Locked rooms - Laurie R. King [110]
There was another motor there, as well, I noticed. Some sort of baker's van, although the bow-legged man standing across the roadway from it looked nothing like a baker. As I walked up to him, my first impression was confirmed: Grease, not flour, lay in his finger-nails, boots, and pores. And although he wore a cap, he also held in his hands a grey soft hat, turning it round and round in his blunt, blackened fingers. I stopped at the edge of the cliff near the baker's mechanic (Sunday, my mind processed automatically: no bread deliveries, good day to borrow the van) and looked out across the sea, the expanse of green merging into grey-blue with specks of white here and there, and a trace of mist lingering over the horizon. Then I looked down.
A man was working his way along the rocks, a dozen feet above the waves. His head was bare, a shock of greying red hair blowing about in the wind, the brightest object in sight against the dark grey of his overcoat and darker grey of the wet boulders below. His sideways progress was purposeful, undelayed by any consideration but the safest place for his hands and feet. Whatever he'd climbed down after, he'd either already found it, or decided it was lost. I did not even entertain the possibility that he was there for sport, a dare, or drunken whim: A man his age did not launch himself into danger for no good reason. And his companion, the mechanic with the grey hat in his hand, showed even less sign of intoxication than the man picking his deliberate way along the hazardous surface.
I raised my voice against the stiff wind. “What has he lost?”
The man looked up, startled, although I could not tell if his surprise was at my words or at my unexpected presence breaking into his intent concentration. “What?” he asked, half shouting.
“Your friend, what has he lost down there?”
The mechanic shook his head and returned his gaze to the cliff-side. “I don't know. And he ain't a friend, just some guy paid me to drive him out here. Insurance, he said. Didn't think he'd be pulling a stunt like this.” He shook his head again and began muttering; I moved closer to hear his words. “Hands me his hat and down he goes. Didn't even have a rope in case he falls, and seeing the kind of shape he's in, it wouldn't surprise me a bit if he did fall, damned fool, and what'll I tell the wife if I let the guy kill himself down there? Shoulda said no, call yourself a taxi, shoulda.” His voice drifted off and his eyes remained locked on the man who'd hired him, as if the strength of his gaze might be all that held the climber to the cliff face.
In a few minutes, the man below had crept around the worst of the boulders, and appeared to have a straight, if laborious, scramble to the sandy beach. The mechanic stirred and slapped the felt hat against his leg, his back straightening with the beginnings of relief. “Well, I'll go down and pick him up. Oughta charge him extra for the years he's taken off me.”
I stood at the cliff's edge for a moment longer, then turned away and said to Flo, “Shall we go down there, too, and see what on earth that man was doing?”
I climbed inside the car expectantly, giving them little chance to argue. Donny held Flo's elbow across the uneven ground, as her ankle-strap sandals were more suited to urban pavements; her right hand remained firmly clamped to her hat.
At the bottom of the hill Donny pulled into the lay-by near the bread van, and we got out to wait beside its driver. The climber emerged from the rocks, stumbling in exhaustion as he came up the beach. I revised my estimate of his age, and his condition, downward. His hair was thick and its grey premature—he wasn't much older than Donny. But as the mechanic had said, this was not a well man, in no condition, I'd have said, to go clambering around dangerous rocks for a lost article. When he'd dropped heavily onto the floor of the van and put together