Shades of Evil

by Cave, Hugh

  They did four more lengths of the pool—on their backs this time, lazily—and talked while swimming. "What about the woman who was found dead?" Lynne Kimball asked.

  "I'm guessing it was a heart attack."

  "But why did she leave her car with the lights on and the engine running? What made her do that?"

  "People who have heart attacks sometimes panic."

  "Are you convinced the Ellstroms and—what's the man's name? Clay?—really saw something come out of the lake? They were talking about it at the cocktail party, remember."

  "Mrs. Kimball, I—"

  "Lynne, please."

  "I don't know Haydn Clay. He's new here. But the Ellstroms are good people. If they say they saw something come out of the lake, they saw it. What they saw is something else again."

  "May I borrow your last book?" she asked. "I'll be careful of it, I promise."

  "Of course. I'll leave it in your package mail box."

  "Thank you. I ought to go now. I'm still sorting things out and trying to put them away."

  He watched her grasp the handrails of the ladder near the pool's deep end and swing herself up as though she were made of air. He marveled at the perfection of her tiny feet again, at the way her small, round bottom seemed to wink at him just before she stepped from the ladder. She was wearing a one-piece yellow swimsuit, he realized for the first time. Why hadn't he been aware of that before, when he had been so very much aware of what was inside it?

  Lynne Kimball, he thought. A widow who knew the islands, or at least knew Jamaica. They should have things to talk about. He had never been able to talk with Vicky about anything that mattered.

  She plucked a yellow robe from one of the poolside chairs, slipped into it and tucked her feet into rubber thongs. "So long," she said. "See you later." And suddenly the pool was no longer interesting.

  He swam a few more laps and walked back to the condominium, where he climbed the stairs because it now seemed important to make an effort to stay in shape. He showered, dressed, found a copy of Not After Midnight and went down the hail to the elevator, intending to ride to the first floor and place the book in her package box, as he had promised to.

  Funny. When his hand went to the control panel, his finger refused to press the first-floor button. It pressed number five instead.

  She opened her door when he knocked.

  "I couldn't see much point in taking this all the way downstairs," he said, thrusting the book at her.

  "Why—thank you, Mr. Platt."

  "Will, damn it."

  "I'm sorry. Will you come in for a drink?"

  "I was afraid you wouldn't ask me."

  She was out of the yellow swimsuit now and wearing a dress of sea island cotton hand-embroidered with small, streamer-tailed doctor birds. Jamaican, of course. She wore no makeup. Perhaps she never did. Closing the door behind him, he followed her into the apartment. She liked simple furnishings, he observed. And, by God, she had a bookcase full of books, something very few apartments in this building could boast of. Hallelujah!

  "What do you drink, Will?"

  "Bourbon if you have it. Otherwise anything."

  "I have some Jim Beam."

  "Perfect. With tap water, please. In case no one has told you yet, our tap water comes from an artesian well and is high class stuff. May I help you?"

  She took bourbon herself, explaining that what she really liked was a certain very light Jamaican rum, but she was out of it now. "I returned from Jamaica over a year ago, when my husband died there," she said. "We had an apartment in Pompano Beach, and I thought I'd go into selling real estate there. I used to in North Carolina before my marriage. But after a while I realized Pompano had changed in the two years I'd been away. It was noisier, more crowded, really awful after the almost English countryside atmosphere of Mandeville. So I sold out and bought this place."

  "And now?" he asked as they moved into the living room with their drinks and sat facing each other on comfortable easy chairs.

  "Well, Kevin left me well off, so there's no hurry. But I thought I might go into real estate here. It's an up-and-coming part of Florida, and I'm sure I could keep myself busy."

  "I'm sure you could."

  "Now tell me what you were doing in Jamaica," she said, gazing at him with interest as she sipped her drink. "And in Christiana, of all places. No one lives in Christiana without a reason."

  5

  Memories of Margal

  In apartment 603, Tom Broderick sat alone in the living room with a section of the Sunday paper he had been saving to read slowly, without interruption, after Beatrice went to bed. It was an account of the recent happenings, headlined STILL NO CLUES TO THE BAFFLING HERON LAKE MYSTERY.

  What, it asked, was the "ghostly creature with its aura of evil" that the Ellstroms and Haydn Clay claimed to have seen rise from the lake and cross the lawn in the moonlight toward the road? What had destroyed the two Great Danes found there, when two of the most respected veterinarians in the area had failed to find any physical injury or trace of poison? Finally, what had killed Constance Abbott on her way home from her tryst with her lover?

  The article went on to point out that there had been a mystery at Lakeside Manor even before these strange events. Why, it asked, should the wife of a noted author of occult books have suddenly disappeared and left no trace?

  The reporter had been to Miami and interviewed—though not very successfully, he admitted—people at the private detective agency employed by Willard Platt to find his wife. Yes, many women left their husbands and many men their wives, but there were peculiar circumstances here to be taken into account. Mrs. Platt had disappeared soon after her return from the West Indian island of Jamaica, the home of voodoo-related obeah.

  Her husband had written extensively about voodoo and might well have gone to Jamaica on this occasion to investigate obeah. Could there be a connection between his stay in Jamaica and the thing that seemed now to be living in Heron Lake and preying on the Platts' neighbors in Lakeside Manor?

  There followed a summary of the contents of Will Platt's most recent books, in an apparent attempt to show that he, of all the Manor's residents, might be expected to explain what was going on—if, the article subtly hinted, he was not actually the force behind it.

  Slouched down in his easy chair with the paper resting on his overlarge belly, Tom Broderick was reading this part again when he heard the bedroom door open.

  Tom's stout, horsey-looking wife stood there in a flowered dressing gown and looked at him with an expression of anxiety. "Are you all right, hon?"

  She worried about him, always had, even when they were running their motel together in Miami. Actually, Bee had been the one who ran the motel; all he had done was amuse the guests by cracking jokes he had picked up from his theatrical pals. Long, long ago he had tried to be an entertainer himself, but failed to make the grade.

  "I'm fine, baby."

  She came to him, pressed her plump body against his protruding belly, and touched her lips to his. "Don't stay up too late drinking, now."

  "I'm not drinking. I'm reading that story about this place. The fellow seems to think Will Platt might know more than he's admitting. Might even be responsible, somehow."

  "He's crazy," Bee said indignantly. Will Platt is just a nice, hardworking man who happens to write creepy books. Why, I'll bet if we could look through the bedroom wall here, we'd see him at his typewriter right this minute, even if we can't hear him anymore."

  One of the reasons she so liked Will Platt was for his consideration for other people. When told they could hear his typewriter in their bedroom, sometimes late enough at night to be annoyed by it, he had soundproofed the wall of his study and put a thick mat of carpet under his desk.

  But at the moment, at quarter to ten this Sunday evening, Will Platt was not writing a book.

  "What brought me here," Will was saying to Lynne Kimball, "was the same thing that brought you, I suppose. Vicky and I had a home
outside Boston. That's where I grew up. When the West Indies became my bread and butter, so to speak, we moved to Fort Lauderdale to be closer to my work. Then Lauderdale got too crowded and we found this place."

  "Does your wife like it here, Will? I mean, is it possible she left because she doesn't? This part of Florida hasn't much to offer except golf and fishing, after all. And the summers are hot."

  Will allowed a brief silence to pass while gazing at her. They were seated in his living room, he in an easy chair, she on the sofa. Twice he had been to her apartment. This time he had phoned and asked her to come to his for a drink.

  They were on their second drinks now, and he said quietly, "There's something I haven't told you, Lynne."

  "Oh?"

  "Before my wife and I left Jamaica we agreed to a divorce. She was planning to leave here anyway and go out to California where she has a twin sister she's fond of. The only thing that surprised me about her disappearance was the timing of it."

  "I see."

  No, you don't, he thought. To understand the whole of it you would have to know what took place in that obeah house in the Cockpit. You would have to have seen Vicky sitting there with its owner, being instructed in the evils of sorcery, or holding Sister Merle's hands while they both peered into the flaming depths of that damned opal from Pachuca. You . . .

  "If you expected her to go, why did you employ a detective agency to find her?" Lynne asked with a frown.

  "Because I lived in a condominium."

  The lifting of her eyebrows said, "What is that supposed to mean?"

  "Let me tell you how it happened," he said. "I woke up earlier than usual that morning—five-thirty, to be exact—and noticed her bedroom door was open and the room empty. I went through the apartment looking for her, then got dressed and checked the parking lot for her car because she sometimes got up that early and went for a ride around the lake."

  He paused. "The car was there. But I drove around the lake myself, anyway, then returned and looked to see whether any of her clothes were missing."

  "And?"

  "I couldn't tell. She had so many."

  Lynne slowly nodded.

  "Well, I didn't know what to do, so I just sat and tried to think things out. And I decided she must have planned it, must have arranged for someone to pick her up and drive her to an airport. The agency people haven't found her name on any passenger list for that day, but she could have used another name."

  Again he paused. "Anyway, I blame Jamaica. We came back from there when we did because of her strange behavior, really. I mean I would have stayed longer. But she'll turn up in L.A., I know she will. Meanwhile, to answer your question, if I'd been living in a house when this happened, I wouldn't have gone to a detective agency. No one would have questioned what I did. Here, damn it, she was missed the day she walked out."

  Will had been gazing at the carpet while he talked. Now he looked at Lynne. "She had a bridge date with one group, a golf date with another—the whole social routine. And she hadn't told a soul about our pending divorce, so there was nothing to explain her disappearance. I had to call the police and hire a private eye to protect myself. Don't you see?"

  "Yes, of course." Until now, Lynne had seemed to be on the defensive—a little, at least—sitting there rather stiffly, even primly, as though afraid she might invite an attempt at intimacy if she seemed too casual about being in his apartment. Now she visibly relaxed. Nudging her shoes off, she lifted her tiny feet onto the sofa and looped her arms around her knees. Tonight she wore white slacks and a pale green blouse that made her look more than ever like a teenager.

  "So what you think, then, is that she won't come back here even if she's found," Lynne said.

  He nodded.

  "What will you do in that event? Stay here alone?"

  "I've been alone for years."

  "Oh?"

  "You've never met my wife, so this won't shock you as it might some others around here. They know her as a physically attractive woman who was always friendly and easy to talk to. So she was. But the honeymoon wasn't even over before I realized I'd married a lesbian."

  "A lesbian?"

  "Not a practicing one, perhaps. It wasn't as acceptable a life-style then as it is now. But she was completely frigid. 'Don't make love to me. If you insist on sex, I suppose I can't refuse, but don't expect me to enjoy it. Just get it over with in a hurry.'"

  "Why did you go on with such a marriage?" Lynne asked quietly.

  "I suppose I was the eternal optimist, hoping she'd change."

  "She never did? Not even a little?"

  After gazing at her in silence for a few seconds, Will decided he liked this woman well enough to be honest with her. "A couple of years ago she changed very much. But not in the way you mean."

  Lynne waited.

  "She went with me to Haiti when I was doing some background work for my last novel, and she got into voodoo there. When I say she 'got into voodoo,' you would have to know Vicky to understand what I'm telling you. She never does anything casually. We were based in Jacmel, on the south coast, and she sought out a notorious sorcerer named Margal. She became his pupil. What she learned from him made her a wholly evil woman."

  "Evil in what way, Will?"

  "Margal had devilish powers. He could reach you with his mind and force you to obey him. He could make your mind do tricks. You might be riding a mule through a rain forest, and the forest would suddenly burst into flames—or you would think it had, and perhaps kill yourself trying to escape. You could be crossing a mere trickle of water and it might suddenly, in your mind, become a raging flood that could drown you."

  Shaking his head, Will paused. "There was no door you could lock to keep that man at bay, no barrier he couldn't breach in his quest for more and more power. If you believe in demons, he was one. And Vicky wanted to be like him. She wanted to possess the same unholy talents."

  "Did she succeed?"

  "We weren't in Haiti long enough, thank God. But in Jamaica she tried again, with an obeah woman named Sister Merle who was a kind of female Margal." He took in a deep breath. "I didn't want to take Vicky to Jamaica, and I didn't go there to work on a book, as the people here think. I went because an old friend in deep trouble there sent for me."

  He paused again for a moment to marshal his thoughts. "It's a long story. I knew I'd be getting into obeah; Sam Norman made that clear when he asked me to go down there. I had a dread that Vicky might become a catalyst for the evil forces Sam was up against, and be a real danger to him. So I refused to take her, and we quarreled about it—just one more quarrel in a long string of them, all based on the fact that our marriage was a failure. But she turned up in Jamaica anyway." He stopped again. "I'm talking too much."

  "No," Lynne said. "I want to know about you. My husband is dead and I'm free, but you're not. If you were just a man whose wife walked out and left him feeling sorry for himself, just a man looking for someone to drink with until she returned . . . But you're not, are you?"

  "I feel as free as you, for the first time since my marriage."

  "When was that, by the way?"

  "When I was just out of college."

  "Good God," she breathed. "Let's have another drink."

  In the kitchen, while they were refilling their glasses, Will Platt put his hands on her shoulders and kissed her on the mouth. And she responded.

  6

  A Grim and Tender Evening

  It was quiet now in the Broderick apartment. Bee had gone back to bed while Tom, his usual nightcap of Scotch and water in hand, sat in the dark on the veranda and gazed out at the lake. He was thinking of LeRoy Abbott in the apartment to his left.

  It was a shame, really. The poor guy should have guessed Connie was playing around with somebody, the way she always went out alone at night. It was tough, though, having the whole thing come out in the papers after she was found dead. And how had the police learned about Nino Viotti?

  LeRoy had aged ten years i
n the nine days since his wife's death. If he left his apartment, it was only to shuffle up and down the hall for exercise. He'd lost weight, which for him was something. His face was the color and texture of dough. If Bee hadn't been taking food to him a couple of times a day, he'd probably be starving.

  And now this new piece in today's paper. It was bound to start the talk up again and add to the poor guy's misery. A shame.

  Tom drank an inch of his nightcap and let his gaze roam over the lake. The night was moonless, but there was almost always some light in the sky here. Enough to reveal the movement of the water, at any rate. It was moving tonight under a gentle but steady breeze from the east. A nice cool breeze for this time of year.

  Maybe he ought to tell Bee, if she was still awake. The veranda, just a big open-air room with screens for three of its walls, was always cooler than the bedroom. Unless, of course, the air conditioning was on. Neither of them liked air conditioning much.

  He leaned sideways to pull open the drawer of a table. He took out a pack of cigarettes, tapped one loose and lit it. Bee didn't like him to smoke, and he never did when she was around. Lately he didn't even smoke when she was not around, but he felt the need tonight. Returning the pack to the drawer, he leaned back on his chair.

  He could still see most of the lake. The balcony was on the building's top floor, six stories above the ground. But seated near the back of it and relaxed as he was, he could not look down at the beach. And just as he had been leaning back, the thing came out of shallow water less than ten feet from the sand.

  An amorphous thing, white and slow, as though some creature in the lake had breathed out a mouthful of mist in imitation of cigarette smoke drifting from the Broderick veranda. A nothing, really, except that it was white on a dark night, pale against dark water, and so surely would have caught Tom's eye had he been in a position to look down on it.