Storm Front

was broken by the sound of a gasoline engine, rough at first, then smoothing out, well down toward the river. Virgil plunged into the brush, moving quickly, but not trying to be especially quiet: he could still hear the engine, probably a gas generator, and nobody who was near it would hear him coming. Two hundred yards in, he found that he was correct: the kid had mounted an electric winch on a tree, and was using the generator to run it. A steel cable ran down into the water, where Rolf was standing, in hip boots. He was a muscular young man, blond and round-faced like his mother, intent on the work.
    As Virgil watched, a foot-thick stack of wire-bound boards surfaced, hooked up by the winch cable, and Rolf horsed them over toward the shore. There, he threw the winch into neutral and squatted to look at the boards. After he’d spent a couple of minutes scraping at them with a knife, he horsed them back out into the river.
    Not antique enough, Virgil thought. Not yet, anyway.
    He thought about the possibilities, then eased back into the trees. When he was a hundred yards back, he jogged the rest of the way to his truck, turned it around, and headed back toward Ma’s.
    —
    W HEN V IRGIL pulled into the yard, he got a quick flash of Ma’s face at a kitchen window, but she ducked away and Virgil thought,
Is Jones in there?
    He walked up to the door and knocked once and then went through and stood on the landing of the stairs that went down to the basement and up to the kitchen, and called, “Anybody home?”
    A moment later, Ma called, “Who’s there?”
    “Virgil. I thought we were going skinny-dipping.”
    Ma appeared at the top of the stairs, arms akimbo, and said, “I’m entertaining.”
    “Well, hell, I’m happy to join in,” Virgil said. “I’m a pretty good singer, actually.”
    Ma couldn’t help herself, and smiled, and said, “I’ve got Tag Bauer on my couch.”
    “That’s fine, Tag and I are old buddies,” Virgil said, as he climbed the four steps up to her. She was wearing a cornflower blue linen blouse and white shorts, with flip-flops. “I was wondering, though, if you’ve got Elijah Jones under your bed?”
    “I don’t even know Reverend Jones—”
    “C’mon, Ma, this is that fuckin’ Flowers you’re talking to.” She backed into the kitchen, which smelled liked mashed potatoes and gravy, and maybe pie of some kind, and Vigil swerved around her and stuck his head into the kitchen and found Bauer sitting on the couch. His shoes, Virgil noted, were on and firmly tied, which meant that he hadn’t gotten too comfortable. “How’s it going, Tag?”
    “Going fine,” Bauer said, with a cheerful grin. “I’m thinking about leaving town, though.”
    “Not with the stele.”
    “I can’t promise anything—I’d say that the recovery of the stone is something that we all are working toward.”
    Ma said, “Virgil—”
    Virgil said, “Ma, Tag, let’s sit down and have a little conference. I’ve been doing a lot of investigating and have things to report.” He raised his voice and shouted, “And Reverend Jones, if you’re up there, this is something you might want to hear, too.”
    There was no response, not even a squeaky board, and Ma said, “Virgil: he’s not here.”
    “All right,” Virgil said.
    “So what’d you find out?” Bauer asked.
    “I’ve been doing research, Tag, and I know a few things that I didn’t know before,” Virgil said. “You’ve got this urge to be a movie star, which is just fine with me and everybody else. And you’ve got some money—my best estimate is that when your father died, you probably inherited three or four million dollars. You spent a good piece of that on
The Wanderer
and
The Drifter
and so on. Then you’ve got that apartment out in the Hamptons, you pay on that time-share in Malibu, you rent a place in Paris.”
    “Cool,” Ma said.
    “You probably don’t quite break even with your TV show, because they’re so cheap about the travel money,” Virgil said. “And there’s a good chance that the show won’t be renewed—there’s been talk about
Bauer’s Last Crusade
 . . . and I figure you’re probably down to your last million or so.”
    “They’ll renew,” Bauer said. “They know I could be on the History Channel in one second.”
    Ma: “If you’re down to your last million . . . how’re you gonna buy the stone?”
    Virgil: “He can’t.”
    “Well, poop,” Ma said.
    “This is all