Murder in the Wind

by John D. MacDonald

  Sometimes these discussions erupted into violence. And though Sam Morrissey was a powerful man, he was not difficult to knock down. The excess of anger made him squinch his eyes shut and charge with both big arms swinging wildly. Any man who kept his head could knock him down.

  Elena Morrissey, his wife, was a soft, pretty, careless, silly woman. She felt that she had married beneath her station. If so it was a social distinction too narrow to be measured by any outsider. She liked gay colors in the house, but despised housework, and did only the bare minimum necessary for existence. She liked flowery print dresses and large-brimmed hats and tiny pocketbooks. She was a woman with a fabulous memory for dates, names, places, relationships. She spent a great deal of her time calling on friends. When she asked Sam to do something for her, which was often, she used the high clear patronizing voice of the mistress of the manse speaking to a groom.

  They named their firstborn Jonathan. June Anne was born two years later, and Hope was born four and a half years after June Anne. Elena had her children with an ease and a quickness that seemed to her shameful and peasant-like. No nausea and very short labor. She had always considered herself delicate. The doctor who attended her when she had Jonathan told her she was as healthy as a horse. She did not become his patient again.

  Jonathan died, quite grotesquely, when he was twelve. He was a sturdy boy and he spent every possible moment with his father. Because he imitated his father’s walk and his father’s silence, he seemed a rather solemn boy. His best friend was Taddy Western, younger brother of Sonny Western. They were almost the same age to the day. On Taddy’s twelfth birthday he asked for and received a bow and arrows. The bow was much too big for him. It had a fifty-pound pull. Neither boy could draw the arrows back as far as they should go.

  The two boys were together on a bright sunny afternoon after school. Taddy found that he could draw the bow by sitting down, hooking the bow over his toes, and pulling the bow string back with both hands. As Taddy explained it later, they were taking turns rocking back onto their shoulders and shooting the arrows high into the air. Sometimes they could watch the arrow throughout its flight. Other times it would disappear in the high thin air, and then there would be a moment or two of delicious fright while they raced to the shelter of a tree and waited for the arrow to thud down, burying a good half its length in the ground. Jonathan fired the arrow that killed him. They lost it in the air. They ran under the tree. They waited. Taddy heard a flickering sound as the arrow came down through the leaves. Jonathan stood a moment by the tree, with four inches of wood and brightly feathered arrow end protruding from the top of his skull. Then he fell down and bled from the ear, but not very much.

  After Jonathan’s death Sam Morrissey became more silent and sour than ever before. And he worked harder. He left the house at first light and many nights he worked by the blue glare of a gasoline lantern. Elena felt truly afflicted. Her firstborn, her only son, was dead. Her youngest child, her second daughter, Hope, was feeble-minded. June Anne seemed to be the only one left. Her mother would often look at her and weep. That made June Anne uncomfortable.

  At the time of Jonathan’s death, Hope was five and a half years old. She could say a few words. She could not dress herself. She could feed herself messily. She was monstrously fat, dull-eyed, drowsy. Her skin was coarse, hard and shiny and there were bare patches on her skull. She slept between sixteen and eighteen hours out of each twenty-four.

  By the time she was seven she had not improved. She was a great burden to Elena. Elena decided that Hope would be happier with other handicapped children. Elena took her to Jacksonville. Sam was too busy to go along. The people at the home seemed quite pleasant. Elena felt no sense of loss in parting from the child, though she simulated grief. She was shamed by her own high spirits on the way back. She felt as though the weight of the world had been lifted from her delicate shoulders.

  Two months later the home requested that she and her husband visit them. They drove up on a Sunday. The people at the home seemed very proud of themselves. The family doctor had missed what seemed to them to be a rather obvious diagnosis. Hope had been born with an underactive thyroid. Her serious hypothyroid condition had so dulled her mind and body that any layman would have thought her feeble-minded. “In such cases, Mrs. Morrissey, medication seems to work an actual miracle.”

  A miracle it was. A fat little girl with a clear skin, able to walk and talk and play and feed herself. She had a limited vocabulary, of course, way behind her age, but her eyes were reasonably alert.

  They thanked everyone and took Hope home with them. Even though it had been explained, Elena could not feel toward Hope as she felt toward June Anne. Seven years was too long. In seven years she had become too accustomed to thinking of Hope as an ugly burden. She kept seeing the child in the light of the past years, and she could not feel love. It was an effort to simulate affection. Hope progressed quite rapidly. She was able to enter the first grade when she was eight. In the beginning she seemed both affectionate and eager to learn. But affection was too often repulsed. And all the children in the school knew her history. Many of them had seen her the way she used to be. They told the others, with suitable exaggeration. Hope withdrew quietly, sullenly, into herself, convinced that she was different, ugly, unloved, unwanted. Maybe, without June Anne in the house, it might have been different for her.

  June Ann was a girl born to the adjective “most.” Basically she was a normal decent girl, adequate mentally but not brilliant. Well co-ordinated, but not exceptionally graceful. Friendly, but not overly charming. But a rare beauty befogged the eyes of the beholder. A rare and unusual perfection of both face and figure guaranteed that she should be considered brilliant, graceful and charming. In due time she believed herself to be as others described her. She accepted the knowledge without humility, yet without arrogance. She was as she was, and pleased by it. For her alone were her father’s rare gestures of affection, her mother’s constant ones.

  Hope was the disinherited. Though she had a dull mind, she was not too impassive to be hurt. Nor to wonder about herself and find a refuge of sorts in the limited play of her imagination. It was an imagination that needed props, and props were there in the timeless legends of “The Ugly Duckling” and “Cinderella.” Both those stories made a deep and lasting impression on Hope Morrissey. Through childhood she felt as though she waited for her inheritance. The chrysalis would open and she would step out. The glass slipper would fit to perfection. When she was ten she quite suddenly became thin, nervous, unable to sleep. A series of basal metabolism tests showed that the thyroid had somehow reactivated itself. She ceased taking medication. She regained weight, and placidity. For a time she had thought that the princess was emerging at last, but it had not been true. Not this time.

  There was no acceptance for her, not at home, not at school. Perhaps in a larger place than the small town near Ocala she could have found another outcast. But there she was entirely alone, and without resource. A more sensitive child could have been driven into mental illness by the isolation. But Hope was aware only of a restless discontent. A great dull gray weight of discontent.

  By the time she was fourteen she was a doughy, ripe-bodied girl, heavy, soft-fleshed, with no-color hair, dull blue eyes, careless of her person, uninterested in clothes. Though her teachers tried to force her assimilation into the group, the other children would have none of her. No boy cared to be seen with a girl he considered spectacularly unattractive.

  During her fourteenth year her father broke his right arm in a fall. A man came to work for him. He was a migrant worker who had last worked up around Orange Springs, a lean stringy man in his middle twenties who looked much older. He was not so much evil as primitive. His name was Dinty Seral. He had a hawk’s face, pale weak eyes, a manner of servility, self-effacement. He watched the girl carefully and he stalked her with brute purpose. He raped her one rainy afternoon in a tool shed at the far end of the grove, and terrorized her with a knife
blade at her throat, explaining precisely what he would do to her if she told. She did not tell. She met him whenever he demanded. Her abject fear of him faded quite quickly. She began to look forward to the quick and merciless interludes. They were, after all, the only change in the flat gray of her days. And it was the only acceptance she had achieved, ever. She took to following Seral about until he savagely ordered her to stop, fearing that her manner would arouse suspicion. She obeyed him.

  It was in this way that Hope Morrissey found what was, to her, a satisfactory reason for her existence, a fulfillment, and a constantly growing need. The colors of her world were vivid at the times she was with Seral. At all other times they faded into grayness. Throughout the seven months that Seral worked for Sam Morrissey, her role altered subtly until by the time he was paid off and left, she had become, in her soft demanding way, the aggressor.

  After Seral left her life was gray again. She had established her function, dimly classified it as the act for which she had been born and patterned, found that it was the only area of acceptance for her—and was then denied it. Had she more boldness she might have gone about in the community trying to find a substitute for Seral. She could probably have found someone with more need than taste. But she was caught up in the habit of isolation.

  She performed the single positive act of her lifetime on the night that Frank Stratter paid his unsuccessful call on June Anne. Hope knew that Frank was wanted by the police for something. That did not matter to her. She asked with unexpected boldness and was accepted. It did not occur to her that his acceptance was a gesture of revenge against June Anne. She was fifteen when Frank took her away to Miami with him. She was not interested in the city. She did not concern herself with what Frank and Billy Torris were doing. She was satisfied to be wanted, to eat and sleep and live, and accept this new life.

  It was too bad that they had had to leave the apartment. She had grown to feel quite at home there. And it had frightened her a little—not very much—when Frank had made her bring those men back to the darkness from the bars. She hoped she wouldn’t have to do that very often. It didn’t seem right.

  She rode along in the truck, her hands clasped loosely in her lap, heavy white thighs stretching the cotton dress, wipers flapping at the rain, truck swaying in the wind.

  She thought of her father’s grove and she wondered vaguely how they were. She had no desire to ever see them again. Particularly June Anne. She realized she was getting very hungry and she wondered if she should turn around and wake Frank up and tell him. But Frank might get angry. When he got angry he would hurt her by pinching or hitting her. She balanced pain against hunger and decided she could wait a while.

  She swayed forward when Billy stepped on the brake. She saw the police car ahead, the blinking red light. She saw the man beckon them on. Frank knelt in back, his head between them, voice sharp as he said, “Okay. Keep going. Down that road. That’s where he wants us to go.”

  They caught up with the other slow-moving cars. It was a narrow wet, rutted road. When the cars stopped she got out with the others and the wind caught her and tumbled her into the ditch. The force of the wind shocked her. It was almost the same panicky unbelieving shock as when Seral had first forced her down on the dirt floor of the tool shed. The feeling that this cannot be happening, not really.

  Then the great green top of the tree came swinging down at her. She could not get out of the way. It came down with a great wet sighing smashing sound, driving her down into the ditch, hurting her face, thumping hard against her hip. A big man tore the branches apart and got hold of her and pulled her out. She stumbled and he caught her. Her cheek was bleeding and she was crying. He examined the cheek and told her it was just a scratch. Her bruised hip made her limp a little. She could see that the cars couldn’t get out. She didn’t know what they were going to do. The wind was frightening. They climbed over the tree and went back into an old house. It was boarded up and quite dark in there. All the people came in. She stopped crying and felt quieter inside. Frank had a white strained look. Billy seemed very nervous. She stood between them and the three of them leaned against a wall.

  After a while a sort of fat-looking man made the boys work. People brought things in, suitcases and things, and the boys had to help carry them upstairs. She felt tired and hungry. She eased herself down gingerly and sat with her back against the wall and felt as if some time, pretty soon, she would begin crying again. And she kept thinking of the grove. She wished she could stop thinking about the grove.

  Frank Stratter meekly obeyed the orders of the big mouth who had taken charge. He carried endless suitcases up the creaky stairs and put them in the narrow hallway. There were four small upstairs bedrooms that opened off the hallway. Upstairs the wind sound seemed louder, and he thought he could feel the house sway.

  He met Billy at the head of the stairs and Billy said, wide-eyed, “What are we going to do?”

  “Shut up!” The kid was getting too nervous. This would be as good a time as any to take off, to leave the pair of them right here. With a hurricane coming in, the police were going to be too damn busy to bother looking for any fugitive from Miami law. He decided he would find the right chance and take off. He had what was left of the money they had gotten in Bradenton. And the clothes he wore. And a pocket knife with a four-inch blade. Nothing else. And it was pretty obvious that some of these people would be carrying a nice chunk of cash. The couple from the Mercedes for example. Or the big-mouth with the Cadillac. He knew he’d feel better if he could take off with some of that money. And it looked like it would be one hell of a long time before anything he did here could be reported.

  The tactical problem was complicated by leaving Billy behind. The kid would talk. And that might cut down the time margin. Also, it would rule out New Orleans. And he wanted badly to go to New Orleans. He wished he had told the two of them they were headed for some other city. He wished he had a gun.

  He stopped suddenly, half way down the stairs and wiped the palms of his hands on the thighs of the khaki pants. There was one way that would diminish all complications. When he thought of doing it, the breath was shallow in his throat. Billy stopped behind him and said, “What’s the matter?”

  Frank turned. “Go on back up. I want to talk to you.”

  They went into a far corner of one of the small bedrooms. “We can’t stay here, kid. When they come in to get all these people out of here, they’re going to ask a lot of questions. Who are you? Where did you come from? Like that.”

  “I guess they will,” Billy said.

  “So we don’t stay.”

  “It’s pretty rough out there.”

  “And it’s rougher on the road gang, kid.”

  “I guess it is. When … when do we go?”

  “It’s going to get darker. I want a good chance to take some money off these folks. Then we light out. We can make it to the highway okay. Then we take our chances from there. Okay?”

  “Hope’ll be pretty scared to go out in this.”

  “She’ll have to come along. We’ll have to make her come along.”

  Billy looked dubious. “All right, Frank. Anything you say. But how do we get another car?”

  “We’ll get one. Now go on down and get another load.”

  Frank watched the kid leave the room. He wiped his hands again. He felt a trembling anticipation within himself. He put his hand in his pocket and clenched it around the closed knife. You wondered about doing it. How it would be. There could never be a safer time or place. Three of them would go into the dark storm wind. Only one would reach the highway. Even if the bodies of the girl and the kid were found soon, the details would be all confused. He wondered if it would be easy to do. Or hard. He imagined it might be pretty easy to do. He thought of the dream sky and the way he saw his name in the giant glowing letters. Frank Stratter. He thought of the swing of the brush hook. He felt again the jolt of his foot as he had kicked the man. This might be easy to do. Just once. Just
to see how it was. And maybe never do it again. Because it was a damn fool thing to do. If they found out about it, they really came after you. And when they caught you, they killed you.

  He stretched his shoulders, arched his chest, sucked his belly in and thumped himself in the pit of the stomach where the trembling feeling was strongest. He went downstairs. On the next trip up he carried a child’s crib.

  14

  Virginia Sherrel had not been particularly aware of the big man until he came over to her and asked her if her keys were in the car. She took them out of her purse, and handed them to him. “This one is for the trunk. Really, I could get the things myself. Mr. Flagan seems to feel that women are helpless.”

  He took the keys. “His conditioning, I guess. Southern womanhood or something. Anyway, it is rough out there. And he gave you a job being doorwoman.”

  She smiled up into his face. He had a look of massiveness, of implacability. There was the slightest glint of amusement in deepset eyes, a surprising hint of sensitivity in the set of his wide firm mouth. “I’ll bring everything in.”