Sanguineus heard voices. He went back to the transverse passage and waited beside the step ladder.
Outside three figures stood by the mausoleum door, two men and a woman. One man, the shorter one, the older one, handed something to the woman and turned away.
"If you are who you say you are, then there is no irregularity," he said in an anxious tone.
They paid him no more attention. He walked as quickly as his arthritic legs allowed, out along the stretch of damp grass between the rows of statuary.
The other man found the door to be unlocked. He waved away the key in the woman's hand. Instead he took what she had removed from her coat pocket. He twisted the end of it and nodded at her to get away from the door. She walked backwards several steps, her clasped hands at her chin.
The man opened the door just enough to toss into the passage the canister he had activated. Then he closed the door, motioning to the woman, and, taking the key she held out to him, he locked the door.
He listened. His worried smile meant to the woman that he heard, or thought he heard, the canister releasing its deadly gas.
Three hours earlier, in a room of the Blue Pelican Motel, Eleanor came out of the bathroom in a leopard-spot terrycloth robe, a towel wrapped around her hair. She frowned at John Huffins, and opening her overnight case she put back the expensive bottles of shampoo and conditioner.
Huffins was sitting in an armchair at the round table, in a white undershirt and red-striped boxer shorts. He was of average height, a bit flabby around the waist, hairless everywhere except for a bristle of greying brown hair over his ears and along the nape of his neck. His face was like that of a bloodhound: big sad eyes and an extensive nose of a slight purplish color due to a pigment disorder. Overall he had a benign and not unpleasant appearance, and his smile, which was almost a permanent feature, suggested a tendency toward adoration.
His smile was tentative this evening, seeing the soured look of Eleanor. He crossed his bare legs and patted his knee.
"I had no idea you were so fond of Nellie," he said, avoiding her hard stare. His smile turned thoughtful. "We had to have a reason why Ross Arden went looking for his favorite cousin. You should have known from the beginning that Nellie was the one. I don't see why you can't have a good relationship with Penny. After all, she's in on this. We couldn't have gotten rid of Ross and Nellie without her."
"She doesn't like me," Eleanor said. "You can't think fondly of someone who doesn't like you."
"And what about Ricklen Cruor? You don't blame me for arranging his imminent death, do you? It is quite necessary."
"No, of course I don't blame you, he's probably with the FBI. I just hope--"
"How many times do I have to tell you, El, there are no FBI snoops involved in this. The NSA would not want--"
"I just hope you're right about Rick's death looking like the work of Ross, and that the way Ross died will seem to have been the reaction of Nellie, who slept with Rick, who had a real liking for him, and who hoped... But that she would commit suicide after killing Ross--" There was a critical question mark in her eyes.
"Relax, El. The NSA will cover for us. The police will see it the way the NSA wants them to see it. A murder suicide. After all, it is 'Penelope' the NSA wants dead, and they are now quite convinced that Nellie was the mastermind of the Good Life Sorority."
Eleanor stood staring at Huffins as if she were still trying to figure him out, or if she was having second thoughts about the wisdom of going along with him. Softly she said, "I had no choice. It was an offer I could hardly refuse. Kill 'Penelope' or face the goon squad from the NSA."
Huffins smiled broadly, nervously. "Oh there is more to it than that. A depth of politics. You would have to know the Ardens influence in certain quarters to understand that side of it. But our concern is more mundane. With my power of attorney in the Arden affairs, we will take possession of the mansion and its acreage. A ten-point-five million dollar windfall, if I must remind you."
"Which we have to split with--"
"No no, not split. Twenty percent goes to Penny. We've agreed. And one million clear for--"
"THAT'S what I don't understand," said Eleanor testily. "THEY are tight with the NSA, and how could this spy agency not know that it's all about money?"
Huffins waved a deprecating hand. "Of COURSE they know it's all about money. But what better way to ensure the cooperation of needed participants than to allow for a substantial monetary reward? Really, El, it's your nerves talking, not your normally good sense."
"It's hardly good sense thinking that all is working out just wonderfully when WE DON'T KNOW WHERE PENNY IS!"
"Relax," Huffins said, exasperated. "Where is that big laughing smile I have grown to love? Penny has fled possibly, out of fear or anxiety, but she knows she must come to me for her cut. If she doesn't, then you and I are twenty percent richer."
Penny thanked God for the stone mason. Her flirtations, her promises couched in innuendo, and her tripling of his fee resulted in a hinged entrance into the crypt that was not noticeable to the uninformed eye. The step ladder might look a little suspicious, she thought, but that could not be helped. She needed it to get up into the crypt.
Inside there was a foam rubber pad, a lightweight cotton sleeping bag, and three oxygen masks just in case the small air hole above the secret entrance was not adequate. She had to assume that she would be lying in the crypt for at least two hours before THEY arrived. She smiled thinly at the thought of them lying together in the crypt: together in death, as they had been in life, a very practical togetherness that had nothing of romance in it.
Penny laid the 30,000-candlepower flashlight and the Remington .32 revolver on her stomach. She waited in a tight darkness that did not frighten or depress her. It excited her. It was an expression of that desired good life that had no judgmental light blinding her cynical confidence. It was the sort of thing that Nellie used to talk about when they were teens.
'Good' meant a manageable mix of carefree living and an enjoyable but systematic breaking of the rules, of laws that forbade any connection between good and evil. She remembered Nellie saying that each were an antidote for the other; bad made good tolerable, and good made bad accessible and safe.
Penny touched the underside of the crypt top. It was not like the bark of a tree limb, and yet here she lay, the Sleeping Beauty awaiting the coming of Prince Goodlife. She closed her eyes. To imagine herself under a tree, on the bare earth, in the shade of a sun she couldn't see through the thick matte of leaves, stirred her senses. There is nothing more invigorating for the senses than to be trapped, to yearn for what you can not actually see or touch or taste. You smell it, and it affects you like a letter from a faraway lover.
She remembered Nellie painting the diptych, the twin trees, the twin Sleeping Beauties, and she recalled her, Penny's, own feelings about the concept. The cemetery superintendent had it right. Trees kill grass. Get out from under the web of branches into the sun. Get out and grow. Follow the maze of hedges. Discover life and its indifferent, even amoral, challenges, where 'good' is the act of living free and unfettered, and evil is its spice. The only really bad thing was to lie sleeping, to succumb to a lack of vibrant activity, from a lack of sun, like grass under a tree.
Penny noticed that the small hole was now rimmed with light. Her heart raced. Someone had come into the mausoleum, someone to whom the superintendent had given a key.
Footsteps? It sounded like the scrape of shoe leather on the rough stone flags of the passage floor. Was it Ricklen? Was he actually here, or had Huffins lied to THEM, to bait them in, to put them in a situation most conducive to their deaths? No, she didn't think Huffins had lied. Ricklen was here.
THEY knew that the golf course designer was a criminal of some obscure sort; Eleanor had said as much. This Ricklen Cruor knew enough of the scheme to want to get his hand in, to remove any obstacles in his way. Would he... Would he be the Prince who... He had certainly 'awakened' Nellie. Would he do the same for Penny? She thought: What a coincidence, that I should be lying 'asleep' under the 'tree,' and HE should come...
She heard a pop! sound. There came a sudden scraping of shoe leather. Then a stinging stench reached her. Immediately she put on an oxygen mask and adjusted the strap. What had happened? Had THEY--?
In a panic she flicked on her flashlight, unlatching the hinged access. She pushed against the square of concrete and began wriggling out of the crypt, twisting around onto her stomach and groping a hand for the step ladder; the broad and intense beam of light sweeping across the back wall.
The step ladder had been moved. She cursed into the mask, her eyes watering.
A dull thudding noise echoed softly down the passage from somewhere ahead, presumably by the metal entrance door.
Penny now had both hands on the floor, her body half out of the crypt. The flashlight and revolver, and a spare oxygen mask, clattered on the stone flagging. The beam of light shone providentially on the overturned step ladder at the other side of the passage, and on the figure of Ricklen Cruor kneeling beside it, doubled over and retching.
Instinctively Penny tossed the spare mask at him. Then with a sharp pain in her knees she slipped completely out onto the cold floor.
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