Infinity Beach - Jack McDevitt [87]
Gould offered her a chair and they both sat down. “Yes,” he said. “That’s right. That’s where he lived. My wife also lived there at the time.” He repeated the details while Kim listened patiently. Finally he asked whether she knew he was a war hero.
“I know,” said Kim. “Tell me about the villa.”
Gould recalled that the living room had been coldly formal; that Kane had lived in his den, had entertained his friends there. “Sometimes,” Gould said, “people he’d served with, in the fleet, came to town.” He shook his head. “Kane and his friends knew how to party.”
“It’s beautiful country,” said Kim. “He must have had a lovely view.”
“He had a deck on the side of the house where you could sit in the evenings and watch the sun go down behind the mountains—
They continued in that manner for several minutes until Kim felt ready to ask the one serious question she’d brought with her. “Did I hear you say there was a secret room?”
“Secret room?”
“Yes. When I was here before, you told me that during his last couple of years there, he sealed off part of the house. Wouldn’t let anybody see it.”
“Oh yes. I’d forgot. That was the den. After the Mount Hope business, he stopped using it for guests and switched to the living room.”
“Why do you think he did that? Was he restoring it, maybe?”
“No, I don’t think so.” He made a face, signifying he was thinking hard. “You could see Mount Hope from the den. Maybe he didn’t want to look at it anymore. Or maybe he’d just developed an eccentricity. Artists are like that.”
“I suppose,” she said. “He wouldn’t let anybody in there?”
“Not as far as I know.”
“I wonder if it might have been that he’d begun to work there? To paint?” Or whether he’d hidden something he didn’t want anyone to get near. Like the Hunter logs?
“I doubt it. He had a workroom toward the front of the house.”
“Where was the den?”
“At the rear.”
“You never saw it again after he sealed it off?”
“No. Never did.” He looked at her and at the two Kane’s. “Now, why don’t we arrange for you to take one of these little beauties home?”
Kim had to pay the Rent-All Emporium for both the wet suit, which had been torn, and for the mask and converter, which were still in the river. They asked no questions, but snickered at her when she told them she wanted to rent a rubber boat and another wetsuit. It would require, they explained, a substantially heavier deposit.
An hour later, in her rented flyer, she lifted off the Gateway pad into a cold gray afternoon and once more turned south. For a few minutes she ran above a train, but it quickly distanced her and lost itself in the craggy countryside.
She had not told Solly what she intended to do because he would have insisted on coming. That would have been comforting, but she was anxious to have the results on the Hunter logs. And she felt a compunction to confront her fears about the local demon. After her experience in the river, she told herself, she feared nothing that walked.
She looked up the train on the schedule. The Overland. Hauling dry goods, electronics, lumber, and machinery from Sorrentino to the coast. She liked trains. Always had. She’d have preferred at the moment to be aboard one.
She’d circled the location of Kane’s villa on her map of the village. It had been on the north side, in an area now in deep water.
She traced bearings from the Kane home to the dam, to the city hall (which was in fifteen meters of water, but whose tower still rose proudly out of the lake), and to a onetime flyer maintenance facility atop a low hill that had become an island when the dam came down.
The river looked cold in the somber light. She glided out over the lake and, minutes later, descended on Cabry’s Beach.
The flyer came to rest with one of its treads in the water. She watched the edge of the forest while changing into her wet suit. The tree branches swayed gently in the wind coming off the water. No blue jay fluttered through that sky; no deer came down to the shoreline to drink.
She opened the hatch and eased down onto the