Bill Pronzini: Nightshades

The oxygen gave me the strength I needed to yank one end of the board loose. When I wrenched it out of the way I tried to heave my body up onto the sill — but that wasn’t the way, wiggle and squirm, that was the way, up onto the sill, through the opening — and in the next second I was toppling over backwards, then jarring into the hard earth on my stiffened left shoulder and elbow-out of there.

I rolled over twice in the grass, away from the burning building. Got up and staggered ten or twelve paces into the middle of the road before I fell down again. I lay on my back, with the night wind fanning across my face, cooling it. But I didn’t lie there for long. Now that I was clear of the fire I could smell my singed hair, the smouldering cloth of my pants and shirt. The smells made me gag, and I had just enough time to roll over and pull back onto my knees before I vomited up the beer I’d drunk earlier in Redding.

But I was all right then. My head cleared, the fear and the wildness were gone; in their place was a thin rage, hot and glowing like the fire, fed and kept that way by the pain in my shoulder and in my head where I’d been clubbed. I got to my feet again, shakily, and pawed at my smoke-stung eyes and squinted over at the hotel.

It was coated with flame, and the fire had spread to the adjacent buildings, was beginning to race across their roofs to the ones beyond. Part of the cloudy sky was obscured by dense coagulations of smoke. Within minutes, that whole creekside row would be ablaze.

I swung my head around, to look up along the road to where I had parked my car. It wasn’t there any more.

The rage got thinner, hotter. He took it away somewhere, I thought. Took my keys after he slugged me and drove the car somewhere and hid it.

I started to run painfully along the far edge of the road, back toward the fork. I kept glancing back over my shoulder, keeping track of the fire, so I did not see the cluster of people until I was abreast of the last of the south-side buildings, where the road jogged in that direction.

They were standing in the meadow up there-more than a dozen of them, the whole damned town. Just standing there like a bunch of frigging stumps, watching me run toward them, watching the ghosts of Ragged-Ass Gulch burn as though in some final rite of exorcism.

None of them moved, not even when I stopped within a few feet of them and stood swaying a little, panting, rubbing my bad arm. All they did was stare at me. Paul Robideaux, holding a shovel in one hand. Jack Coleclaw, with his arms folded across his fat paunch. Ella Bloom, her mouth twisted into a witch’s grimace. Hugh Penrose, shaking his misshapen head and making odd little sounds as though trying to control a spasm of laughter. Their faces, and those of the others, had an unnatural look in the fireglow, like mummer’s masks stained red-orange and sooty black.

“What’s the matter with you people?” I shouted at them. My voice was hoarse, my throat hot and raw from the smoke. “What’re you standing around here for? The whole camp’s burning, you can see that!”

Jack Coleclaw was the first of them to speak. “Let it burn,” he said.

“Ashes to ashes,” Penrose said, “dust to dust.”

“For Christ’s sake, it’s liable to spread to some of your homes-”

“No, that won’t happen,” Ella Bloom said. “There’s hardly any wind tonight.”

Somebody else said, “Besides, there’re firebreaks.”

“There’re firebreaks-that’s terrific. Goddamn it, look at me! Can’t you see I was in one of those burning buildings? Didn’t any of you think of that possibility?”

“We didn’t see your car anywhere,” Robideaux said. “We figured you’d left town.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“What were you doing in one of the ghosts? You start the fire, maybe?”

“No. But somebody sure as hell did.”

“Is that so?”

“He was trying to kill me, the same way he killed Munroe Randall last week. He damned near broke my head with a board and then he locked me in a room in the old hotel and took my car and hid it somewhere. When he came back he sloshed coal oil around the place and set fire to it.”

Coleclaw said in a low, tense voice, “Who are you talking about, mister?”

“You know who I’m talking about. The only person who isn’t here right now-your son Gary.”

The words seemed to have no impact on him. Or on any of the others. They all kept on staring at me through their mummer’s masks. None of them made a sound until Coleclaw said, “Gary didn’t do any of them things. You hear? He didn’t.”

“He did them, all right.”

“Why would he?”

“You know the answer to that too. You all hate the men who own Northern Development, so he hates them just as hard. Harder. And he decided to do something about it.”

“You can’t prove that-”

“I can prove it, Mr. Coleclaw.”

“How? How come you’re so sure he set them fires?”

The reasons flickered across my mind. The stone cup with the bryophite fossils and the wax residue inside; the room in the hotel with the same kind of fossilized rocks on its shelves, a room that resembled nothing so much as a private clubhouse, a room where a child-or a child-man-could keep the treasures he’d collected. Penrose’s comments to Kerry and me that Gary was a “poor young fool, poor lost lad” and that he had “rocks in his head.” A pun, Penrose had said after the latter remark, meaning that Gary had rocks in his head not because he was retarded but because he was a collector of unusual stones. The way Coleclaw had been acting when I’d run into him outside the sheriff’s department yesterday; he hadn’t been worried for himself, he’d been worried that Gary had killed O’Daniel too and that the authorities would find out the truth. That was why he’d made a point of telling me he’d been with his son on the nights both men died: he wasn’t trying to alibi himself, he was trying to alibi Gary.

But I did not say any of these things to Coleclaw and the others; it was testimony better left unspoken now. And I didn’t want them to know about the notebook in my pocket, the notebook with Gary Coleclaw’s name in it and the crudely drawn map of Munroe Randall’s street and property in Redding.

I said, “Where’s Gary? Why isn’t he here with the rest of you?”

No answer.

“All right,” I said, “have it your way. But I’m going to the sheriff as soon as I find my car. You’ll have to turn Gary over to the law, if not to me.”

“Not,” Coleclaw said.

“You don’t have any choice-”

“The law won’t take him away from us,” a thin, harried-looking woman said shrilly. Coleclaw’s wife. “I won’t let them. None of us will, you hear?”

I looked at her, at the others-and I understood the rest of it then, the whole truth, the source of all the hostility I’d encountered. It was not any sudden insight, or even what Mrs. Coleclaw had just said; it was something that was there in her face, and in her husband’s, and in each of the other faces. Something I’d been too shaken to see until now.

“You knew all along,” I said to the pack of them. “ All of you. You knew Gary set those fires; you knew he killed Randall, you were afraid he’d killed O’Daniel too-”

“No!” Mrs. Coleclaw said. “He never killed O’Daniel, he never did that!”

“A cover-up, a conspiracy of silence. That’s why none of you would talk to me.”

“It was an accident,” Mrs. Coleclaw said. “Gary didn’t mean to hurt Randall, he didn’t know Randall was home-”

“Hush up, Clara,” her husband told her sharply.

Robideaux said, “No matter what happened to Randall, he had it coming. That’s the way we look at it. The bastard had it coming.”