Douglas Child - Fever Dream

"I wish you'd let me hire a live-in housekeeper, Maurice. And a cook. It would greatly relieve your burden."

"Nonsense! I can take care of the house myself."

"I don't think it's safe for you to be here alone."

"Not safe? Of course it's safe. I keep the house well locked at night."

"Naturally." Pendergast sipped the sherry, which was an excellent dry oloroso. He wondered, a little idly, how many bottles were left in the extensive cellars. Many more, probably, than he could drink in a lifetime, not to mention the wine, port, and fine old cognac. As the collateral branches of his family had died out, all the various wine cellars--like the wealth--had concentrated around him, the last surviving member of sound mind.

He took another sip and put down the glass. "Maurice, I think I'll take a turn through the house. For old times' sake."

"Yes, sir. I'll be here if you need me."

Pendergast rose and, opening the pocket doors, stepped into the entry hall. For fifteen minutes, he wandered through the rooms of the first floor: the empty kitchen and sitting rooms, the drawing room, the pantry and saloon. The house smelled faintly of his childhood--of furniture polish, aged oak, and, infinitely distant, his mother's perfume--all overlaid with a much more recent odor of damp and mildew. Every object, every knickknack and painting and paperweight and silver ashtray, was in its place, and every little thing carried a thousand memories of people long since under earth, of weddings and christenings and wakes, of cocktail parties and masked balls and children stampeding the halls to the warning exclamations of aunts.

Gone, all gone.

He mounted the stairs to the upper landing. Here, two hallways led to bedrooms in the opposite wings of the house, with the upstairs parlor straight ahead, through an arched doorway protected by a brace of elephant tusks.

He entered the parlor. A zebra rug lay on the floor, and the head of a Cape buffalo graced the mantel above the massive fireplace, looking down at him with furious glass eyes. On the walls were numerous other heads: kudu, bushbuck, stag, deer, hind, wild boar, elk.

He clasped his hands behind his back and slowly paced the room. Seeing this array of heads, these silent sentinels to memory and events long past, his thoughts drifted irresistibly to Helen. He'd had the old nightmare the previous night--as vivid and terrible as ever--and the malevolent effects still lingered like a canker in the pit of his stomach. Perhaps this room might exorcise that particular demon, at least for a while. It would never disappear, of course.

On the far side, against the wall, stood the locked gun case that displayed his collection of hunting rifles. It was a savage, bloody sport--driving a five-hundred-grain slug of metal at two thousand feet per second into a wild animal--and he wondered why it attracted him. But it was Helen who had truly loved hunting, a peculiar interest for a woman--but then Helen had been an unusual woman. A most unusual woman.

He gazed through the rippled, dusty glass at Helen's Krieghoff double-barreled rifle, the side plates exquisitely engraved and inlaid with silver and gold, the walnut stock polished with use. It had been his wedding present to her, just before they went on their honeymoon safari, after Cape buffalo in Tanzania. A beautiful thing, this rifle: six figures' worth of the finest woods and precious metals--designed for a most cruel purpose.

As he looked, he noted a small edge of rust creeping around the muzzle rim.

He strode to the door of the parlor and called down the stairs. "Maurice? Would you kindly bring me the key to the gun cabinet?"

After a long moment, Maurice appeared in the hall. "Yes, sir." He turned, disappearing once again. Moments later, he slowly mounted the groaning stairs, an iron key gripped in his veined hand. He creaked past Pendergast and stopped before the gun case, inserted the key, and turned it.

"There you are, sir." His face remained impassive, but Pendergast was glad to sense in Maurice a feeling of pride: for having the key at his fingertips, for simply being of service.

"Thank you, Maurice."

A nod and the manservant was gone.

Pendergast reached inside the case and--slowly, slowly--grasped the cold metal of the double barrel. His fingers tingled at the mere touch of her weapon. For some reason his heart was accelerating--the lingering effects of the nightmare, no doubt. He brought it out and placed it on the refectory table in the middle of the room. From a drawer below the cabinet he removed the gun-cleaning paraphernalia, arranging it beside the rifle. He wiped his hands, picked up the gun, and broke open the action, peering down both barrels.

He was faintly surprised: the right barrel was badly fouled; the left one clean. He laid the gun down, thinking. Again he walked to the top of the stairs.

"Maurice?"

The servant appeared once more. "Yes, sir?"

"Do you know if anyone has fired the Krieghoff since... my wife's death?"

"It was your explicit request, sir, that no one be allowed to handle it. I've kept the key myself. No one has even been near the case."

"Thank you, Maurice."

"You're quite welcome, sir."

Pendergast went back into the parlor, this time shutting the doors. From a writing desk he extracted an old sheet of stationery, which he flipped over and laid on the table. Then he inserted a brush into the right barrel, pushed out some of the fouling onto the paper, and examined it: bits and flakes of some burned, papery substance. Reaching into his suit pocket, he pulled out the loupe he always carried, fixed it to his eye, and examined the bits more intently. There was no doubt: they were the scorched, carbonized fragments of wadding.

But the .500/.416 NE cartridge had no wadding: just the bullet, the casing, and the propellant. Such a cartridge, even a defective one, would never leave this kind of fouling behind.

He examined the left barrel, finding it clean and well oiled. With the cleaning brush he pushed a rag through. There was no fouling at all.

Pendergast straightened up, his mind suddenly in furious thought. The last time the gun had been fired had been on that terrible day. He forced himself to think back. This was something he had avoided--while awake--at all costs. But once he began to remember, it wasn't hard to recall the details: every moment of that hunt was seared forever into his memory.

She had fired the gun only once. The Krieghoff had two triggers, one behind the other. The front trigger fired the right barrel, and that was the trigger normally pulled first. It was the one she pulled. And that shot had fouled the right barrel.

With that single shot, she missed the Red Lion. He'd always chalked it up to bush deflection, or perhaps extreme agitation.

But Helen wasn't one to display agitation, even under the most extreme of circumstances. She rarely missed. And she hadn't missed that last time, either... or wouldn't have missed, if the right barrel had been loaded with a bullet.

Except that it wasn't loaded with a bullet: it was loaded with a blank.

For a blank to generate a similar sound and recoil, it would have to have a large, tightly wadded plug, which would foul the barrel exactly as he'd observed.

Had Pendergast been a man of lesser control, the hinges of his sanity might have weakened under the emotional intensity of his thoughts. She had loaded the gun with .500/.416 NE soft-points at the camp that morning, just before heading into the bush after the lion. He knew that for a fact: he had watched her. And he knew they were live rounds, not blanks--nobody, especially not Helen, would mistake a wadded blank for a two-ounce round. He himself clearly recalled the blunt heads of the soft-points as she dunked them into the barrels.