The cards had been substituted, and to balance the books, Nathan had credited the payments he had subtracted from the Larkins to his own mortgage on the condominium at Navarre. It was necessary now however that he have certain papers drawn up, by the regular secretary at the bank, for the appropriation of the property. This must be accomplished anonymously if possible, and though Nathan stood over Mrs. Roland’s shoulder, and watched carefully the typing, his name appeared on none of the documents.
He hurried the woman through, and carried the papers himself to Charles Darrish’s office. He was back in the bank, thoroughly satisfied with himself, by eleven o’clock. Nathan had worried a little how Charles Darrish would take the deaths of the Larkins, but if the man suspected anything, he said nothing at all, and guarded himself so well, that he did not betray even the suppression of his suspicions.
Nathan had commented warily and briefly that the strange deaths fell right into line with their plans, making everything much easier; and that now their consciences need not even snag on the possibility that they were doing the old woman out of money rightfully hers.
“Yes,” replied Darrish: “All this is easier now. It can all go quieter now that they’re—not here anymore.”
Nathan said nothing at all to this, and Charles Darrish went on after a moment: “Nathan,” he smiled and shut his eyes tight: “You go on down to Navarre just the way you planned. Take Ben like you said, and just sit still a couple of days. Don’t call—”
“There’s no phone,” said Nathan.
Darrish nodded, and went on: “—and I’ll take care of everything here. Everything can proceed. In a couple of weeks, all this will go through. I just want to put one more step between you and me and the company in Mobile, just to make sure that there’s no way for somebody to stumble on the fact that it’s you and me that owns it. I’m gone make a little trip to Atlanta. I’m gone fly up there tomorrow, and see what I can arrange. Probably I’ll have good news for you by the time that you’re back. Why don’t you come back on Thursday sometime, planning to have dinner with Ginny and me? We’ll have a little dinner, just the four of us, down at the White Horse. Now that you and I are going to be partners, in this and maybe other things too, who knows?—you and Ginny ought to make it up between you. I’m taking her with me tomorrow, let her go shopping, let her buy all the livelong day while I’m going about my business, and I’ll take it up with her then.”
Nathan nodded and smiled blandly: “I’d like that. You’re right: Ginny and I ought to make it up, though I cain’t really say that there was anything that much that was keeping us apart. But nobody’s gone get hurt with what you and I are putting through right now, and Ginny’s gone benefit from it too.”
In all Nathan’s dealings now, his aim was to discourage trouble. He had no particular wish to make it up with Charles’s wife, for his enmity with Ginny had been long and satisfying, but it was possible she might someday be able to do him harm in these matters. Just so, he had asked Ben to accompany him to Navarre, not simply because Nathan was reluctant to be alone, but also that he might watch over his nervous younger brother.
What Nathan decided, on the walk from Darrish’s office back to the CP&M, was that the lawyer knew something, suspected a great deal more, but had determined merely to concentrate on the business portion of the conspiracy— for conspiracy it certainly was—and to limit his guilt to only that part. What else had been done he consigned to Nathan’s conscience and Nathan’s culpability. Nathan knew that the man was only protecting himself by not trying to find anything else out, and this selfish motive reassured the banker as no other would.
Nathan sat at his desk, signed a sheaf of drafts for the First National Bank in Pensacola, dictated three short letters required by the arrival of the morning mail, and then talked with Mrs. Roland concerning his absence over the next few days.
At the last, Nathan went through the files in his desk, to make sure that he had replaced everything that had to do with the Larkins, and that no scrap of paper remained that might be aligned with the altered records.
He slammed the drawer shut with a smile, turned the key in the lock, and stood out of the chair, lifting his hand in general farewell. But he stopped with a choked laugh or astonishment. Across the mahogany railing, at the end of the line of customers before the single open teller’s window, a woman was standing in the middle of a puddle of water on the carpet.
“What is—” he cried in a small amazed voice, thinking that the roof had leaked there, without anyone having noticed. But he glanced at the ceiling above that spot, and the plaster was not discolored.
Someone had spilled something and not cleaned it up, but who had been dragging a bucket of water across the floor?
Nathan stared; the pool grew slightly larger, as if the water were pouring off the woman’s body onto the floor. The thought even crossed Nathan’s mind that she had failed to hold in her urine, and now was determined to ignore her misfortune with as much dignity as possible.
Nathan leaned forward over the desk, wondering how best to approach the woman, whether to call out, or tap her on the shoulder discreetly. Just as Nathan was turning to Mrs. Roland, from the corner of his eye he saw the woman in line turn her head toward him, smiling.
It was Evelyn Larkin. Her mouth was split in a meaningless grin, and black water spilled out of it, staining her featureless white shift, and splashing into the small pool about her bare feet.
Her mouth widened and contracted, and the water spilled faster.
Nathan staggered to the mahogany railing and leaned over it. Evelyn was no more than five feet away. She stood still with her back to him, but her head was twisted over her shoulder, and she stared and grinned.
“Get out of here!” Nathan whispered hoarsely.
Maintaining her mocking grin, Evelyn Larkin turned her head away, and faced forward to the man standing before her in the line. He had turned to stare at Nathan, and did not apparently notice that he stood beside a rotting corpse.
Nathan stepped awkwardly over the railing, grabbed the woman by the shoulders. Her flesh yielded beneath his grasp as it had the night before in the cemetery and he was sickened. Despite his disgust he swung her around to face him.
She grinned, and opened her mouth in a wide circle O. She laughed shortly, but the sound was cut. He stared into her mouth, and saw that black space fill suddenly with blood, welling up from the throat, a scarlet spring in that livid bloodless face. She spat it up all over him.
He drew back. She laughed again, Her mouth filled once more with the thick blood, and she spat in his face so that he was blinded by it.
Nathan wiped the noisome blood from his eyes, and screamed, “Goddamn! Goddamn you back to hell!”
He looked up into the frightened face of Annie-Leigh Hooker.
“Annie-Leigh—” he cried, “Annie-Leigh, I thought you—”
“Thought what!” she demanded. She advanced on him, now angry, embarrassed for his having yelled at her, cursed her, swung her around by the shoulders. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing! I come in here wanting to deposit a hundred and forty-seven dollars even, and you start yelling at me, and—”
“Annie-Leigh,” Nathan pleaded, “listen, I’m sorry, I—” He was suddenly aware that he was being watched by everyone in the bank. There was no blood on him.
“Annie-Leigh,” he began again, in a low voice that he tried hard to control, “I apologize. I think I’ve got a fever. It had nothing to do with you. I was having an hallucination of some kind, because—”
“Well,” said Annie-Leigh severely: “You better go to the doctor about it right now, or you’re not gone have any customers left. What do you do to people who want to take their money out?!”
Nathan rushed from the bank, and Annie-Leigh remained half an hour longer there, surrounded by the employees who apologized for Nathan, and gossiped about what might have brought on the attack. Eventually all agreed that it was but a momentary aberration,
and that it had nothing to do with Annie-Leigh. Nathan ought to go to see a doctor, he ought to take a long rest, he ought to bribe everybody in town to keep his father from finding out that he had assaulted a customer in the main lobby of the CP&M.
Though she had been badly frightened at the time, by that afternoon Annie-Leigh was proud of the morning’s mishap, because for once she was not only a relayer, but the subject of Babylon’s hottest gossip. Annie-Leigh held court at the sporting goods store, and people in Babylon who couldn’t tell a golf ball from a pup tent came in to hear how Nathan Redfield had threatened her with immediate death by strangulation while she was waiting in line, with a deposit slip already filled out, in the middle of the CP&M bank.
At four o’clock, Jay Neal dropped over from the sheriff's office with the perplexing news that during the night, someone had dug up and stolen the corpses of Evelyn Larkin and her grandson Jerry, buried only the previous day. The perpetrators, whether medical students or pranksters, had unaccountably destroyed the coffins afterward and left them strewn over half the cemetery.
Chapter 40
Two days served both to repair and refresh Nathan and Ben Redfield. The brothers spent a lazy quiet time of it in their condominium on the beach. Because it was the middle of the week, only one other apartment was occupied, and that by three Eastern Airlines stewardesses. The women came over the second night for drinks, and Nathan and Ben were so excited by their company, that although nothing more came of the evening, they were as pleased as if they had waked the next morning with all three in the bed between them.
At Navarre the sand is as white as sand may be. The vegetation is sparse, sharp sea grasses that make a desultory effort to hold down the shifting high dunes. This end of narrow snakelike Santa Rosa Island is little inhabited, and the mainland only a few hundred yards distant, is thick subtropical forest. Navarre has no permanent inhabitant, and even on July fourth weekend, no more than a hundred persons can be found in the few dozen houses that make up the unincorporated summer community.
The brothers’ bedroom was on the second floor, and on one side they could see the soft blue water of Choctawhatchee Bay, nominally a freshwater basin, and on the other the fine green water of the Gulf of Mexico, sticky and clear and breaking all night long in noisy whitecaps. The moon was reflected off the Gulf.
The sky was wide and low and always bright, and they saw not a single cloud all the while they were there. It was a fine and important change from Babylon, where all water stagnates, and the sky is masked by crowding tall pines. The Larkins were dead, and would never bother them again.
Ben was reassured by his brother’s constant proximity, and by their distance from Babylon; but be dreaded returning and often looked out the window, expecting Ted Hale’s car to drive up with two pairs of cuffs dangling from the rearview mirror. Ben lay on the beach in the same position as he lay beside the pool at home; the sun beat the thoughts out of his head so that he hadn’t the presence of mind to be fearful of the future.
Nathan's thoughts and evasions were more complex. He was troubled by what he termed “what he thought he had seen”: the watery ghost of Margaret Larkin, and the animated corpse of her grandmother. He didn’t dare call these visions up directly.
He told himself that he had been drinking too much over the past couple of years, and that this excess, combined with the strain of the past few weeks, had tripped an imaginative switch in his brain, to produce the phantoms. He thought he was being honest with himself in declaring that he hadn’t a guilty conscience, that he did not feel upset that he had deliberately murdered three persons, and judged that he felt no worse now than he had about Jim and JoAnn Larkin fifteen years back.
In the cemetery he had been alone with the ghosts. He had been alone on the streets of Babylon when Margaret Larkin had exploded against the windshield of the Lincoln. These incidents were doubtless the residue of some long night of drinking six months back— nothing more. But some more recent night of drinking had triggered the stronger and more dangerous reaction, the transformation of Annie-Leigh Hooker into the corpse of Evelyn Larkin—more dangerous because it had happened in public.
Certainly he wasn’t actually haunted; he couldn’t admit for a moment that the ghosts were real. Rather than leaving the question there, on whether they were genuine or imaginary, he constrained himself to wonder only how long he would be inflicted with these terrible visions. He feared that he would betray himself, for though convinced that they were false and unsubstantial images, he might still be surprised by the sudden reappearance of Margaret or Evelyn Larkin in some populated place. His sole consolation was that he wasn’t yet troubled by Jerry.
Nathan concluded by telling himself that he must simply stare down any apparition until it disappeared or shifted back into its proper form.
As part of this resolution to deal bravely with subsequent appearances of the murdered family, in whatever place they showed themselves, Nathan drank only beer in his time at Navarre. In explanation, he told Ben that he had lost his taste for hard liquor.
Late in the night, Nathan and Ben walked up and down the empty beach, toeing the tide line, and talked of all the things they’d do when their father was dead; and Nathan even told Ben some details of his intimacy with Belinda Hale. Ben, who had nothing of comparable significance to confide in return, merely expressed over and over his intention to say nothing about anything to anybody as long as he lived.
It was only when the nearly full moon seemed to expand a little when he brushed his eyes across it, that Nathan turned to go inside again. He asked Ben how many beers he had drunk, so that he might stop short of that number in future.
The following afternoon, Thursday, they carefully locked the condominium, and drove back to Babylon. The road all the way lay through thick forest, and neither brother said much. Both were occupied in repeating small personal rosaries of courage that they hoped would preserve them through to the end of all this unfortunate business.
Chapter 41
Nathan and Ben found all in Babylon as they had left it. Nina remained at the house after their return only long enough to gather all their clothing, stiff with sand and seawater and salt air, and throw it into the washing machine. Belinda Hale came out of their father’s room, and suggested that they might both want to step in and speak to the old man.
Belinda preceded them, and went to her chair at Mr. Red’s side. Nathan and Ben stood awkwardly in the doorway. “Hey, Daddy,” they both said.
“Why you back so soon?” said Mr. Red, in a high-pitched whine.
“Daddy,” said Nathan, attempting a little joke: “We just didn’t think that you could do without us, and that’s the truth.”
“It’s not the truth,” said the old man: “You could at least have stayed away until Sunday. Miss Pie and Nina and me were having the time of our lives, weren’t we, Miss Pie?”
“We sure were!” cried Belinda vehemently.
“Well, Daddy, we sure don’t want to interfere with your pleasure, not at any time, so Ben and I’ll just leave you alone to yourself with Belinda. Ben and I are having supper out tonight anyway, with—guess who?”
“Who?” shouted the old man, looking away.
“With Charles and Ginny!” blurted Ben, who hadn't spoken yet to his father, and felt that he ought to say something to him before they left the room.
Mr. Red looked up slowly, and glanced at his two sons. Then turning to Belinda, he said, as if they weren’t there: “What I want to know, Miss Pie, is whose idea this supper is. I don’t believe Ginny and Nathan have sat down at the same table since President Kennedy got ’ssasinated. You think you could find out?”
Belinda, not a bit disturbed by this impolite indirection, looked up at Nathan and said: ‘'Nathan, your daddy—”
“I heard him,” said Nathan. “Daddy,” he said, with some little exasperation: “You can ask me a question direct and still have hope of getting it answered. You can ask me direct, and I will tell you that
Charles Darrish is looking for a reconciliation between Ginny and me, and I for one am all for it. We don’t have much kin in this town, we got so little it hurts, in fact, and it just doesn’t make sense any more for Ginny and me to be dancing the warpath around each other like we have been.”
James Redfield turned sourly away. “Well go on then. You having dinner over at Ginny’s house?”
“No, Daddy,” said Nathan: “We are meeting on neutral territory, down at the White Horse in just about thirty minutes, and I will give her your loving regards.”
Half an hour later, Ben and Nathan were seated in the main during room of the White Horse. They had been given the best table, across from the bar, in the bay window that looked out over the gravel parking lot. As they sipped at their beers, and talked of nothing, the sun went down on the other side of the building. The brief southern twilight passed before the waiter could refill their glasses.
The White Horse was the only restaurant in Babylon with any claim to quality. In laminated plastic, tacked beside the entrance, were two reviews it had received in the past eight years in Sunday editions of the Pensacola News-Journal. Both, in similar language by the same reporter, called the White Horse the best restaurant in the northern part of the county, well worth the drive up from Pensacola.
The White Horse was owned by Calvin McAndrew, and it would have made him rich if he had not spent every afternoon at the Cantonment dog track. His wife acted as hostess and waitress, and invariably dressed in a deep purple; their son John, in Belinda’s class in high school, had been waiter for the past three years, and the twenty-one-year-old unmarried daughter was cashier. No one could remember having seen Jean McAndrew standing up, or in fact anywhere else but behind the register by the doorway. She knew everybody who came into the restaurant, and she knew no one else; and the joke in Babylon was that Jean McAndrew didn’t have any legs.
Cold moon over Babylon Page 23
