“Yes.”
“I didn’t think things would turn out the way they have.”
“No one did.”
“I thought—well, damn it, I’m so fond of you both, and I wanted you to get together. You seemed a natural, you know? And I hoped—well, I guess what I really hoped was that Gwen would drop dead or something. What a dreamer I am, eh?”
“I’ve had a happy year,” Charlotte said. “I should thank you for it.”
“Well, don’t,” he said sharply. “I feel responsible.”
“You shouldn’t. I was ready to fall in love and I did. I had never loved anyone before.”
He smiled then, a friendly, but rather sad little smile. “Not even me?”
“No.”
“My trouble is that I’ve got to wait around for a woman who likes fish, or who likes me well enough to get to like fish.” He saw her glance towards the door and said, “Don’t leave yet.”
“I have to.”
“If he doesn’t want to be found, don’t look for him, Charley. He may have reasons.”
“I have reasons, too.”
“In that case.” He opened the door for her. “Good luck, anyway.”
“Thank you, Vern.”
Downstairs in the lobby the old Negro was still mopping the tiled floor, humming to himself as he worked.
“Good night, Tom.”
“Floor’s wet, you walk easy.”
“Yes, I will.”
“A fine clear evening, ma’am.”
She stepped out into the dusty street.
The wind went everywhere, like an inquisitive ghost through keyholes, down chimneys; under the cracks of doors; and everything felt gritty to the touch.
The beach was littered with the broken shafts of palm trees. In the little café near the breakwater the tables were layered with fine sand that blew in when the door was opened and gradually settled over everything. Sam, the proprietor, went around muttering to himself and making futile swipes with a dish towel.
Charlotte sat at the counter and ordered a cup of coffee. The phone was where she remembered it, at the end of the counter beside the cash register. The hope grew in her mind that it was the phone Lewis had used yesterday morning to call Vern. She and Lewis had often come here for a late supper. The food was terrible and the dishes never quite clean, but it was the sort of place where neither of them would be likely to meet people they knew. Besides, in the rear booth where they usually sat, there was a tiny window like a square porthole, with a view of the breakers crawling up the beach.
Our view,
Lewis called it, with a kind of sadness in his voice, as if he meant that it was the only view they would have together, from the small murky window.
Sam brought the coffee. He was a Greek from Brooklyn, a fat curious-eyed man with spindly legs and narrow, delicate feet that could hardly support his weight. He talked a lot, always in a whisper out of the side of his mouth like a movie spy.
“How come you’re sitting up here? The back booth’s empty.”
“I’m alone tonight.”
“Mother of pearl, aren’t we all,” Sam said gloomily. “I’m thinking myself of maybe getting married again. I have the type of lady in mind, a nice widow with a little something in the bank and a little insurance. But they’re hard to find and in this business the dice are loaded against you. Take a nice widow coming in here for instance—sees me in this lousy apron and don’t see no further than the apron. Get what I mean? Sure ya do.” He leaned his elbows on the counter to ease the weight off his feet. “That your steady boyfriend you come in here with?”
“Yes. In fact, I’m looking for him now.”
“Anything the matter?”
“No, I just—well, yes. We had a quarrel. I want to find him to apologize.”
“He hasn’t been in today. Say, he’s got class, you know? I guess it’s the clothes, nifty tweeds instead of a lousy apron like…”
“What about yesterday?”
“Oh yesterday, sure. He came in early for breakfast. Ate a couple of eggs, drank some coffee and asked if he could use the phone. I said sure, go ahead. Though I’m telling
you,
confidentially, that I don’t encourage people to use the phone. How do I know they aren’t going to call their Aunt Daisy in Jersey City?”
He paused long enough to turn over a couple of hamburgers that were cooking on the gas grill.
“Well, he made the call, and then he bought a loaf of bread and a quart of milk and some cigarettes. He wasn’t looking himself. He had on a pair of dungarees and an old mackinaw. I said, kidding-like, ‘Going on a fishing trip?’ He didn’t answer. Paid his check and walked out. I was kind of curious, so I went to the window and watched where he went. He was heading hell for leather down the breakwater where all those dinghies are tied up. Well, then this girl in pink shorts happened to walk past with a rod and reel, and well, you know how it is. My eye kind of wandered. I’m very interested in rods and reels.” He chuckled at his own joke, supporting his heaving stomach with the palms of his hands.
Charlotte didn’t hear him. She knew now where Lewis was.
The breakwater was dark but there was light in the harbor master’s little office and the door was open. A young man was sitting on top of the desk examining the sole of one of his canvas shoes. He was about seventeen, clad in skin-tight levis and crew shirt, with a yachting cap pushed back on his head. He was full-grown but his face was beardless, and his manner had the uncertainty of adolescence.
When he saw Charlotte in the doorway he jumped down from the desk with an embarrassed grin.
“I’m looking for the harbor master,” Charlotte said.
“He went home, ma’am.”
“Are you in charge?”
“Well, kind of. I mean, he’s my uncle and I’m just kind of hanging around for the summer vacation.”
“There’s a boat anchored here called the Mirabelle.”
The boy’s uncertainty vanished. “Oh sure, that’s Mr. Johnson’s cruising sloop. He let me go aboard her tonight when I asked him if I could.”
“Tonight?” If Vern had been on the boat tonight it meant that her whole theory was wrong, that Lewis wasn’t hiding there after all. She felt defeated, exhausted, like an animal that had been trying for hours to find its way out of a maze of closed traps and blind alleys.
He was looking at her curiously, his brown eyes as round and alert as a spaniel’s. It was apparent that he wasn’t used to well-dressed women coming alone to the breakwater at nearly eleven o’clock at night. “You want to go out to the Mirabelle, ma’am?”
“Yes. I—Mr. Johnson’s a friend of mine.”
“Oh, he is?”
“A very good friend. You can verify that if you like.” She couldn’t understand the sudden blush that stained his cheeks and the lobes of his ears. “I guess you can take one of the skiffs that’s down there on the float, ma’am, if you bring it back in the morning.”
“I’ll have it back in half an hour.”
He didn’t say anything, he seemed too embarrassed to speak.
“Look,” Charlotte said. “If you’re in any doubt, you can phone Mr. Johnson. I believe he’s still at his office.”
“Mr. Johnson’s on board.”
“On board?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“I saw him at his office half an hour ago.”
“No ma’am,” the boy said stubbornly. “He’s aboard. He said he was going to s-sleep there.”
She went down the gangplank to the float, thinking, Vern can’t have reached here ahead of me. But if he did, why? Did he suspect all the time that Lewis was hiding on the boat? Did he come to warn him? No, that’s absurd. Vern doesn’t even know what kind of trouble Lewis is in.
The heavy float was rolling gently in the ebbing tide. Half a dozen skiffs were drawn up on it, bottoms up. The boy eased one into the water and walked back up to the top of the gangplank silhouetted against the light of the tiny office.
The Mirabelle was anchored a hundred yards off shore, its sails furled, its cabin portholes dark. She tied the skiff up at the stem and climbed awkwardly up the ladder.
“Vern?”
She crossed the deck and opened the door of the cabin. Her eyes had adjusted to the darkness and she could make out the figure of a man lying on the lower bunk, face down.
She descended the five narrow steps, slowly, as if her legs were numb. “Vern?”
He stirred, moaned; one of his hands came up to his head as if to ward off a blow that he saw coming in a nightmare. She found the light and turned it on.
It wasn’t Vern. It was Lewis.
He was sleeping, but still moving, moving his head back and forth, and shielding his face with his arms. The dream stopped as suddenly as it began, his hands dropped, the fight was over.
She knelt down and touch his cheek gently. “Lewis, it’s me, Charley. Wake up, Lewis.”
He opened his eyes. They were pink and swollen, as if from tears. In the dream he had fought and won—or fought and lost—and the fight, the effort, was real; his forehead was drenched with sweat
“Lewis…”
He turned his face to the bulkhead. The back of his neck looked very young and vulnerable. “I have nothing to say, Charley.”
“You can’t go on hiding like this. They’ll find you just as I did.”
“I don’t care.”
“You must care. Things will be so much harder for you if they have to come and get you, harder for—for all of us.”
He got up off the bunk without answering. There wasn’t enough headroom in the cabin for him to stand upright. The portholes were closed and the air was suffocating and heavy with the odor of Bourbon. He seemed not drunk, but stunned, as if he had used the Bourbon not as a method of escape, but as a weapon against himself, had hit himself over the head with it in self-punishment.
“I must talk to you, Lewis. Come up on deck.”
“It’s too late for talk
“No, no, it isn’t.” But her voice held no conviction, she knew it was too late. Easter had given her three hours and two of them were gone.
She went up on deck and he followed her. The shore looked far away, and the lights of the city as remote as stars.
While the little harbor waves slapped and sucked at the stem of the boat, she told him everything that Easter had said. Her voice was quiet and calm. It had no relation to the things she was saying or to the fear and pain and pity in her heart.
Evidence
, she repeated,
evidence
, and it seemed to her a word as final as death, more terrifying than murder.
When she had finished Lewis was silent for a long time, his head buried in his hands so that she couldn’t see his face, find on it the expressions any innocent man would be wearing—shock, denial, protest.
When he finally looked up at her, there was no expression on his face at all. He spoke flatly, “On advice of counsel, I have nothing to say.”
“You must say something, you must!”
“I’m sorry, Charley.”
“Sorry.
Sorry.”
She felt hysteria rising in her throat like bile. She swallowed, fighting it down, but the harsh bitterness of its taste remained. She knew that he would say nothing to incriminate himself, not even if it meant saving her. She remembered the words Easter had spoken a few hours ago: “
He loves himself, too, and that’s the big passion. You’re running a poor second, Charlotte.”
“If I could only understand,” she said painfully. “If I knew why,
why
…”
He took her hand and pressed it against his hot dry cheek. “Perhaps some day you’ll know all the answers… Don’t draw away, don’t be afraid.”
But she was afraid. She looked down into the black water and thought of Violet.
“Tell me you loved me, Charley.”
“I—I did love you.”
“And now?”
“I don’t know… You lied to me about Violet. You said you’d never even heard of her.”
“It wasn’t a lie then. I didn’t know it was the same girl until I saw her picture the next morning. I—God, she was just a kid. I’d been drinking quite a bit. She kept hanging around me, I couldn’t get rid of her, I… But it’s too late now for excuses, explanations. No, you mustn’t cry, Charley, please don’t.” She hid her face against the sleeve of her coat. He stroked her hair, awkwardly. “Tell me, Charley, do you believe in another life, a second chance?”
“I—I try to, but I can’t.”
“I can’t, either. This is all there is, there isn’t any more. No second chances.” His eyes were fixed blindly on the dark horizon. “It’s a funny ending to a dream, isn’t it? Stop now. Stop crying, Charley. You’ll come out all right I promise you.”
She wept for a long time, like a child, her fists jammed into her eyes. When she had stopped he wiped her face with his handkerchief and raised her to her feet. “You’d better leave now, Charley. Perhaps we’d both better leave.”
“Where will you go?”
“I’ll go home.”
“Home?”
“Yes. You can tell Easter I’ll be there waiting for him.”
The cypresses that lined the walk fought the wind, bent and convulsed in fury like mad boneless dancers.
The veranda lights were lit, as if Lewis had deliberately turned them on like a good host, to welcome the guest he expected, Easter. Bold shafts of light struck the garden, and Charlotte could see that it was no longer Gwen’s garden, formal and precise. The lawn was a clutter of broken flowers, and palm fronds and dry prickly oak leaves and little mauve dots, like confetti, that had once been part of jacaranda clusters. The wind had beaten the flowers. The stocks and dahlias cringed, half naked, on the ground; the foxgloves had toppled like poles and their pink bells rolled silently across the lawn.
The collies, herded together at the fence gate, made nervous little noises, as if they would have liked to bark but didn’t dare, knowing that Gwen would appear with a folded newspaper in her hand and tap the wire fence with it warningly. They feared the newspaper and Gwen’s displeasure more than they feared the lunatic wind, the unquiet night.
They went up the front steps in silence—Charlotte holding her coat collar over her face to shield it from the grinding dust, and Easter with his hands in his pockets, unaware of wind or dust.
The drapes of the living room had been pulled back all the way. Charlotte wondered whether this, like the veranda lights, was a gesture of welcome, an invitation to stop, to look in. On her first visit tonight the drapes had been closed, the house blacked out, and Gwen upstairs in her room with a bruised throat.