Read Online The Paper Grail by James P. Blaylock - Free Book Online Page B

had to sleep in a chair all night, too. Mr. Jimmers couldn’t get through to me until this morning, because I was out late. He said that he had a man locked into the attic who might be a thief and murderer but claimed to be my cousin. We didn’t expect you until the end of the week, actually.”
    “I got impatient. Solitude wears you out after a while.”
    “And you’ve had years of it, haven’t you? No wonder you look like you do.” She smiled at him, clearly assuming that his sense of humor had held up. She might easily have seen himlast week, It was as if there were nothing about him that she had forgotten, which either was a good thing or wasn’t. Howard wasn’t awake enough to tell yet, but he remembered that this was another reason he had never gotten rid of his memories of her.
    He dropped the quilt and managed a smile. He was a fairly ridiculous sight. The whole adventure in the attic was funny as hell if you looked at it right, through the Sylvia spectacles, so to speak. He realized that he was staring at her, and he looked away, bending over suddenly to pick up the quilt from the chair. He folded it carefully.
    “And I’m awfully sorry about all this,” Mr. Jimmers said to Howard. “There’s been dirty work recently, though, what with Mr. Graham going off the cliff and all. Things along the north coast are … unsettled, you might say, and your sudden appearance, I’m afraid, was fraught with suspicion. I hope you forgive me.”
    “Sure,” said Howard. “Not at all. Of course I do.” Forgiving him was easy all of a sudden. He was a friend of Sylvia’s, after all. Howard wondered exactly how he was a friend of Sylvia’s, and whether he could use that friendship to pry the sketch out of Jimmers. This was no time for that sort of selfish thinking, though. He would tackle Mr. Jimmers some other time. He’d had enough of the man for the moment.
    Mr. Jimmers hurried across the room just then and pulled the plug on the space heater, looking skeptically at the frayed cord. He threw open one of the windows. “Close in here,” he said, wrinkling up his face. Then he caught sight of the chiseled wall, blinked at it in surprise, started to say something, and fell silent. He picked up Howard’s pocket knife, which still lay open on the desk. “Burrowing out through the wall?” he asked, gesturing at the hacked plaster. Sylvia looked at it, seeming mildly surprised. “This man is a curious man,” Mr. Jimmers said to Sylvia. “You must always be a tiny bit vigilant around a man who suspects that things are hidden in the walls.” He closed the knife and handed it across carefully.
    Sylvia peered more closely at the plaster now. “Things
are
hidden in the walls,” she said to Mr. Jimmers.
    “I wonder if this man didn’t put them there himself,” Jimmers said.
    “I … Of course I didn’t. How would I have done that?” Howard found himself fumbling again. Mr. Jimmers couldn’t seem to stop pummeling him with nonsense.
    Jimmers shrugged, as if he would believe Howard mainly out of politeness. “Well,” he said. “I’m nearly certain that you
would
have put them there, if you’d been given half a chance. Don’t you think so, Sylvia?”
    “Of course he would have. So would I. I think right now, though, that I have to get back to the shop. Some of us have to work. Where are you going?” she asked Howard.
    “Why … I thought I’d drive up to Uncle Roy’s,” he said. “Up to your place. You’re still there, I guess.”
    She nodded.
    He felt a little like he was inviting himself, despite his having sent the letter telling them that he was coming—which is to say, the letter inviting himself.
    “It isn’t any sort of palace,” she said.
    “I don’t need a palace, really. I’m not the palace type.”
    “You never were,” she said, and she stepped across and kissed him on the cheek in a sisterly way. “Father is a little down on his luck right now. He’s not what you’d call