Deadly Welcome

Chapter Eight

Buddy made the opportunity to talk privately with Alex by saying, “Any obliging type gal would swim in and open up some cold beer that we brought out and put in your ice box, and be there on the beach to meet us when we come out.”

“I just work here,” she said, and made a face at them and swam toward the cottage.

Buddy rolled over on his back and floated. “Got the name and the town, but not the address. A Mrs. Trace Annison up in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Ran into Judge Ellandon outside of Ducklin’s and he give me the name. So I got change and phoned up there. Got hold of her. Could hear a lot of kids squalling in the background. Funny damn thing, Alex, she thought I was phoning her to say Lucas had showed up down here. Couldn’t get it through her head I wasn’t phoning from the sheriff’s office.

“She cried a little on the phone. Said Lucas had gotten real restless the past few months. Kept saying he was homesick for the sight of water. And about eight or nine days ago he took off. Left her a note saying he was coming back here. She knows he couldn’t have had more than ten dollars on him, probably not that much. Soon as she found the note she phoned the sheriff’s office over in Davis. She doesn’t think Lucas is right in the head. And he’s too old to be beating his way back across country. She asked Lawlor to keep a lookout for him and let her know by collect phone when he arrives so she can come back down and pick him up again.”

“Then Lawlor would have told Donnie!”

“Sure he would. So Donnie is waiting for him.”

“Where would Lucas head for when he gets back?”

“Depends on the time of day. If it was morning, I guess he’d head for Chaney’s Bayou, back to that shack he shared with Arnie Blassit. And if it was afternoon or evening, he’d probably head for the Mack. You know, he must be awful close to eighty years old, Alex.”

“I wouldn’t want Donnie to get to him before anybody sees him. He might never be seen again.”

“Just how the hell do you make sure that won’t happen?”

“I don’t know, Buddy.”

“I know one thing. It isn’t natural that if Donnie knew about it from Lawlor, he wouldn’t pass the word around. People would get a kick out of it, old Lucas running out on his daughter and heading back here. It’s the kind of thing you’d talk about.”

“Have you told anybody about it?”

“Just you.”

“Then wouldn’t it help a little to spread the word? So people would be looking for him?”

Buddy asked then, in a quiet voice, “What if he already got here, Alex? How can we know he didn’t make it back here fast? How can we know Donnie hasn’t already got the money and Lucas is some place on the bottom of the bay?”

“That could have happened. He could have come in at night, walking over from Davis. Donnie must patrol that road.”

“Right often. But, wait a minute — now you’ve got me doing it — how about that shovel? If Lucas found the place for him, it would be natural to leave that shovel there, wouldn’t it? If he got it all, he wouldn’t need the shovel. And if he wasn’t sure he got it all, he’d leave it there for the next time he got a chance to go back and dig.”

“So let’s figure that Lucas hasn’t gotten here yet. It’s about all we can do.”

“And I’ll spread the word that he’s on his way back, that he run away from home like a little kid.”

“It will get back to Donnie.”

“Sure it will, and it ought to give him the jumps. That is, Alex, if we haven’t been going overboard with all this guesswork.”

“You saw the shovel.”

“I know. I know. And I saw how he acted this afternoon. But we seem to be getting spread so damn thin. I wish there was more to go on.”

Alex heard Betty’s shout and looked toward the beach. She was standing holding two cans of beer aloft. They swam in, side by side. When they walked up the slant of the beach together, Alex sensed that Buddy’s great hard bulk must make him look almost frail in comparison.

Later, when Betty had gone to shower and change, Buddy said, “Got me another idea, Alex.”

“Yes?”

“If Lucas comes in and he gets him, he’d use his own boat. Might have to leave Lucas tied up some place along the shore line where nobody would run across him before Donnie came to get him in that boat. So I can fix that boat a little. Easiest way is to plug the cooling system. He wouldn’t notice anything wrong. He’d go a couple of miles before it quit cold on him. Do that tonight.”

“Be careful.”

“I can move quiet in the dark.”

They left at six-thirty. Doyle sat on his porch and watched the last of the sunset. Just as the light was fading, a figure came into his line of vision, coming from his right, walking hastily along the packed sand at the water’s edge, almost running. He recognized Celia M’Gann, and there was such a look of trouble in the way she moved that he got up and went out into the gathering night. The screen door slammed behind him.

She stopped at the sound and took several tentative steps toward the cottage. “Mr. Doyle?” Her voice was shrill and taut, as though she could be close to losing control.

“Yes, Miss M’Gann,” he said, walking toward her.

“Have you seen my brother? Have you seen the colonel?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Have you been here long?”

“Since a little after five. I guess I would have seen him if he went by on the beach. I wasn’t watching the road.”

“Could you... help me look for him?”

“Sure. What’s wrong?”

And suddenly she was crying silently. There was just enough light in the west so that he could see her face, contorted like a child’s, as she stood there with her fists tightly clenched.

“You better try to tell me what’s wrong,” he said softly. And, to his discomfiture and astonishment, she turned and thrust herself against him, sobbing in a hoarse and rasping way against his throat, her strong body shaking. It did not last long. She wrenched herself away, saying harshly, “How stupid! How damn girlish!”

“Can you tell me what’s wrong?”

She stood with her back to him, wearing a pale blouse and a dark skirt, sandaled feet planted strongly on the tide-wet sand. She made a half gesture toward the charcoal Gulf. “He... might be out there.”

“And he might not be out there. He could have taken a walk.”

“Not after what happened.”

“What did happen? If you tell me maybe I can be more help to you.”

She turned and it was now too dark for him to see her expression. “You seem to be speaking with a good deal more precision, Mr. Doyle. What did you say to him when I left you alone?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Something changed him. I’m supposed to be an administrator, Mr. Doyle. I am on a leave of absence from a large insurance company. I was in charge of a section employing over three hundred women. I’m not a fool. I’m not as brilliant as my brother but I’m no fool. I could handle those women adequately. Today I said the wrong thing. I said a stupid thing. If he’s gone, it’s my fault. We’re twins. We’ve always been close. We’ve always had a curious awareness of what the other one is thinking. I do not see how I could have gone six months without knowing what was in his mind and how it was affecting him, holding him back when he should have been improving.”

She took a half step closer to him. “He didn’t take his nap today. He sat on the porch, almost motionless. I made his highball at five o’clock and took it to him. I sat by him, doing some mending. Without any warning at all, he said, ‘Did you kill her, Celia?’ What should my reaction have been? I know now. I should have reacted violently, with a horror, dismay that he could think such a thing. So, in complete stupidity, I sat there and said in a sort of mild and chiding way, ‘What a strange idea, Crawford. Of course not!’ And he did not speak again. And about fifteen minutes ago I found he was gone. For six months he’s been thinking I killed her. I know that now. It explains how he’s acted.”

Her fingers suddenly closed around his wrist. They were cold and strong. “So now he must think I did. And what could he do with a conviction like that? Turn me in? Keep on letting me take care of him? Live with that knowledge? An almost insoluble problem for the kind of man he is. I reacted improperly, Mr. Doyle, because you become accustomed to treating invalids as if they were children. And because I am guilty. I came so horribly close to killing her. So desperately close. I should have told him. But I didn’t want to risk upsetting him even more than he was already upset when he learned she was dead. He wasn’t as strong six months ago as he is now. And after a little while... it seemed too late. But he must have heard me leave the cottage that night. And return. And he never let on that he had heard anything. He’s always known there wasn’t anything in the world I wouldn’t do for him. And I almost did him the... ultimate favor. Help me, Mr. Doyle. Help me find him.”

He went out to the car and got a flashlight out of the glove compartment. He walked up the beach with her. The tide was coming in. The waves had already erased the tracks she had made walking down toward his cottage. He could find no sign of any tracks the colonel might have left.

They walked north. As they walked she said, “I have the feeling it’s ended now. All of it. She was such a horror. I was afraid the cumulative strain of her misbehavior would kill him. Every time she didn’t return for two or three nights, I would be hoping she’d never come back. We had a terrible quarrel out on the beach the Wednesday before she was killed. I tried to plead with her, to beg her to be considerate. I couldn’t reach her. She told me to live my own life, not hers. I said that I shouldn’t have expected more of her. She had come from nothing. And then she started to curse and rant at me, telling me how good her family was, how her father had been a wealthy man, how he had bought her everything. And she brought up that ridiculous myth of hidden money.

“I told her that when a hard, shrewd man lived in a small town and made a fetish of secrecy, rumor always credited him with a fortune he didn’t have. Instead of a mythical fortune, it would have been far better, I said, if he had left her a legacy of decency and manners. She started to tell me, violently, how nice her dear daddy had been to her when she was little. And quite suddenly she stopped. She looked as if she had quite forgotten I was there. When I spoke to her she stared at me as if she didn’t know my name, and turned and walked away.”

Celia M’Gann was talking tensely and rapidly, with a threat of hysteria in her voice. He sensed that it was compulsive talking, a device she was using to hold herself together.

“I worried about the quarrel, Mr. Doyle. I felt I had handled her wrong. Better if I had tried to bribe her to put less strain on my brother. She was a greedy little thing. I didn’t get a chance to try a new tack on Thursday or Friday. I couldn’t sleep Friday night. I knew her habits. Many times she had walked back from town alone, along the beach, because the walking was better and there were fewer mosquitoes on the open beach. It was more probable that she would have a date, and then there would be no telling when she would come rolling in. But, because I couldn’t sleep with the problem on my mind, it seemed worth taking a chance of meeting her. I got up very quietly, and left the cottage. It was a little after two. Even if I missed her, I thought the walk would help.

“I met her not far beyond the cottage where you are. She was quite unsteady, but she was coherent. She was surprised to see me. There was a little moonlight. We stood there and I tried to reason with her. If all else failed, I was going to offer her all my savings to leave and never come back. It’s an... adequate amount. She teetered and leered at me there in the moonlight and then in the most foul possible way she hinted at... an unspeakable relationship between my brother and myself. She tried to soil the finest thing in my life. I do not know exactly what happened. It was as though I went blind and numb. When sensation came back I was standing over her. She lay unconscious on the sand, and I had a terrible blazing pain in my clenched fist. I had never struck anybody with my fist before. I’m a strong woman. I had noticed the tide was coming in. I bent over her and thought of dragging her into the water. I tried but I could not force myself to touch her. Then I saw that the tide would reach her before very long. I turned and ran, literally ran back to our cottage. I sank exhausted on the sand, trembling, nauseated.

“In a little while I knew it was something I could not do. I could not leave her there. No matter how dangerous she was to my brother, I could not kill. And so I went back. I stopped just about in front of your cottage when I saw, far off in the moonlight, somebody bending over her. I could not tell if it was a man or a woman. I knew she would be all right. It was even possible she wouldn’t remember me striking her. And so I went back to bed and stayed awake waiting for her to come in. She was always noisy when she came in. She had no consideration. None. I fell asleep. And we were both awakened by that Darcey woman, screaming and gibbering outside the cottage.”

“You haven’t told anyone this.”

“No. What good would it have done to subject myself to a lot of clumsy interrogation? I couldn’t possibly identify the person I had seen with her. And she had died of strangulation, not drowning. I suppose in a certain sense I did contribute to her death.”

“Do you think you were seen by the person who killed her? He could have been following her, or waiting to intercept her.”

“I thought of that. I worried about it. But he could not have told of seeing me without implicating himself. Unless he were caught, and then there was the chance he would try to blame it all on me. That was a risk I had to take. And, you know, I could not be at all certain I had been seen. When I woke up, my hand was badly puffed. I pretended to burn it when I fixed breakfast. It gave me a chance to bandage it so the puffiness did not show. It did not last long. And now... it all ends this way. And all for nothing. Because I tried to save him.”

They were far beyond the Proctor cottage, and beyond where the road ended at the Janson land.

Doyle had been shining the flashlight on the smooth unmarked sand. And suddenly he picked up the indentation of a naked foot, and another, walking away from the water. She clutched his arm. She looked at the empty beach and toward the blackness of the brush.

“Crawford!” she called, her voice wild and lost in the emptiness of the night. “Crawford!”

“I’m right here,” he said, so close that it startled both of them. Doyle turned his light toward the shadows. Colonel M’Gann sat slumped on the sand, his back against the bole of a big Australian pine that had been brought down by erosion. Celia ran to him and dropped to her knees in the sand and, with a strange harsh cry of pain and gladness, put her arms around him. Doyle turned the light away from them. The woman was sobbing quietly.

M’Gann said, apparently addressing Doyle, ignoring his sister, “The survival instinct is a strong and curious thing. I walked up this way and swam out beyond my limit. I knew it was beyond my strength to get back. And at the first edge of panic, the brute body took over, pacing itself, struggling to live. The heart should have quit, but it didn’t. And so I lay in the shallows finally, until I had the strength to get up.”

“She has something to tell you, Colonel.”

“I know what she has to tell me.”

“I don’t think you do.”

Doyle went up the beach. The murmur of her voice faded away. He waited a long time. Finally Celia called him and he walked back to them.

“I guess I’ve been a fool,” the colonel said.

“We... I think I know who killed her.”

“Can you tell us? Not that it matters terribly,” he said.

“Not yet. If we can’t prove it somehow, I’ll tell you.”

“Mr. Doyle, my sister’s protective instinct toward me has always been obsessive. She has had so little emotional release in her own life that her concern has not been entirely... healthy. Hush, Celia, please. Jenna’s behavior was hampering my recovery. I heard Celia go out and I heard her come back, but I lied to the sheriff, as she did. And I let myself believe she had done something I should have known her to be incapable of. I’m ashamed of that. I decided to call it justifiable homicide. Be her judge and jury. But I would find myself looking at her hands and thinking of how Jenna had been when we were first married. I thought I knew what she was keeping from me. Early this evening I finally tested her. From the way she answered, I knew I could no longer afford the small luxury of doubt. And my solution seemed to me to be... apt. As I told you, Mr. Doyle, I was faced with an emotional problem. An ethical problem.”

“Why would you say that to him?” Celia asked.

“Colonel, what can I tell Colonel Presser now?”

“I don’t know yet. I have to adjust to... new knowledge. And I will have to find out what damage was done by this... asinine little adventure of mine. God help the man who takes himself so seriously, Mr. Doyle.”

“What is this talk about Colonel Presser?” Celia demanded. “Has this Mr. Doyle sneaked around my back and...”

“Please be still, Celia. Mr. Doyle is a very competent and effective man. Mr. Doyle, it would be inefficient to keep you here while I make one of my slow decisions. Mission accomplished, I would say. There’s no more you can do. You can tell Austin that I will be in touch with him in a week or two. If I say yes, and I think I might, he could then send some people down here to bring me up to date.”

Celia had jumped to her feet. “I will not have it! You are not going to go back and let them work you to death. You’re a sick man and I will not...”

“Celia!” he roared.

“But...” she said in a small voice.

“You will order the lives of those female clerks of yours, but you will not order my life for me. I am grateful for your care. It does not give you the authority you seem to think is yours. My apologies, Mr. Doyle. Family scene.”

“Can I help you back to the cottage?”

“No thanks. I’ll rest a little longer. And then Celia can help me if necessary. I suppose you’ll be going back now?”

“Not yet, Colonel. One mission accomplished. The official one. And now there’s a personal one. It seems to be... necessary. Miss M’Gann, could I ask you one question?”

“After you lied to me about...”

“My sister will answer your question, Mr. Doyle. She’ll remember later she has reasons to be grateful to you, and she’ll regret her rudeness.”

“You said you were too far to identify the person you saw bending over Jenna.”

“That’s right.”

“Was there any distinguishing thing at all? Light clothing or dark clothing?”

“I was much too far away, in that light. But... I got the impression that the figure was wearing a beach hat. One of those straw things, like a coolie hat. It somehow gave me the impression that it was a woman, but it seemed strange for her to be wearing it at night.”

“Do you recall Deputy Capp’s hat?”

“Of course. That Texas-looking thing. I see what you mean. I couldn’t swear to it. But at that distance that cream-colored hat could have given me that impression. You must realize that had I known I was seeing a murderer, I would have been more observing.”

“Thank you. And good night. If there’s anything I can do...”

“We’re all right now,” the colonel said. They both said good night to him. He walked back to his cottage. Now the pattern was more distinct. The blurred area was gone. Donnie Capp had bent over the unconscious woman. Perhaps he, too, had thought of pushing her into the water. And then she had begun to stir. And before she was conscious enough to fight him, he had closed that small, sallow, wiry hand around her throat. Maybe it had not been premeditated. Maybe her very helplessness had triggered a new aspect of that deep sadistic aspect of him.

He knew it was not yet finished here for him. Now that he was free to leave, he could not. It was not revenge against Donnie, or the desire to protect Lucas, or even the strange enchantment of the handsome and unapproachable girl. It was part of being home again. As though, by accomplishing something difficult and perhaps dangerous, he could pay in partial measure for the long years of exile, self-imposed.

As he ate and as he showered and as he lay sleepless in a slant of April moonlight, he thought of Donnie Capp.