into the center of the floor...
A nap was out of the question. But what would I do instead? I would go to the icehouse. There was no percentage in my pretending to be Abner Benbow any longer. Might I disguise myself? A putty nose and a wig might accomplish something. I dismissed the idea. That was the sort of thing they would expect. My only trump card was that they would have no notion of my having returned to Sterne Bay.
Still, I wouldn’t take any unnecessary risks. I was ready for them now. I went out through the second-story door at the back of the inn, and down rickety steps that led out past a weedy bit of garden and through a gate, right to the edge of the bay. A half score of rowboats were serried along a dock of rotting wooden planks that ran out into the water fifty good yards or so before becoming a mere thicket of broken pilings. There was no one about.
The tide was out, leaving a little stretch of shingle running along beside a low stone seawall. I clambered down and picked my way along the shingle, thinking to emerge into the village some distance from the Apple, so that if they were onto me, and someone was watching the inn, I’d confound them.
Some hundred yards down, I slipped back over the seawall and followed a narrow boardwalk between two vine-covered cottages, squeezing out from between them only a little ways down from where my beggar man was shot before he could borrow any money from me. I hiked along pretty briskly toward the icehouse, but the open door of The Hoisted Pint brought me up short.
I had never discovered whether my rubber elephant inhabited a room there, largely because I had been coy, playing the detective, and was overcome by the woman behind the counter, who, I was pretty sure, had taken me for a natural fool. The truth of it is that I’m too easily put off by an embarrassment. This time I wouldn’t be. I angled toward the door, up the steps, and into the foyer. She stood as ever, meddling with receipts, and seemed not to recognize me at all. My hearty, “Hello again,” merely caused her to squint.
She pushed her spectacles down her nose and looked at me over them. “Yes?” she said.
Somehow the notion of her having forgotten me, after all the rigamarole just a few days earlier, put an edge on my tone. I was through being pleasant. I can’t stand cheeky superiority in people, especially in clerks and waiters, who have nothing to recommend them but the fact of their being employed. What was this woman but a high-toned clerk? Perhaps she owned the inn; perhaps she didn’t. There was nothing in any of it that justified her putting on airs.
“See here,” I said, leaning on the counter. “I’m looking for a woman and her son. I believe they’re staying here or at any rate were staying here last week. They look remarkably alike, frighteningly so, if you take my meaning. The son, who might be as old as thirty, carries with him an India-rubber elephant that makes a noise.”
“A noise?” she said, apparently having digested nothing of the rest of my little speech. The notion of an elephant making a noise, of my having gone anatomical on her, had shattered her ability to understand the clearest sort of English, had obliterated reason and logic.
“Never mind the noise,” I said, losing my temper. “Disregard it.” I caught myself, remembering St. Ives’s dealings with the landlady at the Crown and Apple. Tread softly, I reminded myself, and I forced a smile. “That’s right. It’s the woman and her son that I wanted to ask you about. She’s my mother’s cousin, you see. I got a letter in the post, saying that she and her son—that would be, what? my cousin twice removed, little Billy, we used to call him, although that wasn’t his name, not actually—anyway, that she’s here on holiday, and I’m anxious to determine where she’s staying.”
The woman still looked down her nose at me, waiting for me to go on, as if what I had said so far hadn’t made half enough sense, couldn’t have begun to express what it was I wanted.
I winked at her and brassed right along. “I asked myself, ‘Where in all of Sterne Bay is my mother’s favorite cousin likely to stay? Why, in the prettiest inn that