Fever Dream (5 page)

“That would be a thrill,” said Pendergast, in the same jocular vein.

Continuing his brisk pace, the lawyer followed a once-graveled path now overgrown with weeds toward a specimen-size weeping
hemlock, beyond which could be seen a rusting iron fence enclosing a small plot of ground. Peeking up from the grass within
was a scattering of slate and marble headstones, some vertical, some listing.

The gentleman, his creased black trouser cuffs now soaked, came to a halt before one of the larger tombstones, turned, and
then grasped the briefcase in both hands, waiting for his client to catch up. Pendergast took a thoughtful turn around the
private graveyard, stroking his pale chin, before ending up next to the dapper little man.

“Well!” the lawyer said, “here we are again!”

Pendergast nodded absently. He knelt, pushed aside the grass from the face of the tombstone, and read aloud:

Hic Iacet Sepultus

Louis de Frontenac Diogenes Pendergast

Apr 2, 1899–Mar 15, 1975

Tempus Edax Rerum

Mr. Ogilby, standing behind Pendergast, propped his briefcase on the top of the tombstone, undid the latches, raised the cover,
and
slipped out a document. On the cover of the briefcase, balancing it on the headstone, he laid down the document.

“Mr. Pendergast?” He proffered a heavy silver fountain pen.

Pendergast signed the document.

The lawyer took the pen back, signed it himself with a flourish, impressed it with a notary public seal, dated it, and slipped
it back in his briefcase. He shut it with a snap, latched it, and locked it.

“Done!” he said. “You are now certified to have visited your grandfather’s grave. I shall not have to disinherit you from
the Pendergast family trust—at least, not for the present!” He gave a short chuckle.

Pendergast rose, and the little man stuck out a pudgy hand. “Always a pleasure, Mr. Pendergast, and I trust I shall have the
favor of your company in another five years?”

“The pleasure is, and shall be, mine,” said Pendergast with a dry smile.

“Excellent! I’ll be heading back to town, then. Will you follow?”

“I think I’ll drop in on Maurice. He’d be crushed if I left without paying him my respects.”

“Quite, quite! To think he’s been looking after Penumbra unassisted for—what?—twelve years now. You know, Mr. Pendergast—”
Here the little man leaned in and lowered his voice, as if to impart a secret. “—you really should fix this place up. You
could get a handsome sum for it—a handsome sum! Antebellum plantation houses are all the rage these days. It would make a
charming B and B!”

“Thank you, Mr. Ogilby, but I think I shall hold on to it a while longer.”

“As you wish, as you wish! Just don’t stay out after dark—what with the old family ghost, and all.” The little man strode
off chuckling to himself, briefcase swinging, and soon vanished, leaving Pendergast alone in the family plot. He heard the
Mercedes start up; heard the crunch of gravel fade quickly back into silence.

He strolled about for another few minutes, reading the inscriptions on the stones. Each name resurrected memories stranger
and more eccentric than the last. Many of the remains were of family members disinterred from the ruins of the basement crypt
of the Pendergast mansion on Dauphine Street after the house burned; other ancestors had expressed wishes to be buried in
the old country.

The golden light faded as the sun sank below the trees.
Pallid mists began to drift across the lawn from the direction of
the mangrove swamp. The air smelled of verdure, moss, and bracken. Pendergast stood in the graveyard for a long time, silent
and unmoving, as evening settled over the land. Yellow lights—coming up in the windows of the plantation house—filtered through
the trees of the arboretum. The scent of burning oak wood drifted on the air; a smell that brought back irresistible memories
of childhood summers. Glancing up, Pendergast could see one of the great brick chimneys of the plantation house issuing a
lazy stream of blue smoke. Rousing himself, he left the graveyard, walked through the arboretum, and gained the covered porch,
the warped boards protesting under his feet.

He knocked on the door, then stood back to wait. A creaking from inside; the sound of slow footsteps; an elaborate unlatching
and unchaining; and the great door swung open to reveal a stooped old man of indeterminate race, dressed in an ancient butler’s
uniform, his face grave. “Master Aloysius,” he said, with fine reserve, not offering his hand immediately.

Pendergast extended his and the old man responded, the ribbed old hand getting a friendly shake. “Maurice. How are you?”

“Middling,” the old man replied. “I saw the cars drive up. Glass of sherry in the library, sir?”

“That will be fine, thank you.”

Maurice turned and moved slowly through the entry hall toward the library. Pendergast followed. A fire was burning on the
hearth, not so much for warmth as to drive out the damp.

With a clinking of bottles, Maurice muddled about the sideboard and poured a measure into a tiny sherry glass, placed it on
a silver tray, and carried it over with great ceremony. Pendergast took it, sipped, then glanced around. Nothing had changed
for the better. The wallpaper was stained, and balls of dust lay in the corners. He could hear the faint rustle of rats in
the walls. The place had gone downhill significantly in the five years since he had last been here.

“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.

Between the time she loaded the Krieghoff with soft-points and the time she fired, someone had removed her unfired cartridges
and replaced them with blanks. And then, after the hunt, someone had removed the two blanks—one fired, one not—to cover up
what they had done. Only they made a small mistake: they did not clean the fired barrel, leaving the incriminating fouling.

Pendergast sat back in the chair. One hand—trembling ever so slightly—rose to his mouth.

Helen Pendergast’s death had not been a tragic accident. It had been murder.