The Paper Grail Read online

  “No thanks.”

  “That’s the stuff,” his uncle said, after swallowing a mouthful. “That’s the feathers on the bird.” He replaced the cork with a shaking hand. “My advice to you is to forget this—what did you call it?”

  “It’s a sketch by an old Japanese artist. Hoku-sai, I think. Graham had it hidden. Jimmers claims that it’s gone now, but I can’t make out whether Jimmers has made off with it or if the piece has been stolen. I don’t mean to accuse him, of course.”

  “Well, you know how it is up here. Lots of mysteries. Jimmers is one of the biggest of them. It’ll probably surface in one of the oriental antique shops down in San Francisco, and Jimmers will be in groceries for a couple of months. I’ll level with you. This is nothing you want to be involved in. If the thing’s gone, it’s gone. I’m certain that if Jimmers still had it, he’d ante up. Think of it as spilt milk.”

  “Maybe,” Howard said. “I’ve got to try to recover it, I guess. I’ve got to have something to tell them back at the museum. I’ll need advice, though, from someone who knows the territory. But I won’t take it for nothing, so this commission business still stands. If you won’t help, I’ll have to go elsewhere, which I don’t want to do.”

  “I’m telling you that I can’t do you a shred of good. You’re pumping money down a rat hole.”

  “Fair enough. I’ve been warned.”

  “Of course if push comes to shove,” Uncle Roy said cryptically, “then I’m your man. You won’t be working alone.”

  Howard nodded, grateful for the promise but wondering how to apply it. He pulled in at the curb in front of the house and the two of them got out. Howard decided not to press it any further, not to mention the “object” that Stoat had referred to back at the bar. Easy does it, he told himself.

  “Follow me,” Uncle Roy said, heading toward the back, past the scaffolding again. He stopped at the lean-to shed, pulling the splinter of wood out of the hasp, then stepped inside. There was a trouble light hooked up, hanging from the ceiling, a heavy orange extension cord leading away beneath the house. Uncle Roy turned the light on, pulled open a drawer, hauled out an inch-thick stack of sandpaper, and shoved the bottle in under it.

  “Edith’s not much on hard liquor,” he said. “I’ve got a house bottle, too, but I’m pretty sure she keeps a weather eye on it. She’s a fierce one when she’s got a measuring stick in her hand. Doesn’t mind a couple of bottles of beer gone, but a bottle of whiskey had better last a man six months; either that or he’s a rummy. Better to humor her than to argue the case, though. That’s paramount in a marriage. Argue for fun, if you want to, but not for profit.”

  Together they strolled toward the back door, Uncle Roy telling Howard about his plans for the haunted house, calculating ticket prices and overhead and then going on to the barn lumber issue, and from there into talk about video game arcades and the profit to be made hauling chicken manure, carrying the conversation farther and farther away from landlords and rice paper sketches and the manifold mysteries that rode on the evening sea wind.

  8

  HOWARD found himself that evening in Sylvia’s yellow Toyota, riding down the coast highway toward Mendocino and Sylvia’s shop. Dinner had been a little rough. Uncle Roy talked so seriously and optimistically about the haunted house that he might have been soliciting investments in it. It was set up in an abandoned icehouse down on the harbor, behind the Cap’n England. His friend Bennet was “working on it night and day.” It wasn’t clear to Howard whether “Bennet” was the man’s first name or last name. Uncle Roy was the business end of the thing and the creative genius behind it. The man Bennet could use a hammer and nails and had been willing to work “on spec.” Uncle Roy promised to haul Howard down there tomorrow, first thing in the morning, and show him a thing or two.

  Uncle Roy’s cheerful and convincing notions about the haunted house did nothing to enliven things, though. Aunt Edith had a look about her that suggested she found the haunted house tiresome, or worse—that she saw it as another looming financial disaster. Howard knew that they were in such straits that the loss of a couple of hundred dollars qualified as a financial disaster.

  Sylvia said little. The subject of haunted houses seemed to embarrass her slightly, as if she had her opinion but couldn’t state it without causing trouble between her parents. Howard smiled and nodded, uttering pleasant statements in a sort of oil-on-the-waters way. It had been a strain, though, and when he had suggested, after dinner, that he and Sylvia go out for a drink, she had accepted without hesitation.

  Now Howard tried to make small talk while driving into Mendocino, but she seemed depressed and was untalkative. “This haunted house business might just work,” he said. “Those are popular things down south. Kids line up for blocks.”

  Sylvia glanced into the mirror and shrugged. “Maybe,” she said. “Mr. Bennet’s sunk most of the materials into it. They’re mostly salvage. If it fails, there won’t be too much loss, financially speaking.”

  “Right. That’s what I was thinking. Uncle Roy’s got some nice props, anyway—the eyeballs and ghost woman and all.”

  Sylvia looked at him as if she thought he was kidding. “It isn’t money, though, that’s bothering Mom. Not mainly. I think she can’t stand to see him make a fool out of himself. She believes in him like crazy, and so every time he jumps on a new idea she suffers for it. She’s seen him fail, and she doesn’t want it to happen again, for his sake.”

  “I talked to the old landlady today, what’s-her-name.”

  “That would be Mrs. Lamey. She can be awful. Sometimes I think that it isn’t just money she’s after.”

  “He gave her a thrill with the rubber bat.”

  Sylvia smiled just a little bit, as if there were something about Uncle Roy’s eccentricities that pleased her, after all. Then the troubled look came into her face again. “If I lose the store,” she said, “we lose the house.”

  “That’s too bad. The store floats the house?”

  “In the spring and summer, when the coast is full of tourists, but the rest of the year it’s a matter of squeaking by. Dad gets a Social Security check, but you know what that’s worth these days. Anyway, I’m squeaking now. I operate these private New Age parties on the side, selling catalogue stuff, and that helps. That’s what I was doing last night. That’s why Jimmers couldn’t find me. Mother and Father were out playing pinochle. Anyway, Father has the capacity to sort of fritter money away when we get a little ahead. Before the haunted house it was an aquarium down at the harbor. He got hold of a lot of heavy window glass and had the idea of gluing up aquariums and piping water in out of the ocean. He even applied for a grant to study marine life. He was going to sell fish and chips on the side.”

  “It didn’t work?”

  “No.” She shook her head.

  “He means well.”

  “Of course he means well. And he’s optimistic, too. He’s always on the verge of making a killing. The spirit museum was going to make a killing, and it bled him nearly dry. It’s almost a blessing that he doesn’t have any real money to invest anymore.”

  “He’s got a certain innate genius, though. I’m sure of it. If he’d only find out how to put it to use.”

  “Before we all go broke.”

  “As I understand it, he believed pretty strongly in the museum.”

  Sylvia looked hard at him. “Why shouldn’t he have?”

  Howard shrugged. “Sounds a little implausible, that’s all. He was in competition with all those other roadside attractions, where gravity abdicates and water runs uphill and all. Hard to imagine tourists stopping at any of them, unless maybe their kids force them at gunpoint. What sorts of gimmicks did he have?”

  “Gimmicks? None, if I understand what you mean. It wasn’t fakery. He had a historical interest in the paranormal. He was sure there was something out there, along that stretch of highway. He was picking mushrooms early one morning, and … He’s an amateur mycologist, did you k
now that? He used to be very well thought of, actually.”

  “No,” said Howard, “I didn’t know. Anyway, he was out picking mushrooms …”

  “And he saw a car full of ghosts drive past in the early-morning fog. They were apparently in Michael Graham’s car.” Sylvia looked straight ahead, down the highway.

  “I heard about that. He wrote a letter to my mother. How did he know they were ghosts?”

  “He said they just evaporated there, while he was watching. The car was sort of drifting up the highway, and there were three men in it, wearing out-of-date hats. The car was slowing down as it passed him, and the three inside just … the car disappeared in the fog. It was Father that drove it back down to Graham’s after it rolled to a stop against the guardrail. There wasn’t anyone in it and not a soul around.”

  “These ghosts were car thieves?”

  She shrugged. “I guess they were.”

  “And so on the basis of this he invested twenty-odd thousand dollars?”

  “That’s just what he did.”

  “You know, maybe he opened the place too close to town. If it was out in the middle of nowhere, people would stop in hoping to buy a snack or just to stretch their legs. But there’s no use stopping when there’s restaurants and motels five miles down the highway. They’d breeze right past him. He’s big on location. I wonder why he didn’t see that.”

  Sylvia didn’t say anything for a moment. Howard realized that what he was saying wasn’t new to her. She and her mother had agonized over all this for years. His dredging it up now wasn’t helping to cheer her up.

  “You still don’t understand it,” she said. “Dad believed in these ghosts, and he thought that there was something out there that accounted for them. That explains the location problem. Why on earth would he have set up the museum anyplace else?”

  “Sure,” said Howard. “I wasn’t thinking. I guess it’s just that I wish he would have made a go of it. I’d like to go out there sometime. See what it’s all about. Building’s still there, I see. I passed it on the way in yesterday afternoon.”

  “Yes, it’s still there. Mrs. Lamey owns it. It’s pretty worthless, though. The roof leaks and there’s termites in the walls. It’s too small for a restaurant, and there’s a moratorium against new building out there, so no one can do anything with it. There was talk of it being opened up as a gift shop, to sell redwood products, I think—lamps and carvings and all. Nothing’s come of that, though.”

  They pulled off the highway into Mendocino. There was the hint of mist in the air, and a fuzzy red-tinted ring around the full moon. A scattering of cars was parked along the sidewalk, but almost no lights shined in any of the shops except at the Mendocino Hotel, where the bar was fairly quiet.

  “Can I have a look at the boutique?” Howard asked.

  Sylvia nodded, fumbling in her purse for her keys. They clomped down the boardwalk and opened up the darkened shop. It was neat and sparse, a sort of study in minimalism, with blond fir paneling and a pine floor and what seemed to Howard to be almost no clothing at all on the wooden racks. It looked very high-toned, being empty like that, but there couldn’t be much money in it. He fingered a roughly woven wool scarf, taking a peek at the price tag that dangled from it. Eighty-nine dollars, it read.

  “Sell this stuff?”

  “In the summer. Local folks can’t quite afford most of it.” Sylvia slipped behind the counter and began to fiddle with papers while Howard looked around.

  There was a pile of wooden bowls turned out of burls, a couple of rugs, a few pieces of art glass, and two Plexiglas trays full of folksy jewelry. All of it was expensive, backwoods designer stuff. There didn’t seem to be a lot of anything but space. At one side of the counter were half a dozen books on origami art as well as patterned paper, cut into big sheets and slipped into plastic bags along with step-by-step folding instructions. Alongside lay an origami bird standing next to an origami egg, the egg so finely folded and faceted that there seemed to be almost no hard edges.

  Hanging overhead were a half dozen more folded creatures, most of them fish. They were startlingly intricate—thousands of tiny folds in what must have been enormous sheets of paper to begin with. “Still folding paper?” Howard asked.

  “Yeah,” Sylvia said. She seemed distant, angry perhaps at what she had conceived Howard’s attitude to be, or upset about the lease business and about the tense dinner.

  Howard wondered if this was the time to bring up having found the paper lily, but he decided against it.

  “It’s therapy of a sort.”

  “Ah,” said Howard. “Therapy.” Somehow the notion of therapy spoiled things just a little. Sylvia opened the cash drawer and banged a roll of pennies hard against the edge, breaking the roll in half. Howard noticed that the several bills in the drawer were folded up, too, into bow-ties and stockings and elfin-like shoes. He reached across, picked out a bow-tie dollar, and widened his eyes at her.

  She shrugged. “Lots of time to kill, I guess.”

  On the other side of the counter lay a couple of Chinese baskets full of crystals—mostly quartz and amethyst—as well as big copper medallions and bracelets and small vials of herb potions and oils. Alongside were racks of books full of New Age advice on the mystical properties of rocks and about reincarnation and out-of-body travel. There was some Rosicrucian flapdoodle on a throwaway pamphlet and a calendar of local events starring self-made mystics and seers and advice-givers of nearly every stripe.

  Howard put the folded dollar back into the drawer and picked up the Rosicrucian ad. On it was a drawing of Benjamin Franklin seeming to be impersonating Mr. Potatohead. The legend below read, “Why was this man great?” Howard grinned, thinking up a couple of possible answers.

  “You don’t have to stand and sneer at it,” Sylvia said suddenly.

  “I wasn’t sneering, was I? I didn’t mean to sneer. Look at Benjamin Franklin here, though.” He held the paper up so that she could see it. “What’s wrong with this man’s face?” he said in what he hoped was a sufficiently serious and compelling voice, and then puffed out his cheeks and crossed his eyes. He started to laugh, but Sylvia’s frown deepened, and so he controlled himself with an effort.

  “Really,” he said, gesturing at the crystals and books. “It’s very … modern, isn’t it? Very up-to-date. I like all of this sort of New Age stuff. It’s so easily replaceable, like a paper diaper. This year your piece of quartz crystal cures arthritis or summons up the spirit Zog; next year it’s a mantelpiece ornament, and you can’t sleep until you own a three-thousand-dollar Asian dog. What was it last year, Cuisinarts and biofeedback? Or was that the seventies? I thought the Rosicrucians went out with Fate magazine.” He caught himself then. He had started out thinking to be funny, but now he was being something else. Uncle Roy would advise against the truth, or at least his version of the truth. There was no profit in it. It would make things worse.

  “You see through things so clearly,” Sylvia said.

  He shrugged, deflating a little but stung by her getting ironic with him. “Well,” he said. “I guess I wasn’t taking the long view. People can’t afford a hundred bucks for a hand-knit pair of gloves, but they can fork out twenty easily enough for a copper bracelet that lets them talk to the dead.” He tried to look cheerful, full of play.

  Sylvia looked steadily back at him, though, and he realized that he had messed up, perhaps fatally. Sylvia didn’t seem to have any sense of humor about this sort of thing. Like her father, she had probably developed a rock-steady belief in her products. She was too honest to do anything else. Howard reminded himself that he hadn’t known her for fifteen long years. She might have come to believe in anything. Back when they were younger she had accused him once of despising whatever he couldn’t understand, and there had been some truth in that. He hadn’t forgotten it, but maybe he hadn’t changed much, either. Life was safe and restful that way. You didn’t have to tire yourself out developing new interests, and you could fee
l virtuous about being narrow-minded, too.

  “I don’t care about turning a profit. Not like you mean it,” Sylvia said. “I’d like to make things a little easier on Mom and Dad, though.”

  “Sure.” Howard felt a little ashamed of himself now that she had put it like that. “I didn’t mean …”

  “And besides, you seem to think this is all a fake. Everything’s a fake to you. I was thinking you might have outgrown that sort of cynicism by now. And what’s worse, how do you know what I think? How do you know what I believe and don’t believe? Don’t go around insulting people before you know what they’re all about.” She paused for a moment and then looked him straight in the face, glaring just a little bit. “In fact,” she said, “there’s evidence that I’ve lived past lives—lots of them. If you’d open your mind, instead of closing it down like a trap, you might find out a few things about yourself that would interest you.”

  “What sorts of lives?” Howard was suddenly defensive again. He couldn’t help himself. Maybe it was because she’d let him spend the night locked in Jimmers’ attic while she hustled crystals to New Age loonies. He knew what she would say, too, about these past lives—that she was some sort of princess, Egyptian, probably, maybe Babylonian, or a serving girl who had caught the eye of the prince. There must have been a raftload of them back then, all waiting to die a few times in order to have a shot at being modern girls.

  “I was a servant in the court of Ramses III, if you’re really interested. Once, about a year ago, I underwent trance therapy and drew hieroglyphic figures in the sand with a stick. They had meaning, too. They weren’t just scribbles. My therapist translated them. I had never seen any such things before, either. So you explain it, Mr. Skeptic; nobody else can.” She still stared straight at him, waiting for him to scoff.