A Question of Time d-7 Read online

  They were escaping, scot-free, after making a mockery of Bill's and his colleagues' efforts to protect their client.

  Worse than defeat was insult. There was something indefinably daunting about the figures Bill had glimpsed—about that first one in particular—but he was a brave young man and did not hesitate, at least not more than momentarily, to pursue.

  His flashlight now failed to reveal anything of the foremost figure that fled from him down the slope—that appeared to have already vanished—but the beam afforded him one fairly clear look at the rearmost, who had paused momentarily. In Bill's sight this took the form of a man, a total stranger as far as he could tell—gray-haired, and dressed in gray work clothing. Bill yelled at this man to halt.

  The gray-haired man paid not the least attention, but strode on, resuming his effortless Olympic pace.

  Bill, running now at something like full speed, started to give chase in earnest.

  Joe Keogh had been able to catch only a fleeting glimpse of the same two figures. To him they were extremely ominous, but in the next moment he saw something that scared him more—Bill, plunging heedlessly down the trail after them.

  Joe yelled for Bill to stop.

  If Bill heard Joe's command, he paid no more attention to it than Bill's quarry had to his.

  Joe, drawing in breath to yell again, started in full-speed pursuit also.

  But before he could shout Bill's name a second time, or run more than a few yards, Joe tripped and stumbled on the rough and unfamiliar trail. A numbing shock shot through his ankle, sudden forewarning of agony about to come. Joe fell, hardly aware of the impact of rock and dirt beneath his hands, scraping palms and fingers painfully on tough brush and unyielding rock.

  Heedlessly wasting what little breath he still retained on useless oaths, Joe struggled to his feet and tried to resume his run. One attempted step on his right leg was all he needed to convince him that he was through running for the night. He collapsed again, with a groan of pain.

  Meanwhile John Southerland, dutifully holding his assigned post at the front of the house, heard some disturbance inside, or, as he thought, at the rear. There was a crash of glass and other violent noise, accompanied by yells in several voices.

  John crouched slightly, alternating his attention between the house and the approaches to it, from which the last tourist had disappeared more than an hour ago. He refused to let himself be drawn away from his post. The disturbance was quite possibly a planned distraction.

  Gradually Maria became aware that Gerald Brainard, trembling and muttering, carrying a heavy revolver in hand, was standing beside her chair, in the room next to where old Sarah was still sitting upright in the bed.

  "They're gone now. It's all over," said Brainard in a husky voice. Maria thought that he looked curiously relieved.

  Maria's radio was buzzing on the little table beside her chair, and she groped to answer it.

  Outside, Joe, sitting helplessly on the ground, was using his own radio to call for help.

  John Southerland, getting the call, at last did leave his post, moving decisively. With flashlight in hand he went running around the house and downhill to the place from which Joe was calling for help.

  John relaxed somewhat when the beam of his flashlight showed him his brother-in-law sitting on a rock, swearing too loudly for a man with a mortal injury.

  "Help me up, goddam it!"

  "Where you hurt?"

  "My ankle."

  John grabbed the older man under the arms and hoisted. "Where's Bill?" he asked, looking around.

  "Went chasing off downhill like a damn fool." Joe balanced on one foot, leaning half his weight on John's shoulder. "After those… I tried to stop him—no, don't you go running after him."

  "He went chasing after…?" John didn't complete the question; he could already read the answer in Joe's frightened eyes.

  For the next couple of minutes they both tried, with no success, to get Bill on the radio.

  "Help me back to the house," Joe growled at last. "What's going on in there?"

  "I haven't looked. Maria sounded like she had things under control—still there, Maria?"

  "Still here," her voice responded after a moment. "If you guys are coming in, I'll open the trapdoor."

  Getting the injured man up the ladder was difficult, but with Maria tugging from above and John pushing from below the task proved not impossible. Joe's adrenaline was up, and his arms were strong enough to hoist his weight repeatedly.

  Brainard and Sarah came to meet the investigators in the lowest level of the house.

  Of those present, no one but Joe had been hurt.

  "Did I hear shots?" he demanded.

  No one answered that directly.

  "I thought I heard one," said Maria. "And Mr. Brainard here was carrying a pistol. Also there's a small hole in one of the windows."

  "All right, we'll deal with that later." For a moment Joe stared at Brainard, who looked back numbly. "Maria, try again to get Bill on the radio. John, get me up the stairway to the main floor, can you?"

  While John was helping the boss upstairs, Maria tried her radio. "This is the house," she kept saying. "Bill, is that you? Come in."

  Only noise responded.

  Joe, hobbling now through the middle level of the house, leaning on furniture, muttered something to the effect that the radios were expensive junk.

  "They always worked great before," John commented.

  And then, suddenly, unexpectedly, Bill's voice was coming clearly through the little unit in Maria's hand. Some of the words were unclear, half-drowned in noise, but the burden of Bill's message seemed to be that he had managed to get himself lost, or at least bewildered; he was going to have to sit tight until daylight.

  Joe, at the head of a stairway, looking down at Maria at the foot, let out a sigh of relief. He nodded at her.

  "Sit tight, then," she told Bill. "Anything you need?" Bill did not answer. Joe shook his head and muttered.

  Maria was left with the puzzling feeling that she had fainted during the excitement; but no, she couldn't have done that. She had been sleeping when it started, that was it. Noise had awakened her, and lights at the windows, and then… Brainard, standing over her with gun in hand.

  She had the nagging feeling that there had been something else. But just exactly what…

  Neither the client nor her nephew, thought Maria, puzzling, were as outraged as she would have expected clients to be under the circumstances. At first old Sarah had been, naturally enough, somewhat stunned by the intrusion, but now she appeared much calmer. Neither she nor Brainard wanted to call in the Park Rangers, who served as the police here on this federal land. She, Maria, would certainly have been outraged if she had hired a private security force at great expense, and her new employees had failed her dismally within a few hours of going on the job.

  Joe established himself for the time being in a chair on the highest level of the house. Maria suggested tentatively that she and John try searching downhill for Bill in darkness; or they could at least try shining flashlights in that direction, so their missing colleague might have a beacon that could guide him home.

  Joe fiercely forbade any attempt to search, and proclaimed that shining lights anywhere would be a waste of time.

  "But there's no use his just sitting there on a rock all night if he doesn't have to. If we could just show a bright light—"

  "Sit down and shut up." Joe Keogh's gaze for once was icy. "I know what I'm doing. I'm not sending any more people down that hill tonight. Our client is up here."

  "Okay." Maria wondered silently why the boss was so vehement. Well, some people got that way after they had screwed things up.

  All of them gradually became aware that Brainard seemed much more at ease now than he had been before the mysterious visitation. Now he was going out of his way to be friendly with the hired investigators, offering to get them coffee or hot chocolate from the kitchen.

  Sarah Tyrr
ell on the other hand, after a few minutes of apparently peaceful contemplation, had resumed worrying. She had retreated to her bedroom, where she sat in a rocker, tense, staring into space, saying little. The old lady seemed still to welcome the presence of Maria, who tried to comfort her.

  John and Joe also remained in the Tyrrell House for another couple of hours. The two men took turns, one dozing in a chair while the other remained awake, listening for any further radio communication from Bill. A light was kept burning in one of the northern windows of the house.

  But Bill's radio remained silent, despite the fact that they tried several times to call him back.

  Chapter 6

  "Numbly Jake followed Camilla uphill through heavily gathering darkness, treading the path beside the nameless little stream whose voices chanted only nonsense. She was leading him back, Jake knew, to the place where the side canyon widened into a kind of amphitheater. Back to the neat little house standing not far from the strange cave.

  Jake's companion led the way in silence, now and then pausing to look over her shoulder at him, as if she wanted to make sure he was still with her.

  In a few minutes they were standing once again in front of the small log house, whose windows showed no lights behind their curtains. There was plenty of light in another place, forty or fifty yards away, at the foot of one of the surrounding cliffs. An electric glare poured from the cave's low entrance, as wide as a garage door. The glare was growing steadily brighter and brighter against the coming night. The generator, whose housing was now invisible in the background dusk, droned on as before, making noise that was barely perceptible through the voice of the waterfall. Nearer at hand, intermittent clinking and hammering sounds from the direction of the cave indicated that the old man must be still at his labors, though for the moment at least he was out of sight.

  Jake jerked his head in that direction. "You say old Edgar is to blame for my troubles. He's the one who can show me the way out of here. The one who can let me go."

  Camilla bobbed her head, and whispered, as if she feared old Edgar might hear her even against the noises of the generator, and the stream, and the racket he himself was making. "He can. He could. But—"

  Jake had already turned his back on her, starting toward the place where the old man banged fanatically on rock. Camilla grabbed Jake by the arm.

  "No!" she whispered fiercely. "Don't mess with him tonight. Not while he's working. Stay with me tonight, and—and get some rest. You don't want to try to walk hack to your camp tonight anyway. Tomorrow you can talk to Edgar. That'll be plenty time enough."

  Jake hesitated. The truth was that he did feel as if he'd hiked a hundred miles today. He was almost swaying on his feet.

  "Come get some rest," Camilla coaxed him again. "And I'll fix you something to eat."

  Giving up for the time being on the idea of a confrontation, Jake let her lead him to the little house, where she held open the neat screen door for him to enter. Despite all the strangeness that engulfed him, and his weariness, Jake retained enough capacity for surprise to notice how nicely the place was fixed up inside. He thought it could almost be in the middle of a suburb somewhere instead of here in the wilderness.

  It was really a small house, not a shack. Camilla after opening a couple of windows clicked a wall switch and an electric lamp came on, revealing the main room, furnished with rustic chairs and tables. A large, new-looking rug covered much of the floor of broad planks. Under the windows at one side was a kitchen sink, complete with faucets—indoor plumbing was more than anyone had back at the CCC camp.

  Crossing this main chamber, Camilla led Jake to a door that opened into what seemed to be the only bedroom. There she gestured for him to sit down on the only bed. Another door on the far side of the bedroom remained closed. Maybe, he wondered, a real bathroom?

  Sitting on the bed, which softly squeaked beneath his weight, Jake looked around him. An ordinary dresser, with drawers. No mirror on the dresser, or anywhere else. Several pictures decorated the whitewashed walls.

  He asked: "Where's the old man sleep? What time does he turn in?"

  "Don't worry about him," Camilla assured him positively. Bustling about almost maternally, she fluffed pillows and turned down covers. "He won't turn in till dawn, and he never comes in the house."

  "He doesn't?"

  "No. You can go to sleep."

  Sleep was tempting, but for the moment Jake just sat stupidly, watching a mouse scamper along the neat baseboard right in front of him. He felt too tired to think.

  Camilla had retreated briskly to the main room, where she struck a match and was now kindling some kind of brighter flame with it. In a few moments she re-entered the bedroom and set down a lighted kerosene lamp on the small table.

  "No electric light in this room," she explained apologetically. Now, with more light, Jake could see stains on the neat whitewashing of one wall, up near the ceiling, as if a roof leak had been neglected.

  "Are you hungry?" Camilla was asking him.

  "Not any more." Then Jake burst out, pleading, demanding help: "Tell me, what's going on?"

  "Right now," said Camilla, "this is." She turned away to close the bedroom door firmly, and then turned back. Then, standing right in front of him, she began to undress.

  * * *

  Jake woke up several times during the night. On each occasion he alternated between wondering whether he was going mad, and deriving considerable comfort from the warm presence of Camilla sleeping at his side. Once Jake got out of bed and wandered naked from one dark room to another of the small house, looking for the shotgun. For some reason it was preying on his mind. He found the weapon at last where Camilla must have left it, in the main room, leaning casually in a corner. Jake put his fingers on the cool metal of the double barrel, and then decided to leave the shotgun where it was.

  He checked the door leading outside, and discovered that it was unlocked. In fact, as Jake now discovered, there appeared to be no way to lock it.

  Holding the door open, looking out, Jake could see a steady glow of electric light from the direction of the quarry. Faintly he could hear the metallic sounds of the workman at his unceasing labor.

  Despite Jake's weariness, hours passed before he was able to sleep soundly.

  On waking to broad daylight, with a sharp start, from some dream that vanished even as he tried to grasp it, he found himself alone in the neat little bedroom. The sun was coming in around the edges of flowered window curtains. Now he could see more plainly the colors and the decoration of the room, and now he was no longer too stunned and tired to think about them. This was a woman's room, all right. There were no man's clothes or things about.

  Sitting naked on the edge of the bed and doing his best to take stock of his surroundings, Jake confirmed last night's impression that the little house boasted real glass windows. There were even window screens, though they fit poorly. The interior walls were formed of the flat sides of split logs, neatly smoothed and whitewashed. There were two pictures hanging on the walls, one was of flowers in a basket, another small boats in a harbor. They were in the same style as sketches he had seen Camilla make. Small shelves attached to the walls held knick-knacks. There was even a good carpet, looking practically new, on the plank floor. But the clothing Camilla had dropped on the floor last night was gone. Jake opened the door of a small closet. Some men's clothes here, shirts and pants, but he recognized one of the shirts; Camilla had worn it on their second meeting. There was also a single dress, light blue, hanging by itself. The shelves and the floor in the closet were dusty. On one shelf stood an alarm clock, hands stuck at five minutes to twelve. Jake picked up and shook the timepiece, but it remained silent.

  Somebody had put in a hell of a lot of work, building this place and fixing it up. But now Jake had the impression that it was starting to run down.

  Hoping to find a bathroom, Jake tried the unopened door in the bedroom wall. Instead, to his surprise, he found an even smaller bedroom
, as neatly fixed up as the room where he had slept, but furnished with a child's bed instead of a regular sized one. There was a child-sized rocking chair as well. This room was even wallpapered, in a pattern of teddy bears and clowns, and a lone, forlorn toy animal sat on a shelf. The stuffed rabbit looked as if it might have been there for a long time.

  On a small table stood the child's lunch box that had so aroused Edgar's anger.

  Jake found the bathroom just off the main room, the logical site from the point of view of whoever had done the plumbing, where pipes could be economically coupled to those of the sink in the kitchen area. Water had been piped in from the creek. And someone must have gone to the trouble of putting in some kind of septic tank.

  On coming back into the main room he also took note of the small electric refrigerator and even a tiny electric stove. Neat. But on the wall, as Jake now noticed for the first time, hung a calendar, just three years wrong, informing him that this was June of 1932.

  Camilla wasn't here, or anywhere in the house.

  Jake got into his clothes and went exploring outdoors, taking note in passing of how a couple of cottonwoods had been strategically planted where they would shade the house on summer afternoons. There was still nosign of Camilla. Fortunately or not, there was no sign of the old man either.

  Jake walked closer to the mouth of the cave. He had to duck his head a little to see inside, but past the entrance the height opened up. The space inside, or what Jake could see of it, was now silent and dark except for what sunlight got in past the overhang. Evidently old Edgar had tired himself out at last and gone to his rest somewhere. He certainly wasn't anywhere in the house.

  Standing just inside the entrance to the cave, confronted by invisible depths of shadow, Jake thought of calling for Edgar, but decided against that course for the time being. Peering into the dimness, he was unable to see anything that gave him any help.

  He didn't know where else to look for either Camilla or Edgar. But he swore to himself that he was going to demand some answers from the old man as soon as he got the opportunity.