dark, hard rain. The skies were limned with black threads on a dove-colored background—and the fog had evaporated, as if the downpour had magically triggered some huge and invisible suction machine. The sea wind blew the pungent smells of brine and wet pavement and damp leaves and gray loneliness. Winter, having arrived at last, had come with all its chattels; it would be staying on.
In the small town of Sebastopol, some fifteen miles inland and to the southeast of Bodega Bay, rain, like semi-translucent sheets of heavy plastic, slanted down on a low, modem redwood-and-brick building a few blocks from South Main Street. But the wide rectangular redwood sign on the fronting lawn was easily discernible through the downpour; it read: SPENCER AND SPENCER MEMORIAL CHAPEL.
Inside the mortuary, in a huge and high-ceilinged parlor, an unseen organist played soft dirge music and there was the almost cloying fragrance of chrysanthemum and gardenia. Ringed by variegated sprays and floral horseshoes, an unadorned casket rested on a bier of ferns and white carnations at the upper half of the parlor. The coffin’s lid had been closed and sealed.
To the immediate right, on a dais in a tiny alcove, Trina Conradin sat with her hands clasped tightly at her breast, her head bowed. Her dead husband’s mother wept softly, convulsively, agonizingly, on one of the brown folding chairs beside her; her own mother held Mrs. Conradin’s hand and whispered gentle, useless words in a tremulous voice. Trina’s eyes were dry, like those of her father and Jim’s father, both of whom sat stoically, like Oriental stone carvings, on her other side. She had done her crying in the cold darkness of Sunday night, when Jim hadn’t come home from his drive and the terrible premonition, the fear which had been rising within her, manifested itself and she had reported him missing; and throughout the somber opalescence of yesterday—after a Sonoma County Sheriffs Deputy had found him lying broken at the foot of the cliff at Blind Beach. She was purged now, empty, barren.
Trina lifted her head slowly, with an inaudible exhalation of breath, and looked upon the some two dozen folding chairs which had been set into neat, symmetrical rows on the deep-pile maroon carpet of the parlor. They were perhaps only a third occupied now, and the services were due to begin any moment.
Her eyes went from each man and woman who had thought enough of Jim Conradin—the man good and kind and gentle—to attend his funeral, to pay their last respects. Troy Gardner, who had been Jim’s best man at their wedding, and his wife; the owner of the processing plant where Jim sold most of his catches; their neighbors on Bodega Flat; the old man who had once been a sailing master and who was somewhat of an institution around the area; and—Trina studied the faces of the final two mourners, sitting at the rear of the parlor side by side. A tall, muscular man with thick black hair and hollow cheeks, wearing a charcoal suit and a starched white shirt and a muted tie; and a dark Latin man, who reminded her vaguely of some actor, dressed similarly but more expensively. She couldn’t recall ever having seen either of them before. Strangers? No, certainly not. They must have known Jim at one time or another, perhaps in the Air Force ...
The service was mercifully brief.
Eventually the mourners rose from their chairs and formed a single line at the far side of the parlor and began to file one by one past the closed coffin and past the family alcove, their hands clasped at their waists, avoiding the eyes of the family in deference to their grief. Finally they entered the vestibule for the momentary assemblage of the funeral cortege, which would take them first to the tiny hamlet of Bodega—inland and south of Bodega Bay—to a small white church on a hill there, and then to the old cemetery on Fallon Road, not far from the sea.
The two men whom Trina did not know drew by the coffin—the final links in the too-short chain of mourners—and the dark Latin man walked beyond the alcove rapidly, with his head held erect and his hands swinging free at his sides. The tall man lagged several steps behind him, and when he came parallel to the family he paused, hesitant, uncertain, and then raised his head, and his eyes touched Trina’s for a brief second. She saw in them compassion and sadness and—something else, an indefinable something which made them seem haunted.
He opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again, and then said, “Mrs. Conradin ... I’m sorry, Mrs. Conradin.” She was so surprised he had spoken to her that way, at that time of silence, that she nodded once: a single confirmation. He pivoted his head, and walked with swift, silent steps along the maroon carpet into the vestibule, and was gone.
Steve Kilduff sat staring out through the heat-vapored window of the coffee shop in downtown Sebastopol, watching the rain fall silver and heavy and then turn into flowing brown rivers, as if it had somehow become contaminated upon touching earth and concrete. To the west, over the roofs of the buildings, he could see an occasional jagged flash of lightning illuminate the leaden afternoon sky. Drum-rolls of thunder edged closer, grew louder, only moments apart now. When the gods are angry, mortals die, he thought foolishly; he shook himself and looked back to the cup of hot coffee which a pretty waitress had set before him. He began to stir a third cube of sugar into it.
Across the Formica-topped booth table, Larry Drexel set fire to a cheroot and watched him through the ensuing miasma of heavy smoke. He said at length, “That was a goddamned silly thing you did at the mortuary.”
Kilduff laid his spoon very carefully on the saucer. “I suppose it was.”
“Why, Steve?”
“I don’t know,” Kilduff answered. “Jim and I were ... oh Jesus, Larry, we were friends once, good friends—you know that. I
“She didn’t know us from a gnat’s ass,” Drexel said. “We were just faces at a funeral. But you had to go and wax emotional.”
“She’s not going to remember me.”
“You’d better hope not.”
“It’s not that important, Larry.”
“Everything’s important now.”
“Look, if it bothers you that much, why did you come to the funeral in the first place?”
“Because you insisted on coming,” Drexel said. “Because you’re emotional, and you react without thinking. Christ knows what you might have said to Conradin’s wife later on if I hadn’t gotten you away from there.”
“I wouldn’t have said anything to her.”
“No? How do I know that?”
“Do you think I’m still a kid?”
“You act like a kid sometimes.”
“Shit,” Kilduff said.
“Yes, shit,” Drexel said. He leaned across the table and put his face close to Kilduff’s. “You wouldn’t listen to me Saturday night. You wouldn’t even consider what I said. You tried to pass the whole thing off as some pipe dream, because you were too weak and too afraid to admit to yourself that the past has finally caught up with us, that somebody wants us dead. Now tell me that isn’t the way it was.”
“The whole idea is . . . fantastic,” Kilduff said slowly.
“That’s right. It’s fantastic. But what do you say now, baby? Do you think Conradin fell off that cliff accidentally Sunday night, like yesterday’s papers had it? Four of us now in less than a month. Do you still call it coincidence?”
No, Kilduff thought, and he knew that it wasn’t, that he’d known it wasn’t almost from the beginning. He’d been deluding himself, lying to himself that there was nothing wrong, nothing to worry about; he just hadn’t been able to face it. Too many things had happened at once, that was the reason—Andrea and the money and Granite City, all piling in on him at the same time. Was it any wonder he’d reacted the way he had? But he had to face it now, he had no choice but to face it now. Yes, it was true all right, it was murder all right; Jim hadn’t misjudged his footing in the fog and fallen accidentally off that cliff. Somebody had pushed him and somebody had deliberately murdered Cavalacci and Wykopf and Beauchamp—this Helgerman, this Mannerling guard who had suffered spinal damage as a result of Conradin’s blow to the base of his neck those thousand years past . . .
He said, “I don’t think it was coincidence, Larry. I don’t think Jim or any of the others died by accident.”
“You weren’t so sure on the phone last night. You wouldn’t talk about it.”
“I’m sure now.”
Drexel drew back against the red Leatherette of the booth and inhaled the cheroot and expelled twin streams of smoke through his nostrils. “Okay,” he said. “You’re sure now. What do you think we ought to do?”
