Restless Dead

by Cave, Hugh

  It was called Four Pines Motel, no doubt because of the four tall slash pines that grew in a clump in front of the office. There were six bungalows, all the same size, all painted white with a dark green trim. The lady proprietor, tall and bony in her fifties, watched Verna sign her name and handed her the key to number four.

  "Just one of you?" She tipped her head and squinted at Jeff. "You sure?"

  "Just me," Verna said. "He's only a friend." Smiling, she put her credit card back into her handbag. "As you see, he has his own car."

  The rain had stopped. The office door was open. The woman glanced out at the two cars and nodded. "Right. Well, my name's Gwen—Gwen Towson—if you need anything. Hope you enjoy your stay, Miss Clark."

  They walked down to bungalow number four and unlocked the door. It was a good-sized room, old but adequate, with a TV set, a double bed, a dresser, and two overstuffed chairs. Jeff sat while Verna opened her luggage on the bed and began to put things away.

  "We agree that Earl is the one who tried to ambush me?" he said.

  "Yes, Jeff."

  "The question, then, is why does he want me dead? And if he's the one who dropped the boulder on you and tried to drown you at the pond, again why? What are we doing that's bugging him?"

  "Snooping?" she suggested.

  "All right, snooping. But what is it that he doesn't want us to find?"

  She turned at the dresser to frown at him. "Could it be something in the cave, Jeff?"

  "Mmm. If it were only a cave, he wouldn't be keeping it a secret, would he?" Jeff got up and began pacing. "That should be our next project, don't you think? To find out what's in there."

  "I don't know much about cave-crawling," Verna said with a frown. "Do you?"

  "It can't be that big."

  "And what about the creature? The cat you met in there."

  "Of course." He sat on the bed. "But that's what we're trying to find out, isn't it? The connection between the creatures and the fossils, if there is one. We'll have the cocomacaque. There are other things we can do for protection, if we're dealing with something unnatural."

  Gazing at him, she said very quietly, "When should we go there, Jeff?"

  "Well, we seem to be starting our days early. How about meeting me there tomorrow morning, same time? Or maybe an hour later, since you'll have farther to drive than I will."

  "Why do I feel we should go back there right now? That if we don't, Earl Watson may get there before we do and take what we're looking for?" With her things put away in dresser and closet, she came to the bed where he sat and closed the two suitcases, then stood there looking at him, waiting for his answer.

  He shook his head. "With the head he must have, Earl won't go back there today, Verna." She, too, must be badly needing a rest, he thought. He knew he was. The bed here was mighty tempting.

  "Well, yes," she agreed. "I suppose."

  Jeff took the suitcases to the closet. When he turned, she was lying on the bed with her shoes off and her arms outstretched to him.

  "Let's lie here and talk a little about this, huh?" she said. "And if we decide to wait, let's at least go somewhere for lunch before you leave me?"

  With his own shoes off, Jeff lay beside her and took her in his arms. Holding this woman close was getting to be a habit, he thought. A good one, that he had no desire to break. Yes, he would take her to lunch. And after lunch he would return the scuba gear he had rented, because from now on they would be using the cave entrance on the knoll, not the one in the Drowning Pit.

  Then tomorrow, early, they could try to find out what was in that cave in addition to voodoo and fossils.

  Chapter Nineteen

  It was her birthday.

  They said she was mentally incompetent, which was just another way of calling her crazy, but if she were all that crazy, how would she know it was her birthday?

  "You sure?" she asked the man.

  He was leaning over his cash register, staring at her. Pointing over his shoulder with his thumb at a calendar on the wall behind him, he said without turning his head, "Look for yourself, lady. Today's June the twenty-ninth."

  "And that's my birthday." she said. "Yes. And my name is Ethel Everol and I live in Clandon. I mean Clandon is the nearest town to where I live. What's your name?"

  "Gus Atkinson. And like I told you, it's that way." This time he pointed out the window, at the highway. "About fifty miles."

  "I'd better be going, then."

  "I guess so, if you plan on walkin' it. Why'n't you take a bus? There's a Greyhound station down the road a ways. Be better'n walkin', lady. You're soaked a'ready and it's gettin' ready to come down hard again, looks of it."

  "I don't like buses." Meaning she hadn't enough money for one. Looking down at her dress and shoes, she shook her head in annoyance.

  He was right, of course: She looked like a cat that had been fished out of a pond. She put a hand up to her hair and that was soaked, too. When had it finally stopped raining, anyhow? About an hour ago? The clock on the wall, next to the calendar, said it was seven-ten now.

  She had walked all night in the rain.

  How many miles had she come in that time? It seemed like a thousand, but how many, really? She couldn't ask Gus—what was the name? Atkinson?—how far away the home was or he might guess she had escaped from there and call the police. He might even try to hold her here until they came. Anyway, what difference did it make? She'd at least walked in the right direction, because he wasn't telling her to go back the way she'd come.

  "Well, thank you," she said, and picked up the pita bread and cheese she had bought.

  "It's on your right, about half a mile," Gus Atkinson said.

  "'What is?"

  "The bus station. You may have to wait awhile for the next one goin' that way, but it'll sure beat walkin' fifty miles."

  "Yes," she said, with no intention of stopping there. "Well, good-bye."

  Through the window, Gus Atkinson watched her walk toward the road "Nutty as a fruitcake," he said aloud. "Jesus."

  Her birthday. She was sixty-nine.

  And not crazy, no matter what they said.

  He'd been a nice man, though, hadn't he? Not everyone would have been so kind.

  Halfway to the road she turned and saw him watching through the 7-Eleven store window and smiled and waved to him. He waved back. Fifty more miles to Clandon, though? That was a long way. An awful long way.

  As she walked along the edge of the highway she tore open the package of pita bread and unwrapped the cheese. The cheese was already sliced. If she were crazy, she wouldn't have thought to buy it already sliced, now would she? So there. Putting a slice into a piece of the pocket bread, she nibbled as she walked.

  About now, back at the home, they were probably just finding out she wasn't there. And they would know what happened, of course, because the sheets would still be hanging from the rocker at the window. What did they do when someone got away? Call the police? Probably, yes. And a man at the station would notify all the police cars to be on the lookout for her, the way they did on television. She must be careful.

  She finished the sandwich, made another and ate all of that, too, and began to feel better. The ache in her stomach went away. Reaching into a pocket of her dress—and if she were crazy, why had she asked Everett's wife, Blanche, to send her a dress with pockets?—she took out what remained of her money and counted it.

  She'd had seven dollars and twenty cents when she escaped. That was all there'd been in Miss DaCosta's office desk when she sneaked in and opened it. What she had now, after stopping at the 7-Eleven, was four dollars and sixty-four cents. So no, she couldn't take a bus. And it wouldn't be safe to ask anyone for a ride, either. Even if someone would stop to pick up a woman her age who looked half drowned, most cars had radios and it might have been on the news that she had escaped.

  A car was coming up behind her now. She turned her head. If it were a police car...

  How would she know if it was
a police car? In Florida did they have lights on the roof, like the ones in the TV movies? She couldn't remember. That didn't mean she was crazy, though. If you were to ask a hundred people in the state of Florida that question, probably not even half of them would know, now would they?

  The car was an old gray sedan driven by a man about her age with a mop of gray hair, and he was alone in it. It stopped beside her and he leaned across the seat to open the door on her side.

  "Where you goin', lady?"

  There wouldn't be a radio in a car that old. If there was, he didn't have it on now and probably wouldn't turn it on if she kept him talking. You could always keep a man talking if you wanted to. Just ask him about himself and what he did.

  "I'm going to Clandon," she said.

  "Clandon, hey? Well, I ain't goin' but a few miles, but it'll save you some. Get in."

  She got in and shut the door but it didn't shut right and he told her to open it and slam it. The car smelled of tobacco and beer. "How come you're afoot?" the man said as he drove on again.

  "I was robbed."

  "What?"

  "I gave a man a lift, just as you're doing, and he took a gun out of his pocket and ordered me to stop. Then he made me get out of the car and drove off in it."

  Turning his head to stare at her with his mouth open, the man almost let the car go off the road. The right front tire actually did go off the blacktop into soft sand, but he was able to jerk the steering wheel in time to bring it back. When he had it under control again, he said, "Lady, what you want is the nearest police station!"

  "No, I don't. I just want to get back to Clandon," she said. "My brother is chief of police there." With Clandon a whole fifty miles from here, there wasn't much chance he would know she was lying. "I don't want to deal with any strange policemen," she said. "My brother will take care of everything."

  "Then why don't you phone him instead of waitin' till you get there?" the driver argued. "By the time you get to Clandon hitchhikin', the guy that made off with your car could be long gone from these parts."

  "I can't phone. The man with the gun took my purse."

  "Well, I can lend you money for a phone call."

  "Would you? Really?"

  "Sure." He reached into his hip pocket for a billfold and, opening it with one hand, glanced into it. "Well, the smallest I got is a five, but what the hell. A hard-luck lady like you..." He thumbed a five-dollar bill partway out so she could take it.

  She took it and thanked him.

  "There's a phone in front of the Winn Dixie in the next town," he said. "The folks in the store'll change it for you."

  "You're very kind."

  "That's all right, lady." He stopped glancing at her and concentrated on his driving.

  So her brother was a chief of police, huh, he thought. Jesus. And he'd been thinking she was about his own age and not bad-looking, and being down and out and wet and probably hungry, she'd most likely jump at the chance to go home with him. Not that he'd forgotten Alice, but it was more than three years now.

  But the sister of a police chief? Good grief, no.

  He stopped in front of the Winn Dixie and watched her walk to the door. The moment she was inside, he stepped on the gas hard and sent his old car growling away from the curb.

  He never looked back.

  Inside the store, Ethel took a shopper's cart and began walking up and down the aisles. With no intention of using the telephone outside, she took her time for fifteen minutes or so without putting anything at all in the cart. Then she returned to the front of the store and saw through the window that the car was gone. Maybe he'd only parked it, but she didn't think so. If he'd done that, he would be waiting out front.

  She took the five-dollar bill from her pocket and smiled at it. So she was crazy, was she?

  It was a shame, though, that she'd got a lift of only two or three miles. Why couldn't the nearest telephone have been ten miles closer to Clandon?

  Out on the road she began walking again.

  She walked all morning.

  She bought lunch at the drive-in window of a Kentucky Fried Chicken place with some of the five dollars he had given her and remembered, while walking along eating it, how Everett and Blanche went shopping once a week in Clandon and almost always brought home something for supper from a fried chicken place there. Then she remembered the vulture.

  Off and on, all through the rest of that day, she thought about the vulture, how it had torn off Jacob's face and appeared at her own window. Then, when she realized the day was about over, she made herself stop thinking about the vulture and began to look for a place to spend the night. It wouldn't be safe to keep on walking in the dark. She could be hit by a car, or some policeman could come along in a car and ask who she was.

  She was on a wooded stretch and hadn't seen a house in half a mile or more when she spied a place that seemed suitable. In a clearing well back from the road, with the woods on both sides and behind it, stood a house under construction. The yard was only a patch of churned up black mud—churned up by trucks delivering materials, no doubt—but the walls were up and the roof was on. The windows were in place, too, but there was no front door yet. She trudged through the mud of the yard and went inside.

  There, seated on the floor of what would be a rear bedroom, with windows looking out on nothing but woods, she sat on a sheet of plywood to keep out the cold of the conrete floor and ate the last of her fried chicken and then lay down with her head on one arm and remembered it was her birthday.

  My birthday, she thought. I'm sixty-nine and look at me. All alone, wet, hungry—well, no, not hungry anymore—and they think I'm crazy. Oh, God. Oh, dear God, look at me. Help me, please.

  Would the vulture come for her here? Every night at the home for the longest time, she'd been afraid to go to sleep, but now the terrible fear was gone.

  Just as she had called on her wits today to get money for food, there was now some secret strength or courage inside her that she could call upon if the vulture or anything like it came again. She couldn't explain it, but she knew it was there.

  She wasn't crazy. Not now. But she had been for a time, and this was something her mind had brought back from wherever it had been then. God had special ways of talking to His failures.

  Don't you, God? Yes. Thank you.

  Holding on to that thought, she closed her eyes and slept.

  Chapter Twenty

  On his way back to Clandon, Jeff asked himself if he should tell the Everols about the cave on their property. No, he decided. First, they probably already knew about it—the Haitians certainly did—and if they had wanted him to explore it they would have told him about it. Second, if he mentioned it at all there would be a whole barrage of other questions for him to answer.

  At the house he opened the car trunk and reached in for the cocomacaque he had put there along with the diving gear. The gear was no longer there. He had returned it. But on second thought he had better not take the stick into the house. It undoubtedly belonged to Lelio Savain, and though it was now after nine o'clock and the Haitians were probably not still at the house, he could not afford to take the chance.

  Nine o'clock. The end of an exciting and memorable day. After the adventures of the morning he had taken Verna to lunch at a little roadside café near her motel. Then, after spending the afternoon on her bed talking—and not too much of that—they had returned to the café for dinner. She was a very special woman. The longer he knew her, the more special she became.

  Closing the car's trunk, he walked empty-handed into the house and found the Everols waiting for him.

  All of them, even Amanda, were seated in the living room, looking like some kind of court waiting for a condemned man to appear for sentencing. The faces of Everett and his wife were especially fierce. Amanda looked like a painting of her own ghost done in grays and whites. Only little Susan, the bird woman, seemed human.

  Knowing he had to sit and be questioned, Jeff tried to hide his appre
hension behind a smile. "Well, good evening. Amanda, it's good to see you up and around again." Did they know he had found the cave?

  "Mister," Everett said, "do you mind telling us what you've been doing since you left here this morning? And why you left before daybreak?"

  "You heard me go out, did you?"

  "We did."

  It was like being nailed to the back of his chair by their relentless stares. The only one of the four who seemed not to be a declared enemy was Susan, and she seemed unduly nervous, even frightened. "I wanted to be outside, watching the house, when daylight came," Jeff said carefully. "I had done everything I knew how to do inside. It seemed important to be out there where I would see anything new that might threaten us."

  "If you just wanted to watch the house," Blanche said, "why did you drive off in your car?"

  He had to dig deep. And fast. "So that anyone out there would think I'd left. I drove up to the road that runs in by the pond, left the car there, and walked back over the knoll." As he spoke the word knoll he made a point of watching their faces. If they knew about the cave at all, they had to know about the entrance there. None of them would ever have gone in by way of the sinkhole.

  Everett was the only one who seemed to react. His bony, long-fingered hands definitely gripped his knees a little harder, and he leaned farther forward in his chair. "And did you see anything?" he demanded.

  "On the knoll, do you mean? No."

  "Here at the house! Did you see anything like the God-awful things that have been driving us out of our minds here?"

  "No. Nothing."

  "Then where'd you go? You didn't come back in the house."

  "I went to town and had breakfast, then took care of some needs of my own. Remember, I was robbed. Lost my luggage, my money, everything."

  "You took care of all that before," Everett said darkly. "You offered me money for staying here. Which, if you remember, I refused."

  A mistake, Jeff realized, and tried to repair the damage. "Yes, of course. But there were other things I needed—"