Deadly Welcome

by John D. MacDonald

  Then, in the Arcadia game in his sophomore year, when Bowers was hurt and they sent him in, he became a personage. He’d had his full height then, one inch over six feet, but he had weighed only a hundred and fifty-five. But it was all hard, fibrous muscle, and there had been a lot to prove, and this was the time. The chance.

  And he had become part of the group, running with them when he had time off from the store, accepted. In the group with Jenna, and closer to her. Didn’t think she would say yes to a date. Didn’t ask for one. She asked him. Spence had given her a fast little runabout. He had taken it in on a trade at the boat yard and had it put back in shape. She asked him, in the store, on a Saturday night when they all stopped in. Asked when the others were talking and couldn’t hear. “Come to the yard tomorrow morning, Alex. About ten. We’ll try out the Banshee. Make a picnic out of it.”

  They took it down the bay, down between the mainland and the south end of Ramona Key, and then out through the tidal chop and Windy Pass, and then, running outside in the Gulf, down most of the deserted length of Kelly Key and anchoring it just off a wide white beach, anchoring it in the shallows and wading ashore with the beer and food and blankets and her little red portable radio. A strange day, unbelievable that he was alone with her. They took turns changing to swim suits behind a screen of sea grapes. Casual talk and some laughter. Swimming and sandwiches and beer. A strange day of mounting tensions, in glance and accidental touch. With the strain mounting between them until, at dusk, she was in his arms whispering that she thought he would never never try. He had been scared as well as wanting. He hoped they had been wrong—all that talk. He hoped they had been making it all up about her.

  But she rolled away and took off the damp green and white swim suit and she was there for a little time to be looked at, and he somehow did not want to look at her but could not look away, until she rolled back to him with a little raw laugh and hungry mouth. He was virgin yet felt he should be gentle and tender because she was such a small girl. But tenderness was not her need. And even as he held her in that ultimate closeness, he had known with a wisdom beyond his years that he still did not know Jenna Larkin, that perhaps no one could know her. And in this union she had contrived, he was but an instrument of her restlessness and protest.

  He drove the little Banshee home through dark familiar waters, her head on his shoulder while they sang old songs, sleepy with the sun, the swimming, the beer and the love. Very sophisticated. Making no direct reference to what had happened between them. Her car was at the yard, and when she dropped him off at the Ducklin house and responded so completely to his kiss, he asked her when he could have another date, sensing that “date” was now a new word for him.

  “I don’t know, Alex. Sometime, I guess. You ask me, hear?”

  “I’ll ask you.”

  When he was in bed with the lights off that night, it all seemed unreal, and he tried to encompass the enormous realization that It had finally happened to him, and It had happened with Jenna Larkin. He lay in the dark with his eyes wide, and went over each vivid fragment of memory right up to the point where he had not been aware of anything in the world, and beyond that to where he had been aware of her again, watching him with a strange intensity. He tried to think how the next date would be, and he tried to feel anticipation. But he merely felt sleepy and uncomprehending, and subtly soiled.

  He tried to date her again, but he had little time off, and when he did, she was busy. And about two months after the picnic trip in the Banshee she was gone. With the sailor. The talk about her was worse after she was gone. Once he came close to joining in, letting them know that he hadn’t been left out. But at the last moment he had turned away, bitterly ashamed of himself.

  Since that time he had often wondered if Spence had found her and brought her back to Ramona. The dossier on Jenna, part of the thick file Colonel Presser had given him, answered the question. She had not come back. It covered the years from when she was eighteen until she was thirty, when M’Gann had met her. Had he read it about some strange woman he would have thought it unsavory in the extreme. A marriage and divorce. Modeling for life classes and seedy photographers and unsuccessful commercial artists. Singing with third-rate groups and in grubby joints. A police record of sorts. The minor night-time offenses for which you can be picked up in Seattle and Biloxi, Buffalo and Scranton. But it was all because she had been so alive… and restless.

  So how had she felt when she had gone back? As the colonel’s lady. Full of an uneasy bravado? Amused, perhaps? Why had she gone back there at all? There had been no need.

  chapter TWO

  AFTER LUNCH the next day he got the folder from the hotel manager and went to the Pentagon. He told them he had decided to do it. He did not tell them why. He did not tell them that he had learned in the long and sleepless hours of the night that if he did not go back he would spend the rest of his life in a half-world where neither identity fitted him, neither the old nor the new. He could not say that this was, in a sense, his own search for Alexander Doyle.

  When he said he would rather not take the file with him, they both questioned him sharply until they were satisfied that he had retained all the information he needed to know. “And what about a cover story, Mr. Doyle?”

  “I’ve got one that I think is very ordinary and very foolproof, sir. I know South America pretty well. And I know heavy construction equipment. On my last assignment I was working outdoors. And I look it, I guess. A lot of single men take construction jobs abroad for the high pay, and then go back to their home towns. If I had the passport and necessary papers to show I’d been in Venezuela for the last three years…”

  “Sounds good enough. Get rolling on that, Jerry. Mr. Doyle, what will be your public reason for going back to Ramona?”

  “Tired of knocking around. Got a few bucks saved up. Looking around with the idea of maybe setting myself up in a small business. If it hasn’t changed too much, I’ll rent a cottage out on Ramona Beach. That will put me closer to Colonel M’Gann. After I get established, I’ll have to play it by ear. Maybe I can line up some kind of temporary job that will make it easier to get to the colonel. I’ll need mobility, Colonel Presser. I think the best thing would be to fly to Tampa and pick up the right kind of clothes there and a used car. I don’t think I was expected to amount to very much. Except for having some cash, I don’t think I want to disappoint them.”

  “You sound bitter, Mr. Doyle.”

  “A little. Maybe. But I’ll be a lot less conspicuous than if I went into town driving a rental sedan and wearing a suit like this one, sir.”

  “You are absolutely right, Mr. Doyle. I approve the plan. It isn’t theatrical. You won’t be tripped by the casual question. And you can look and play the part, I’m sure. When can we have his papers ready, Jerry?”

  “By tomorrow noon, Colonel.”

  “We want you to take all the time you need to handle it carefully, Mr. Doyle. I think three thousand dollars would be ample.”

  “More than enough.”

  “How would you take it with you? Traveler’s checks?”

  “Alex Doyle, construction bum, would wear a money belt, sir. Or he wouldn’t have any cash to bring back with him.”

  Presser laughed his approval. “Come in a little before noon tomorrow.”

  He bought the three-hundred-dollar Dodge off a Tampa lot late on Monday afternoon, the thirteenth day of April. He didn’t want to arrive in Ramona after dark, so that evening he drove down as far as Sarasota and found a second-class motel south of the city on the Tamiami Trail. Ever since he left Washington he had been trying to fit himself into the part he would play.

  That night, when he was ready for bed, he carefully inspected the stranger in the bathroom mirror. The sandy hair had been cropped short and the gray at the temples was now practically invisible. The eyes were a pale gray-blue. It was a long face, subtly stamped with the melancholy of lonely tasks. A big nose and a stubborn shelving of jaw. A sallow facial
texture that took a deep tan and kept it. Twisty scar at the left corner of the broad mouth. A flat, hard, rangy body, with big feet and knobbed wrists and big freckled hands.

  He studied the stranger and said quite softly, “Banged around here and there. Have driven shovels and Euclids and cats. And some deep-well work.”

  The face looked back at him, passive, somewhat secretive, with a hidden pride and hint of wildness.

  He stretched out in the dark and listened to the trucks go by just beyond his window. There was a band of moonlight in the room. And air scented with diesel fuel and jasmine. This was home land. And different. Sarasota had turned from sleepy village to busy tourist center. Ramona would be changed too. But not as much. It was miles off the Tamiami Trail.

  Tomorrow he would drive into town, right down Bay Street. His hands were sweaty. He could hear the knocking of his heart. And he was a kid in a cell in Davis, wondering what they were going to do to him.

  At ten o’clock on Tuesday morning he turned off Route 41 onto State Road 978, moving slowly through the bright hot morning, through soaring throngs of mosquito hawks, through flat scrub land with occasional oak hammocks and some tall stands of slash pine. The last time he had come over this road he had been going the other way, fast, in a back seat between two deputies, dog-sick and trying not to sniffle. They had stopped to let him be sick at the side of the road while the deputies talked in soft slow voices about the hunting season. He remembered wondering if they were wishing he’d try to run.

  About four miles from town he came upon the first change. A huge tract had been cleared and shell roads had been put in, but now the scrub was growing up again. A big faded sign said that it was Ramona Heights. Florida Living at a Reasonable Price. Big Quarter-Acre Lots at $300. Ten Dollars Down. Title Insurance. See Your Broker. The roads were named after the states of the union, and the road signs were so faded as to be almost illegible. He could see a few scattered houses, small cinder-block structures painted in brave bright colors.

  Farther on he came on new houses where it had all been pasture land, and then some drive-ins and motels and a small shopping section. More houses, and a new school of blond stone and glass, with the yellow buses ranked outside it. And then, ahead of him, he could see where the trees started, the big live oaks, bearded with Spanish moss, that shaded the east end of Bay Street. They were the memorial oaks, planted right after the first World War, and to him they had always marked the edge of town.

  He drove along the shade of Bay Street, past the old frame houses and the old stucco houses of the boom of long ago, and he read the forgotten names of the side streets. And then he was back in sunlight again, where the street widened, looking along the three blocks of the business center toward the blue water of Ramona Bay, bisected by the causeway and old wooden bridge that, as a continuation of Bay Street, provided access to Ramona Key and Ramona Beach.

  The old hotel was still there with its broad porches, but the stores across from it had been torn down and replaced by a chain supermarket set well back, a big parking lot, orange parking lines vivid against asphalt, in front of it. Cars dozed in the sun. A pregnant woman walked tiredly toward a dusty station wagon, followed by a boy in a soiled white apron pushing a supermarket cart containing two big bags of groceries. A grubby little girl sat on the curbing in front of the telephone office, solemnly licking a big pink icecream cone. Cars were parked diagonally in the sun on either side of Bay Street, noses patient against the curbing. There was a new bright plastic front on Bolley’s Hardware. Where Stimson’s Appliance had been there was a big shiny gas station where two fat red-faced men stood drinking Cokes and watching an attendant check the oil on a Chrysler with Ohio plates.

  He read the lawyer names and the doctor names on the second-floor windows of the Gordon Building, and a lot of them were different, but a lot of them could be remembered.

  The Castle Theater was closed, boarded up. There was a new dime store. And now they had parking meters.

  He looked at Ducklin’s Sundries. It was bigger. It had taken over the feed store, and the whole front was an expanse of cream and crimson plastic and big windows. He parked in front of it. Getting out of the car and walking in was one of the most difficult things he had ever done. It was frigidly air-conditioned. An old man who looked vaguely familiar stood by a big magazine rack mumbling to himself as he read a comic book. Two young women sat at the counter with their packages, eating sundaes. There was a pimpled young girl in a yellow nylon uniform behind the counter, scraping the grill with a spatula, slowly and listlessly. A young man sat on his heels by a center counter, taking items out of a carton and stacking them on a shelf. Alex Doyle knew no one.

  He walked to the counter and slid onto one of the red stools. The pimpled girl glanced at him and dropped the spatula, wiped her hands on her apron and came over.

  “Coffee,” he said. “Black.” When she brought the coffee he said, “Is Joe or Myra around?”

  “Joe? Myra? I don’t get it.”

  “Mr. or Mrs. Ducklin,” he said.

  “They don’t own it any more,” the girl said. “You want to see the owner, it’s Mr. Ellman and he isn’t in.”

  The young housewives had apparently overheard the conversation. “Pardon me, but Joe Ducklin died a long time ago. Oh, ten years anyway. She ran it for a while and then she sold out, a couple years later I guess it was. It’s kinda creepy, somebody asking for Joe. Pardon me. I mean it just sounded creepy. You know.”

  “I used to live here.”

  She was a heavy young matron, hippy, with a rather coarse face and a dab of chocolate on her chin. “I’ve been right here my whole life long, so if you lived here I guess maybe I ought to know you.” She laughed in a rather disturbingly coy way.

  “I used to work in this store,” he said.

  The other woman peered at him intently. “You wouldn’t… you couldn’t possibly be Alex Doyle? You must be!” She was a sallow blonde with a long upper lip.

  “You’re right.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t guess you’d know me because I was just a little bit of a thing, but I sure remember you coming over to the house to see Jody. Jody Burch. I’m one of Jody’s kid sisters. I’m Junie. Now I’m Junie Hillyard. I don’t know if you remember Billy Hillyard. And this here is my best girl friend, Kathy Hubbard, who used to be Kathy King.”

  “I… I don’t remember Billy Hillyard, except as a name. But I certainly remember Jody. Does he live here?”

  “Jody’s dead,” she said. “He liked the navy so good he stayed in, and it was just three years ago and he was on a supply ship and they were loading something and something broke and they dropped it on him. It was a terrible thing. He had thirteen years in and he was only going to stay twenty.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it.”

  “It just about broke us all up. His wife is married again. She sure didn’t wait long, that one. She wasn’t local so you wouldn’t know her. A Philadelphia girl.”

  “Does Myra Ducklin still live in town?”

  “Why, she surely does! She’s right over on Palm Street in that house they always had. I just remembered you’re kin to her, somehow, and you used to live there so I guess I don’t have to tell you…”

  She stopped abruptly and her eyes grew round, and Doyle knew that she had suddenly remembered all the rest of it. She leaned close to her friend and whispered to her, rudely and at length. Then Mrs. Kathy Hubbard turned and stared at him also.

  They had finished their sundaes and their money was on the counter. They stood up and Junie cleared her throat and said, “Are you really sure Mrs. Ducklin would want to see you?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Are you on a vacation?”

  “I might move back here, Junie. Care to advise me?”

  “Maybe you’d feel more at home if you settled down at Bucket Bay, Alex Doyle.” They walked out with great dignity. And stared at him through the windows as they walked toward their car with the packages. J
unie had the intense look of the confirmed gossip. The self-righteous gossip. That Alex Doyle has come back here, bold as brass, and what are decent people going to do about it? He had the nerve to speak to me. Robbed his kin and they let him run away into the army and here he is right back again after all this time. Cheap sporty shirt and snappy slacks. Tough looking.

  He put a dime beside the empty cup and as he got up and turned to go, a big old man, sweaty and slow-moving, came in out of the sidewalk heat, patting his broad forehead with a blue bandanna. Jeff Ellandon. Perennial mayor of Ramona. Fifteen years heavier and slower.

  He looked at Doyle with shrewd old eyes, stuffed the bandanna in his pocket and said, in a voice frayed and thin with age, “Guess I should know you, son. Guess my memory is about to give out on me. You one of the Bookers?”

  “Doyle, Judge. Alex Doyle.”

  “Well sure now. Bert’s boy. There was you and Rafe, and he was the older one, got drownded with Bert that time. Mother was Mary Ann Elder from up in Osprey. Come and set, son.”

  Alex followed the man back to a small booth and sat facing him. He ordered another cup of coffee and Judge Ellandon had a double order of chocolate ice cream.

  “Been away for some time, I’d say, son. You were the one had that trouble. You worked right here, come to think of it. Joe Ducklin was a second cousin of your daddy. I remember Joe cussin’ you almost right up to the time he died. Stingy old rascal. He and Spence Larkin were the closest men in town. The way I figured it, you were just collecting back wages, son. I guess you can see the town ain’t changed much.”

  “I saw a lot of new stuff when I drove in, Judge.”

  “I guess we must have had maybe fifteen hundred people when you left and we haven’t got more than seventeen, eighteen hundred right now. Everybody else growing up big north and south of us and we keep poking along. No future here, son. It’s those dang Jansons.”

  It was a story Alex had long been familiar with, the favorite gripe of local businessmen and boosters. At the turn of the century a wealthy sportsman named Janson had come down from Chicago to fish. He bought land on the north end of Ramona Key and built a fishing lodge. When Alex had been little the kids believed the old corroding structure was haunted. It had burned down when he had been about nine years old. Janson had been the one who financed the causeway and bridge to Ramona Key. And he had so believed in the future of the area that, for a sickeningly small sum, he had purchased all of Ramona Key except for a three-quarter-mile strip of Gulf to bay land just opposite the causeway, all seven miles of Kelly Key, and huge mainland tracts on either side of the sleepy fishing village. Janson had died during the first World War, and the estate had been tied up in litigation for many years. At the time of the Florida boom there were plans to subdivide and sell off the Janson lands, but the boom collapsed before any action was taken. Since then any attempt to buy any Janson land had been met with stony indifferent silence.