by Farris, John
Hap Washbrook let out a sigh and cursed himself for gullibility in the line of duty. Take a look, he thought: have it over with. Nothing to be afraid of.
He was so certain now that he'd been tricked by that phone call that he could admit he'd been uneasy in the beginning. So he had come creeping up the summit road and stopped a good distance away from the stony-sided rush of river and waited, waited to be sure in his bones that he had not been talking to a ghost.
The garbled amplified voices from below had ceased, and Hap looked at the luminous face of his chronometer, which gave the time as ten minutes to nine.
Be starting the fireworks soon.
Hap grunted and reached for the big, six-battery electric torch clipped to the underside of the dashboard; his eyes shifted to the pump-action shotgun that always rode with him in the front seat.
"What for?" he asked himself, after serious thought about the need for such a weapon, but he was uneasy again and so he sprung the fully loaded shotgun from the clamp that held it upright and got out of the car, closing the door noiselessly behind him.
He walked along with surprising quickness for a large man, the electric torch swinging in his right hand, shotgun level in the left hand. He had no need of the light yet, no need to announce himself.
There was a satisfying crumpling sound overhead, and a violet smoky bloom. Hap turned his head for a look.
Get their money's worth this year, he thought. Two thousand bucks just for fireworks.
Whoosh!
Goddam beautiful, Hap thought, walking backward. Really lights up the sky. Really lights up old Hap. He glanced at the torch in his hand. What the hell, might as well use this thing.
There was a twenty-second silence following the green-and-yellow burst against the black sky, and then half a dozen sharp cracks—those were the little spiraling ones; he didn't know what they were called.
Hap reached the edge of the river, thinking about Amy. God, how she could give a man agony just standing next to him! Terrible waste of a good woman if she married that nephew of Helen's. He looked broodingly across the water, raised his light, played it on the jumble of stones thrown down from the break in the ridge perhaps centuries ago. The sound of the water was quite loud. There was a searing whiteness behind him, then a scarlet glow.
He followed the river to the trail house, where the footbridge arched, trying to hear something besides the bubbling of the river. The house was securely padlocked as it should have been, tightly shuttered for the night. There were no surprises waiting.
I suppose I'll have to cross the bridge, he thought.
The sky crackled.
See it pretty good from up here.
Midway on the bridge he stopped and beamed his light down into the broken quarry of limestone, slab on slab, wet from the slashing river.
He glimpsed the thrown rock a second before it hit him, and he flinched just enough, getting his left arm up, to deflect it away from his face. It was a small rock but it stung his forearm, and he forgot all about the array of fireworks in the night sky.
Hurried probing with his light showed him nothing, and he never saw the second whizzing stone at all. It flicked off the bridge rail and shot away into darkness.
Hap figured he'd better get the hell off the bridge.
Crouching, he followed the beam of his torch to the far side and half slid down a slope of stone into a narrow space where the waters of the river lapped coldly at the soles of his boots.
A rocket boomed emphatically overhead, loosing a shower of crimson embers, and the stones that wedged the sheriff to the river glowed for a moment.
"All right, I'm here!" Hap shouted angrily. "Where are you?"
He thought he heard something downstream—a rock dislodged into water. He stepped out ankle deep into the tugging river and shot his light along the edge. The beam carried a good quarter of a mile, fading at last into the woods where the river began its fall.
Hap plunged recklessly through the water, searching with his light, and he was rewarded by the sight of a leaping shadow. He climbed ashore, sorry now that he had brought the shotgun, which was only in his way. He skinned his knuckles, cursed under his breath and shimmied over a moss-covered boulder. He dropped, gasping, on the other side, his light sweeping across a broad tongue of gravel to the tree-studded wall of ridge looming above him.
"I've got a loaded shotgun here," Hap yelled. "And I'm using it."
His hearing was affected by the constant low roar of the river, but all the same he could not mistake the sound which seemed to come out of the darkness only a few inches behind his head, a terrible, animal sighing that shocked his heart still.
Something like a baseball bat swung with maniacal force hit him on the left arm just above the elbow, snapping the bone. Hap screamed and the shotgun clattered to the rocks at his feet. The force of the blow knocked Hap to one side and his feet slipped on the slightly pitched, slick-surfaced rock he'd been standing on. He fell, cracking the lens of his flashlight, and plummeted up to his chest in the numbing river.
The cold water helped him to recover from the first sickening burst of pain and he struggled to keep from being pulled along by the current. Somehow, without losing his grip on the flashlight, he managed to inch his way back up the slanted stone, to drag himself free of the river. With his right arm extended, Hap lifted the beam of the flashlight and saw, through a haze of pain, who had assaulted him. He was almost as shocked as he had been to hear Michael's voice over the telephone. For a few seconds he wasn't even aware of the fact that the shotgun he had dropped was now pointed at him.
"You loved my mother, didn't you? You sneaked around and you made love to her, but you wouldn't stand up for her!"
Hap scarcely heard him. He concentrated on not slipping into the river again, on finding a niche for his feet, on easing carefully to his knees. The pain in his broken arm was excruciating but he'd been in pain many times, he knew how to ignore it and set to work.
The sky was lighted once more, in tones of gold and strawberry pink, but there was a deadly roaring in his ears which cut out all sound. Hap had no definite plans, except to stand on his feet again. Nothing else seemed so important to him, not even the fact that he was in the company of an Imp of Death. But he had another look at the shotgun as he dragged himself up; to his horror there was a pinching in his stomach, a bitterness of dread.
"That tears a man up," he heard himself say. "Please God, don't shoot me with it." And he heard a skyrocket going up. The sky dissolved in streamers of green. There were earnest words in Hap's mind, on the tip of his tongue. It was an incredible feeling, being there with an Imp of Death, under the muzzle of his own gun, pinned by those long-dead and hating eyes: it would never happen and morning would come along. He would get out of bed at the usual time and put on the starched forest-green shirt with the big weight of polished badge and go down the street to Madge's place for his eye-opening cup of coffee, and it would be Hello, Sheriff, as usual. Another rocket whistled dismally. See it good from up here, Hap thought. He said hopelessly, humbly, choking on his words, "That thing tears a man up," and in the next instant his chest was ripped open by the double-aught shot, he followed his own sprayed blood out into the river, and disappeared.
The screeches and throaty whisperings and scintillating whistles and vibrant poppings and ear-pounding booms had reached a crescendo and the sky was almost continually ablaze now, saturated and molten. From her perch astride Doremus's neck Peggy watched with a sleepy satiated eye, and yawned.
With a final volley the sky went to black again, and the crowd on the picnic grounds that fronted the hundred-foot Competition Falls began to stir and think of the traffic jam that was to follow.
"Is that all?" Peggy said in an aggrieved voice, and Amy reached over to pat her knee. Peggy was still wearing the version of a pioneer dress that Helen had painstakingly sewn for her for the pageant, and her cheeks were deeply red from rouge. She had said her one line with clarity and such gu
sto that she had received a round of startled applause from adults wearied by dozens of mumbling children.
"I don't think that was the grand finale," Helen said, wishing they weren't so close to the falls. It was a long way to the parking lot, and she had been on her feet for several hours. She wondered if Doremus would mind if she just leaned on him for a few minutes, and then she wondered if she wasn't a little giddy from fatigue.
"What's a grand finale?" Peggy asked.
Helen started to explain but the grand finale was under way, rockets' red glare and patriotic streamers of blue and white unfurling above the glowing falls.
Ahhhh, they all said, gratefully, and began to think of home, began to turn away.
And then the thing came down the falls, in a torrent of white water, came fast, slowed, turned, slipped past jutting ice-slick rocks, turned a little more, head lolling, arms flopping, was washed downward to a level a dozen feet above the deep foaming pool at the base of the falls.
Ahhhh! they said, amazed, and they lingered to puzzle over this thing that seemed a joke, that could not be accepted for what it was obviously meant to be, a dead body, because the Old Settlers' Reunion had come to its customary reassuring end, and they were ready to go.
The thing in the falls hung motionless for several seconds on the ledge where it had dropped, and then the jetting pressure of water behind it pushed it gently forward, and for an instant before it plunged down into the floodlit pool it emerged from the curtain of white water in its shredded green shirt and the big, handsome, shot-gunned badge on the shirt glittered. The vacant eyes of Hap Washbrook surveyed them all pensively.
"Oh, my God!" Helen said, and hid her face from the sight of Hap's cut-string sprawl into the deep river pool.
Chapter 9
The highway patrol car stopped in front of the Connellys' at ten minutes after one in the morning, and Doremus got out. Helen was on the lookout for him, and she took him back to the kitchen, where Craig and Amy waited. They all appeared red-eyed and dreary from fatigue. They were drinking whiskey; Doremus looked at the decanter on the table with undisguised longing. Helen poured a couple of ounces of the whiskey for him while Craig and Amy sprang questions.
Doremus was exhausted himself from climbing over the boulders of the Competition River, and his hands shook as he grasped the shot glass. He deferred answers to their questions until he had sipped about an ounce of the whiskey and lighted a cigar.
"Hap's car was parked not too far from the footbridge and the trail house above the falls," he said then. "Partly concealed, as if he'd been staked out. Finding where he went into the river was easy; he'd dropped his flashlight and we homed in on the beam. His shotgun was right there too, fired once. From the condition of Hap's body when he was pulled out, he'd been shot at close range."
"By whom?" Craig demanded.
Doremus tackled his whiskey again. "By himself," he muttered.
Amy's expression was incredulous; she shook her head in protest. Doremus glanced at her and then explained. "From appearances, Hap was there looking for something, or somebody. He lost his footing and dropped the gun. It went off either when he dropped it or when he tried to pick it up. That's the best explanation anyone has right now. In the morning the Patrol will go over that area inch by inch, and by tomorrow night there may be some conclusions from the autopsy which will change the story."
Craig said, "You don't think it was an accident."
"Hap had handled guns all his life. It's unlikely he would have dropped one. Unlikely, but not impossible."
"What if there was a fight and somebody took his shotgun away?" Amy suggested. "You said he was up there on a—a stakeout. That means he was expecting someone, doesn't it?" Amy's expression changed, and she became so excited she almost upset the untouched glass of whiskey in front of her. "Helen, remember when the deputy came looking for Hap earlier tonight? I didn't hear much of the conversation, but the deputy said Hap had had a telephone call, and it was important for him to go down to the courthouse! That call must have had something to do with Hap's murder."
"It isn't exactly murder," Doremus reminded her. He gave the decanter a friendly look and Helen poured for him again, saying:
"What matters is that Hap is dead. And The Shades doesn't seem like such a pleasant place to live anymore." She sat back tensely, hands in her lap.
Craig glanced at Amy, who nodded, and they got up together. "It's late," Craig said, "and we ought to be going. Helen, why don't we all get together at my place tomorrow afternoon?" He glanced at Doremus, hesitated, then said, "You too, Doremus."
"Thanks," Doremus said, smiling, but he seemed intent on other things.
"Do you have a way home?" Amy asked him.
"Oh, sure."
Helen said, "Craig, I don't know about tomorrow. I'll call."
"All right, Helen. No, don't get up."
Once they were on the walk outside, Amy said, in a misguided effort to cheer Craig. "They're becoming very much aware of each other, have you noticed?"
"What?"
"You didn't notice. It's the way Doremus looks at Helen. I don't think he's recognized that he's falling, but I'm sure—"
Craig scowled. "Amy, for God's sake."
Amy was silent until they drove away from the house in Craig's car, and then she said defensively, "It's time for Helen to marry again. She needs marriage." A glint appeared in Amy's eye. "Most people do."
Craig shifted gears roughly. "If she decided to marry it wouldn't be to that . . . tramp fisherman, or whatever he is."
"That isn't fair to Doremus. He's hard to get to know, but—And I don't think he'll spend the rest of his life lying around a riverbank; he isn't suited for that. For one thing, he's not so much older than Helen—I'd say he's about forty-five. He has sort of a neglected look; it ages him. I think Doremus is recovering from something; he's finding himself." Craig's eyes were narrowed, as if he were in pain. "I hope Helen will give him a chance. After all, how many eligible men will she meet in this—"
"Amy, would you please quit speculating. Look, I've got a damned awful headache, and I—"
"'Keep your distance, Amy.' I only waited four hours for you tonight."
Craig stopped suddenly in the middle of the empty street and glanced at Amy. She was hurt, and not hiding it particularly well.
"I'm sorry," he said, after a difficult half minute of silence.
"That's familiar."
"No, really, Amy, I—" His face crumpled and Amy had the alarming notion that he was about to cry. She'd never seen him in tears. But he suppressed his emotion grimly and said in a low voice, "I don't feel well, but I . . . want you with me tonight. All night, Amy. I've never needed you more than I do now." He pressed his forehead against the steering wheel, eyes closed. He was rigid until Amy touched his shoulder, exploring his mood.
"What's wrong, Craig?"
"Helen said it. The Shades isn't such a pleasant place to live anymore. I've spent my life here, and now something evil has moved in, and I'm afraid, I'm actually afraid. Of him, Amy. Of Michael, my brother."
She was stunned.
"I believe it now. I believe it's Michael. Somehow he killed them both, Amy."
"Michael didn't have anything to do with Hap's death. He . . . he wasn't there."
"Wasn't he?" Craig said, with another, horrified look at her. "How do we know?"
Doremus finished his third glass of whiskey, feeling pleasantly flushed in the warm kitchen. Helen sat as quietly as she had been sitting all evening. She had discovered it was useless trying to keep her thoughts away from the sight of Hap, so torn and pathetically loose-jointed, spilling madly down the sparkling falls. It was easier for her to breathe when she went over the tragedy many times. Repetition dulled the shock; the prospect of healing tears seemed less remote.
She said politely, "Would you like another drink, Doremus?" She only wished that he would go, even though she dreaded being alone. But she was afraid of some greater horror, as yet undisc
overed; there was a suggestion of this horror in the detective's pensive eyes.
"No, thank you," Doremus replied. "Much more whiskey and I'll turn into a roaring drunk. A roaring, boring drunk."
Helen smiled tentatively. "I can't imagine you roaring."
Doremus leaned forward, hands clenched on the table. "I got that way once a year," he said. "Had to do it, to take the pressure off." He nodded emphatically. "You can't imagine the work that goes into solving a murder case: plain hard work. Oh, once every two or three years we were lucky; we broke a case in a hurry. But—"
There was an empty water glass in front of Helen; Doremus reached for it abruptly and poured a slug of whiskey for her. Helen looked puzzled.
"Would you drink that?" he asked. "You're not looking too well. Those circles under your eyes . . . My wife had liver trouble, and she got terrible circles. . . . Go ahead, drink up."
Helen didn't care for whiskey and she was about to tell him so, but he looked at her so earnestly, with a high flush in his cheeks, that she couldn't refuse him. She nipped at the whiskey. "I don't feel bad," she explained. "I'm . . . I'm just overtired."
"You have the horrors, and I don't blame you." He winked at her, solemnly. Helen felt so startled by the incongruity that she drank a good deal more of her whiskey and presently, after it stopped burning in her nearly empty stomach, she found it had a soothing effect. The whiskey stilled a need to shudder, it brought the kitchen walls a little closer and mellowed the light above the table. She looked in fascination at Doremus's clenched hands. Awfully late, she thought, but that didn't seem to matter so much. His hands looked rough and strong and it comforted her to study them.
