The Drowner

by John D. MacDonald

  “How horrible!”

  “You came right out after us?”

  “I didn’t even have time to think. I dived and found you and took you away from her.”

  “How?”

  “I just don’t know. She kept trying to grab us. I kept fighing her off. Then the boat came. She wasn’t like anything human.”

  “But she is. They shouldn’t have kept hitting her on the head.”

  “We couldn’t stop them.”

  “We didn’t try.”

  “I didn’t particularly want to try,” Barbara said with precise savagery.

  Doctor Rufus Nile was waiting for them at the hospital. As soon as he had drugged Angela Powell and ordered her put in restraint, he checked Stanial over, gave him a prescription to be filled and ordered him to bed at the motel.

  “I’ll come by this evening and look you over. We’ll just watch out for pneumonia or some kind of lung infection, Stanial. You keep an eye on him, Miss Larrimore. What you have to watch for is …”

  “Doc! Doc Nile!” a great screeching voice called, filling the corridor outside the emergency room. The huge woman filled the doorway. “What kind of nonsense am I hearing? They’re telling lies about Angie. Where is my little girl? What have you done to my little girl?”

  Doctor Nile, moving with a slow dignity unlike his normal movements, moved toward her. “Done to her? None of us have done anything to her, Mary. The thing that was done to her—you did, a long long time ago.”

  Doctor Nile stopped at the motel at nine. He looked and acted weary.

  He sat beside the bed and said, “What a mess! What a stinking mess! This town will talk about nothing else for weeks. Months. Anyhow, I got her to talking calmly enough. Not rationally. Just calmly. They took it all down. The state’s attorney can look the transcript over and bring in somebody else to see if she can stand trial. I’d say no. I hope they don’t try to go through with it.”

  “What will happen to her?” Barbara asked.

  “Criminally insane is a pretty broad term. It covers a heap of things. They’ll probably say she’s some kind of a classic case, once they figure out the right name to call it. But clever enough. It was going to be fixed to look like Sam run off with you, Miss Larrimore. And nobody was ever going to find Stanial or his car. Not five murders. Five punishments. For sin.”

  “But you would have guessed,” Paul said to Nile.

  “And guessed right and maybe got myself killed too. Kill the sinners and it looks like you have to clean out the whole world. Hah? But she got rid of three before her luck ran out. And Walmo says it would have been four if you hadn’t gotten him stirred up.”

  “Or five,” Barbara said. She frowned. “I should hate her, but I can’t. It’s as if Lucille was struck by lightning.”

  “She just got there first. They had a date to talk about something. She parked in the next road down, went out in her skin-diving outfit and was out there in the deep water waiting when your sister swam out. She just pulled her down. Then she swam back to where she’d parked, took the gear off, went through the woods, took the apartment key and then drove on back to town and went back to work. She did it on her lunch hour. She went and got the money that night. Went out a window after her folks were asleep.”

  “Where is the money?”

  “She took it into the woods and burned it all. It was sinful money, she says. Poor Gus Gable got squeezed unconscious and then she stuck her hand up under his ribs and gave his heart a squeeze and turned him loose in his car. And went back through that same window into her room. She clunked Sam on the head with her pocketbook with a piece of lead in it, and slid him into his sunken tub. But she was following what she was put here to do, she says.” Nile sighed again. “I can turn over a pretty good case history, I guess. She was fighting something inside herself and she took it out on the world.”

  “How is she now?”

  “Quiet. Relaxed. Doesn’t know what’s coming next and doesn’t much care. That girl has a nice pleasant disposition.”

  “Everybody likes her,” Stanial said. “Everybody likes Angie.”

  “News people here from Miami and Jacksonville already,” Nile said.

  “I had to tell the desk we’re not taking any calls,” Barbara said. “I don’t know what to say to them. What can I tell them? I called my aunt and my mother and I told them. They wanted to know why. There isn’t any why. The plane went down. The car skidded. Life is going to be a tricky thing, isn’t it, no matter what or where? How can you sidestep everything?” Her voice had gotten thin.

  “Give you a little pill, too?” Nile said.

  She shivered slightly and straightened her shoulders. “No. I’m all right. Thank you.”

  Nile jumped to his feet. “Well. You have the number. Any fever starts, any difficulty breathing, you phone. Hah? Good.”

  In a midnight dream Stanial was back in the yellow deep, and around him swam the orange-brown girl, around and around, naked, without equipment, hair streaming wild, face severe and remote, moving sleekly with each pump of a powerful thigh, the long muscles of her back reaching, the bubbles streaming up and back from parted thoughtful lips as she breathed.

  The dream jolted him awake and he heard the echo of a sound he had made in sleep. Barbara had put a thick towel over the shade of a small lamp in the far corner of the room, and she got up from a chair and came toward him to lay the inside of her wrist across his forehead.

  “Are you all right?” she asked in a low voice.

  “Just a dream.”

  “Are you breathing all right?”

  He took two deep breaths. “Yes. You don’t have to stay here.”

  “I’d rather. I don’t mind. Go to sleep, Paul.”

  She went back to the chair.

  “I keep thinking of a funny thing. An odd, thing,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “When I was convinced I was finished, I had this … terrible feeling of irritation. Like wanted to say to her, ‘Not now! Not while I’m like this.’ ”

  “Like what, dear?”

  “Like being an impostor, I guess. Not doing what I should be doing. Maybe most of the people in the world feel that way. I thought I could get along in this kind of work. I can. But it’s sort of like a career navy guy taking a job as a hired skipper of a private boat. Next week I’ll probably be checking out some plaintiff in an auto case to find out if the neck brace is window trimming or if he really wears it all the time. I don’t know. It just seemed to be a hell of a thing—to die when you’re not in your own line of work.”

  “So you’ll change it.”

  “I … I guess so. Back where I belong.”

  “Thanks to Angie?”

  “You could put it that way.”

  “Try to sleep, Paul.”

  When he awoke again the room was full of a gray light. She was standing by the window, with the look of someone who had been standing, looking out for a long time. No dream had awakened him this time.

  “Barbara?”

  She started, came quickly to him. When she felt his forehead he took her hand, tugged gently so that she sat on the edge of the bed.

  “There’s something else,” he said. “When I was going, sort of fading away, there was the thought of you. And enough life in that thought to bring me back a little, make a final effort.”

  “Yes?”

  “So the involvement began then. Whether I wanted it or not. But maybe you’re still free. I wouldn’t know.”

  Her hand rested in his for a long time. And then she sighed and leaned down to him and put her mouth on his. In the gentleness of that kiss he ran his hand along a firm plane of her back, and she shivered and let the round girl weight of her come slowly onto his chest, and dug then into a deeper sweetness of that kiss. She placed her cheek against his and held him and shivered again and said, “Now you know about me.”

  “Barbara. Darling. This isn’t just a …”

  She put her fingers across his lips.
“I don’t want to strike bargains. I don’t want to dicker. Not yet, anyway.” She kissed him again, and laughed aloud, a strange, small laugh of triumph. “Look what I towed ashore!” she said. “Are you well enough?”

  “No fever.”

  “We’ll change that,” she whispered. And his girl stood up in the gray light and, turning half away from him, began to undress. She moved deliberately, with no flavor of coyness or enticement. In the silver light her expression was thoughtful, her lips curved into a shape that was on the edge of smiling, yet marked with a sadness. She turned, took one meek and hesitant step, then hastened the rest of the way into waiting arms—a creature complex and glorious and rewarding, demanding of him now and forever nothing less than a total commitment, willingly given.

  About the Author

  John D. MacDonald was an American novelist and short story writer. His works include the Travis McGee series and the novel The Executioners, which was adapted into the film Cape Fear. In 1962 MacDonald was named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America; in 1980 he won a National Book Award. In print he delighted in smashing the bad guys, deflating the pompous, and exposing the venal. In life he was a truly empathetic man; his friends, family, and colleagues found him to be loyal, generous, and practical. In business he was fastidiously ethical. About being a writer, he once expressed with gleeful astonishment, “They pay me to do this! They don’t realize, I would pay them.” He spent the later part of his life in Florida with his wife and son. He died in 1986.