Suspicion Island

He flew in from the West, so the flight stopped at Tampa International and then went on to Miami. He looked down at the hot October land, at the saw-grass plains cut by the impossibly straight canals. In the beginning, it had been fury that had sustained him. A rage that the things he had planned had been taken away. Then all that had faded into a pain of loss. And loss had eventually turned into a cold curiosity, an almost wry desire to know why and how this had been done to him when he was away.

Home is the soldier, he thought. Home again, and two wars is too many. This one is a war for the professionals. They’ve given up the parades. Social note for the season, please: Captain Paul Rayder, U.S.A., Infantry, returns to his broken home and abandoned business enterprise after two years of, shall we say, inadvertent active duty. During his sojourn among the up-and-down hills, the captain saw many interesting things. He was decorated for valor, and — combination social and humor note — he became known to his company as the “Iceman.”

Over a year of rehearsing the scene with Valerie and not being able to wait to say the lines — yet now the big plane moved too fast, and he’d mislaid the script. He felt as though he couldn’t take a breath that was deep enough. The back of his neck was full of wires pulled too tight.

The plane banked for its landing, and he saw, beyond the pastel cubic city, the billion-dollar playground of the beach, framed by blue. For reassurance, he touched his pocket, felt through the cloth the texture of the letter from Dobson. “It took some hunting, boy. She’s moved a couple of times, but still in town. Thirty-third Street, on the beach. In the first block off Collins. A thing called Seawinds Court Hotel, Number 18. None of my business, Paul, but why bother? I don’t think it’s anything you’d want back. Incidentally, she calls herself Valerie Mason.”

The plane touched and shrieked and touched and rolled, and Paul unhooked the belt. After waiting around to collect his heavy bag, he took a cab and told the driver to take him down Northwest Thirty-sixth Street to Biscayne and over Venetian Causeway. The familiar pre-season frenzy of construction was on.

He directed the driver to a small hotel he remembered, one that was clean and comfortable and, at this time of year, certainly not full.

He signed the card, and the elderly desk clerk said, “I thought you looked familiar, Mr. Rayder. You used to stay here, didn’t you?”

“Not for the last couple of years. I want something quiet, please.”

“Glad to have you back with us.”

The room was high and on the side away from Collins Avenue, where he could see the Atlantic with the white boats trolling their way in after a day of charter fishing. He unpacked, feeling unreal being back here, back where you could pick up a phone and order almost anything you could pay for. Someday there would be time to vegetate, time to let the wires go slack, time to let this slowly become reality, while the other turned into a crazy sequence that had happened to some half-remembered stranger. A stranger who wrote the letters — “Dear Mr. and Mrs. Blank: During the time your son served with Company B, he proved himself to be...” Funny how the ones with soft eyes never lasted. So in the end you had yourself a bunch of pros.

It was four-thirty. He knew he could catch Jerry Dobson in his office. He stripped to the waist, stretched out on the bed, and gave the number. While the distant phone rang, he looked down at his rib cage, at the too visible ribs, at the last pallid vestiges of what had been a deep year-round tan. Dobson’s girl answered and connected him with Jerry.

“Paul! Good to hear your voice. Rough trip? You sound beat.”

“Sort of a long trip.”

“Have you gone over to see her yet?”

“I’m about to go over.”

“If you catch her in you’re going to need a drink afterward. Where are you?”

Paul told him, and agreed to meet him in the lobby at six. He asked if the account was set up so he could start writing checks.

Jerry said, “Yes. I put two thousand in a checking account and the balance in an interest-bearing account. I’m sorry that she— I tried to block it. You know that. But setting her up with a power of attorney left her in the driver’s seat. I’ll say this: she got a good price.”

“Isn’t that just dandy.”

“I know how you feel. Anyway, I fixed it so you got the house, at least. Lord knows why she didn’t sell that, too. Paul—”

“Yes?”

“Don’t let it get you down when you go see her.”

“See you here at six, then. ’By.”

“I’ll bring the warehouse receipt for your personal stuff. I put it in storage for you. See you.”

Paul Rayder hung up, stripped, took a quick shower. In the bathroom mirror his face had, to him, an alien look, thin, weathered, expressionless. It did not seem to belong here in funtown.

It was a quarter after five when he found the Seawinds Court Hotel. It was jammed in between taller buildings, and it had a seedy look. An old man was scratching futilely at the shell walk. Paul went down to Number Eighteen and up two weathered steps to the shallow community porch. A card with curled corners was thumbtacked to the door-frame. V. MASON, it read. The door was open, and he looked through the screen into the dim, shadowy room. He knocked on the screen and saw her walk tall out of an adjoining room, walk toward the door in flaring yellow skirt, black narrow halter, tossing a sheaf of the coarse blue-black hair back in a familiar way, squinting toward the light with an automatic welcoming smile.

The smile faltered, and she stared through the screen at him, her eyes going wide. “Paul! I didn’t—”

“I want to talk to you.”

She turned away, and he pulled the door open and stepped in. She bent over a cigarette box on the coffee table, stood up with the table lighter, lit her cigarette, and with her back to him, said, “There isn’t anything in particular we can say to each other.”

“I just want to know why,” he said. He sat down, wondering why there seemed to be no anger in him. Only a sadness, and a regret.

She turned and faced him, cupping her elbow in her palm, the cigarette hand canted outward from the wrist, smoke drifting toward the black hair.

“The judge accepted the reason in the Virgin Islands. Incompatibility. Haven’t you heard?”

“I want your personal reason.”

“Maybe I just didn’t fit the concept, Paul. Loyal, tough-fibered little woman, keeping the home fires burning. I wasn’t having any fun. And it was just too much work. So when I got a good price, I sold out.”

“Just like that. Just like that, after all the blood and sweat we both put into it. We started on a shoestring. We had something. If you were sick of it, Jerry could have found a manager. And we had it free and clear, so if you still wanted a cash settlement, Jerry could have mortgaged the place. A chance for golden eggs, and you sell the goose. What am I supposed to do? Start over again? I did that once. That other war clobbered me, and I came back. Now this. I want to know why. Why.”

“I told you I got a good price. And for a property settlement. I took half. You insisted. Isn’t it funny, dear? You don’t talk about us, about our marriage. You want to know about your business.”

“That’s what it comes down to. Because the whole thing Seems so... vindictive. As if you were trying to hurt me. For a year I’ve been thinking. It’s like something some other woman would do to some other guy. Not what you’d do to me. All those tears when I took off. Those letters you should have written on asbestos. Then the cooling off. I didn’t get it.”

“I’m living the way I want to live, Paul. I shouldn’t have married anybody. You better go, because I have a date.”

“There’s something missing in this whole picture.”

She said, too loudly. “Get that out of your head! I’m not what you thought I was. I pretended, but it didn’t work. That’s all.”

He got up quickly and took her shoulders and wrenched her toward the door so that the daylight struck her face. She turned her head away, and he put his knuckles against the side of her chin and turned her back. “It’s an act,” he said in a low voice. “Give me the right reason.”

Her eyes held an emptiness. There were new lines bitten deep around her mouth. He smelled her juniper breath. She said, “No act, Paul. Anybody you marry is supposed to be Joan of Arc. Is that it? I got sick of it and sold it. And what difference would that have made if you weren’t coming back?”

He released her. “That was the pitch. I wasn’t supposed to come back.”

“At this point it doesn’t make any difference, does it?” She turned back into the dimness of the room. “I didn’t sell the house to Winkler. I could have.”

“I’m supposed to tell you you’re a good girl.”

He looked through the screen when he heard firm steps on the shell path. A very large, very young man took the two weathered steps in one stride. He had a look of richness and importance. He pulled the screen open, then started a bit. “Vally? Oh, there you are.” He stepped around Paul with a slightly quizzical look, put an arm around Valerie, patted the back of the yellow skirt cheerfully, and said. “Little late. Sorry, pal. Who’s your friend?”

“My ex. Paul Rayder. Paul, this is Harry. I told you about him, Harry.”

“Oh, sure. How was it, soldier?”

Paul stared at him, stared at the bland, smiling face. He turned and pulled the door open and went down the steps and down the shell path. He heard the deep sound of Harry’s voice, heard them both laugh. There was a shrillness in Valerie’s laugh. A bright-red MG was parked at the curb. Paul walked slowly down the street. When he was close to the corner, he heard the gutty roar of the motor. Harry took the corner onto Collins hard and fast. Paul glanced at the car. Valerie’s dark hair was wind-whipped. She looked back at him, and it was more the face he remembered. It seemed, almost, to have something soft, lost, and wanting in it. He wondered if she knew Harry’s last name.

When Paul went into the lobby of the hotel at six. Jerry Dobson bounded up out of a chair and came over, hand outstretched.

“In spite of the fact you look like death warmed over. I’m glad to see you.”

“What I’ve lost, you’ve gained. Fat, sleek, and prosperous.” They went into the cocktail lounge, took a corner table.

They ordered, and Paul said, “You were right. A drink is indicated.”

“You caught her, then. I know what you mean.”

The drinks came. Paul turned his glass slowly on the tabletop. “It’s funny. Fun-town is always loaded with them. Funny to see your wife right in the routine. Find out anything when you traced her?”

“A little. Not much. After the decree, she stayed in the Virgin Islands, got in with a pretty fast crowd, and blew a good piece of the settlement. Came back here and took a beach apartment. Started unloading more at the tables over the county line while the season was on. Moved to a smaller place. Like she was trying to get rid of every dime as fast as she could, I guess. She’s on the town right now, as I can see you guessed. She’ll make out through this season all right, probably. It will be May or June before she gets picked up for soliciting on the street.”

“That bad? You’re kidding. Jerry.”

“That’s the trouble. I’m not. They’ve got an eye on her. They know she’s in business. It’s a hell of a thing, but you better know the worst. Forget her, Paul. Plenty of other guys have married no-good women.”

“I had the funny feeling she was holding out on me.”

“About what? She’s a type. Life has got to be a party, with paper hats.”

“Who did she sell to?”

“A guy named Winkler. For cash.”

“Know anything about him?”

“He’s been around the Keys most of his life. Heard a rumor he used to run Chinese in, but no proving that.”

“Funny it should be a local.”

Jerry said thoughtfully, “I know what you mean. You usually get that kind of a price when you unload a setup like you built down there to a nice trusting old couple from Michigan. He wanted it, though. And it is a nice hunk of land. What do you want to do about the house? I can rent it again for the season. Tragic thing, that couple that had it last year.”

“What was that, anyway? Your letter didn’t tell me much. You’re a specialist on short letters.”

“It was a young couple. Morrisey. They built a little restaurant about two hundred yards down the pike from your place. The house was handy, so they rented it until they could build one of their own on land near the restaurant. He went swimming early one morning, and she got worried and went out and couldn’t find him. The tide brought him in. He was a strong swimmer, but he hit his head somehow. On that reef offshore, they think. The girl is game. Her mother came down. They’re running the restaurant together. The Sand-Dollar Inn. Pretty decent food. You want to rent the house this season?”

“I don’t know what I want to do. All I could think of, all the way back, was talking to Valerie. So I’ve talked to her, and I feel like it was a swing and a miss. I think maybe I’ll go down there and stay in the house for a while. Get some sun and some fishing and maybe some thinking done. What am I worth? About forty thousand plus the house? I’ve got to get into something, I guess. But not yet. Not until I find some reasons, I guess. And if I don’t find any, I won’t do anything. I could get a shack and fish and make it all last as long as I will.”

“You? I know you better than that, Paul. You’d go nuts.”

“Not the way I feel now.”

“It isn’t the same kind of war I was in, is it?”

“No. I haven’t figured it out yet. That other war, Jerry, being in it, it took you finally down into a sort of emotional valley. It flattened you. This one, you come part way up some kind of a hill on the other side. Because you stop paying any kind of attention to any issues, or moralities. All you have left is competence. So you get competent. It’s a cold-eyed war, this one. You kill them deader in this one, because you kill them in a workmanlike way.”

Jerry signaled for a refill. They sat and talked. Jerry wanted him to come home with him for dinner. Catherine would want to see him. Paul said not yet. Not this quick. Jerry had to leave. Paul sat alone and drank and thought of the girl he had married and the stranger he had seen today.

When he walked out into the gray seaside dusk, he was unsteady on his feet, and his mouth felt numb. There were too many bright faces around him. Too much laughter. He ate and went back to the hotel and went to bed, and heard it start to rain heavily as he went to sleep.

In the morning, he test-drove a used convertible, inspected it carefully, paid for it by check, then waited around for the details of plates, license, check clearance. At noon he ate at the hotel, checked out, put the top down on the car, and drove down through South Miami and Homestead and Key Largo, down the Overseas Highway, on the long bridges. Traffic was light. The sun was a hot weight on his shoulders.

At last he was near his place. He went through the small Key village of Cove’s End, hot and dusty with a memory of a long summer, and noticed, just beyond the town, a neat, new-looking cinderblock restaurant called the Sand-Dollar Inn. Some new roadside courts had been built beyond the town. He saw his sign ahead: PLAYA DE MAÑANA. THE BEACH OF TOMORROW. HOUSEKEEPING CABAÑAS ON THE ATLANTIC. As he slowed to make the left turn across traffic, down the abrupt slant of the sand road, he took a second look at the sign and frowned. The big post had tilted a little and had not been straightened. The neon looked broken. A breeze swung the end of the broken wire that had lighted the sign. Summer sun had cracked and faded the paint. A new sign, crudely lettered on raw wood, was nailed to the post, closed, no trespassing. The genera] flavor was that of abandonment.

The car dipped down off the highway, and he followed the winding sand road, remembering the day that the men had come and put up the sign, remembering the joyous look of Valerie as she squeezed his hand tightly when they had stood and admired the new sign. The sign represented brutal labor. For month upon month, he had been bricklayer, carpenter, electrician, plumber, architect. And Valerie had become a talented amateur in all those departments, her hands callused almost as heavily as his. He remembered how she had looked that day. Deep coppery brown, standing there in the white play suit. A good piece of land. A crescent of white beach with the cabañas ringing it. They had lived in one the first year, and then bought the additional small piece of land and put the house on it. It had taken the first three years to get out of debt, to own the whole thing free and clear.

The road was getting badly overgrown, he saw. He turned left at the fork and went down to the house. The yard was a mass of sandspurs, cactus, weeds. The house had a sour, neglected look. He parked the car and sat in the silence, staring at the house. He got out. Looking along the beach line, he could see three of the cabañas. They looked as overgrown and neglected as the house. Maybe that man Winkler had gone north during the offseason. He’d have to come back soon to put the place in shape for the season. He didn’t want to go into the house right away. He walked down onto the beach in front of the house. From there he could see more of the cabañas. And he could see that a boat channel had been cut through the beach and was protected by groins. On an unprotected piece of beach, such a layout wouldn’t last past the first storm. But the reef, three hundred yards out, served as a breakwater. The white beach was littered. Sandpipers scurried along the slap of the small waves. A tern wheeled in the wind and jeered at him.

When he had first looked at this land, he had known it was the place. It afforded complete privacy. Bulldozing it out had been a major expense. Now it seemed to be reverting to its original wildness.

He took out the key he had carried for over two years and unlocked the front door of the small house. The lock grated. The door was wedged, and he had to kick it open. Moisture had got to the furniture. The house smelled of mold. High weeds obscured half the picture window that faced the sea. Insects scuttled across the terrazzo floors. This was the house that should have been brisk and shining for reunion.

He stood for a long time in the small bedroom. Somebody had changed the furniture around. Then, quickly, he went through the house, opening windows. The place had to be aired out. He went into the garage, threw the switches on the fuseboard. The water pump wheezed and choked and began to run smoothly. He walked over to the water tank and watched the pressure gauge begin to climb. There was a rusty saw hanging from a nail. He rolled his sleeves up, and began a slow circuit of the house, sawing through the pithy trunks of the overgrown weeds, pruning the desirable shrubs away from the windows. The pump had stopped. When he had finished, he took his bag into the bedroom. The house was considerably brighter inside, but it still had a stale smell, an air of neglect. There were sheets in the linen closet. They smelled damp. He took them out and spread them in the afternoon sun.

He was beginning to sweat. He decided he would mop down the floors later. He went down the beach toward the place he had built. The cabañas were empty. He turned up the main path to the swimming pool. The concrete apron was cracked. The pool was empty, and there were cracks in the floor. Tufts of grass grew up through the cracks. He looked beyond the pool and saw where the channel that had been cut through the beach led. It was a boat basin, scooped out. There was a dock, and a gas pump, and an above-ground storage tank. A battered, unkempt cabin cruiser with good lines was moored to the dock. That meant somebody was here after all. He stared up toward the cabaña where he and Valerie had stayed before they had built the house. It was the obvious one, being at the head of the road. Yes, no brush had grown up around that one. Washing hung on a line. A heavy gray sedan was parked nearby. As he looked toward the cabin, a big redheaded man shoved the screen door open and came out and stared down toward him. He was stripped to the waist, and his body looked soft even though it was burned dark red by the sun.

“Don’t you read signs, mister?” he yelled in a thin, high-pitched voice.

Paul walked up toward the cabaña. The man advanced, barefoot, to meet him. Paul saw that he was older than he had looked at a distance. He had a pouched, bad-tempered face.

“The place is closed,” he said. “Says that right on the sign.”

“My name is Rayder.”

“I don’t care what your—” The man stopped and looked more closely at him. “Rayder, you said? You the fella built this, then. I’m the fella bought it from your woman. Winkler’s my name. Moss Winkler. I want to talk to you. That Miamah man — Dobson — he said he didn’t know if you want to rent that house there or sell it. Either way, Rayder, I got first word on it. Right?” He smiled in what was intended to be an ingratiating way. “Give you a thousand right now to seal it. What do you say?”

“I haven’t made up my mind yet.”

“When a man gets an opportunity, he ought to grab it.”

Paul felt his annoyance grow. His voice sharpened. “Right now I’m going to live in that house for a while.”

“Dobson said you were in the Army. You on leave?”

“No. I’m out of the Army.”

“You just want a rest. Is that it?”

“Why all the questions?”

“Like I said, I’m right interested in that little house. If somebody came to rent it, I was going to have something to say about that little house.”

“Like what?”

“I was going to say that property line over there runs all the way out to the highway. But to get into it, the way it is now, you come over my land. You come down my drive and turn off. I didn’t give no official right of way.”

“What harm does that do?”

“I’m not saying about harm. I’m saying you own property, you got rights. And the way the land drops off, it’ll take an awful lot of fill to build up to where you can run a new drive onto the highway. Now, if it rents to me, there’s no problem, see? Because I’m crossing my own place. But I’d rather buy. Then that gives me the whole piece. Then I got the highway on one side and water on the other sides, and no problems.”

Paul knew Winkler was correct. You couldn’t get a car to the house without going down the Playa de Mañana drive.

“I told Dobson I don’t want to make any decisions yet.”

“Well, I’ll tell you this. I’m not a hard fella to get along with. You go ahead and stay there a while and rest yourself, and you got my permission to use the drive. Only I got a lot on my mind, and I got to know soon. Let’s say a week.”

“And at the end of the week I can’t use your drive?”

“You make it sound like I was hard to get along with.”

“I’ll let you know.”

“Today’s Thursday, and I’ll come see you a week from today, mister.”

Paul looked around. “For a man who paid a nice price, you’ve certainly let the thing go.”

Moss Winkler cleared his throat and spat. “Crew of men can chop out this brush in a couple of days. That’s my worry, anyhow, isn’t it? Seeing as how I bought the place. Gave your woman a good price.”

A younger man came out of the cabaña. He wore torn khaki shorts, and his hair was bleached white by the sun. He was slim-hipped, heavily muscled, with a huge, deeply tanned, symmetrical chest. He scuffed his hair with his knuckles.

“For Lord’s sake, Moss, you talk at a full holler. Who’s that?”

“Shut up. You got errands to do.”

The younger man shrugged and went back into the house. He had a square-jawed, sulky-looking face. He came out immediately, shouldering into a white sport shirt, and got into the gray sedan.

“Did you do a good business last year?” Paul asked.

“We didn’t get started last year. We closed her up and did some fishing.” Paul looked at him incredulously and saw that the man had nothing further to say. He said, “Well, I’ll be getting back.”

“Have yourself a good rest, fella.”

Paul walked back to the beach, and Winkler followed along with him. They went along the beach. Winkler gouged at the sand with his heel. “There’s the stake up there, and the property line comes right down across about here.”

The meaning was clear. Paul nodded, without speaking. When he looked back, the big man was standing spread-legged on the property line, scratching his red chest.

Back at the house, Paul stripped down to his shorts, efficiently mopped the floors in the small house, then went down the beach, waded in, and swam to cool off. He took an outside shower, dried himself off. The sun had made the sheets smell fresh. He made up the bed, unpacked. Through all the routine motions, he was thinking of Moss Winkler. The man acted as if he had a still on the place. An unpleasant type.

At five o’clock, Paul dressed and drove into Cove’s End. Some of the stores had new fronts. Two new buildings were going up. He parked outside a familiar bar called the Grouper Hole and went in. When his eyes adjusted to the dimness, he saw Al Wright behind the bar reading a comic book. Two intent fishermen were playing a crucial game of table shuffle-board. Two middle-aged women in sun suits and billed caps sat in a booth, drinking beer.

Al looked up as he approached the bar. His face lit up, and he stuck his hand out. “Paul Rayder! Where’s the monkey suit? This one is on the house. Scotch and water? Coming up.”

Paul looked around, slid up onto a stool. No redecoration here. The same dusty stuffed fish, same framed admonition against asking for credit.

“Staying long?” Al asked, putting the glass in front of him.

“I don’t know yet. I’m down at the house right now.”

“The whole darn town is sorry you sold out, Paul. That place attracted a nice class of people. Hear it’s a mess down there now.”

“It is that. Talked to Winkler. I can’t figure that guy.”

Al Wright leaned a bit closer and lowered his voice. “Neither can anybody else. That’s a good property he bought, and the town knows what he paid for it. After he bought it, he put up a no-vacancy sign, and after every cabin was empty, he puts up the closed sign. That doesn’t do the town any good. He and his people, they don’t even trade here unless they forget something they need in a hurry. What I say is, what’s going on out there?”

“Anybody have any guesses?”

“You know how the town is, Paul. If you’re fixing to spit, the whole town knows it before you start looking for a spot. They been trying to add two and two, and all they get is wild ideas. Me, I don’t go for gossip. You know that.” His broad dark face assumed an expression of complete innocence. “There’s that Moss Winkler. Then there’s a husky white-headed kid called Donny. And there’s a thin mean-looking guy called Corson. They do a lot of that there skin fishing — you know, spearing stuff underwater. They have parties sometimes, with girls down from Miami, and for a while they had some beat-up-looking little old girl cooking for them, but I hear she isn’t there anymore. Then they got some real slick friends come down in big cars. The town figured smuggling from Cuba for a while, but some of the boys kept track, and Winkler don’t take his boat out far, or meet anybody.” Al edged even closer. “Now, I got my own idea.”

“What’s that?”

“I think some of those big gangsters are using this Winkler as a front man and had him buy the place for a hideout. That’s why he doesn’t want any business there. He’s got to keep those cabins ready, see? Suppose the Senate committee is looking for a big shot and he wants to disappear for a while. Doesn’t that make sense?”

“I don’t know. He doesn’t want people around. He made that clear today.”

Al reached over and nudged him. “Sure. Sure. That’s a real private spot. He doesn’t want anybody around. He keeps your sign up. That’s just a front. He wants your house, too, the way I hear it. Funny she didn’t sell it to him. Paul, I’m sorry about you folks splitting up. I always liked Valerie, in spite of what they say. Another drink?”

“Please. What do they say?”

Al gave him a wide-eyed look. “You didn’t hear? I’m not one to gossip. You can depend on that. Wait’ll I fix your drink.”

He made the drink quickly and came back, wiping his hand on his apron. “Well, just before she sold, the town says, she got herself all jammed up with that Donny. Seems like he was staying there at one of your cabins, too. All alone. Folks saw ’em riding around together.” He leaned over and nudged Paul on the shoulder. “How do you like that! But, as I said, I always liked your wife, Paul. She sure worked hard after you were gone. The whole town was pulling for her to make out good. But then she ups and — boom, the place is sold.”

Al leaned his heavy tattooed arms on the worn bartop across from Paul. He said, “Of course, a bad thing like what happened to that Eddie Morrisey didn’t do the town no good. Makes the tourists nervous when one of our own people gets himself drownded.”

“Hit his head, I heard.”

“He did a fool thing — dove off the reef. That’s what they think, anyhow. It didn’t kill him. The drowning killed him. There was little pieces of coral in the wound on his head. I got a look at him that morning. Went down when I heard something was up. The tide brought him in, and it was a good thing he wasn’t in there long enough for anything to start eating on him, because it was his wife found him and drug him out of the shallows. That Linda is a real nice girl, Paul. They had to give her shots, and they took her up to Homestead and put her in the hospital. Closed up the restaurant, of course. Her ma came down, and they took Eddie up and buried him in Ohio someplace. We figured the restaurant would go on the market then, brand-new and all, but no, sir. Two weeks, and the two of them are back down. Linda a lot more quiet-like, but with her jaw stuck out, and they’re making it pay off. Another drink?”

“Not right now, thanks, Al.”

“Put your money back in your pocket. Here, I’ve been doing all the talking. You come back in and tell me about this Korea deal sometime, hear?”

When Paul went out, the sun was almost gone. He got into his car and drove to the Sand-Dollar Inn. There were three other cars parked there. Inside, all was crisp and shining, with tile floor, bright plastic upholstery on the chairs, booths, counter stools. Behind the counter was an opening where he could see into a kitchen that looked as aseptic as a laboratory. He walked to a booth, and a tall bright-haired girl hurried over with a formal smile and a menu. She looked familiar, and he suddenly realized she was the oldest daughter of Mack Randolph, who owned the Cove’s End Market.

“Aren’t you Marie Randolph?”

She gave him a startled, puzzled look, and then her eyes widened a bit. “Gee, I didn’t recognize you, Mr. Rayder.”

“How’s your father?”

“Oh, he’s swell. You coming back to stay?”

“I don’t know, Marie.”

She flushed and looked away from him. “I’m sorry about everything.”

“Thanks.”

“The baked red-snapper throats is special tonight, Mr. Rayder.”

“Okay. With mashed, string beans, and coffee with.”

She scribbled the order, smiled at him, and hurried off, her heels brisk on the tile. She called the order through to the kitchen, and another girl came from serving a party at one of the tables to stand beside her. Paul wondered if it was Linda Morrisey. She was a small girl, very slim-waisted, but sturdy, her yellow uniform snug against firm hips and taut across her breasts. Her hair was heavy, thick, alive-looking. It was light brown and nearly straight, curled in at the ends, and the sun had streaked it, bleached it to blonde on top of her head. He didn’t get a good look at her face. He saw Marie lean close to her and murmur something. The girl turned quickly and looked directly at him. She had a strong face. Handsome rather than pretty, with bold bone structure, a firm wide mouth, the eyes set wide and grave and gray. He saw her realize that her quick stare might look rude, and he saw her cheeks color a bit as she turned away.

When Marie brought his order, he said, “Is that Mrs. Morrisey, that other girl waiting on table?”

“Yes, it is. She wants to meet you, after. I told her who you are.”

“Her mother’s here, too?”

“She’s in the kitchen. With Mike. He’s the chef. The four of us can handle it now, but there’ll have to be eight anyway when the season gets started. You said you wanted coffee now?”

“Please.”

The food was attractive, well cooked. Some of the customers left, and more arrived. The girls were busy for a time. Paul had more coffee. At last there was only one other table occupied, and Marie and Linda came toward his booth.

“Linda, I want you should meet Mr. Rayder. This is Mrs. Morrisey.”

He took her small firm hand. Her smile was good, her voice surprisingly low-pitched. “Will you sit down?” he asked.

She slid into the other side of the booth, and Marie said, “You want I should bring you some coffee, Linda?”

“Please,” she said. Marie hurried away.

“I think you have a fine place here, Mrs. Morrisey.”

“Thank you. My husband and I — we selected the location carefully. One of the reasons for placing it here was the place you built, Mr. Rayder. Even though those cabañas are equipped for housekeeping, we knew we would get steady trade from your customers during the season. So it was distressing to us when the man who bought it closed it. But new courts have gone up now, and someone else is going to put in some waterfront apartments on the other side of town.”

“I guess you’re not any more distressed than I am. When you build something and work as hard as we did and gamble everything on it, it hurts to see it fold.”

She stirred the coffee Marie had brought her. “Did you design the little house we rented, Mr. Rayder?”

“Most of it. My wife added a few touches.”

“It’s a perfect house. After we started to live in it, we would have tried to buy it if it hadn’t been waterfront land and sort of out of our reach. We decided to build one exactly like it. It’s a good little house to — to be in love in. But I guess I don’t ever want to look at it again.”

“I’m sorry about that. It’s something special that you could even come back to Cove’s End.”

“I wasn’t trying to... well, to prove anything. What happened is something I’ll have to live with wherever I go. You see, Eddie and I, we decided that if we were ever going to get ahead, we’d have to do it on our own, and take the plunge while we were young enough to work like dogs. We managed to get started, and when it... happened to Eddie, it didn’t seem right for me to give it up. And, like I said, I’d have to live with it anyway, so I just came back. I’m glad I did.”

“It’s funny, you know,” he said, “how Valerie and I had the same kind of idea. Working for ourselves instead of for other people. We lived on nothing until we had enough to make the break. But then... well, she sold it. Even if I’d known, I couldn’t have stopped it in time.”

“It surprised people here.”

“I know.”

He began to sense that she was slightly nervous. He had the feeling that she was fencing, that she had some subject she wanted to bring up but didn’t know exactly how to go about it. The silence grew awkward.

He said, to fill the gap, “Does your mother like it here?”

Her smile was crooked. “She detests it. She’s dying to see her friends in Ohio, but she won’t leave her poor helpless little daughter alone down here in this tropical wasteland. I’m trying to get her to go.” She glanced toward the door to the kitchen and called, “Mother! Would you come here, please?”

Paul got up. An austerely handsome woman came toward them. Her gray hair was cropped short and curled. She was taller than her daughter, and her expression was one of chronic mild suspicion. “Marie tells me you are Mr. Rayder. Your wife — or I should say your ex-wife — sold your place of business to some remarkably dreadful people, sir.”

“Mother! You know he had nothing to do with that.”

“It is merely an observation, dear. I am not being rude.”

“I was just telling your daughter what a nice place this is.”

“Sixteen years of schooling, and she winds up selling fried fish at the end of nowhere. Mr. Rayder, she is as stubborn as any goat.”

“Mother, please!”

“She forgets most of the social graces, Mr. Rayder. I am Mrs. Robert McGalvie. I don’t believe she mentioned that. Officially, I am in charge of salads and pastries. And that reminds me that there is dressing to be prepared. With just a trace of garlic. Nice to meet you, Mr. Rayder.” She stalked off, her head high.

“In other words,” Linda said softly, “she doesn’t care for it here. Actually, she works much too hard, but there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“Sort of awe-inspiring,” Paul said.

“Do you have a car here?” Linda asked.

“Why, yes. Is there something I—?”

“I know how strange this sounds,” she said, her eyes uneasy, “but would you please take me for a ride? There’s something I haven’t told anyone. I had no idea of telling you until after we’d been talking a while. Do you mind?”

“Of course not.”

“I don’t want to talk here. I’ll tell Mother.” She walked across the floor and pushed the kitchen door open and went through. He found that he liked watching her walk. She had a quick free stride, and the alive hair bounced at the nape of her neck as she walked.

Marie brought the check, and he paid and left a tip for her. He was standing by the door as Linda came back from the kitchen to say, “I won’t be back before closing time, Marie. Is that all right?”

Marie gave Paul a quick, speculative look and said, “Oh, sure.”

They went out into the soft warmth of the October night. “You’re sure you don’t mind, Mr. Rayder?”

“Of course not. I’m Paul.”

“All right, Paul. And I’m Linda. Please stop over there at Palmetto Court. Mother and I stay there. I want to get out of this darn uniform. And get something for my hair. Please leave the top down.”

He turned at the court, and she hurried in. She was back in five minutes in a sun-back linen dress that was pale in the night. He shut the car door and went around and got behind the wheel.

“Any special place?”

“Anywhere. The closer I get to saying all this, the sillier it sounds.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

He headed northeast. She sat far over on her side of the seat, her hands folded on the purse, silent and thoughtful. He guessed she was planning what she would say. Watching the road, he suddenly realized that he was nearing a turnoff, a sand-and-shell road that led down to an abandoned fishing camp. He slowed the car and saw from the condition of the turnoff that it was still not in use. He realized then that there was a certain masochism in selecting this particular spot. He had turned down this same road many times with Valerie beside him. Linda made no comment as the car lurched over the lumpy road.

He parked with the car headed toward a massive broken sea wall, the great slabs heaved up by hurricane, the reinforcing rods sticking out like naked bones.

“There’s a place where you can sit on the wall,” he said.

“Good,” she said. He walked with her to the place. It was still intact. He got on it, held his hand for her, pulled her up. They sat side by side on the wall. The waves made soft sounds on the sand.

“Is that something on fire?” she said. “Way out there?”

“Moon about to come up. Cigarette?”

“Thanks.” He cupped the lighter flame in his hands and held it for her.

“This is pretty crazy,” she said.

“Don’t mind that.”

“I better take it from the beginning. After your wife left the house empty, we asked around and got in touch with a nice man named Dobson, who gave us a fair price for a one-year lease. We thought we’d have our own place done in a year. Eddie and I worked awfully hard, and the little house was wonderful to come back to. We’d get back late and take a quick swim. We were too busy to be friendly with the new owner of Playa de Mañana, and then we found out he wasn’t renting the cabañas as they became empty. While we were still wondering about that, he put up the closed sign. Eddie thought maybe they were going to enlarge it or something, but they didn’t do anything to it. We were open by then, and working like dogs. But business wasn’t as good as we’d hoped.

“We were closed every Tuesday, the way we are now. We got up late one Tuesday and swam and then walked down the beach to say hello to Mr. Winkler and find out what he was planning. There were quite a few people there, friends of theirs, I guess, and they were pretty drunk and noisy, and Winkler was rude. Terribly rude. He ordered us off the place. It burned Eddie up. And we heard gossip in town about Winkler.

“Anyway, Eddie started wondering just what was going on next door. We’d see their boat go in and out after the new channel was dug, and we’d see them fishing off the reef out there. I’m a pretty-good swimmer, but Eddie was much better. Those people left us strictly alone, and we left them alone. Eddie swam out to the reef a couple of times, and once he swam way out beyond it to that rocky island out there. I told him it made me nervous to have him go that far out.

“He had to go into Miami alone one day, and he came back with a pair of binoculars. It made me a little mad because they were expensive, even if they were secondhand. About that time he started looking mysterious, and he stopped talking about what our neighbors could be doing. He left the restaurant a couple of times during the day without saying where he was going, but I had the idea he went back to the house.

“One night he accidentally woke me up as he was creeping back to bed in the middle of the night, breathing hard. I asked him where he’d been, and he just grunted at me. But he seemed more thoughtful and — I don’t know just how to say it — triumphant. Smug, sort of. I asked him what he was finding out, and he told me he’d tell me when he was absolutely positive.

“One morning, it was a Tuesday morning, he went out early for a swim. I got up and made breakfast and waited, and he didn’t come back. I went out, and I couldn’t see him anywhere. It was a sort of gray, misty morning. It made the water look oily, and it was quite calm. The tide was just coming in. I walked up and down the beach, but I couldn’t see him. The worst thing, I guess, was seeing his bare footprints in the sand going into the water and not being able to see any coming out. I got the binoculars and looked at the reef and at that rocky island. I kept telling myself he’d swum out to the island and he was on the far side of it and that was why I couldn’t see him. But I guess you know how you... have those terrible hunches about things.

“I was getting more and more frantic, and then I saw something in shallow water, and while I was running I knew what it was. I pulled him out, and I don’t know where the strength came from. I tried artificial respiration, but I could tell, just from the feel of him, that it wasn’t — any—” Her voice changed, and she turned away from him, in silence.

Paul sat stolidly, sensing she did not want any physical evidence of sympathy or awkward understanding. After a time, she turned back and dug in her purse for a cigarette. He lit it for her, looking at the flame rather than at her eyes.

When she continued, her voice was flat and under control. “When I talked to you in the restaurant. I left out one of the reasons I came back here. I was never completely satisfied about what happened to Eddie. If that Winkler was doing something wrong, and if Eddie was on the verge of finding out, then it was almost too perfectly timed.”

“Overconfidence, carelessness — they’ve killed a lot of swimmers, you know.”

“I know. I guess it’s crazy to keep thinking it was something else.”

“Have you told anyone about Eddie’s investigations?”

“You’re the only one, Paul. There’s one other thing, though. When I realized Eddie was — gone, I screamed, and I guess I fainted. When I came out of it, there was a blanket over Eddie, and Mr. Winkler and the two men who work for him were there, and they said they’d already phoned the sheriff. It was the only time they were anywhere near halfway nice, and they stayed right with me through the questioning and everything. It was only afterward that I realized that they had seemed relieved, sort of, after the questioning. Maybe because it had shown them that Eddie hadn’t told me anything — that is, if they knew he was spying on them. I can’t help feeling that if Eddie hadn’t drowned, they would have had something happen to him sooner or later, maybe to both of us. I sense that they’re completely brutal and ruthless and doing something wrong.”

He said slowly, “What happened to me today fits the picture, too. Winkler, out of the goodness of his heart, is letting me stay in my own house for one whole week. Then I’ve got to rent or sell to him, or else put a lot of money into giving the little house its own exit drive onto the highway. Let’s think out loud. It didn’t occur to Winkler in the beginning to suspect that anybody living in that little house could be dangerous to whatever he’s doing by getting too nosy. Suppose they’re aware that your husband has found out too much. And then, while they’re trying to figure some nice, quick way of shutting him up, Eddie has his accident. That makes it clear to Winkler that he better sew up the house. It sits empty, so he has no problems. Now I show up. He doesn’t want to push me too hard, so he gives me a week. Meanwhile they suspend whatever it is they’re doing. Smuggling, counterfeiting, whatever.”

“I suppose,” she said, sighing, “that I ought to just forget it.”

He sat there beside her, conscious of a weariness that was more than physical. It was deeper than bone marrow, a tiredness that lay like gray fog in the lowest valley of his soul. He resented the necessity to react, even negatively. There had been too many fire fights. A certain stranger named Eddie was dead. Another stranger named Valerie was gone. A young sturdy woman named Linda sat beside him, and from the beginning, from the first look across the bright restaurant, there had been a restless awareness of her — and he knew she, too, was puzzling about how quickly they had achieved a closeness that had nothing to do with what they had said or what they had done. Yet he resented even his inadvertent reaction to her. They were wrong about wars and woman hunger. Nobody came back full of need anymore. You had to learn to need all over again.

She had turned toward him, and her voice came from far away. “Should I forget it, Paul?”

“Don’t ask me. Don’t ask me anything.” He pushed off the wall and dropped to the sand and walked away from her, not looking back. He walked fifty feet and stood, his fists doubled, hitting them softly together in front of his chest, his jaw muscles aching. Go back and drive her home, a sturdy little girl full of cool indignation, full of a careful politeness.

“Paul,” she said, close behind him. It startled him. The sea sound had washed out the noise of her footsteps.

“Paul, I’m sorry. It’s all pretty meaningless to you, isn’t it? I didn’t think.”

He turned and looked down at her face, grave and concerned, with the moon laid across it.

“That was rude, Linda. You don’t have to forgive it.”

“I feel like a child who’s stayed too long and bored the guests.”

“Not bored. I don’t know. This isn’t an excuse. All of a sudden I just didn’t want the responsibility for anything. For myself even. Didn’t even want the effort of living.”

She took one of his fists, cupped it in her small, firm hands, held it against the hollow of her throat, close under her chin. “You’re like broken springs,” she said. “You need acres of sleep. Orchards of it. Do you sleep?”

“Not too well yet.”

“I... I wish you’d come home to me,” she said. She quickly released his hand and moved uneasily away from him. Her voice changed. “I guess that made me pretty transparent. Linda, the world mother.”

“I wish I had come home to you. So now I’m obvious.”

“No. Just the need is obvious. But you’re strong, aren’t you? I mean. I feel that you are, way deep, where it counts. Where it adds up.”

“I don’t know that, either.”

“Moonlight makes people talk too much. You should be home. But I guess that isn’t a good place for you, is it?”

“It’s all right.”

“You’ll make it be all right, won’t you?”

They walked back, and he helped her up the broken wall and down the other side. He drove back and let her off at her place. He said. “I’m not thinking very well. I’ll sleep and do some better thinking, and then we’ll talk again.”

“If you’d like.” she said. He watched her walk in, and he sat in the car and smoked a cigarette and then drove back by the restaurant and down to the house. The night wind had blown through it, and it had a cleaner smell. Through the scrub trees, he could see a vague light next door. He undressed quickly and turned out the light. All at once the air around his head was full of the acid whine of mosquitoes. He stood it for a few minutes, cursed, and got up and turned on the lights. He found a newspaper and tore scraps and plugged the holes in the ruptured screens. He shut the door of the bedroom, took a towel, and began killing them. He went at it methodically, counting for a time, then losing count as he went after them more hurriedly, then wildly, flailing at the ones that refused to light, grunting with effort. Suddenly he saw his face in the mirror, strained, distorted, crazy-eyed.

It shocked him, and he took a long, shivering breath and stood very still. When his face was again a weathered mask, he killed the others, searched the room, turned out the lights, and went back to bed. Nothing else sang of hunger in the night. He wanted warm thoughts on which he could ride downward into sleep. He thought of the look of the body of the woman Linda. He thought of the look of moonlight on her face. He held thoughts of her tightly so that nothing else could get in, and when danger was past, he released her and fell, turning slowly, into sleep.

In the morning, he drifted in and out of sleep like a slow train that crosses mountains and goes through many tunnels. When he got up, the morning was bright and still and hot. He went naked down to the beach and swam hard, snorting and thrashing, fighting the water. He rolled and spat and went winded up the beach and lay in the sun with a towel across his loins until he could feel the rays biting the inner layers of skin. He showered, shaved, dressed, and drove to the restaurant. It was quarter of eleven. Linda served his breakfast at the counter.

“You slept,” she said.

“Power of suggestion. I mended a few of those springs.”

“If you always eat like this, I’ll start making money.”

“I’m going to Miami to sort out personal stuff that was put in storage. Can you come along?”

She made a face. “Checks to write today. Salesmen calling. Fish to buy. Menus to type. Uh uh. Thanks, though.”

He was back at the house by five, carrying one suitcase. In it were a few important papers, photographs of his parents and brother, long dead, some sport shirts, shorts, slacks, trunks. All the jumble in the warehouse had depressed him at first. Too many things had the touch of Valerie on them. In the beginning, he had sorted in a halfhearted way. Then he had begun to throw things out ruthlessly. It had been a release to do that. It made him feel free again. Paul Rayder owns a house, furniture, car, and bank balance. And everything else in the world he can pack and carry around with him. Full of this sense of freedom, he walked toward the door of the house and stopped as he saw the red bonnet of the MG parked close beside the house. He pushed the screen door open and let it hang behind him. She came out of the living room, faintly unsteady on her feet. Her smile was pasted on a bit crookedly. She wore a Chinese-red halter and tailored white linen slacks with a red belt. Her coarse dark hair was tied back with a piece of red yarn.

“Where’s Harry?” he asked flatly.

“I borrowed his car today. I thought I’d see how you’re making out.” Her tone was too casual.

“I’m making out fine, thanks. Nice of you to stop by. Have a nice ride back.”

She looked at the suitcase. “That’s one of ours.”

“One of mine. Drive carefully.”

She walked back into the living room. He went to the doorway and leaned against the frame, fists in his pockets, watching her. She sat down, uncapped a thermos bottle, filled the cap. She raised it to him and winked. “Cheers, dear. A picnic for one. They’re called stinkers. Made with rum instead of brandy.”

“Look. Valerie. Words of one syllable: Get out.”

“I’m a guest. Be nice to guests.”

“What’s on your mind?”

“Oh, I was sitting here alone. Right over there you nearly killed me. Remember? The hammer slipped off the roof. The scar’s right here. Over my ear.”

“Why did you come here?”

“Because I don’t like the idea of you being here. This was for two of us or none of us, not one of us.”

“It isn’t bothering me.”

“Winkler will buy it. Let him have it. Paul. That’s the last thing I’ll ever ask of you.”

“Why? It can’t make any difference to you. Not the way you live.”

“Paul, don’t stay here. Go away.”

“Are you maudlin? Is that it?”

She held the blue thermos top against her cheek and looked at the middle of the floor. “Even when I was little... I’ve told you... so terribly afraid of being hurt. Little things. A panic over a hornet. Hysteria about dentists. You don’t understand about that, about being weak and afraid. But when you are, they fix it so you pay and pay.”

“You’re not making sense. You better leave while you can still drive.”

She looked at him with the askew smile. “Add it up. That’s what I did. I added myself, and the total stinks. A minus character. But I was given a sample, and it broke me in pieces. What do you do when you can’t add yourself up and get anything? Just for — for memories of me when I used to add up right, please don’t stay. Go when the week is up.”

“I’ll stay here until I’m ready to leave. Now get out.”

She stood, recapped the thermos bottle. “I said from the word go the idea was no good.” She seemed to be talking to herself as she looked around the room. “I love it here,” she said. “And it got awful empty, Paul. Very, very empty. No husky male to hear my woes. Then there was a husky male, a paying guest.”

“Donny?”

She turned, slat-eyed, “Oh! Of course. Al Wright, the poor man’s wailing wall. Donny heard my woes. He listened and listened and listened, until he knew just a little bit too much about what makes me tick, and then he started using his information and had himself a dandy time, and, incidentally, chalked up mission accomplished. A sort of real estate mission. Now, darling mine, I spread my woes all over. And I have more to spread around, truly.”

“Take them back to Harry.”

“In his little red car. Of course, dear. But Harry isn’t another Donny. Donny turned out to have teeth and claws and cold, cold eyes. And I couldn’t cope. Harry’s just a tourist. Donny is that thing they use to open a stuck window. A pry bar. And once the window is open, my sweet, there are burglars in the house. So I moved out of our house, and out of your life, neatly, sweetly, completely. I have new rules now for being a good girl, and today I’m being a good girl, indeed, but you are stubborn, and so the end of today is something I look forward to like going to the dentist.”

“You don’t make very much sense.”

“I could not love thee half as much loved I not Valerie more,” she said. She looked around the room. “I sure loved it.”

“You must have.”

“I loved me a little more, son. Walk me out.”

He went out with her, and she got into the little car. She looked up at him. “A kiss for the bride?”

He looked down into her eyes until she looked away. She bit her lip, started the motor, raced it hard, then ripped it into gear. The back end of the MG slewed as she horsed it up the sand road toward the highway. He stood there in back of the house, heard the change in motor noise as she got onto the highway and leveled out. There were places where he could see the road, and he saw the flash of red as the small car sped away. He turned back toward the house, hearing the fading snarl of the motor.

He heard the crash. It seemed to go on for a long time. He stood by the door, his hand touching the screen. He had the feeling that he had stood in this exact place in some other life and listened for that same sound that ended the motor noise, that ended a piece of his life.

His hand was lifted, touching the door to push it open. He saw a mosquito plant itself on the back of his hand. He watched its abdomen pulse and swell. He broke out of it then, turned and raced to his car, swung it around hard.

Just beyond Cove’s End, a trucker, spread-legged, waved him to a stop with a red rag. He pulled over onto the shoulder and jumped out and trotted up to where he could see a tractor-trailer slewed across the road, the back corner of the trailer canted down at a precarious angle. A crowd had gathered. People were still coming on the run. In the distance, a thin siren was growing.

A pale, well-dressed man was spreading a car robe over something on the shoulder of the highway. He wore the intent, serious expression of a man trying to put the bedspread on neatly. People watched him from a safe distance. They were swallowing, and a little boy nearby was throwing up. Paul hurried toward the man, and the man stepped away and blocked him and said, “Nothing to see. Nothing to see.”

“She’s dead,” Paul said.

“As a physician, sir, I should say she is extremely dead. As a tourist, I am happy to see her off the highway.”

Al Wright moved close to Paul, his broad face grayish around the mouth under the thick tan. “I just stepped out of my joint for a minute and heard her come through town, Paul. Crazy fool woman was going over eighty right through town. Drunk or crazy. Way down here I see her swerve right into that truck.” He paused and shook his head. “Cut in and jammed that little car right under it and hit the rear-left duals. They’ll have to torch-cut it out of there. She took off alone like a big bird, made a bank shot off the side of the trailer, and landed way over here.”

The highway patrolmen were climbing out of their sedan, taking over.

Al said, “Man, you look green! I’d think you’d seen enough people shot up lately so this shouldn’t get you.”

“It was Valerie,” Paul said tonelessly.

Al stared at him, jaw sagging. Paul could hear the hoarse excited voice of the trucker. “...so I think she’s by me, and bang. I don’t get much jar up there, but it puts the whole rig in a skid. Going eighty or ninety, she was.”

Paul walked over and heard one of the patrolmen say, “Joe, see if you can check identification.”

Paul said, “I can tell you what you want to know.”

“Who are you?”

Paul told him, and answered his questions about Valerie’s name, address, occupation. “How was she when she left your house? Drunk?”

“She’d been drinking.”

“To the best of your knowledge, she ever have any accident before, or get convicted of any traffic violation?”

“She got a speeding ticket about four years ago. She drove fast, but she was a good driver.”

“You say you don’t know the name of the guy owns the red wagon?”

“He was introduced to me as Harry. That’s all I know.”

“Michigan plates. We can check that. What’s the deal, mate? Why was she visiting you? You pretty chummy with her or something?”

“Is that part of the routine?”

“I just want to know, fella. Curiosity.”

“She divorced me a year ago while I was in Korea. I just got back the other day. I don’t know why she called on me today. I told her to get out.” The patrolman looked uneasy.

“I guess I got too nosy. Sorry.”

“It’s all right. Do you need me for anything else?”

“Mind looking at her in the presence of me and the other officer? Then we can make that an official identification.”

“I don’t mind.”

The crowd was herded back, and the patrolman knelt on one knee and lifted a corner of the car robe. He glanced down and glanced away quickly. He asked, “Is that the woman whose name and address you gave me?”

“It is.”

“Thanks. You made this a little easier, Rayder. Better go get yourself a shot.”

Traffic was moving again. Tow-car experts were studying the truck, scratching their heads, comparing ideas. An ambulance was backing into position. Paul backed his car deep onto the shoulder and drove back to the house. He got out, and he saw the marks of her sandal heels in the dirt. He went into the house and looked dully at the three lipsticked butts in the ashtray.

“A kiss for the bride?” An old routine from away back. A tired routine. So you didn’t send her off with a kiss. Which would either have made it easier to do or made it impossible to do.

He hoped it hadn’t hurt. She’d always had a terror of pain.

He stretched out on the bed. There was a familiar knothole in the bleached paneled wall. A little man with big ears and a grin. Valerie had discovered him. She said it was an indecent grin. A horrid little spectator. She had named him Arnold, and she said that while he was gone, Arnold would watch over her. Not such a good job there, Arnold. Now the divorce was pretty final. Pretty complete.

When the last of the sun was gone, the room grew dim. He heard the ting of the springs on the back screen door. He rolled quickly to his feet.

Linda came to the doorway.

“Oh,” he said, sitting back on the bed.

“I didn’t want to knock or call, in case you were asleep.”

“I wasn’t asleep.”

He heard her go to the kitchen, run water. She came back with a glass of water and two pills. “They’ll relax you.”

“How did you know I’d need them?”

“The whole town knows what happened. Al Wright said you acted funny. I guessed that you might have said things to her that would make you feel bad now. Losing something twice — sometimes the second time is the worst.”

He took the pills, handed her back the glass. She took it back to the kitchen and came in again. “Why don’t you lie down, Paul?”

He swung his legs up and stretched out. She stood by the bed. “I could sit here until you go to sleep, if it wouldn’t bother you.”

“I think I’d like it. But you didn’t want to see this house again.”

“It isn’t as bad as I thought it would be.” He moved over a little, and she sat on the side of his bed and took his hand.

They sat in silence, and he knew it was a bad room for her. Bad for them both. The pills began to work, began to make a thick feeling in his ears, a faint, not-disagreeable numbness of lips. He watched the silhouette of her face against the faint light from the window. She had the art of silence, of warmth through silence. Death, he thought, is a final erasure. But under the smear, the words can still be read. Valerie was a few words in a scrawling childish hand. Something that had once been shining and bright and new. In an odd way it seemed that the Valerie of long ago had died, and the stranger, in her chippy clothes and knowing arrogance, had never existed.

He did not awaken until predawn light was smoke-gray at the windows. Before she left, she had apparently eased off his shoes and loosened his belt. It had happened to Valerie long ago. A memory from the other side of a high wall of drugged sleep. The suitcase was still in the living room. He took it near a window, opened it, and found swimming trunks. He went out on the beach. There was a shore mist, just lifting. In the east there was a touch of gold in the gray. He walked into the water and saw, out beyond the reef, the battered cruiser he had seen in Winkler’s improvised basin. It was still against the corroded steel plate of the water, like a toy in a shop window. A doll figure swam clumsily in the water toward the stern, and another figure came out of the cabin and went to the stern and helped it aboard.

He stood thigh-deep and watched. One figure went to the bow, and the cruiser moved slowly as the man hauled on the anchor line. The powerful engines started, and as the anchor was swung aboard, the cruiser picked up speed, turning out toward the small bare island of rock several hundred yards beyond the reef. It turned in a long half circle around the far end of the reef, and as it came up the shore line between beach and reef, Paul instinctively moved out into the water so that he would not be so visible. The speed dropped, and the cruiser turned into the channel. The first sun rays were coppery on the red hair of Moss Winkler at the wheel. Donny sat cross-legged on the cabin roof.

In the morning stillness, between the lap of the small waves, Paul heard the engines die. He swam slowly for a time, showered, put on ancient khaki shorts, a T-shirt. It was too early to go to breakfast, so he used the morning coolness to chop away some of the brush. He went up the road at seven-thirty and walked along the highway, locating the place where he could most easily have fill dumped to form a driveway.

As he stood looking over the situation, he heard a car slow down. He turned and watched it turn left and dip down by the sagging sign. It was a black Chrysler sedan, new and of the largest size, chrome winking, tire-sides blazing white. It had Miami plates. A thin dark man drove it, sitting alone in the front seat. Two men and a woman sat in back. Paul saw them for just a moment, and got the impression of a Latin foreignness, a look of richness and importance. They did not look at all like the sort of people who would be visiting Winkler out of friendship. He wondered if the driver was the one they called Corson. He fitted the vague description Al had given him.

He walked to the Sand-Dollar. Linda was alone behind the counter. He sat on one of the low stools and said, “Whatever they were, they worked.”

“I’m glad, Paul. It was all pretty hideous, wasn’t it?”

“I thought I’d grown some pretty good calluses. That peeled me right down to the pink.”

“Paul, who is Rip?”

He stared at her. “Rip? He was a sergeant. A damn good one.”

“When you were going to sleep, you got all tense. You shut your hand so hard on mine I thought you were going to break bones. And you were calling him in a funny way. A kind of whisper. ‘Rip! Rip! Over here!’ As if you didn’t want anybody to hear you calling him. Then you gave a big sigh and went all limp.”

“He was a big stringy kid from Kansas. Acted like he didn’t have a nerve in his body. One morning we had tank support, and we walked right into trouble. Enfilading fire from both sides. It was one of those things that may or may not have been my fault. I couldn’t decide. I dove for a shallow ditch, and I was calling him, and I saw him get it just as he turned. He was a good man, and I couldn’t afford to lose any good men. I blamed myself for a long time, and then I forgot it. I didn’t know there was any part of it left in my mind.”

“Maybe now it will be gone.”

“Talking will make it go quicker than I dreaming about it, Linda. I’ve never talked about it until now. I depended too much on tanks that day. After that I got colder and harder and smarter. I didn’t waste any people. When I lost people, it was an exchange that had to be made. People traded for real estate. I kept my people tough and wise and ready. I found out the battalion was calling me the Iceman. My people killed well and inexpensively. When we lost people, it was because we had come up against people who knew what they were doing, too.”

She put her hand on his wrist and said, “Paul!”

He realized that his voice had gone too loud and harsh. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly and felt his tight cheeks relax. He smiled at her and said, “All appearances to the contrary, I wasn’t discharged psycho. I seem to keep racing my motor.”

“We’re going to find a time and a place, and I am going to sit while you pace and talk and walk and talk and talk it all out.”

“Some date for a girl. But you have a funny knack. You seem to keep loosening a valve I’m trying to keep tied down. You know, on the plane I was thinking I’d go in a room with two fat quarts of whisky and lock the door and sit down and drink every damn drop. And wake up cured.”

“I tried that after Eddie’s funeral. Only I just got sick. Say, you did come here for breakfast?”

He was eating when Linda’s mother came, and Marie came in a few minutes later. Marie kept giving him nervous sidelong glances and wetting her lips, and Paul knew she wanted to say something about Valerie but didn’t know what the proper thing to say could possibly be. So he turned to her and smiled and said, gently, “You don’t have to say anything about it.”

Marie flushed. “Well, I wondered. I guess I’m sorry. I liked her. She was always nice to me, right up until before she left.”

“Then she wasn’t nice?”

“Not the last time I saw her, after selling it was all arranged. We all thought that you probably didn’t know about it, and it seemed like a dirty trick, so we were all cold-acting. The whole town was. She felt it, I guess. I was in the store, and she came in and she had a bandage on her wrist and, gee, I just said what anybody’d say. I sort of asked her if she fell or something, and she looked at me as if she wanted to kill me. She leaned real close to me, and it sort of scared me. She said, almost whispering. ‘Yes. I fell a long way.’ You know, that was the last time I ever talked to her, and she had no reason to bite my head off.”

Paul finished, and as Linda gave him his change, he said, “Go for a swim this afternoon? If your mother will let you.”

She bit her lip. “Not down there.”

“Of course not. Cove Beach. Cold beer and handstands.”

Her good grin wrinkled her nose. “Love it.”

“Okay. I’ll come to lunch late, and we’ll go from here.”

At two-thirty, he drove her from the restaurant to the court and waited in the sun glare while she changed. He wore swimming trunks and a T-shirt. She came out soon in a dark-green strapless one-piece suit. The look of her made his breath catch in his throat. The faintly chunky look that she had in her uniform was completely gone. Her tan was like pale milk chocolate and honey. She eased herself onto the hot leather of the seat, saying, “Ai! Qué calor, hombre!”

“You speak Spanish?”

“Kitchen Spanish. Twenty words, and I use them all wrong.”

Cove Beach would be jammed during the season. It was the public beach used by all tourists who did not rent waterfront property. It was nearly deserted.

They swam out a ways and floated, letting the waves lift them and drop them gently. They raced to shore, and Paul won by a narrow margin, but at the expense of almost complete exhaustion. Linda was not even breathing hard.

She looked professionally at the color of his back and shoulders, dredged a bottle of lotion out of her beach bag, and made him lie still to be protestingly greased. They lay there in the sun, and he felt the heat of it slowly daze him, take him into that familiar drugged world where all sounds are far away and where the sun is blood color through tightly closed eyelids.

“Give up the restaurant and help me loaf,” he said lazily.

“Oh, fine. Live like a sea gull. Not a care in the world. All I have to do is give up eating.”

“It’s an unpleasant habit, anyway.”

“Will you stay when the week is up?”

“Same question Valerie asked me,” he said. “I haven’t—” And suddenly he sat up, frowning.

“What’s the matter, Paul?”

“That’s funny. She was rambling on, half drunk and not making any particular sense, but she mentioned that week, too. And I didn’t tell her about it. You’re the only person I told.”

“I didn’t tell anybody.”

“She knew about that week, and it had to come from Winkler. I would have sworn — I’ll still swear that he felt me out and decided on one week without having made his mind up before. So word got to Valerie fast. And that makes what she said more — understandable.”

“How do you mean?”

“She came to ask me to get out of the house. And I told her to get out. And then she said something about having known from the beginning the idea was bad. Whose idea? Winkler’s? To have her come and see if she could influence me. She would have known that wouldn’t work.” He frowned. “So take it another step. Winkler could make her do something she thought was pointless. Some hold on her. And if he could do that, maybe he could have made her sell out, even though she didn’t want to sell. And she said crazy things about pain and how she couldn’t stand it.”

He stood up, scuffed at the sand with his bare foot. There seemed to be an electric silence across the world. “No.” he said. “Things like that — things like that don’t happen to people.”

“What is it?” Linda demanded. “What’s upsetting you, Paul?”

He sat on his heels, picked up sand, and let it sift through his fingers. “I couldn’t understand how she could do what she did. Al told me that that Donny character was in one of the cabañas before the sale went through. All right. Suppose Winkler had a good reason for wanting my place. A very good reason. He tries to buy it, and Valerie says no. Donny is planted there to find a weak place, find a way they can get at her. Donny finds out, maybe by accident, maybe by experiment, that she has a deadly fear of being hurt. Under threat of being hurt worse — she said something about a sample, and Marie said her wrist was bandaged — she wouldn’t have gone to the police or to Jerry Dobson. It was almost a psychotic fear of being hurt. You’d have to live with her to know how it was. The thought of having a baby made her go gray and shake all over, but she said we’d start having them, after I got back.”

“But that’s horrible, Paul. To think that they’d coldly find that weakness and—”

“So she sold, and Winkler gave her a good price to ease her conscience and make it look good, and then she felt unworthy. She got the divorce. Jerry told me she handled her share of the money as though she wanted to get rid of it. Downhill and downhill. Ever since. Telling me I shouldn’t have come back. And yesterday. That fits. It all fits. And that’s how they could make her do anything they wanted her to do, and maybe she drove away from here thinking that she’d have to tell them it didn’t work, afraid there’d be punishment for failure.” He wanted so badly to explain it to Linda. “You see, when she was made, they left out the courage to stand pain. She couldn’t help it. And after what she’d done to me, she couldn’t even tell me. Because I would have wanted her back, and she felt dirty.”

“I heard what Marie said. About her saying she had fallen a long way.”

“Do you believe I’m right, Linda?”

“There’s no other way to believe, is there?”

He had been anxious to make Linda believe, anxious to defend Valerie, yet now he barely heard her response. He sat there on his heels, his legs cramped, and he shut his hand on a handful of sand until his knuckles popped.

Her voice came from far away. “Paul! Paul, look at me!”

It seemed a vast effort to turn his head. She was at the wrong end of a lens, her eyes full of concern. “Paul!”

“No way to prove a thing,” he said, and the words felt as though they had edges that scraped the side of his throat.

“Paul. Stop it!” She knelt, and her hand flashed and her small, hard palm cracked hard against his cheek, toppling him over. He sprawled in the sand and stared at her in utter astonishment. She was breathing hard and shallowly, and her eyes were in flame. But the blow had brought him back from some dark place.

“Good Lord!” he said.

“I could see what you were thinking of doing. I could see it in your eyes.”

“I wanted to do it so bad I could taste it.”

“And now?”

“I still want to. In a different way. In a colder, smarter way.”

“That isn’t any good, either.”

“It’s what they’ve asked for. No law covers it. So make your own. And I know how to do it. I’m an expert.”

He moved over to sit on the blanket.

“No, Paul.”

“Why not? I know I’m right. Why not? There isn’t a reason in the world good enough to stop me.”

She was still kneeling, close beside him. He glanced up into her face. She was looking at him oddly. With a motion almost as quick as her hard, competent slap had been, she leaned forward, hands light on his shoulders, and brought her lips down firmly on his. It was an awkward kiss because of their positions, and it lasted but a few seconds before she flung away from him and turned face down on the blanket, her head cradled in her arms, yet there had been a fierce possessiveness in the kiss, an almost shocking immediacy. He sat stupidly and looked down at her. Her shoulders shook, but she made no sound.

“Linda,” he said. “Linda.”

Her voice was muffled. “Go walk or something. Leave me alone.”

He reached over and took her cigarettes, lit one, and noted dispassionately that his fingers trembled. He looked down at her sleek tan back, at her firm, round legs and the way they tapered to the slenderest of ankles.

After a time, she hunched herself up onto her elbows and stared down at the blanket. Then she turned and sat up, keeping her face away from him. She held her hand out, half behind her. “Cigarette.”

He fixed one for her. “Careful. It’s lighted.”

“Thanks.”

After a long time, she said, “Pretty impulsive, wasn’t it?”

“Very pleasant, though.”

“Don’t make standard answers. I’m trying to think out loud. I’m trying to figure out why it happened. I’ve told myself enough times that once is enough. I thought Eddie had all the love I had to give. And I thought of what you were going to do. And I thought of what they’d do to you afterward, because you’d do it boldly and go and tell them what you’d done and why. And you said there wasn’t any reason. No reason in the world why you shouldn’t, and right then it seemed to me as if I could be a reason if you gave both of us enough time. Am I making any sense?”

“I think so. I feel close to you in an odd way. Without very much reason for it. I mean, any reason that’s easy to understand. Turn around.”

“I can’t. I don’t want to look at you. I’m ashamed.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t be. I think it worked. It gave me a different way to look at killing them. That would be a sort of self-indulgence. A dramatic kind of selfishness. And it wouldn’t do Valerie any good. Or me, either. Or, of course, you.”

“What will you do?” she asked so quietly he had to lean a bit closer to hear her.

“I think I’ll go in there tonight and find out what they’re doing.”

“Can you do that?”

“I built that place. I could walk around it for hours blindfolded. I know how to move in the dark. I’ll find out and I’ll tell you, and if it’s something the law should break up, then we’ll fix that up, too. Now, turn around.”

She turned around, lifted her eyes shyly to his, and looked away. “If it worked, then maybe it was all right.”

“Maybe it was.”

“But I wish I didn’t feel like such a fool.”

“Smile and look casual.”

“Like this?” She made her eyes wide, her smile broad, and stuck her tongue out of the corner of her mouth, to give herself a look of idiocy.

“That’s my girl.”

Her face saddened. “Oh, Paul. Coming back to life hurts, doesn’t it?”

“We can be experts on that.”

“With a lot of time. Give me a lot of time, will you?”

He knew he could use the moon shadows. He turned the house lights off at nine-thirty and sat in the dark for an hour. He wore dark trousers, a dark shirt, sneakers. He rubbed his face and neck and hands with insect repellent. He walked out into the night and saw the vague light through the trees. He turned on the hose faucet and let water dribble into the black earth under it. He puddled the water with his fingers, made a black paste, and carefully smeared his face and hands. He made certain that there was nothing in his pockets to chink or rattle. The trousers fitted snugly at the waist; there was no need of a belt, which might creak. He could hear, in his ears, the thud of his heart, quickened by adrenalin. Yet he felt the familiar coldness that came over him before every patrol. The difference was that this time he carried no weapon. He drifted noiselessly across the silver patch of moonlight and entered the brush that separated the house from the cabañas.

Some small creature scampered away in panic, and a bird made a sleepy croaking sound. Mosquitoes whined nearby, and he heard the slow wash of the surf.

He stood in the shadow of a palm bole and saw the two cars parked there, the familiar gray sedan and the black one he had seen that morning. The moon gleamed on the black satin of the hood. The palms of his hands were sweaty. He moved off to his right, then circled around and came up to crouch in the black shadow of the gray sedan, one knee against the ground. He heard a man’s heavy laugh, a deep mumble of voices. Venetian blinds closed out most of the light that came through the two windows on that side of the cabaña. He knew they were the side windows of the living room. He was between the two cars. He looked at the windows and saw that the blind on the farthest one was about a half inch clear of the sill. As he was about to move silently to the side of the house and risk the full slant of moonlight, a door opened, and light poured out across the yard.

The voices were suddenly louder, and he recognized Winkler’s saying, “Here, let me get that for you.”

Paul froze for a moment, then lay flat on the ground between the two cars. He looked under the cars and saw two pairs of feet heading for the black sedan. He rolled silently under the gray one.

A strange man said in a thickly accented voice. “Wait, I unlock the trunk.”

Paul heard the trunk lid go up, heard Winkler grunt, heard a heavy thumping noise. “There. That do it?”

“Thank you. It is fine.”

“Remember what I told you. If you fellas have bad luck, you don’t know where it came from.”

“There will be no bad luck, señor. We are careful people.”

“Not any more careful than we are.”

“Perhaps.”

Paul saw others coming, three more pairs of feet. One of them was a woman’s. The car doors opened, and Paul heard a faint creak as the body of the car tilted when someone heavy got in.

“We are indebted,” the woman said. “You must forgive the precautions. It is not like a purchase from an established institution.”

“It don’t bother me,” Winkler said. “I want you folks satisfied. Then you’ll be back.”

“When would the same quantity be available?” the woman asked.

“Hard to say. We can’t run it like a sausage factory. Tomorrow I take a party down the line after grouper.”

“You are intelligent, señor.”

“I’m just not too greedy. Next time bring the kind of money I want, you hear? I don’t like the new stuff. Especially that big. It makes questions.”

“Do you have other customers?” the woman asked.

“Now, I got a feeling that would be tellin’,” Winkler said, chuckling. “You know where to leave the car?”

“You have told us at least six times,” the accented man said irritatedly.

“Now, don’t go getting mouthy on me, my friend.”

“In a month, then, señor.”

“I’ll let you know if we got it.” The car started, bright lights flicking on. Paul tautened, wondering if the headlights would sweep under the gray car when they backed away. But they backed the other way, and the headlights swung away from him.

The car sound faded, and Winkler said, “How about that bunch. Donny?”

Paul heard Donny spit, then say sullenly, “I get tired of being treated like a servant by that crowd.”

“They pay nice. Donny. Right up there close to market price.”

“What good does that do when you stash everything. I’m getting sick of—”

“Shut up, kid. Do just like I tell you, and you’ll live nice the rest of your life. Now, go get that bottle away from Corson. We got a party to take out early.”

“He said he isn’t going. He says it took him three days on that last batch while we loafed, and he says it’s hot work this time of year, staying inside there with the blinds closed, and he says his wrist hurts where he burned it on that last batch. Why don’t you let him pass out, and maybe he’ll stop singing.”

“It’ll mean more work for you.”

“So it’s more work. We fish all this week?”

“While we’ve got neighbors. There’s enough for Corson to work on, anyway, when you figure in this morning’s take.”

“I got to have a day to go in and get the tanks filled.”

“You got a new place lined up?”

“Sure. Like you said. Up in Hollywood. How about the neighbor, Moss?”

“Don’t know if she got him to promise anything. I sure can’t ask her, and I don’t want to ask him until the week is up. He’s got a thick head on him. In a way, Donny, it was a break, the way it worked out. She was acting funny. Like she might have a chat with Rayder. Like she was cracking up.”

Their voices were soft and guarded in the night. Donny spat again. “You sweat too much, Moss. I had her under control. I had to give her just one taste to let her know I was serious. After that, she’d turn green and start rubbing her wrist every time I’d light a cigarette. She wouldn’t dare talk too much. I’m sure going to miss that little old gal.”

Their voices faded as they moved toward the door. Paul heard the door shut. He lay under the car for a time, anger and outrage in him like a sickness, like a disease that could smother him. It would be no great trick to ambush them and kill the three of them. Silently, with a knife, out of the darkness. He clung to the memory of Linda on the sun-hot sand until slowly the rage began to fade.

He slid out from under the car and went quickly to the window. All the lights were on, and the room was unkempt, battered. The thin, dark man he had seen driving the black sedan was on the long couch, a glass in his hand, balanced on his chest. Donny went over and gently eased the glass out of Corson’s hand, turned, and said to Moss Winkler. “He’s out already.”

“Leave him be, then.”

Donny went over and sat in a chair and picked up a newspaper. Paul could hear Moss rattling dishes. From the stillness, it seemed evident that nothing more of interest would happen. He decided it would be a good time to take a look at the boat, to see if it would add any of the missing parts of the puzzle. He moved back into the shadows and circled the house back to the main path that led down to the swimming pool. Just as he reached the pool, he heard the door open again. He wasted no time staring back. He dropped almost noiselessly into the empty pool. Half of it was in bright moonlight, and he flattened himself against the shadowed side.

Someone came down the path, whistling softly, bare feet padding by within inches of Paul’s head. After the sound passed. Paul risked a look, and saw Donny’s white hair in the moonlight.

He waited and heard Donny on the cruiser, rattling something metallic. Minutes later, Donny went back to the cabaña. Paul looked again and saw that he was carrying a pair of small cylindrical tanks. Paul waited five minutes. One of the lights went out in the cabaña. He pulled himself up out of the swimming pool, remembering the day it had been finished, remembering Valerie grinning up at him from the dancing green water, her dark wet hair pasted to the fragile line of her skull.

He went down to the crude boat basin, stepped over the low rail, and went into the cruiser’s cabin.

The air was thick in there, smelling of sweat and fish. He had no idea what he was looking for. He found a gear locker, fumbled inside it, touched a tangle of lines and pulleys. He had brought no light, and he would not dare use one in any case. He went back up on deck and found, near the wheel, in a protected place, a locked gun rack with two rifles. Something rattled under his foot. He felt for it, picked it up. It was a thick, rusted object shaped like a ringbolt, half the size of his hand. The rust powdered away, and the metal itself felt rotten. On impulse he put it in his pocket. The boat had nothing further to offer, at least in this darkness. He moved slowly back up toward the cabaña, keeping in the shadows, and each time he paused to listen, he could hear the slow hard beat of his heart. He stood in the deep shadow of a thick palm bole and wondered if it would be worth while to risk again the bright moonlight by the window. He could hear no sound. The door opened suddenly, and Moss Winkler stood framed against the light. Paul stood motionless, barely breathing. The big man seemed ill at ease, as if some animal caution warned him that something moved silently through the night.

He came out into the darkness, out of the light that came from the doorway. Paul saw the cigarette end glowing, saw the silent bulk of the man. Winkler moved slowly toward the palm tree, until he stood within six feet of Paul. Paul gingerly worked the heavy piece of rusted metal out of his pocket, put his two middle fingers through the ring, and waited.

Winkler was so close he heard the man’s faintly asthmatic breathing. Winkler moved slowly away, stood for a time, then shrugged and went back into the house. Paul let his breath out slowly, shoved the ringbolt back into his pocket. After a few minutes, he turned and worked his way back to the small house.

He went into the bedroom, turned on the lights, and looked at the heavy bolt. It was crudely fashioned, and so rusted he could not tell whether it had ever been threaded. The circle was a bit lopsided, and it looked as if the metal, which he could almost pinch off between thumb and finger, had been a bit thicker on one half of the circle than on the other when it was new.

He sat, bouncing it lightly on the palm of his hand for a long time, and by the time he was ready to go to bed, he believed that he had almost everything he needed. Almost everything. Corson would sleep late tomorrow. Winkler and Donny would be off with some apparently innocent and uninvolved fishermen.

Paul was waiting at the restaurant when Linda arrived, in the morning. She looked at him questioningly. He said, “I think I know the score. But it’s going to take some looking, and I need help. Can you come along when Marie and your mother show up?”

“Of course.”

He liked her instant awareness and acceptance of his not wishing to say more about it, not until he knew more.

She made breakfast quickly for both of them. Then, after Marie showed up, she went with him to Al Wright’s small bayside house, on the Gulf side. Al’s wife, a small, tight-faced woman, was reluctant to wake Al up. Finally he came into the kitchen, his thin hair tousled, his wide face puffed with sleep.

“Al,” Paul said, “this is weird-sounding, but it’s important. Is the Baby Barnacle in the water?”

“Sure. She’s running, but not so hot. You want to take her?”

“I’d like to.”

“She’s gassed up. Give her a lot of choke.”

“Did your boy leave any of his skin-fishing stuff here?”

Al looked at his wife, and she said acidly, “There’s things in the closet.”

They looked, and Paul found a face mask that fitted him. The swim fins would be a tight squeeze, but they seemed to measure close enough. He found a wide web belt with snap pockets for the lead weights and a quick-release buckle in the front. He packed it with weights while Al watched silently.

“You said it’s important?”

“That’s right.”

“But you don’t want to talk about it.”

“Not yet, Al.”

“You got the answer to what Winkler’s doing?”

“I might have it. I’m not sure yet.”

“You want to watch it, then. I think he’s pretty rough. And I think Donny and that Corson are pretty rough. She going with you?” He pointed a thumb at Linda.

“It’ll be all right, Al. They took an early party out. I saw them head south. Out of sight. Corson is sleeping it off. It’ll be all right. It won’t take long.”

“You know where you’re going?”

“I’ve got it marked.”

“Well, let me know.”

“If I’m right, you’ll know.”

“Wait a minute.” Al went into the bedroom, came back out working the slide of a big forty-five automatic. He inspected the clip, shoved it into the grip, handed it to Paul. “A thing like that can be right handy, hear?”

“Thanks.”

Paul carried the gear down to the Baby Barnacle. He put the stuff on the dock, unsnapped the tarp off the broad-beamed open craft, folded it on the dock.

Linda cast off the bow line, came lightly aboard. Paul got the motor going. It chuckled raggedly. He cast off the stern line, put it in reverse, and moved out into the bay clear of the dock. He turned her north, heading for the bridge and the pass through into the Atlantic.

“What am I going to do?” Linda asked. “I mean, while you’re down there.”

“Watch. And if anything comes, anything that could be Winkler’s boat or Corson coming out to investigate, take this gaff and bang it on the side of the boat below the water line. I’ll be able to hear that a long way down.”

“Is your wind good enough?”

“I think so.”

“You should have had me bring a swim suit. I’m pretty good.”

“I can manage.”

Once through the pass, he swung south outside the reef. The Baby Barnacle chugged along, solemn and seaworthy. Finally, ahead and to the right, he saw his land, saw the glint of his house in the morning sun. Some boats were far out, fishing, vague dots against the horizon. He watched for the notch in the reef. He slowed when he came to it and tried to guess the drift of wind and tide. The first time he dropped anchor, he was too far back from the estimated spot where Winkler’s boat had been. He was correct on the next try.

“Here?” she asked. “It’s close to the reef.”

“Pretty close.” He stripped down to his swimming trunks, worked his feet into the swim fins, put the mask on. It was smeared, so he moistened a cigarette, rubbed the glass with the wet tobacco, inside and out. He strapped the belt on and went over the stern and tested himself for buoyancy. He had too much lead, so he emptied four of the snap pockets. With a full breath, he sank very slowly. He broke surface and grabbed the stern of the Baby Barnacle. He said, “Watch down there for Winkler’s boat. And keep a watch on the shore for Corson. There’s a dinghy there. If he wakes up, he may try to come out.”

He took a few slow breaths, let them out, took another, turned, and swam down hard. The green color of the water deepened rapidly. The reef was jagged at his left. He knew that if he brushed against it, the coral would infect him at every scratch. The currents were tricky. At what he guessed to be forty feet, he came to flat sand bottom outside the coral reef. He flapped the swim fins and moved across the sand toward the reef. His chest tightened, and he released some air. When his throat began to work convulsively, he braced his feet, sprang upward and swam hard, looking up to be sure he didn’t come up under the Baby Barnacle. He came up forty feet away and swam wearily to the stern.

“Nothing that trip,” he gasped, and shoved the mask up. He clung there until his breathing quieted.

He went down again, and again he saw nothing. She watched him with concern as he clung to the stern of the boat. “This time,” she said with artificial cheer.

He went down again and saw nothing. On the way up, as he peered up through the lightening green of the water, he saw a line that stretched up from the bottom. He swam to it, worked his way up it. It was fastened to a red buoy suspended a good eight feet below the surface.

Paul surfaced over the buoy, marked the position of the boat, and swam to it. He said pantingly, holding onto the transom, “Pay out a little more anchor line. Got to let out about fifteen feet.”

“Have you got something?”

“I think so.”

She let out the line, and he told her to stop when he could see the faint gleam of the red buoy directly below him.

“Shouldn’t you rest a little longer?”

“I’m okay. This is taking longer than I thought.”

He surface-dived, found the line, followed it down. It passed through a bolt set in a gallon tin of concrete and stretched from the ringbolt toward the reef itself. He followed it and found that the end was fastened to another ringbolt driven into a crevice in the coral. There was a definite overhang to the reef there, so that, holding the ringbolt, he was in a big shallow cave in the side of the reef. There was a wide shallow depression in the sand. He saw the huge rotting timbers, lime encrusted, worm-eaten, still hinting of the shape of an ancient ship. He saw the digging tools, clumsily lashed to the coral, saw the wire screen on the anchored frame, saw the pry bar, the chunks of coral that had been prized away. He saw it and knew that it was enough, and knew that he was near the limit of his endurance. He knew he had to swim out before starting up. The coral would cut like knives.

He floated down onto his hands and knees on the sand and began to dig in the loose sand. And then he knew at once that he had waited too long. His chest began to heave with the convulsive effort to breathe against the closed throat. He thrust hard with his legs, slanting up and out of the shallow cave. But the surface was too far away, and he knew that his throat would open. He released the snap of the weighted belt and then, in a dim and dreamlike state, made listless motions of swimming, moving slowly upward through the paler green of the water as he neared the surface. Water was solid in his throat, and he felt the sun and air on his face as he surfaced, and turned slowly so that his face was under once again, and the green water world was something going away from him very fast, like something seen from the observation platform of a train.

Paul felt a mild annoyance as he was grasped and turned. He wanted to protest, but he coughed, gagged.

She took his hand and lifted it and put it on the transom and folded his fingers over the warm wood and said in his ear, her voice coming from far away, “Hold on, Paul! Hold tight for just a minute.”

He clung there, blinded by coughing, vaguely aware that she had climbed into the boat, that she knelt, dripping in the soaked cotton dress, holding his wrists. She stood up and pulled hard. The transom edge scraped his chest, then cut across his middle. She grabbed the back of the belt of his swimming trunks and tumbled him awkwardly the rest of the way in. He coughed water out of his lungs, sourly.

Finally he could sit up. The whole world looked bright and new and freshly scrubbed after the dimness.

“Thanks. I—”

“Not twice, Paul. Not two of you. I couldn’t stand that.” Her voice was low and shaken, and her gray eyes were wide. The soft brown hair was plastered flat to her head, the sun-bleached streaks darkened by the water. The soaked dress displayed the woman-lines of her, the strong body, the young sturdiness.

One had drowned, he thought, and one had not. One had dived or fallen from the reef. There were no rocks farther in than the reef. It was all flat sand. Some uncertainty nibbled at a back edge of his mind. Broken chunks of coral down there in the green depths. A man who had watched too often and learned too much. Tracks that led into the water and did not—

“Linda!”

“What, Paul? What’s the matter?”

“Linda, those footprints your husband made going into the water. Bare footprints, weren’t they?”

“Why, yes, of course. I don’t know what—” And he saw her face change, saw her turn her head and look at the reef. He did not have to turn to see what she saw, the waves hissing and breaking to whiteness on that cruel surface that would have slashed bare feet to bloody tatters in seconds. And with an incoming tide, he couldn’t have been hurled against the reef while swimming, not if he had never crossed it. And it had been one of those calm gray mornings...

She said, in a voice full of lost wonder. “The day he swam out to that rocky island he wore tennis shoes so he could cross the reef.”

“It isn’t proof,” he said.

As she looked at him, she was like somebody coming awake. “What else do we need?”

“There’s timbers down there, bits of old rigging. Spanish, I’d say. Their treasure ships used to sail out of Veracruz, full of Aztec gold. Hurricanes out of the Caribbean used to drive them onto this coast, onto these reefs. Most of the gold is gone for good, buried over, lost. The reef helped protect this one. Maybe it was uncovered by one of the storms. What I heard last night gave me the clue. What I heard, and a rusted old hand-forged ringbolt. They’ve been working it. Diving with Aqualungs, bringing the stuff up, and Corson has been melting it down. There’s a profitable illegal traffic in gold. I bet Winkler’s peddling it all over Latin America. Corson melts it right there, I imagine, with one of those little lab-size electric furnaces.

“Lord knows how they happened to stumble across it. Maybe while spear fishing. Then Winkler knew he had to have a base that was handy. I don’t know how they would have worked it if I’d been around. But they had it easy. A woman alone, and a woman who was emotionally vulnerable through loneliness, and not very brave. Donny got close to her, and found out she could be frightened, and then they scared her into selling, and she decided her penalty would have to be to get out of my life.”

“And Eddie,” she said, “found out too much, and they — just killed him...”

He stood up and picked up the mask. “I’d like to get a piece of the gold, if I can find any.”

She took the mask from him. “Let me. I’ve got to help.”

His strength was coming back too slowly for him to protest. Unself-consciously, she pulled off the soaked dress and spread it out on the engine hatch. She wedged her feet into the swim fins, adjusted the mask, slipped over the stern. He saw her locate the buoy, then turn down in a quick surface dive. He saw a last flutter of green fins, then nothing.

He stood and watched the water, legs braced against the slow rise and fall of the Baby Barnacle.

She was staying down a long time. Too long. There was a drone like that of a mosquito, far away, and he did not notice it until it seemed to grow heavier, drumming in the air over the sound of the wave wash on the reef. He turned sharply, cursing his own inattention.

Winkler’s cruiser was coming hard and fast, white bow waves sparkling in the sun. It was about four hundred yards away. Even if he had had the anchor up and the slow engine chugging, it was far too late to hope for escape. He turned and looked again at the surface of the water. Just as he turned. Linda broke through the surface, gasping, smiling at him, holding up a dark object the size of a plum. She looked past the Baby Barnacle and saw the cruiser bearing down on them.

She reached the transom in two strokes, and he hauled her up and into the boat. He hoped Winkler didn’t have glasses on them. He snatched the surprisingly heavy piece of metal out of her hand, shoved the engine hatch over, snatched up the pistol, and placed both down beside the engine, out of sight.

“Get your dress on, and don’t say anything,” he said.

They came up at full speed, and at the last possible moment Winkler, at the wheel, shifted into full reverse. The cruiser lugged down, and the water boiled astern. The battered craft eased gently to within ten feet of the Baby Barnacle.

Donny stood at the stern of the cruiser, one of the rifles held across his thighs. Winkler headed into the tidal current, and the heavy marine engines turned over slowly, just matching the drift.

“Any luck?” Winkler asked. Paul decided it was something in the way they stood, something in their eyes, something in the set of their mouths. He had seen that look before.

“Where’s your fishing party?” Paul asked.

“We got a little ship-to-shore. Corson got us word. Little code word that means company. That’s the boat belongs to that bum that runs the tavern, isn’t it?”

“This is Al Wright’s boat,” Paul said steadily. “And I’m the guy whose wife you turned Donny loose on, Winkler. And this is the lady whose husband you killed. And today is the day you run out of luck.”

“I make my luck, Rayder.”

Donny moved close to Winkler. Winkler gave instructions in a low tone that Paul could not hear. Donny did not take his eyes from Paul as he listened. Paul felt as if every nerve in his body were being pulled slowly through his skin. His hands were wet. It was a familiar feeling, adrenalin in his blood. That patrol feeling, when your ears magnify the night sounds, when your eyes see more than ever before.

Winkler took the rifle, held it easily in one hand, the other on the wheel. Donny uncased binoculars and climbed to the cabin roof, braced his feet, and methodically searched the shore line, the surrounding horizon.

“Nothing I can see, Moss.”

The big, red-bodied man bit his lip. Paul could sense the deep uneasiness in him and tried to increase it by giving the impression of calm. He glanced at Linda. She stood easily in the drying dress, and he saw that she never took her eyes from Winkler’s face. He knew there was fear in her, and knew also that she would never show it.

“Toss her a line, Donny.”

The coiled line rattled aboard. Winkler said, “Girl, make that fast to the bow.”

Linda looked at Paul, and he nodded. She went forward with the end of the line and made it fast.

“Now, girl. Heave up that anchor. And then sit down in the bow. You, Rayder, sit on the engine hatch.”

Donny stood in the stern of the cruiser with the rifle Winkler had given back to him. The engine sound deepened, and the cruiser began to move straight out away from the reef. The line tautened and pulled the bow of the Baby Barnacle around, and the smaller boat began to waddle busily in tow after the cruiser.

There had been, as yet, not the slightest opportunity for escape. And Paul realized, with a sudden chill feeling, that if Winkler wanted to play it safe all the way, there never would be an opportunity. With the island blocking the view and the boats far out on the horizon, too far away to be of any help or even to be aware there was trouble, it would take merely two quick shots, the flat sounds lost in the sea sound, and two weights and some wire, and casting the Baby Barnacle adrift. Winkler would be enormously stupid to kill the two of them. It would focus enough attention on him as to inevitably lead to too many questions and not enough answers.

And yet there would be a supreme futility in saying, “Don’t kill us, please, because it really isn’t terribly bright of you, old boy.” And no matter how deep the water was off the island. Winkler would not be impressed by the fact that corpus delicti means not the body of the deceased but the body of the evidence.

He saw Winkler turn away from the wheel and bend over a compartment to his right. He straightened up with a twin to the weight that anchored the buoy line, only larger. A two-gallon pail full of concrete with a ringbolt set in it. Linda attracted Paul’s attention with a furtive motion of her hand. Paul saw that she had found a heavily rusted fish knife. Winkler turned in a slow curve around the island and cut the engines. The cruiser drifted to a stop. The Baby Barnacle drifted toward the stern of the cruiser, the tow line going slack.

“There’s a hundred feet of water here,” Winkler said in the sudden silence.

Paul saw there had been a subtle change in the attitude of the two men. In the minds and limited imaginations of Winkler and Donny, he and Linda were already dead. There remained only the details of effecting it neatly. Winkler seemed to be growing more calm. Donny seemed taut, unable to look at Linda.

The Baby Barnacle thumped gently against the stern of the cruiser. Both men looked down into the smaller boat. Paul saw Linda had tucked the rusted knife under her thigh, out of sight.

“It’s a stupid idea,” Paul said softly.

Winkler barely glanced at him. Donny shifted the rifle, and the muzzle swung and centered on Paul’s face.

Winkler hit the barrel up with the heel of his hand. “Fool!”

“Oh,” Donny said. “I get it. No marks on the boat.”

“Which one of you killed him?” Linda asked.

Winkler looked at her with annoyance. “Don’t talk.”

“Which one of you was it?”

Donny didn’t look at her. He said, “I did it, if that makes you happier. I was out there before daylight, standing on bottom, wearing the air tanks. I looked up and saw him coming, above my head, so I jumped up and clubbed him with a hunk of corral.” Paul saw him slant his eyes toward her and quickly look away.

Winkler took a length of line and threaded it through the ringbolt and took the rifle from Donny and handed him the two long free ends of the line. He said, “Get down there and knot one end good to her ankle and the other end to his. And don’t get between me and either of them, hear?”

Paul was aware of the clear blue of the sky overhead. Tied to a common rope, they would dance down there in the deep-green current, swinging apart, coming back together again, her wild hair afloat, deep-sea maiden in the sea-rotted cotton. Once the line was firmly knotted, Winkler had only to heave the improvised anchor overboard. There would be a hard tug. And then Donny could muscle them over the side, loosen their desperate fingers, and stand, watching the steep, slow-motion falling, the dwindling, and then the empty sea. Paul looked at Linda. Her face was a sick color under the tan.

Winkler had the flat eyes of a man who is not susceptible to any improvised diversion. It would, Paul saw, depend largely on how cleverly or how stupidly Donny approached him to affix the rope. And he knew, thinking of it, exactly how he would do it. Make a slip noose, direct the leg to be raised, toss the noose over the foot, and tighten it with one hard yank, trusting to the water to soak the knot quickly, make it too stubborn for fingers that would fumble at it during the slow fall through the deepening green.

“Move back to the stern, girl,” Winkler directed. Paul saw Linda half turn her head and then slump, her head thumping with a painful sound against the thwart.

Donny pulled the Baby Barnacle a bit closer and jumped lightly in. Winkler held the barrel aimed directly at Paul’s eyes. Donny seemed not to want to touch the unconscious girl. He wet his lips and wiped his hands on the side of his shorts, and finally squatted and looped the rope around her slim ankle, pulled it tight, knotted it expertly. He tested it, wiped his hands on the sides of his shorts again, and stood up, turning with the other end of the line in his hand to look at Paul.

In that instant, Linda moved like a cat. She was in an awkward position. Paul realized, even in that flash, that he had not noticed that her fingertips had been tucked under her thigh as she had slumped in an apparent faint. Too low and a shade too far from Donny to reach any vital part of him with the rusty blade, she did, apparently from some primal instinct the only damaging thing she could do. She sliced hard across the backs of his knees.

Paul had once heard a pack mule scream with sudden, unexpected agony. He did precisely what he had rehearsed mentally for the past fifteen minutes, a linked series of movements so completely thought out that now there was no thought involved in the performance. He tumbled backward off the hatch, catching the hatch cover in his fingers, hurling it aside, rolling to his knees, knowing he was taking far too long, even though Donny’s scream was still high and clear and he had only begun to fall, then snaking his arm down beside the motor, yanking out the heavy automatic pistol, working the slide as he dropped back to use the maximum possible cover of the engine compartment, hearing the flat crack mingling with the fading scream, feeling the hot rawness along the side of his face as the heavy pistol in that same instant jumped in his hand. He did not hear the sound of his own shot, but he watched the slow and vivid dance Winkler did in the sunlight, the slow-motion disintegration as when a cliff is dynamited a long way off. Winkler had been working the rifle bolt, and he took the slug in the pit of the stomach. It swept him backward and off his feet, his face wild and slack with surprise.

Donny rolled in agony. Paul straightened up, hearing his grunting and thumping, and saw Linda with the rusty knife poised above the broad hard brown back, her lips flat back against her teeth, and she was on her knees. She dropped the knife and sagged back on her heels and covered her face with her hands.

First Paul tied the Baby Barnacle close to the cruiser. He looked at Winkler. The man was unconscious from the force of impact, flat on his back, a viscid hole an inch above his belt and a shade off center to the right. There was a knife in a rack near the wheel. Paul took it and cut short lengths of rope and found a screw driver and a short-handled gaff, which could be used as tourniquets. The right leg, where the stroke hit first, was the worse of the two. He rolled Donny onto his back. Donny watched the sky with gray face and his powerful fingers dimpled his thighs as Paul worked over him. The hamstrung legs were sickeningly distorted because the severed tendons had pulled back up into the muscle tissue of the thighs and down into the hard calves.

“Is there something I can do to help?” she asked at his elbow, in a weak voice.

“Take that knife and cut two more pieces of line about a yard long, please.”

“You’re bleeding, Paul.”

“It’s wood splinters. He hit the engine compartment an inch from my cheek.”

She brought the pieces of line. Donny lay still while he got the tourniquets tightened and lashed in place. Paul straightened up and wiped his bloody hands on his swimming trunks. Most, but not all, of the flow had stopped. Donny’s face looked shrunken, simian. He propped himself up on his elbows, looked unbelievingly at his legs, and slumped back.

She tore off a scrap of her skirt and wet it and made Paul hold still while she gently cleaned the side of his face. The salt stung tears into his eyes. She bit her lip and gingerly pulled out the more obvious splinters. One had missed the corner of his eye by a quarter of an inch.

They towed the Baby Barnacle to the Cove’s End municipal dock. Winkler regained partial consciousness on the way back. They did not talk on the way in. Reaction was too heavy in them. There was no exhilaration at escape. Only a heavy weariness.

The Miami office where the three men questioned them was frigidly air-conditioned. The men were neat, trim, brisk, efficient, and formal. At last the one in charge reached over and turned off the tape recorder.

“We’ll want your signatures on the transcription. Now, I’d like to show you this.” He took a plum-sized object of burnished glowing gold and handed it carefully to Linda.

“Why, it’s a buckle, isn’t it?”

“The experts cleaned it up. They tell me it was made in Oaxaca. That face is supposed to be the Aztec god called Xipe. I guess my accent is a little shaky. The experts were almost in tears thinking of the other priceless things that crew melted up into little bars worth six thousand apiece, approximately. Corson and that Donny Walto agree on the number of bars they turned out and sold. Nearly a hundred and sixty. Figure it out. It’s a million-dollar business.”

The phone buzzed. The man in charge picked it up, spoke briefly. He hung up. “Winkler won’t confirm anything. He just died without ever being in any shape to answer questions.”

“I had to shoot quickly.”

“Don’t apologize. I guess he had a certain cleverness. He had sense enough not to bring in regular diving equipment.”

“And clever enough,” Paul said, “to ruin Valerie’s life.”

“I don’t think you want to hear what Walto had to say about that, Captain. It’s pretty clinical. Pain as a persuasive. Once they convinced him at the hospital that he’ll have to be carried to his execution, he was willing to answer any question. He’s got no more interest in his own future, protection, or welfare. By the way, I suggest you get your lawyer to start an action to get that property sale set aside on the grounds of duress. We’ll be glad to cooperate. Title should revert to you without too much difficulty.”

On the way down the Keys, Linda reverted again to the somber silence that had worried him since those moments of violence on the boat. The last of the day was nearly gone as they approached Cove’s End. With a bitter impulse, he braked the car hard and turned into the road that led down to the abandoned fishing camp, the battered sea wall.

She sat up. “What are you doing?”

“I’d like to sit on the wall for a little while. Do you mind?”

“Well, for a little while.”

He parked, and they went down, and as before, he helped her up onto the wall. The sea looked deep purple, and the first faint stars were out. He gave her a cigarette, lit hers and his own.

“Linda, what is it?”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. Maybe the best way to say it is: Where have you gone?”

“I don’t know.”

“Something happened to you.”

“I know that. Maybe all this is something I didn’t want in my life. All I wanted was the good things, the warm and safe things. Not murder, and the way blood looks, and knowing that there’s some dark, violent thing in me that can come out and use my arm and hand and a knife.”

“A good thing you did.”

“I thought it was over, Paul. We were done, you and I. They were going to finish us. So all I wanted to do was hurt him. What kind of a person does that make me?”

“Normal, I’d say.”

“Normal?”

“It’s something you learn. Some people never learn it. A form of self-knowledge. We’ve got a veneer. A neon, TV, asphalt, cocktail-lounge veneer. But scratch any of us hard enough and deep enough, and out comes the jungle.”

“You seemed to topple off that hatch cover and have the gun in your hand and fire in the same instant.”

“I couldn’t do it again that fast unless there was just as much hate and fear and anger. The jungle quickness. In you, in me, when the chips are down.”

She turned her head sharply and said with surprising bitterness, “I don’t want to think. Why can’t you let me alone?”

Before he could answer, she dropped off the wall, landed lightly, walked slowly up the beach. He was angry until he remembered another time. When he had walked away. He followed her slowly. She stopped. When he spoke her name, she started violently, yet as he took her shoulders, turned her around gently, he had the feeling that she had stopped there to wait for him. And there was a fire at sea where the moon would soon appear.