The teenager looked at the others, as if he wondered if he were being teased. He decided he wasn’t and moved back a couple of paces from the brink.
“You all right, Doc?” Mildred asked, seeing that the old man was looking a little pale and had moved back out of the sun to sit on a shelf of shaded rock.
He was holding his stomach, biting his lip. “I believe it is just a passing attack of dyspepsia, thank you, Doctor. But rather sharp, I must confess.”
“Maybe we should get back to the house, so you can have a rest. Put your feet up. Ryan?”
“Yeah, sure.”
But the sight of the misty river, raging through the deep gorge, was hypnotic. The sensation drawing him toward it was strangely powerful and brought back to him the mesmeric powers of Straub.
He tore himself away from the platform, and they made their way back to the ville, Doc occasionally rubbing at his stomach while assuring them that he was feeling fine.
Ryan walked with J.B. and Krysty. “What do you make of Straub?” he asked.
“Mad and bad all the way through, lover. He glories in what that bitch’s done to him. Like it was some sort of sick honor. Still wouldn’t trust him as far as I could spit.”
“J.B.?”
“Man’s got a brain like a cunning, rabid rat. My guess is that he’s got himself caught by someone as devious and power crazed as him. Now he’s settling himself inside her nest. Become a councilor to her so she’ll need him and trust him.” The Armorer was polishing his glasses as they walked by the pool. A dragonfly, better than a foot in length, floated by them, a poem in iridescent turquoise and aquamarine. “And one day the Countess Katya Beausoleil gets to wake up dead.”
Ryan paused to look at a gigantic carp, rainbow scaled, as it broke the surface of the pond to snap at a skimming water boatman. “Yeah,” he said. “Like we think along the same lines. Wish he’d tell us the truth about Trader. Probably the only way we’ll ever know how that final curtain came down.”
THE HOUSE HAD A wonderful library, and it was a pleasure for the companions to spend some time there during the afternoon. The weather had closed in, and a gray drizzle blew across the gardens from the gorge, beating on the shuttered windows. There was no sign of either the countess or of Straub himself.
They ate a perfectly cooked but exceedingly dull supper alone in the dining room.
A guard warned them as they prepared to go to their rooms for the night that the expedition for Graceland would be leaving around nine in the morning, so would they make sure they were down for breakfast by eight.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The eggs were golden and perfectly circular. The bacon was lean and crisp, in long rashers. The tomatoes had been sliced precisely into halves and fried in salted butter. The hash browns had been sliced thin as a whisper and then cooked until their texture was exactly right. The bread was in uniform slices, and the grits were snowy, served in equal mounds on every plate.
And it was dull, dull, dull.
Krysty leaned across and whispered to Ryan, “Like the sort of food you see in old women’s mags, brilliantly photographed so that it looks better than you could imagine. And when you eat it, then it somehow tastes like the paper the pix are printed on. I don’t know how they do it.”
The countess hadn’t yet joined them, and Straub had told them that she was probably dining in her room alone.
“This is going to be so exciting. I just hope that we don’t meet any muties or malcontents on the road.”
“Is it far?” Ryan asked.
“I checked the maps last night. Sleep seems to evade me more than it once did. Few miles south of downtown Memphis. Whitehaven township in what was once called Shelby County. It’s off Highway 51 South. On Elvis Presley Boulevard. One of the small number of streets in the whole region that keeps its predark name. Number 3764. I never saw it yet.”