He got to me and took my arm and helped me up. "Are you all right? Christ!"
"I think… so."
"Dancer?"
"Not in there. It's empty."
"Bastard got away. He went over the boulders and up a steep bluff down the way. I heard a car engine, and by the time I got up there he was gone. If I'd worn my goddamn gun, I might have had him-son of a bitch, anyway!"
Panting, I pivoted and looked at the shack. Smoke rolled up into the misty sky in thick clouds, and you could see flames licking with curled orange tongues through the shingled roof. As I watched, the rear glass wall shattered from the intense heat, bursting smoke and glistening shards and more tongues of fire outward. There was nothing we could do; the place was a damned tinderbox.
Quartermain's face looked hellish in the dancing light. "We'd better get up to the car before a spark catches the stairs," he said savagely, and we ran in a wide sweep toward the bluff and along it to the stairs. I could feel the heat again and taste the smoke as we scrambled up. I stopped on the landing, hanging onto the railing and looking down at the flaming shack; Quartermain continued on to the car, and a moment later I could hear him shouting into the transceiver's handset.
I stayed where I was, letting the cool sea wind act as a balm on the heat-reddened surface of my face. Breathing was still a problem, but I thought that it would be all right after a while. A minute or two slid away, and I began to think about the blazing bookshelves and the can of gasoline and the emptiness of the shack, and what meaning those facts had. I turned and went over to the car.
Quartermain was leaning wearily against the roof, the handset still in his fingers and the door open; his iron- colored hair was disarrayed, jutting up and out at angles from his scalp. I said, "I think I know why the fire was set, Ned."
He moved his head in a quadrant and put his eyes on mine; they contained a thinly controlled fury. "Say it."
"There was a can of gasoline in there; the bald guy doused it over Dancer's bookshelves and touched them off. Dancer wasn't home, but the guy still set the fire-and because there were better places to soak up the gasoline, he had to have picked the bookshelves for a specific reason."
Quartermain saw it immediately. "To destroy any copies of The Dead and the Dying Dancer might have had."
"Yeah."
"But why?"
"He doesn't want us to read that book," I said. "There's something in it, something in the writing itself. It has to be that way. What the something is we'll know when we read the book-or he figures we will."
"How does he know we haven't already read it?"
"Maybe by my actions, and yours-the police. Maybe we'd be doing things differently if we knew why the book was important."
Quartermain straightened, and his canted eyelids came down. "All right, then," he said. "We've got to read the book."
"The sooner the better."
"Where did you say Paige's copy was-the one I gave you?"
"My unit at the Beachwood, on the nightstand."
"Then we'd better get it."
"Fast." I said. "Before something happens to that one, too."
He called through to Donovan again; Favor had returned to the Cypress Bay station-there was still no report on Winestock-and Quartermain told him to get over to the Beachwood and into my cottage for the book. Favor said he was on his way.
Leaning inside, Quartermain replaced the handset. Then we went over to the stairs again, and the shack was nothing more than a black-and-orange shell now; the roof had collapsed, and sparks drifted and flared in a brilliantine, joyless fireworks display. By the time the county fire equipment got there, not much would be left, not much at all.
Quartermain said tightly, "If that bastard came here to get rid of copies of The Dead and the Dying, why wouldn't he be thinking about Dancer too? Dancer wrote the damned book."
"He might have been. Maybe, if Dancer had been here, he was supposed to go up along with the shack." I paused grimly. "Or it could be he already got to Dancer, somewhere else."
"I don't want to think about that possibility," Quartermain said. And then, with sharp frustration: "Goddamn it, I don't understand what's going on. I don't understand any of this. Who in God's name is that guy?"
"Yeah," I said, "who?"
I could hear ululating sirens in the distance, coming down from the north and then coming west from Highway 1 along Beach Road, very loud now. Pretty soon a couple of bright-red county pump engines and a fire marshal's car and a State Highway Patrol unit came out to fill the bluff face with darting light and screaming noise. I retreated to Quartermain's car, and he went over to talk to the marshal. Black-uniformed, white-helmeted men came off the trucks and went to work with hoses and pumping units, and after a time they began playing streams of pressurized water down onto the burning shack.
I sat on the front seat of the car, with the door open and my feet on the ground. My chest was band-tight, but I could breathe all right now if I took the air in short, shallow inhalations. Pain rushed through my temples and behind my eyes, dull and heavy, and I felt vaguely nauseated.
Quartermain came over finally, and I stood up. He said, "You look rough. How do you feel?"
"I'll make it."
"I can radio for a doctor."
"I don't need one."
"All right."
We watched the firemen working with their hoses. The smoke drifting to the south and commingling with the incoming mist formed a curtain of black-flecked gray- ness over the stars. With the noise created by the men and the pump engines, and local residents attracted by the arrival of the fire units, I could no longer hear the sound of the surf. It would have been no comfort anyway.
The transceiver set began to make crackling noises. Quartermain slid in under the wheel, motioning me around to the other side, and closed the door. When I got in on the passenger side, and shut that door, I could hear Favor's voice saying, "… here at the Beachwood now, Ned. Orchard gave me a key to the cabin, but once I got inside I could see that something was wrong. The rear glass door was open, and when I checked I found jimmy marks on the lock."
Oh, I thought. Oh, oh, oh.
Quartermain hit the Send switch. "What about the book?"
"It's gone," Favor said.
Fourteen
We left the bluff face and Beach Road immediately, and drove to the Beachwood in Cypress Bay. The book was the only thing missing, nothing else had been touched, and it seemed obvious the balding man-it had to have been him, all right-had used the cover of darkness to come over the hedge or gate into the cottage's private rear garden. Favor had dusted the sliding door and the nightstand with his kit, but there were no prints; the guy had wiped everything clean. Quartermain told him to get in touch with a local artist named Vance, who did portrait work for them from time to time, and to have him waiting at the station to work up a drawing; then we drove over to Bonificacio Drive to talk to Beverly Winestock.
Neither of us expected any help from her-she was too fiercely loyal to her brother for one thing; and I had my doubts he would have told her where he was going tonight-but Quartermain had to talk to her anyway. At the moment, there was no one else he could talk to.
Beverly answered the door fully dressed-and still cool, still distant. But her eyes contained a touch of fear, and there were strain lines etched at the corners of her mouth. She was worried, apprehensive, and trying desperately not to show it. She noticed the condition of my face and clothing immediately, and what little color existed in her cheeks drained away. Had something happened, was Brad-?
Quartermain told her, succinctly, about the fire-gutting of Dancer's cabin, and the reason for it, and the theft of Paige's copy of The Dead and the Dying from my motel cottage. None of it seemed to have much effect on her; it was, I thought, as if she knew her brother was involved in all of this, but not the why or the how of his involvement. Quartermain began to question her, but she gave him nothing in response. No, she didn't know where her brother had gone tonight; no, she knew of no connection between Brad and a man answering the description of the balding guy; no, she had no idea why Dancer's book was so important, she had never read it and she knew nothing about it. She wanted to know what it was we suspected Brad of, and Quartermain told her only that he seemed to have information which would assist the investigation into the death of Walter Paige and the location of the balding man. Well, she said, she didn't know anything about Paige's death and she was certain Brad didn't either, we were misguided if we thought he did. There was sincerity in her voice, but you could tell she was holding an intangible something back and would keep on holding it back as long as necessary to protect her brother.