Where the Summer Ends

•III•

“Jesus!” Stryker swore. “Slow down, Russ!” He braced himself with one hand against the dash, almost slung out of his bucket seat as the Jensen took a curve at 70.

“Use the seat belt,” advised Mandarin, slowing down somewhat. After all, he was a little high to be pushing the car this hard.

“Don’t like them,” Curtiss grunted. “The harnesses make me claustrophobic.”

“They say they’re someday going to pass a law making it compulsory to wear them.”

“Like to see them try—we’re not to 1984 yet! Why don’t the prying bastards work to prevent accidents instead of putting all their bright ideas into ways of letting the damn fools who cause them live through it. And speaking of prevention, how about slowing this sports car down to legal velocities. The cops would sure like to nail you on a drunk driving charge.”

“Who’s drunk?” Russ slowed to 65, the legal limit for noninterstate highways.

“Son, you had a few before you picked me up this noon—and Gayle Corrington wasn’t running up her water bill on those drinks she poured for us.”

Russ veered from the ragged shoulder of the old two-lane blacktop. “If she starts the day customarily with drinks like she was pouring for me, I think I know where her poltergeist comes from.”

“You weren’t impressed?” Stryker sounded amused. “But you’ll admit natural explanations get a little forced and tenuous after a while.”

A stop sign bobbed over the crest of a hill, and Russ hit the brakes hard. Four disc brakes brought the Jensen up almost in its length. Stryker uncovered his eyes.

“Yeah,” Russ went on. “There were a number of damned things she said that sounded like telling points in favor of a poltergeist. But you have to bear in mind that all this is by her unsupported evidence. Hell, we can’t be sure she isn’t hallucinating this stuff, or even just making the whole thing up to string you along. Women do get bored at fortyish—to say nothing of what the thought of starting over the hill does to their libidos.”

“She didn’t look bored—and certainly not headed over the hill. Another few years, my friend, and you’ll stop thinking of womanhood withering at thirty. Hell, it’s just starting to bloom. But do you think she’s unreliable? Seemed to be just the opposite. A level-headed woman who was frankly baffled and a little embarrassed with the entire affair.”

Russ grunted, unwilling to agree offhand—though these were his own impressions as well. “I’m just saying you need to keep everything in perspective. I’ve gotten fooled by too many patients with a smooth façade—even when I was expecting things to be different beneath the surface.”

“But you’ll hazard an opinion that Mrs Corrington is playing straight with us so far as signs indicate?” Stryker persisted.

“Yeah,” Mandarin conceded. “But that’s one tough woman lurking beneath all that sweet Southern Belle charm she knows how to turn on. Watch out.”

He turned onto the Interstate leading into Knoxville’s downtown. In deference to Curtiss’s uneasiness with high speed, he held the needle at 80, safely just over the 75 limit of the time. “What’s your opinion of it all, then?” the author prodded.

“Well, I’ll maintain scientific neutrality. While I consider poltergeists improbable, I’ll accept the improbable when the probable explanations have all been eliminated.”

“Nicely phrased, Holmes,” Stryker chuckled. “And taking a position that will have you coming out sounding correct no matter what.”

“The secret of medical training.”

“I knew you’d come in handy for something.”

“Well, then, what’s your opinion?”

The author decided it was safe to release the dashboard and light his pipe. “Well, I guess I’ve used the supernatural too often in my fiction to accept it as willingly as I might otherwise. Seems every time I start gathering the facts on something like this, I find myself studying it as a fiction plot. You know like those yarns I used to crank out for pulps like Dime Mystery Stories, where when you get to the end you learn that the Phantom of Ghastly Manor was really Cousin Rodney dressed up in a monster suit so he could murder Uncle Ethelred and claim the inheritance before the will was changed. Something like that. I start putting facts together like I was plotting a murder thriller, you know. Kind of spoils the effect for me. This thing, for instance...”

Russ cursed and braked viciously to avoid the traffic stopped ahead at Malfunction Junction. Knoxville’s infamous rush hour tangle had the Interstate blocked solid ahead of them. Swerving onto the shoulder, he darted for the upcoming exit and turned toward the University section. Curtiss seemed about to bite his pipe in two.

“Stop off at the Yardarm? I don’t want to fight this traffic.” Stryker thought he could use a drink.



Safely seated in a back booth, stein of draft in hand, Curtiss regained his color. It was a favorite bar—just off the Strip section of the University area. When Stryker had first come to the area years back, it had been a traditional Rathskeller college bar. Styles had changed, and so had students. Long hair had replaced crewcuts, Zen and revolution had shoved fraternities and football from conversational standards, and there was a faint hint of marijuana discernible through the beer smell. Someone had once suggested changing the name of the Yardarm to the Electric Foreskin or some such, and had been tossed out for his own good.

Stryker didn’t care. He’d been coming here for years—sometimes having a round with his creative writing students. Now—well, if they wanted to talk football, he’d played some; if they wanted to talk revolution, he’d fought in some. The beer was good, and the atmosphere not too frantic for conversation.

His office was a block or two away—an upstairs room in a ramshackle office building only slightly less disreputable in appearance than the dilapidated Edwardian mansion turned community clinic where Russ worked. This was several blocks in the other direction, so the bar made a convenient meeting place for them. Afternoons often found the pair talking over a pitcher of beer (Knoxville bars could not serve liquor at the time), and the bartender—a huge red-bearded Viking named Blackie—knew them both by name.

“You were saying that your faith in the supernatural was fraught with skepticism,” Mandarin reminded, wiping foam from his mustache.

“No. I said it was tempered with rationality,” Stryker hedged. “That doesn’t mean I don’t believe in the supernatural. It means I examine facts with several of those famous grains of salt before I offer them to my readers.”

“I take it then you’re going to use this business today in your new book.”

Stryker nodded enthusiastically. “It’s worth a chapter, I’m certain.”

“Well, that’s your judgement, of course,” commented Mandarin, glancing at his watch. “Personally, I didn’t read any irrefutable evidence of the supernatural into all this.”

“Science scoffing under the shadow of truths inadmissible to its system of logic.” Stryker snorted. “You’re as blind in your beliefs as the old-guard priesthood holding the bastions of disease-by-wrath-of-God against the germ-theory heretics.”

“I suppose,” Russ admitted around a belch.

“But then, I forgot that you were back in Libby’s room while I was finishing up the interview with Gayle Corrington,” Stryker said suddenly. “Hell, you missed out on what I considered the most significant and intriguing part of her story. Let me read this off to you.” He fumbled for his notepad.

Mandarin had had enough of hauntings for the day. “Let me have you fill me in later,” he begged off. “I’ve got an evening clinic tonight, and I’d like to run back to the house beforehand and get packed.”

“Going out of town?”

“I need to see my high-priced lawyers in New York tomorrow.”

“That’s right. How’s that look?”

Russ frowned, said with more confidence than he felt: “I think we’ll make our case. Police just can’t burglarize a physician’s confidential files in order to get evidence for a drug bust.”

“Well, I wish you luck,” Stryker allowed. “There’s a few angles I want to check out on this business first, anyway. I’ll probably have the chapter roughed out by the time you’re back in town. Why don’t I give you a carbon then, and let you comment?”

“Fine.” Russ stood up and downed his beer. “Can I give you a lift somewhere?”

“Thanks—but I’ve got my car parked just down the block. You take it easy driving back though.”

Russ grinned. “Sure. Take it easy yourself.”



Two nights later Mandarin’s phone woke him up. Stryker hadn’t taken it easy.



•IV•

Dishevelled and coatless in the misty rain, Mandarin stood glumly beside the broken guardrail. It was past 3 AM. His clothes looked slept in, which they were. He’d continued the cocktail hour that began on his evening flight from New York once he got home. Sometime toward the end of the network movie that he wasn’t really watching he fell asleep on the couch. The set was blank and hissing when he stumbled awake to answer the phone.

“Hello, Russ,” greeted Saunders, puffing up the steep bank from the black lakeshore. His face was grim. “Thought you ought to be called. You’re about as close to him as anyone Stryker had here.”

Mandarin swallowed and nodded thanks. With the back of his hand he wiped the beads of mist and sweat from his face. Below them the wrecker crew and police diver worked to secure cables to the big maroon Buick submerged there. Spotlights, red tail lights burning through the mist. Yellow beacon on the wrecker, blue flashers on the two patrol cars. It washed the brush-grown lakeshore with a flickering nightmarish glow. Contorted shadows wavered around objects made grotesque, unreal. It was like a Daliesque landscape.

“What happened, Ed?” he managed to say.

The police lieutenant wiped mud from his hands. “Nobody saw it. No houses along this stretch, not a lot of traffic this hour of night.”

An ambulance drove up slowly, siren off. Static outbursts of the two-way radios echoed like sick thunder in the silence.

“Couple of kids parked on a side road down by the lake. Thought they heard brakes squeal, then a sort of crashing noise. Not loud enough to make them stop what they were doing, and they’d been hearing cars drive by fast off and on all night. But they remembered it a little later when they drove past here and saw the gap in the guard rail.”

He indicated the snapped-off stumps of the old-style wood post and cable guard rail. “Saw where the brush was smashed down along the bank, and called it in. Investigating officer’s flashlight picked out the rear end plain enough to make out the license number. I was on hand when owner’s identification came in; had you called.”

Russ muttered something. He’d met Saunders a few years before when the other was taking Styker’s evening class in creative writing. The detective had remained a casual friend despite Mandarin’s recent confrontations with the department.

“Any chance Curtiss might have made it?”

Saunders shook his head. “Been better than a couple hours since it happened. If he’d gotten out, he’d’ve hiked it to a house down the road, flagged down a motorist. We’d have heard.”

Someone called out from the shore below, and the wrecker’s winch began to rattle. Russ shivered.

“Rained a little earlier tonight,” Saunders went on. “Enough to make this old blacktop slick as greased glass. Likely, Curtiss had been visiting some friends. Had maybe a few drinks more than he should have—you know how he liked gin in hot weather. Misjudged his speed on these slippery curves and piled on over into the lake.”

“Hell, Curtiss could hold his liquor,” Mandarin mumbled. “And he hardly ever pushed that big Buick over 35.”

“Sometimes that’s fast enough.”

The Buick’s back end broke through the lake’s black surface like a monster in a Japanese horror flick. With an obscene gurgle, the rest of the car followed. Lake water gushed from the car body and from the open door on the passenger side.

“OK! Hold it!” someone yelled.

The maroon sedan halted, drowned and streaming, on the brush-covered shore. Workers grouped around it. Two attendants unlimbered a stretcher from the ambulance. Russ wanted to vomit.

“Not inside!” a patrolman called up to them.

The diver pushed back his facemask. “Didn’t see him in there before we started hauling either.”

“Take another look around where he went in,” Saunders advised. “Someone call in and have the Rescue Squad ready to start dragging at daylight.”

“He never would wear his seatbelt,” Russ muttered.

Saunders’ beefy frame shrugged heavily “Don’t guess it would have helped this time. Lake’s deep here along the bluff. May have to wait till the body floats up somewhere.” He set his jaw so tight his teeth grated. “Goddamn it to hell.”

“We don’t know he’s dead for sure.” Russ’s voice held faint hope.

Sloshing and clanking, the Buick floundered up the lakeshore and onto the narrow blacktop. The door was sprung open, evidently by the impact. The front end was badly mauled— grill smashed and hood buckled—from collision with the guard rail and underbrush. Several branches were jammed into the mangled wreckage. A spiderweb spread in ominous pattern across the windshield on the driver’s side.

Russ glowered at the sodden wreck, silently damning it for murdering its driver. Curtiss had always sworn by Buicks—had driven them all his life. Trusted the car. And the wallowing juggernaut had plunged into Fort Loundon Lake like a chrome-trimmed coffin.

Saunders tried the door on the driver’s side. It was jammed. Deep gouges scored the sheet metal on that side.

“What’s the white paint?” Mandarin pointed to the crumpled side panels.

“From the guard rail. He glanced along that post there as he tore through. Goddamn it! Why can’t they put up modern guard rails along these back roads! This didn’t have to happen!”

Death is like that, Russ thought. It never had to happen the way it did. You could always go back over the chain of circumstances leading up to an accident, find so many places where things could have turned out OK. Seemed like the odds were tremendous against everything falling in place for the worst.

“Maybe he got out,” he whispered.

Saunders started to reply, looked at his face, kept silent.