Blood Walk Part 17

I'm closed,the man's mouth said.

"I just want to know where those earrings come from!"

Come back tomorrow.

Garreth groped in his jacket pocket, then swore when he remembered there was no longer a badge to pull out and dangle before the window.

"Sir," he called, "this is very important. I must-"

But the man shook his head a final time and walked out of the room, leaving Garreth swearing in frustration. The question would have taken only a minute to ask and answer. The shopkeeper would have opened up fast enough for a badge. So why did he refuse Garreth that minute?

Because I don't have a badge; I'm only a civilian now.

And as the implications of that beyond the present inconvenience sank in, Garreth saw how truly alone he stood against his quarry, and he shivered in the cold wind blowing down his unprotected back.

9

The TV morning news warned citizens to drive cautiously. Fog had rolled in overnight and blanketed the entire city so heavily that it lay in a dim, shadowless twilight. Foghorns sounded from Mile Rocks east to Fleming Point and from Point San Pablo south to Hunters Point. Traffic accident investigation units ran fifteen calls behind. Garreth, though, welcomed the fog. He still felt the sun above it, weighting and weakening him, but for once he could enjoy opening the shades and letting such daylight as there was fill the apartment. He could sit by the window wearing his trooper gla.s.ses, feet upon the sill, phone in hand, and look out at the billowing grayness while he dialed the number of the biology department at the University of San Francisco.

"My name is Garreth Mikaelian. I need to talk to someone who can tell me where certain kinds of shark's teeth are found."

He would have thought that was a simple request, but the phone went on hold for what seemed to be an eternity before a reedy male voice said, "This is Dr. Edmund Faith. You're the gentleman who needs to know where to find certain breeds of sharks?"

"I need to know where theirteeth are found. Let me explain."

"By all means, Mr.-"

"Mikaelian. I found a shark's tooth in a shop on Fisherman's Wharf the other day. It's unusual because it's black. I'd like to find another and have a pair of earrings made for my wife. However, the girl in the shop had no idea where the tooth came from and neither did anyone else I asked."

"Ablack shark's tooth?"

"Yes. Do you know where in the world they come from?"

"Mr. Mikaelian, if you're interested in black shark's teeth, you don't want me; you want a paleontologist. I'm not sure of all the areas they're found, but I do know that the black ones are fossils."

"Fossils?" Garreth sat upright.

"Maybe I can give you a name," Dr. Faith went on. "Let's see." Over the line came the rustle of paper. "Yes. Try Dr. Henry Ilfrod in the geology department." He gave Garreth a phone number.

Garreth jotted the number down, then jiggled the phone b.u.t.ton and dialed the new number.

Dr. Ilfrod, a secretary informed Garreth, was in cla.s.s. Garreth remembered from his college days how difficult it could be to find a particular professor when one needed him, and with a sigh, said, "I need information on locating fossil shark's teeth. I'll talk to anyone who can help me."

"I'll see if the graduate students are in their office," the secretary said.

The phone went on hold again. Garreth drummed his fingers. As much as he preferred phoning to running around in daylight, perhaps he should have driven to the campus. Listening to a phone in limbo, he found it too easy to imagine the secretary finishing a letter then going on coffee break, forgetting about him.

Before long, though, another voice came on the line, pleasantly female, inquiring if she could be of help. Garreth patiently repeated his question. "Can you tell me the areas where black shark's teeth are found?"

"Well." She drew out the word. "Fossil shark's teeth can be found in about seventy-five percent of the country. It's almost all been under water at one time or another."

Garreth sighed. Seventy-five percent? So much for the tooth as a lead to Lane's background.

"But," the young woman went on, "most of the teeth are white. The only places I know to find the black ones are on the eastern seaboard and in western Kansas."

Garreth scribbled in his notebook. "Just those two places? How easy are the teeth to find there?"

"I think you have to dig back east, but they're on the surface and accessible in Kansas."

Accessible. "Could a kid find one without much trouble?"

"I'm sure he could. I've been told it's possible to pick them up just walking across a plowed field or in the cuts along roads and streams."

Which should be how she acquired it, if the tooth in the type tray were a "treasure." He recalled the other fossils in the type tray. "Are there many kinds of fossils available in the Kansas area, say in limestone?"

"It's wonderful fossil country."

He thanked her and hung up, then sat staring at his scribbled notes. Kansas. The postmark the lab brought up on the burned envelope had a 6 and 7 in it. Harry had said that the Kansas ZIPs used those numbers. He ticked his tongue against his teeth. Did the trail smell warmer?

He went through the phone book again, this time for the number of the sociology department. "I need to talk to someone who can tell me where immigrant German and Russian groups settled in this country."

That brought him more interminable time on hold while the secretary hunted for a likely prospect. She came back suggesting he call in two hours, when a Dr. Iseko would be in his office.

Hanging up, Garreth sat looking out the window. A partial Zip code and-when he reached this Dr. Iseko-areas of German and Russian settlements would still not pinpoint Lane's home exactly. He needed a town. Three partial letters had also been visible on that postmark. What were they? An O or U preceded by A, K, R, or X and followed by any letter beginning with a vertical stroke.

He hunted through the bookcase, but had nothing like an atlas, nothing with a detailed map of Kansas in it. It appeared he would have to go out, after all.

He drove down to what had become his best source of information lately, the public library. There he spent an hour, with the zip directory, fording towns with 67 as the first or second two numbers and whose name contained letters in the right combination to match the postmark. Halfway through the list of towns, a name leaped out of the book at him:Pfeifer. Pfeifer! Eagerly, he raced through the rest of the names. Ten fit. He looked up their locations in an atlas. Of the ten, two possibles lay in the immediate vicinity of Pfeifer, Dixon to the southwest and Baumen to the northeast.

Then he went looking for a telephone to call the university back. This time he found Dr. Iseko in his office.

"I'm a writer doing research for a book," Garreth told him. "I need to know if Kansas has communities of German immigrants living in close proximity to Russian immigrants, and if so, where."

"I'm afraid there are none quite like that in Kansas," the anthropologist replied.

Garreth's stomach dropped. He swore silently in disappointment. "But what about towns like Pfeifer?"

"That's the Ellis County area? Pfeifer and the communities around it like Schoenchen and Munjor don't have German and Russian immigrants; they were settled by the so-called Volga Germans, Germans who immigrated to Russia and lived along the Volga before immigrating to this country in the latter quarter of the nineteenth century."

Something electric sizzled through Garreth. He felt all his hair stand on end. "They're a kind of mixed German and Russian, then? Does their language have both German and Russian in it?"

"It most certainly does. It's a very unique language. An acquaintance of mine wrote his dissertation on it."

Claudia etc. had said: Itwas nothing but a hodgepodge of German and Russian.

"How large an area did these Volga Germans settle?"

"The Catholic group is mainly around Ellis County. However, there was a Protestant German-Russian group who settled in Bellamy and Barton counties, and some of them extend into Rush and Ness."

Garreth wrote it all down. After thanking the doctor and hanging up, he went back to the library and the atlas. Dixon lay in Rush County; Baumen, in Bellamy County.

Back to the telephone, calling Information in Kansas, calling Information in Dixon and Baumen. Did they have listings for Biebers? Yes. Both had Biebers.

Excitement rose in Garreth. He might be completely wrong, Lane might come from the East, but Kansas looked good. Very good. He had a feeling about it. A Grandma Doyle-quality Feeling? Or perhaps blood called to blood. After all, in a sense, he was Lane's son; she had made him.

However strongly he felt the key to her lay in those two small towns, though, he would never know for certain without further investigation. He could not do it by phone, either. If she were in touch with people there, they might warn her that she had been traced. To be effective needed subtlety.

He would have to go there.

10

The country did not have the dinner-plate flatness Garreth expected, but its gold-brown hills, so unlike either the yellow ones of California or those in San Francisco, stepped with streets and houses, rolled to an almost unimaginably distant horizon, only spa.r.s.ely dotted with trees and human constructs. The sky arched overhead, a cobalt bowl of infinity broken only here and there by wisps of cloud. The sun burned Garreth's eyes even behind his gla.s.ses. Driving south toward Dixon out of Hays, he felt overwhelmed, a mote crushed between the immensity of earth and sky. He wondered whether it might have been wiser to drive during the day instead of only at night, sleeping in his little tent at public campsites by day. Then he could have gradually accustomed himself to the broadened horizon instead of being suddenly hit by it on this drive.

To take his mind off his unexpected agoraphobia, Garreth thought ahead to Dixon, rehearsing his cover story. He wanted to hunt his relatives. When his grandmother died last year, she had left a letter revealing that she was not the real mother of Garreth's father. Phillip Mikaelian, the letter said, had really been born to a young girl who roomed with them and became pregnant out of wedlock. After the birth, the girl ran away, abandoning the baby, and rather than send it to an orphanage, Garreth's grandmother had raised the boy as her own. She had no idea where the real mother was, but she had a photograph and remembered that the girl used to write letters to a town in the Ellis County area of Kansas. As he was currently between jobs, he had decided to trace his real grandmother's family. He looked young enough to pa.s.s as the grandson of a woman born around 1916.

The photograph he carried was actually of Grandma Doyle, taken in the late twenties when she was seventeen and fresh from Ireland. The hard cardboard square stiffened the inside pocket of his coat. Feeling it, Garreth remembered two weekends ago, when he asked for it.Handing it to him, his grandmother had said, "May it bring you she who killed you, and then a peaceful sleep."

She had known what he was from the moment he walked in the house. She said nothing, but beyond his parents, he saw her reach for the silver Maltese cross she always wore around her neck.

"Garreth," his mother had exclaimed in horror, "you're becoming skin and bones!"

His father said, "What the h.e.l.l is this I read in the paper about your partner being shot and you quitting the department?"

But his eyes and attention were on Grandma Doyle. "Grandma?" He reached out to hug her but she hurriedly backed away and left the room. Garreth stared stricken after her. "Grandma!"

His mother touched him on the arm. "Please forgive her. I think she's getting old. Ever since you were attacked, she's insisted you're dead. I think she just needs time to accept that, for once, her Feeling was wrong."

Garreth had given silent thanks that his mother misinterpreted the reason for his distress. "I understand." Which did nothing, however, to lessen the pain of having someone in his family fear him.

"What's been going on out there with you?" his father asked.

Garreth's jaw tightened in resentment. Could they have at least a little of:How are you, son? and:It's good to see you home in one piece, rather than immediately moving into:Up against the wall. Spread those feet. You don'thave the right to remain silent, and anything you say or don't say will be used against you.

Explaining was not only going to be difficult; it would be impossible. Nevertheless, Garreth tried.

His mother went white, listening. "Will you go back to college now?"

He heard the relief in her voice. Of course she was glad to have him out; now she did not have to fear phone calls about him.

But his father said, "Shane never gives up. They've operated on that knee four times and sometimes he has to play filled with painkillers, but he always plays. He never quits because he's been hurt a little. He's never walked out of a game because he was going to be penalized, either."

That stung. Garreth protested, "I didn't resign because of what the shooting board might say or do!"

"Are you going to see a psychiatrist like they suggested?" his mother asked.

His father snorted. "He doesn't need a shrink; he just needs to quit feeling sorry for himself." He leveled a hard stare at Garreth.

"You ought to ask for reinstatement, take your lumps from the shooting board like a man, and get back to work."

Garreth had not argued. "Yes, sir," he said, and escaped from the house into the backyard. Even sunlight was preferable to further conversation with his father.

Why did this have to happen? He loved his father dearly. If only the man could ask a question without making it sound like interrogation and offer an opinion that did not seem to be an order. The worst part was, Garreth could not help wondering if his father was right.

The earth welcomed him as he sat down in the shade of the big cottonwood where he and Shane had built a tree house years ago. The platform still sat in the fork, a little more weathered each year but sound enough yet for Brian and for Shane's kids to play on it when they visited.

Garreth had lain back against the trunk, rubbing his forehead as he thought about Brian. As soon as he visited the boy the question of adoption was bound to come up again. He closed his eyes wearily. What should he do about it this time?

Feet whispered down the back steps and across the lawn toward him, but he left his eyes closed. The scent of lavender overwhelming that of blood told him who it was.

The feet stopped a short distance away."Dearg-due. Undead," his grandmother's voice said quietly. Fighting his eyes open, he saw her lower herself into a lawn chair. "Why is it you're walking?"

He sat up. "Grandma, I'm not dead! Look at me. I walk; I breathe; my heart beats. I reflect in mirrors. I can touch your cross, too."

"But what do you eat? Do you still love the sun?" She pointed at his gla.s.ses.

He could not answer that. Instead, after a hesitation, he said, "Whatever else I am, I'm still your grandson. I won't hurt you."

She regarded him uncertainly, then, with a quick touch on the cross around her neck, patted the side of the chair. "Come to me."

She sat in the sun, but he moved to the ground beside her.

She reached out hesitantly to touch his cheek. "Is it to avenge yourself on she who did this to you that you can't sleep?"

He considered several answers before sighing and giving the one she appeared most ready to accept. "Yes."

She stroked his hair. "Poor unquiet spirit."

His inner self protested, denying that he was walking dead, but he swallowed it as useless to say-she would expect the refusal to believe-and leaned his head against her knee. "I need your help."

"To findher ?"

Garreth nodded.

"What will you be wanting me to do?"

At the fierce tone of her voice, he looked up and had to laugh. She looked so righteously angry, so ready to go into battle against the fiend who had done this to her grandson, that Garreth regretted needing only the photograph from her. Coming up onto his knees, he hugged her.

She hugged him back and then, to his dismay, began sobbing. He knew he was hearing her cry over his grave.