A Dead Man's Tale (32 page)

A Trivial Detail

As Charlie Moon was making his way to the Silver Mountain Hotel parking lot, he was smiling about his conversation with Scott Parris.
I guess I spurred Scott a little too hard.
The semirepentant offender unlocked and opened the Expedition door.
I’ll find a way to make it up to him.
As he eased himself onto the driver’s seat, something caught Moon’s eye. Something that
wasn’t there
.

What? Why, a facsimile of a spider on the windshield, of course.

This doesn’t make sense?

Patience. All will be explained.

What the driver was surprised
not
to see was the break in the safety glass where—just last month—a chunk of gravel had made a pit. Over the past week, the thing had grown eight little legs.

Moon inspected the windshield with considerable care. Didn’t help.
It just ain’t there.
He continued to stare at the unbroken glass. There had to be a simple, rational explanation. But try as he might, Moon couldn’t think of one.
That spider break was there this afternoon when I parked the car, so unless somebody replaced the windshield while I was inside having supper with Scott…
But even that outlandish explanation wouldn’t work.
This windshield isn’t a new one, not by a long shot.
The glass was dirty, and the lightly sandblasted surface still had the wiper marks from a rain days ago.
And the sticker from the last oil change is still in the upper-left-hand corner.

Well. What does a man make of a weird thing like that?

As he pulled out of the parking lot and aimed his trusty automobile in the happy direction of hearth and home, Charlie Moon made up his mind to forget about it.
Every once in a while, something peculiar happens.
Like the big mole that showed up one morning on the back of Scott Parris’s hand, only to be gone the next morning. And little Scottie going to sleep beside the creek and waking up twenty miles away and two days earlier in Aunt Minnie’s house in Midway, Indiana. Like those inexplicable conundrums, the missing break in the windshield fell into that category of
sleeping dogs
that a sensible man leaves alone.

And so he did, with the aid of a musical distraction.

When Granite Creek was about mile and a minute behind him, Charlie Moon plugged Reed’s audition tape into the dashboard cassette player. The leader of the Columbine Grass was impressed as he listened to the rich man sing and finger the strings.
Sam Reed has a fine tenor voice and he sure knows how to make that mandolin sing.
Moreover, the member of the Velvet Frogs barbershop quartet had selected a fine old song for a lonely man to listen to around about sundown.

As the Ute rancher rolled along on the darkening high plains, his consciousness slipped backward in time to
away back then
when the dying cowboy had begged his friends not to bury him out here on the
lone prairie
.

Loose Ends

Concerning the so-called Crowbar Burglar

To date, this particular pest has been neither identified nor arrested, but it is gratifying to report that the troublesome felon no longer plagues the peaceable folk of Granite Creek. His chosen vocation was abruptly terminated during a break-in on a balmy August evening when a sweet little eighty-six-year-old retired schoolmarm got a bead on the center of his belly with her single-shot Remington rifle and popped a .22-caliber projectile into his Coors belt buckle. Upon hearing the metallic ping of a lead slug on brass and the thug’s startled yelp, the shooter made the following observation: “Thunder and damnation! I did so want to gut-shoot the foul miscreant!”

Alas, before the lady was able to reload, the startled intruder had vanished like a dandelion puff in a stiff breeze, and has not been seen or heard from since. Chief of Police Scott Parris opines that the undesirable element has found a more congenial place to settle down and pursue a less-stressful vocation.

Which he has.

Among his other transitory enterprises, the habitual criminal is using the Internet to sell Idaho real estate. We are talking prime shoreline lots on Lake Colette, which is located approximately six miles east of Taffy Creek.

Potential buyers who bother to consult a map will conclude that both the lake and the creek are entirely fictitious.

One Last Detail

An inconsequential postscript. Hardly worth mentioning.

But in the interest of fair play, it must be reported that Charlie Moon was mistaken in his suspicions of Samuel Reed. We do not refer to the golf-course-ape escapade, where the tribal investigator’s speculation was right on the mark. Reed did indeed make his break-in recordings at the groundskeeper’s toolshed, and he was the “gorilla” who chased Ms. Bernice Aldershott.

Moon’s wrongful suspicion has to do with the investor’s uncanny prognostications. The wealthy man never made a dime on insider information. Moreover, Samuel Reed was convinced that he slipped between parallel universes, and he firmly believed his assertion that there were as many otherworldly copies of Charlie Moon and Scott Parris as himself. And for that matter,
yourself
.

Speaking of whom—brace yourself for some serious bad news.

That’s right. Professor Reed’s enormous multiverse is also populated by gazillions of Daisy Perikas. Each copy, no doubt, up to malicious mischief specific to her peculiar circumstances. The mind reels, boggles, and so forth at the contemplation of such a calamity. (Parenthetically, let us say multiuniversal calamity.) Notwithstanding the fact that in many of these worlds Miss Daisy would have clubbed Chico Perez (aka Posey Shorthorse) to death. In which instances, Mrs. Reed might well have lived happily ever after.

But enough of this pseudoscientific twaddle.

Let us dismiss all that does not lead to bliss.

Good night.

May you sleep in perfect peace and dream visions of multihued autumn hills, rainbow fields of wildflowers, and crystalline mountain streams wherein speckled trout dart about.

And just on the off chance that Professor Reed is right, may these same blessings be enjoyed by all your hypothetical counterparts, doppel-gängers, doubles, and whatnot.

Wherever they might be.

And whenever.