The Knights of the Cornerstone Read Online Free PDF Page A

solid twenty minutes, and any number of people might have breezed into the lot, opened his trunk, and grabbed the box. The very fact that Woolsworth had walked inside to chat argued that it hadn’t been him. Most thieves didn’t go out of their way to talk with people they’d just robbed. Unless Woolsworth was merely a distraction … Unless he had an accomplice in another vehicle …
    A dry stretch of the old riverbed swung into view below, a wide, rocky swath right along the edge of the mountains, and he could see the Y-shape where the new bed had surged away from the old, back when the river had changed course nearly a century ago, shifting a little section of the border between California and Arizona two hundred yards to the east and forming the crescent-shaped piece of beachfront that had become New Cyprus. The land between the old riverbed and the new had remained unincorporated territory, a couple of hundred acres of essentially ownerless land, open to homesteading. His uncle and aunt hadn’t been among the first homesteaders, but they were old-timers by now, and the early homesteaders were long passed away. The sheer cliffs of the Dead Mountains,walling off New Cyprus both upriver and down, killed the potential for further development. Aside from Shangri-la there probably wasn’t another city in the world that was so clearly defined and isolated.
    He remembered his uncle having told him years ago that the residents of New Cyprus had taken a vote whether they’d live in Mountain Time or Pacific Standard, but couldn’t decide, and so had given up wearing watches altogether in accordance with the way things were done in Heaven. During the first visit out here that he could remember, Calvin had innocently asked his uncle what time it was, and his uncle had replied, “Not yet,” which had turned out to be a standard New Cyprus response to the query.
    The road dipped across the old riverbed, which lay white and sandy in the evening shadows, with scrubby-looking plants growing up between the boulders. On the other side it ended at Main Street near the downriver edge of town. Calvin turned left, upriver, crossing a bridge over a wide wash where storm waters had funneled down out of the hills since time immemorial. It was nearly seven thirty. The sun had dropped below the mountains now, and the town had fallen into evening, gratefully shedding ten degrees of heat. A sign on the roadside read “New Cyprus Town Limits” and beyond that lay a scattering of tree-shaded mobile homes on a surprisingly green, park-like lawn. People were sitting outside on lawn chairs, children and dogs were running around, and there was smoke rising from barbecues. He rolled the car window down, and the smell of the river and the cottonwoods brought with it a sudden childhood memory of playing in this very park, of the cozy interiors of mobile homes, and of sitting on the lawn watching bats flitting through the open spaces between the trees on an evening very much like this one.
    Several people looked up curiously as he drove past, and one man waved, as if he knew who Calvin was, which he probably did. Probably they
all
did, for some inscrutable reason. Calvin waved back, then took off his watch and put it into the glove box, switched off the air conditioner, and rolled down the window. His cell phone lay on the seat beside him, and he realized that he wouldn’t be wanting it, despite the chance of Hosmer calling him with further orders. Whatever the Bible had to say about a nagging fishwife went double for cell phones. He turned the phone off and put it into the glove box with his watch, and turned right onto a small potholed street that led to the river, past the Cozy Diner cafe, a secondhand store, and the churchyard. Along the river stood several old homes on big lots, one of which was the Lymon estate.
    The house sat a few feet above the bank of the Colorado, shaded by a half dozen big cottonwoods. An arbor out front was draped with