The Reincarnation of Peter Proud (17 page)

It had all seemed so simple. He had planned to find the cottage, then find out who the owners were. They could tell him who had owned it back in the forties, or tell him where he could find out. Then he would know his own name. But there was no chance of that now.

He drove slowly along the blacktop until he came to a public beach. There was an open area here where he could see the entire lake. He parked the car, got out, and walked to one of the picnic tables on the grassy area just behind the sand itself. He sat on the table and stared out across the lake.

It seemed so quiet here, so empty, so desolate. In a couple of months, Nipmuck would come alive. This beach would be crowded with bathers, laughing and chattering, pretty girls toasting themselves in the sun, children running round, screaming and splashing in the water. The surface of the lake would be covered with small
boats, their motors desecrating the silence. And beyond them, on the other shore and the mountain beyond, the naked trees he saw now would be clothed in rich summer green.

But this was April and it was quiet, and there was still a chill in the air. An errant breeze started and stopped at intervals, rippling the surface of the lake.

He fixed his eye on a point toward the middle of the lake. There, he thought, is where I died.

He wondered what had happened after that. Had they found him? Had they dragged the lake for him? Or had his body floated to the surface? Had Marcia reported him dead? Or missing? Maybe he’d been caught in the weeds down there. Maybe he was still down there on the bottom, rotted to the bone, eaten by the fishes.

He continued to stare at the point in the lake where he estimated he had gone down. Then the sun ducked behind a cloud. Suddenly he couldn’t stay there any longer. He got up and walked slowly back to the car.

He stopped for gas at the juncture of the lake blacktop and the road linking the lake to the parkway itself.

The sign said: Pop Johnson’s Place. It was a combination gas station and country store. The owner came out of the store. He was about sixty-five, and his walk was slow and deliberate. He wore a stained baseball cap and a heavy lumberjack shirt of plaid design.

“Afternoon.”

“Good afternoon.”

“Fill ’er up?”

“Please.”

The proprietor set the pump, inserted the gas line, and then came around to clean the windshield. As the man sprayed the glass with a spray can, Peter studied the wrinkled, wind-beaten face. Maybe he would know.

He’d have to give the man some kind of cock-and-bull story, of
course. He got out of the car, went to the soft drink dispenser in front of the store, and dropped the required coins into the slot. A bottle of Coke rattled down. He pinched off the cap and drank while he figured out his approach. The man looked simple enough. There was no reason why he shouldn’t buy it. He walked toward the proprietor.

“Are you ‘Pop’?”

“That’s right.”

“Been here at Nipmuck long?”

“All my life. Born near here.”

“I wonder if you could give me a little information.”

“I’ll try.”

“Well, you see, I’m a writer. I write true mystery stories. Right now I’m doing a series of articles on, well, famous murders of the past here in New England. For one of the Boston papers.”

The old man stared at him.

“What do you know. Murders, eh? My wife’s crazy about that kind of stuff. Watches all those programs on television. Personally, I don’t care for ’em much.”

“Someone told me that there’d been a famous murder here at Nipmuck. Happened a long time ago. Way back in the forties, I think. Got a lot of publicity, they tell me. But this someone who told me about it couldn’t recall the name. I thought maybe you’d know …”

The proprietor thought for a moment, pursing his mouth.

“Back in the forties.” Then his watery eyes lit up. “Yep. Now I remember. That must have been the Grady killing.”

“Grady?”

“Man named Charles Grady. Had a cottage here at Nipmuck.”

“Yes?”

“Found his body floating in the lake. It was something terrible.”

Peter held his breath. He heard himself say, “What happened?”

“Nobody knows. They never found who done it. But Grady’s throat was cut, and he’d been hacked in about ten places with a knife. Some maniac, they say. No reason for it at all. Everybody
liked Charlie. Anyway, scared the devil out of people around here for weeks. Bolted their doors, wouldn’t go out nights. They were afraid the maniac would come back and try it again. But he never did. It was in all the papers. I forget the year exactly, but you could look it up.”

“Thanks. I will. And that was the only homicide?”

“Yep. Can’t think of any other. If there was, I’d know.”

Peter swallowed his disappointment.

“I suppose there’ve been plenty of accidents around here.”

The old man peered at him. “Accidents?”

“You know. People drowning.”

“Oh. Yep. Get a lot of drownings over the years. The thing is, there are cold springs out in the lake. People get cramps. Then, someone’s always tipping over a boat or canoe and going down and getting caught in the weeds. There are some pretty thick weeds on the bottom there. Things like that. But that isn’t exactly what you’re looking for …”

“No.”

The old man glanced at the register on the gas pump. “That’ll be $4.85, mister.”

He paid the man, thanked him again, and drove away. And he thought, that’s that.

Good, sweet, beautiful Marcia. She had gotten away with it after all.

As he started his drive back to Riverside it began to rain. In a few minutes it was coming down in sheets.

He had one more card he could draw. This was Saturday. He had to be back in Los Angeles on Monday. The final quarter would begin soon, and he would be heavily involved in all the administrative detail before actual classes resumed. But before he flew home the next day, he had to try this one last possibility. Rain or no rain, he had to check out the Tree Dream. He didn’t give it much of a chance, but he had to try.

He came off the parkway at an upper exit to Riverside itself. The exit spilled out onto a busy four-lane highway, Again, as he drove, he had the same eerie feeling: I have been on this street before. Only then I was driving a Packard Clipper, not a rented Pontiac.

The rain continued coming down in torrents. He looked at his watch: 2:30. He realized he was hungry. He turned into a big shopping center, parked the car, and ran through the rain into a big super drugstore with a lunch counter. He ordered a hamburger from a waitress whose badge said her name was Joan.

“Terrible day.”

“You can say that again.”

“Joan, wonder if you could help me with something. I’m trying to find a certain park here in Riverside.”

“
Which
park?”

“I don’t know the name.”

“Stranger here, huh?”

“Yes.”

“Well, we’ve got three parks in town. If you don’t know the name, you’ve got a problem.” She glanced at his coffee cup. “Another cup, while you’re waiting?”

“Thanks. As I said, I don’t know the name of this park, but I have an idea it’s a pretty big place. And there’s a mausoleum somewhere on it.”

“A
what?
”

“A burial tomb. This one’s got a couple of figures on it. You know, statues. A man and a woman. The man has his arm around the woman …”

“Oh, yeah. You’re talking about the Bannister tomb. Frederick Bannister. He gave half the park to the city. Woodland Park. That’s him and his wife standing on top. They’re buried there.”

“Woodland Park.”

“Right.”

She stared at him. “If you knew about the Bannister tomb and
all, you must have been there. How come you didn’t know the name of the park?”

“I used to live here when I was a little kid. I remember the tomb, but I forgot the name of the park.”

“Oh.”

“How do I get there?”

“You’re not too far away now. Go straight down Central about half a mile, turn right on Oak. You’ll run right into it.” She turned, picked up his hamburger on the serving counter, and then moved a tray toward him. “Mustard and relish.”

“Thanks.”

“This is a pretty lousy day to be walking in the park,” she said. “If that’s your idea, you’d better wait till tomorrow.”

“I will.”

He bolted down his hamburger. As he left he noticed that the store sold cheap umbrellas, and he bought one. Walking toward his car, he found that it helped, but not much. A hard wind had come up, blowing the rain almost horizontally. He was wet by the time he reached the car.

At Woodland Park he entered the main gate. Rain spattered on the tiny puddles already forming on the clay tennis courts located on each side of the entry road. The downpour was so hard that it made visibility almost impossible. For a moment, he considered canceling the whole idea and going back to the hotel. Maybe he could come out here early the next morning, then catch his plane.

But he decided against it. He was here, and the time was now. He knew if he went back to the hotel now, he would be unable to sleep. It was better to get it over with.

The trees whipped in the wind. His tires splashed through puddles on the road. He passed a wading pool. Beyond this was a series of buildings which he took to be a zoo.

A sign with an arrow pointing to the right said: Bannister Tomb.

He passed a series of baseball diamonds and a bowling green.
The citizens of Riverside, he thought, were well provided with recreational facilities. He drove down a road lined with elms and bordered with lily ponds. Then he saw the tomb.

It was perhaps two hundred yards from the road. It stood on a grassy hill, a square, massive structure. The two statues, man and woman, looked sad in the rain. Bits of the statues had already eroded with years of weather. The stone was chipped and worn in places and covered with the white stains of bird droppings. Both figures were leaning forward, as though leaning into the wind. The woman’s long hair was blowing backward. The stone face of the man was half turned toward his wife. In the sense that a face made of stone could show love, the face of Frederick Bannister did.

And inside the thick walls of the tomb they lay in caskets, dead. At least, so everybody thought. But he, Peter Proud, knew better.

Maybe they had already been reincarnated into some future life. He wondered whether they would meet again, as strangers. And whether they would be attracted to each other again, as they had been in this life.

From his memory he focused the Tree Dream. He was about thirteen or fourteen. There was a girl with him about the same age. He had a knife and was cutting some initials into the bark of the tree. The bark was hard, and he worked hard, cutting the initials deep. But he could not see what they were.

The tree was about a hundred yards from the mausoleum. He rolled down the car window, stared out for better visibility, and was suddenly brought up short. In his dream he had seen only one tree. But now he saw a dozen scattered about, all about a hundred yards from the tomb. They were all big trees, old, gnarled. Their high branches, leafless, rattled in the rain. The bark on their trunks glistened with the sheen of it.

The trick was to find the right tree. It had to be one of them, but which one? He tried hard to think of the angle from which he
had seen the mausoleum in the dream. But nothing registered. He simply did not know.

Worse, thinking of it now, he saw the odds pyramid against him. He, or X, had been only a boy when he had carved those initials. In that case, the incident would have taken place almost fifty years before. The chances were that the bark had grown completely over the initials, wiping them out completely. Still, there was no way of knowing, at least not from here. It depended on how deep they had been cut.

He stepped out of the ear and raised his umbrella. The wind howled about him, slanting the hard rain under the umbrella and onto his body. In a few moments he was soaked. The umbrella, bellied by the wind, fought against him, twisting in his hand. It threatened to collapse at any moment. He decided it was useless and threw it away. It bounced and spun on the ground, gyrating crazily under the gusts.

He picked out one of the trees at random. Rain whipped his face and drenched him as he ran to it. He walked around the tree, staring at the bark.

He ran to the second tree. Nothing. And the third. Nothing.

This is crazy, he thought. He was insane to be out here, running around in this park like some grotesque and drenched zombie. If he had any sense, he would go back to the hotel.

The fourth tree. The fifth. The sixth. Nothing.

Then he realized he had made a mistake.
Stupid, stupid. Idiot, idiot
. He had been looking at the tree bark from the eye-level of an adult. He was six feet tall. But it had been a boy who had carved the initials. That meant the initials would be carved perhaps a foot lower down on the bark, it they were visible at all.

The rain was relentless. He had to get close to each tree so that he could see the bark at all. Then he saw them—the initials.

They were very faint, so faint that he had almost missed them. They were bare impressions in the bark. And, as he had calculated,
about a foot lower than his actual line of vision. But he knew instantly that these were the ones he had carved almost half a century ago. He stood there in the rain, staring at them stupidly. It was an old tree. It must have been an old tree when he had carved the initials. And he must have cut them pretty deep. Otherwise, the new bark would have grown completely over them.

He reached out his hand and traced the outline of the initials with his forefinger. There were two sets.

J. C.—E. K.

As a boy, he would have carved his initials first. The name of the boy always came first. Steve loves Sally. Tom loves Elaine. Tony loves Rosa.

His initials then, had been J. C.

X equals J. C.

When he got to the hotel, he peeled off his wet clothes, then soaked in a hot bath for an hour. After that, he asked room service to bring him two double Scotches.