The Executioners

Chapter Four

All five Bowdens had breakfast, for once, at the same time. There was discussion of the violence of the storm that had struck in the night. Jamie and Bucky had not heard it at all. Nancy said it had awakened her and she had put her robe on and sat by her window and watched it. Neither Sam nor Carol mentioned that Carol, wakened by the storm and timid of lightning, had slid over into Sam’s bed, cuddling in fragrant closeness to still her fears. Marilyn was not mentioned. But Bucky had shadowy hollows under his eyes.

“Schedule,” Sam said. “Attention, all Bowdens. Nancy will help her mother swamp out the kitchen and make the beds while you boys help me find the stuff for the boat and load it in the wagon. Then we shall have a spot of target practice. You are in charge of hanging up the cans, Jamie. Then we go work on the boat.”

The range was part way up the gentle hill behind the house. The backstop was a clay bank. Jamie got a half dozen empty cans from the rubbish and tied cord on them and hung them from a red maple limb in front of the clay bank. They used up a box and a half of longs in the .22 automatic. Sam and Nancy were the best shots. Jamie, as usual, became infuriated with himself when Nancy outshot him. Carol did better than she had done in the past. She did not try to give up her turn. She listened with care to the hints Sam gave her. She did not flinch as badly. Sam, standing behind her and off to one side, saw the set of her jaw and her frown of concentration. The kids were much quieter than usual. This had been a game they had played often. Today it was more than a game. There was a new flavor to it, sensed by all of them.

On Bucky’s final turn he hit three of the riddled cans at sixty feet with an eight-shot clip. He flushed red with pride at the congratulations.

“Shall I take the cans down?” Jamie asked.

“Leave them up,” Sam said. “Maybe we’ll get a little more practice in tomorrow afternoon. If we finish the boat.”

“How about their homework?”

“Tonight and tomorrow night,” Sam said.

“I was going to the drive-in tonight,” Nancy said in a complaining tone.

“Forgotten the new rules already?” Sam asked.

“No, but gosh, Dad, I’d already said yes.”

“And just who has a car to take you to the drive-in.”

“Well, his name is Tommy Kent and he’s a senior and he’s eighteen so he can drive at night, and it’s a double date, sort of, and Sandra is going with Bobby.”

“Is that the family that has the furniture store?” Carol asked.

“Yes, and it would be all right, honestly. They’ll pick me up right here and we’ll come right back after the movie. It’s with John Wayne. I was going to ask about it Friday, but... on account of Marilyn I forgot. Can’t I go, please? Just this time?”

Sam looked at Carol and saw the almost imperceptible nod. “All right. But just this once. And how did you do on the history?”

“Pretty good, I think.”

“You kids run along and get ready. We’re going to the boat yard right now.”

They ran down the hill. Sam and Carol followed more slowly. Sam said, “You crossed me up.”

“I know. But I think this will be all right. And you would have no possible idea of how much I’ve heard about Tommy Kent, Tommy Kent, Tommy Kent. Before and during the Pike Foster era. He’s a school figure. A big athlete. It’s quite a coup for a junior-high girl to get a date with him.”

“I suppose. But I wish she’d get tired of the muscle set.”

“This one isn’t as dull as poor Pike. Tommy waited on me at the store one Saturday. When I was buying that lamp for the study last August. He’s quite a poised young man.”

“He’s probably too poised, damn it. Too sophisticated for Nance. She’s only fourteen. I don’t want her hot-rodding around in the night, going to those drive-ins. What do they call them? Passion pits. And they make jokes about never seeing the movie.”

“Now stop being the traditional father, darling. If we haven’t given Nance a good set of moral standards by now, it’s much too late to start. She’s nearly fifteen. Sandra will be along. And no two determined young men are going to separate them. She will very probably be kissed.”

“It makes me writhe to think of it.”

“Be brave, darling. She’ll be safe and it will be better than having her gloom around. Pike’s desertion really hurt her morale. And this date built it back up again.”

“The damn car probably has no brakes, weak lights, and bald-headed tires.”

“It happens to be a brand-new Plymouth two-door sedan.”

“I forgot the mark-up on furniture. What’s with Jamie?”

Jamie had let the other two go ahead. He stood by Marilyn’s fresh grave, waiting for them. When they came up to him he said fiercely, “We’re going to have a big marble monument. With dates and her name.”

“We’ll have to have something, Son,” Sam said. “But a big marble marker would be pretentious, wouldn’t it?”

“What do you mean?”

“It ought to be simpler. I’ll bet if you and Mike scouted the creek bed, you could find a good stone with a flat side on it. Then I think we could chisel her name in it.”

When Jamie looked dubious, Carol said, “I think that would look very nice, dear.”

Jamie sighed. “Okay. We’ll look. Ever since I got up I keep feeling like I see her around. Sort of over to the side. Like if I turned my head quick enough I could see her.”

Carol hugged him against her side. “I know, dear. We all feel the same way.”

Jamie looked at his father from the circle of his mother’s arm. “We could find where he eats and sneak in the kitchen and put something in his food and then when he eats it we could be looking through those round windows they have in the doors of the kitchens in restaurants and he’d be rolling around knocking tables over and everybody screaming until he’s all quiet and dead.”

“Those pants are too good for boat work,” Carol said. She gave him a little push. “You run in the house and put on the rattiest pair of jeans you can find in your closet.”

“The ones you said were too far gone to patch?”

“Those will be perfect.”

Jamie ran off. Carol said, “I wonder if it’s healthy, the way his imagination works. Some of the things he comes out with are shocking.”

“At eleven civilization is still a thin coating. Underneath is all savage.”

“Sir, you are speaking of the children I love.”

“They run in packs, pick on the weak ones and the different ones, gloat on thoughts of dreadful torture. It’s part of survival, darling. In wartime, in the big cities, they survive, when the ones a little older, softened up a little more by the moralities, perish.”

“Sometimes you get ridiculously objective. I’m thinking of Jamie. He has such violent ideas.”

“Speaking of violent ideas, can you manage to keep the automatic handy without being obvious about it?”

“I think so. My big straw bag.”

“It won’t make you feel too melodramatic?”

“I am not going to let you make me feel self-conscious about it. It’s a gun. It shoots. And I am not squeamish a bit. You’ve showed me how the safety works. I’m going to keep one shell in the chamber. My brood is threatened, Samuel, and I’m turning just as primitive as Jamie. While I was shooting up there I kept wondering if I could point it at a human being and pull the trigger and keep the sights lined up and not flinch. And I thought about Marilyn and I know I can.”

“You impress me.”

The New Essex Yacht Club is four miles east of the city. It has an ample yacht basin, dock space, its own breakwater, a long club building, with terraces, bars and ballroom. The motor-cruiser owners call the devout sailors the Magellan Set. The sailors call the cruiser owners the Stinkpot Group. Large yachts stop at New Essex because the facilities are good. In the summer there are visitors from Miami and Fort Lauderdale. In the winter several of the local owners of the big cruisers head south.

After Sam and Carol graduated from the Sweet Sioux II — a converted lifeboat from an obsolete lake ferry — to the Sweet Sioux III — a cranky twenty-six feet of day cruiser about sixteen years old, with convertible navy top — they joined the New Essex Yacht Club. The dues were high, and the social schedule was intensive. The Sweet Sioux, no matter how fresh her current paint and varnish job, never looked at ease tied up in the middle of all that teak, brass, chrome and mahogany. She had a beamy and disreputable look, like a dressed-up washer-woman at the opera.

She seemed actively to resent her new environment. On each departure she tried to swing and bash one of the grand craft tied up near her. She had a single screw and a sixty-five horse power marine engine of a make few people had ever heard of. The engine was stolid, reliable and unaccountably quiet. It could push the Sweet Sioux along at a waddling ten knots. But at the New Essex Yacht Club the engine also revolted. Twice it quit in the middle of the basin as they were headed in. And twice they had to accept a tow. After that Sam kept a five-horse outboard motor wrapped in a tarp stowed forward.

The club was expensive and too many of the members were excessively stuffy. And it was a long way from Harper. When it came time to pay dues for the second year, Sam and Carol talked it over and were each pleased and surprised to find how willingly the other person would give up the club.

They joined the Harper Boat Club. It was ten miles closer, on the lake shore between New Essex and Harper, at the end of a road that turned off Route 18. The club building could more accurately be called a shack. The boat basin was small and crowded. Jake Barnes’s boat yard was next door to the club. It was a cluttered, informal enterprise. He sold boats, gas, oil, gear, fishing tackle and cold beer. He was a fat, sleepy man who had inherited the business when his father died. He was a good but indolent craftsman. He had rickety ways on which he could haul anything up to forty feet out of the water. He had a good touch with marine engines and outboards and, when pressed, could do major hull repairs. His yard was an incredible clutter of timbers, corroding hardware, empty oil cans, hulls too far gone for repair, rotting lines and sagging roofs over his covered storage area.

Most members of the Harper Boat Club were ardent do-it-yourself addicts. This seemed to please Jake. He charged a nominal fee for hauling the boats out. He seemed happiest when he could stand in dirty tee shirt and soiled duck pants drinking his own beer and watching the clientele work on their boats. The children of the members of the neighboring club adored Jake. He told them all kinds of monstrous lies of his adventures.

The Sweet Sioux took kindly to the change. Here she looked almost modern. After the opera the washer-woman had returned to the neighborhood saloon and was content. The marine engine no longer conked out. And Sam and Carol had a lot more fun at club affairs. The group was younger.

Sam parked the station wagon in the rear of Jake’s boat yard and checked off the things they had brought. Sandpaper, calking material and calking compound, antifouling marine hull paint, deck paint and varnish.

Jake, with a can of beer in his large dirty hand, ambled over to meet them as they came around the side of the main shed.

“Hi, Sam. Howya, Mizz Bowden. Hello, kids.”

“Did you get her out?” Nancy asked.

“Sure did. Right down there on the last cradle. She needs some work, all right. Looked her over yesterday. Want to show you something, Sam.”

They walked down to the Sweet Sioux. Out of the water she looked twice as big and half again as ugly.

Jake finished his beer and threw the can aside, took out a pocket knife, opened the small blade and went around to the transom. As Sam watched, he dug the blade into the rear of the keel just forward of the prop. The blade went in with alarming ease. Jake straightened up and gave Sam a significant look.

“Rotten?”

“It’s rotted some. The last two, three feet of the keel.”

“Is that dangerous?”

“I’d say if a fellow let it go too long it might give him some trouble after a while.”

“Should I do something right away?”

“Now, I wouldn’t say right away. Busy as I am this time of year, it would be some time before I could get to her. Then I’d say cut it back to about here. Cut this whole section right out. Then cut a good choice piece to fit and bolt it up right here, and then put some plate braces on both sides along here and bolt them all the way through. I checked the rest of her over and she’s still sound.”

“When should I do it, Jake?”

“I’d say after I pull her out in October is time enough. Then you’ll have the use of her all summer. Now, come around here and I’ll show you where the bad leak is. Right here. See. The planking is a little sprung and it opened up this here crack. Water run out of her real good right at that place.”

“Isn’t that a little wide to calk?”

Jake reached under the boat and picked up a thin piece of wood off the crossbar of the cradle. “I whittled this piece out and it seems to fit okay. I was going to soak it good with waterproof glue and pound it in there, but I didn’t get around to it. I guess you could handle that okay. I’ll show you where the glue pot is, Sam. Now, I want to see you kids turn out some work today. No runnin’ off like the last time, Bucky. You sand good and you’ll raise yourself a crop of muscle. You bring old Marilyn along to help you?... What’s the matter? I say something wrong?”

“Let’s go get that glue,” Sam said. On the way up to the shed he told Jake about the dog.

Jake spat accurately at an empty oil drum. “Take a special mean kind of son of a bitch to poison a dog.”

“I know.”

“There was a fella here before your time, when my daddy was alive. Most folks say fish got no feelings. Cold blood and all. But he used to clean his fish here, and he’d take them alive out of the bait well and scale ’em and fillet ’em still wiggling. Seemed to get a kick out of it. We run him off the place finally. Lost a bait customer. Some people got a mean streak all right. It’s surely hell on those kids. That wasn’t much of a dog for fight, but she sure liked friends. Here’s the glue. Let me get that top for you. Use this here rubber mallet and don’t try to get it in too fast. Little taps, and keep it even. Don Langly’s setter bitch had another litter couple of weeks ago. She jumped the fence again. Don thinks it was a chow dog got to her this time, but those pups are sure cute. He’s trying to find homes for them for when they’re weaned.”

“Thanks, Jake. But maybe later on.”

“Sometimes it’s good to get another one right away. I’d say a little more glue. Slop it on good. You can wipe off what squeezes out.”

After the family had watched him tap the whittled wedge into place, Sam apportioned the work. They all began to work, using the sanding blocks. The sun was hot and it was tiring work. After a half hour Sam took off his shirt and hung it on a sawhorse. The slight breeze off the lake cooled the perspiration on his lean back. Bucky was unexpectedly solemn and diligent.

When Gil Burman came by and stopped, Sam used it as an excuse to call a break. Jamie and Bucky raced off with a dollar to buy two beers and three Cokes from Jake.

“You got this crew organized,” Gil said. Gil was a forty-year-old vice-president of the New Essex Bank and Trust Company. He had moved out to Harper a year ago. He was a big man, prematurely gray. His wife was a vivacious and rattle-brained redhead. Sam and Carol liked and enjoyed Gil and Betty.

“He’s a whip snapper,” Carol said.

“I lost my helpers on account of the pram race this afternoon. They’re getting organized.”

“Does the Jungle Queen need work?”

“Does she ever not need it? Dry rot in the dashboard this time. Damn old clunker. Why we keep her, I’ll never know. Carol, did Betty get in touch with you yet about next Friday?”

“No, not yet.”

“A big old Burman soiree, kids. Cindered steaks in the back yard. An extensive clobbering on Martinis. Drunken conversation and family battles afterward. We have to do it for a lot of sordid types, and so we need some of our friends around to improve the situation.”

Carol glanced at Sam and then said to Gil, “We’d love to come. But there may be a hitch. I might have to be out of town. I could let Betty know later in the week?”

“Right up until kickoff. It’s a big party.”

The boys came back with the Cokes and beer. Sam went off to one side to talk business with Gil. The bank acted as trustee on many of the estates represented by Dorrity, Stetch and Bowden. As they talked, Sam looked idly at his family. Carol was getting them back to work. Nancy wore very short red shorts, old and faded, and a yellow linen halter. Her legs were long and brown and slim, beautifully shaped. She worked the sanding block with both hands, turning lithely at the waist. The smooth young muscles bunched and lengthened under the sheen and texture of her back.

After Gil left he worked again, steadily, and by one o’clock Carol announced it was time for a lunch break. They would run home and eat and come back. It was then that Nancy announced, quite demurely, that she had told Tommy Kent what they’d be doing and he had said he might stop around and help, so, if it was all right, she would stay and keep working and they could bring her back a sandwich, please.

Sam drove Carol and the boys home. Mike Turner was sitting on the front porch, waiting for Jamie. Carol made hefty sandwiches and a giant pitcher of iced tea. As she was wrapping Nancy’s sandwich, Carol said, “You itching to get back to work?”

“I’d like to get that hull painted before dark.”

“I’m going to make Bucky take a nap. He’s completely pooped. He’ll yelp at the idea, but he’ll cork off in about ten seconds. You go on ahead and I’ll bring the boys down in an hour or so.”

He took the MG and drove back to the boat yard. He walked around the shed, carrying the sandwich and a small thermos of iced tea. Nancy was sitting on her haunches, sanding the undercurve of the hull, a difficult place to get at. She smiled up at him.

“No dreamboat yet?”

“Not yet, Daddy. Nobody says that any more.”

“What’s a good expression?”

“Well... he resonates me.”

“Good Lord!”

“Please just set that stuff down, Daddy. I want to finish this one place first.”

He went over and put the sandwich and thermos on the sawhorse. As he was unbuttoning his shirt, he had his back to Nancy. He stopped, motionless, his finger tips touching the third button. Max Cady sat on a low pile of timbers twenty feet away. He had a can of beer and a cigar. He wore a yellow knit sports shirt and a pair of sharply creased slacks in a shade of cheap electric blue. He was smiling at Sam.

Sam walked over to him. It seemed to take a long time to walk twenty feet. Cady’s smile didn’t change.

“What are you doing here?” Sam kept his voice low.

“Well, I’m having a beer, Lieutenant, and I’m smoking this here cigar.”

“I don’t want you hanging around here.”

Cady looked quietly amused. “So the man sells me a beer and I’m thinking about maybe renting a boat. I haven’t fished since I was a kid. Fishing any good in the lake?”

“What do you want?”

“That’s your boat, hey?” He gestured with the cigar, winked with obscene significance and said, “Nice lines, Lieutenant.”

Sam looked back and saw Nancy sitting on her heels, the short red shorts pulled to strained tightness around the young hips.

“God damn it, Cady, I—”

“A man has a nice family and a boat like that and a job where he can take off when he feels like it, it must be nice. Go out into the lake and mess around. When you’re locked up you think of things like that. You know. Like dreaming.”

“What are you after? What do you want?”

The small deep-set brown eyes changed, but the smile still exposed the cheap white teeth. “We started pretty near even back there in forty-three, Lieutenant. You had a fancy education and a commission and little gold bars, but we both had a wife and a kid. Did you know that?”

“I remember hearing you were married.”

“I got married when I was twenty. The boy was four when you got me sent up. I saw him when he was a couple weeks old. Mary dumped me after I got life. She never even visited. They make it easy to do when you’re in for life. I signed the law papers. And I never got another letter. But my brother wrote me how she got married again. Married a plumber there in Charleston, West Virginia. Had a whole litter of kids. My brother sent me clippings when the kid got killed. My kid. That was in fifty-one. He was twelve, and he fell off his motor scooter under a delivery truck.”

“I’m sorry about that.”

“Are you, Lieutenant? You must be a nice guy. You must be a real nice guy. I looked Mary up when I got back to Charleston. She damn near dropped dead when she recognized me. The kids were in school and the plumber was out plumbing. That was last September. You know, she’d got fat, but she’s still a pretty woman. All the Pratt women are pretty. Hill people, from around Eskdale. I had to bust open the screen door to get to talk to her. Then she ran and got one of those fireplace things and tried to hit me over the head with it. I took it away from her and bent it double and threw it in the fireplace. Then she came out quiet and got in the car. She always had a mean temper.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“I want you to get the picture, like I told you last week. I drove her over to Huntington — that’s only about fifty miles — and that night I got in a booth with her while she called up the plumber. By then she was doing just what I told her, and I had her say she was taking a little vacation from him and the kids. I hung up while he was still yelling. I made her write me a love note and date it, asking me to take her away for a while. I made her write it full of dirty words. I stayed with her about three days in a hotel in Huntington. By then I got tired of her sniveling all the time and blubbering about her kids and her plumber. All the fight was gone, but she was marked up from that first day when she was still trying to get away. Are you getting the picture, Lieutenant?”

“I think so.”

“When I had enough of her, I told her that if she ever tried to yell cop, I’d mail a photostat of the note to the plumber. And I’d come around and see if I could throw a couple of the plumber’s kids under some delivery trucks. She was impressed. I had to put damn near a whole fifth of liquor into her before she passed out. Then I drove her over the Big Sandy into Kentucky, and when I found one of those rough little road-houses near Grayson, I lifted her out and put her in an old heap parked there. About a mile back up the road I threw her shoes and her dress in a field. I give her a good chance to work her way home.”

“This is supposed to scare me.”

“No, Lieutenant. This is just part of the picture. I had a lot of time to think. You know. I’d remember how it was when we got married. I’d gone back to Charleston on leave. I was twenty and it was 1939 and I had two years in. I wasn’t fixing to get married, but she’d come into town with her folks on Saturday night. She was just turned seventeen and I could tell looking at them they were hill folk. My people came from around Brounland before they moved down into Charleston. I followed them around town, never taking my eyes off Betty. After lockup at night I’d remember how it was on that Saturday night, and how the wedding was, and how she came down to Louisiana when we had the maneuvers before I got shipped. She wanted to be near me. She was religious. Came from a big clan of Bible shouters. But it didn’t stop her taking a big interest in climbing into the hay.”

“I don’t want to listen to all this.”

“But you’ll listen, Lieutenant. You want the word. I got this word for you. After I found out from my brother about her marrying again, I planned the whole thing, just exactly the way I did it. I changed it just a little. I was going to keep her a week instead of only three days, but she lost her fight too fast.”

“So?”

“You’re supposed to be a big smart lawyer, Lieutenant. I thought about her and naturally I thought about you.”

“And you made plans for me?”

“Now you’re getting warm. But I couldn’t make plans for you because I didn’t know how you were set. I wasn’t even sure I could locate you. I hoped to hell you hadn’t been killed or died of sickness.”

“Are you threatening me?”

“I’m not threatening you, Lieutenant. Like I said, we started pretty near even. Now you’re a wife and three kids ahead of me.”

“And you want us to be even again.”

“I didn’t say that.”

They stared at each other, and Cady was still smiling. He looked entirely at ease. Sam Bowden could find no way to control the situation. “Did you poison our dog?” he demanded, and immediately regretted asking the question.

“Dog?” Cady’s eyes went round with mock surprise. “Poison your dog? Why, Lieutenant? You slander me.”

“Oh, come off it!”

“Come off what? No, I wouldn’t poison your dog any more than you’d put a plainclothes cop on my tail. You wouldn’t do a thing like that.”

“You did it, you filthy bastard!”

“I’ve got to be careful. I can’t take any punches at you, Lieutenant. I’d get sent up for assault. Want a cigar? They’re good ones.”

Sam turned helplessly away. Nancy had stopped working. She was standing looking intently toward them, her eyes narrowed, and she was biting her underlip.

“There’s a real stacked kid, Lieutenant. Almost as juicy as your wife.”

Sam turned back blindly and swung. Cady dropped his beer can and caught the punch deftly in the palm of his right hand.

“You get one sucker punch in a lifetime, Lieutenant. You’ve had yours.”

“Get out of here!”

Cady had stood up. He put the cigar in the corner of his mouth and spoke around it. “Sure. Maybe after a while you’ll get the whole picture, Lieutenant.” He walked toward the shed, moving lightly and easily. He grinned back at Sam, then waved his cigar at Nancy and said, “See you around, beautiful.”

Nancy came over to Sam. “Is that him? Is it? Daddy! You’re shaking!”

Sam, ignoring her, followed Cady around the shed. Cady got behind the wheel of an old gray Chevy. He beamed at Sam and Nancy and drove out.

“He is the one, isn’t he? He’s horrible! The way he looked at me made me feel all crawly, like worms do.”

“That’s Cady,” he said. His voice was unexpectedly husky.

“Why did he come here?”

“To put a little more pressure on. God knows how he found out we’d be here. I’m glad your mother and the boys weren’t here.”

They walked back to the boat. He glanced down at her as she walked beside him. Her face was solemn, thoughtful. This was not a problem that would affect only him and Carol. The children were within the orbit.

Nancy looked up at him. “What are you going to do about it?”

“I don’t know.”

“What is he going to do?”

“I don’t know that either.”

“Daddy, do you remember a long time ago when I was little and the nightmares I had after we went to the circus?”

“I remember. What was the name of that ape? Gargantua.”

“That’s right. The place where they had him had glass walls and you held me by the hand and he turned and he looked right at me. Not at any of the other people. Right at me. And I felt like something inside me curled up and died. It was something savage that didn’t have any right to be in the same world I was in. Do you know what I mean?”

“Of course.”

“That man is a little bit like that. I mean I got a little bit of the same impression. Miss Boyce would say I was being unrealistic.”

“And who is Miss Boyce? I’ve heard that name.”

“Oh, she’s our English teacher. She’s been telling us that good fiction is good because it has character development in it that shows that nobody is completely good and nobody is completely evil. And in bad fiction the heroes are a hundred per cent heroic and the villains are a hundred per cent bad. But I think that man is all bad.”

Never before, he thought, have we been able to talk on an equivalent, adult level without a mutual shyness. “I suppose I could understand him, if I wanted to. He was in a dirty, brutal business, and he was a combat-fatigue case, and he went right from that into life imprisonment at hard labor. And that is a brutalizing environment. I suppose he couldn’t think of it as a reward for services rendered. So there had to be somebody to blame. And he couldn’t blame himself. I became the symbol. He doesn’t see me. He doesn’t see Sam Bowden, lawyer, home owner, family type. He sees the lieutenant, the young J.A.G. full of puritanical righteousness who ruined his life. And I wish I could be one of your hundred per cent heroes about it. I wish I didn’t have a mind full of reservations and rationalizations.”

“In our psychology class Mr. Proctor told us that all mental illness is a condition where the individual can’t make a rational interpretation of reality. I had to memorize that. So if Mr. Cady can’t be rational...”

“I believe he’s mentally sick.”

“Then shouldn’t he be treated?”

“The law in this state is designed to protect people from being wrongly committed. A close relative can sign commitment papers which will put a person away for a period of observation, usually sixty days. Or, if a person commits an act of violence or, in public, acts in an irrational manner, he can be committed on the basis of the testimony of the law officers who witness the violence or irrationality. There’s no other way.”

She turned and ran her fingers along the sanded side of the hull. “So there isn’t much to do.”

“I would appreciate it if you’d break your date tonight. I’m not ordering you to. You would probably be safe, but we wouldn’t know if you were safe.”

She thought it over, frowning. “I’ll stay home.”

“I guess we can break out the paint.”

“All right. Are you going to tell Mother about this?”

“Yes. She has the right to know everything that happens.”

Tommy Kent appeared a few minutes before Carol and the boys came back. He was a rangy, good-looking boy, polite, amusing and just deferential enough. He was given a brush. He and Nancy painted in the same area of the hull, each objecting to the other’s sloppy work. Sam was glad to see how she handled him. No melting looks. No tinges of adoration. She was brusque with him, fencing with him with pert confidence and the sure-footedness of self-respect, quietly aware of her own attractiveness. Sam was surprised that her young weapons were so professionally edged and were wielded with such an air of long practice. She treated him like a slightly incompetent elder brother, which was, of course, precisely the correct tactics with a school wheel like Tommy Kent. Sam, giving them sidelong glances from his painting position near the bow, could detect only one flaw in her utter naturalness. She took no pose or attitude that was in any way ungainly or awkward. She was as careful as if she were dancing. He heard her break the date. She was just sufficiently apologetic to avoid being rude. And just vague enough to awaken suspicion and jealousy. Sam saw the black scowl on Tommy’s face when Nancy turned away from him, and thought, Young man, she just sank the hook. She’s keeping the rod tip up, and she’s got the drag set perfectly. And when the time comes, she’s going to be just as expert with the net, and you will flap in the bottom of the boat, eyes rolling and gill covers trembling. Pike Foster never had a chance, and now she’s ready for bigger game.

After Carol arrived and made Nancy take time off for her sandwich and tea, and the four young ones were busily painting, Sam bought two beers and took Carol down to one of Jake’s sagging docks and sat beside her, feet dangling just above the water. There he told her about Max Cady.

“Here!” she said, her eyes wide and round. “Right here?”

“Right here, watching Nancy, when I got back. And when I looked at Nancy I seemed to see her the way he was seeing her and she’d never looked more undressed, even in that bikini thing you let her wear only when we’re on the island without guests.”

She closed her fingers on his wrist with hysterical strength and shut her eyes tightly and said, “It makes me feel ill. Oh, God, Sam! What are we going to do about it? Did you talk to him? Did you find out about Marilyn?”

“I talked to him. Right at the end I lost my temper. I tried to hit him. I was tremendously effectual. I tried to hit him while he was sitting down. I could have tossed a tennis ball at him. Underhand. His damn forearms are as big as my thighs, and he’s as quick as a weasel.”

“How about Marilyn?”

“He denied it. But he denied it in a way that was the same as telling me he did it.”

“What else did he say? Did he make threats?”

For a moment Sam was tempted to keep the story of Cady’s wife to himself. But he plodded through it, trying to do an unemotional job of straight reporting, looking down at the green bay water. Carol did not interrupt. When he looked at her it was as though she had suddenly, tragically become an older woman. At thirty-seven he had taken great pride in her agelessness, at the way she could look a consistent thirty and, at special times, a gay and miraculous twenty-five. Now, with shoulders slumped, and face all bones and gauntness, he saw for the first time how she would look when she became very old.

“It’s hideous!” she said.

“I know.”

“That poor woman. And what a slimy way to threaten us. By indirection. Did Nancy find out who he was?”

“She didn’t notice him until toward the end. When she saw us talking, she guessed. When I threw my ridiculous punch, she knew. After he drove away we talked. She made good sense. I think I’m very proud of her. She willingly broke tonight’s date.”

“I’m glad. Isn’t Tommy nice?”

“Quite nice, but don’t start talking as if she’s eighteen. He’s better material than Pike. And she seems to be able to handle him well. I don’t know where she learned.”

“It isn’t something you learn.”

“I guess she inherited it from you, honey. There I was, minding my own business, looking around for a place to sit in that cafeteria and...” He was trying to be light, but he knew it was falling flat. Her head was bent and he saw the tears clinging to her black lashes. He put his hand on her arm.

“It will be all right,” he said. She shook her head violently. “Drink your beer, baby. Look. It’s Saturday. The sun is shining. There’s the whole brood. We’ll make out. They can’t lick the Bowdens.”

Her voice was muffled. “You go back and help. I’ll stay here a little while.”

After he picked up his brush he looked back. She looked small out on the dock. Small, humbled and dreadfully afraid.