Deadly Welcome (6 page)

“I’m sorry to bother you.”

“Doesn’t bother me a bit. Come on in.”

She came into the kitchen, a big, strong, vital-looking woman, and when she was on his level he knew that if she were to wear high heels, she would stand eye to eye with him.

“Myrtle should have remembered this. Mrs. Carney has been letting us use the cottage to change in when it isn’t rented. And we left some stuff out here. Maybe you’ve run across it and wondered about it. Here’s the extra key. I don’t imagine you want a stranger having a key to your castle.”

“Some castle. I haven’t found anything. I haven’t looked around much.”

“Just some swimming gear in that little closet off the living room. Suits and fins and masks and towels. I ran into Myrtle on Bay Street and she said she’d just rented it. I’ll get the stuff if it’s all right.”

“It isn’t going to be in my way. I’m not going to use that closet. As far as I’m concerned, you can leave it right here and come on out with your husband and swim any time you feel like it.”

“I come out with my brother. We couldn’t impose on you that way, really.”

And suddenly he knew the reason why she had seemed so curiously familiar to him. She was Jenna, cut from a bolder pattern. And more forthright than sensuous, more grave than mischievous. He wondered why he had been so slow to recognize the obvious.

“Aren’t you Betty Larkin?”

“Yes, and I’ve seen you before. A long time ago. And I just can’t remember. Myrtle didn’t tell me your name.”

“Doyle. Alex Doyle.”

Her eyes widened and she lifted her hand to her throat. “Of course! Of course! And you haven’t changed so terribly much. Golly, I had such a horrible crush on you, I don’t see how I could have possibly forgotten.” Her color deepened under her tan.

“This isn’t flattering, Betty, but I just can’t remember you at all. I knew Jenna, of course. And I can remember Buddy a little bit. But you’re a blank.”

“I used to go into Ducklin’s and make a lemon dope last just about forever. But the big football hero wouldn’t have had any time for eleven-year-olds. Oh, I was a living doll, Alex. Nearly as tall as I am now, and I looked like something made out of broomsticks. We went to all the home games and some of the out of town ones. Every time they wrote anything about you in the
Davis Journal
, I’d cut it out and paste it in a book. With appropriate comments in my diary. Isn’t it crazy the things kids do?”

“It sure is. But I’m flattered anyhow.”

“Have you been in town long?”

“Just since mid-morning. Haven’t seen anybody to talk to except Judge Ellandon. Sat with him in Ducklin’s and got a briefing on the local picture. I can’t offer a lemon dope, but the beer I bought ought to have a chill on it by now.”

“Sounds good. Right out of the can or bottle, please.”

He opened two cans of beer and they took them out onto the small screened porch. She asked him what he’d been doing, and he told her just what he’d told the judge. And then, as though sensing what he’d most want to know, she began to talk of his friends. Who had married and who had died and who had moved away. Who had children and who had been divorced. Having an older brother and sister had given Betty a better working knowledge of his age group than she would otherwise have had. There were only a very few names he could recall that she could not tell him about.

He was astonished that so many of them had moved
away. When she started to tell him about Jody Burch he said, “I heard about that. Junie was in Ducklin’s with a woman named Kathy Hubbard. She told me about Jody. It’s a damn shame. And then, all of a sudden, she remembered the dirt about me. And got a little nasty and took off.”

“Junie is a terrible pill, Alex. Too bad Billy Hillyard ever married her. She’s full of virtue and civic works, but the truth is her home and her kids bore her. That’s why she’s on so many committees.”

He said, into the sudden silence, “Well, when the big hero fell off the pedestal, it sure must have raised hell with your diary.”

She grinned at him. It was a good grin that slanted her eyes and wrinkled the tan nose. “It blighted my life. I was your valiant defender, Alex. I got in more darn kicking, scratching, snarling, hair-yanking fights over you. I couldn’t
bear
to have anybody call you names.”

“But I guess they did.”

“They certainly did. You were drinking and you weren’t used to drinking, and you’d never been in trouble before. I couldn’t understand why people were so … vicious about it.”

“Don’t you know, really?”

“No,” she said, frowning.

“I was Bert Doyle’s kid. A kid from Chaney’s Bayou which was just about a half step better than Bucket Bay. I was from down there where they throw the trash and garbage off the front stoop into the bay, down there where they fish all week and get stinking drunk on Saturday night. My old man and my brother drowned in the Gulf and my old lady scrubbed in the kitchen at the Ramona Hotel until she died, and it was too damn bad Joe Ducklin had such no-account kin, but it wasn’t really close kin, and wasn’t Joe a hell of a fine man to take me in like he did? They never thought how much wages Joe saved. So I was supposed to be grateful and know
my place. And it made them all uneasy when I got better grades than their sons and daughters, and they felt kind of strange about it when I could run harder and faster and carry a ball better than their sons. And get up quicker when I was hurt. And it didn’t seem right I should be popular in school and get invited to things, and run around with their kids. I guess they’d look at me and see I was mannerly and knew which fork to use, and they wished they could put a big tag on me, saying I was bayou trash. I was too big for my britches. So then I did just what they wanted. I did it up fine. Got drunk and robbed good old Joe. That proved something, didn’t it? You cain’t trust that bayou trash. They’ll turn on you ever’ time. Got that mean shifty streak in ’em.”

He turned his head violently away from her and looked blindly south down the afternoon beach, and felt the unexpected sting of tears in his eyes.

“Oh, Alex, Alex,” she said softly, and for just a moment she laid her hand on his arm, and took it away. “It was long ago. You were just a kid.”

When he was sure of his control he turned back toward her and smiled a crooked smile. “It was so long ago, wasn’t it, that there wouldn’t be any point in my lying now?”

“I … I wouldn’t think so. What do you mean?”

“The sad crazy thing about it is I didn’t do it.”

She was frowning, her eyes moving quickly as she searched his face. “But you pleaded guilty. It was in the papers.”

“I pleaded guilty. They talked to me and talked to me and they said if I tried to fight it I’d end up in Raiford sure as hell. So be sensible, kid, and plead guilty and it’s all set so the judge’ll let it drop if you enlist right off. And I was going to enlist anyway. That was what the party was about. I passed out. Somebody took the store key out of my pocket and they went and they took twenty cartons of cigarettes, and those pens
and lighters, and nearly two hundred dollars out of the register. Then they shoved the key and two twenty-dollar bills and three fountain pens in my pockets.”

“But you
should
have fought!”

“I know that
now
, Betty. But I was sick and I was scared and I was confused. All I wanted was to get out of that cell and get in the army and never think about Ramona again.”

“Why didn’t you write Joe later and tell him the truth, Alex? Or write any of your friends?”

“I wouldn’t have written Joe. I should have written to Myra. I must have started a dozen letters. I couldn’t say it right. I tore them up. I told myself when I got out of the service I’d come back and clear things up. I was going to be my own private eye and find out who did it. But I got out and … I couldn’t make myself come back. I knew I’d never come back.”

“And now here you are.”

“I got older. And smarter, maybe.”

“But it still hurts, doesn’t it? You sounded so bitter it made me feel … sort of strange. Have you thought of who could have done it?”

“It was a big party, Betty. A beer party and dance. I guess over a hundred of the kids. I kept having to make speeches. It was Willy Reiser brought that raw ’shine, and we got to drinking it out of paper cups. They let us have the Legion Hall and when I passed out early, they put me in one of those little back rooms and stuck flowers in my hand and went on with my going-away party. Almost anybody could have done it. It isn’t a long walk from Ducklin’s to the Hall. They’d need a car, maybe, to carry the cigarettes, but anybody who didn’t have a car could borrow one. I’ll never know who did it, Betty.”

“What a filthy, filthy trick! Worse than the stealing was making it look like it was you. But even so, Joe wouldn’t have had to swear out a complaint.”

“Hell, he enjoyed it. Do you know something? Outside of trying to tell the county police fifteen years ago and Joe, you’re the first person I’ve ever told this to? It became sort of a point of honor to keep it to myself. I guess I told you because … of the clippings and the diary and those scraps you had over me. Now tell me about yourself, Betty. I want to know about my fan club of one.”

“I … I’m not the dramatic one in my family. I’m just a big healthy uncomplicated horse. After I got out of school in Gainesville I came back here and went to work in the yard. I’m sort of a top sergeant or general manager or something. Buddy bosses all the shop work and I take care of everything else. Buddy and I live with mother at the same old house on Grove Road. Johnny Geer rents a room from mother, and we pay our share of the board.”

“Work, and go swimming?”

“And sailing, Alex. In my little Thistle. Called the
Lady Bird
. And that’s about it. It’s enough. We’re all sort of trying to recover from … what happened.”

“I’m very sorry about it, Betty.”

She shrugged. “I guess something was going to happen to her. Nobody knew what it would be. But I do wish it hadn’t been this. Somebody did it. They may be still around. Pretty spooky. Buddy and I have talked about her. I guess we loved her, but not very much. You can’t love anybody who doesn’t want love, who won’t accept it.” She looked at her watch. “I’ve goofed off too long.”

“Come back, will you? Any time at all.”

[unclear] at the yard.”

“I will. And leave your gear here. It isn’t in my way.”

[unclear] right.”

He walked out to the jeep with her. She turned and shook hands with him. Her hand was solid, her grip
strong but feminine. “Hope you’ll stay around a while, Alex.”

“I hope so too.”

“I guess you knew Jenna … pretty well.”

It was a hesitant question and he saw a look of uneasiness, almost of pain, in her eyes before she looked away.

“We were in the same crowd, but I wasn’t somebody special to her. Why?”

“I don’t know. I was just talking.”

“Did they find her very far from this cottage?”

She slid under the wheel and looked up at him. “You can ask questions, Alex, and they’ll be answered because you’re from Ramona. But it isn’t a very healthy place for strangers who come around prying. It’s all over and the town wants it to be forgotten. There was some very … strong meat written. At first the town was excited, but now it’s kind of ashamed. We kept the worst of it away from mother, thank God. And I guess Celia kept Colonel M’Gann from seeing much of it. It wasn’t far from this cottage, Alex. About three hundred yards south. Just opposite that stand of three big Australian pines.”

“How is Colonel M’Gann taking it?”

“I wouldn’t know. Celia wants no part of the Larkin family, and what Celia wants, Celia gets. Not one of us has seen the colonel since … it happened. And I guess that suits Celia perfectly. Her dear brother married so far beneath him. Sorry, but she makes me want to spit. See you later, Alex.”

He watched the jeep until it went out of sight around a bend. At the last moment she looked back and waved. He was pleasured by the picture it made, the faded blue jeep and the spume of white shell dust behind it, and her vivid hair and the warm brown of shoulders and arms and the red of the blouse. As he reached the back door he heard the bridge timbers again after she turned on to the causeway.

He took another can of cool beer out on the porch and he wondered why he felt so utterly relaxed, felt such inner peace. And he decided that telling her the truth had been for him a kind of therapy he had not realized he needed so badly. It was like retching away something that had lain sour and heavy on his stomach. And he thought of the tall spindly child fighting so fiercely for him, and it made him smile.

There was such an odd contrast between Jenna and Betty in spite of the elusive resemblance. It had been almost impossible for Jenna to walk or move or speak without making of it an act of provocation. The fabric of her sexual tensions had surrounded her with an unmistakable aura of awareness and surmise.

Betty, in contrast, seemed to handle herself in a way that, through long habit, seemed to negate her bounties, to underplay her charms. She seemed to have no body awareness, no iota of consciousness of self. So there was a bluffness in the way she moved, an asexual indifference. It was a big lovely body, with good shoulders and strong breasts, delicately narrow waist, and long strong shapely legs. Yet when she had sat on the porch she had propped her heels on the railing just inside the screening, and crossed her ankles with neither coyness nor seemingly any awareness that she was good to look upon.

It gave him the feeling that should a man attempt to kiss her, it would surprise her utterly. And she would glare at him and say, with great impatience, “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” So it was no wonder that at twenty-six she was unmarried, and seemed perfectly content with that condition.

He finished his beer and put on swim trunks and swam down the beach and came ashore at the stand of three tall pines. There was no mark or footstep on the sand where the tide had gone out. A tan crab ran sideways to its hole and popped in and watched him with stalked eyes. So she had been found just about here. And, with forlorn irony, on her back. In soiled white sweater and soiled
yellow slacks, with damaged mouth and staring eyes and darkened face, black tongue parting the swollen lips.