The Knights of the Cornerstone Read Online Free PDF

bougainvillea and honeysuckle and was a tangle of purple and red blossoms. Two swamp coolers perched on the roof, and Calvin could hear them rumbling as soon as he pulled in under the carport and turned off the engine. There was a wooden door set into the base of the wall at the top end of the carport—the entrance to a cellar bomb shelter or some other survivalist quirk. Apparently all the houses in New Cyprus had one, although he wasn’t sure about the trailers in the park. Maybe they had some kind of hatch in the floor.
    The shelter door stood open now, a light glowing out of it. He sat for a moment in the quiet car, thinking about meeting his aunt and wondering whether she would remember him at all or if she was too far gone. There was a movement in the lighted doorway, and his uncle’s head emerged, followed by the rest of him. He carried an emptycardboard box, which he tossed aside, waving cheerfully at Calvin before switching off a light on the outside wall and shutting the shelter door.
    Calvin climbed out of the car, taking the box that Shirley Fowler had given him. His uncle stood there smiling, wearing a sport shirt, a pair of Bermuda shorts with suspenders, and beat-up leather slip-on sandals. He said, “Welcome to New Cyprus, Cal. I was just loading supplies into the shelter. Can’t tell when the next flood might rise up.”
    “But do you want to be belowground when the waters rise?” Calvin asked.
    “By heaven, you’re right,” his uncle said. “What we want is an ark. Maybe the two of us can knock one out while you’re here.” He put out his hand and Calvin shook it. His uncle had the same jolly look about him that Calvin remembered—the same edge-of-laughter smile, the conspiratorial wink. He had always been stout, and the extra pounds gave his round face an almost youthful look. He seemed tired, though, borne down by gravity, as if life had gotten hard for him at a time when he would have been better off taking it easy.
Let that be a lesson to you
, Calvin told himself. Taking it easy wasn’t something to be put off.
    “Did you bring that grape soda?” his uncle asked.
    “Yes, indeed,” Calvin said, and he handed over the substitute Aunt Iris box before heading around to the passenger side of the car.
    His uncle looked at the box and nodded, not saying anything about the Gas’n’Go address.
    “You know a character named Fred Woolsworth?” Calvin asked him.
    “Never heard of him,” his uncle said. “Woolsworth?”
    “Yeah, like ‘money’s worth.’ He said he was a friend ofyours, and that he knew Dad back in Orange City in the old days.”
    “That doesn’t tell me much. I never heard of any Woolsworth.”
    “Says he lives in Bullhead City. Drives an old green pickup with a bad muffler.”
    “That sounds like a fellow named Bob Postum. Beard? Heavyset?”
    “Yeah. Longish gray hair. Maybe seventy. He’s big, but he looks fit enough, like he could take care of himself if he had to.”
    ‘That’s Postum. He told you his name was
Woolsworth
? That’s typical. Lowball sense of humor. It’s stretching it a little if he told you he’s a friend of mine. We wouldn’t let him into the Knights. Wrong pedigree. In fact, he tried to buy the old Brewer place right upriver there through a second party, but it … fell out of escrow, you might say.”
    Calvin hefted out the case of soda and set it on the trunk. “I might be wrong, but I think he might have stolen the box with the veil in it—the one I got in the mail from Warren Hosmer. I don’t say that he
did
, only that he might have. Someone broke into my car when I was in Shirley Fowler’s store—she sends her regards, by the way—and when I came out the trunk had been opened and the box was missing. Whoever it was left the trunk unlatched, too, like they
wanted
me to know they’d stolen it.”
    “Pride goeth,” he said. “Are you sure you didn’t leave it back home?”
    “No chance. Like I say, I don’t
know
that