Deadly Welcome (10 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Come on now! Come on!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’ll stop by some time, Betty.”

“Good.”

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

“About what I said last night, Alex.”

“Yes?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t know what you mean.”

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

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

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

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

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

“What a filthy thing to do!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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