Her comment surprised Abe and pleased him. Many people in her place would want only to curl up alone with their loss. Her attitude seemed healthier than that. “Swim we shall,” he said.
“We didn’t even bring our suits,” Nora reminded her. “I didn’t, anyway, did you?”
“I want to buy a new one.”
“Sure. Okay. Me too.”
Abe pulled out and drove slowly up the road. “Why don’t we let you off at a store? You can buy your suits. Jack and I’ll go on back to the motel for ours, and we’ll pick you up in about fifteen minutes.”
“It may take longer,” Nora said.
On the next block, Abe spotted the sign for Will’s Sporting Goods. White lettering on the display window announced guns, tackle, swimming and camping accessories. “How about there?” he asked.
“We can give it a try,” Nora said.
He pulled to the curb. Tyler met his eyes. “Hurry back,” she told him.
“I will. We’ll meet you right here.”
She opened the door and climbed out. Nora pushed the seat-back forward. She looked at Abe as if about to say something, seemed to change her mind. She joined Tyler on the sidewalk. Abe waited for a car to pass, then swung onto the road.
“Christ,” Jack said. “The poor kid.”
“She’s holding up pretty well.”
“Gutsy.”
“Yeah.”
“Nora said she almost married the guy once. She finally figured she’d screwed up by turning him down, and came here to give him another shot.”
Abe nodded. He scanned the building fronts.
“Nora also said she was having second thoughts about it all. ‘Cause of you.”
Abe said nothing, but he felt his heart speed up.
“She thinks Tyler’s really fallen for you. No taste.”
Abe grinned. Then, down a sidestreet to the right, he spotted a pair of flag standards on the sidewalk. He turned. The gray stone building might be a post office, he realized, but it turned out to be the city hall.
“What are you doing?”
“You take the car. Get the trunks and some towels, and meet me back here. I want to do some checking.”
“On Jenson?”
“You got it.”
He eased in behind a pickup truck, left the keys in the ignition, and handed his room key to Jack. He left the car. He crossed the road at an angle away from the administrative offices’ entrance, heading for a blue, five-pointed star suspended above a set of double glass doors. The doors read, police department malcasa point. Pushing one open, he entered a deserted waiting area. A partition of frosted glass ran the length of the countertop. He stepped up to one of its three windows.
“We’ll want to impound it,” said the man. He was sitting on the corner of a nearby desk, his back to the window.
The female officer nodded. Her tan uniform was too tight across her broad chest and hips. She must be twenty-one, but she didn’t look it. She wore her hair short, in a cut similar to Tyler. Her eyes were on the other cop, and she didn’t notice Abe.
“Have Bix tow it in, but I want you supervising.”
“Oh, great. Bix is my favorite human.”
“Fortunes of war, Lucy. He’s a jerk, that’s why I want you out there. Give him half a chance, he’ll screw up the works just to spite us. Soon as it’s in the yard, let me know. I’ll want to go over it myself.”
“Right.”
“Bix puts a grope on you, you have my permission to deck him.”
She had a nice smile. “I’ll run him in for nauseating a police officer.” She started to turn away, and spotted Abe. With a nod, she signaled that they had a visitor.
The man looked over his shoulder, smiled, and scooted off the desktop as Lucy headed for a side door. He was taller than Abe, with a lean, creased face. His gray hair was long at the sides as if to make up for what he lacked on top. His eyes were the same gray as his hair. Sniper eyes, Abe thought. But cop eyes, too—wary and somewhat bemused.
“Yessir,” he said. “I’m Harry Purcell. What can I do for you?”
“I just finished a tour of Beast House.”
His smile slipped a bit. “Yes?”
“They’ve got Dan Jenson on display over there.”
The smile vanished completely. “I’m aware of that.”
“I was with a young lady who used to know him. Can you tell me what happened to him?”
Purcell’s face pinched up as if he’d stubbed a toe. He said, “Oooh. You mean she didn’t know he was deceased?”
“That’s what I mean. The first she knew was when she found his wax face staring up at her.”
“Oooh. That’s raw, mighty raw. How’s she bearing up?”
“She’s managing.”
“The damn shit house. Sometimes, I think I’d like to torch the place.”
“How was Jenson killed?”
“Went in without a backup. He was on routine patrol, noticed a light in one of the windows. Now, nobody goes in that place at night. Not even Kutch or Hapson. Claim they don’t, anyway. So Jenson suspected prowlers. He radioed for backup, but we haven’t got much personnel. Two-man shifts, and a watch commander on dispatch. Well, Sweeny’d picked that time to stop for a bite. Jenson said he’d wait for him, but then he went on in alone. And he didn’t come out. When Sweeny got there, he found Jenson’s radio car abandoned. He wouldn’t go in the house alone, and I can’t say I blame him. We rousted up the rest of the force, even got the volunteer fire department in on it, and went in. Found his body in the upstairs hallway. His, and the other two. Ziegler and his kid. Searched the place top to bottom, came up zilch.”
“What became of Jenson’s body?”
“He had a sister come for it. Had it sent south. To Sacramento, I believe. It was a real shame. Dan was a fine young man.”
“There was a coroner’s inquest?”
“Sure. Verdict was ‘death at the hands of another’ on all three of them. Trouble was, we couldn’t come up with ‘another.’ We carried out a full investigation, but it ran out of steam. Just wasn’t much to go on. Couldn’t even say for sure it was a man that did it. Might’ve been a wild animal, but we couldn’t think what. We’ve got some coyotes in the hills, but they’re too small. We considered maybe a dog—it’d have to be the size of a mastiff or Dane. We even had some talk of bobcats and bears, though I don’t know where one could’ve come from. But all that’s pretty much ruled out. Those are furry creatures, and the only hairs we picked up in the vacuum were human.”
“Could the wounds have been made by a human?” Abe asked.
The cop shrugged. “If he was mighty strong and had a good set of fingernails.”
“They looked like claw marks on the wax.”
“We had a theory he might’ve used some kind of device, like a spading-fork or maybe a glove fixed up with spikes of some sort. Sounds a bit farfetched, but the whole situation was pretty curious.”
“Think the beast did it?”
“That’s sure what Maggie wants the whole world to think. Her business picked up a hundred percent after the killings. Which gives her something of a motive, in my opinion. If I was to hazard a guess—and I haven’t got a speck of evidence to back it up—I’d say Maggie was in back of it. I think her boy, Axel, is physically capable of ripping a man’s arm out of its socket. Maybe Wick or Maggie were with him. They took care of Ziegler and his kid, killed Dan when he came up, then used something to claw them up to make it look like the work of their beast and hightailed before we got the house surrounded. That’d be my best guess, but like I say, you can’t take a guess into court.”
“What about the other killings?”
He leaned forward, elbows on the counter. “I’ll tell you what I think, and I’m not the only one in town who suspects the same. I say Maggie Kutch, maybe with Wick Hapson’s help, murdered her husband and kids back in ‘31, mutilated the bodies and started up this story about a mysterious creature to tie it in with the old Thorn killings and throw off suspicion. I was just a kid at the time, but I remember there was plenty of talk along those lines. Wick was in high school then and he used to do yard work at the Kutch place. There was talk about him and Maggie even before the killings. They came under plenty of suspicion, but it died down over the years. Started up again in the fifties, after the Bagley boy was murdered in there, but by then they’d been running the tour so long they half had people believing in that beast of theirs. And it didn’t help any that the kid who survived—Maywood—claimed it was some kind of monster that did in his friend. Of course, he was hysterical. It was dark in there. He probably expected to see some kind of hellish creature and his eyes played tricks on him. Then again, maybe it was Wick in some kind of outfit. Who’s to say?”