The Paper Grail (15 page)

She shrugged. “I guess they were.”

“And so on the basis of this he invested twenty-odd thousand dollars?”

“That’s just what he did.”

“You know, maybe he opened the place too close to town. If it was out in the middle of nowhere, people would stop in hoping to buy a snack or just to stretch their legs. But there’s no use stopping when there’s restaurants and motels five miles down the highway. They’d breeze right past him. He’s big on location. I wonder why he didn’t see that.”

Sylvia didn’t say anything for a moment. Howard realized that what he was saying wasn’t new to her. She and her mother had agonized over all this for years. His dredging it up now wasn’t helping to cheer her up.

“You still don’t understand it,” she said. “Dad believed in these ghosts, and he thought that there was something out there that accounted for them. That explains the location problem. Why on earth would he have set up the museum anyplace else?”

“Sure,” said Howard. “I wasn’t thinking. I guess it’s just that I wish he would have made a go of it. I’d like to go out there sometime. See what it’s all about. Building’s still there, I see. I passed it on the way in yesterday afternoon.”

“Yes, it’s still there. Mrs. Lamey owns it. It’s pretty worthless, though. The roof leaks and there’s termites in the walls. It’s too small for a restaurant, and there’s a moratorium against new building out there, so no one can do anything with it. There was talk of it being opened up as a gift shop, to sell redwood products, I think—lamps and carvings and all. Nothing’s come of that, though.”

They pulled off the highway into Mendocino. There was the hint of mist in the air, and a fuzzy red-tinted ring around the full moon. A scattering of cars was parked along the sidewalk, but almost no lights shined in any of the shops except at the Mendocino Hotel, where the bar was fairly quiet.

“Can I have a look at the boutique?” Howard asked.

Sylvia nodded, fumbling in her purse for her keys. They clomped down the boardwalk and opened up the darkened shop. It was neat and sparse, a sort of study in minimalism, with blond fir paneling and a pine floor and what seemed to Howard to be almost no clothing at all on the wooden racks. It looked very high-toned, being empty like that, but there couldn’t be much money in it. He fingered a roughly woven wool scarf, taking a peek at the price tag that dangled from it. Eighty-nine dollars, it read.

“Sell this stuff?”

“In the summer. Local folks can’t quite afford most of it.” Sylvia slipped behind the counter and began to fiddle with papers while Howard looked around.

There was a pile of wooden bowls turned out of burls, a couple of rugs, a few pieces of art glass, and two Plexiglas trays full of folksy jewelry. All of it was expensive, backwoods designer stuff. There didn’t seem to be a lot of anything but space. At one side of the counter were half a dozen books on origami art as well as patterned paper, cut into big sheets and slipped into plastic bags along with step-by-step folding instructions. Alongside lay an origami bird standing next to an origami egg, the egg so finely folded and faceted that there seemed to be almost no hard edges.

Hanging overhead were a half dozen more folded creatures, most of them fish. They were startlingly intricate—thousands of tiny folds in what must have been enormous sheets of paper to begin with. “Still folding paper?” Howard asked.

“Yeah,” Sylvia said. She seemed distant, angry perhaps at what she had conceived Howard’s attitude to be, or upset about the lease business and about the tense dinner.

Howard wondered if this was the time to bring up having found the paper lily, but he decided against it.

“It’s therapy of a sort.”

“Ah,” said Howard. “Therapy.” Somehow the notion of therapy spoiled things just a little. Sylvia opened the cash drawer and banged a roll of pennies hard against the edge, breaking the roll in half. Howard noticed that the several bills in the drawer were
folded up, too, into bow-ties and stockings and elfin-like shoes. He reached across, picked out a bow-tie dollar, and widened his eyes at her.

She shrugged. “Lots of time to kill, I guess.”

On the other side of the counter lay a couple of Chinese baskets full of crystals—mostly quartz and amethyst—as well as big copper medallions and bracelets and small vials of herb potions and oils. Alongside were racks of books full of New Age advice on the mystical properties of rocks and about reincarnation and out-of-body travel. There was some Rosicrucian flapdoodle on a throwaway pamphlet and a calendar of local events starring self-made mystics and seers and advice-givers of nearly every stripe.

Howard put the folded dollar back into the drawer and picked up the Rosicrucian ad. On it was a drawing of Benjamin Franklin seeming to be impersonating Mr. Potatohead. The legend below read, “Why was this man great?” Howard grinned, thinking up a couple of possible answers.

“You don’t have to stand and sneer at it,” Sylvia said suddenly.

“I wasn’t sneering, was I? I didn’t mean to sneer. Look at Benjamin Franklin here, though.” He held the paper up so that she could see it. “What’s wrong with this man’s face?” he said in what he hoped was a sufficiently serious and compelling voice, and then puffed out his cheeks and crossed his eyes. He started to laugh, but Sylvia’s frown deepened, and so he controlled himself with an effort.

“Really,” he said, gesturing at the crystals and books. “It’s very … modern, isn’t it? Very up-to-date. I like all of this sort of New Age stuff. It’s so easily replaceable, like a paper diaper. This year your piece of quartz crystal cures arthritis or summons up the spirit Zog; next year it’s a mantelpiece ornament, and you can’t sleep until you own a three-thousand-dollar Asian dog. What was it last year, Cuisinarts and biofeedback? Or was that the seventies? I thought the Rosicrucians went out with
Fate
magazine.” He caught himself then. He had started out thinking to be funny, but now he was being something else. Uncle Roy would advise against the truth, or at least his version of the truth. There was no profit in it. It would make things worse.

“You see through things so clearly,” Sylvia said.

He shrugged, deflating a little but stung by her getting ironic with him. “Well,” he said. “I guess I wasn’t taking the long view. People can’t afford a hundred bucks for a hand-knit pair
of gloves, but they can fork out twenty easily enough for a copper bracelet that lets them talk to the dead.” He tried to look cheerful, full of play.

Sylvia looked steadily back at him, though, and he realized that he had messed up, perhaps fatally. Sylvia didn’t seem to have any sense of humor about this sort of thing. Like her father, she had probably developed a rock-steady belief in her products. She was too honest to do anything else. Howard reminded himself that he hadn’t known her for fifteen long years. She might have come to believe in anything. Back when they were younger she had accused him once of despising whatever he couldn’t understand, and there had been some truth in that. He hadn’t forgotten it, but maybe he hadn’t changed much, either. Life was safe and restful that way. You didn’t have to tire yourself out developing new interests, and you could feel virtuous about being narrow-minded, too.

“I don’t care about turning a profit. Not like you mean it,” Sylvia said. “I’d like to make things a little easier on Mom and Dad, though.”

“Sure.” Howard felt a little ashamed of himself now that she had put it like that. “I didn’t mean …”

“And besides, you seem to think this is all a fake. Everything’s a fake to you. I was thinking you might have outgrown that sort of cynicism by now. And what’s worse, how do you know what
I
think? How do you know what I believe and don’t believe? Don’t go around insulting people before you know what they’re all about.” She paused for a moment and then looked him straight in the face, glaring just a little bit. “In fact,” she said, “there’s evidence that I’ve lived past lives—lots of them. If you’d open your mind, instead of closing it down like a trap, you might find out a few things about yourself that would interest you.”

“What sorts of lives?” Howard was suddenly defensive again. He couldn’t help himself. Maybe it was because she’d let him spend the night locked in Jimmers’ attic while she hustled crystals to New Age loonies. He knew what she would say, too, about these past lives—that she was some sort of princess, Egyptian, probably, maybe Babylonian, or a serving girl who had caught the eye of the prince. There must have been a raftload of them back then, all waiting to die a few times in order to have a shot at being modern girls.

“I was a servant in the court of Ramses III, if you’re really interested. Once, about a year ago, I underwent trance therapy and drew hieroglyphic figures in the sand with a stick. They
had meaning, too. They weren’t just scribbles. My therapist translated them. I had never seen any such things before, either. So you explain it, Mr. Skeptic; nobody else can.” She still stared straight at him, waiting for him to scoff.

He widened his eyes at her. “Do you mean like bird-headed men and ankhs and people doing that bent-handed Egyptian dance? I always loved that stuff. I had an elementary school teacher whose name, I swear it, was Rosetta Stone.”

“Seen enough?” she asked, heading toward the door.

“I guess. Look, I’m sorry. I was just being funny.”

“You’re a riot. You don’t believe in anything and so you make fun of people who do. Are you frightened of something, or what?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it that way.”

“Well, think about it. You don’t half understand what’s going on up here, do you? Maybe you ought to go back down to L. A. and leave us alone. Get lost on the freeways or something.”

Howard followed her out of the store, into the moonlight. His mind whirled. He’d been stupidly facetious, even though he could have predicted it would cause trouble. If he were utterly confident that he
did
understand some central mystery, then maybe he could put up with that sort of behavior from himself. But truthfully he had come to think, over the last couple of years, that he understood almost nothing. And the last two days had pretty much made him certain of it.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Actually I’m a little nervous. I
don’t
know what’s going on, just like you said. Everybody’s telling me that, and I think it’s getting to me. I don’t know anything about anybody’s past lives, and I’ll admit it. I promise I won’t make fun of it anymore. Let’s get something to drink, like we set out to do. A bottle of wine.”

“I’m pretty busy,” she said, clearly still miffed about his attitude.

“What busy? What’s there to do?”

They stood on the boardwalk near the duck pond. The full moon shone on the weedy water. It might have been romantic under other circumstances, but at the moment it was just cold and windy and uncomfortable. It occurred to Howard that he and Sylvia had gotten remarkably familiar with each other in the last two hours. The fifteen years had simply disappeared, like Uncle Roy’s ghosts. Somehow, though, it had gone just as quickly sour. And it was Howard’s fault, mostly. He tried to think of why it was partly Sylvia’s fault, but he couldn’t come
up with anything good except for the reincarnation nonsense.

“I’m sorry I got smart,” he said.

She nodded. “I think you say that too often.”

“Say what?”

‘That you’re sorry. Quit saying it. Just do something about it.”

“Right. Bottle of wine?”

Without saying anything more she headed up the street. He followed along, catching up to her at the corner, where she turned, angling across toward the Albatross Cafe. The bar upstairs was nearly empty, only a couple of people playing darts and eating popcorn. Geriatric-sounding New Age jazz played softly over hidden speakers. After being careful to consult her, Howard ordered a bottle of white wine and two glasses, and they sat in silence for a time.

“Mr. Jimmers tells me you were robbed yesterday,” she said finally.

Howard nodded, then went on to tell her about the adventure at the turnout on the highway, about the gluer microbus and the stolen paperweight. The news didn’t seem to surprise her. “Did you tell Father about it, about the paperweight?”

“Nope. Subject never came up.”

“I’ll see if he can get it back for you,” she said. “It might be sold by now, or traded away. There’s a fairly hot black market operating up here. Lots of bartering and contraband. Father’s had a hand in it. He’s got connections that might have seen it. You might check out the antique stores downtown, too, or right here in Mendocino.”

“Good idea,” Howard said. “I wouldn’t mind buying it back.” He paused, thinking hard. Seconds passed while he stared into his glass. Finally he spoke, taking his chance on the wine and on Sylvia’s inherently romantic nature. “Actually I was bringing it up as a gift for you.” He gazed into his glass as the moments slipped past, hoping that the silence was underscoring his meaning. When he looked up in order to meet her eyes, she wasn’t there; she was standing at the popcorn machine, holding the empty bowl from the table.

“I can’t stand not to eat popcorn when it’s around,” she said, returning with a full bowl.

“Me neither.” He snatched up a big handful and munched on it, trying to think of how to rephrase the statement about the paperweight. He topped off their wineglasses, noticing that the level in the bottle had gone down quickly. That wasn’t a bad
thing, except that if he were depending on the wine to loosen the evening up, a single bottle might not do it. And yet if he ordered a second, she might think he was up to something, or else drank like a fish along with the rest of his vices and bad attitudes.

“Anyway, this paperweight was a Mount Washington weight. I’m not sure how old, but nineteenth century for sure.”

She nodded at him and said, “I almost feel like an appetizer. What do you think?”

“Sure,” he said, putting the lid on the urge to make a silly joke out of her statement. “I mean, I’m pretty full of salmon. Something light, maybe. You choose it.”

“Be back in a sec.” She stood up and moved away, studying a menu that lay on the bar and then talking to the bartender for a moment. Howard could hear her laugh, but she was speaking too low for him to make out any of the conversation. Clearly they knew each other well. He felt like a tourist as he pretended to watch the dart game. Now he would have to bring up the paperweight a third time. That was almost impossible.