Dead Matter

Wren

Chapter 1

Miss Beatrice Dobie pushed open the dormer window and inhaled deeply, convinced she could smell the spindrift in the morning air. That was unlikely, since her house—which she liked to call her cottage, as neatly kept in middle age as she was—stood on the flank of Hollis Heights three hundred feet above the surf.

She looked south where, along a shallow curve of summer-pale beach, the houses of Holliday Beach formed a random rampart, casting triangular shadows across the sand, the apexes of shadow roofs pointing west toward the blue-green Pacific Ocean.

It was going to be hot today. A relative term on the Oregon coast, of course. Here hot was anything over seventy degrees. And already, at eight in the morning, the beach was dotted with people. Saturday. August. Miss Dobie sighed. By January she’d be complaining about the dearth of customers at the bookshop, but now she took solace in the thought that Labor Day—and the end of the tourist season—was only ten days away.

Miss Dobie abruptly turned from the window, pulled off her quilted robe, and tossed it on the water bed as she crossed to the closet. She didn’t have time now to think about Labor Day. Not on this day.

She was ready except for her dress and shoes, and she knew exactly what she would wear: the silk shirtwaist that was the same color as her auburn hair with its purposeful curl and not a hint of gray. She wasn’t willing to attempt anything to alter the sagging jowls that made her face ever squarer, but in this day and age, she could certainly do something about gray hair.

She frowned at the dress, so conservative, so staid, and wondered if Savanna Barany would come to the autographing, wondered what Savanna would wear. Something décolleté, no doubt; something bright and slightly exotic. Miss Dobie sighed again. There had been a time when she had worn décolleté, bright, slightly exotic clothes.

Of course, Savanna might not come. There were rumors that she and her husband weren’t on the best of terms. But with people like Savanna Barany and Ravin Gould, there were always rumors.

Ravvvin, Miss Dobie whispered. "Like the first two syllables of ravenous." She’d heard him say that on more than one television talk show. Family name. Something like that.

She sloped the dress over her head, careful not to disturb her hair. But what if Savanna did attend the autographing? Miss Dobie had alerted the Portland television stations. After all, that was the purpose of this shindig: publicity. The Holliday Beach Book Shop, which had been moldering for half a century in dowdy obscurity, was hosting Ravin Gould, one of America’s top ten best-selling authors. And just possibly, Savanna Barany, at one time billed as the sexiest woman in the world.

Of course, there was a secondary purpose: money. Miss Dobie’s mouth tightened into a horizontal line as she thought of the three hundred copies of The Diamond Stud waiting at the bookshop. Three hundred copies of a book that retailed at $22.00 a copy. That wholesaled at $13.20. Plus freight. For the Holliday Beach Book Shop, that was a major investment,

She stepped into a pair of white pumps, her best ones, checked her reflection in the mirror on the closet door to be sure her slip wasn’t showing, then crossed to the dresser to pick up her good white purse.

And a copy of The Diamond Stud.

The jacket was of satiny black paper with a female figure outlined in hot-pressed gold. Where the navel might be, was a stylized diamond. The title was crowded at the bottom of the jacket in red letters. At the top, the author’s name glittered in solid gold: James Ravin Gould.

She studied the photograph on the back. Definitely a handsome man, with a hint of—well, sexiness about him. She wondered if other people were as surprised as she had been to discover how short this handsome, sexy man was. He couldn’t be more than five six. And it was curious how much this photograph reminded her of Mr. Flagg. Conan Joseph Flagg and Ravin Gould were about the same age, and Miss Dobie was old enough to consider anything under forty-five young. Both men had black hair and dark skin, and a certain lean intensity in their faces. But Mr. Flagg was a head taller, and his eyes were black and slightly tilted—that was the Nez Percé coming to the fore—while Ravin Gould’s eyes were a pale, rather unpleasant gray-green.

And what was behind those eyes…

That was hard to decipher. She’d only talked to the man once, although he’d been in Holliday Beach over a month. But in a way, she did know him. She had read The Diamond Stud and found it rife with gratuitous sex and violence. That didn’t surprise her. Gould had made his reputation on sensationalism. But there was an undercurrent of something she couldn’t quite pin down, something that made it a relief that she didn’t know him better and wasn’t likely to. Something that made any comparison between Ravin Gould and Conan Flagg a travesty.

Her breath caught, and she closed her eyes.

Thank God Mr. Flagg was in Cornwall and wasn’t due back until the day after Labor Day.

He was her employer, after all, and she was well aware that he considered Ravin Gould books literary garbage. He might recognize the right of any individual to read anything he or she chose, but he also maintained his right not to provide shelf space for a Ravin Gould book.

Miss Dobie put down a momentary queasiness. Mr. Flagg had left the bookshop in her hands—as he did nearly every summer, when hordes of tourists mushroomed Holliday Beach’s population from two thousand to twenty thousand—and even if he considered the shop a hobby of sorts or an obligation to the maintenance of civilization, she staunchly considered it a business, and always hoped to make it a profitable business. She couldn’t overlook an opportunity like this. Ravin Gould was, after all, one of Holliday Beach’s few claims to fame: Gould had been born and spent the first twelve years of his life here.

She squared her shoulders and checked her watch. Eight-thirty. She wouldn’t open the bookshop until ten, but first she had to pick up the sign Gwen Loftstern had made, the coffee urn at the Grange, the cookies at the bakery; she had to decorate the refreshment table and call Tina Burbank to make sure she didn’t oversleep; she had to feed Meg and hope the cat would stay out from under people’s feet today.

Beatrice Dobie forgot to lock her front door as she marched out to the red Porsche in her driveway. It was going to be a fantastic day. But still…

She said another silent prayer of thanks.

Mr. Flagg wouldn’t be home for ten days.

Chapter 2

At least he had a window seat out of Denver. Conan Flagg looked down from thirty thousand feet on titanic folds of rock etched in snow golden in the dawn. His eyes ached with sleeplessness, and his decision to come home ten days early had long ago begun to seem irrational. At the moment, he wasn’t even sure what day it was.

Yesterday—or the day before yesterday?—after weeks of leisurely exploration of England’s west coast from Solway Firth to Land’s End, he had walked along a beach in Cornwall and felt a restlessness he didn’t understand until he stood looking out at the blue-gray roil of the Atlantic Ocean and found himself desolate with homesickness for his own ocean. It was all one sea, he knew, whatever the names given its various parts by the human beings who lived on its shores. Still, he longed for the ocean named Pacific on a clear day, and he longed particularly for the few square miles of the Pacific he could see from his house, the few square miles he called his own.

At that point, his impatience had made sense, but in the grinding hours since he left Heathrow, he began to doubt his sanity. His impatience not only cost him lost sleep—he’d never learned to sleep upright or in the presence of strangers—it condemned him to a night flight from New York and a three-hour layover in the noisy caverns of Denver’s airport.

But the sun had time to catch up with him there, and when at last he resumed his homeward journey, northwest across the Rockies and the enigmatic reaches of the Basin and Range country beyond, when at last his plane crossed the cloud-veiled Cascade Mountains and he saw Mount Hood, magnificent in summer snow, looming beyond the wing tip as the plane descended toward the green tapestry of the Willamette Valley, he began to believe it was all worthwhile.

But Portland International Airport was still three hours from the coast, counting the time it took to get out of the airport and maneuver the clogged freeways of Oregon’s largest city. Finally he left the last suburb behind and drove west, too tired to leash the black Jaguar XK-E to the speed limit. With the top down so the hot, humid wind beat at his skin, he faced the bastion of the Coast Range, gentled by forests of fir and spruce and hemlock, and he waited for the moment when at the crest of those hills he would feel the temperature drop, the air turn sweet under the influence of the Pacific Ocean, still thirty miles away, but reaching out to him in cool welcome.

And now he was sure it was all worthwhile.

At length, he reached the junction with Highway 101, the Coast Highway, drove south a few more miles, and just past the sign that read HOLLIDAY BEACH POP. 2001, he caught a glimpse of the razor-line horizon of the sea beyond the new shopping mall.

The mall had the architectural originality of a potato shed, but the same could be said of most of the buildings in Holliday Beach. Here there was none of the charm of antiquity in which he had steeped himself for the last six weeks. This village was a product of the Depression, and its architectural traditions were necessity, availability of materials, and recalcitrant individualism, out of which any charm Holliday Beach possessed arose perversely and against all odds.

Conan puttered behind a caravan of campers down Highway 101, Holliday Beach’s main street, anticipating what he would see when he reached what he considered its true center. On the west side of the highway, paralleling it and separated from it by a concrete curbing, he would see a block-long parking lane wide enough for cars to park on both sides, while two cars might barely pass in the middle. Facing the lane, he would see a row of shops, most of them sided in grayed cedar shingles, splashes of color provided by geranium-filled planter boxes.

And dominating the block from its position between the mom-and-pop grocery and the Chowder House Restaurant, he would see the Holliday Beach Book Shop, a long, shambling, two-story building, topped by three mismatched dormers; a building that had acquired, by virtue of age and the weathering of countless sou’westers, its own stolid charm. There were occasions when Conan regarded the bookshop as his albatross, yet it never occurred to him to rid himself of it. It was also—he admitted on other occasions—his raison d’être.

Still, the bookshop wasn’t his objective now. At the moment, his only objective was home and the beach. But since he had to pass the bookshop to reach his house, he decided he might as well stop to let Miss Dobie know he had returned.

Yet the closer he came to the bookshop, the slower the traffic moved. Inching along in the fuming wake of a Winnebago, he had ample time to notice that the old Day store had a new occupant, SHE SELLS SEA SHELLS, the sign over the door proclaimed. No doubt shells raped from tropical beaches. A few more feet, and he sighed at the first hint of the approaching political season: placards planted among the weeds in front of the empty Higgins building. One of them briefly held his attention: EARL KLEBER FOR COUNTY SHERIFF. Kleber was chief of the Holliday Beach Police Department, and Conan was surprised that he would take on the incumbent, Gifford Wills, who was well entrenched in Taft County’s political good-ol’-boys network. Conan hadn’t thought of Kleber as a tilter at windmills.

The Winnebago spewed more smoke in Conan’s lace as it lurched forward another two yards, and he began swearing methodically. Yes, it was the height of the tourist season, but this was absurd. Finally he saw the Hollis Street sign just ahead and signaled for a right turn. When he reached Hollis, he had only to dogleg into the parking lane….

And he found himself snared in a one-block gridlock.

In five frustrating minutes, he made it only as far as the grocery store, and there he was forced to stop altogether, unable to move in any direction. The sidewalk was mobbed with pedestrians—tourists, most of them, although he recognized a few natives—all converging on the bookshop. Double-parked outside the main entrance near the south end of the shop was a van marked with red, white, and blue stripes and the words KEEN-TV CHANNEL 3—THE EYES OF PORTLAND. One man was unloading equipment, while a second stood on the sidewalk talking with a stringently petite woman in a white dress whose dark hair seemed immune to the wind.

Shelly Gage. Few people in western Oregon wouldn’t recognize her; they saw her daily on the evening newscasts and on her morning show. But Conan had met her more than once in person, and her persistence in demanding an interview with him had not endeared her to him.

But why was she here now?

He looked around at the cars and campers entrapping the XK-E and saw that none of them was likely to move in the near future. He pulled the emergency brake and left the car to join the crowd surging around the bookshop’s north entrance.

Mr. Flagg! You made it after all.

He smiled and sidled past portly Mrs. Iona Higgins, wondering what it was he had made.

Conan! How was England? That from a tall black woman. Kara Arno taught physical education at Holliday Beach High School and served as living proof of the efficacy of fitness.

England was fine, Kara, he said absently. How’s Dan?

She laughed. Up in the air. As usual.

Hey, Mr. Flagg! Hiram Hitchcock, stooped and knuckly. I was meanin’ to talk to you ’bout that roof soon as you got back. Then Mrs. Hopkins, the wife of the Methodist minister, with her dour husband in tow. Then the Daimler sisters, Adalie and Coraline. Nice to see you home, Mr. Flagg, and just in time.

Not, he thought, if he couldn’t reach the door of his own shop.

But he did, finally. The doorway angled across the northeast corner of the building, with a wooden stoop filling out the truncated corner. He reached it just as Mrs. Hollis, well over ninety years old, stumbled on the stoop. Conan caught her twiglike arm, and she gave him a nod that might have indicated thanks, but probably only indicated recognition. He shouted, "Mrs. Hollis, what’s going on here?"

What? She tilted her supposedly good ear toward him, and when he repeated the question, she replied, Well, it’s Rev’rend Good! Heard it on the radio. Didn’t know he wrote a book, though.

With his hand still at her elbow, Conan pushed his way into the shop. What’s the name of the book?

It was like entering a crowded cave. Or maybe the Black Hole of Calcutta. Conan took off his dark glasses, but it didn’t seem to help.

Can’t rightly remember, Mrs. Hollis shouted over the hubbub of voices. "Somethin’ about The Blinding God."

But before he could question that, Mrs. Hollis slipped away to be swallowed up in the crowd. Conan maneuvered into a spot against the shelves on the east wall where he could let his eyes adjust to the twilight, his ears adjust to the high decibel level in a place usually as quiet as a library, and where he could let his jet-lagged, sleep-deprived mind adjust to a scene that was, quite simply, incredible. The Holliday Beach Book Shop had never held a crowd of this magnitude, and he wondered if the aged floor joists would support the weight.

Reverend Good, one of the most venal of the televangelists? The Blinding God? Conan felt an incipient headache behind his eyes.

Never seen anything like it, have you, Conan?

Conan was washed in the fragrance of young Scotch as Dr. Maurice Spenser—who liked people to call him Doc—leaned close to ask that question. Slight and stooped, he was wearing his brown suit today, and he seemed entirely sober. He always did. But at sixty-eight, he looked eighty-eight, his skin netted with broken veins, his gray eyes swimming behind the thick lenses of plastic-framed glasses.

No, Doc, I definitely have never seen anything like it.

And where the hell was Miss Dobie?

Over the din of voices, he heard the clang of the old cash register and knew that’s where he’d find Beatrice Dobie. But getting to her was another matter. The register was near the south end of the building, and at least a hundred sardine-packed people stood between him and that clang. He thought of Meg, the blue point Siamese whom some regarded as the shop’s true owner, and wondered where she was hiding.

He began working his way along the wall toward the center of the shop. The crowd seemed most densely packed there, and eventually he reached a point where he could look over and between heads to see what held everyone so spellbound.

A folding table had been set up in the alcove formed by two jutting bookshelves. The table was stacked with black-jacketed, hardbound books, and above it, suspended from the ceiling, hung a sign painted in red and black on a sheet of mat board:

HOLLIDAY BEACH’S OWN RAVIN GOULD!

BEST-SELLING AUTHOR OF THE DIAMOND STUD!

Conan might have laughed at the malapropism arising from Mrs. Hollis’s faulty hearing, but at the moment, Ravin Gould and The Diamond Stud made no more sense than Reverend Good and The Blinding God.

Ravin Gould? Here? In Conan Flagg’s bookshop?

Two women turned away from the table, clutching black-jacketed books, and before the next customers moved in, Conan saw him.

Ravin Gould. Here. In Conan Flagg’s bookshop.

Conan was on the verge of charging through the crowd, impelled by righteous rage, but it was at that moment that he saw her.

Savanna Barany.

Oh, yes, there she was in the fair, subtly voluptuous flesh, perched on a stool behind and to one side of Ravin Gould.

And now Conan knew where Meg was. He should’ve anticipated that far from seeking a place to hide, Meg would seek the one place where she’d be the center of attention—on Savanna Barany’s lap, stretched out luxuriously along the lady’s thigh.

But for once, Meg was upstaged. She seemed no more than a whimsical accessory, her white to gray fur contrasting with Savanna’s peasant blouse and frill skirt of deep blue-green. Peacock blue, it was probably called, and no other color could more perfectly complement her coppery hair. It was arranged in a Gibson pile cascading from the crown of her head to sweep her bare shoulders. Curling wisps brushed her cheeks like silken whispers, and when she smiled, her face seemed luminescent.

Conan had seen that face hundreds of times in magazines, newspapers, on screens both large and small. It occurred to him that he hadn’t seen it so often recently, but he remembered exactly when he first saw it: seven years ago in New York in a musical called Blitz, her vehicle to instant fame. It was a face out of another century, a perfect oval with a small mouth indulgently curved, and lavender-blue eyes so large, they gave that face a childlike aspect, yet were heavy-lidded, capable of seduction. She sat with her long dancer’s legs crossed, one hand stroking Meg, the other braced on the edge of the stool. It was an extraordinarily sensual pose, and Conan recognized in it a self-aware calculation. Or perhaps it was art.

She turned to speak to the tall, saturnine man standing beside her, and Conan sighed. "What is she doing here?"

A whiskey-scented laugh reminded Conan that he’d asked the question aloud and that Doc Spenser was still with him. Doc said, Well, she’s married to Jimmy Gould, after all. Didn’t you know that?

Jimmy? Conan glanced at Doc, but didn’t have a chance to ask more. KEEN-TV was invading from the south door.

We need some space around the table, Shelly Gage said, smiling sleekly, as the camera and sound men waded in, and space was made without complaint, with only excited murmurs, despite the crush of bodies pressing closer. Conan’s headache was no longer incipient as he flattened himself against the bookshelves and watched Shelly introduce herself to Savanna and Gould. Gould took her hand, lavished on it a kiss, with a smoldering look into her eyes. Savanna’s smile faded.

Abruptly the camera lights went on, and the glare made a small stage of the alcove. The tall man with the saturnine face stepped back into the corner out of center stage, while the cameraman positioned himself in front of the table, panned from the sign above it down to Savanna Barany—on whom he lingered a long time—then to Ravin Gould, then to Shelly, who stood at the end of the table, her mike and smile ready. The quaint coastal village of Holliday Beach is bursting with excitement today. The old Holliday Beach Book Shop—a landmark here—is hosting best-selling author Ravin Gould, and with him… A pause for dramatic effect, then, …his lovely wife, Savanna Barany!

Savanna leaned toward the camera and blew her unseen viewers a kiss, upstaging her husband as effortlessly as she did Meg, and the crowd in the bookshop responded with applause and whistles.

Ravin Gould’s gray-green eyes were cold as he flashed a smile and reached for Shelly’s mike, then laid his hand on Savanna’s knee in a patently proprietary gesture, ignoring Meg’s hissing show of teeth. Eat your hearts out, guys! The erstwhile studio audience laughed, and Shelly retrieved the mike to ask, Mr. Gould, what brings you to this quaint little village?

Well, Shelly, this is my hometown, you know. I was born and spent twelve years of my life in Holliday Beach.

You’ve come back to rediscover your roots, so to speak?

A confiding laugh. "That title’s been taken. But it’s true in a way. I’m finishing my next book here. Odyssey. Yes, I know that title’s been taken, too. It’s what you might call an autobiographical novel."

Shelly looked earnestly quizzical. "Then it’s really your life story?"

"Well, not the whole story, I hope. I plan to add a lot to my life story before I die. Let’s just say it’s based on some of my experiences."

Including your childhood here in this quaint little village?

Oh, yes. And it wasn’t always so damned quaint.

Conan smiled at that barb as Shelly countered, Do you mean this book is going to be a sort of exposé?

Gould shrugged, teeth white against his tan in a sardonic grin. It just might be, Shelly, and if you don’t think anything interesting happened in this quaint little village, you’re dead wrong. It’s all in the book. Everybody’s there. And he singsonged sarcastically, Doctor, lawyer, po-lice chief.

He seemed to be looking directly at Conan with that, and Conan felt a chill. What in hell was Gould talking about?

"Excuse me…let me through…I’ve got to get through!"

There was a moment of confusion on the alcove stage as a young woman with golden hair elbowed her way through the crowd, her blue eyes wide with what Conan could only call fear.

He recognized her; he’d known her since she was a cheerleader at the high school. Angela MacGill. Angela Kleber MacGill, oldest of Police Chief Earl Kleber’s two daughters. She carried a manila envelope, and she was so intent on Gould that she seemed oblivious to the cameras and lights or even the rapt crowd. She reached the table, offered the envelope with shaking hands, leaned over to whisper urgently to Gould, but he cut her off with Damn it, I’ll talk to you later! Can’t you see—

"But it’s Cady! Ravin, you’ve got to get out of here!"

He surged to his feet. Shut up, Angie! Then to Shelly, Goddamn it, stop that camera!

Startled, Shelly signaled the cameraman with a finger across her throat at the same moment a shriek of alarm followed by a sputtering roar sounded from outside the north door. There was an uneasy stirring in the crowd, then Meg catapulted out of Savanna’s lap as pandemonium erupted.

Screams and shouts catalyzed a stampede away from the door, and the cameraman staggered and fell, a display rack toppled, paperbacks scattering to be kicked aside like autumn leaves on a sidewalk; a crash of crockery punctuated the melee, and Conan held on to Doc to keep him on his feet, while the sputtering roar rose to a nerve-rending crescendo.

And Cady MacGill strode onto the stage, a latter-day, black Irish Paul Bunyan in a plaid shirt, red suspenders supporting Levi’s cut and frayed at the ankle, his caulked boots shaking the floor. Six foot five and well over two hundred pounds of solid, supple muscle, his enormous hands gripping a thirty-six-inch Husqvarna chain saw that vibrated with braying menace, Cady bellowed, "Gould, I’m gonna cut off your balls so you won’t ever sleep with another man’s wife again!"

Gould kicked the table over, sending black-jacketed books avalanching, and crouched behind it. Savanna, Shelly, and the tall man huddled in the corner, and Cady swung the chain saw high, demolishing the sign above the table. The torn remnants whipped about like demented birds. From behind his barrier, Gould cursed with the vitriol of a longshoreman, while Cady matched him with a logger’s repertoire at twice the volume, and the chain saw revved to an earsplitting pitch as the spinning blade sliced through the supports of the bookshelf at the north side of the alcove. Splinters, books, and a confetti of shredded pages made a sudden blizzard.

And Conan crossed a threshold from annoyance to anger. He elbowed his way toward center stage, noting peripherally that the cameraman had recovered his footing and was still taping, that in the debris around the table, an orange purse had fallen open, disgorging its contents, including a small, chrome-plated automatic.

Cady! You damned fool, put that saw down!

Cady turned, the lethal blade slicing within