Go Home, Stranger

Thirteen

He said nothing for a moment as he sat looking at the neat and well-ordered and utterly terrible beauty of the way the pieces could fit together. The two men in the cruiser almost had to be strangers in this area—nobody here had ever turned up missing. But, still, he thought, there could be a hundred other explanations.

“Look, Pat,” he said. “It’s probably just a coincidence. Maybe he went on somewhere else. And just hasn’t written yet.” Yet, he thought. It had been three months.

“No,” she said quietly. She looked at him and her face was calm, perfectly controlled, but he could see the infinite unhappiness in the eyes. “There’s more. There’s no way to escape it. But the awful thing is why? Why? There’s no reason he should have come here. He’d never been here before in his life. Why should he take Griffin’s boat? Why did it explode? What were they trying to do out there?”

“Maybe you’d better start at the beginning,” he said gently. “What makes you so sure he was on board?”

She stared directly at him. “Something I overheard them say. A word I’m beginning to hate.”

“What word?”

“Robert.”

“I must be slowing up,” he said wearily. “I should have guessed that one.”

“Yes. How on earth could just one person—” She stopped and looked at him hopelessly. “What is it, Pete? Where is he? Is he dead? Is he still here?”

“I don’t know. The thing that puzzles me most, though, is how there could have been only one Robert Counsel. He must have been triplets, at least.” He shook his head. “But go ahead.”

“To begin with,” she said, “my name isn’t Lasater. It’s Devers. Patricia Devers. And I’m not from Ohio. I’m from Chicago. My brother’s name was Carl, and the man who was killed with him was Charles Morton, but Carl always referred to him as Chappie.”

“Was he an old friend of your brother?” Reno asked.

“Not exactly. He was somebody he knew in the Army during the war. He was from New York.”

“I see,” Reno said thoughtfully. “But how did they happen to come down here?”

“I’ll get to that in a minute, Pete. But first, when Carl came back from the Army in 1946, he was changed somehow. I don’t know exactly how to put it, but his attitude toward everything, and especially his job, seemed to be different. He lost that job, and I don’t know how many more, and when I would try to talk to him about it all I’d ever get was an impression he was just waiting for some big deal or that he considered work a stupid pastime for suckers. I don’t like to say all this, Pete, but it’s part of it and I can’t leave it out. Six years is a long time to readjust to civilian life.

“And then in April of this year he received a letter from Italy. I think it was from a girl he knew when he was there with the Army. Anyway, it was addressed in a girl’s handwriting.”

Reno stared thoughtfully. “He was in Italy during the war?”

“Yes, Africa, and then over there. Anyway, a day or two after this letter from Italy, he received one from this Charles Morton in New York. Carl became strangely excited, and for two or three weeks he wrote a lot of letters. He got another one, air mail, from the girl in Italy, and several from Morton.

“It was around the third or fourth of May when Morton arrived from New York to see Carl. He stayed over night with us. There was a great deal of talk in Carl’s room, and that’s when I heard them mention the name Robert.

“The next day,” she went on, “Carl asked to borrow my car for a trip down to the Gulf Coast. They were going fishing, he said. He’d quit his job too. I let him have the car anyway. There was no point in arguing about it; it was so like him to quit a job for the slightest reason.

“They left that night. I received a couple of post cards from him from various places on the way down, and one last one from Waynesport. Two weeks went by before Mother began to be really worried about him. I still didn’t think anything was wrong, but to soothe her I wrote to the police at Waynesport and several other cities along the coast, giving them the information on the car and descriptions of Carl and Charles Morton.

“They all answered promptly and tried to be of help in any way they could, but there was absolutely no trace of the men or the car. They’d just vanished. Mother began to be frantic, and I had to have the doctor for her. It was about this time I began to have that awful feeling about it myself. I don’t know what it was exactly, except that I knew somehow they hadn’t been going fishing at all and that something terrible had happened to them. I began to think about those letters, but when I went through Carl’s room they weren’t there—any of them. That was odd, in itself, for he always just threw letters in a drawer of his desk. And there was another thing. A gun, an Italian pistol he had brought back as a souvenir, was gone too.

“I had read about the odd explosion on a fishing boat somewhere down here on the Gulf, but at the time it happened, on the tenth, I hadn’t received Carl’s card and didn’t even know they were down here. There’d only been a few lines about it in our paper, anyway.

“Then one night while I was lying awake and worrying it just hit me, all at once. I almost went crazy between then and daylight, trying to remember exactly where the explosion had been, and when. I didn’t have a class that morning, so I went to the public library and looked it up. When I found it, I was scared—more scared than I’d ever been in my life.

“I didn’t tell Mother. I called the Waynesport police from a pay phone and asked if the two men had ever been identified. They said no, and wanted to know who I was. I told them they had the information on the car in their files, and asked them to check on it. They came back and said it couldn’t be Carl and Morton because no such car had ever been picked up or even seen. And naturally, if they had been killed in the explosion the car would still be there wherever they’d left it to get aboard the boat. I didn’t press it any further, but I did see there was one flaw in that.”

“Yes,” Reno said. “There’s one, anyway.”

“That’s right,” she went on. “The car could have been stolen when they didn’t come back. We never heard any more. After school was out I came down here. I didn’t use my own name or say what I was looking for because by then I was convinced that there was something terrible behind all this.”

“I began to hear about Robert Counsel, because this country is saturated with him and his family. There was a horrible fascination in the names. Try it. Counsel Bayou, where the boat exploded. Robert, the man they were talking about. Robert Counsel. Then early this month I met Mr. McHugh. He came by the camp asking questions about a man named Conway. Rupert Conway. You see? Names again—but I’ll get to that in a minute.

“Conway was supposed to be driving a Cadillac with California license plates and towing a boat. I’d seen him. I told Mr. McHugh about it, how the man had turned off into the timber just beyond the camp one evening at dusk. We talked about it for a long time, and the more he told me about the man the more he sounded like all the things I’d heard about Robert Counsel.

“We were both excited about it. Mr. McHugh made more inquiries and came to the conclusion they were the same man. But that brought us up against something else, something that didn’t fit. Why the assumed name? Counsel wasn’t a criminal. And that wasn’t all the puzzle. Assuming he did want to change his name for some reason we couldn’t even guess, why would a man as brilliant as they say he was fall into the same error as a lot of the more stupid type of criminals? Mr. McHugh pointed it out. You see? The same initials, the same four syllables altogether, and even the same accent, or beat. Try them aloud. Mr. McHugh had a theory about the initials.”

“Yes,” Reno said musingly. “That’s an old story. Monogrammed possessions he’d have had to throw away otherwise.” But that wasn’t all of it. He was thinking of something else, of a boy who liked to cut the fuses short. It was a game, playing with danger.

He turned, and the fine brown eyes were regarding him with an unhappiness in which there was no longer very much hope. “What do you think it all means, Pete?” she asked. “What is it?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. But has it occurred to you that one of the craziest things about the whole mess is the way we’re obsessed with this Counsel guy? Just take a look at it. There isn’t any evidence at all that he had anything to do with killing Mac, and I don’t see how on earth he could have had any connection with that boat explosion, even if it was certain your brother was aboard. But what do we do? We look for Counsel, we try to guess what he was doing, why he came back here, where he is now, whether he’s dead or not, why he changed his name . . . What for? What is there about it?”

“Just the fact,” she said slowly, “that we both know he’s at the bottom of it somewhere. Mr. McHugh felt it too. He said that if we ever really understood Robert Counsel we’d see the answer to it.”

“Yes. I know that,” Reno said. “But why? Let’s look at it objectively. He couldn’t be here unless he’s dead, because he’s too well known. And if he’s dead, he couldn’t have shot Mac, or set off those explosions we heard today, or chased us out of there with a rifle, or moved that trailer—” He stopped, suddenly conscious he had forgotten about that.

“Trailer?” she asked, puzzled.

“Yes. Don’t you remember when you came up in your boat while I was peeking at something with the rod, with my head under water?”

“Yes. But what?”

“That was a boat trailer. And it almost had to be the one Counsel was pulling. But when I went back the next morning to pull it out, it was gone.”

“Oh.” Her eyes widened with comprehension. “I see it now. You thought I knew what you’d found and moved it, or told somebody about it.”

“Frankly, yes. It was the obvious guess. But you didn’t even mention it to anybody? I mean, that you saw me there.”

“No,” she said.

She was telling the truth. There was no doubt of that. “Then somebody else saw me,” he said.

She turned suddenly, and her eyes were full of excitement. “Max Easter!”

“What!”

“He was right around that next bend. I remember now. I hadn’t heard his motor start.”

“What was he doing up there?” Reno demanded swiftly.

“Fishing. I was sketching him, until the light failed. He must have been still there.”

“All right,” Reno said. He went on, talking fast, his eyes growing hard. “So Easter has to be our boy. Counsel disappeared off the earth at that spot, so far as we know.

But Easter doesn’t know that anybody ever trailed him that far. The only thing he could see was that I was about to uncover the trailer and stumble on the fact that Counsel had been there. So he moved it, to cover up the evidence. Counsel was dead, but he didn’t want anybody to find out. You can see what that adds up to. And I suppose you know about Counsel and Easter’s wife.”

“Yes” she said. “I’ve heard that. They still talk about it around here. But, Pete, you’re looking for the man who killed Mr. McHugh, and I don’t think it was Easter.”

“Why?”

“Because Mr. McHugh was shot right at one o’clock in the morning, according to the papers. It was about twenty after one when I got back to the camp, and I saw Max Easter’s pickup truck come out onto the highway just as I turned in. So he couldn’t possibly have been in town at one. I’m sorry, Pete.”

He felt the whole thing come crashing down on him again. For almost a minute he’d been certain he was very close to the answer. “You’re sure it was Easter?” he said wearily.

“I’m positive it was his truck. I’ve seen it lots of times.”

“But you didn’t actually see who was driving it?”

“No. It was too dark. But it’s not likely anybody else would be.”

He sighed. “All right. But how do we get away from the fact that it almost had to be Easter who moved that trailer?”

“We can’t. That’s the terrible part of this whole thing. As soon as you learn something you turn up another fact that denies it. I’ve studied Easter a long time. He has posed for me, and I’ve had him guide me a lot. He tolerates me, but I think he hates women, or is contemptuous of them, probably because of his wife’s leaving him. He’s intelligent, self-educated, radical, and very bitter, and I believe that if he were convinced Robert Counsel had wronged him, he’d kill him with no regret. But I don’t believe he’d try to hide it. He’d do it openly, with nothing but contempt for the consequences.

“Sometimes I’ve been so afraid of him I get cold all over, knowing what he’d do if he had an idea I was spying on him. I’ve seen him staring at me with those cold, utterly emotionless eyes of his, and wondered what he was thinking—” She shivered.

“Not any more,” Reno said flatly. “You don’t go anywhere with him alone again. We’re in this together now, and you can’t take any more chances like that.”

She faced him quietly. “I’m glad we are, Pete. I don’t feel so alone now.”

It was strange, but he knew what she meant. He felt it himself. It was as if he’d never been conscious of being alone in all his self-sufficient existence until this moment had called it to his attention.

“Did you have any particular reason to think Easter was mixed up in that boat explosion?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “Except that explosives had been his trade. And those theories Hutch Griffin told you about. But I’ve never had anything to go on. I’ve just been groping blindly.”

He nodded. “The same as I have. And that’s the reason you followed me?”

“Yes. I was beginning to have an idea of what you were up to, but I wasn’t sure. And when I saw where you were heading, I began to wonder if you knew something I hadn’t found out yet. You see, I think Robert Counsel is up there somewhere.”

“What!”

“If he really vanished, as you say, I don’t think it was down there where the trailer was. He was up there where we were today. That’s where I found this.”

“Found what?” He stared. She was fumbling in her purse now.

“Here,” she said.

He took it, and felt the skin prickle along the back of his neck. It was a silver cigarette lighter with the initials “R.C.” engraved on one side. He was conscious of an eerie feeling that at last he had put out a hand and touched the elusive and mysterious figure he had sought so long.

“Where’d you get this, Pat?” he demanded.

“I found it. Just beyond where you swam the bayou.”

“When?”

“Three days ago. I was up there with Max Easter.”

“Does he know you found the lighter?”

“No. I don’t think he saw me pick it up. He was ahead of me when I saw it lying off to one side, near the water. I wouldn’t have noticed it except a sunlight happened to hit it.”

“But you didn’t get a chance to look around? For anything else? I mean, you were with Easter—” His voice was tight with excitement.

“Not then,” she said. “But I went back the next day. Alone. I looked around, but there wasn’t any indication there’d ever been any people up there, except somebody had cut down a tree, about a hundred yards away, back from the water.”

“A tree?” he asked. “Was it cut up?”

She tried to remember., “Just partly, I think. Why, Pete?”

“I don’t know,” he replied, his eyes thoughtful. “It just seems an odd place to cut wood. It’d have to be hauled out in a boat. There wasn’t a road of any kind, was there?”

“No.”

“And it was right near where the explosions were?”

“That’s right. Just beyond where you came out of the water.”

“Where you pulled me out of the water,” he corrected gently. Then he went on. “I’ve got to have a look at that place. I’ll do it tomorrow when I go after that boat.”

“I’ll go with you. We can take my boat with the motor.”

He shook his head. “You’d better stay. I’m suspicious of that country.”

Her voice was firm. “I’m suspicious of it too. That’s the reason I’m going.” Then she added, “I’d have to show you where I found the lighter, anyway.”

He saw the futility of argument. After all, he’d said they were in this thing together. The thought of possible danger faded as he became conscious of a wild impatience to get back up there. He had no idea of what he might find, if he found anything at all, but there was a chance the answer to everything might be there on that desolate arm of the bayou. They had to wait until tomorrow. It was no place to blunder around in at night.

* * *

They had dinner at the Counselor and drove down to the Gulf. Where the ship channel met the sea, long jetties ran out from the beach, and a lighthouse swung its probing beam against the offshore darkness. He parked the car and they talked for a long time through the rushing monotone of the surf beyond them while the sea wind blew against their faces.

Once her voice broke as she was speaking of her brother, and he knew she was crying quietly in the darkness. He held her in his arms as if she were someone he had known for years, and when the crying had ceased he kissed her. She came willingly to him, with a warmth and soft fragrance that made his breath catch suddenly in his throat; then she gently disengaged herself and moved back. Afterward, for a while, there was an awkward sort of awareness between them that made them formally polite.

When they came back to the camp he walked up on the porch of her cabin and held her hand for a moment as they said good night. In a moment of sour rebellion against the way she was beginning to dominate his thoughts he merely said, “Keep your door locked,” and turned away.

He went down to the float, reluctant even to attempt sleep with his mind pulled this way and that by a mysterious and disappearing phantom called Robert Counsel and a brown-eyed girl he couldn’t keep in her proper perspective. He had just put flame to a cigarette and dropped the match into the water when he heard someone coming down the path. He whirled, instantly alert.

“That you, Reno?” a voice asked. It had the soft, yet somehow vicious monotone of Skeeter’s drawl.

“Yeah,” Reno replied. The match had blinded him momentarily and he could only guess where the other man was. “What is it?”

“I didn’t see your boat here tonight. You lose it?”

“Let’s say I left it,” Reno answered. “I had a little accident. Going back after it in the morning.”

“Where?” Skeeter asked.

“Up the bayou a little way.” Reno’s eyes were becoming accustomed to the darkness again and he could see him, the hard, thin slat of a figure at the foot of the trail.

“How far’s a little way? And what you mean, an accident?”

“Look, Malone,” Reno said, feeling irritation. “I left your boat up there. I’m going after it. If I don’t find it, I’ll pay you for it. Does that clear it up?”

“Mebbe.” Malone’s voice was utterly without emotion. “But I’m not worried much about the boat. If I was you, I’d stay out of that country up there.”

Reno grew tense in the darkness. “Why?”

“You might get lost.”

“I’m pretty good at finding my way around.”

“So was some of the people they never found. I’d think it over. There’s plenty of bass down here.”

Advice? Or warning? Reno wondered about it later, after he had gone in the cabin and undressed for bed. He lay on the hard mattress trying to guess what had been behind the words.

Sleep was a long time coming. I didn’t have enough parts of this, he thought, and now I’ve got too many. Where was the pattern of it? What connection could there be between Mac’s death and two men who had disappeared off the face of the earth here one night in May, a boat that had blown up for no reason at all, a man named Counsel who was everywhere and nowhere, and explosions on a lost reach of bayou? And the last person he thought of before he finally went to sleep was Patricia Lasater.

No, Devers, he thought. Patricia Devers. He could hear the surf and see the upturned face so near to his, the eyes immense and still faintly misted with tears.

Tomorrow, they’d go up there together. He dropped off to sleep with a strange feeling that something was going to happen tomorrow.