Then I saw that it was still dark, although the door behind the screen was now standing partially open; the area was wrapped in stillness. I stopped as I had on the way down, frowning, and stood looking over there.
When a man comes back to his cabin, I thought, he turns on a light somewhere, he doesn't just rattle around in the dark or jump straight into bed. So why didn't Bascomb put a light on?
Maybe he hadn't come back at all, maybe he had been inside there all along and decided to go out. But then, why hadn't I seen him or at least heard him on the path? Because he went the other way, deeper into the woods? There was no path back there and the growth was pretty thick for late-night strolling.
I waited another thirty seconds. Silence, darkness. Come on, I told myself, what the hell difference does it make where Bascomb is and what he's doing? He's not with Mrs. Jerrold, that's all that concerns you.
But the edginess had sharpened now inside me, and the stillness seemed unnaturally acute-and I stopped fighting my impulses and walked slowly across the open ground between the path and the cabin. I climbed up onto the porch, not trying to be quiet about it, and put my face close to the screen. Blackness, the vague shapes of furniture; there was nothing else to see.
“Bascomb?” I called softly.
No answer.
I rapped on the wall beside the door, but that got me nothing either. A faint prickling cold settled between my shoulder blades. I reached out compulsively and tugged the screen door open, pushed the inner door wide with the tips of my fingers. Hot, stale air stirred sluggishly against my face, thick with the smell of dust.
“Bascomb?”
Only the dull echo of my own voice.
I slid my left hand around the jamb and along the wall until I located the light switch. Flipped it up and blinked against the sudden pale glare from the ceiling bulb. I realized I had been holding my breath and let it out audibly as I scanned the room, the bath alcove beyond the open door at the far end.
Empty.
That stagnant air was the kind that accumulated when a place was shut up during the summer for a day or more. But Bascomb could not have closed himself in here all that time, half-suffocating, because Harry and the sheriff's deputy had not found him in this morning. Then where had he been and where was he now?
And who had been in here a few minutes ago?
I looked over at the bed. It was rumpled, blankets sleep-kicked into a tangle at the foot On the table was a plate with two pieces of bologna curled up and dried out like dead insects, and a glass half-filled with what looked to be flat beer. A pair of corduroy trousers was draped across the back of one chair, and on another, near the bed, was an open suitcase that contained several items of neatly folded clothing. Against the left-hand wall were two small oil paintings, one of them mounted on an easel, both of them done in bright bold colors that depicted Eden Lake at dawn and in the late afternoon. And on the floor next to the easel, lying with its pages fanned out at opposing angles like a collapsed tent, was Bascomb's sketchpad.
The sketchpad was the only thing out of place. It should not have been on the floor and it should not have been so carelessly positioned. Artists don't treat their work that way, and there was nothing in the immediate area off which it could have fallen by accident. It looked as if it had been thrown there.
I hesitated, struggling with myself because I wanted to go in and have a look at that pad, but if I did it I would be trespassing and invading privacy. Just another pulp detective, despite all my mental ramblings earlier. Well, maybe that's just what I was, and Erika had nailed it square on the head that day four years ago. A derivative chunk of pulp.
I stepped inside and let the screen close softly behind me.
Feeling furtive, I crossed to the easel and bent and hauled up the pad. Some of the pages were creased and some of them had smudge marks where the charcoal had been touched by heedless fingers. And one of them had been torn out, but hurriedly or angrily because a three-inch triangle remained at the upper left corner. Part of a sketch was visible on the triangle. When I held it up to the light I could make out the tops of trees and what might have been part of a hill and something else in the lower angle that looked like the peak of a roof.
There was not enough there to tell me much, and yet just that little bit had a vaguely familiar aspect. I stared at it, concentrating, searching my memory. No good. Vaguely familiar, nothing more.
If Bascomb wasn't the one who tore out the sketch, I thought, that leaves the somebody else who was in here a little while ago. But why? What possible significance could a sketch have that would lead someone to steal it or destroy it?
A lot of other questions and speculations began to crowd the back of my mind, all of them dark and ominous. I tore off the triangle, folded it carefully and tucked it into my shirt pocket; then I went over and put the pad on the table and had another standing look around the cabin. Everything seemed normal and in its place; no sign of a search or anything else intimidating. All right. I pivoted abruptly and moved to the screen door, pulled it open and took a step across the threshold.
Something made a rustling sound in the trees beyond the east wall.
I froze for a moment, half in and half out of the doorway, the hairs rising along the back of my scalp. Silence, heavy and pregnant. I stepped out all the way and eased the screen shut and stood tensed on the porch, listening.
Almost immediately another sound came, closer this time, a sound that might have been footsteps sliding on dry pine needles.
My reaction then was instinctive: I ran down the stairs and straight ahead for a dozen steps, turning my body, looking over at the east corner. That put me fully into pale silver starlight, unshad-owed and exposed, but it also surrounded me with open space and gave me room to maneuver. I changed direction and went diagonally toward the corner, running in a half-crouch now, hands out away from my body.
There was a dark shape hunched in the shadows beyond it, a long thick object upraised in one hand.
I could not see who it was, or even if it was a man or a woman. I opened my mouth to yell, but I did not get anything out; the figure had seen me coming, and it wheeled around and dropped the long thick object and plunged away to the rear.
By the time I got to the front corner and swung around, the figure was just disappearing into the trees again; I could hear it crashing and stumbling through the undergrowth. I ran along the side of the cabin, slowed, and finally came to a halt near the back-leaned against the wall there. No point in my going into those woods; I was not about to find anybody in all that vegetation and darkness, and I would be running the risk of an ambush if I tried it.
The sounds of flight diminished and the silence resettled again, still heavy and charged with tension. I turned and came back to the front, watching my flank, and located the thing the figure had dropped. Three feet of dead tree limb, as big around as my forearm. Jesus Christ. I picked it up and turned it over in my hands, and thought of what it could do to a man's head. Then I thought: Suppose it had been a gun, a rifle? He could have drawn a bead and shot me dead in all mat starlight.
Some detective-some pulp detective.
My breath was raspy in my throat, and the inside of my mouth was dry; I worked saliva through the dryness, went out again into the open space and over to the path. The shadows there seemed now to have taken on a malevolent cast, like nocturnal creatures crouched and waiting. Imagination. The incident, whatever its meaning, was finished.
But when I started slowly back toward the lake, I carried the tree limb with me, poised across my body, just in case.
Thirteen
Nothing else happened; I made it through the woods and along the lakefront to Harry's cabin without seeing or hearing anybody. I put the limb down against the porch steps and went up, and he was sitting inside with his feet propped on a stool, reading a fish-and-game magazine. He looked up when I knocked, gestured for me to come in.
“How goes it, buddy?” he asked.
“Pretty damned lousy,” I said.
