The Tip of the Iceberg
In her dream, Laura stood deep in the midst of a forest. The trees were bare of all their leaves, and a thick, hot breeze stirred through their creaking branches. The world was a bake-oven of stagnant heat. Though sunset was upon her, she knew there would be no relief. She turned suddenly to the side. A stick-figure man, fashioned roughly from twigs and twine, dangled limply from a nearby bough. She reached for it, and the music began.
“I go out walkin’ after midnight,
out in the moonlight,
just like we used to do.
I go out walkin’ after midnight,
searchin’ for you. . .”
The song was distorted, warped, unbearably twangy. She clasped her hands over her ears, but still, she heard it.
A tear oozed out of her clenched-shut eye. They were doing this on purpose. They were doing it because they knew she hated country music. Sweat drenched her, and the stifling breezes began to die down.
The song concluded in an earsplitting yodel, and all was quiet. . .until the screaming began.
From somewhere, it seemed just over the tree-clogged horizon, she heard Will.
“Laura! Laura!”
Something was terribly wrong. His voice had an edge of panic and horror she had never heard before.
“Laura! Follow the sound of my voice!”
She began to run, despite the oppressive heat, despite her total exhaustion. The tinder-dry trees whirled past her.
She yelled as she ran. “Will! I’m coming! I’m coming to find you!”
Suddenly, on the path before her, was an enormous snake. Or rather, two enormous snakes, boa constrictor-sized, wrapped around one another in a scaly, undulating horror. She recoiled in horror.
From nowhere, she a stout willow switch appeared in her hands. She felt a little better then.
Will called hysterically: “Laura! Oh, God! Hurry!”
She brought down the stick on the snakes’ heads, and instantly they vanished. She continued to run.
A man stood beside the path ahead, rippling with muscle and with the coldest blue eyes she had ever seen. She couldn’t help but run toward him. He towered over her, and smiled.
“Looking for something?” the man asked charmingly.
“I--I have to find Will. He’s lost.”
The man slowly blinked. “Perhaps,” he said to the trees, “perhaps it’s not Will who’s lost. Perhaps it’s you.”
Laura sobbed, “Which way should I go?”
The man’s eyes glittered. “Ask Faye.” He gestured nonchalantly to a nearby tree. Faye stood bound to it, tears streaming from beneath her rounded spectacles. A square of duct tape neatly covered her mouth.
Will called again, unhinged with fear. “Laura! Oh, please! Laura!”
But Laura couldn’t move. Her legs had vanished into the drought-hardened earth.
She bolted awake in her stuffy room at the Fountain Lights Inn, just west of Salt Lake City on I-80. The ancient air conditioner whirred asthmatically in the window, spewing a stream of musty, dank cool air into the fleabag room.
Damn that movie.
She should have known it would be a terrible idea to go and see that scary movie on her own at the local multiplex, but she simply couldn’t drive another mile in the smothering heat of the desert. She was exhausted from too many sleepless nights, too much stress, too much packing, and too many life-changing decisions in too short a time period. She was entitled to an evening of mindless relaxation, even if it did scare the wits out of her.
She would get to Will, and San Francisco, tomorrow.
Wearily, she turned on the bedside lamp and glanced at her watch: 2:30.
She had to get back to sleep, but she was compelled to read Will’s letter just once more. It still was all so unbelievable to her. She reached down into the backpack next to the bed, fished past the canister of mace, the ivory-handled pistol her father had given her, and her neatly pinned-together packets of Kleenex, until she felt the folded-up bulk of Will’s last correspondence with her.
She unfolded the letter and began to read.
I am BEGGING you to return to San Francisco and take up the Sooner Than Never hunt again. Not only am I sure that we can win, but it may be perilous for you not to pursue it with me. Your instincts about the level of danger after the events at the Mystery House were correct. . .Mr. Waterbury is playing a big, scary game, and to put it quite bluntly, we both know too much and we could be in terrible danger.
I am assuming at this point that you think I am being melodramatic and exaggerating the facts, but in the last few days, I have had a number of startling revelations. . .revelations which go past the clues in the novel and into something much, much bigger.
The long and the short of it is this: Sooner Than Never is not only a search for a fortune in hidden cash, it is Simon Waterbury’s attempt to get someone to solve the mystery of his wife’s disappearance almost thirty years ago. Everything about Sooner Than Never, from the text of the story to the locations of the clues, has either a literal or symbolic connotation to the life of Lily Waterbury. Through the novel, Simon is trying to find an answer. . .or perhaps, trying to find his missing wife.
Do you think I’m crazy yet? Bear with me. There’s more. . .much more, and worse.
You may recall that Lily Waterbury was (or perhaps, is) Simon’s wife from the early 1970s. A fresh-faced, pie-eyed, cornfed midwestern girl, Lily came to NYC, fresh out of high school, to pursue a degree in social work at Columbia. During a women’s rights march shortly after her arrival, she was interviewed by a reporter from Chatter magazine (which was owned by Everyone’s Favorite Media Mogul, Simon Waterbury). The piece caught the attention of Mr. Waterbury, and he arranged to meet the girl at a charity function, charmed by her feistiness and the near-Gothic story of her wretched childhood in a Nebraskan foundling hospital. After a whirlwind romance, they were married in October, 1971. She was 18, he was almost 41. The tabloids screamed of their bizarre May-December relationship, and hinted at Simon’s rather notorious and unsatiable appetite for sex.
All was well for the first few months of their marriage, but in the summer of 1972, the society columns began to report that the young Mrs. Waterbury was seen less and less frequently in her husband’s company, and more often was in the care of his assistants, servants, etc. She even began to make appearances at society functions with Philip Huffmann, Simon’s right-hand man. One such appearance took place at a fundraising ball in Beaver Creek, Colorado.
Is anything clicking for you yet?
Two years after the wedding, Lily vanished. She was last seen by one of Simon’s servants in his penthouse. Simon was away on business. Nearly everyone assumed that she had been kidnapped and was being held for ransom, but no ransom note ever came. Then there were rumors of drug addiction, severe depression . . . but no substantiating evidence ever turned up. Neither did Lily’s body. Simon hired a fleet of detectives, spent millions on a desperate search, but Lily was never seen again. By 1980, with no body, no incriminating evidence, and no suspects, the case was deemed unsolvable and officially closed.
And that’s not even the tip of the iceberg, my little turtle-dove.
Sometime in the mid-70s, Philip Huffmann, Simon’s trusty assistant, vanished as well. He didn’t “officially” vanish. . .no one was particularly looking for him, it wasn’t even noted in the newspapers. . .he just kind of faded out of sight. And then he was gone. Poof. Vanished. . . until he showed up in Mountain Center, Colorado, this past February for a roll in the snow with yours truly, claiming to be an Australian mountain man named Sebastian Moffat.
I’ve seen a picture of Philip Huffmann. There is no doubt that he is Sebastian Moffat. None. And don’t you dare criticize me about the age of the men I am attracted to.
And get this. . .Philip Huffmann, from the scanty bits of information I have pieced together, was born and raised in Centralia, Pennsylvania. Do you recall that name of that woman we met in Centralia? It was Gertie Huffmann, Laura. She’s got to be some sort of relative. I’ve dispatched Fern Findlay to drive out to Centralia and track her down.
Have I sent you reeling yet?
Clearly, Philip/Sebastian is trying to throw us off the trail. He doesn’t want us to get close to the solution, whatever the solution may be, because my guess is it will implicate him. As you so wisely asserted, I do think that your beloved Agent M IS an agent for the Federal government. And I bet you he’s on the trail of that very bad man!
Would that I hadn’t pistol-whipped poor Mike! We may need him yet!
It all fits so perfectly--Centralia, PA, the birthplace of Philip Huffmann; Beaver Creek, Colorado, a trendy mountain resort where Lily was seen with Philip Huffmann; The Huntington Library’s mausoleum is shrine to a lost love; and the Winchester Mystery House is another shrine to a deceased spouse. I also suspect that the characters in the novel are parallels for people in Waterbury’s colored past. Lady Violet, suffering so wretchedly, is almost certainly based on poor Lily Waterbury. I think that young Harlowe, her hapless ward, is Philip Huffmann. Philip Huffmann/Harlowe Lufton? Get it? And perhaps Violet’s lecherous and aged father is dear old Simon’s depiction of himself.
To top it all off, one of the few extant photographs of Philip Huffmann was taken on The Pirates of the Caribbean at Disney World. How does a midsummer trip to Orlando sound?
Now don’t be alarmed (and I wasn’t even going to tell you this), but most of this information was discovered for us by a certain wee girl with glasses. It seems that she has left her home, her roommates, her studies, and vanished off the face of the earth. She is alive and well, but she is hiding, from someone or something. I think, perhaps, someone discovered that she knew too much and she bolted. The danger around us is quite real. . .that’s the primary reason why we need to forge ahead. We don’t want to be sitting ducks.
I think we ARE being chased by a psychopath, my dear. And his name is Philip Huffmann. Or Sebastian Moffat.
$500,000,000 in cash is ours, if we can just hustle. It is only a matter of time before someone else begins to piece all of this together.
I await your decision.
I need you, Dial. I don’t have the constitution, or the organizational skills, to do this on my own.
Love,
Will
Laura folded the letter and returned it to the backpack. She couldn’t deal with this any longer. She couldn’t. This was no longer a game. It was no longer fun. It was no longer a grand adventure. It was terrifying, out of control, and life-threatening.
No amount of money in the world was worth getting killed over. Having a police record was one thing; being pursued by a dangerous criminal who was himself pursued by the FBI was quite another story.
She had made up her mind. Upon her arrival in San Francisco, she and Will were going to put a stop to the Sooner Than Never madness. If Will wouldn’t agree to do it, she would do it herself. They would tell the press, they would tell the police, they would tell the FBI, the CIA, and anyone else who would listen what was really going on with Simon Waterbury and Sooner Than Never. Lily Waterbury could stay missing and Philip Huffmann could go back to wherever he had been for twenty years.
It was over. Period.
Somewhere out in the hotel’s parking lot, a car door slammed. Instinctively, Laura’s hand flew to her backpack and its mini-arsenal.
She fell into an uneasy sleep with the bedside lamp still on.
*****
It had been the hottest summer in the history of New York.
Every day, day in and day out, the mercury climbed over ninety degrees, sometimes close to one hundred, and the copper sun battered down on the city. It hadn’t rained substantially in weeks, and everywhere, there was an odor of sweat, unwashed bodies, and baking garbage. The old town definitely needed a bath.
Chad Bismarck sat crouched in a pool of his own sweat in the deepest recesses of Vesper’s walk-in closet. The heat had completely debilitated him. Despite Vesper’s industrial-strength air conditioner, the humidity and the blazing sunlight outdoors had pushed his tinnitus to nightmarish levels he had never believed possible. The constant ringing in his ears had gotten to a point where the only way in which he could relieve it was to repeatedly bang his head against the wall or lay submerged in a tub of ice water.
Vesper, though she was constantly ill-at-ease with his behavior and outbursts, had somehow gotten ahold of some European wonder pills which quelled the noises in his head. The little blue pills made him feel so light. Airy. Carefree.
They also made him feel slightly fuzzy. His thoughts were hazy, unfocused. He had a periodic, fleeting suspicion that the pills were also sapping him of his will and strength, but it didn’t matter. Anything was preferable to the noises, the voices, and the earsplitting pounding.
Here, alone in the cool darkness, he could almost put together a coherent thought. Simon Waterbury had hidden a fortune in cash, and published that awful novel. But the novel was really about his wife. His wife Daisy. No, Iris. Or was it Rose?
And Rose was. . . ? Where was Rose? Chad massaged his temples, closed his eyes tightly, and tried to concentrate.
Vesper had. . .Vesper was in cahoots with someone. A man in Chicago. Or was it Los Angeles? Vesper had to stop the contest so she could--
Vesper was really an enemy spy. No, that didn’t sound right at all.
All the facts were there, they just wouldn’t match up.
He had an indistinct memory that months ago, when he had first made his way back to New York, he had told Vesper that he had spilled everything he knew about her and Simon Waterbury to an unnamed third party. That was a lie. There was no third party. No one else could be trusted with the information he had.
But now, even he didn’t know the information.
He needed help. He needed a partner. Someone who could stitch together the scraps and shards of knowledge that he had. Someone who would expose Simon and Vesper for who they really were. Someone who could help him kick his habit with the little blue pills. But who?
He let out an animal-like yelp and snuggled back against the wall behind Vesper’s peignoirs.
Who would ever think to look for him here?
*****
Having grown up in Pittsburgh, Fern Findlay had of course heard numerous stories of the mine fires in Centralia, but as her rental car purred along the obliterated town’s main drag, she could hardly believe her eyes.
The unrelenting summer sun had bleached the town’s scanty vegetation to a sickly yellow. Swirls of dust and dirt scudded across vacant lots where houses used to stand. A faint smell of sulfur hung in the air. The entire area looked as though it belonged in the desert southwest, rather than the rolling hills of eastern Pennsylvania.
She was glad that she was finally getting to be of some real assistance to Will and Laura. For months, she had dutifully forwarded their mail to them, kept them abreast of all developments in the lives of their New York friends, and watered all of the adopted houseplants that Will had bequeathed to her upon their departure. She found it difficult to believe that in two scant months, her friends would be marking the one year anniversary of their departure from New York. It seemed inconceivable that they had been gone for that long.
But now, now Fern had a chance to really make a difference. Will had called her with an urgent request: to drive out to Centralia and track down an elusive woman named Gertie Huffmann. Somehow, this Huffmann woman was connected to the entire Sooner than Never treasure hunt. Will hadn’t gone into specifics, except to tell Fern to question Mrs. Huffmann on the whereabouts of a certain Philip Huffmann, a native Centralian to whom the woman might be related.
Ahead of her, Fern saw the spindly shape of a single row house jutting up on the north side of what had once most likely been the town square. Will’s spotty directions had been perfect; he had told her that it wasn’t easy to get lost in Centralia, and he was right.
She parked the car beside the road, adjacent to a cracked and steaming concrete foundation. This place is enough to give you the heebie-jeebies, she thought anxiously. She smoothed down her windblown, shoulder-length brown hair and approached the house. Every window and door was open, to benefit from whatever paltry breezes might be stirring the smoky summer day. From within the house, Fern heard a radio loudly playing,
That song always made her laugh. For years, her multiple brothers and sisters had teased her, after discovering she believed the song’s lyrics to be, “There’s a bathroom on the right.”
She rapped on the rickety screen door just as the song was ending.
A stout, disapproving woman appeared on the other side of the door, clad in an orange sleeveless polyester blouse and a stained pair of ample culottes. A snaggled incisor protruded from her colorless lips.
“Who are you?” the woman asked, as she quickly fastened the hook-and-eye on the inside of the door.
Fern heard the words coming from her mouth before she knew she was speaking them: “Mrs. Huffmann, my name is Fern Findlay. I’m a private investigator from New York City,” she lied through her teeth. “I’m here to ask you some questions about Philip Huffmann.”
The blood drained from Gertie’s already pallid face. “What. . . what did you say?”
Fern took a deep breath and proceeded. “Philip Huffmann. Do you know who he is?” “Of course I do. He was my son.” Mrs. Huffmann’s lips trembled slightly, and then her rheumy eyes suddenly shifted from Fern’s face to the street behind her. “Is that man with you?”
Fern turned to face the street. Striding up the sidewalk toward the house was Will’s ex-boyfriend, David Nimoy.
*****
The next night, Laura drove the wobbly truck, purchased after Elks Club Spaghetti Dinner so long ago, up the steep incline of Russian Hill in San Francisco. It was foggy, chilly, and damp; the mournful moo of the Alcatraz foghorn periodically echoed through the darkness. very Ellery Queen, she thought, as she craned her head to see if she could catch a glimpse of the Bay through the houses and apartment buildings perched on the hillside to her left. The Pacific Ocean, or any body of water, for that matter, was so restorative to her prairie-bred brain. But she could see nothing. It was as though the Hill were an island, broken off from the rest of the city and floating on a lonely sea.
She parked near the balustrade at the very crest of the Hill, double-checked to make sure the emergency brake was on, and proceeded down the ferny path to Chloe Horton’s apartment at the rear of 1018 Vallejo Street.
She knocked at the door. There was a noise of faint movement, but no one answered. She rang the bell, and heard a muffled “Damn it!” inside. Finally, Chloe, clad in a flowing organic cotton outfit, swung open the door and looked at Laura vaguely for a few seconds. Then, her enormous grin split her face wide open.
“Hi, Laura! So good to see you! Come on in! I was just in the midst of my Meditation for Women Who Do Too Much. It’s the only thing that keeps me sane these days.” Before Laura could respond, Chloe spun on her heel and receded into the apartment. It would be a long evening before Will came home.
Laura followed her down a high-ceilinged, shotgun hallway to the living room. Numerous candles were lit, incense was burning, and a recorded harp softly played a tune on the stereo. Chloe scooped up her cat and sat down cross-legged on the floor. “This won’t take but a minute,” Chloe explained, as she straightened her blouse and closed her eyes.
Laura stood planted in the center of the room, not certain where she should go or what she should do. She glanced around nervously, wondering how long Chloe would be bathing her toes in the lavender tides of another astral plane. The roomy studio seemed empty, hollow. Then, Laura realized what was wrong.
“Chloe? Chloe!” She strode across the room and shook Chloe gently by the shoulder. Her eyes popped open. “Chloe, where is all of Will’s stuff? Where is Will?”
Chloe sighed. “I was meditating, Laura,” she said wearily, getting up from the floor. “Will called yesterday and told me to tell you he had discovered something. He said that you should hang out here until he called you.”
Laura’s mind swam. Where on earth would Will have gone? Orlando? What could be happening now?
“Oh,” Chloe said absently, picking up an envelope from a low bookcase, “this came in the mail for you, too.”
Laura peered through the dim candlelight at the letter. It was Will’s handwriting, addressing the envelope to her, care of Chloe Horton, 1018 Vallejo Street, San Francisco.
With trembling hands, she tore it open.
It was neatly typed on expensive paper. It was not from Will.
If you are looking for Will Gilbert, rest assured he is safe and sound. My colleagues and I have made certain that he is well cared for and as happy as can be, under the circumstances.
We will be detaining him until we see fit to release him from our care.
If you proceed to the police, or any other state or national organizations regarding this matter, Mr. Gilbert will immediately be released from our supervision, one piece at a time.
We’re sure you don’t want that.
At the bottom of the letter, in Will’s handwriting, were scrawled a few fleeting words: “L--This is no joke. Help.--W.”
Be sure to tune in on Thursday, August 26,
for the
horrifying and heartrending
Chapter 32
of
THE WEBSERIAL
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