A Coldness in the Blood Read online

  Dolly touched Andy’s arm and pointed to one of these. “That was Gramp. He loved that old carny kind of stuff.”

  More remarkable was the casual but extensive ruin of furniture and contents. Drawers everywhere had been pulled out and their contents strewn about, closets and cupboards emptied. Already Maule had propped his spear in a corner, and was muttering what sounded like swear words in some exotic language. It appeared that he was ready to abandon hope of finding any small white statues here, or anything else that might be of help.

  Dolly had set her shotgun down again. As she moved from room to room she was increasingly disturbed by the mess. “Oh my God! Look at this!”

  “The landlord certainly didn’t do this,” Andy observed.

  “Landlord lives out of town. I’m sure he doesn’t know about it yet. He’ll have a cat-fit when he does.”

  They were standing in the vandalized kitchen. Maule patted her shoulder. “That is the least of our problems, I assure you, and easily solved. Now I would like to make sure of the vandals’ identity. Perhaps they were some surviving friends of the late Mr. Lambert. Or …”

  “Maybe it was Sobek,” Joe Keogh offered. “Could have been here before he visited Carmel. This place could have been torn up yesterday, or the day before.”

  Maule nodded; there was a distant look on his face, that of a man listening intently.

  Moments later, the others heard it too: the sound of a small car pulling up in front of the house. When Andy moved that way to look out a window, he could see it was a late model with heavily tinted windows. It stopped very close to the SUV, as if determined to seek the shade as well. Now a young woman was getting out.

  “Connie. She’s alone.” John’s voice sounded only slightly surprised.

  A moment later the newcomer was tapping briskly at the front door. Maule’s voice spoke the necessary invitation.

  When Connie took off her sunglasses she still looked wide-eyed and innocent, though less prim and ladylike than she had in Chicago. She was wearing a different outfit now, but this one was just as stylish and the pants were just as tight. Her bright red toenails were hidden now in low-heeled shoes that still managed to avoid looking practical. The dark curly hair had been somehow differently arranged, and the heavy silver earrings were no longer to be seen. Her perfume was no less entrancing, though different from the fragrance Andy could remember.

  Her eyes lit up as soon as her gaze fell on him. “Ah, there you are, young Andee! I must apologize for hovering outside your window late at night—the window of your little room aboard the train.” She looked at Dolly. “And my apologies to you, my dear, as well.” Back to Andy again. “Ah, but I regret I did not have the chance to get to know you, back in Chicago. I can hope you have not utterly forgotten me?”

  “I don’t see how I could have done that,” Andy heard himself saying. “But I just don’t remember clearly.”

  “Ah, how sad, to feel myself forgotten!”

  Her smiling eyes swept on around the group—rested for a moment on the silent Maule, warily making sure he was not really angry with her—and came to rest on Joe. Now she brightened again. “Ah, it is the very dangerous Mr. Keogh!”

  He nodded, gravely. “Please, call me Joe, or Joseph. Why dangerous?”

  “Mr. Keogh—oh I beg pardon, Joseph!—but you are becoming something of a legend among certain clans and families of the nosferatu.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh yes. I think no breather who now walks the earth has killed as many of us as you have.” Connie pouted prettily. “I am almost afraid to be in the same room with you myself.”

  And I with you, Joe thought to himself. Aloud, he performed a tersely formal introduction between Connie and Dolores Flamel.

  Presently a renewed search effort was under way, with Connie, at a nod from Maule, allowed to take part. She threw herself into the task, searching as energetically if not as efficiently as Uncle Matt himself.

  A quarter of an hour later, when every room of the house had been examined in detail with no result, Maule gathered his helpers in the ruined parlor.

  John Southerland broke the glum silence. “If one of the statues was here, whoever tore the place apart like this must have found it.”

  Maule was shaking his head. “Not necessarily. If one of our enemies has indeed gained control of the Philosopher’s Stone, then I believe we would already have convincing evidence of the fact, in the form of a noticeable change, and not for the better, in the nature of the world.”

  The room was very silent. All Maule’s companions were listening intently, watching him.

  His voice was less somber as he went on. “If that has happened, then it would seem that the game is over, and we have lost—but be of good cheer. All that I can see, and hear, and feel, tells me that the game is not quite over yet.”

  Now his manner became brisk. “As I see it, there remain three possibilities.” He looked keenly at Dolly. “The first is, that no statue was ever hidden here—a young woman was somehow deceived by the ravings of a dying man.”

  Dolly was shaking her head, as Maule turned to regard his other colleagues. “Second possibility: a statue was hidden here, our enemy discovered it. Of course Sobek smashed it at once, hoping for treasure inside—but he found none. In that case the white plaster fragments should still be visible, in or near the house. But so far none of us—hey?—have observed any such debris.”

  The others nodded agreement. Maule sighed, and spoke more slowly. “A third possibility remains: that a statue was indeed hidden in or near this house, hidden by one of the most cunning stage conjurors of the twentieth century—and hidden so well that the intruder in his arrogance, haste, or confusion failed to discover it.”

  The vampire’s compelling gaze came back to Dolly. “Now, my dear—you have lived here, and know the house, the grounds, quite well. And you know your grandfather. Think carefully, and tell us what you think.”

  The young woman stared at Maule for a full ten seconds before answering. “You know what the first idea is that comes to me? I remember there’s a hole, just about the right size, in the trunk of a tree, in that little patch of woods just behind the house.”

  Maule nodded briskly. “Go and look into the hollow tree. Take someone with you. Meanwhile the rest of us will examine the house yet again, slowly and carefully this time.”

  Dolly shot Andy a questioning look. He nodded.

  The grass in what had once been the backyard had long since gone dead and yellow for lack of watering. Farther back, there stretched an expanse of earth now supporting only a few tough weeds, that doubtless at some other time, and for some other occupant, could have been a vegetable garden. Defunct grapevines were still crucified on scaffolds of dried-out poles. At the far end of the former garden stood, or squatted, a miniature religious shrine, a knee-high grotto of wood and adobe, holding a small figure of the Virgin.

  “You see a lot of things like that around here,” Dolly observed as she walked past with Andy. “It’s a pretty Spanish state.”

  The hollow tree she had set out to find was farther back, surrounded by a dozen or so other trees, in a scrap of woods some fifty yards behind the house.

  Weaving among thin trunks and thick ones, tramping on tough weeds, Dolly found the cavity in a dead tree just as she had remembered it, and reached inside. Her grasping fingers pulled out dried leaves, but nothing else. She muttered bad words; Andy heartily agreed.

  In a moment the couple were on their way back to join the others, recrossing the dry, untended garden.

  “Can’t think of any other place,” she muttered. “Of course if you want to hide something, you can always dig …”

  Andy had just put a consoling hand upon her shoulder, when her words died away. Dolly turned her head to one side, and stopped in her tracks.

  In the next instant she was running, leaping over the parched earth, toward the religious shrine. It looked as if it had been in place for decades, built by the land
lord or some other tenant, years before Flamel had moved into the house. The image of the Virgin, blue-gowned, white-faced, and crowned with gold, was a little over a foot tall, partly sheltered from the elements in a small recess of wood and deteriorating adobe brick.

  Dolly tore the little statue from its niche and held it up. A light blue robe, covering most of the figure’s surface, had been smoothly painted over white plaster, and gold paint dabbed around the head skillfully suggested a radiant crown. From a few yards away everyone who looked at it would see a commonplace religious statue.

  But surely no Virgin had ever confronted her votaries with a face like this one.

  “Not the statue that was here before! That’s my gramp!” she screamed in her excitement, thrusting her discovery high in the air. “If you want to hide something, put it in plain sight!”

  Dolly’s friends and helpers, Maule running in the lead, came hurrying to see what had provoked the screams. Only Connie remained hovering near the house, under a shade tree.

  The strange little figure stood on two small feet on a narrow plaster base. The arms, or forelimbs, swathed in concealing drapery, hung straight at the sides. The face unpleasantly combined a pug nose with a long jaw and a suggestion of large teeth.

  Maule’s dark eyes were uncovered under his broad hat-brim, and for the moment he seemed oblivious to the glaring sun. “Yes,” he muttered. “Yes, certainly. Stripped of its paint, this would be practically identical to the statue broken in Chicago.”

  Dolly was looking at her adviser questioningly. “Then we smash it open?”

  “It would be pointless to delay. And certainly the honor of discovery should be yours.”

  Dolly dropped the statue on the sunbaked soil, then looked about for a rock of handy size. There were several within reach and she grabbed one up. “Here goes.”

  It took three blows to satisfactorily shatter the whole length of the figure. Eager hands and eyes then probed minutely through the resulting white chips and dark organic mess. But there was nothing to be found, nothing at all that might suggest a gem.

  Within a minute, feverish excitement had faded to cold disappointment. Maule had dropped to his hands and knees, joining in the search, but now he raised eyes blazing with anger and frustration.

  Glumly the party retreated to the shade before the house, where Connie stood waiting for them in graceful gloom.

  Once more it fell to Maule to sum up their situation.

  “We now know of one statue that was not on the list compiled by Nicolas Flamel.

  “I have a suspicion that is growing stronger by the hour—that the famous, or notorious, list is not as all-important as we originally thought.”

  Dolly cleared her throat. “You mean maybe the Stone was never inside any of the statues?”

  “The possibility cannot be totally ruled out. But I had other matters in mind. One statue smashed in Chicago, a second and third in Carmel, and now a fourth—that was not on the list—in Albuquerque. All of them devoid of treasure.

  “In the dream, as several of us have seen it, there are six statues drying in the workshop of the crocodile god. What I am saying now is that we cannot be sure of numbers or locations.

  “Tamarack, one of the three partners, had a statue with him when he was murdered in Chicago. A second partner, Nicolas Flamel, contrived to keep a statue for himself and hid it here.

  “There was, of course, a third partner. What ought we to assume about him?”

  Maule and Joe looked at each other, but it was Andy who spoke the name aloud.

  ~ 18 ~

  Joe Keogh was fielding an incoming call on his cell phone, and everyone stopped to listen. Joe was mostly listening too, just putting in a few words now and then.

  At last he pocketed his phone and looked around. “Most of you people already know, my agency has working arrangements with certain others around the country. Dolly, I passed along to some of them the two remaining addresses on your list, having scratched off Chicago and Carmel, and asked that they be carefully checked out. One, in Salt Lake City, is a real antique shop, the other, in Reno, more like a secondhand store—but according to their owners, neither place has ever bought, received, or ordered a statue of the kind we’re looking for.”

  Maule asked: “How sure can we be?”

  “Reasonably sure, I’d say. Don’t know why the shop owners would lie about it. If they thought they’d caught hold of something valuable they’d want to cash in.” Joe gave everyone a moment to think that over, then raised his hand. “There’s more. My people have located one statue, that from its description has to be one of our original six, in a museum in Cairo—I should say, it was there until about a month ago, when it was smashed to pieces in a mysterious accident. So it looks like there were only five that ever actually made it to this country.”

  There was a little silence, while the crew digested this. Then Maule removed his broad-brimmed hat and rubbed his pale forehead. “It would seem that the usefulness of the list is at an end. We can now be reasonably certain that there is now one statue left, and only one. And it is not at any of the listed addresses.”

  “Then what do we do?” Dolly demanded.

  Uncle Matthew looked around, meeting the eyes of each of his associates in turn. “We must locate the monster. Find out where he is going, what he is up to. We do not know where the last statue is, but I think Sobek will be able to track it down.”

  Joe said: “We can assume that he was here, trashing this house, not too long ago. He may still be near.”

  “Or he may not. One thing the Crocodile does not seem to be doing is following us, though he may believe that we are trying to run away.”

  “How do we locate him?”

  “There are ways. Here is a token that ought to help.” Reaching into his watch pocket, Maule drew out the single scale from Sobek’s hide, the horny little wafer that he had picked up on the bank of the Sauk. This he displayed on his white palm. “I have good hopes of success, since one among us is already in mental contact with the Crocodile.”

  “You mean me,” said Dolly.

  “I do.”

  “What is that thing?”

  Everyone listened in awe while Maule gave a brief account of his skirmish on the riverbank, back in Illinois. To Andy the scale looked like nothing so much as a giant’s thumbnail, hard and translucent, leaf-shaped at its thinner end, knobby at what seemed to be its base.

  Uncle Matt was not given to wasting time. Two minutes later, Dolly had been established in the most comfortable chair available, in the center of the littered living room, whose doors and windows now stood open to let a little breeze blow through. Perching near her on another chair, Maule had given her the scale to hold, making sure that the fingers of her right hand were clenched firmly around it.

  Dolly was as good a hypnotic subject here as she had been in the railroad car. In less than a minute she had fallen into a light trance, and was giving her anxious listeners a report on the Crocodile’s location. “Yes, I see … I feel … he is in water. It’s flowing, but quiet … he’s moving against the current.”

  Maule asked gently: “He is crossing a stream?” Everyone else was watching in attentive silence.

  A frown. “No … not crossing. But moving steadily along. Upstream all the time, against the current … swimming most of the time … sometimes crawling … staying under water.”

  “That is very interesting. I am reminded of something I noticed in Chicago. Early Tuesday morning, while waiting for you, Joseph, to arrive at my apartment. A rippling in the quiet water of the Chicago River, at the side of a lone canoe.”

  Maule asked a few more questions, gently, but it seemed that at the moment Dolly could discover no more useful information. After bringing her easily out of her trance, Uncle Matt looked about him thoughtfully. Then he fixed his gaze on Connie.

  He spoke to her in such an amiable voice that she gave him an especially wary look. “Do you have any idea at all, my dear, of where
it might be possible to find our old acquaintance, Dickon? Some brighter hope, perhaps, than the roof of the Chicago public library? You might know better than I whether that venue should be ruled out?”

  “Dear Vlad, it would be hard to say,” she began hesitantly. When Maule stared at her, she hastily added: “Maybe something will come to me.”

  “Let us hope it does. But that task may take some time, for your quarry is clever and elusive. So before you devote yourself entirely to finding him, I would be pleased if you would gather samples of water from all streams within two hundred miles of where we are—in this desert region, that cannot be too formidable a task, for one who is able to go flying about by night, as swiftly and purposefully as you. I need not tell you to use small, clean glass or plastic bottles of some kind, and label them all carefully. When I have them it will be easier to determine the monster’s true location.”

  Connie murmured, and protested prettily, but Andy thought she did not really find the assignment that much of a problem.

  Maule added: “And need I caution you not to approach the Crocodile?”

  Connie almost whimpered. Her feelings were hurt, that dear Vlad could have so poor an opinion of her intelligence. She meant, she said, to remain inside Flamel’s house till after sunset, then promptly undertake her assigned tasks. There would be no use her trying to start before dark anyway.

  There was no reason for any of the others to linger in the vicinity. Before leaving, Dolly grabbed a few items of clothing from the shambles of what had been her room, and made sure her shotgun was snugly packed aboard the SUV. Moments later the vehicle, with everyone but Connie aboard and John Southerland at the wheel, pulled out and headed for the highway, its destination Albuquerque International Airport.

  Just as they were getting back on the highway, Joe Keogh wondered aloud whether Maule really ought to trust Connie.