Death Under the Lilacs (10 page)

“It's a favor, Gary. I need that plane. Now!”

“I can't do that, Lyon. You haven't flown in years and would be rusty as hell. If anything happened to you or the plane, the FAA would close me down.”

Lyon looked out the window a moment and then pointed. “You have any of those for rent?”

Gary's gaze followed the pointed finger. “You've got to be kidding! Those are death traps. I keep them here because I need the rental money, but I wouldn't fly one if my life depended on it.”

“They don't require a license, do they?”

“Well, no, but do you know how many people were killed in ultralights last year?”

“I'm not interested, Gary. Give me a rental agreement. In fact, now that I think about it, an ultralight will fit my purposes. What's their landing run?”

“Sixty to a hundred feet.”

“That will do just fine.”

Lyon stood at the far end of the runway looking at the fragile craft in front of him. He shook his head; the damn thing was scary. “What's it called?” he asked Gary Middletown, who was standing slightly to his rear.

“It's a Pterodactyl Ascender.”

“Pterodactyl? It sounds like something prehistoric.”

“My opinion exactly. You know, Lyon, those are two-cycle engines, and you sit on practically nothing. The flying surfaces are controlled by those wires.”

“You don't get any simpler than a hot air balloon. What are the specs on this thing?”

“All right,” Gary said tiredly. “You've got a five-gallon fuel tank with a one-point-five gallon-per-hour consumption. A takeoff roll of one hundred twenty-five feet and a glide ratio of nine to one. What can I tell you? It's a damn hang glider with a thirty-horsepower engine attached. You do any aerobatics and it comes apart at the seams. Stay away from turbulence, if you can, and watch out for wires and mountains. Better yet, don't go up in it.”

“Uh-huh.” Lyon lashed his small bag of tools to the rear of the seat and began to untie the small craft from its lashings. “Thanks, Gary.”

The airport manager shook his head and turned his back to Lyon as he strode back to the small operations building.

Lyon hoped that flying was like riding a bicycle—once you learned, you never really forgot. There was no denying, however, that you were rusty after a decade of pulling propane levers rather than trying to stabilize a hundred-pound piece of wire and cloth in the air.

He revved the engine up to 5,500 RPM, kept it there a moment, and then released the brakes. The ultralight wobbled down the runway and in less than half the length of a football field was airborne.

The right wing dipped precariously and nearly brushed against the runway. Lyon fought to stabilize the craft into some sort of rational flight.

He climbed to what he estimated was a thousand feet and took a northwest heading toward the foothills of the Berkshires gleaming green in the distance.

There was a grace to the flight that he might have enjoyed if his misson had not been so important, and also if the sputtering small engine located only inches from the rear of his head had not been so loud. He missed the silent vertical ascent of his balloon and the sense of oneness with the sky that he had in a drifting balloon.

He stabilized the craft and reached into his shirt where he had stuffed his map with its circled locations.

Lyon reduced the Pterodactyl's speed to 40 miles per hour, its most effective cruising speed. The tiny craft still yawed alarmingly, and he tended to over-correct, but gradually his feel of flying was returning. The craft began to gyrate less and less and and to fly almost normally.

After forty minutes of flight, he spotted the first cemetery circled on his map. He put the craft into a descending pattern and approached from the east. The cemetery loomed larger than his old maps indicated, which meant that it had been enlarged by the acquisition of more land over the years.

The ultralight was nearly at treetop level, and he watched carefully for an access road that would be wide enough for his wingspan.

He realized with a start that there was all sorts of room to land; in fact, the whole cemetery could be considered one large landing field.

There weren't any monuments, crypts, or aboveground markers of any kind.

He reduced his altitude until he was only feet off the ground.

All the markers were brass plates recessed into the ground. There was a small chapel at the far end of the plots, but it looked used, and two groundskeepers on mowers lounged near its entrance.

A gigantic oak tree loomed immediately before him.

Lyon immediately increased the RPM on his small engine and nearly set the ultralight on its side as he tried to slideslip around the massive trunk of the ancient tree.

His right wing was nearly brushing the ground, but the small plane managed to slip past the oak's trunk, and he changed its attitude of attack to fight for height.

One graveyard down. Thirty to go. He felt quite positive that the cemetery he had just checked out would not be suitable for the kidnapper. The small chapel was obviously in use, and there were no crypts removed from sight that would give adequate cover.

He glanced down at his map and adjusted his course for the next circled area.

He thought that perhaps it was the seventh—or was it the eighth?—when it happened.

It was an old cemetery nestled in a cove of trees at the end of a valley. As he made a slow, 30-mile-an-hour approach to the grounds, he could see the small fallen American flags and withered baskets of flowers left over from the Memorial Day ceremonies weeks before. Needlelike monuments and large family crypts were spotted across the overgrown grass of the cemetery, and the land was pitched in a deep incline that would make landing difficult.

He finally saw the rutted dirt road that wound up from a narrow asphalt lane and gradually petered out near the apex of the hill. He banked the ultralight in an easy glide and throttled down to near stall speed as he flew over the dirt road looking for the smoothest portion on which to land.

He set the tricycle landing gear down on the road with a jolt that bounced him half a dozen feet into the air before the plane settled into a landing roll.

The road was narrow—too narrow—and the wings of the plane jutted over its shoulders and barely cleared some of the medium monuments on the side. Lyon knew that he had nearly seven feet of clearance from the ground to the wings, but if any of the larger monuments were near his glide path, the wings would hit and shatter.

A 30-foot-high white marble obelisk, built by some long-forgotten merchant prince, loomed at him not a yard from the shoulder.

He wouldn't make it!

He tried to stop the Pterodactyl, but its landing gear was slithering back and forth on the rough road surface. The monument rushed closer. The plane's wing tip would hit the stone and swing the small craft around, smashing its delicate structure into pieces that would resemble a child's bent toy.

He would survive with a few bad jolts, but the search would be held up for days, until he recovered sufficiently to ply these back roads by time-consuming ground transportation.

In a final act of desperation, he swerved the ultralight and allowed it to careen over the narrow shoulder to the far side of the road, away from the monument. It passed between two rows of weathered tombstones and rocked to a gentle halt by the wire fence of another obelisk.

The Pterodactyl was intact and would fly again—that is, if he could take off on the rutted surface of the dirt road.

Lyon climbed from the narrow seat and unstrapped the small bag of tools from the rear of the seat. Weight had been important, and so his tools were light: a flashlight, a stethoscope, an ice ax with cold chisel, and an army entrenching tool whose blade folded back against the stock.

He began to walk toward an old mausoleum protected by an iron fence whose front gate had half rusted until it canted from its supports. He was thirty feet from the crypt when he heard the sounds faintly echoing from its interior.

“Oh … oh God … please …”

It was a woman's voice. Lyon dropped everything to the ground but the ice ax and the flashlight. He ran at full speed toward the ancient mausoleum. As he drew closer he could see that the metal door was slightly cracked.

Again the voice from the interior. “Oh, Jesus …”

He was past the rusted gate now; two more steps and he would be in the mausoleum itself. His shoulder hit the interior metal door and the shock of the impact jolted him, but the door creaked inward and a shaft of light fell across the stone floor.

Lyon flicked on the flashlight and raised the ax. “Let her go!”

Their eyes flickered in the light as they stared up at him.

Lyon slowly lowered the ax and took two backward steps.

“My father sent him!” the girl screamed.

“He's a goddamn pervert,” her boyfriend answered. “You seen enough, mister?”

“I … I'm sorry,” Lyon said. “I thought you would have heard my … never mind.” He turned and, red-faced, left the crypt and its young lovers.

It was ten minutes later, when he had finished checking out the cemetery and was turning the ultralight around, when the young couple came out of the crypt. She was still adjusting her clothing, and he wheeled a motorcycle around the squat stone building and prepared to kick-start it. He glared at Lyon. “Okay, Peeping Tom. The place is all yours, pervert.” The motorcycle roared into life.

Lyon wheeled the ultralight in a semicircle and positioned it for takeoff. It was going to be a long day.

The cemetery was barely visible from the road, and if his map hadn't indicated its location, he might have flown past without landing. The rusted gate was nearly obscured by high weeds, and the graves had not been tended in years. The foundation of a church was nearby, its interior filled with fire-blackened timbers.

Seeing that there was no road within the cemetery itself that would accommodate his craft, he decided on an easy road landing. He throttled the engine back to a near stall and made his approach. It was a bad landing that ran too close to the rusting fence, and the wing almost engaged the iron spikes. He was tiring, and in addition to that, the limits of the craft's cruising range had been reached. There was a small airport near Torrington where he would land and refuel after this last search.

He unstrapped himself from his precarious seat and pushed the ultralight off the road until its nose touched the cemetery gates. He retrieved his tools from behind the seat and started wearily into the cemetery.

How many had it been? He had lost count. He could take out his map and count off the ones he had searched, but it hardly seemed worth the effort.

It was all too farfetched. Under the stress of her abduction, Bea might have mistakenly named lilacs, or he could have misconstrued the whole clue and missed an obvious answer.… All his doubts seemed to merge into his aching body as he trudged up the steep incline of the small country cemetery.

He walked the lanes between the gravestones, keeping an eye open for a possible air vent. Years ago he had read of a kidnapping in the south where a young girl had been entombed in a packing case buried beneath the ground. He sounded the ax against any above-the-ground crypts or mausoleums and listened with his stethoscope for sounds in their interiors.

He walked the leaf-strewn lanes between the stones. The ones located nearest the road were the oldest. Their faces were worn smooth from the elements; only a few with deep-cut letters still announced the name of the deceased. Lyon had a strong sense of history, and now he felt a living presence, as if the souls of those interred were near him.

He was not a spiritualist, nor was he a believer in any facet of the supernatural; still, he felt he could somehow sense the dead.

He was tired and sat on a toppled stone. A soft breeze brushed his face, and he sighed and forced himself back to his feet.

The crypt at the top of the hill stared down at him like a malevolent face. He felt drawn toward it and began to walk up the hill. Etched into a marble slab across the front of the tomb was the family name, Trumbull. It was a vaguely familiar name, yet he couldn't place it.

The tomb was built into the side of the hill, with a marble face broken in the center by a locked barred door before an oval interior metal door.

Lyon inserted the stethoscope earpieces and pressed the bell through the bars until it was flush against the inner door.

With his free hand, he slammed the ax against the metal until sound reverberated through the tomb and across the valley.

He listened for a moment and was about to turn away when he heard a sound that seemed like a faint scratching from within the crypt.

He tore the cold chisel from his back pocket and placed it against the padlock that chained shut the barred door. He struck the chisel with the ax three times before the lock fell apart. He noticed that the fallen lock was not rusted and was by far the newest artifact in this ancient graveyard.

Lyon pulled open the barred door and swung up the lever restraining the interior door. He pushed in the final barrier.

A large rat blinked in the bright light and then scooted between his feet and loped down the hill.

“Damn!” he said. He would have to replace the lock he had just broken. That meant a round-trip to the nearest town. He began to close the door.

The sound was hardly human, a guttural gasp.

Lyon shoved the door open with such force that it banged against the interior wall. Mid-morning sun fell over his shoulder and crept into the tomb.

She stood before him chained to the wall. Her eyes were sunken, with deep rings surrounding their sockets. Her clothing was tattered, and she was coated in dust and grime. Wisps of hair straggled over her face as she squinted painfully into the bright light.

“You took your time, Wentworth,” Bea said.

8

He carried her down the hill past rows of gravestones toward the road. He had been able to chisel one end of the chain from the ring on the crypt wall, but the handcuff on her right wrist defied his simple tools, and the chain dangled behind them and clanked against stone as he made his way through the rusted gates.