Cold moon over Babylon

by Michael McDowell

  “Stay for supper,” Nathan suggested as well, but Hale refused out of hand. “No,” he said, “you let me go home and think about this. Ben was sure now that it was Warren Perry that he saw in the woods? And it was when Belinda was here?”

  Nathan nodded.

  “All right,” said Hale: “Don’t say anything about any of this to anybody, okay? I don’t imagine, at least I hope that there’s nothing in it, and probably there’s not—”

  “Probably not—” said Nathan.

  “—so we don't want to go starting trouble for Warren when there’s no need to. I’ll talk to him maybe, but I guarantee you that I’ll keep an eye on him.”

  Nathan smiled and rose. “I didn’t want to upset you, Ted,” he said: “But I just thought that you ought to know. If anything did happen, and of course it won’t, I wouldn’t have been able to face you, knowing that I hadn’t told you what I knew.”

  The two men shook hands warmly, and Hale went to the door to call Belinda over. Father and daughter stood on opposite sides of the screen, one baking with the sun at her back and the other shivering with air-conditioned drafts. They spoke in low voices.

  “Listen, honey—”

  “What, Daddy?” Belinda appeared nervous.

  “When you get ready to leave here tonight, you call me up at home, and tell me that you’re on your way, okay?”

  Belinda glanced at her father warily. “Okay,” she said slowly; “Sure. Why, though?”

  “Just because. And I want you to get Nathan or Ben to walk you out to the car, okay?”

  “Daddy,” Belinda said doubtfully: “That car is parked about five inches from the front door, I don’t need anybody to walk me—”

  “Do it for me, honey, will you please? And please don’t ask me why, either.”

  Belinda had feared that Nathan was saying something to her father regarding their carrying-on; but he evidently had told Hale something quite different.

  “Daddy,” she said: “Of course, if you want me to do it, I will do it. If you had told me, I’d get down on my hands and knees and empty that swimming pool with a ’luminum strainer.”

  Hale smiled and turned away. Nathan walked him to the front door. “You haven’t said anything to Belinda?” asked the sheriff.

  Nathan shook his head. “She’s got a mouth, your little girl, and I’m not really accusing Warren Perry of anything except driving around in the cul-de-sac and wading through the creek down in the back of the house. Besides, she might have gotten scared. There was no reason I could see for telling her.”

  Hale nodded: “Don’t do it now, either. She’s gone try and worm it out of you when you get back in there, she’s gone try to get you to tell her what it was that we talked about. Don’t tell her.”

  “I won’t,” Nathan promised, and closed the door.

  Hale regarded Nathan’s information in troubling relation to the case of Margaret Larkin’s death. Nathan evidently hadn’t made the connection, but Hale saw now that if his first conjecture was correct, and Warren Perry had indeed murdered the girl, then Belinda herself might be in danger. Maybe Warren Perry had Belinda in mind for number two in the series.

  This possible danger to his daughter prodded him in a way that none of Evelyn Larkin’s hysterical remonstrances could. It was necessary, if Warren Perry was the murderer, to prove that fact directly, before he really got going on his second victim; but Hale realised with despair that he was no nearer obtaining proof than before.

  Hale resolved that he would keep Belinda well out of Warren’s path, until he was certain of the man’s innocence. He knew that the schoolteacher was spending the weekend with his mother in Atmore, so all was well for the time being; but he would return on Sunday night or Monday morning, and then it might be necessary to warn Belinda to remain out of his way.

  This most important question set aside, Hale, as he drove back toward his house, tried to think what on earth Warren Perry could want with a Civil War sword.

  Chapter 34

  The Boy Scouts, the Cub Scouts, the Girl Scouts, and the Brownies of Babylon were beside themselves with frustration and disappointment because Evelyn and Jerry Larkin had deserted their farmstead without notice, at the height of the blueberry season. Several days of promised lucrative employment had not materialized. Each morning a few of the older boys and girls rode their bicycles out across the Styx, trembling exquisitely as they crossed the bridge. They knocked on the front and back doors of the farmhouse, prowled through the patch, grabbed handfuls of the ripest berries for their own throats, and wondered aloud what could have become of their seasonal employers. Two twelve-year-old girls, twins called Nadine and Nerlene Comer, rode out to the blueberry farm shortly before noon on Saturday. They pulled open the back door which had remained unlocked since the sheriff had fled the house, and stepped onto the dappled latticed porch. Nadine called hesitantly for the old woman. From the smell, Nerlene declared herself certain that seven rats had perished beneath the kitchen sink. They hurried nervously down the back steps, having decided against exploring the house.

  But once outside, Nadine and Nerlene were reassured by the warm fresh air; they considered that they had the run of the place in the absence of the owners. Both had attended vacation bible school with Margaret the previous summer, and felt keenest interest in her death. On this partially cloudy morning they walked among the blueberry bushes, deliciously losing themselves, pretending there was no way out of the lush green maze.

  A series of giggling right-angled turnings brought them suddenly upon the eroding bank of the Styx. A couple of large bushes had recently tumbled into the water, and washed down to the junction of the Perdido. Their root systems lay exposed in a yard-high: declivity over the whirling black water. Here, tied to a stake set not very firmly into the ground, was Jerry’s small green rowboat.

  The girls decided there was no reason they should not get in, and row across to the sandbar where Margaret Larkin had been killed. They’d look for bloodstains and some clue that Sheriff Hale might have missed. They’d come back to Babylon in triumph, bearing the solution to the crime.

  The twins rowed sturdily upstream along the north shore of the river, where the current was not so strong. Gliding under the bridge, they shivered; it was unexpectedly chill and damp beneath, and the unreflecting black water seemed abysmally deep and lifeless. No fish swam there, and dead things swirled along a few inches below the surface of the water.

  During the few seconds they were under the bridge, the sun went behind a bank of clouds that looked to hide it for the remainder of the day. The upstream side of the Styx, above the bridge, was wild, cold, and dark, and the two girls thought they had passed onto a different river altogether.

  Above the bridge, the course of the stream was tortured, and narrow, and its banks uninhabited. Abundant shallows and numerous snags made the going difficult, and the water rushed headlong in those narrow channels where it ran deep, Nadine and Nerlene had heard of canoes and small boats overturned inexplicably on this portion of the Styx, and of young divers, no older than themselves, whose heads had broken open on submerged tree trunks.

  The two young girls, no longer giggling, rowed carefully across the river, along the pilings of the bridge. The water knocked the boat harshly against the rotting wooden posts, and the jarring was so great, so seemingly deliberate, that they cried out a little with each accident. Finally they reached the upper end of the narrow sandbar that ran beneath the bridge, at the other end of which Margaret had been murdered. Nadine jumped out, and then dragged the boat onto the gravel, so that Nerlene would not ruin her new shoes.

  They then proceeded slowly along the length of the sandbar, staring nervously at the gravel and sand and small dank weeds, now very much afraid of finding anything like blood, or pieces of torn clothing, or an identification bracelet that had belonged to the murderer.

  That portion of the sandbar directly under the bridge was dark, almost as black as the Styx itself. It stank of rot an
d damp, and was unnaturally cool. The girls whisperingly decided that they would hurry to the end, proving their courage, and then run back to the boat, paddle swiftly back across the river, race through the patch, and then pedal home to Babylon as quickly as they could.

  Holding hands then, Nadine and Nerlene raced across that little black space, emerged gasping into the clouded light, and moved quickly to the end of the bar. Here they were unnerved by the indistinct impressions made in the sand, most recently by the sheriff and his deputies, before that by Ed Geiger and Jerry Larkin, and in the beginning by Margaret and the man who murdered her. The gravel had been disturbed; clods of low-lying red clay had been thrown up to the surface. A small depression was filled with stagnant water and leeches.

  “All right,” said Nadine, in a low measured voice: “We can go back now.” They turned.

  Just within the shadow of the bridge, propped against a little mound of pebbles and palely gleaming, was the severed head of Jerry Larkin. Light bouncing off the white gravel illumined his filmed eyes. Large black ants trailed in and out of the slack mouth.

  The head blocked the twins’ path back to the boat. Nerlene pushed Nadine into the water on the shore side of the bar, then, never minding her new shoes, jumped in after. The girls waded through the waist-deep water, and clambered up the muddy bank opposite from where they'd set out.

  They looked back once at Jerry's head, screamed in unison, and then, abandoning their bicycles that were on the other side of the bridge, ran all the way back to Babylon.

  Chapter 35

  The bodies of Jerry and Evelyn Larkin were not recovered before the following morning. On Saturday afternoon, the sheriff, his deputies, and several state highway patrolmen started out in boats from the bridge, moving slowly upstream, carefully prodding the riverbed with long cane poles. They located the station wagon in only an hour and a half. A diver dispatched from Pensacola arrived at five, and ascertained that the bodies were in the back. The driver’s window was open, and it was assumed that Jerry’s head had floated out of the automobile sometime during the night, tumbled downstream, and come to rest on the sandbar beneath the bridge,

  Hale decided to leave the bodies as they were until the automobile itself could be raised. It was possible that some clues might be disturbed if the attempt were made to pull the corpses from the car now; the doors were stuck and could not be opened without torches, which weren’t available anyway. The county coroner, called back up from Pensacola, assured the sheriff that the two bodies would not appreciably deteriorate before dawn.

  The Sunday morning papers made but brief mention of the discovery of the bodies, for Hale had not released the information until late on Saturday night. He had tried to think of some way to disguise the obvious fact that an entire family under his jurisdiction had been wiped out in a peculiarly bloody and disgusting fashion. A young girl had been murdered brutally; he had failed to discover her killer, and the man had returned now to do away with her brother and her grandmother. Hale knew nothing like it had occurred in all of Florida for years, and he soon realized as well that there was no way to soften the tale.

  The sheriff sat up late Saturday night with the county coroner and the two state patrolmen who had assisted on the river; and with them he went over the entire case in great detail. The strained consensus of their opinions was that Warren Perry had killed all three, but once this conclusion was grasped at, the county coroner and the state highway patrolmen declared themselves astounded first that Hale hadn’t seen it before, whereby he might have avoided these horrible double deaths of the grandmother and her grandson, and second, that he had allowed the man to leave the state without even a warning.

  “Well,” said Hale defensively: “Warren’s not exactly out-of-state, I wouldn’t call it. He’s up at his mama’s in Atmore, that’s all. And he’s not exactly fleeing, because all his stuff’s out there, and he’s not the type of boy to go off without saying anything about it. I mean, the rent’s due on Tuesday, and Warren’s always on time with the rent.”

  The county coroner and the patrolmen were unconvinced, pointing out sensibly that if the boy were the murderer, he would hardly let himself be caught because of financial obligations to his landlord.

  At their urging, Hale telephoned Warren in Atmore and asked him to come back to Babylon directly. Hale said he needed Warren’s help to assess some vandalism that had occurred at the high school.

  “You’re at the school?” said Warren.

  “No,” said the sheriff: “You come by the house first.”

  Warren arrived shortly before dawn, and went directly into the kitchen, where he found the men gathered at the table, drinking black coffee, eating frozen coffee cake, and staring him down with dreadful countenances.

  Hale, in short order, told Warren what had happened. Warren declared himself distracted with amazement and grief.

  “Warren,” said Hale, with some embarrassment, for though the little evidence there was all pointed to the schoolteacher, he could not readily imagine that the small quaking boy in front of him had cut off Jerry Larkin’s head, or had pushed the station wagon, with two corpses in the back, over a bluff into the Styx—“Warren, what do you know about all of this?”

  “Know?” echoed Warren: “I know what you just told me. I just came over that bridge. You told me somebody had broken into the school. You—”

  “I just didn’t want you going off—”

  “Going off?”

  The county coroner and the patrolmen stared hard at Warren.

  “I—I thought Jerry and Miz Larkin were in Pensacola. I thought they were staying with relatives in Pensacola,”

  “They were in the back of their station wagon, under twelve feet of water,” said one of the patrolmen. “D’you put ’em there?”

  Warren stared wide-eyed at the officer, then at Hale. “Me? I—”

  “Warren,” said Hale earnestly, “d’you have anything to do with this?”

  Dumbfounded, Warren shook his head no. He leaned trembling against the sink.

  “Would you have any objection if we searched your place?” asked Hale.

  Warren shook his head distractedly.

  “You sit here, then,” said Hale: “Have a cup of coffee, and keep Dr. Dickinson company.”

  Warren sat without a word. He had been awakened by Hale’s phone call, and still wore the tops of his pajamas, tucked into a pair of old corduroy pants. He shakingly poured a cup of coffee, and stared at the county coroner, who turned away.

  Hale and the two patrolmen got up and went out into the driveway. Above, in the east, the sky was pink and eggshell blue. The green Rambler still ticked after the rapid drive back to Babylon from Atmore.

  “We might as well look in the car first,” said one of the patrolmen. He climbed into the front seat; Hale got into the back, and leaned down and thrust his hand beneath the springs.

  The second patrolman asked for the keys to the trunk, but Hale looked up and said: “Lock’s gone. You'll have to fiddle with it. Wait, look in the glove compartment, fee keeps a screwdriver up there, I think, to open it with.”

  The first patrolman, a little surprised at Hale’s knowledge of the suspect and his ways, retrieved the screwdriver, and handed it to his partner.

  After only a few moments, full of low curses, the officer was able to open the trunk, and be made a quick search of the junk in the back. With the end of the screwdriver he tenderly lifted the tools, the miscellaneous bits of clothing, the soiled beach towels.

  “I found something,” he cried with soft triumph.

  “What?” demanded Hale, and quickly backed out of the car.

  “Come look,” said the man.

  Hale and the other officer went around to the trunk, and he pointed out the bloodied sword.

  “It looks like that’s what took that boy’s head off, don’t it just?” said the officer who found it.

  “Why’d he leave it here though?” asked Hale. “Why didn’t he just throw i
t away somewhere?”

  “If he was dumb enough to use something like that to try to kill somebody, then he’s dumb enough to keep it in the back of his car.”

  “Where’d he get something like that?” said the first officer.

  Hale looked between the two men, then said softly: “He stole it. He stole it from Nathan Redfield not long ago. Nathan said the sword was missing, and he said he had seen Warren hanging about the house of late. That’s probably where it came from.”

  “I think you got a case,” smiled the second officer.

  “I guess I do,” sighed Hale, and glanced toward the kitchen windows; the dawn was not yet strong enough to block the light from inside, and he could see the top of the coroner’s immobile head.

  “I think,” said the first officer: “That we had best go back inside before something just perfectly awful happens to Dr. Dickinson.”

  Warren Ferry was duly arrested and taken to town hall, where he was placed in the best cell, a young thief having been moved to a windowless cubicle because he was not after all, a local boy. The schoolteacher did not even protest to Hale, except to say in a low and wondering voice that he was innocent. He begged Hale to make sure that it was Evelyn and Jerry who had been killed—he was almost certain that they were still in Pensacola. He looked at the sword dumbly, and avowed that he had never seen it before.

  Hale promised that he would call Charles Darrish, who because of his friendship with Ginny, would no doubt be happy to represent Warren.

  Hale was more troubled by these proceedings than Warren himself. The schoolteacher was in shock, as much astounded by the deaths of his newfound friends as by the accusation against him. But the sheriff was disturbed by the incongruity of the evidence; it pointed easily enough to Warren, and the only point in his defense was his character. Yet the balance was in Warren's favor: Hale knew it was impossible that Warren had committed any of the three killings. The man didn’t have it in him. Though Hale had suspected Perry before, he realized that this was mere laziness on his part, and a desire to have some explanation for the inexplicable. Now that the evidence had presented itself in fine incontrovertible fashion, he was inclined to disbelieve it. But it was impossible to explain how a bloody sword had found its way into the trunk of Warren’s Rambler.