Blood in the Water and Other Secrets

by Janice Law

  “Take a look and get out,” said LaDoux, starting to turn away. Marvin noticed that he carried a drink in one hand.

  “You might want to take a look at me, too,” Marvin said. “I wrote your last two novels.”

  “What are you doing here?” LaDoux demanded, his voice rising. “You’re not supposed to have any contact with me. That was in the contract!”

  “No,” said Marvin, “that was about the only thing that wasn’t.”

  “Audrey should have thought of that,” LaDoux said querulously. “Did she give you my address? I’ll fire her if she did. No one’s supposed to have my address.”

  “I acquired it elsewhere,” Marvin said. “Look, I thought we might work out a deal. Something beneficial to us both.”

  LaDoux eyed him suspiciously. “What’s Audrey been telling you? She’s wrong to give you any hope at all. I’ll get back on schedule.” Marvin decided that he was probably drunk.

  “This has nothing to do with Audrey. “I’ve constructed some interesting plot outlines, and I want to talk to you about them.”

  LaDoux’s eyes glittered. “Plots, plot ideas, used to be my forte,” he remarked. “But no more. The Muse has showed me her backside lately.”

  “So we should talk,” Marvin repeated.

  “Audrey said you were being difficult. Audrey said you didn’t want to sell anything.”

  “Well, now I need the money.”

  “Where is this material?”

  Marvin tapped his breast pocket. He had a diskette, plus an envelope with few printed pages from one of his detailed outlines. “Pull your car in,” LaDoux said. He opened the gate and waved Marvin up the short drive and into the dark and empty garage.

  The door clattered down behind them, giving Marvin a moment’s trepidation before his host switched on a light. Marvin stepped out with the bottle of wine. He followed LaDoux through the hall and a book and paper strewn dining room that opened onto the terrace and a rustling jungle of palms and banyans. On the west side, a heavy flowering vine cut off the lights and noise of the street with a cascade of foliage and deep red blossoms, while the east was open to the coal black sea, fringed white with breakers along the sand. The place struck him as absolutely perfect.

  “For me?” LaDoux asked when Marvin held out the bottle. “Naughty. I’m reformed, on the wagon, learning abstinence.” He gave a sour laugh. “We’re at the mercy of mysterious forces. “That’s the reality of it.”

  Marvin agreed; he certainly felt that way at the moment.

  “Course, a certain awareness of mysterious forces is what pays our bills.” LaDoux opened the bottle expertly and poured the wine into two large and ornate glasses. He raised his glass silently and took a long drink. “Not bad.”

  Marvin said nothing.

  “And your problem?” LaDoux asked, after he’d refilled their glasses for a second time. “I assume there is a problem.”

  “I can’t do my own work any more. The only ideas I get now are for the Dragon novels, for Ostrucht and his Lady. Even your beautiful terrace with the sound of the sea suggests . . .” Marvin signed. “I’ve been ruined after writing your novels.”

  “You wrote them rather well the critics say. Of course, my reputation provided a leg up there,” he added.

  Marvin nodded. He knew the ways of the literary world.

  “So?”

  “I thought we might collaborate,” said Marvin.

  “But I don’t need you now, and it’s time for you to depart— in the literary sense, I mean.” He splashed more wine into each glass. “There’s no reason for you to leave this nice burgundy.”

  “Yet you were willing to buy the outline for the second trilogy.”

  “The flesh is weak,” LaDoux admitted.

  “Perhaps you’d like to see a sample.”

  He looked up with an eager expression and stretched out his hand. He needed help, whatever he said. “Let me see.”

  “One page.” Marvin opened the envelope and handed over the synopsis of the first five chapters.

  LaDoux put on a pair of tinted glasses and scanned the copy. “Like this wine, not grand cru, but very nice. And the rest?”

  “Good. Audrey knows. She wanted to buy them for you.”

  “Audrey has somewhat lost confidence in me,” LaDoux said. In the silence that followed, Marvin listened to a rustling in the shrubbery and the night wind in the palms. Perhaps Lord Ostrucht should be sent on a sea voyage to some hot, tropical land. “What do you want?” LaDoux asked abruptly.

  “To write some of the books,” Marvin said.

  “But not all of them?”

  “Not all of them.”

  LaDoux stared at him for a minute. “We’ll drink to that,” he said. “But now I want to see the rest of the plots.”

  “They’re on this diskette.” Marvin drew the floppy out of his pocket and dropped it back in. “We’ll call Audrey, shall we? Have her come over and draw up a contract.”

  LaDoux hesitated, then smiled. There was an avidity about him that both encouraged and disgusted Marvin. “Right. We’ll call Audrey. To whom we owe so much. Including this whole bloody situation.” He stood up. “My office is upstairs. I never do business on the terrace.”

  Inside, LaDoux switched on the weak hall light and started upstairs. Marvin saw old woodwork, Mexican tiles, cracked and dirty plaster. The main stairs made a steep run to a landing, then turned left. A full moon was shining through the tall window at the top, and Marvin was about to remark on its bright beauty, when LaDoux suddenly pivoted on the landing and kicked him square in the gut. Marvin gasped, his lungs suddenly airless, and grabbed the banister to keep from falling. LaDoux struck him again, in the face this time, sending Marvin tumbling backward down the stair to land flat at the bottom.

  He was quite helpless. His lungs were deflated, and he couldn’t make his legs work. The stair rose above him like a monstrous wave, down which LaDoux dropped toward him like a surfer. Marvin waved his arms, trying to pull air into his lungs, trying to strike LaDoux, who, clearly not as drunk as he’d appeared, caught Marvin under the arms and dragged him down the back hall. He kicked open the French door and pulled Marvin onto the grass and then, to his rising horror, toward the shore. Out of shock and surprise rose an awareness that he was very likely going to die.

  Marvin tried to shout, but his voice was a cracked whisper, lost in the wind and surf. LaDoux hauled him through a low hedge and unceremoniously dropped him over the seawall onto the sand. Marvin tried to get to his feet, but his whole body was focused on acquiring air and his limbs refused to cooperate.

  LaDoux adjusted his grasp and started toward the water, but here Marvin began digging his heels and his hands into the soft, deep sand, causing LaDoux to swerve and stagger. It was dark on the beach, too, the few lights dazzling and confusing rather than illuminating. Twice LaDoux dropped to his knees, but though Marvin could impede their progress he could not stop it. Drops of spray landed on his shirt, as he was dragged through a fishy, salty smelling band of wrack. Then LaDoux splashed into the surf, and cold water shocked Marvin’s back.

  There were crushed shells underfoot. Unsteady, LaDoux slipped both left and right, almost stumbling on every step. Waves broke over Marvin’s head and sloshed down his legs. “The diskette,” he managed to gasp. “It’s in my pocket.”

  LaDoux stopped and released one of Marvin’s arms, dropping him halfway into the water. Marvin jerked up his head, took a great gulp of air and, as LaDoux fumbled in his shirt pocket, threw himself sideways, pulling LaDoux under with him.

  They weren’t in more than a foot of water, but the shore was at once soft and gritty, the band of ground up shells unstable beneath them. Thrashing and struggling, they got a little further out, then further yet, and as they swallowed more water and took more blows, they found it harder and harder to get back on their knees, to find their feet.

  At last, they floundered into chest deep water, and they were half swimming, half wrestling, eac
h trying to hold the other under, when a big roller crashed into them, separating them and turning Marvin head over heels. As he felt himself dragged out by the current, he forgot LaDoux, forgot everything but the shore, dry land, air. He paddled forward, clawing for ground and, after a second wave broke over his head, felt the rough band of shells under his hands and lurched onto the shore, gasping for breath and shaking with cold and shock.

  He crawled onto the beach and fell forward on his face. The waves whooshed and thundered behind him, his lungs burned, the night wind chilled his sore back. He had nearly died; someone had tried to kill him; he had possibly drowned a man. With this, he remembered his danger and scrambled painfully to his feet, but he could not see LaDoux.

  Marvin called softly: nothing but the sea and the rattle of palm fronds, and somewhere far away, the sound of traffic, of civilization. He limped to the water’s edge and peered into the darkness for what seemed a long time before he saw a whitish something as inert as a log rising and falling in the surf. Marvin waited until he was sure of that inertia, before wading out into the water and hauling LaDoux’s body to shore.

  Once he had wrestled the corpse up onto the sand, he laid his hand on LaDoux’s chest and felt for a pulse. When all signs proved negative, Marvin sat down, put his head between his knees and vomited on the sand. “You’ve killed the Golden Goose,” said a voice in his mind.

  An another, even less welcome, thought followed: Hilaire LaDoux was someone whose death would be investigated, whose loss would be news. Marvin’s own version of events, so implausible and peculiar that even he had trouble crediting what had happened, would come under scrutiny. He had been attacked, there had been a struggle, and Marvin had survived without anything to prove his story. It did not take a novelist’s imagination to see big difficulties, both professional and legal, ahead for Hilaire LaDoux’s fired ghost writer.

  Marvin stood up, washed off his mouth with salt water, and began to undress, dropping his sodden clothing on the sand beside the corpse. Next he turned to LaDoux, though the body already felt cold, and the slippery feel of the skin, as well as LaDoux’s unsettling resemblance, turned Marvin’s stomach and made his hands shake.

  Finally, after an exhausting struggle, he managed to get his own clothes onto the body and jammed his sneakers on its feet. The diskette, ironically, was still in the pocket his shirt. Marvin retrieved it and set it on the sea wall before dragging LaDoux back to the water. He towed the body out as far as he dared, and when he felt the first signs of a rip current, he let it go.

  Back on shore, he bundled up the novelist’s wet and sandy clothes. One shoe was missing, and he made a futile search of the sand, before returning to the house. The clothing went into the washer, the remaining shoe in a plastic bag. Up in LaDoux’s bedroom, Marvin found a change of clothes and dry sneakers. After he composed a brief note for Audrey, he drove north to the public beach, where he abandoned his car, keys, and wallet. He discarded LaDoux’s incriminating shoe in a trash barrel. Then Marvin went down to the surf, took off his borrowed sneakers, and slogged back along the shore to the house. He let himself in, found a bottle of Scotch, and went up to bed.

  A day later, Marvin saw a brief about his abandoned car and, within a week, read an account of the recovery of his body. He waited a few days before calling Audrey. By then he knew a great deal more about his new identity: debts, alcoholism, dubious investments, an estranged family, and the absolute impossibility of ever holding a driver’s license again.

  On the other hand, he had a fair sized bank balance, a spectacular, if deteriorated house, and more important that all the rest, Lord Ostrucht and his lady, for whom Marvin, or Hilaire, as he must now call himself, had wonderful plans. He reached for the desk phone and dialed. “Audrey?”

  “Yes, Audrey Striker speaking.” Her response seemed tentative; voices are, after all, hard to disguise.

  “Hilaire LaDoux. I’m really flying on the new novel, and I wondered if you’d like me to send you the finished chapters.”

  Again, the hesitation. He could almost hear the wheels turning. “Of course, I would,” she said with a fair show of enthusiasm. “But Hilaire, you’re working? You’re really working? Because I understood you wanted me to find someone to replace poor Marvin— you heard about that?”

  “Yes, I did. I can’t help feeling a little guilty. He sold me his last outlines, you know. Yes, yes, he cut you out, the naughty boy. But poor fellow! The writer’s life is not always a happy one.”

  “I’d actually found someone— tentatively, you understand. I thought perhaps a woman writer this time . . .” In truth Audrey had been nearly at her wit’s end.

  “Quite, quite unnecessary,” he said briskly. “I’ve had a genuinely life changing experience. You might say I met a ghost, Audrey, and I can assure you I foresee no more writing problems from here on in.”

  Tabloid Press

  Kim is standing there between Princess Diana— tiara, white satin, eyes blue as window spray— and Monica Lewinsky— dark suit, lots of curves, mega lipstick. Though not as nice as Diane’s, Monica’s eyes are on the blue side, too, which doesn’t surprise Kim. She’s had a weakness along those lines, herself, named Chris. When she was sixteen and three quarters and bored with school, Chris seemed exciting. Besides the blazing blue eyes, he had a truck, a trailer, independence, a job. Now she knows he’s got a pack a day beer habit and a lousy temper from inhaling spray paint at the body shop.

  Well, everyone has problems. There’s the princess dead with that fat Egyptian: “Diana a Year Later” is the People headline; and though Monica looks pretty good in most pictures, today’s tabloid screams, “Monica on Suicide Watch.”

  “What a shame,” one old geezer told Kim just that morning, though another one didn’t buy the usual and said she’d get more than she wanted on the internet.

  Now the woman off pump four in the dark green Jetta wants to give Kim exact change and can’t come up with the final thirty cents. She’s got her crap all over the counter— pennies, a pen, car keys, kleenex. “I know I’ve got it somewhere,” she says with this loopy, idiotic smile.

  And pump two is screwed up, as it’s been all week. Some guy in a big Suburban is yelling over the intercom that he’s got five-seventy in the tank, and the pump’s froze on him. “Yeah, yeah, I’ll get it started for you,” Kim’s saying, when Stu, fat and fortish but agile, hustles behind the counter to stand in her back pocket. He’s wearing the baggy gray suit and beige shirt, plus, today, the Tweetiebird tie that he claims gives the customers a laugh. Kim can smell his cologne.

  Stu says, “I need some help in the store room, Kim. Let Michael handle the front.”

  Automatically, Kim looks at her watch; that’s what she always does when Stu wants something, she checks the time: 12:35. Lunch is at one, after the trades guys have come in for sandwiches, beer, and sodas, after the high school kids have bought ice cream and diet cokes, and after the elderly morning shoppers have stopped for gas and papers. 12:35: time for her to hump a few dozen cartons and for Stu to try to get his hands down her jeans.

  “Michael’s gotta leave early today for an exam,” she says, thinking quick, because between Stu hitting on her and Chris wanting beer money, Kim doesn’t want to stay and can’t afford to quit. “Michael’s’ got early class this semester, so I gotta be up front. And pump two’s jamming again.”

  That distracts Stu for a minute, because he likes to have everything running just right— pumps fast, counter manned, sandwiches fresh, coffee made every couple hours. He’s got an eagle eye for the register, too. You have to move fast to get away with anything. He’ll count every damn pack of cigarettes himself if he has to.

  With this Quick Mart, one in Putnam, another two in Norwich, Stu Gleb should be a rich man, and sometimes Kim tries to imagine what if he was handsome. Maybe bald like he is but attractive, even passable, not so fat, nicer manners. Or maybe elegant with fancy suits, gold jewelry, and a convertible like the rich, wrinkled geeze
rs who pose with blond girlfriends in the tabloids and who set up love nests and get themselves into expensive divorces. What then? Would that be a way out? An escape from Chris and misery?

  But Rakesh has told her Stu isn’t really rich. Rakesh is the other college student, not at the community but at the state college, and he does some of the books cut rate for Stu. What Rakesh told her was that it’s Stu’s wife who has the cash. Kim tends to believe that, because Stu is always bitching about money. It’s a lousy day at the store after he’s been to the casino, and sometimes there are odd phone calls that get Stu upset good.

  12:50: pump two’s running again; Michael, who doesn’t really have an exam, is on the counter; Kim’s back shifting cartons of motor oil with Stu, who really should get one of the guys to do the heavy work. Stu’s told her he likes her jeans and likes her tank top, and next she’s expecting he’ll try to get her onto the night shift, when he says, out of left field, like, “Chris still picking you up?”

  “You see me with a car?” Kim asks. One of the few smart things she’s done with Stu is to impress him with Chris’s temper, jealousy, and strength.

  “I wanna talk to him next time he comes by.”

  “Yeah? I’m not working the night shift,” Kim says quickly. “I don’t care if you talk him into it, I’m not working any night shift.”

  “Who said I want you working the night shift?” asks Stu. “I thought you said Chris is outa full time work. Didn’t you tell me that?”

  Kim nods.

  “So I’m maybe looking for workers.”

  That’s an idea Kim will have to digest on her break. One o’clock sharp, she takes a cigarette from the pack she keeps in the counter drawer, buys a bottle of juice and a brownie, and crosses the road, because lunch choice between the storeroom or the cemetery is a no brainer. Kim walks through the tall iron gates and down the deeply groved dirt and gravel road. There are graves on either side, neat rows of gray, brown and white stones, trees, too, and further back, the big monuments of the formerly rich, still looking impressive fifty, eighty, one hundred years after.