A Question of Time

'Why not? Anyway, I don't have to imagine. I've already seen stranger things, since I met you.'

Chapter 15

On leaving Sarah Tyrrell, Drakulya walked back to El Tovar, intending to consult once more with Joe Keogh, and also to ask some questions of the adoptive father of the missing girl.

Brainard, still lying low in Joe Keogh's suite, was made uneasy by the way Mr. Strangeways looked at him. Brainard in fact impressed his caller as a man who would dearly love to become invisible.

Under steady scrutiny, Brainard looked from Joe to Strangeways and back again. Then he ventured:

'You're maybe—a friend of Mr. Tyrrell's?'

Strangeways shook his head. 'I have not yet had the pleasure of meeting him. We do share a certain background, however.'

Brainard nodded slowly. 'I thought so. So maybe you'll be able to find my daughter?'

'As I have told your aunt, I will do what I can to help her. First, I would like you to tell me all you can about Tyrrell.'

Brainard fumbled through several pockets before he found his cigarettes. 'That won't be much. He's alive, down there somewhere, as far as I know. I haven't seen him for a long time. And I've been doing business with him over the years. Honest business. There's nothing wrong with that, is there?'

Another question elicited the information that Brainard himself had never been down into the Canyon, not even the most mundane modern version of the place, and he seemed to have no clear idea that a Canyon of any other time or shape might be accessible. He had never even set foot on the main trails that descended from near the Village and whose upper portions at least were trampled daily by a thousand tourists. He was not expert or even interested in the out-of-doors. In fact, Brainard seemed to think it believable that a man had been hiding out for sixty years, in some sanctuary accessible without magic or its equivalent in science, within a mile or two of the swarming tourist activity on the South Rim.

Drakulya said to him: 'Tell me more about the business that you do with Tyrrell, and—since you ask—I will venture an opinion on its honesty.'

'Well sir, there's nothing wrong with the kind of business I do with Mr. Tyrrell. I'm a dealer in art. Specifically in his creations. There's nothing very complicated about our arrangement—except that most people think he's dead. But I'm not defrauding anyone; the pieces I deliver are genuine. Mr. Tyrrell carves statues, and I sell them for him. Unlike paintings, carved stone is very difficult to date, so the buyers just assume these items were done in the thirties, or even earlier. The man has a right to sell his own creations, doesn't he? And a right to employ me as an agent?'

At this point Joe interjected: 'His wife also has a legal right to his estate. But as I read the situation, she's not getting most of the money from these deals that you conclude.'

'Is Sarah complaining?' Brainard demanded.

Mr. Strangeways made a slight gesture in Joe's direction, as if to silence him. Looking steadily at Brainard, he said: 'Tell us, please, just how this arrangement began, between the two of you.'

'Sure.' Brainard looked at the ceiling, considering. 'It was back in the early sixties, and I was here looking over some things for my aunt—she usually does her best to avoid spending any time here. But she never has wanted to turn the place over to the Park Service completely.

'Well, I'd come here one day to take a look at some of the furnishings in the Tyrrell House, to see what they might be worth. I was staying in the place overnight, when—he showed up, in the middle of the night. Surprised the hell out of me.'

'Showed up—under what circumstances?'

'I was sitting there in a chair, thinking—actually I supposed I dozed off in front of a fire. Then something woke me up—a dream, I thought at first. Then I heard someone in another room. I went to look, and he was just standing there. At first I thought he might be a burglar—but he soon convinced me he wasn't.'

'Then he made no strenuous effort to avoid discovery.'

'I—suppose not. Maybe he was curious about me.'

'And how did you recognize him?'

'Oh, I'd seen several of the old photographs. And, being in the house, I'd also been thinking about him… but above all I think it was the way he just told me who he was, when I asked him. Very calm, low-key, and self- assured. Still, that he was really Edgar Tyrrell was a little more than I could believe at first—also, I may add, that meeting was one of the spookiest experiences of my entire life. Here's this man who was supposed to have been dead for thirty years… but, to make a long story short, I believed him. Had to. We got to talking about art, and he excused himself—disappeared, almost as if he were a ghost—and in twenty minutes he was back, carrying something that convinced me.'

'What was that?'

'A pretty little piece, a coyote as I recall, not one of those really strange animals—he told me he'd come up to the rim to compare one of his new pieces with an old one he remembered being in the house. Of course the one he remembered wasn't there. All that was left in the house, even then, were reproductions.

'We talked some more. When he found out I was his wife's nephew—well, his own nephew too, of course, though I could never imagine myself calling him 'uncle'—he started asking me questions about Sarah. Apparently they'd had no contact since she left him.

'He was really curious about her, and seemed concerned. But he also made it a condition of our doing business that she was not to know I'd met him and talked to him. In fact, no one at all was to know that he was still alive.'

Brainard considered. He lit a cigarette, with hands afflicted with a noticeable tremor. 'To make a long story short, after we'd talked for a considerable time, he left me his new piece to sell for him. In return he didn't want money—he had a list of tools, construction materials, things like that. 'I could obtain the material by other means,' he said. 'But this will save me time.' '

'Always,' said Mr. Strangeways, 'always a question of time. In one way or another. Does it not seem so, Joseph?'

'Yeah,' said Joe abstractedly, and turned back to Brainard. 'Go on.'

Brainard crushed out his cigarette in an ashtray, and went on. 'After he'd gone, I began to think, and the more I thought, the less I could credit what I'd just seen. I mean, this guy would have to be ninety years old, and still active, the way he was.'

'And that was almost thirty years ago. By now he'd have to be well over a hundred. Maybe a hundred and twenty? But you're still doing business with him.'

'All right, it's crazy. I don't know. You tell me. Maybe it's his son who meets me now, or his grandson. Maybe it's his younger brother. Maybe it's Tyrrell’s ghost—I don't know, though I have my own ideas. All I do know is that he keeps bringing up carvings and I've never had any trouble selling them as authentic. I know what the collectors think, that my aunt and I have this secret hoard of Tyrrell’s that we're putting on the market gradually, one a year or so, just to keep the price up.

'The one time an expert did question authenticity, I took his objections back to Tyrrell. And the next item Tyrrell gave me, and all the ones after that, were done in such a way that those objections wouldn't hold. I guess some people are still doubtful from time to time, but I've always been able to find a number who believe.'

'And what did you do for Tyrrell, in exchange for being made wealthy?'

'Brought him stuff. He never wanted money, said he had no use for it. He's got some kind of cave, a hideout down there in the Canyon, that no one's ever managed to find.'

'He told you that?'

'In a way. Little things he said from time to time. That sounds crazy too, that nobody could find his hideaway. Until you stand on the Rim here for a while and take a real look at the place.' There was no doubt that Brainard believed in the plausibility of what he was saying.

'What sort of things, exactly, did you bring him?' Joe asked.

'I'd get him catalogs, and he'd pick out what he wanted from them, and tell me what specific tools to buy. A few times he wanted chemicals, and I'd go to a scientific supply house. Explosives, once in a while. That took a bit of doing, because you usually need a license, but I know some people. Usually it was things like rope, and generator