The Paper Grail Read Free

He read the name several times, looking at Howard’s face, and then checked the number against a little book of bad-risk numbers shoved in alongside the cash register. “Barton,” he said. “You ain’t any relation …” He looked closely at Howard’s face again and then smiled broadly. “Sure you are!”
    “He’s my uncle,” Howard said. “On my father’s side.” It was no good to lie. Now he would have to pay triple for the bumper sticker. Howard’s Uncle Roy had founded and owned the Museum of Modern Mysteries and then had gone broke with it. Howard had never even been there, although he had always loved the idea of it. And now, these years later, here was a long-lost bumper sticker advertising the place. Clearly he had to buy it as a memento. The man knew that now. He sat there as if thinking about it, about soaking Howard for the rectangle of sun-faded paper.
    “Roy Barton,” he said, shaking his head. “That old son of a gun. Hell,
take
the damned thing. You going up to his place now?”
    “That’s right,” Howard said, surprised. “I’m up here on business, mostly.”
    “Roy Barton’s, or your own?”
    “My own, actually. I haven’t seen Roy for a few years. I don’t know what kind of business he’s in now.”
    The man gave him a curious look, as if Uncle Roy were in some sort of business that didn’t bear discussion. Then he said, “Roy Barton’s pretty much in business with the world. Nobody’d be surprised if your business and his business didn’t cross paths down the line. He used to call himself an ‘entrepreneur of the spirit.’ And by God he ain’t far wrong. He’ll liven up your day.”
    “I hope so,” Howard said. “I could use it.”
    “Give him a howdy from me, then, will you? Tell him Cal says hello. He used to come in here pretty regular when he was working the ghost angle up to the museum. He had a lot of idle time. It wasn’t but a half mile up the road. Building’s still there, sitting empty. Ever been up there?”
    “Never was,” Howard said. “Always wanted to, but I put it off. Then he went under and it was too late.”
    “Too damned bad, too. He’s a character, Roy Barton is. He
seen
some things out in the woods …” The man laughed, shaking his head, remembering something out of the past, some sort of Roy Barton high jinks. “Hell, I believe him, too. I’ll be damned if I don’t.” He turned around to a glass-fronted drink cooler, opened it up, and pulled out a six-pack of Coors. “Take this along for him, will you? Tell him Cal Dalton says hello and why don’t he stop in.” He handed Howard his credit card along with the beer, and Howard signed for the gas and decals. Cal shook his hand. “Look for it on the right, three or four bends up. You can pass it easy if you aren’t looking out.”
    Howard thanked him and left. Fog had settled into the campground below, making it look inhospitable and cold. Somehow the man’s carrying on like that had lifted Howard’s spirits, making him feel less like an outsider. The idea of having a look at the abandoned spirit museum appealed to him. There was a couple of hours of daylight left.
    He had heard all about the museum from his mother, who had done her best to make the whole cockeyed thing sound reasonable. His mother was fiercely loyal to Uncle Roy, who had looked after them, in his way, in the years following Howard’s father’s death. Howard had picked up bits and pieces of family gossip lately about the museum’s sad decline and about how Uncle Roy had borrowed himself into lifelong debt to make a go of it. The rotten thing about it was that his poor uncle had believed in it, in the ghosts. Despite the gimmicky bumper stickers and decals, he had been convinced that he had seen a carload of spirits appearing out of the north coast dawn andgunning away up the highway, dressed in out-of-date clothes and driving a Studebaker.
    Why a Studebaker? That’s what had torn it, had wrecked the museum,