Deadly Welcome

Chapter Two

After lunch the next day he got the folder from the hotel manager and went to the Pentagon. He told them he had decided to do it. He did not tell them why. He did not tell them that he had learned in the long and sleepless hours of the night that if he did not go back he would spend the rest of his life in a half-world where neither identity fitted him, neither the old nor the new. He could not say that this was, in a sense, his own search for Alexander Doyle.

When he said he would rather not take the file with him, they both questioned him sharply until they were satisfied that he had retained all the information he needed to know. “And what about a cover story, Mr. Doyle?”

“I’ve got one that I think is very ordinary and very foolproof, sir. I know South America pretty well. And I know heavy construction equipment. On my last assignment I was working outdoors. And I look it, I guess. A lot of single men take construction jobs abroad for the high pay, and then go back to their home towns. If I had the passport and necessary papers to show I’d been in Venezuela for the last three years...”

“Sounds good enough. Get rolling on that, Jerry. Mr. Doyle, what will be your public reason for going back to Ramona?”

“Tired of knocking around. Got a few bucks saved up. Looking around with the idea of maybe setting myself up in a small business. If it hasn’t changed too much, I’ll rent a cottage out on Ramona Beach. That will put me closer to Colonel M’Gann. After I get established, I’ll have to play it by ear. Maybe I can line up some kind of temporary job that will make it easier to get to the colonel. I’ll need mobility, Colonel Presser. I think the best thing would be to fly to Tampa and pick up the right kind of clothes there and a used car. I don’t think I was expected to amount to very much. Except for having some cash, I don’t think I want to disappoint them.”

“You sound bitter, Mr. Doyle.”

“A little. Maybe. But I’ll be a lot less conspicuous than if I went into town driving a rental sedan and wearing a suit like this one, sir.”

“You are absolutely right, Mr. Doyle. I approve the plan. It isn’t theatrical. You won’t be tripped by the casual question. And you can look and play the part, I’m sure. When can we have his papers ready, Jerry?”

“By tomorrow noon, Colonel.”

“We want you to take all the time you need to handle it carefully, Mr. Doyle. I think three thousand dollars would be ample.”

“More than enough.”

“How would you take it with you? Traveler’s checks?”

“Alex Doyle, construction bum, would wear a money belt, sir. Or he wouldn’t have any cash to bring back with him.”

Presser laughed his approval. “Come in a little before noon tomorrow.”

He bought the three-hundred-dollar Dodge off a Tampa lot late on Monday afternoon, the thirteenth day of April. He didn’t want to arrive in Ramona after dark, so that evening he drove down as far as Sarasota and found a second-class motel south of the city on the Tamiami Trail. Ever since he left Washington he had been trying to fit himself into the part he would play.

That night, when he was ready for bed, he carefully inspected the stranger in the bathroom mirror. The sandy hair had been cropped short and the gray at the temples was now practically invisible. The eyes were a pale gray-blue. It was a long face, subtly stamped with the melancholy of lonely tasks. A big nose and a stubborn shelving of jaw. A sallow facial texture that took a deep tan and kept it. Twisty scar at the left corner of the broad mouth. A flat, hard, rangy body, with big feet and knobbed wrists and big freckled hands.

He studied the stranger and said quite softly, “Banged around here and there. Have driven shovels and Euclids and cats. And some deep-well work.”

The face looked back at him, passive, somewhat secretive, with a hidden pride and hint of wildness.

He stretched out in the dark and listened to the trucks go by just beyond his window. There was a band of moonlight in the room. And air scented with diesel fuel and jasmine. This was home land. And different. Sarasota had turned from sleepy village to busy tourist center. Ramona would be changed too. But not as much. It was miles off the Tamiami Trail.

Tomorrow he would drive into town, right down Bay Street. His hands were sweaty. He could hear the knocking of his heart. And he was a kid in a cell in Davis, wondering what they were going to do to him.

At ten o’clock on Tuesday morning he turned off Route 41 onto State Road 978, moving slowly through the bright hot morning, through soaring throngs of mosquito hawks, through flat scrub land with occasional oak hammocks and some tall stands of slash pine. The last time he had come over this road he had been going the other way, fast, in a back seat between two deputies, dog-sick and trying not to sniffle. They had stopped to let him be sick at the side of the road while the deputies talked in soft slow voices about the hunting season. He remembered wondering if they were wishing he’d try to run.

About four miles from town he came upon the first change. A huge tract had been cleared and shell roads had been put in, but now the scrub was growing up again. A big faded sign said that it was Ramona Heights. Florida Living at a Reasonable Price. Big Quarter-Acre Lots at $300. Ten Dollars Down. Title Insurance. See Your Broker. The roads were named after the states of the union, and the road signs were so faded as to be almost illegible. He could see a few scattered houses, small cinder-block structures painted in brave bright colors.

Farther on he came on new houses where it had all been pasture land, and then some drive-ins and motels and a small shopping section. More houses, and a new school of blond stone and glass, with the yellow buses ranked outside it. And then, ahead of him, he could see where the trees started, the big live oaks, bearded with Spanish moss, that shaded the east end of Bay Street. They were the memorial oaks, planted right after the first World War, and to him they had always marked the edge of town.

He drove along the shade of Bay Street, past the old frame houses and the old stucco houses of the boom of long ago, and he read the forgotten names of the side streets. And then he was back in sunlight again, where the street widened, looking along the three blocks of the business center toward the blue water of Ramona Bay, bisected by the causeway and old wooden bridge that, as a continuation of Bay Street, provided access to Ramona Key and Ramona Beach.

The old hotel was still there with its broad porches, but the stores across from it had been torn down and replaced by a chain supermarket set well back, a big parking lot, orange parking lines vivid against asphalt, in front of it. Cars dozed in the sun. A pregnant woman walked tiredly toward a dusty station wagon, followed by a boy in a soiled white apron pushing a supermarket cart containing two big bags of groceries. A grubby little girl sat on the curbing in front of the telephone office, solemnly licking a big pink icecream cone. Cars were parked diagonally in the sun on either side of Bay Street, noses patient against the curbing. There was a new bright plastic front on Bolley’s Hardware. Where Stimson’s Appliance had been there was a big shiny gas station where two fat red-faced men stood drinking Cokes and watching an attendant check the oil on a Chrysler with Ohio plates.

He read the lawyer names and the doctor names on the second-floor windows of the Gordon Building, and a lot of them were different, but a lot of them could be remembered.

The Castle Theater was closed, boarded up. There was a new dime store. And now they had parking meters.

He looked at Ducklin’s Sundries. It was bigger. It had taken over the feed store, and the whole front was an expanse of cream and crimson plastic and big windows. He parked in front of it. Getting out of the car and walking in was one of the most difficult things he had ever done. It was frigidly air-conditioned. An old man who looked vaguely familiar stood by a big magazine rack mumbling to himself as he read a comic book. Two young women sat at the counter with their packages, eating sundaes. There was a pimpled young girl in a yellow nylon uniform behind the counter, scraping the grill with a spatula, slowly and listlessly. A young man sat on his heels by a center counter, taking items out of a carton and stacking them on a shelf. Alex Doyle knew no one.

He walked to the counter and slid onto one of the red stools. The pimpled girl glanced at him and dropped the spatula, wiped her hands on her apron and came over.

“Coffee,” he said. “Black.” When she brought the coffee he said, “Is Joe or Myra around?”

“Joe? Myra? I don’t get it.”

“Mr. or Mrs. Ducklin,” he said.

“They don’t own it any more,” the girl said. “You want to see the owner, it’s Mr. Ellman and he isn’t in.”

The young housewives had apparently overheard the conversation. “Pardon me, but Joe Ducklin died a long time ago. Oh, ten years anyway. She ran it for a while and then she sold out, a couple years later I guess it was. It’s kinda creepy, somebody asking for Joe. Pardon me. I mean it just sounded creepy. You know.”

“I used to live here.”

She was a heavy young matron, hippy, with a rather coarse face and a dab of chocolate on her chin. “I’ve been right here my whole life long, so if you lived here I guess maybe I ought to know you.” She laughed in a rather disturbingly coy way.

“I used to work in this store,” he said.

The other woman peered at him intently. “You wouldn’t... you couldn’t possibly be Alex Doyle? You must be!” She was a sallow blonde with a long upper lip.

“You’re right.”

“Well, I wouldn’t guess you’d know me because I was just a little bit of a thing, but I sure remember you coming over to the house to see Jody. Jody Burch. I’m one of Jody’s kid sisters. I’m Junie. Now I’m Junie Hillyard. I don’t know if you remember Billy Hillyard. And this here is my best girl friend, Kathy Hubbard, who used to be Kathy King.”

“I... I don’t remember Billy Hillyard, except as a name. But I certainly remember Jody. Does he live here?”

“Jody’s dead,” she said. “He liked the navy so good he stayed in, and it was just three years ago and he was on a supply ship and they were loading something and something broke and they dropped it on him. It was a terrible thing. He had thirteen years in and he was only going to stay twenty.”

“I’m sorry to hear it.”

“It just about broke us all up. His wife is married again. She sure didn’t wait long, that one. She wasn’t local so you wouldn’t know her. A Philadelphia girl.”

“Does Myra Ducklin still live in town?”

“Why, she surely does! She’s right over on Palm Street in that house they always had. I just remembered you’re kin to her, somehow, and you used to live there so I guess I don’t have to tell you...”

She stopped abruptly and her eyes grew round, and Doyle knew that she had suddenly remembered all the rest of it. She leaned close to her friend and whispered to her, rudely and at length. Then Mrs. Kathy Hubbard turned and stared at him also.

They had finished their sundaes and their money was on the counter. They stood up and Junie cleared her throat and said, “Are you really sure Mrs. Ducklin would want to see you?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Are you on a vacation?”

“I might move back here, Junie. Care to advise me?”

“Maybe you’d feel more at home if you settled down at Bucket Bay, Alex Doyle.” They walked out with great dignity. And stared at him through the windows as they walked toward their car with the packages. Junie had the intense look of the confirmed gossip. The self-righteous gossip. That Alex Doyle has come back here, bold as brass, and what are decent people going to do about it? He had the nerve to speak to me. Robbed his kin and they let him run away into the army and here he is right back again after all this time. Cheap sporty shirt and snappy slacks. Tough looking.

He put a dime beside the empty cup and as he got up and turned to go, a big old man, sweaty and slow-moving, came in out of the sidewalk heat, patting his broad forehead with a blue bandanna. Jeff Ellandon. Perennial mayor of Ramona. Fifteen years heavier and slower.

He looked at Doyle with shrewd old eyes, stuffed the bandanna in his pocket and said, in a voice frayed and thin with age, “Guess I should know you, son. Guess my memory is about to give out on me. You one of the Bookers?”

“Doyle, Judge. Alex Doyle.”

“Well sure now. Bert’s boy. There was you and Rafe, and he was the older one, got drownded with Bert that time. Mother was Mary Ann Elder from up in Osprey. Come and set, son.”

Alex followed the man back to a small booth and sat facing him. He ordered another cup of coffee and Judge Ellandon had a double order of chocolate ice cream.

“Been away for some time, I’d say, son. You were the one had that trouble. You worked right here, come to think of it. Joe Ducklin was a second cousin of your daddy. I remember Joe cussin’ you almost right up to the time he died. Stingy old rascal. He and Spence Larkin were the closest men in town. The way I figured it, you were just collecting back wages, son. I guess you can see the town ain’t changed much.”

“I saw a lot of new stuff when I drove in, Judge.”

“I guess we must have had maybe fifteen hundred people when you left and we haven’t got more than seventeen, eighteen hundred right now. Everybody else growing up big north and south of us and we keep poking along. No future here, son. It’s those dang Jansons.”

It was a story Alex had long been familiar with, the favorite gripe of local businessmen and boosters. At the turn of the century a wealthy sportsman named Janson had come down from Chicago to fish. He bought land on the north end of Ramona Key and built a fishing lodge. When Alex had been little the kids believed the old corroding structure was haunted. It had burned down when he had been about nine years old. Janson had been the one who financed the causeway and bridge to Ramona Key. And he had so believed in the future of the area that, for a sickeningly small sum, he had purchased all of Ramona Key except for a three-quarter-mile strip of Gulf to bay land just opposite the causeway, all seven miles of Kelly Key, and huge mainland tracts on either side of the sleepy fishing village. Janson had died during the first World War, and the estate had been tied up in litigation for many years. At the time of the Florida boom there were plans to subdivide and sell off the Janson lands, but the boom collapsed before any action was taken. Since then any attempt to buy any Janson land had been met with stony indifferent silence.

“They still won’t sell any off, Judge?”

He snorted with ancient fury. “Got all the money in the world. Don’t want more. Don’t give a damn the town is strangled. Can’t grow except to the east into the piny woods. Nobody’s going to come in here with big money and put up the kind of stuff that’ll bring the tourists and make the town grow, not with that little bitty piece of Gulf front that’s the only part them Jansons didn’t buy.”

“Are you mayor now, Judge?”

“Lord, boy, it’s been a mighty long time since I was mayor. Or anything else. I was on the County Commissioners a while, but it like to kill me running over to all those meetings in Davis all the time. Seventy-one-mile round trip to argue about if we should buy a two-bit record book. I couldn’t get no place political after Spence Larkin died. You know we were close, and just about anything he wanted to happen in this town, it happened. Anybody try to cross Spence and they’d find out he picked up their paper from the bank and he’d start in a-squeezing on them.”

“When did he die, Judge?”

“Let me look back now a minute. Yes, that was in nineteen and fifty. Seems he had a gut pain he didn’t pay enough attention to, and he finally went up to Tampa and they checked him over and said they wanted to operate. So he come back and he was busy as hell selling stuff and getting all his business stuff straightened away. And he went back up there and they operated and he up and died the next day. There was me and one or two others and his family that felt sorry about it, but the rest of the town went around sort of trying to hide a big grin. He was a man didn’t give a damn for making himself popular.”

“Did Jenna get down for the funeral?”

“Lordy, no. They never knew how to get hold of her fast. But she found out somehow and she was down here about two weeks later, storming around. Come in a great big car along with some funny-looking people. She’d done her hair red and she wore the tightest pants ever seen around here, son. Didn’t even stay over the night. Just found out from her folks that the will said she was to get one dollar, so damn if she didn’t go over there across the street to Wilson Willing’s office and collect the dollar and take off. Buddy Larkin didn’t make the funeral either. He was off there in Korea running up and down them hills with the marines. The only family here was Betty and her ma. Betty was seventeen then, thereabouts. Well, sir, old Angel Cobey, he was running the boat yard for the heirs, and when Buddy came back home it didn’t take him long to find out Angel was stealing the family blind. Buddy brought a marine pal of his back, name of Johnny Geer. So they pitched in and they did fair with it, but they didn’t begin to do real good until about fifty-four when Betty come home from college in Gainesville and pitched in too. Buddy is good on the mechanical end, but it’s Betty’s got more the head for business like Spence had. Of course their ma, Lila, she’s got no more head for business than a water turkey. Spence had left the business awful run down. He wasn’t interested in it. Now, Lordy, they get boats in there from all the way from Tarpon Springs to Marathon, boats where people want the work done right and done reasonable. They turned it into a corporation so Johnny Geer could get a piece of it, and they wrote Jenna to see if she wanted in and she said she didn’t want no gifts.”

“Judge, I’m a little confused on this thing. What for would they want to run that boat yard? After what Mr. Larkin must have left?”

“Well, I’ll tell you what Spence left, son. He left that house on Grove Road all free and clear. And a thousand shares of bank stock you can’t sell and hasn’t paid a dividend in years. And a pretty good new Cadillac. You remember that was about the only thing he ever bought himself, a new car every year and run the living hell out of it. And about eleven thousand in cash. And the boat yard. Oh, and some little pieces of acreage. No-account land.”

“Where did it all go anyhow?”

He chuckled. “Good question, son. The tax folks would like to know too. By God, you never saw such digging. Like to tore up half the county looking for Spence’s money. Thought they were about to turn up an old coffee can with a million dollars in it. There’s some kind of tax action been dragging along in the courts.”

“Do you think he hid the money, Judge?”

“I know he had plenty that never showed up. The way I figure it, Spence wasn’t quite ready. He counted on some more time. But he got cut off too quick. Son, it was one hell of a funeral. About half of Tallahassee down here, and folks out of county government from all over hell and gone. Ole Spence had put the screws to most of them and the word was they come to make sure he was really dead. When they lowered the box, you could dang near hear the big sigh of relief. Me, I liked old Spence, mean as he was. You just had to understand him. His daddy fished commercial all his life and when they buried him they bought a used suit coat and a new necktie. And borrowed the white shirt. Spence and me were a pair of raggedy-ass kids in those days, and that didn’t bother me as much as it did him. It bothered him a lot. And so he spent his life correcting that state of affairs. And he was one hell of a lonely man the whole time. Seems like Jenna was the only thing really meant anything to him outside of the money. But she had that wildness in her. Got it from her grandma, Spence’s mother, I’d say. That woman kicked up her heels all over three counties afore work and kids ground her down. And the only kid lived to grow up was Spence.”

“And then Jenna came back for the second time,” Alex said.

“She surely did. Just about a year and a half ago, with her important husband in such bad shape they had to ambulance him from Tampa airport all the way down here. She’d been down ahead of him and rented the old Proctor cottage out on the beach and fixed it up some, and then went back and got him. It had been in the Davis Journal about her marrying him, but you couldn’t get folks around here to really believe it. But they believed it all right when she showed up, better than seven years after Spence passed away. Maybe she came back here to prove she’d done good. I don’t know. But she come back a lady, son. In dress and talk and manners. You never hear such gabbling and cackling as the women did. Said she looked hard in the face, but I couldn’t see it. She looked fine to me. Didn’t mix much, not with him so sick, but she saw a lot of Betty and Buddy and her ma. She was nursing that colonel back to health. And she kept it up about six months.”

“I saw some of the newspaper stuff when she was killed, Judge. It sort of hinted she’d been living it up.”

“Out of the clear blue she shows up one night over there in the Spanish Mackerel on Front Street, Harry Bann’s place. The Mack ain’t changed since you were here, son. It’s rough and tough most of the time, and gets worse when those people down to Bucket Bay come up to town to raise hell. So she had some drinks and she played the jook and the pinball and the bowling and didn’t leave until the bar closed and then she didn’t leave alone.”

The judge winked ponderously and said, “There’s a lot of fellas around here in their thirties and early forties that first learned what makes the world go round from Jenna. And the pride in any man says that if he’s once bedded a woman he can do it again. And if it’s been a long time, he gets an itch to prove he’s the man he used to be. So while Jenna was being a lady, they were trying to edge in on her and getting no place at all. And when she stopped being a lady, they gathered around pawing the ground something fierce. It was like she stopped giving a damn. Find her in the Mack almost any night, sopping it up. Some army friend had drove their car down, a blue Olds, one of the small ones, and you could find it parked in front or out in that lot behind the place any time. Well, sir, after she got picked up for drunk driving, the colonel’s sister come down to take care of him, and I don’t guess Jenna and the sister got along so good. Buddy and Betty and Miz Larkin were trying to get Jenna straightened out again, but it was like the old days. She wouldn’t listen to nothing. She drove the car after they took away her license and she racked it up for fair. Chopped down a big old cabbage palm with it. Total loss. Then she took to disappearing two and three days at a stretch. Come back hung over to rest up and start all over again.

“Well, sir, that went on until last November on the twenty-first day, a Friday. Better to call it Saturday morning, I guess. She was in the Mack from maybe eight o’clock on. I stopped in and saw her. Just happened to see her. Bright yella slacks and a little white sweater, but both of them looking slept in, and her hair tangly, and no money so people were buying her drinks for her. There was always somebody around to buy Jenna a drink. They say Buddy came in about eleven to get her to go home. She didn’t have transportation. But she bad-mouthed him and he took off and left her there. But I guess you read all about it, son.”

“I can’t remember it so good.”

“Near as anybody can tell she left the place alone to walk back. It would be a mile, or a little better. And it would make easier walking on the beach than on that sand road. She left a little after two, and the one found her on the beach at daybreak, halfway home, was that crazy old Darcey woman that goes shelling at dawn every day of her life no matter what weather it is. Jenna was there, on her back, her head up the beach slope and her feet in the water. No rape or anything like that. Somebody had busted her a dandy on the jaw. It had chipped her teeth. And then they’d took hold of her by the throat and held on. I tell you it made one hell of a sight for that Darcey woman to come up on. You know something. She hasn’t acted half as crazy since then, and she hasn’t been shelling one time.

“Well, sir, you never seen such a fuss as we had around here. Sheriff Roy Lawlor, he come over from Davis, and Parnell Lee, the State’s Attorney, he was here, and both of them acting like the one in charge. And there was some kind of special investigator down from Tallahassee. And we had reporters from as far off as Atlanta. More questions asked and picture-taking than you ever saw. For once the town was full up. They questioned the colonel’s sister and, when she finally let them, the colonel, but they’d both gone to bed early and anyway back then the colonel was still in no shape to go around killing anybody, even a little bit of a thing like Jenna. They questioned everybody lived on the beach which wasn’t many, and they locked up just about every customer the Mack had had that night. I guess it was all on account of that Colonel M’Gann being a sort of national figure and Jenna having been, in a manner of speaking, in show business. The papers really struggled keeping that story alive. Some smart fella with a long memory on a Miami paper, he dug around until he got hold of one of those art photography magazines from way back about forty-eight where dang near the whole issue was pictures of Jenna, naked as an egg. And there were a few of them you could just barely print in a family newspaper, like one of her holding a big black cat to kind of cut off the view. So those wire service people picked those up and as you know I guess there wasn’t a man in the country didn’t find out Jenna was built pretty good. You know, son, back when that magazine came out, while Spence was still alive, somebody from here found a copy on a stand over in Orlando, and he bought all they had and he went around and bought a lot more copies from other stands, and for a time there this town was full up with copies of that magazine. Then somebody sneaked one onto Spence’s desk over to the boat yard and why he didn’t fall over with a stroke I’ll never know.

“Yes, sir, we had us a time last November. Cash registers ringing all over town. It’s a wonder the junior chamber didn’t try to set up a murder a week to keep things humming. The big shots just elbowed Donnie Capp out of the way. I don’t know if you remember him. He got himself a little shot up in the service and got doctored out in forty and three, and when he came back, Sheriff Roy Lawlor he made Donnie a deputy and he’s been that ever since. And Donnie takes care of this end of the county all by his own self. Knows every inch of it. He purely loves to beat heads. He had to sit way back while Lawlor and Lee were around here puffing out their chests.

“But they couldn’t find out a thing and so it all kind of dwindled away. Jenna is planted right beside Spence. Wonder sometimes if they’ve had a chance to make up. Before she run off there was an outside chance Spence could have turned into a human being. But that tore the rag off the bush.” He sighed. “You get an old man to talking, son, and you’ve got yourself an all-day listening job. What you been doing all the time you’ve been gone?”

“A couple of wars, Judge. And knocking around here and there. South America. Construction work. Decided maybe I’d come back and look around. Might settle here.”

“Like I said, there’s no future here. Not in Ramona. The young folks leave fast as they can. Town gets older every year. The waters are about fished out. All the cypress has been logged out. The deer and the turkey are all gone. We got some retireds moving in. Folks that like it quiet and ain’t got much to do with. It’s quiet all right. Always had the idea I’d like to see some of the world. The furthest away place I ever did get to was Chicago, in nineteen and twenty-six when we made up a committee and went up to dicker with those Janson folks about the land. Scared hell out of me up there.”

“Judge, are you still in the real-estate business?”

“Not to strain me none. Got an office just around the corner on Gordon Street. Took a woman in with me, name of Myrtle Loveless. Got a lot of energy, Myrtle has. A Carolina woman that got her divorce down here and stayed on. She does most that has to be done.”

“I think I’d like to rent a beach cottage.”

“Good time to do it, son. Town folks don’t move out there until school’s over. Got a pretty good choice right now. You just go see Myrtle. Tell her you’re a friend of mine.”

“I... I guess people are going to remember what happened when I left.”

“Sure they’ll remember. There isn’t enough happens here to cloud up their minds. Most kids do fool things. Some folks will try to nasty things up for you. Do you care?”

“I guess so, Judge.”

“Nice to see you back home, son.”

As Alex left Ducklin’s, turning toward Gordon Street, he saw a young man walking toward him, a slouching, swaggering kid of about twenty-three or four with red hair worn too long, a pinched, insolent face boiled red by the sun, faded jeans patched at the knees, a soiled white sport shirt. When the blue eyes stared at him in reckless, arrogant appraisal, Doyle felt his muscles tighten with ancient angers. And just as suddenly he realized that this could not be Gil Kemmer. He was too young to be Gil. But he was one of the Kemmers. One of the wild breed from Bucket Bay.

The young man stopped in front of Alex and said, “Know you, don’t I?” There was a sharp reek of raw corn.

“I used to know Gil pretty well. I’m Alex Doyle.”

“I’ll be damn. I’m Lee Kemmer. You and Gil used to pound on each other regular. You bust his wrist one time.”

“He tried to cut me.”

Lee Kemmer swayed in the sunlight, grinning in a knowing way. “Gil didn’t get the breaks they give you, Doyle. He drew four at Raiford. He’s been out a year, keeping his head down. He draws a little county time now and again on account of they pick on us Kemmers all the time. And need their damn road work done for free. This is a rough place for anybody likes a little fun. Let’s you and me go to the Mack and drink up some beer, Doyle.”

“Thanks. I’ve got things to do.”

“You still too good for the Kemmers?”

“It isn’t that.”

“If my brother couldn’t whip you, maybe I can. We’ll try that some time. I’ll tell Gil you’re back in town.”

Doyle shrugged and stepped around him. When he looked back, Lee was still standing there, grinning at him.

Alex walked to the real-estate office, a small place with a big window, a cluttered bulletin board, a wide hearty woman with black hair cut like a man’s sitting on the corner of a desk talking over the phone. She cupped her hand over the phone and said, “Have yourself a chair. Be through here in a minute. Now, Emily Ann, you’re jus’ not bein’ realistic, honey. No, I certainly don’t want you to give the lot away, but after all, honey, you’ve had it on the market three years and this is the first firm offer that’s come in, and I think it’s better to take it than keep paying taxes on that little old lot. All right, I’ll see if he’ll come up just a little bitty bit more. And let you know. ’By, honey.”

She hung up and said, “Her husband’s been dead twenty years and he bought that lot for forty dollars and now she doesn’t want to sell it for twelve hundred. I’m Myrtle Loveless. Can I help you?”

“Alex Doyle. The Judge says to see you about renting a beach cottage.”

“I’ve got listings, but they’re kinda on the primitive side, Mr. Doyle. They...”

“I used to live here. I know what they’re like. I’d want one for a month.”

She opened a big key rack. A half hour later he paid her eighty dollars for a one-month rental, picked up groceries at the supermarket without seeing anyone he knew, and drove back on out to the Carney cottage on the beach. It was of weatherbeaten cypress and sat two feet off the ground on thick piers. There was a small living room with rattan furniture and a grass rug, a bedroom, a small and primitive kitchen in the rear with a very noisy refrigerator, an inside bath with tub, and an outside cold-water shower. On the front was a small screened porch with two chairs of corroded aluminum tubing and plastic webbing. The front porch was fifty feet from the high-tide line. He stowed his supplies, took a long swim and a cold shower, and then sat on the screened porch with a cheese sandwich and a bottle of milk, squinting through the white glare of the sand toward the deep blue of the early afternoon Gulf.

The cottage on his left, visible beyond the trees, was empty. Myrtle had told him that the next cottage to the north was also empty. He could not see that one. Beyond that one was the Proctor cottage where Colonel Crawford M’Gann lived with his sister.

He realized that somehow the world had reverted to the dimensions of childhood. This was the known place. So well known. He and Jody Burch had gone gigging along this beach line in Jody’s old scow, with a homemade tin reflector around the Coleman lantern, taking turns with the gig. Not two hundred yards from where he sat, but twenty years ago, he had helped work the nets when that unforgettable school of mullet had appeared, a mile and more of mullet, a hundred yards wide and five feet deep, almost solid enough to walk on. Hundreds upon hundreds of tons of fish, so that every boat had been out. And he had taken them out of the gill net until his arms had been like lead. But it hadn’t done anybody any good. They’d been getting seven cents a pound, but it dropped to five and then three and then a penny, and then you couldn’t get rid of them. And they had been buried under fruit trees and rose bushes all over town.

The Sunday school picnics had nearly always been at the Proctor cottage where the colonel was now living. And you showed off by swimming out as far as you dared, pretending not to hear the Reverend Mountainberry bellowing at you to come back.

Up the beach a little farther was where you and Ed Torrance set out all those stone crab traps that year and did so well. And the stone crabs bought that American Flyer bicycle, and Joe Ducklin got so sore because he thought the money should have gone for clothes.

A vivid world, every inch of it known. And now, as in childhood, the rest of the world did not exist, except as colored maps and faraway names. He had been out into a lot of that world, but now it did not seem real. It was like something he had made up. This was the home place, and the bright borders of it were those farthest places you had been when you were a kid. Beyond the borders was a hazy nothingness.

The Gulf was flat calm, the day strangely still — without thrash of bait fish, or tilting yawp of terns or the busy-legged sandpipers.

He heard, in the stillness, a distant rumbling of the timbers of the old wooden bridge, and the sound of a rough automotive engine, coming closer, running along the sand and shell road between the cottages and the bay shore. He heard it stop directly behind the cottage. He got up and walked back to the kitchen door and looked out through the screen and saw a battered blue jeep parked next to his old gray Dodge. A sign on the side of the jeep said, The Larkin Boat Yard and Marina — Ramona, Florida.

A girl had gotten out of the jeep. She stood for a moment, looking toward the cottage, and then came toward the back door.