf, the rasp of his breathing.
It was two or three minutes before he reached the foot of the nearest dune. No sooner had he begun to plow upward along its steep side than the wraith-like human shape appeared suddenly at the crest and then bounded away in a rush of shimmery phosphorescence.
Quincannon shined the lantern in that direction, but the beam wasn’t powerful enough to cut through the wall of fog. Cursing, he leaned forward and dug his free hand into the sand to help propel himself upward. Behind and below him, he heard a shout. A quick glance over his shoulder told him it had come from a man running across the sand field-Barnaby or Jared Meeker, alerted too late to be of any assistance.
He was a few feet from the crest when a wind-muffled report reached his ears. The ghost shape twitched, seemed to bound forward another step or two, and then suddenly vanished. Two or three heartbeats later, it reappeared, higher up, twisted, and was gone again.
Quincannon filled his right hand with his Navy Colt as he struggled, panting, to the dune top. When he straightened, he thought he saw another flash of radiance in the far distance. After that, there was nothing to see but fog and darkness.
He made his way forward, playing the lantern beam ahead of him. The grassy surface of this dune and the next in line showed no marks of passage. But down near the bottom on the opposite side, the light illuminated a faint, irregular line of tracks that the wind was already beginning to erase.