Go Home, Stranger

  “Found what?” He stared. She was fumbling in her purse now.

  “Here,” she said.

  He took it, and felt the skin prickle along the back of his neck. It was a silver cigarette lighter with the initials “R.C.” engraved on one side. He was conscious of an eerie feeling that at last he had put out a hand and touched the elusive and mysterious figure he had sought so long.

  “Where’d you get this, Pat?” he demanded.

  “I found it. Just beyond where you swam the bayou.”

  “When?”

  “Three days ago. I was up there with Max Easter.”

  “Does he know you found the lighter?”

  “No. I don’t think he saw me pick it up. He was ahead of me when I saw it lying off to one side, near the water. I wouldn’t have noticed it except a sunbeam happened to hit it.”

  “But you didn’t get a chance to look around? For anything else? I mean, you were with Easter—” His voice was tight with excitement.

  “Not then,” she said. “But I went back the next day. Alone. I looked around, but there wasn’t any indication there’d ever been any people up there, except somebody had cut down a tree, about a hundred yards away, back from the water.”

  “A tree?” he asked. “Was it cut up?”

  She tried to remember. “Just partly, I think. Why, Pete?”

  “I don’t know,” he replied, his eyes thoughtful. “It just seems an odd place to cut wood. It’d have to be hauled out in a boat. There wasn’t a road of any kind, was there?”

  “No.”

  “And it was right near where the explosions were?”

  “That’s right. Just beyond where you came out of the water.”

  “Where you pulled me out of the water,” he corrected gently. Then he went on. “I’ve got to have a look at that place. I’ll do it tomorrow when I go after that boat.”

  “I’ll go with you. We can take my boat with the motor.”

  He shook his head. “You’d better stay. I’m suspicious of that country.”

  Her voice was firm. “I’m suspicious of it too. That’s the reason I’m going.” Then she added, “I’d have to show you where I found the lighter, anyway.”

  He saw the futility of argument: After all, he’d said they were in this thing together. The thought of possible danger faded as he became conscious of a wild impatience to get back up there. He had no idea of what he might find, if he found anything at all, but there was a chance the answer to everything might be there, on that desolate arm of the bayou. They had to wait until tomorrow. It was no place to blunder around in at night.

  They had dinner at the Counselor and drove down to the Gulf. Where the ship channel met the sea, long jetties ran out from the beach, and a lighthouse swung its probing beam against the offshore darkness. He parked the car and they talked for a long time through the rushing-monotone of the surf beyond them while the sea wind blew against their faces.

  Once her voice broke as she was speaking of her brother, and he knew she was crying quietly in the darkness. He held her in his arms as if she were someone he had known for years, and when the crying had ceased he kissed her. She came willingly to him, with a warmth and soft fragrance that made his breath catch suddenly in his throat; then she gently disengaged herself and moved back. Afterward, for a while, there was an awkward sort of awareness between them that made them formally polite.

  When they came back to the camp he walked up on the porch of her cabin and held her hand for a moment as they said good night. In a moment of sour rebellion against the way she was beginning to dominate his thoughts he merely said, “Keep your door locked,” and turned away.

  He went down to the float, reluctant even to attempt sleep with his mind pulled this way and that by a mysterious and disappearing phantom called Robert Counsel and a brown-eyed girl he couldn’t keep in her proper perspective. He had just put flame to a cigarette and dropped the match into the water when he heard someone coming down the path. He whirled, instantly alert.

  “That you, Reno?” a voice asked! It had the soft, yet somehow vicious monotone of Skeeter’s drawl.

  “Yeah,” Reno replied. The match had blinded him momentarily and he could only guess where the other man was. “What is it?”

  “I didn’t see your boat here tonight. You lose it?”

  “Let’s say I left it,” Reno answered. “I had a little accident. Going back after it in the morning.”

  “Where?” Skeeter asked.

  “Up the bayou a little way.” Reno’s eyes were becoming accustomed to the darkness again and he could see him, the hard, thin slat of a figure at the foot of the trail.

  “How far’s a little way? And what you mean, an accident?”

  “Look, Malone,” Reno said, feeling irritation. “I left your boat up there. I’m going after it. If I don’t find it I’ll pay you for it. Does that clear it up?”

  “Mebbe.” Malone’s voice was utterly without emotion. “But I’m not worried much about the boat. If I was you, I’d stay out of that country up there.”

  Reno grew tense in the darkness. “Why?”

  “You might get lost.”

  “I’m pretty good at finding my way around.”

  “So was some of the people they never found. I’d think it over. There’s plenty of bass down here.”

  Advice? Or warning? Reno wondered about it later, after he had gone in the cabin and undressed for bed. He lay on the hard mattress trying to guess what had been behind the words.

  Sleep was a long time coming. I didn’t have enough parts of this, he thought, and now I’ve got too many. Where was the pattern of it? What connection could there be between Mac’s death and two men who had disappeared off the face of the earth here one night in May, a boat that had blown up for no reason at all, a man named Counsel who was everywhere and nowhere, and explosions on a lost reach of bayou? And the last person he thought of before he finally went to sleep was Patricia Lasater.

  No, Devers, he thought. Patricia Devers. He could hear the surf and see the upturned face so near to his, the eyes immense and still faintly misted with tears.

  Tomorrow, they’d go up there together. He dropped off to sleep with a strange feeling that something was going to happen tomorrow.

  Chapter Fourteen

  THEIR PLANS WERE INTERRUPTED.

  He was waiting when she emerged from her cabin early the next morning clad in white slacks and a long-sleeved blouse. They ate breakfast together in the restaurant under the cold eye of Della, and walked down to the float. Mildred Talley was climbing from the water.

  She regarded them with an arch smile. “Going to gang up on the poor bass, are we?”

  “Something like that,” Reno answered briefly.

  “But haven’t you forgotten your tackle?” she asked innocently.

  He was about to make some curt reply and turn away to the job of bailing out the boat when he looked up suddenly, catching the sound of a motor. It was not an outboard. He looked down toward the bend below them, where the bayou ran up from the highway bridge and the ship channel, and at that moment it came into view, a trim cabin cruiser dazzling in the sunlight with new white paint. Off the float it backed down with a growl of power, coming to rest in mid-channel.

  The man who had been at the wheel was Hutch Griffin, in white shirt and slacks, the reckless face grinning at them from under the rakish slant of a yachting cap. “Hi, men,” he called. “Let’s go for a ride.”

  Reno was conscious of quick irritation. He had forgotten about the trial run in the new cruiser, but there was no way they could get out of it now without some explanation. He shot a quick glance at Patricia and saw her look of dismay.

  As if he had been reading their thoughts, Griffin called across to them. “Only be two or three hours. I’m running down to the bar to take off a pilot, and we’ll be back by eleven.”

  There was nothing to do but make the best of it. “We’ll be right with you,” Reno said.

  “I
can’t come alongside,” Griffin explained. “Not enough water there. Pull out in one of those skiffs. You can give it a shove back, and Mildred can tie it up. How about it, baby?” This last was addressed to Mildred Talley. “Or can you go too?”

  “No,” she replied, pouting. “I’ve got to work.”

  Reno caught the sidelong, icy look at Patricia, and was conscious that at last he understood the answer to something in this country. Mildred was jealous. She had her eye on Griffin, which accounted for the catty remarks about the dark-haired girl. Then, unaccountably, he was jealous himself. He angrily shrugged it off. What did he care?

  He pulled the skiff alongside and Griffin helped her step up into the cockpit of the cruiser. He climbed aboard himself and shoved the skiff back toward the landing. He and Patricia sat down on leather-covered seats running along opposite sides of the cockpit, while Griffin pressed the starter.

  Reno noted with surprise they did not turn around. The cruiser gathered speed, straight ahead up the channel. In a few minutes they had rounded the first turn and had passed the arm of the bayou that ran north, where he had gone yesterday.

  Then he remembered the second highway bridge. “Can you get back to the ship channel up this way?” he asked Griffin.

  “Yeah. About a mile up here. Bayou goes back across the highway.”

  “Hutch, I like your boat,” Patricia said. “It’s lovely.”

  “Handles like a dream,” Griffin said, glancing back over his shoulder and grinning. “When we get out to the ship channel you can take over.”

  Her eyes were excited as she glanced across at Reno. “Do you think a landlubber could handle it all right?”

  “Sure,” Griffin said easily. “Just like driving a car.”

  In a few more minutes they had passed the old campground on their left, where he had discovered the trailer. Thinking of it reminded Reno that by now they would have been on their way up the bayou, and for a moment he was irritated and impatient. But whatever was up there could wait another few hours.

  They swung left now and were headed south. As soon as they straightened out Reno could see the steel highway bridge up ahead. Whoever towed that trailer away, he thought, could have come right through here and dumped it in thirty-five feet of water in the ship channel itself.

  Griffin looked around at them as they approached the steel span and said something Reno didn’t catch above the noise of the engine. He and Patricia got up and went over to stand beside him at the instrument panel, looking out ahead.

  “I say there used to be a wooden bridge here years ago,” Griffin repeated. “Had a lot of piling under it, spans not over twelve feet apart, and Robert Counsel used to shoot it in those speedboats of his.”

  At mention of the name, Reno and Patricia looked at each other. “Reckless, eh?” Reno said, hoping he would go on.

  “Reckless? Mother, dear!” Griffin said, and whistled softly. “A lot of people used to have the idea Robert was kind of a mamma’s boy—I mean, all that money, private tutors, that kind of stuff—but they just didn’t know him. I was with him one day when he came through here in a souped-up job that could really get up and fly. There was a girl in front with him, and another in the back seat with me—we were all about sixteen, I guess—and when his girl saw that bridge ahead and the clearance we had to get through between the pilings she fainted. She fell right over onto Robert, and he took it through with one hand, trying to get her off him with the other. You could have reached out a hand and touched a piling on either side, and he was clocking around fifty-five miles an hour.”

  “If you’ll pardon my saying so, Hutch,” Patricia said, “your friend Robert just doesn’t sound very bright to me.”

  Griffin shook his head and grinned. “That’s the hell of it though. He was. Brilliant son-of-a-gun. But he was just easily bored.

  “You take those speedboats and runabouts of his; he designed most of the hulls and propellers himself. Did it by feel, or instinct, or something, the way somebody else could write a symphony. There’s a hell of a lot of mathematics to hull design, even for a garbage scow, and when you start playing around with speed it gets rugged. Not that he didn’t know the math—he did; but I think he felt the answers instead of working them out.

  “He had a nasty sense of humor, though,” Griffin went on. They passed under the highway bridge and in a moment came out into the ship channel. At this point it described a sweeping turn, leaving its course roughly paralleling the highway and running south for half a mile between high walls of trees. The dredged channel itself was marked by buoys, “You want me to take it now, Hutch?” Patricia asked.

  “In just a minute, honey,” Griffin replied. “As soon as we get past that dredge. It’s working around the next bend.”

  “What was that about Counsel’s sense of humor?” Reno asked.

  “Oh.” Griffin leaned forward over the wheel and swung his head with soft laughter. “I wanted to tell you about that. Robert and I were in prep school together for a couple of terms, and about this time somebody started that goldfish-swallowing gag again. And there was this big blowhard of a joker who’d been trying to give Robert a bad time. Anyway, this joker was making a big name for himself swallowing fish and throwing his weight around, when Robert showed up from somewhere with one just a little bigger and bet him fifty dollars he couldn’t swallow it. The joker gulped it right down, like a hungry pelican, and began hollering for his fifty. Robert gave it to him, real deadpan, and asked how he felt. ‘Fine,’ the joker says. ‘Why?’ So then Robert told him. It was murder. ‘Nothing,’ he says. ‘Except I’d be careful about coughing. That goldfish had two dynamite caps inside it.’ ”

  “Good Lord,” Patricia said, horrified. “What happened?”

  “Nothing.” Griffin laughed again. “The joker just went limp and passed out. They eased him over to the infirmary and went to work on him with a stomach pump. They got the fish out.”

  “But were there really two caps in it?”

  “Nobody ever knew. The doctor and nurse wouldn’t say. But the joker’s family took him out of school the next week, and Robert’s mother took him to Europe. Personally, knowing Robert, I’d say there were.”

  They rounded the turn and passed the busy rumble of the dredge just beyond. Some men on deck waved as they went past.

  “What do they do with the mud?” Patricia asked. “I don’t see any pipes.”

  “Hopper dredge,” Griffin explained laconically. “Fills up and runs back outside to dump the stuff offshore.”

  “Does it work on the channel all the time?”

  “No. They just started this section the first of the month. Going to dredge from here up five miles.”

  They were past it now and the channel was clear. Griffin stepped back from the wheel and sat down on one of the leather seats, stretching out his legs and lighting a cigarette.

  “Hey—” Patricia said, startled.

  He grinned. “Honey, you’re driving now. Just keep to the right, and watch out for traffic cops.” He looked across at Reno and winked.

  Reno felt the stirrings of jealous anger, but let none of it show on his face. Griffin was a likable guy, but there was just a little too much easy familiarity in the way he spoke to Pat. But hell, maybe he talked to all the girls that way.

  A little over a mile below the dredge they passed a ferry and a small shrimp-freezing plant. Griffin nodded, “My place over there,” he said, indicating a dock at which two small diesel tugs were moored.

  In a short while the heavy timber along the banks began to thin out and they were running through flat salt marsh. Reno could see the white tower of the lighthouse straight ahead. They ran on out between the twin rock walls of the jetties and past the light.

  “How far out do we go?” Patricia asked.

  “Sea buoy,” Griffin said. “Last one out there, about a mile.” He got up and opened the small door going forward, and the sound of the big marine engine increased. “Just keep her on course, Sk
ipper,” he called back, grinning over his shoulder. In a moment he emerged with a trolling rod and a big reel. He set them up, attached a white feather jig to the leader, and began paying out line.

  “All right,” he called, “who wants to catch the first mackerel?”

  “Ladies first,” Reno said.

  Griffin took the wheel and throttled the engine back to slow trolling speed. Patricia settled into the seat at the rear of the cockpit and held the rod. In a few minutes she had a strike, but lost the fish. She landed the next one, a mackerel slightly over a foot long.

  Reno enjoyed watching her. Any other time the cruise would have been fun and he would have been reluctant to see it end, but now he was conscious of a gnawing impatience to get back.

  He took out cigarettes and offered Griffin one. “This pilot on his way down on a ship now?” he asked.

  “Yeah.” Griffin craned his neck, looking astern. Then he glanced at his watch. “Should be showing any time now. Said he’d be down to the bar around ten.”

  “Don’t the pilots have a boat of their own?” Reno asked curiously.

  “Yes, but it’s in for overhaul. When they go to the yard they give most of the business to me. I usually use one of the tugs, but thought I’d try this one today, since it’s smooth out here.”

  In another twenty minutes the ship was in sight astern. Patricia reeled in her line while Griffin advanced throttle and changed course to intersect the ship’s course as it cleared the sea buoy. They came up alongside and Reno could see the name. It was the SS Silver Bay. His eyes narrowed reflectively. Wasn’t that the one—? No, he remembered. The one Counsel had been on was the Silver Cape. It must be the same line, however. Probably all named Silver something.

  They bumped against the side. In a moment he heard the rattle of a Jacob’s ladder and the pilot stepped down onto the foredeck of the cruiser. He slid around the outside of the cabin and dropped into the cockpit.

  Griffin introduced them with a sweeping wave of the hand as he advanced the throttle and spun the wheel to break contact with the ship. “Breaking in a new crew, Cap,” he called over his shoulder.