A Question Of Time Read online

  When Keogh seemed to hesitate, Maria put in: “They told us down in Phoenix that this was a missing person, a seventeen-year-old girl—and that the case had what they described as possibly interesting complications.”

  Strangeways sat with his arms folded, attentive but unmoving.

  Keogh looked at Southerland. “You tell ’em.”

  The younger man cleared his throat and began, “Client’s name is Mrs. Sarah Tyrrell. She’s about eighty years old, give or take a few. Her late husband, Edgar Tyrrell, was a fairly well-known sculptor back in the early nineteen-hundreds. He was born in England, but spent his most productive years here. His stuff is enjoying something of a revival now, I understand, and the old lady is well off financially.

  “The missing girl is Sarah Tyrrell’s niece, or rather grandniece, if that’s the proper word.”

  “It is,” said Strangeways shortly. Everyone glanced at him.

  John resumed: “Cathy’s father—adoptive father, whatever that might signify—is Mr. G. C. Brainard, a lawyer who deals in art. I don’t know that he’s too happy about our being called in at this late date to investigate his daughter’s disappearance—anyway something’s bothering him. Anyway someone recommended us to the old lady, and she insisted on calling us in, and he tends to humor her, as I suppose is usual among people with wealthy aunts. Is that a fair way to put the situation, Joe?”

  Keogh only squinted, in a way that Maria Torres took to mean he wasn’t entirely sure. He glanced at Strangeways, who gave him a moody look in return, but no comment.

  “Mrs. Tyrrell is staying here?” Bill asked, when no one else seemed eager to talk.

  “Not in any of the hotels,” Joe Keogh explained. “There’s a building called the Tyrrell House, a little bit west of here, built right on the rim. It was her husband’s studio in the early Thirties, and the house where the two of them lived together. It belongs to the Park Service now, of course, but part of the agreement when the government took it over was that Mrs. Tyrrell would have the right to use the place whenever she wanted during her lifetime. She and Brainard are staying there.”

  “Was Cathy staying in that house,” asked Maria, “when she disappeared?”

  “No,” Keogh shook his head. “It’s more complicated than that. She was in one of the regular lodges—not this one—with a small group of her friends from boarding school. Everyone agrees that Cathy had never been anywhere near the Grand Canyon before her visit at Thanksgiving.

  “The kids did some of the usual tourist things, hiked around, took pictures. They had camping equipment with them, and they debated whether to take a mule ride down to Phantom Ranch—that’s an overnight trip to the bottom of the Canyon and back—but decided not to. Then, on the second day of their visit, for some reason, Cathy began acting strangely. Or so her companions thought later. She left them suddenly, saying something about going for a walk. They assumed she meant only that she was going to the Visitor Center or the general store. But a few minutes later, a disinterested witness saw a girl who looked like Cathy Brainard, and was dressed like her, carrying a pack and equipment as if for an overnight hike, starting down Bright Angel Trail alone.

  “As far as we know, that witness was the last person to see Cathy Brainard anywhere.”

  Bill said slowly: “I’m no expert, but that doesn’t sound to me like a planned kidnapping. Maybe some lunatic encountered her and—”

  Joe nodded. “I agree. There’ve been no demands. Kidnapping’s a federal offense, of course, and the feds did come here and look around. But they pretty quickly decided that the girl had most likely just walked off on her own, a deliberate runaway. And a fatal accident wouldn’t too be surprising, that kind of thing happens to someone in the Park practically every year. By all reports she’s a good hiker, or an energetic walker anyway, and in a few hours she could have gone all the way down to the river at the bottom of the canyon, and drowned. The Colorado’s deep and swift, and very cold. It wouldn’t be surprising if a body was never found.

  “Or she could have simply got off the trails, perhaps got herself lost, and fallen into a hole or off a cliff somewhere—you’ll see how very possible that is, once you get a close look at the terrain. Have either of you had a chance to do that, by the way?”

  Bill and Maria shook their heads. “Never been here before,” Bill said. “We tried today, but it was too foggy.”

  Maria said: “I presume none of the girl’s schoolmates are here at the Canyon now?”

  “No reason to think they are. I haven’t had the chance to talk to any of them yet, and it’s one of the things I want to do, of course, eventually.”

  Bill asked: “And the witness at the head of Bright Angel Trail? Who was that?”

  “Good question. A middle-aged lady schoolteacher, long since gone home to Ohio. No reason to doubt her story.”

  “How’d she happen to notice Cathy, among what I suppose was the usual throng of tourists?”

  “Cathy came up to her and asked her where it might be possible to get a map of the trails in the Canyon. The teacher remembered the girl who spoke to her, because she thought the youngster seemed worried or disturbed. Later she could describe what Cathy looked like, how she was dressed. I don’t doubt it was our girl.”

  Maria nodded, eyes gleaming faintly. “I wonder what disturbed her suddenly?”

  Strangeways gave her a sidelong glance of interest, but did not comment.

  Joe Keogh continued the briefing. “Some more information, possibly relevant. I get the feeling that young Cathy is likely to inherit old Aunt Sarah’s money one day—if Cathy is still alive. There seem to be no other close relatives, except Cathy’s father, of course. Old Sarah gives nephew Brainard a hard time, from what I’ve seen. And sometimes vice versa. They have a business relationship now but that’s about it. Whereas the old lady was—is—much attached to Cathy.”

  “A possible conflict of interest,” commented Strangeways, “between this Brainard and his adopted daughter.”

  Maria, in her ongoing effort to practice being observant, decided silently that this unexplained colleague had a commanding air about him, despite the fact that he seldom spoke. He might be thirty-five at the most, she thought. His dark hair and beard were full and short, and he wore a dark turtleneck shirt or sweater under a brown jacket that in the arrangement of its pockets suggested to her vaguely that it had been designed primarily for a hunter rather than a skier to wear. The more she looked at Strangeways the more certainly she felt him to be in some way truly out of the ordinary. It wasn’t easy, try as she might, to pin the feeling down any more specifically than that.

  “You think he made her vanish?” Joe Keogh asked him, somewhat deferentially.

  “Stranger things have happened, Joseph.”

  “That’s for damn sure.” Keogh sighed, ran fingers through his sandy hair, and looked as if he wanted to ask Strangeways another question or two. But perhaps the presence of his new recruits constrained him. Turning to them, he began questioning them on mundane matters. Maria and Bill quickly ran through their qualifications and experience.

  Apparently satisfied on that score, for the time being at least, Joe returned to the main business at hand. “There are reasons, reasons I’m not going into right now, to think this case is likely to have unusual aspects. And I want the people who work for me to be able to deal with the unusual in a level-headed way.” He stopped, waiting for a reaction from the recruits.

  “Unusual how?” Bill Burdon asked.

  “How would you react if I told you there could be—psychic factors, involved in this case?”

  Having asked that question, Keogh paused again, waiting for a reaction from his two loaners. “Neither of you look especially surprised,” he commented, as if that fact surprised him.

  “We’re not getting paid to be surprised,” Maria said.

  “Psychic?” asked Bill. “Meaning like in spiritualism? I don’t believe in that stuff.”

  “I’m not asking y
ou to believe in anything,” said Keogh. “As long as you follow orders.”

  Bill shrugged. “That’s what I’m being paid for.”

  Maria agreed in a businesslike way. “A missing person is a missing person. Whether the causes are psychic or whatever. So our job is to get this girl back, or at least find out what happened to her.” She paused, then added: “Actually, my own grandmother was fleeced by a fake medium out in LA. I’d like to get my hands on one of those people.”

  “Yes, naturally.” Keogh sighed faintly. “Well, I doubt there’s any fake medium involved in this.”

  “What do you suspect?” Maria asked.

  “I don’t want to suspect anything, until I’ve talked to the client face to face. So far I’ve only spoken to her briefly, on the phone.” He looked toward Strangeways, as if in a silent appeal for help.

  “I concur,” said Mr. Strangeways, in a voice that despite its softness had nothing tentative or deferential about it. Maria, still trying to place him, suddenly wondered if he was supposed to be some kind of a medium or psychic. The trouble was he didn’t at all match her notion of what one of those people, genuine or fake, ought to look like.

  * * *

  There were still a few items that needed to be carried in from Bill’s car, including some small two-way radios and some cameras he and Maria had brought with them from Phoenix. Also Joe Keogh wanted someone to check at the desk on the chance that another room in the hotel might have become available.

  As soon as the two young investigators had been sent out of the room to accomplish these errands, conversation among the three men who remained became somewhat less guarded.

  “Mr. Strangeways,” said Keogh, in a speculative tone. It was a comment, almost a question.

  Strangeways leaned back in his chair and raised an eyebrow. “Do you see any reason, Joseph, why I should not use that name?”

  “No. No, none at all. A change of names doesn’t surprise me. It’s just your being here that does. When you walked in on us this afternoon I was—surprised.” He paused. “So, is it a fair guess that some of your people are involved in Cathy Brainard’s disappearance? And how did you know John and I were here?”

  The man who was now calling himself Strangeways nodded slowly. His answer ignored the second question. “At least one of my people, as you call them, is concerned. I fear not innocently. I mean Tyrrell.”

  “Tyrrell? Edgar Tyrrell, the one who—?”

  “The artist, who disappeared approximately half a century ago. Yes, he is nosferatu. Oh, there are indeed complications.” Strangeways stood up slowly, staring in the direction of the window, where clouded daylight had not yet entirely died. “A thought occurs to me. I am going outside, Joseph. I take it you are soon going to visit the Tyrrell House?”

  “That’s my plan.”

  “Then I shall probably meet you on the way.” Strangeways turned to the door, and in a moment was gone. Joe was vaguely relieved to see that he opened the door and passed out of the room in mundane breather’s fashion. Of course the day’s clouded sun was not yet down.

  “Vampires,” John Southerland said meditatively, as soon as the door had closed behind one of them. “Okay, Joe. Where are we now? What are our two new helpers going to say if we start briefing them about vampires?”

  Joe turned to him. “I don’t really want to undertake that chore. How about you?”

  “No thanks.”

  “So, we’re not going to tell Burdon and Torres any more than we have to about the nature of Mr. Tyrrell and Mr. Strangeways. That means we have to be careful how we use them.”

  “And how will we?”

  “They can certainly help us search the Canyon. If I understood Mrs. Tyrrell properly on the phone, that’s basically what she wants. Okay. Maybe she has reason to think we can do better than the hundred or so people who searched a month ago—I’ll know better after I’ve talked to her face to face.”

  “‘Strangeways’?” John managed to sound the quotation marks.

  “God, John, I don’t know any more than you do about why he’s here. But evidently our client isn’t exactly a widow after all.”

  “I wonder if she knows?”

  “Well. If old Sarah’s husband is still around as a vampire, I wouldn’t be surprised if she knew about it. That’s why she wanted Keogh and Company, the famous discreet psychic specialists. As for her nephew, he gives me the impression of a man who has never heard of vampires in his life. Not even fictional ones. Outside of that, he’s somewhat haggard and worn, as you might expect of a man whose only daughter has been missing for a month. The police have been no help to him.”

  John tilted his chair back so it balanced on its hind legs. “Is there a Mrs. Brainard around? The girl’s adoptive mother?”

  “There was, but she died three or four years ago. Since then Cathy’s been spending a lot of time in boarding schools.”

  There came a tap at the door, and John got up to answer. The two young helpers were returning together, laden with the hardware from the car, and bringing confirmation of the fact that no additional hotel rooms were available.

  When all four were seated at the table again, Joe began to share with Maria and Bill his meager stock of information on Cathy Brainard. John got out several photographs of the missing girl and passed them around, along with a terse typed description. When last seen she had been dressed for hiking, carrying a pack and camping gear.

  * * *

  While his assistants were contemplating this material, Joe looked at his watch. Getting up from the table, he went to peer out out around the edge of the window curtain, into the slowly darkening afternoon. The next step would be to introduce his crew—with, he thought, the probable exception of Mr. Strangeways—to Mrs. Tyrrell and her nephew.

  He decided it was time to set out for the Tyrrell House.

  Before ushering his colleagues out of his hotel room he opened the last suitcase Bill had brought in from his car, and handed out two-way radios to everyone. Each radio was small enough to fit easily into a winter jacket pocket.

  There was some other hardware in the suitcase, tools loaned by the Phoenix agency at Joe’s request . After a moment’s hesitation Joe decided to let it stay where it was for the time being.

  Thus equipped, Joe and his colleagues put on their coats and left El Tovar by the west entrance, bypassing the lobby. Gathering darkness had begun to diminish the number of tourists on the broad, paved walk that closely followed the rim through most of Canyon Village. Joe led his people west, past Kachina Lodge, Thunderbird Lodge, and Bright Angel Lodge; all of these auxiliary hotels were decades more modern than El Tovar, built of more conventional twentieth-century materials, lower to the ground and on a less ambitious scale.

  Before the crew of investigators had gone very far, they found Mr. Strangeways waiting for them, standing in the gathering gloom with the hood of his jacket pulled up. He joined them wordlessly.

  Modest streetlights, widely spaced, now suddenly came to life along the esplanade, giving the area the look almost of a city park. Late daylight was fading steadily behind persistent clouds, though still the sun was not quite down.

  As the investigators walked west along the esplanade, the low stone barrier was on their right. Beyond that, the Canyon fell away from a brink as abrupt as the shoreline of an ocean. Still fog-filled and all but totally invisible, this gigantic vacancy abruptly began to dominate Maria’s awareness as a brooding presence, surreal as a dream.

  “They say,” said Bill conversationally at her side, “that it’s a mile deep and about ten miles wide. Wish we could see it—what’s this building, now?”

  Maria was able to pass on information gleaned from her brochure: this had to be the Lookout Studio, constructed (in 1914, by the Fred Harvey Company) of unfinished limestone that blended with the cliff on which it stood.

  A few paces farther west they passed the Kolb Studio. According to the brochures, Maria recalled, this structure had been put up early in t
he century, by a pair of brothers who were both explorers and photographers. Their studio stood empty now, preserved by the Park Service.

  And then, a little past Bright Angel trailhead and its mule corral which stood a few yards in from the brink, the four at last came in sight of the Tyrrell House.

  Mr. Strangeways excused himself at this point. After a few murmured words to Joe Keogh, he seemed to fade away along the dim walk leading back toward the corral. Maria, quietly curious, watched him go.

  And now the remaining four investigators had very nearly reached their goal. Actually little more than the roof of the Tyrrell House was visible from where they were now standing on the broad paved walk. Most of the Tyrrell House, like most of Kolb’s Studio, was down out of sight below the rim.

  Joe led his colleagues to the door of the Tyrrell House, where he knocked briskly.

  Almost at once the door was opened, by an elderly lady who, Maria thought, could only be Mrs. Tyrrell herself. It was as if she had been waiting expectantly just inside. She was slender and silver-haired, her body beginning to be bowed under the weight of eighty years and more, her movements slow but still authoritative. She wore a Navajo necklace of turquoise and silver, over a purple dress.

  “Mr. Keogh?” The old woman’s voice, at least, was still strong.

  “That’s me, ma’am. These are some people who are going to be working with me. And you must be Mrs. Tyrrell.” Even as Joe spoke, he could recognize his client’s nephew, Gerald Brainard, hovering just inside the house. Old Sarah’s nephew was fiftyish, of stocky build and pale complexion, with a neatly trimmed dark mustache. He was wearing a Pendleton wool sweater over a shirt and tie.

  “Come in, then,” said the old lady, with a kind of tired eagerness. She looked with interest at the people who had come with Joe. “Come in, all of you.”

  The entryway, of logs and stone, reminded Maria strongly of the lobby of El Tovar, though naturally on a vastly reduced scale.

  Joe performed quick, businesslike introductions. The old lady shook hands with the people she had not already met; Brainard contented himself with a nod in their general direction.