skeptic, lad?”
“I believe what I see with my own eyes. What about you?”
“I have an open mind on the subject,” he lied.
“Well, it’s a real ghost, all right. Likely of a man who died in one of the cars, or in a railway accident. Couldn’t be anything else, no matter what anybody thinks. You may well see it for yourself, if you’re planning to spend the night.”
“I am.”
“If it does reappear, you’ll be a believer, too.”
“We’ll see about that.”
Jared grinned and loosed another bark. “A detective. Hah!”
Alone in the parlor, Quincannon smoked his stubby briar and waited for the hands on his stem-winder to point to 11:30 p.m. The Meekers had all retired to their respective bedrooms in the end cars some time earlier, at his insistence; he preferred to maintain a solitary vigil. He also preferred silence to desultory and pointless conversation. There were ominous rumblings in his digestive tract as well, the result of the bland chicken dish and boiled potatoes and carrots Mrs. Meeker had seen fit to serve for supper.
The car was no longer overheated, now that the fire in the stove had banked. Cooling, the stove metal made little pinging sounds that punctuated the snicking of wind-flung sand against the car’s windows and sides. As 11:30 p.m. approached, he checked the loads in his Navy Colt. Not that he expected to need the weapon—the Carville ghost seemed to have no malevolent intention, and no one had ever succeeded in plugging a spook in any case—but he had learned long ago to exercise caution in all situations.
It was time. He holstered the Navy, donned his greatcoat, cap, scarf, and gloves, and slipped out into the night.
Icy, fog-wet wind and blowing sand buffeted him as he came down off the walkway. The night was not quite black as tar but close to it; he could barely make out the shed and corral nearby. The distant jumble of abandoned cars was invisible except for brief rents in the wall of fog, and then discernible only as faintly lumpish shapes among the dunes.
He slogged into the shelter of the lean-to. The two horses, both blanketed against the cold, stirred and one nickered softly at his passage. He removed his dark lantern from beneath the seat of the rented buggy, lighted it, closed the shutter, and then went to the side wall and probed along it until he found a gap between boards. Another brief tear in the fog permitted him to fix the proper angle for viewing the cars. He dragged over two bales of hay, piled one atop the other, and perched on the makeshift seat. By bending forward slightly, his eyes were on a level with the gap. He settled down to wait.
He had learned patience in situations such as this, by ruminating on matters of business and pleasure. Sabina occupied his mind for a considerable time. Then he sighed and shifted his thoughts to the other cases currently under investigation. The missing Devereaux heiress should be easy enough to locate; like as not she had gone off for an extended dalliance with one of her swains, since no ransom demand had been received by the family. Sabina needed no help from him in yaffling the pickpocket at the Chutes amusement park. The Wells Fargo robbery was more his type of case, and a challenging one since city bluecoats and rival detective agencies were also on the hunt for the two masked bandits who had escaped with $25,000 in cash. He had to admit that he’d made little enough headway over the past two weeks, but the same was true of his competitors for the reward Wells Fargo was offering.
Light. A faint shimmery glow through the mist.
He strained forward, squinting closer to the gap. Gray-black for a few seconds, then the fog lifted somewhat and he spied the eerie radiance again, shifting about behind the windows in one of the cars. More than just a glow—an ectoplasmic shape, an unearthly face.
He snatched up the dark lantern, hopped off the hay bales, and stepped out around the corner of the lean-to. The thing continued to drift around inside the car, held stationary for a few seconds, moved again. Quincannon was moving himself by then, over into the shadow of the cistern. Beyond there, flattish sand fields stretched for thirty or forty rods on three sides; there was no cover anywhere on its expanse, no quick way to get to the cars, even by circling around, without crossing open