her hand on my arm. 'Wait,' she said. 'I think I did see Jimmy. I'm not sure, but I think it was him. Chucky told me Jimmy'd bought a truck—one of those stupid things with the big wheels and the light bar on the cab?'
'What about his old van, that he worked on so hard?'
'Oh, he still has that, I think Anyhow, a truck like Chucky told me about tore through here about two weeks ago as I was coming in. Ran the stoplight, had to drive onto the curb to miss the mail truck coming from Spring Street. I think it was Jimmy's, but he wasn't driving. Some girl was.'
'Alice?'
'I don't think so, not if Chucky was right. This one was small, with lots of blond hair. And laughing, as though tearing around town on two wheels was funnier than anything.'
I kissed her skinny hand. She pulled it back, laughing. Then her face got serious. 'Is Jimmy in trouble, hon?'
'I don't know. But Brinkman's looking for him, and the state troopers. Just to ask him some questions, for now. But I don't want Jimmy to do anything stupid if Brinkman finds him.'
'Oh, lord. Sheriff Brinkman would love that, wouldn't he?'
'Yeah, he would. Keep an eye out for him, will you, Ellie? I'll see you later.'
I stepped out into the afternoon. Lighting a cigarette, I looked up and down the street. A yellow dog wandered, sniffing, along the sidewalk opposite. The stoplight at Main and Spring changed. No one was at it.
It was a big county. Finding a dark, heavy-set girl named Alice, if that was all I had to go on, could take weeks.
And there was another problem. I had a client. I'd taken Eve Colgate's money to follow a trail that was already four days old and getting colder by the minute.
I reached in my pocket, found the list of antique shops I'd made a century ago, this morning at Antonelli's. I looked at my watch. Two o'clock. If I was smart about it, I could get to the places I'd targeted and be back at Antonelli's by six-thirty or seven. If the place was open—and if I knew Tony, as soon as MacGregor was through with him and MacGregor's boys were through with his cellar, he'd be open—maybe Tony would talk to me.
If he wouldn't, maybe the Navy would let Chuck Warren talk to me.
Either way, at least I'd get a drink.
Chapter 6
One of the antique shops on my list was in Schoharie, down Main Street from the Park View A wooden sign in the shape of a sheep hung over the sidewalk. The proprietress, a thin, quick woman, was very nice, but as far as Eve Colgate's silver, I came up dry. I gave her the number at Antonelli's, asked her to call me if anything like what I'd described turned up, and left.
I decided to hit the farthest of the other shops first and then work my way back across the county. I U-turned in the middle of Main Street, went south where Main turns into 30 and 30 turns into a four-lane highway. Down here in the valley there was nothing dramatic about this road, but it was fast. Even where it was only two lanes, it had been widened and straightened, something they did to the old roads around here when they didn't build new ones to bypass them entirely. Now 30 cut right through some of the farms that had looked so timeless and sure from the hills. Not a few farmers had retired to Florida on what the state had paid for the fields I was driving through. Asphalt was a cash crop, up here.
I turned off 30 onto a narrow road that lead up into the hills past Breakabeen. The shop I was headed for was a few miles outside town. Town was a post office, a bar, a grocery, a Mr. Softee, and a dozen houses strung out along a crossroads.
Just beyond the point where the last of the houses disappeared behind me there was a road leading up to the right—probably a driveway masquerading as a road, like mine. Faded script letters on an arrow-shaped sign told anyone who cared to know that The Antiques Barn was a half mile up.
The first hundred yards was respectable, but after that the road was badly kept, full of potholes and mud. The Acura had good suspension—the old ones did—but I wouldn't cut a diamond in it, even on the highway. I was glad to get out of the car onto ground that wasn't moving.
The Antiques Barn was a real barn, big, with flaking red paint and double square doors wide enough to drive a combine through. Those doors weren't open. Neither was the person-sized door cut into one of them, but it gave when I turned the knob. As it opened, it rang a set of sleigh bells hung on the jamb.
I stepped over the high wooden threshold into a dusky, dank room where plates and pitchers, candlesticks and jewelry, walking canes, hats, boots, and thousands of books lay in piles on wooden furniture of every description. The piles had an air of having been undisturbed since time began. Each piece, including the furniture, bore a square ivory-colored tag with a number written on it in a spidery hand.
The room went on forever, disappearing into the dusk, and it seemed I was alone in it. 'Hello!' I called into the aged air. Nothing happened. Maybe in here nothing ever happened. I called 'Hello!' again, louder; then went back to the door and rattled it, ringing the sleigh bells again and again.
I stopped because I thought I heard a voice. I listened, ready to go back to my sleigh bells; but I was right. Faintly, from somewhere beyond a clutch of stuffed chairs in the center of the room, came words, and with the sound came movement, a figure shuffling toward me out of the primordial twilight.
'Yes, yes!' it muttered as it inched along, placing objects from a pile in its arms onto bureaus and bookcases like a glacier depositing rocks. 'My, my!' The figure came very, very slowly to stand before me. It was the figure of a man, round for the most part. His age was unguessable, as was the actual color of his hair, now a thick dust gray.
He squinted up at me over dusty glasses that seemed to have been forgotten at the end of his nose. 'You must learn to curb your impatience, young man. It will get you nowhere in life.'
'I've been there already,' I said. 'I didn't like it.'
He sniffed, 'Well,' he said. 'Well. An impatient young man like yourself hasn't come here to browse. You're looking for some particular item. Yes; you know precisely what you want. Not for yourself; a gift most likely, for someone who'—he peered at me intently—'who assuredly would rather have you at home by the fire than running all over hell-and-gone seeking out the perfect gift. But you won't hear of it, so we'll say no more about it. What was it you wanted?'
I stared at him. 'Old silver,' I said. 'Was that just for me, or can you do it all the time?'
