Deadly Welcome

Chapter Six

By the time Doyle was up and shaved and dressed on Thursday, he knew that it wasn’t going to be one of the best days he had ever spent. His arms were leaden. Each slow movement had to be tested cautiously to see how much it was going to hurt. Even in areas where he could not remember being hit, his muscles felt as though they had been dipped in cement and rolled in broken glass.

It was a day of high, white, scattered clouds that frequently masked the sun, and a fresh northwest wind with a hint of chill in it. After he had breakfast and cleaned up, he hobbled slowly out onto the beach, dragging an ancient gray navy blanket.

After he had baked for nearly an hour, Betty Larkin said, “Good morning! I guess you feel better.” She beamed down at him and dropped lithely into a Buddha pose on the corner of his blanket. She wore a pale gray one-piece swim suit with small blue flowers embroidered on it. She carried a white rubber cap and a big towel.

“I feel just fine. I feel just a little bit better than if I was poking myself in the eye with a stick.”

“I saw you out here, so I went in and changed. Hope you don’t mind?”

“Not a bit. If I don’t have to swim too.”

“But you do! I heard Gil tell you to.”

“I know. But I haven’t got any character.”

“Come on now! Come on!”

He groaned as he stood up. He followed her to the water. She tucked that bright heavy hair into the rubber cap and dived in and swam out. He paddled very slowly and tentatively, floating often, until, much sooner than he would have thought possible, some of the pain and stiffness began to leave his muscles. And he began to extend himself. He swam beside her, and they swam out to the unexposed sand bar a couple of hundred yards out. He swam with the untutored ease and confidence of any Floridian born and raised near the water. His stroke, he knew, looked clumsy, but it got him through the water quickly and without thrash or great effort. She was a superb swimmer. He knew she had had coaching. She was as sleek and swift and graceful as an otter.

They stood on the bar, facing each other. The water came to her shoulders.

“I talked to Donnie last night. First he tried to laugh it off. Then he got mad. He told me it wasn’t any of my business. But I just got twice as mad as he did, and he finally got it through his thick head that I would make trouble for him, all that I possibly could, if he touches you again. And then he pretended that a great light had suddenly dawned on him and he...” she paused and looked toward the shore, her face coloring slightly under the deep tan “...said he didn’t know we were in love. And even if I wasn’t showing much taste, he wouldn’t beat up any boy friend of mine. It was just his way of saving face. He knows better than that.” She laughed in a bitter and humorless way. “I guess the whole town knows better than that. In his own way, he was being as nasty as he could.”

“I don’t know what you mean about the whole town.”

“It’s a long dull story. Anyway, he got the message.”

“And thank you. It’s a pleasure hiding behind your skirts. I would like to meet him some time outside the state of Florida.”

“And I had a scrap with Buddy. No sister of his, by God, was going to be buddying around with no sneak thief. I told him you didn’t do it, and why you’d said you had. So he said it looked like I’d swallow anything you felt like telling me. I... got him straightened out after a while. Now he’d like to see you. But he won’t come out here. I would like to have you stop at the yard. Sort of casual-like. I mean, if you’re going to settle here, Alex, it’s people like Buddy who will make the difference.”

“I’ll stop by some time, Betty.”

“Good.”

They swam back in. She toweled herself, pulled off the cap, fluffed her hair, sat on the blanket and took one of his cigarettes. He stretched out near her. She sat looking out toward the water, hugging her knees. She had missed one portion of her back when she had dried herself. The sun-silver droplets of water stood out against the deep warm brown of her shoulder.

“About what I said last night, Alex.”

“Yes?”

“About if you were playing a part or something. I guess you thought I was crazy. I guess that ever since... Jenna died, the whole town has been a little bit crazy. There were so many people prying. It’s terrible the way they flock around. Oh, Donnie Capp had a ball. He really did. Some of them were crackpots and some were free-lance magazine writers and some were amateur detectives. Donnie ran them out just as fast as they came in. The business people weren’t too happy about them being run off, but Donnie had the go-ahead from Sheriff Lawlor. There was some trouble about one man, about what they did to him over in Davis in the court house, but Donnie and two of the other deputies swore the man tried to run and fell down a flight of stairs, so nothing came of it. Donnie has said a hundred times that sooner or later, all by himself, he’s going to get his hands on the man that killed Jenna. He takes it as a kind of personal insult that it should happen right in his own area. You know, after they locked up just about everybody who’d been in the Mack that night, Donnie, they say, got six or seven confessions before the sheriff pulled him off because there were too many newspaper people in town. Maybe he will find out someday. I hope he does, and on the other hand, I sort of hope he doesn’t. Because then it will be the same thing all over again, and maybe worse with a trial and all. And it was very hard on Mother. You know, they’d come stand in the side yard and stare at the house with their mouths hanging open, like so many morons.

“Anyway, Alex, we’ve gotten so conditioned to people trying to pry that I got the crazy idea maybe somebody had sent you back here to... write it up or something. I guess you could find out... personal things that an outsider couldn’t. For one of those terrible slander magazines. I guess it was a silly idea.”

“You have my word of honor that I’m not here to write up the story of Jenna.”

She turned and smiled at him. “I guess it’s just an idea that somebody should have thought of. How about me helping you find something to do, Alex? What have you been thinking about doing?”

“Sounds like I’m becoming some sort of a project.”

“Maybe. Anyway, to keep the record straight, you don’t have to worry that maybe I’m moving in on you in any kind of... emotional way. I’d just like... to be your friend, Alex. I like to be with you because you don’t... get sloppy ideas and try to put your hands on me. That is sort of... what Donnie was referring to.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“This is a small town and it’s all public knowledge, and somebody will tell you all about it sooner or later, and they may get it all twisted, so I’ll tell you first. So you won’t make any... mistakes. Now you roll over the other way. It’s easier to talk to your back on this topic.”

“If it’s something that makes you that uncomfortable, I don’t have to hear it.”

“I think I’d like you to hear it from me so you’ll hear it truthfully. I was eleven when you left. And I guess it was all starting at about that time. Or maybe earlier. Jenna was Daddy’s favorite. He had no time for me or Buddy. As if he had only just enough love for one of his kids. When we were little, he used to call Sunday Jenna’s day. And whenever it was nice weather, they’d go off together on a Sunday picnic, sometimes in the car but almost always in that old skiff of his. I guess Buddy used to think the same way I did that when we got to be older, we’d go too. But it never turned out that way. Even though Jenna was six years older, I tried to be exactly like her. So he’d love me too. And get things for me the way he did for her. Little surprises, special things when he went on trips. And swing me up in his arms and laugh and call me his girl. But no matter how hard I tried to be just like her, it never worked, Alex. And so I began to feel that there was something wrong with me. Something terrible that I didn’t know about and nobody would tell me. I used to try to guess what it was.

“And finally, as I kept on growing and growing, I decided that it was because I was so big and ugly. Jenna was so dainty and pretty and little. That was a quality I couldn’t duplicate. When I was about eight, Daddy began to have trouble with Jenna. Some kind of trouble I didn’t understand. She lost interest in going on picnics with him or anything like that. And he started beating her for the first time, and then buying her presents to make up. Usually he would beat her because she came home so late. And when he’d tell her she couldn’t go out, she’d sneak out. I was secretly glad because I knew he was going to stop loving her and begin loving me. And I wouldn’t be bad the way Jenna was being bad. I couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t go on picnics. You remember when Jenna ran away. Daddy was like a crazy man. He spent a lot of money hiring people to find her and bring her home, but nobody could find her. And then he just seemed to pull way back inside of himself, where nobody could reach him.

“About a year later, after I was twelve, I was invited to a party on Saturday afternoon. Daddy was home that day. I had a blue dress, a new one for the party. He was sitting in the living room, reading some kind of business papers. I remembered how Jenna used to go to him and turn around like a model when she was dressed up for a party. And he would call her his girl friend and tell her how pretty she was. I guess I had some idea of cheering him up. And I did want him to be nice to me. So I went in and held my arms out and started turning around and around. It made me a little dizzy. After a little while he yelled for my mother. ‘Lila!’ he roared. ‘Lila, come get revolving scarecrow out of here!’ ”

“What a filthy thing to do!”

“I ran upstairs and locked myself in my room. I wouldn’t come out. I didn’t go to the party. I cut up the blue dress until there wasn’t one piece bigger than a postage stamp. And I refused to wear another dress until I went away to Gainesville after Daddy died. I was a big scarecrow, and jeans and shorts and khakis were good enough for scarecrows. That’s part of it, part of the reason, I guess.

“Anyway, by the time I was fourteen, I had a pretty good knowledge of what Jenna’s local career had been like. I won’t mince words, Alex. It was as if she had some strange kind of disease. Most of the boys she knew and a lot of men, married and single, in the county had lifted her little skirts, practically by invitation. I don’t know when or how it started. Or why. I know she had matured early, and I know I certainly didn’t. At fifteen I still looked like a skinny boy. Maybe I wanted to be a boy. I don’t know. But in the six months before Daddy died, I suddenly turned into the same approximate shape I still am. Sort of bovine, I guess you could call it.

“And I certainly didn’t want to follow in Jenna’s footsteps. She’d been gone a long time but they still talked about her. Dirty talk. It offended me. My ideas of romance were highly platonic. I wanted no part of kissing games. I was going to prove that there could be a Miss Larkin who could stay off her back, excuse the expression.

“In my freshman year I came back for Christmas vacation. All my friends were back. There was a big holiday dance at the high school auditorium. I had a date. There was a lot of drinking going on, out in the automobiles. And a rough element was hanging around, quite a few of them from Davis. By the time I realized my date was coming apart at the seams, he was too drunk to drive me home. I didn’t want to spoil anybody else’s fun by asking for an early ride home. So I started to walk it. It’s only about a mile.

“I got about a hundred yards from the auditorium. And suddenly, there in the dark, there were three men around me. They wanted to know where I was going all by myself. They smelled like ’shine. I tried to run and they grabbed me and took me around behind the gym. I kept trying to scream and fight, but they kept clamping their grimy hands over my mouth, and they kept hitting me so that I was dazed. They ripped most of my clothes off, and two of them held me down. I could hear the band playing in the auditorium. If they hadn’t been quite so drunk, I wouldn’t have had a chance in the world. But I kept kicking and bucking and squirming. I think one of them was trying to knock me out. Then somebody drove in and when they came to that turn in front of the gym, the headlights shone on the little scene and it scared them. Just then, thank God, the music stopped and I got my mouth free and yelled. And the car backed up so the lights were on us again. They took off. It was Ben Jeffry, coming to get his daughters. He had an old blanket in the car and he wrapped it around me. I was blubbering like a big baby. He took me to the doctor and even though I begged him not to make a fuss, he phoned the sheriff’s office and reported it as rape. Sheriff Lawlor himself came over. By then word had gotten to the dance somehow. Buddy was there, stag, and he came to the doctor’s office and then went home and got me some clothes. I wasn’t marked up too badly. I did develop two dandy black eyes, and I was cut on the inside of the mouth. I didn’t know who the men were, and I couldn’t describe them, and I couldn’t have identified them anyway.

“You know this town, Alex. There was more damn talk. I felt as if I couldn’t walk down the street without people running out of their houses to stare at me. By the time the gossips got through with it, it was rape instead of attempted rape, and there had been a whole gang of them, and I was pregnant. And, as I learned later, there was one contingent that said that after all I was Jenna’s sister and I had been drinking and carrying on, and when I was caught I’d started screaming to make people believe it was rape, and I certainly knew who the men were. Very pretty.

“Well, I didn’t really stop being shaky until the following summer. I had a recurrent nightmare that lasted almost until then. But I had begun to wonder about myself. When a boy at school put his hand on my shoulder it made my stomach turn over. And the idea of ever kissing anyone terrified me. I told myself I’d have to stop being silly. After all, I certainly wanted a home and kids eventually. And I decided to cure myself. Poor Billy Hillyard. He’d always been kind of sappy about me. I guess some men like the big cowy type. So I encouraged him. I didn’t see how Billy could upset me. So I gave him the right chance to kiss me that summer. And I stood it just as long as I could and then I had to push him away and jump out of the car and be terribly, horribly sick. I told Billy it was probably food poisoning. But, almost a month later, when exactly the same thing happened, he lost interest.

“In my junior year it seemed to be getting worse instead of better. I went to a woman doctor in Gainesville. I told her my sad story. She satisfied herself that I was normal physically in every respect and sent me to a psychiatrist in Tampa. I told him my problem. I told him about the attempted rape. He asked a lot of questions and he seemed much more interested in my childhood, in the father relationship and the sister relationship. I saw him three times. Then he summarized. My basic instincts were normal. But I could not react properly because of an extreme and artificial frigidity that was the direct result of the pattern of my home life. If I could spend eighteen months to two years in deep analysis, he might be able to help me. That was impossible, for many reasons. And then the damndest thing happened. When I came home for spring vacation, I found that it was all over town. Just about everybody knew the intriguing fact that I had gone to a psychiatrist because I was scared to death of men. I soon found out how that had happened. The Tampa doctor had asked the name of my family doctor. And, I suppose as a professional courtesy, he had sent old Dr. Bormen a detailed report. Maybe you remember that Heeley woman who worked for him. She talked all over town about every treatment Doc Bormen ever gave. And she had spread the news, but good. Talk about invasion of privacy.

“But here is the worst thing about it, Alex. In some crazy way it made me a project for every Don Juan who heard about it. As if I were his personal Sleeping Beauty. And he was just the one to do me the enormous personal favor of waking me up. I was inundated by spooks. And they were all so terribly hurt that I wouldn’t even give them a chance. Nobody would have to know a thing about it. I should just co-operate and try not to be afraid.

“They’ve given up now, most of them. But I’m still one of the town’s more notorious crazies. I don’t date, and I don’t expect to. They watch me. And I suppose it’s common knowledge that this is the third time I’ve been out here. You can understand now how Donnie was being nasty. I like the work at the yard. I like swimming and sailing the Lady Bird. I am quite content, thank you, but I do sometimes miss the opportunity of having a normal and uncomplicated friendship with a man. Too much girl talk bores me rigid. So that’s it. Don’t try to make me your project, Alex. I’ve filed away those dreams of the joker on the white horse who was always killing a fat dragon who looked like Mr. Bolley. I am resigned to my busy spinsterhood. Even though I think you a very nice guy, Alex, and it’s good to see you after all these years, if you were to lay a hand on me in anything but accident or physical assistance, it would chill me to the very marrow of my bones. And as far as being held and kissed by a man, I would much rather stick my head into a bucket of snakes.”

“I keep seeing that kid in the blue dress, wanting to be admired.”

“So do I, Alex. She was so vulnerable. She can break my heart. You won’t mind being a friend of the curious and unnatural Miss Larkin?”

“Not at all. I’m honored, Miss Larkin.”

She grinned at him. “Thanks. Say, is there any bread and anything to put between it?”

She made hefty sandwiches and they ate them on the beach. She went back to work. He baked himself in the sun and thought about her. It seemed curious that she should have such a distorted idea of her own appearance. That was probably part of the quirk. She thought of herself as big, bungling, bovine, cowy. At about five nine and an estimated hundred and thirty-five or forty pounds, she was certainly not tiny. But in the configuration of her body, in the walk and the grace of her, she was superbly feminine.

And, to his own wry amusement, he found himself composing mental charades in which he taught her that she could fulfill her role as a woman. It was a tantalizing situation, and he suspected that any other attitude toward her would be rather less than normal. But it was, of course, impossible. At the very first gesture toward any kind of intimacy, she would be off and running, never to look back.

He swam again, deliberately taxing the sore muscles, getting a certain satisfaction out of feeling the stretching and the pain. The club lumps on his skull were smaller, but still tender to the touch.

He showered and dressed and, at five o’clock, drove over into town. He went to Bolley’s Hardware and bought another spinning rig and got a receipted bill to give Celia M’Gann. He had time to pick up some more groceries. He saw Junie Hillyard in the supermarket. As soon as she recognized him, she deliberately turned her back.

He started back toward the beach but, on impulse, just as he reached the foot of Bay Street he turned left on Front Street and drove along the bay shore and parked across from the Spanish Mackerel. As he walked toward the Mack he saw that it had changed very little. It was still a fisherman’s bar that managed to look like a seedy lunchroom.

The late afternoon sunlight flooded in through the front windows. It sat in shabby patience looking across the street toward a fishing dock and boats and rotted pilings, and a pelican sitting on a slanting channel marker, and the green jungly growth of Ramona Key beyond the blue bay water.

The walls of the Mack were painted a soiled cream and green, cluttered with calendars, smutty mottoes, dusty mounted fish, pieces of net and old cork floats. There were warped Venetian blinds at all the windows. The bar was on his left as he went in, topped with that imitation marble that used to be used on soda fountains. There were a dozen wooden bar stools stained dark. On his right were a dozen round tables with green formica tops in a green that clashed with the green on the walls. Across the back wall was a huge juke box, and two pinball machines, and a bowling game machine, a wall phone, an open door that exposed a narrow dingy area containing a blackened hamburg grill and a big tarnished coffee urn; a closed door that, he remembered, gave access to a back room for card games, a kitchen, a staircase to the upstairs where Harry Bann lived.

The only customer was a man sitting on the stool farthest from the entrance. He wore a blue work shirt and denim pants, with the shirt sleeves rolled high to expose muscular arms thickly matted with curly black hair. He had an empty beer bottle and an empty glass in front of him. In profile his face looked dark and predatory under a forehead so high and bulging that it gave him something of the look of a surly embryo. The girl behind the bar was leaning on it and talking to the man in a voice so low that Doyle could not distinguish a word. But it all had the flavor of argument. She gave Doyle a casual glance when he took the stool nearest the door and returned to the inaudible wrangle.

He sat and stared at a card of potato chips, a jar of evil-looking pickles, a peanut machine, dusty liquor bottles aligned in front of a long blue panel of mirror, a chrome paper-napkin dispenser, a withered menu with a water-skiing maiden on the front, a squeeze bottle of catsup and one of mustard, both obviously used often and carelessly, two busy flies on the coffee-spattered rim of a thick china sugar bowl, one poster announcing a dance over in Wellsland that had taken place two months ago, an ancient cash register which sat on a smeared glass case containing cigarettes, cigars, candy and, incongruously, a small plastic Santa Claus with a face of discontent.

He waited patiently, becoming more and more aware of the effluvia of stale grease, spilled beer and elderly nicotine. More subtle were the drifting odors of rancid coffee, perfume, fish scales, armpits, bad plumbing, and the nausea of ten thousand Saturday nights.

The girl finally walked down toward Doyle, a girl in her early twenties he guessed, with carroty red hair, a moon face lightly pocked with old acne scars, small features squeezed together in the middle of an expression of surly petulance, a pinched discontent. She had made her mouth vast and square with a shade of lipstick that did not suit her. She wore tight threadbare red shorts, a faded red halter, a small stained apron. Her figure was heavy, but reasonably good. Her skin had that damp and luminous blue-whiteness of cheap lard and overturned fish. When she walked she set her heels down so heavily she awakened little jinglings among the racked glasses, and her large breasts and heavy thighs joggled most unpleasantly.

He ordered a beer and watched her walk back to the beer cooler, the pulpy buttocks working under the frayed red fabric. From her coloring he guessed she was some kin to Harry Bann’s wife. Mrs. Bann had been a meaty carroty woman who had often come to visit Doyle’s mother at the hotel, and who had died that same winter Mary Ann Doyle had died. Some kind of kidney trouble.

She banged the beer down in front of him, slapped his change from fifty cents on the bar top and went back to her friend. The old man he had seen reading the comic book in Ducklin’s shuffled in, talking gently to himself. He threw down a double shot and trudged out. The hairy embryo stood up and snarled something at the girl.

“So never come back!” she yelled. “So who cares?”

The man left. The screen-door cylinder hissed wearily as the door swung shut. The girl sighed and began to mop the counter listlessly, working her way down toward Doyle.

“Not much business,” he said.

“Friday and Saddy there’s more.”

“You related to Harry?”

She stopped mopping and stared at him, her eyes small and pale and blue and suspicious. “I’m his niece. Who’s asking?”

“My name is Doyle. I used to live here.”

Her face brightened. “Hey, you’re the one! I hear people talking about you. My brothers were in, talking about you. Lee and Gil. I’m Janie Kemmer. My ma was Miz Bann’s sister. Gil says you and him used to fight. How long you been gone?”

“Fifteen years.”

“Then I wouldn’t remember on account of I was three or four years old.”

“I met Lee when I first got back.”

“And he was drunk, I bet.” She sighed. “They just don’t seem to give a damn. They do a little fishing and they hire out on construction sometimes, but most of the work they do is free road work when Donnie Capp picks them up for drunk or fighting. Gil was sent away once for four years. It was just a fight right out behind here in the lot, with a drunk tourist. He was sort of old but he wanted real bad to fight Gil, so that’s how come it was only manslaughter. Now Lee is back on road work. Donnie picked him up last night again.” She smirked. “Old Lee, he sure is funny sometimes. He didn’t have a ride back down to Bucket Bay and he was trying to steal a boat.”

“It looked to me like you were having a fuss with your friend sitting up the other end of the bar.”

She looked desolate. “That Charlie is a jerk. I been going with him three years; and now I want to get married, he wants to go back in the navy. All the time he says when I’m eighteen we get married and everything is fine. Now he wants to go in the navy.” The blue eyes suddenly began to leak tears. “God damn him!” she said, and snatched a paper napkin, turned her back and blew her nose.

Doyle sat uncomfortably until she turned back and said, “I din’t mean to pop off. Only he gets me so mad. Only he’s twenty-eight, and how long should you wait anyhow? I’m supposed to hang around here and wait or something. Nothing ever happens here. Nothing!”

“From what I’ve heard since I’ve been back, a lot has been happening around here, Janie.”

“Oh, you mean the murder. Well, that was something, I guess. But how many of those do you get? I mean how often? Every hundred years or something. Oh, I don’t mean there hasn’t been killings. Knifings and like that. The last time there was a murder-type murder, it was a long time ago, down in Bucket Bay. I guess I was maybe nine or ten. When that old Paul Garnette, him that had all the kids, got caught by that Casey Myers when Paul was fooling around with Casey’s fifteen-year-old daughter, the one that wasn’t right in the head. Casey grabbed a gaff and yanked him off. Got him right in the throat with the gaff, and then that girl really went nuts. They had to put her away some place. Casey was only in jail overnight and it didn’t get into all the big papers like when Jenna was murdered. God, this little ole town sure was jumping. Harry and I liked to work ourselves to death. Those newspaper people drink almost as fast as the commercial fishermen.”

“I used to know a lot of the commercial fishermen.”

“I guess there was a lot more fifteen years ago, Mr. Doyle. Plenty of them moved further south, and a lot of them got out of the business, they say. There’s empty shacks down to Bucket Bay, just standing there rotting. They can still make it on the shrimps, but they got to go to Tampa or Key West to ship out.”

She excused herself to go greet two young men in sweaty khakis and serve them beer at the far end of the bar. She talked with them for a little while and then she came back to him. There was just enough coquetry in her walk and manner so that he suspected that he had been considered as a possible substitute for the uncooperative Charlie.

“That’s a real pretty sport shirt, Mr. Doyle.”

“Thanks.”

“What’s your line of work?”

“Nothing right now. I’m looking around. Maybe I might pick up a used dozer and see if I can get some land-clearing work.”

“There isn’t as much of that to do around here as there is other places. But there’s some. Don’t they cost a lot?”

“I’ve got a little ahead. I just came back from working in Venezuela.”

“God, I’d like to travel some. I’d like to see me some far away places. Nothing ever happens here.”

“Except a murder every once in a while.”

“Now you just stop teasing me, Mr. Doyle.”

“Alex.”

“That’s a nice name. I like that name.”

“I heard Jenna was in here the night she got killed.”

She glanced toward the two boys and lowered her voice. “I’ve got orders from Harry not to talk about it to strangers. I don’t see what difference it makes. It gets talked about a lot in here. And sometimes you wonder if maybe somebody talking or listening is the one did it.” She hugged herself with her heavy white arms and gave a little shiver. “That’s kind of creepy. Anyhow, I guess it’s because Donnie Capp doesn’t want any strangers around prying. He runs ’em off. I guess he’s maybe afraid somebody might by accident pry around and find out who did it before Donnie finds out. He’s got to be the one who gets the killer because it’s a matter of pride. The big shots sorta pushed him out of the way last fall when they were investigating. But since you come from here, I guess you aren’t a stranger. She was in here all right that night. Friday night. I went off at six on account of Harry doesn’t like me working at night, especially on a Friday or Saddy night when things can get rough around here real fast and a girl can’t walk across the room without wise guys grabbing at her. But she was here before I went off and she stayed until closing. And then she walked right out and got herself strangled. I couldn’t hardly believe it when I heard it the next morning. I wanted to get to see her at Jeffry Brothers, but that sister of Colonel M’Gann had fixed it so nobody could get to see her but the family, and they say the colonel didn’t get to see her even. On account of his bad heart.”

“I guess Jenna wasn’t much like her kid sister.”

“I swear I don’t see how those two came out of the same family. You know, Betty comes in here a lot.”

“She does!”

“The boat yard is just down the road another two blocks, you know. And all the fishermen, they think she’s the finest damn thing on legs. When old Spence Larkin was alive they say he wouldn’t touch a commercial boat unless it was cash on the fine. But she works things out with them so they can get work done when they have to have it. And she’ll stop in here and have a beer with them. Usually in the afternoon, but sometimes in the evening. And you don’t see anybody making any grabs at her. If anybody did, all her boatyard customers would tear the poor guy’s head off and use the rest of him for chum. Not that anybody but some stranger would get fresh with her, him not knowing about her. There’s something wrong with her. She looks like a lot of woman but she isn’t. Something terrible happened to her a long time ago, and she just isn’t any good for anything. God, I’d hate to be like that. I guess it just about wouldn’t be worth living, wouldn’t you say?”

“I guess so.”

“That Jenna was just the other way around. She couldn’t get enough. Funny, isn’t it? Right out of the same family. I don’t know if Donnie will ever find who killed her. Some nights people come from a long way off and drive out to the beach. Me, I think it was somebody like that, from the other end of the county. It would be easier if she was raped, because then it could maybe have been a Negro. But she wasn’t, and I guess that just about every Negro for fifty miles around must know that Donnie checks that beach every now and then and if he caught any of them out there, he’d play hell with them for sure. I think it was some stranger and she got in some kind of drunk argument and got choked. And they took off. Or maybe somebody beached a boat. But one thing, I don’t think that Donnie will give up looking.”

“I guess everybody has their own ideas.”

“Some of them are pretty crazy. Some people say it was on account of the money. They say she got killed because she knew where Spence Larkin hid all the money they never found. So they caught her there on the beach and they killed her and then they went and dug it up. They made her tell where it was. That’s plain silly, because the night she was killed she came in here without a dime. Harry’d said not to let her have any more on credit. But there was always somebody to buy her a drink. If she was out of money and knew where it was, she would have gone and dug it up, wouldn’t she?”

“Looks like she would.”

“Nobody is ever going to find that money except by some kind of accident maybe. And then I bet there won’t be much left of it. Not in this climate.”

She looked toward the doorway and her face changed in an almost dramatic way, becoming instantaneously blank, almost sleepy. Doyle heard the screen-door cylinder hiss.

He turned and saw Deputy Donnie Capp standing just inside the door. “Hello, Doyle,” he said. “Hello, Janie.”

“Hello, Mr. Capp,” she said faintly.

Capp moved in on Doyle’s left and stood at the bar. Doyle could scent the animal sharpness of Capp’s perspiration.

“Hear Charlie’s going in the navy, Janie.”

“I guess that’s right.”

“Maybe you took off twenty pounds and stopped stuffing that hungry gut of yours, you’d look better than the navy. Harry should have pounded your butt for you the very first time you started sneaking off in the brush with that Charlie. You was so sure of Charlie, Janie, you let yourself get real sloppy. Now what you going to do? Want I should pick you a husband off the road gang? Anything I tell those boys to do, they’ll do, no matter how it could ugly up their future.”

Tears had started to roll down her white face, but she couldn’t seem to look away from Donnie.

“You trot all that beef up the other end of the bar, Janie. I got words with Mr. Doyle here. I got to call him mister now.”

She moved away, slowly and heavily. Capp said, “If the slut had a head on her, she’d grab Harry. They aren’t blood kin. He’s got the asthma and the high-blood pressure, and she’d end up with a good little business instead of it going to his brother.”

Doyle lifted his beer glass and drank, and was remotely pleased to see that he could keep his hand from trembling.

“You don’t have much to say for yourself, Mr. Doyle.”

“I guess not.”

“Heard you just as I got near the door. You and Janie talking about Jenna. Guess you knew Jenna before she took off with that sailor boy. That was when you were a big athlete. Before you took up stealing. Knew her, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Now you’re getting to know the sister awful damn fast. Can’t see why the Larkins should give a damn what happens to you. Seems real strange to me. And there you are, right out there on the beach near to where she was killed, and near the colonel and his sister. And I’ve got the word to keep my hands off you. Funny.”

“Is there something you want?”

“It don’t make much sense, but I find myself wondering if somehow somebody brought you back here to look into the Jenna killing. You got you a oily satisfied look, like an egg-sucking hound dog. I’d hate to find out you were sticking your nose in something that’s none of your business. I just might have to naturally take this here club and loosen up your insides a little.”

“Why?”

“Because you’d be getting in the way of the law. We can handle everything that has to be done our own selves.”

Capp moved away, silent in the black boots. The screendoor hissed behind him.

A few minutes later, as Doyle got up to leave, an old man came in, a brown old man with soiled white hair, bleached eyes and a white stubble of beard. He stared at Doyle for a moment and said, “Say, I bet you’re Bert Doyle’s boy. You look a lot like Bert when he was alive, afore he got drownded that time.”

“That’s right. I’m Alex Doyle.”

“And you don’t know me at all?”

“Wait a minute. Arnie Blassit?”

“Dead right, boy. When I was fishing shares with old Lucas Pennyweather, you come along with us a lot of times. You made a good hand, for a kid.”

Doyle sat at the bar again and bought a beer for himself and a drink for Blassit. Blassit talked about old times, about the half-remembered people Alex had known before his father died.

“It’s not like it used to be, boy. It’s getting all fished out. We got no closed season on mullets now, but snook is a game fish and you can’t make a catch on trouts any more. I kinda hang on. Too damn old to learn new tricks.”

“How about Lucas Pennyweather? Is he still around?”

“No. He was getting pretty crippled up. And last November a grown daughter of his come all the way down from North Carolina and she and her husband, they took Lucas back up to live with them. One day you’d think he was going to be here forever, and the next day he was gone. It was real sudden. Sold his boat and gear, but sold ’em so fast it was damn near giving them away. I tell you, there was nobody knew these waters any better than Lucas. Some will tell you Spence Larkin knew more, but I say Lucas Pennyweather.”

“He liked kids. I can remember going out with him when I couldn’t have been more than three or four years old.”

And suddenly Doyle remembered a scene that had been buried for years. Old Lucas had taken a half dozen kids out with him on a Sunday to fish with hand lines in a grouper hole not far outside Windy Pass. And on the way back they had passed a small white skiff with a man at the wheel and a little girl sitting in the bow. The little girl was blond and she wore a pink dress, and to Alex, about six at the time, she was the cleanest prettiest thing he had ever seen.

“There goes Spence Larkin and his daughter,” Lucas had told them. “He’s a big important man there in Ramona, and that’s his eldest. He takes her on picnics of a Sunday, down there in those bay islands some place.”

Alex remembered that he had turned and watched the small girl until she was lost in the sunny distances of the bay. And later he had seen Spence Larkin many times alone in the same skiff. It was his commonly known eccentricity to leave his office at the boat yard at any time of day and go off down the bay alone. People said that was where he did his thinking. People said he would go out in that skiff with its ancient engine and chug along and plot new meanness, new ways to make a dollar grow from a dime. He always took a fishing rod and a tackle box that he kept in his office, but he didn’t do much fishing.

Arnie Blassit chuckled and said, “Just about the last thing old Lucas did in this town was get himself arrested on suspicion of murder. Didn’t mean anything. Everybody who’d been right here in the Mack the night Jenna Larkin got choked to death, they got picked up. Me too. But me and Lucas, we could clear each other. We run out of drinking money along about eleven, and we were sharing a shack down to Chaney’s Bayou, and we had come up in my boat and tied her right across the road there. So about eleven we went on back down the bay together and the first thing we knew about it, them deputies come and took us all the way over to Davis and locked us up. Let us go the next day. Lucas sure was mad. Thing was, he’d spent some time talking to Jenna that night. I thought about that. It was as if the Lord give her one final chance to be nice to somebody and she took it.”

“How do you mean?”

“Up to that last night she didn’t have any time or any politeness to spare for any old beat-down fishermen. There was a good crowd and after we’d been in a few minutes, standing right over there, she come over to us and was real nice. She wanted to talk about the old days. And after a while she took Lucas right over there to that corner table, and they sat there and talked a long time. And when it finally broke up, some of us were kidding Lucas till he got pretty mad about the whole thing. And then he made it worse for himself by saying that he’d made a date with her to go out in the boat the next day and look around the bay islands. Matter of fact, Alex, when they come and took us to Davis, Lucas was just getting ready to take the boat on up to the yard and pick Jenna up. But she was dead by then. And it sure upset Lucas to hear about it.”

“I guess the whole town was upset from what I hear.”

Blassit chuckled again. “I see that Donnie Capp leaving as I come down the street a little while ago. Now I guess he was the one most upset. That boy is just as mean as a snake. And he’d been trying to move in on Jenna. Now there’s a lot of things people called her, but nobody called her especially choosey when it come to men. But she wouldn’t have a thing to do with that Donnie Capp. She just laughed at him. I’ve heard that Donnie has made some gals real willing by roughing ’em up a little first, but he couldn’t take a club to Jenna and get away with it. Matter of fact, he was the one broke up Jenna’s nice little talk with Lucas. Went right over and sat with them without any invitation, and after a while she got tired of him listening, so she went away. Donnie sat there and talked to Lucas for a while, and then he left. I guess Donnie thought he was getting close to talking Jenna into something, because he sure acted like a crazy man after he found she’d been killed. He put knots on half the heads in the county until the sheriff got him soothed down some.”

“Arnie, I’ve got to run along. It’s been good to see you again.”

He drove back out to the cottage. After he had unloaded his purchases he took a walk on the beach until the afterglow of the sunset had died to streaks of yellow and green close to the western horizon.

He fixed a simple supper, and after he had cleaned up he sat and smoked in the dark on the little screened porch and thought about the days of childhood. The vivid memory of Jenna in the pink dress had aroused other memories. They were memories of the other life that he had tried to forget, telling himself that it had all been bad. But in the reawakened memories there was much that was good.

And later he began to think about Jenna. And he began to wonder why she had been pleasant to old Lucas. She must have had some reason. There must have been something she wanted.