McCoy muttered, scribbling, “That’s enough evidence.”
“Evidence?”
“Everyone’s hiding. Everything’s stashed. When I leave—bingo!—the grass gets cut, the icebox drips. How did they know I was coming? Now, I don’t suppose there’s a Western Union in this no-horse town?” He spied a telephone in the hallway, picked it up, listened. “No dial tone.” He glanced through the screen door. “No postman in sight. I am in a big damn isolation booth.”
McCoy ambled out to sit on the front porch glider, which squealed as if threatening to fall. McCoy read Cardiff’s face.
“You look like a do-gooder,” he said. “You run around saving people not worth saving. So what’s so great about this town that’s worth the Cardiff Salvation Army? That can’t be the whole story. There’s got to be a villain somewhere.”
Cardiff held his breath.
McCoy pulled out his pad and scowled at it.
“I think I know the name of the villain,” he muttered. “The Department of—”
He made Cardiff wait.
“—Highways?”
Cardiff exhaled.
“Bingo,” McCoy whispered. “I see the headlines now: ACE REPORTER DEFENDS PERFECT TOWN FROM DESTRUCTION. Small type: Highway Bureau Insists on Pillage and Ruin. Next week: SUMMERTON SUES AND LOSES. Ace Reporter Drowns in Gin.”
He shut his pad.
“Pretty good for an hour’s work, yep?” he said.
“Pretty,” said Cardiff.
CHAPTER 21
“This is gonna be great,” said James Edward McCoy. “I can see it now: my byline on stories about how Summerton, Arizona, hit the rocks and sank. Johnstown flood stand aside. San Francisco earthquake, forget it.
I’ll expose how the government destroyed the innocents and plowed their front lawns with salt. First the New York Times, then papers in London, Paris, Moscow, even Canada. News junkies love to read about others’ misery—here’s an entire town being strangled to death by government greed. And I’m going to tell the world.”
“Is that all you can see in this?” said Cardiff.
“Twenty-twenty vision!”
“Look around,” said Cardiff. “It’s a town with no people. No people, no story. Nobody cares if a town falls if there are no people in it. Your ‘story’ will run for one day, maybe. No book deal, no TV series, no film for you. Empty town. Empty bank account.”
A scowl split McCoy’s face.
“Son of a bitch,” he murmured. “Where in hell is everyone?”
“They were never here.”
“No one’s here now, but the houses get painted, the lawns get mowed? They were just here, have to have been. You know that and you’re lying to me. You know what’s going on.”
“I didn’t till now.”
“And you’re not telling me? So you’re keeping the headlines to yourself to protect this pathetic little ghost town?”
Cardiff nodded.
“Damn fool. Go on, stay poor and righteous. With you or without you I’m going to get to the bottom of this. Gangway!”
McCoy lunged down the porch steps, onto the street. He rushed up to the adjacent house and pulled open the door, stuck his head in, then entered. He emerged a moment later, slammed the door, and ran on to the next house, yanked open that screen door, jumped in, came out, his blood-red visage quoting dark psalms. Again and again he opened and closed the doors of half a dozen other empty houses.
Finally, McCoy returned to the front yard of the Egyptian View Arms. He stood there, panting, muttering to himself. As his voice drifted off into silence, a bird flew over and dropped a calling card on James Edward McCoy’s vest.
Cardiff stared off across the meadow-desert. He imagined the shrieks of the arriving trainloads of hustling reporters. In his mind’s eye he saw a twister of print inhaling the town and whirling it off into nothing.
“So.” McCoy stood before him. “Where are all the people?”
“That seems to be a mystery,” said Cardiff.
“I’m sending my first story now!”
“And how will you do that? No telegraphs or telephones.”
“Holy jeez! How in hell do they live?”
“They’re aerophiles, orchids, they breathe the air. But wait. You haven’t examined everything. Before you go off half-cocked, there’s one place I must show you.”
CHAPTER 22
Cardiff led McCoy into the vast yard of motionless stones and flightless angels. McCoy peered at the markers.
“Damn. There’s plenty of names, but no dates. When did they die?”
“They didn’t,” Cardiff said softly.
“Good God, lemme look closer.”
McCoy took six steps west, four steps east, and came to…
The open grave with a coffin gaping wide, and a spade tossed to one side.
“What’s this? Funeral today?”
“I dug that,” said Cardiff. “I was looking for something.”
“Something?” McCoy kicked some dirt clods into the grave. “You know more than you’re telling. Why are you protecting this town?”
“All I know is that I might stay on.”
“If you stay, you cannot tell these people the whole truth—that the bulldozers are coming, and the cement mixers, the funeral directors of progress. And if you leave, will you tell them before you go?”
Cardiff shook his head.
“Which leaves me,” said McCoy, “as guardian of their virtues?”
“God, I hope not.” Cardiff shifted by the open grave. Clods fell to drum the coffin.
McCoy backed off, nervously staring down at the open grave and into the empty coffin. “Hold on.” A strange look came over his face. “My God, I bet you brought me here to stop my telephoning out, or even trying to leave town! You…”
At this, McCoy spun, lost his footing, and fell.
“Don’t!” cried Cardiff.
McCoy fell into the coffin full-sprawled, eyes wide, to see the spade fall, loosened by accident or thrown in murder, he never knew. The spade struck his brow. The jolt shook the coffin lid. It slammed shut over his stunned and now colorless eyes.
The bang of the coffin lid shook the grave and knocked down dirt showers, smothering the box.
Cardiff stood amazed and in shock, a mile above.
Had McCoy slipped, he wondered, or was he pushed?
His foot dislodged another shower of dirt. Did he hear someone shrieking beneath the lid? Cardiff saw his shoes kick more dirt down into silence. With the box now hidden, he backed off, moaning, stared at the tombstone above etched with someone else’s name, and thought, That must be changed.
And then he turned and ran, blindly, stumbling, out of the yard.
CHAPTER 23
I have committed murder, Cardiff thought.
No, no. McCoy buried himself. Slipped, fell, and shut the lid.
Cardiff walked almost backward down the middle of the street, unable to tear his gaze from the graveyard, as if expecting McCoy to appear, risen like Lazarus.
When he came to the Egyptian View Arms, he staggered up the walk and into the house, took a deep breath, and found his way to the kitchen.
Something fine was baking in the oven. A warm apricot pie lay on the pantry sill. There was a soft whisper under the icebox, where the dog was lapping the cool water in the summer heat. Cardiff backed off. Like a crayfish, he thought, never forward.
At the bay window he saw, on the vast lawn behind the house, two dozen bright blankets laid in a checkerboard with cutlery placed, empty plates waiting, crystal pitchers of lemonade, and wine, in preparation for a picnic. Outside he heard the soft drum of hooves.
Going out to the porch, Cardiff looked down at the curb. Claude, the polite and most intelligent horse, stood there, by the empty bread wagon.
Claude looked up at him.
“No bread to be delivered?” Cardiff called.
Claude stared at him with great moist brown eyes, and was silent.
“Would it be me that needs deliverance?” said Cardiff, as quiet as possible.
He walked down and stepped into the wagon.
Yes was the answer.
Claude started up and carried him through the town.
CHAPTER 24
They were passing the graveyard.
I have committed murder, Cardiff thought.
And, impulsively, he cried, “Claude!”
Claude froze and Cardiff jumped out of the wagon and rushed into the graveyard.
Swaying over the grave, he reached down in a terrible panic to lift the lid.
McCoy was there, not dead but sleeping, having given up, and was now taking a snooze.
Exhaling, Cardiff spoke down at his terrible enemy, glad that he was alive.
“Stay there,” he said. “You don’t know it, but you’re going home.” He dropped the lid gently, taking care to insert a twig in the gap between top and bottom to allow for air.
He ran back to Claude, who, sensing the visit was over, started off again at a good clop.
All around them the yards and porches were empty.
Where, Cardiff wondered, has everyone gone?
He had his answer when Claude stopped.
They stood before a large, rather handsome brick building, its entrance flanked by two Egyptian sphinxes lying supine, half-lioness and half-god, with faces he could almost name.
Cardiff read these words: HOPE MEMORIAL LIBRARY.
And in small letters beneath that: KNOW HOPE, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE.
He climbed the library steps to find Elias Culpepper standing before the great double front doors. Culpepper behaved as if he’d been expecting the younger man, and motioned at him to sit down on the library steps.
“We’ve been waiting for you,” he said.
“We?” said Cardiff.
“The whole town, or most of it,” said Culpepper. “Where have you been?”
“The graveyard,” said Cardiff.
“You spend too much time there. Is there a problem?”
“Not anymore, if you can help me mail something home. Is there a train expected anytime soon?”
“Should be one passing through sometime today,” said Elias Culpepper. “Doubt it’ll stop. That hasn’t happened in…”
“Can it be stopped?”
“Could try flares.”
“I’ve got a package I want sent, if you can stop it.”
“I’ll light the flares,” said Culpepper. “Where’s this package going?”
“Home,” Cardiff said again. “Chicago.”
He wrote a name
