'Are you all right?' she asked, glancing at old man Evelith as if she suspected him of kidnapping me, and injecting me with strange drugs.
‘I’m fine,' I reassured her. 'All you have to do is finish your breakfast and leave when you feel like it. I'll call you later in the day. Maybe I'll even drop in and see you. And don't forget to tell Edward that I'd like to talk.'
'I won't,' said Gilly distractedly, as I left the dining-room, and followed Quamus across the hallway and out to the garage. In the gloom of the garage, Duglass Evelith's LTD wagon was waiting, black and polished, with two large packing-cases stowed in the back, both of them unmarked. Quamus opened the passenger door for me, and I climbed in, turning around to stare at the crates in trepidation.
'How much dynamite do we have there?' I asked him.
He pressed the remote button which opened the garage door. He looked across at me and almost smiled. 'Enough to blow this car to Lynnfield, no driving necessary.'
'Very reassuring,' I told him.
We were circling the shingle driveway when Enid came down the front steps of the house and waved to us. Quamus drew the wagon to a halt and put down the window. Enid looked pale and distraught, and her hair was flying loose.
'What's wrong?' I asked her. 'Did we forget something?'
'It's Anne,' she said. 'Your doctor just called, Dr Rosen?'
That's right, Dr Rosen. What's the matter?'
'It's terrible. I sensed that something was wrong during the night. A feeling, you know, of sudden loss. A feeling that part of us had suddenly vanished. A very cold feeling.'
'What's happened?' I demanded. 'For Christ's sake, tell me what's happened.'
'She was found hanging in her room this morning. They had kept her in for one more day of observation. Then, when they went in this morning, they found her hanging. Her own belt, from the light.'
'Oh, God,' I said, and I felt my eggs begin to curdle in my stomach. Quamus touched his forehead in a sign which I assumed to be the Indian symbol for 'bless me,' or 'rest in peace.'
'She left a message,' said Enid. 'I can't remember what it said exactly, but it was addressed to you, Mr Trenton. It said something like, "Don't feel you have to keep your promise, just for me." She didn't say what promise, though, or why you didn't have to keep it.'
I closed my eyes, and then opened them again. The day looked very gray, like a harsh black-and-white photograph. 'I know what promise,' I said quietly.
Thirty-Two
The co-operative Mr Walcott of the Salem Salvage Company turned out to be a short, broad-shouldered, Slavic-looking man with shaggy gray eyebrows and a vocabulary that consisted chiefly of 'C'd be' and 'Likely that's so', two forms of non-committal agreement that after only half an hour of sailing I began to find extremely irksome and frustrating.
Mr Walcott said that his mother had been Polish and his father had been English, and that between the two of them they had brought up a family that had been part mad, part romantic, part frosty, and part inspirational, and that was all he was going to say in the matter. He helped Quamus to load the dynamite boxes on to the deck of his diving-boat, a greasy 90-foot lugger that I had noticed several times moored up at the less savoury end of Salem Terminal Wharf; then he started up the diesels, and we left the quayside without any delay.
It was a chilly morning, but the sea was calm, and I was confident that I would be able to cope with the diving conditions. I wasn't at all sure about the dynamite, but I kept telling myself that it was all for Jane; and that if I played my part in this carefully and wisely, I would soon have her restored to me. It was an extraordinary thought, but if Mictantecutli kept his promise, it was possible that I might even have her back by tonight.
Quamus touched my shoulder, and beckoned me back to the lugger's after-deck, where our diving-gear was all laid out. A young girl with short-cropped blonde hair and a smudge of oil on her nose was checking the regulator valves on the oxygen cylinders. She wore identical denim overalls to Mr Walcott, and her eyes were the same sharp blue, and from her stocky, busty build I took her at once to be Mr Walcott's daughter. She said, 'Hi,' and looked at us skeptically, a gray-haired Indian of anything between 60 and 300 years old; and a nervous antique dealer in a dark blue business coat.
'You guys want to get ready?' she asked. ‘I’m Laurie, Laurie Walcott. Either of you guys ever dive before?'
'Of course,' I told her, trying to be sharp.
'I just asked,' she said, and threw me a Neoprene wet suit. It wasn't like the pristine white wet suit that Edward and Forrest had lent me: it was gray and smelly, like a discarded walrus-skin, and its wrinkles were clogged with damp talcum powder. The oxygen cylinders, too, were battered and well-worn, as if they had been used to beat off marauding sharks. I guess I had to remember that Walcott was a professional salvage diver, not one of your weekend tyros. Walcott called them 'floating faggots.'
Quamus said, 'If you wish, you can change your mind. It is not good to dive if you are full of fear. Mr Evelith will understand.'
'Do I look that frightened?' I asked him.
'I would choose the word "apprehensive",' said Quamus, with the hint of an ironic smile.
'You've been reading "It Pays To Increase Your Word Power," ' I retorted.
'No, Mr Trenton. I have simply been reading your face.'
When Dan Bass had piloted us out to the David Dark, he fiddled around for almost five minutes, positioning the Diogenes over the site of the wreck. But Mr Walcott, with his deeply-bitten pipe clenched between his teeth, and his oily cap pulled well down over his eyes, swung his lugger around as if it were a Harley-Davidson, right on the datum point, and lowered his anchor so accurately that when we dived we found it caught between the David Dark’s upright fashion-pieces.
Now Walcott came back to the after-deck, and started up the one-ton Atlas-Copco compressor. This huge machine rattled and coughed and sent up blurts of black smoke, but Walcott assured it was the best in the business. It would release a jet of compressed air down a 100-foot hose, and this would hopefully excavate a hole alongside the sunken hull of the David Dark large enough and deep enough for our dynamite.
I was surprised that Walcott asked no questions about what we were doing, or why, but presumably Quamus had paid him to keep his curiosity to himself. Laurie sat on the lugger's rail, chewing a huge mouthful of Bazooka Joe, and staring at the distant horizon as if the whole business were too boring for words.
At a few minutes after nine o'clock, Quamus and I rolled backwards off the lugger's side, and began our dive. Luckily, the water in the harbour was unusually clear, and it only took a few minutes for us to descend to the bottom. We quickly located the wreck, and Quamus tugged on the shot-line to tell Walcott to feed us with compressed air.
I looked at Quamus through my blinkered face-mask. Physically, he was remarkably muscular, and in his wetsuit he looked as if he had been hewn out of solid granite. It was his eyes that interested me the most, though. Framed in his oval face-mask, they looked serious and reflective, as if life had passed him by so many times that no crisis could surprise him any longer; as if he were quite ready for death, whenever it eventually came. I wondered whether old man Evelith had been pulling my leg when he had told me that Quamus had been at Billington over a hundred years ago; I knew that some families gave their servants 'below-stairs' names, so that butler after butler was always called James, no matter what they had actually been christened. The Quamus who had given piggybacks to Duglass Evelith's father had probably been this Quamus' father.