The Empty Copper Sea (14 page)

"Too?"

"Like I lost the car. They say I ran it into a tree, but I don't remember. I shouldn't have been driving anyway because my license was suspended. The car was totaled and the insurance company wouldn't pay a dime because I wasn't a licensed driver any more. How do you like that? I was with them sixteen years! It was right about then that Gretel got here, thank God. Now that she's here, everything will be okay."

"When we got here she was doing the laundry in those big drums. Are you two so hard up you can't spare quarters for a coin laundry? We passed one back at the edge of town."

"Oh, we could afford that, but Gretel is stubborn. And she gets these ideas about things. She wants to see just how independent of everything we can be. No telephones or power companies.

She's trying to grow stuff in a garden she planted way the other side of the hard road, on the edge of the marsh, but the birds and rabbits are giving her a hard time. And the mosquitoes eat her when she goes over to work on it. But she won't give up. Not on anything. Ever."

We came to the path that wound up to the crest of the dune and down the other side. Gretel and Meyer were on the deck. John Tuckerman held up the fillets of jack and Gretel applauded him.

She came down and got the fish. Once she had hefted it, she asked us to stay to lunch. Meyer sidestepped the question and left it up to me. I said we'd be delighted, and thanks very much for asking us.

We tipped the soapy-water drum downslope, and she grilled the fish over the embers from the driftwood fire. While I had been with John Tuckerman, Gretel and Meyer had wrung out and hung up the clothes. We had lunch off chipped blue willowware plates at a table by the windows in the small bare living room of the beach cottage. We had the grilled fish, canned peas, and black coffee. The biggest object in the room was the fireplace. There was seashells on the windowsills and the mantel. Gretel put on a blue work shirt over her bikini before coming to the table. She glowed with strength and health and vitality. I envied John Tuckerman. There were golden flecks in the deep brown pigment of, her eyes, near the pupils. The whites of her eyes
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were the blue-white of peak physical condition.

Through the meal we talked fishing, and over coffee I said, "Where were you before you came here, Gretel?"

"I came out of the nowhere into the here."

"We don't answer questions," John said earnestly. "That's one of the rules. She says I could get into real-"

"Hey!" she said. "We don't have to explain why we don't answer questions."

"Okay," he said grumpily. "But you sure are bossy."

"There are reasons," she said. She smiled at Meyer. "We've had other visitors."

"Like Fletcher. Like that damned Fletcher."

"Hush, dear," she said.

"A deputy sheriff?" I asked. "Now in Mexico with the insurance investigator?"

"He said they were going there," John said.

She glared at me, her face darkening in anger. She said, "I think it is pretty damned low to keep digging and digging away at somebody who ... who . . ." She didn't know how to say it in front of him.

"You're cute," I said. "Both of you. You make a cute couple. Speaking about low. Sure, John Tuckerman. Keep your mouth shut. And deprive a very decent hard-luck man named Van Harder from making a living at his trade. There is a smell of money in the wind, lady, and you seem to turn toward it like some kind of weathervane. You came out of the nowhere into the here to brush up an old affair and get closer to the money."

She stared at me, aghast. "You think I'm his old lady?"

"She's his sister," Meyer said. And as soon as it was said, I could see it. Bone structures, coloring.

She thumped the table with her fist, making coffee dance in the cups. "I came here to help John any way I can, because there isn't anybody else left in the world who will help him."

"In spite of all your marvelous motives and family spirit and so on, Gretel, it still leaves Van Harder on the beach."

"He ran the Julie," John said. "Hub put half of one of those horse capsules in-"

"John! Shut up, shut up, shut up! Jesus God! They can nail you for conspiracy to defraud, or whatever the right words for it are. Now tell me, John, what really happened to Van Harder?"

"I guess he must have had that big drink Hub gave him on an empty stomach. Or else he brought some liquor aboard with him and drank it too. He passed out when we were on automatic pilot, and one of the girls got sick and went up there and saw him and came down and told us. We decided we'd better go back to Timber Bay. When we found the pass and started in, Hub went up on the bow and-"

I interrupted him. He had been reciting it. He had learned it by rote. "Okay, okay," I said. "Van got half a horse tranquilizer. I know the other story by heart too."

John looked at Gretel for guidance. She said to me, "I guess you can understand why we can't help your friend. Why John can't help your friend. The establishment took such a beating, they would be glad to stuff anybody in jail."

John Tuckerman made a muffled sound. We all looked at him. His eyes had filled and one tear broke and ran down his cheek. "He could have taken me with him," he said. "Everything would have been all right. if he had to go, he could have taken me. Instead of that bitch architect. That dirty rotten bitch architect." His voice broke.

Meyer said in his jolliest tone, "John and I are going to clean up here, while you and Travis take a walk on the beach, Gretel."

She looked at him and then she looked at me, a steady, suspicious, interrogatory look, trying to see through my eyes and into my skull. There was a sudden impact, almost tangible. I wanted to be more than I was, for her. I wanted to stop being tiresome and listless and predictable. I wanted to be thrice life-size, witty and urbane, bright and reliable, sincere and impressive-all for her. She merited better than the pedestrian person she stared at.

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The hostility and suspicion faded into a look of doubt, a lip-biting tension. "So come on," she said, and I had to hurry to catch her halfway up the dune.

We stopped at the crest, the early afternoon sun speckling the sea with silver mirrors, aiming arrows of light at us. To the south, birds worked a moiled area of bait.

"We have to trust somebody," she said. She looked sidelong at me. "I've had terrible luck in the trusting department." Before I could respond she was off down the slope, leggy and swift, heading south down the beach.

Ten

"YOU CAN'T really appreciate the change in John unless you'd known him before. So quick and funny and exasperating. If he'd just had the motivation, he could have been a successful person.

Well, maybe he was a successful person. At least he had sense enough not to try marriage. He would have made a terrible husband. As bad, I guess, as the one I married too young, Billy Howard. I think John has always been more than half in love with Julie Lawless anyway."

We were two miles down the beach from the cottage. A driftwood weatherworn section of wooden dock projected from the shallow slope of the dune-a shelf for sitting. She poked at the sand with a stick as she talked, making small avalanches.

"He tied his life to Hub Lawless's life. And when everything went sour for Hub and he decided to run, he shucked John off. John has been an intensely loyal person. He drank for oblivion, and I think he found some ... permanent kind. He is ... a simplified personality now. At the time of the hearing and the investigation, he was himself. I couldn't be here then, but I could tell from the newspaper stories. He could handle it. He couldn't get through that sort of thing now. He can be tricked, like a child."

"The way I was tricking him."

"Yes. It made me angry."

"You didn't hide it."

"Short fuse, friend."

"Short fuse and long talk. You talk around and around it, and you keep on wondering if you should tell me anything, or if you should keep on waffling."

"I just met you a few hours ago."

"I came here at Van Harder's request, to clear his name."

"You're a private detective, then?"

"Me? No. Those people have to have licenses and be bonded and carry insurance and report to the law people wherever they go. They charge fees and have office phones and all that. I just do favors for friends. Sort of salvage work."

"But Van Harder is paying you?"

"No. He offered me ten thousand dollars in time payments if I could do it. He thinks his good name is worth twenty thousand. When I find things for people, I keep half. But I won't take that kind of money from him. I'll have to find some way of saving his pride, if I can get his situation reconsidered. He's spent his life on the water. It isn't fair that he should be victimized by some sharp operator rigging his own disappearance with other people's money."

"And leaving his best friend, as he always called John, flat broke in the bargain."

"Self-preservation. A strong instinct."

She poked away at the sand, bent so far forward I could not see her face. I looked at the smooth brown legs, the flow of the complex curves, one into the next, lovely as music. She had shed the work shirt. It lay on the weathered wood between us. The bikini string bit into the skin of her warm brown back, and I followed the way her back narrowed down to her waist, then flared to the hips. I read the calligraphy of the round knuckles of the bent spine, and of the twinned
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dimples farther down.

She turned sharply and caught me staring at her. She said, "I suppose your hairy pal is worming it all out of John anyway."

"I could say yes in hopes it would open you up. Actually, I don't know. He may be leaving it up to you to decide."

She laughed. "When we were alone he gave me a little lecture on how people have washed their garments, down through the ages. He's really a nice person."

"Maybe we both are."

"I have a track record that tells me not to trust my instincts. I have been undone by scoundrels, sir."

"And probably scoundrels have been undone by you."

"Sometimes. Thanks for the confidence. Anyway . . ." She told me what she had learned from her brother, little by little.

When things had begun to go bad, Hub had begun joking about escape. He and John had made up wild plans, as a sort of running fantasy. But as things got worse, the jokes became strained, and the planning became more serious. John had not learned until very far along in the planning process that it had been, Hub's wish, all along, to take Kristin Petersen with him, or to meet her there. John had thought this ironic, as the architect was really the person who had encouraged Hub to make the land purchases which had finally foundered him. Apparently, according to John's observations, the affair between Hub and Kristin was intensely physical, the kind of obsessive infatuation which seemed to blind him to all consequences.

The most delicate and intricate chore had been the conversion, over three months, of assets into cash, with frequent trips to Tampa, Clearwater, and Orlando. They had taken a four-day trip to Mexico in late February, ostensibly to hunt cat in the mountains, actually to arrange for surgery in Guadalajara at a later date, and to set up a hideaway for Hub and Kristin after the operations.

When I asked where, she said that John didn't know, that he had remained in Guadalajara while Hub flew off somewhere, but John had the impression Hub went to Yucatan.

They had done a lot of the planning right there in the cottage, arguing, picking flaws, finding solutions.

The cash had been hidden at the ranch. On March twenty-second, Hub Lawless had put the cash in the yellow jeep and driven out to the cottage. John Tuckerman had driven out there and picked him up and taken him back into Timber Bay. John had arranged for the two girls to come along on the Julie so that there would be innocent witnesses to the accident. Hub had made certain neither girl saw the powerful tranquilizer in powder form being dumped into Harder's token drink.

Just when it was about time for one of them, John or Hub, to go topside and "discover" Harder, one of the girls became seasick and went up and saved them the trouble. After she came down, they went up to see, then turned the cruiser around to go back. Hub went below and told the girls what they were doing, and also told them that now they were going into the wind, and it was very cold and ugly up above.

Hub went back up. John had taken the Julie as close inshore as he dared. When they came opposite the harsh gleam of the Coleman lantern John had left lighted on the deck railing of the beach cottage, Hub clapped John on the back, thanked him, shook his hand, and went overboard. When he was in the sea, he quickly yanked the cord that inflated the life belt he was wearing. They had tested it several times in rough water off John Tuckerman's beach. Hub was confident using it and could make good time through the water.

John piloted the Julie to Timber Bay, went in the pass, thumped the bow onto the sandbar, began yelling for the girls, and threw the life ring over. He stayed and answered all questions, over and over and over. It was very late when he got back to his apartment. In the early morning he drove out to the cottage and to his consternation, saw that the yellow jeep was still there. He found Hub Lawless on the cot in the corner of the living room, gray, sweaty, and short of
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breath. Hub had the feeling, he said, that some round heavy weight was pushing down on his chest. It was more of a feeling of pressure than of pain. He had been much farther from shore than he had realized when he went overboard. He had struggled for a long time and had finally come to shore, elhausted, a long way south of the lantern light. The cold wind chilled him as he walked up the beach, ond he had a nagging pain in his left arm and shoulder. It was not until he had climbed the dune that he had fainted. He did not know how long he was out, but he did not think it was very long. He got 1limself up the stairs and into the cottage, stripped oft his sodden clothes, and dressed in the fresh diy clothing. The nausea had started then, and the weakness. He did not feel equal to driving the jeep to Tampa, as planned, and anyway he had already missed his early flight from Tampa to Houston and thus also his HoustonGuadalajara connection. The tickets and the tourist card were in the false name he had selected; Steven Pickering, the name he had used with the clinic in Guadalajara.