Where the Summer Ends - By Karl Edward Wagner Page 0,39
afford to bide his time, wait patiently for years perhaps. During that period he could plan, build up unassailable evidence, learn their names—lay preparations for the day when he might expose their dark treason to the unsuspecting world...
“Hey, buddy, you look gloomy. Wife troubles, I bet. They don’t go for their man spending all his time with the test tubes, I should know. How about some coffee?” Dave Froneberger was grinning at him, already fiddling with the urn.
Geoff blinked at him dumbly. After the ordeal of these last few hours, Froneberger with his insinuating banalities and petty gossip seemed almost an ally. Perhaps he could be one.
“Thanks, Dave,” he muttered, accepting the Styrofoam cup. He was too shaken even to feel his customary disgust with the bitter coffee. Yes, Froneberger with his prying interest in his research might be an ally At least he could be one other party to this new cancer data. They couldn’t murder and discredit the entire Center staff.
“You know, Dave,” Geoff began. “I’m glad you dropped by just now. It strikes me that your own research is similar to mine in enough aspects that you might have some fresh insight into some problems I’ve run into. If you’d care to take time, I’d like to go over some of my notes with you, and see what you think.”
“I don’t think you’ll have time,” smiled Froneberger. He reached for Geoff’s empty coffee cup, dropped it into a pocket of his lab coat.
“What do you mean?” asked Geoff thickly, coughing suddenly. There was pain deep, deep in his throat. Another racking cough filled his mouth with blood.
And he knew what Froneberger meant.
Where the Summer Ends
•I•
Along Grand Avenue they’ve torn the houses down, and left emptiness in their place. On one side a tangle of viaducts, railroad yards and expressways—a scar of concrete and cinder and iron that divides black slum from student ghetto in downtown Knoxville. On the other side, ascending the ridge, shabby relics of Victorian and Edwardian elegance, slowly decaying beneath too many layers of cheap paint and soot and squalor. Most were broken into tawdry apartments—housing for the students at the university that sprawled across the next ridge. Closer to the university, sections had been razed to make room for featureless emplacements of asphalt and imitation used-brick apartments for the wealthier students. But along Grand Avenue they tore the houses down and left only vacant weed-lots in their place.
Shouldered by the encroaching kudzu, the sidewalks still ran along one side of Grand Avenue, passing beside the tracks and the decrepit shells of disused warehouses. Across the street, against the foot of the ridge, the long blocks of empty lots rotted beneath a jungle of rampant vine— the buried house sites marked by ragged stumps of blackened timbers and low depressions of tumbled-in cellars. Discarded refrigerators and gutted hulks of television sets rusted amidst the weeds and omnipresent litter of beer cans and broken bottles. A green pall over the dismal ruin, the relentless tide of kudzu claimed Grand Avenue.
Once it had been a “grand avenue,” Mercer reflected, although those years had passed long before his time. He paused on the cracked pavement to consider the forlorn row of electroliers with their antique lozenge-paned lamps that still lined this block of Grand Avenue. Only the sidewalk and the forgotten electroliers—curiously spared by vandals—remained as evidence that this kudzu-festooned wasteland had ever been an elegant downtown neighborhood.
Mercer wiped his perspiring face and shifted the half-gallon jug of cheap burgundy to his other hand. Cold beer would go better today, but Gradie liked wine. The late afternoon sun struck a shimmering haze from the expanses of black pavement and riotous weed-lots, reminding Mercer of the whorled distortions viewed through antique windowpanes. The air was heavy with the hot stench of asphalt and decaying refuse and Knoxville’s greasy smog. Like the murmur of fretful surf, afternoon traffic grumbled along the nearby expressway.
As he trudged along the skewed paving, he could smell a breath of magnolia through the urban miasma. That would be the sickly tree in the vacant lot across from Gradie’s—somehow overlooked when the house there had been pulled down and the shrubbery uprooted—now poisoned by smog and strangled beneath the consuming masses of kudzu. Increasing his pace as he neared Gradie’s refuge, Mercer reminded himself that he had less than twenty bucks for the rest of this month, and that there was a matter of groceries.
Traffic on the Western Avenue Viaduct snarled overhead, as he passed