The Cypress House

by Michael Koryta

  “And you’re helping him lay the foundation.”

  “I just told you why! It’s not as if I made some decision to—”

  “Whose hands were they?” he said.

  “What?”

  “The hands in the box. Who do they belong to? That man in the Plymouth who came by last night?”

  “Yes. Tate McGrath killed him, I’m sure. Tate and his sons. His name was David Franklin. From Tampa. He worked with Walter Sorenson.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Collections. Bookkeeping. They were the money men.”

  “I get the feeling,” Arlen said, “that Mr. Franklin tried to get more than his share. Apparently Wade and his boys didn’t appreciate that he melted Walt Sorenson in his attempt.”

  She turned away as if feeling ill.

  “Why would they bring the hands to you tonight?” he asked.

  “That’s Solomon’s idea of a message. He’s reminding me of his power.”

  “But why would you care about this David Franklin?”

  “Because,” she said, her voice dipping to a near whisper, “we do the same sort of work for Solomon. He’s reminding me to do it right.”

  Neither of them spoke for a while then. The wind blew and the waves broke and they sat in silence.

  “There was a woman with Franklin last night. Do you know—”

  “I have no idea what happened to her,” she said.

  But they both knew.

  Arlen took out a cigarette and lit it and smoked. “This is why you stayed,” he said. “Because you believe that if you leave, he’ll have your brother killed.”

  “I don’t believe it. I know it.”

  “So this place has value to Solomon,” he said, “because he can let his boys meet out here, bring in visitors to talk about things that can’t be overheard, maybe kill a man or two. You’ll keep silent because you’re worried for your brother.”

  “That’s right.”

  He smiled in the darkness and tapped ash from the cigarette. “Do you truly take me for a fool?”

  She pulled her head back. “What?”

  “I’m supposed to believe that’s all there is?” he said. “That’s the most ignorant thing I’ve ever heard in my life. It’s not worth the risk to him. There are a thousand places you could land a boat offshore here and smuggle into these creeks. There are a thousand places you could hold meetings. Hell, if he’s so damned determined that this be the spot, he’d run you off from it and take over.”

  She ran her fingertips across her cheekbone and said, “Long enough ago, he might have done that. He didn’t have to, though. He had my father working for him willingly. My father and my brother. And there aren’t a thousand places like this, not with a deep-water inlet. You can bring a large boat in here and get trucks right down to it, unload quick, and the whole place is such a jungle that it would be almost impossible for anyone to watch you do it, for anyone to surprise you. No, this is actually the perfect place for Solomon Wade.”

  “Your father was partners with him.”

  She nodded. “For a time. Back when it was only liquor and people weren’t being killed and he thought Wade was someone he could trust.”

  “So your father, he just allowed the smuggling to go on, is that it? Pretended not to know what they were doing, took a cut to keep his mouth shut?”

  “He did a little more than that. Tate McGrath’s no mathematician. Solomon needed somebody who could think, somebody who could handle the dollars, the real dollars.”

  “Your father did those things.”

  “He did,” she said, “and now I do.”

  He looked at her for a time and then stretched his neck first one way and then the other, felt the stiff joints pop.

  “I don’t believe that,” he said. “I don’t believe a woman like you could be forced into doing so much for a man like that based on nothing more than intimidation. Someone like you? Shit, you’d have called the governor by now. Called old J. Edgar Hoover himself, had all of them down at Raiford, hauling your baby brother out while they fastened shackles around Wade.”

  “Nothing more than intimidation,” she echoed. “Nothing more.”

  “That’s all it sounds like to me, and you don’t seem the type to crumble under it as completely as you’re wanting me to believe.”

  She lifted her chin and gave him that challenging stare she had. Her shoulders were pulled back and he could see her breasts pushing at the gown and the smooth lines of her sides swerving out into her hips, could see her hair tracing her neck. When he took another drag off his cigarette, he held the smoke longer than he intended. Almost like he’d forgotten it was there.

  “Okay,” he said. “You’ve made your decisions. Something you need to understand? I’m about to make mine.”

  She was silent.

  “There any reason I shouldn’t walk up the road with that cute little box, show it to the law, and tell them what I’ve seen?”

  “Where is the box?”

  “That ain’t the question, honey.”

  “It’s my question. Where is the box?”

  He grinned at her and shook his head.

  It went quiet again. They listened to the water break on the beach, and Arlen finished his cigarette and put it out under his toe.

  “I’ve told you all I care to tell you,” she said. “This isn’t a game. My brother will die. He’s the same age as Paul, almost. Ten months older.”

  “And he’s almost out,” Arlen said.

  “How do you know that?”

  “I only look ignorant, Miss Cady. Solomon told you fourteen days left. I suspect he meant until your brother gets out. Am I right?”

  Her silence told him that he was.

  “So he’ll come back,” Arlen said. “That’s your idea at least. Then what?”

  “I’ve got a plan.”

  “Many of the dead people I’ve known did.”

  “You’ve such an encouraging touch.”

  “Is that what you need? Encouragement?”

  “What I need,” she said, “is to be left alone again.”

  “Bullshit. Last thing in the world you want is to be left alone. You could’ve sent us off days ago, but you didn’t. You let us linger.”

  She was quiet.

  “Well,” he said, “I suppose I’ll have to do some thinking.”

  “What have you done with that box?” she said.

  “It’s in a place of my control. Don’t get any bright ideas about having Wade hang me up by my toenails to find out where.”

  “I wouldn’t do that.”

  “You’d do damn near anything you decide to do,” he said. “That much has been made clear.”

  She went quiet again, and he realized that she was crying. Hardly making a sound, but her cheeks were damp and her breathing unsteady.

  “Like I said,” he told her, the edge dulling from his voice, “I’ve got my own decisions to make.”

  They sat there for a long time in the silent dark, and eventually he stepped away from the railing and went to the door and held it open. She hesitated but then rose and walked inside. Her body passed close to him, almost brushing him, and he could smell her hair, clean and with some hint of flowers.

  She turned to him, still standing very close, her chest inches from his, and said, “So what do you expect me to do? Go upstairs and wait for you to think?”

  “You can do that,” he said, “or you can kill me while I sleep. Let me know what you decide.”

  24

  SHE CAME INTO HIS ROOM just before dawn. He’d finally found sleep; the flask still lay in his hand, held against his side the way a child holds a dear toy. He wasn’t sure what sound stirred him or even if one had. He just opened his eyes and she was there, the white gown almost all that showed of her in the dark. The sky hadn’t begun to lighten yet, but he knew it must be close to morning. For a moment he didn’t speak, just looked at her and then dropped his eyes to her hands, thinking of the pistols. Her hands
were empty.

  “You don’t believe that Wade’s intimidation is enough to keep me here,” she said. “Enough to keep me working for him. That’s what you said.”

  He didn’t answer, just pushed up in bed. He was bare-chested, and the room that always felt too warm now seemed cool.

  “You asked why he didn’t just run us off and take the place over for himself,” she said. “Do you know how much I would love to have him do that? I’d give him the property, sign it over to him without a dime in return. That’s not enough for him, though. Not at this point. This family has been connected to him for too long. We’re either working for him or we’re working against him. That’s how he sees it at least. The minute I try to leave this place, even if I want nothing more than peace, he will view it as a threat. And I can tell you something about how he handles threats.”

  She went quiet for a moment, and when she continued her voice was lower, more controlled.

  “Solomon’s had help at the Cypress House for years. Since not long after my father built it. My father thought he was financially secure and found out he wasn’t. He lost his savings, and he couldn’t make any money here. It was a foolish idea from the start. This place is too far from anywhere to make a success. So what if you can catch fish? You can catch fish anywhere.”

  Her face was beginning to take shape in the gloom.

  “I stayed in Savannah when they moved here. My brother was just a boy, so he went along, but I was grown and I stayed there. They’d been down for only a few years before my mother died. Drowned just out from the beach.”

  Arlen remembered the way his mother had looked at the end, body and mind ravaged by fever, her eyes so far from the woman he’d known that he couldn’t look into them.

  “My father was devastated, and he needed help with my brother. I came down for a time, stayed for just over a year. When the lumber company in High Town went under, they killed off the railroad spur and this place was truly isolated. I couldn’t stand it anymore, and I left. I hated it here. Hated it. I moved back to Savannah. I was there for five years.”

  She paused, and he was about to ask why she’d returned, but something told him not to speak. Just let her talk.

  “During that time my father worked with Wade. After Prohibition ended, things got worse. The people involved were more ruthless, my father’s role more important. He was scared of it, then. After getting in so deeply, he decided he was scared. He began writing me letters, telling me that I needed to help him convince Owen to come and live with me in Georgia, that Owen couldn’t stay in this place anymore. I tried to talk to my brother, and I was ignored. Then he was arrested.”

  A soft breeze slid in through the open window and flattened the sheet against Arlen’s thigh.

  “I left Savannah and came back. Thinking”—her voice hitched slightly—“that I would save them.”

  In his room at the far end of the hall, Paul coughed and muttered. It brought Rebecca up, held her silent. The moon painted her shadow on the wall.

  “My father was terribly depressed. Near suicidal. He blamed himself for Owen’s situation, and he felt trapped here. He said anyone who betrayed Solomon Wade paid for it. That he’d follow you, find you no matter how long it took, and kill you. I didn’t believe that.”

  This time she was quiet much longer.

  Arlen said, “Tell me the rest. I don’t care how hard it is. You’ve got to tell me the rest.”

  “It was my idea,” she said finally, her voice unsteady now. “My father was willing to try, but it was my idea. He kept talking about how the only way you escaped Solomon was through death. I told him we’d use that. He was going to take the boat out and sink it. Fake his death. He would leave, go to a place we’d agreed upon, but I’d have to stay for a while. For it to fool Wade, I would have to stay here at least long enough to make it look like we hadn’t run. I’d sell the inn, and when my brother was released, there’d be no reason for him to return here. It wouldn’t concern anyone when we decided to leave Corridor County once my father was dead. It would seem logical.”

  “Your father actually did drown, though,” he said. “That’s what Thomas Barrett told me. So did he drown trying to scuttle the boat?”

  “You don’t drown with your throat cut.”

  He was silent for a time, and then he said, “No, you don’t. How can you be sure that’s what happened, though?”

  “I saw the body. Who do you think was supposed to get him off the boat before he sank it?”

  “You didn’t tell anyone.”

  “You have trouble believing that,” she said. “I’m sure you’ve never seen your own father with his throat cut because of the way you handled a situation.”

  No, not with his throat cut, Arlen thought. I saw my father spilling blood into the dust from a bullet, though, and you better believe it was because of the way I handled the situation. Difference was, I was right. Edwin Main might have been corrupt, but I did what was right. My father was dangerous. Insane.

  “By the time I got back here,” she said when he didn’t respond, “Solomon Wade was waiting. His message was simple: either I did what was asked, or my brother would end up like my father.”

  Another sound from Paul’s room, this time a garbled sort of cry. Talking in his sleep. Trapped in a nightmare.

  “Is your brother aware of any of this?”

  “No. How could I tell him while he was in prison?”

  “He knows your father is dead, though.”

  “Yes. But he believes that he drowned.”

  “And you believe he’ll be killed if you leave or seek help.”

  “I think that’s obvious.” She shifted her weight, the floor creaking beneath her, and said, “You want to know why Solomon Wade killed my father? It’s not just because what he knew made him a threat. I don’t think it had anything to do with that, really. It was the idea that he thought he could slip out of Wade’s control. The idea that he thought Wade had anything but total power over him.”

  It went quiet again, and the morning wind worked through the window and swirled her gown around her feet.

  “You wanted to know my reasons,” she said. “You wanted to know why I haven’t gone to someone for help. Said you couldn’t believe a woman like me would be intimidated into such an agreement with Solomon Wade.”

  She took a step closer to him, so he could see her face clearly, and said, “Do you believe it now?”

  He nodded. “You’ve been waiting for him to get out. Waiting for Owen.”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s almost out. He’ll be coming back.”

  “Yes.”

  “And then?”

  She wet her lips and broke eye contact.

  “It would seem to me,” he said, “whatever plan you’ve got, it’s going to need to be a damn good one.”

  “We’ll be leaving,” she said.

  “You don’t think Wade’s expecting that?”

  “I know that he is.”

  Arlen let his silence speak for him.

  “Well, what do you propose?” she said. “Stay? Live the rest of our lives with a gun to our heads?”

  “No, I wouldn’t propose that. But you’d better not make a mistake.”

  “After the last six months of my life,” she said, “surely you don’t really believe you need to explain that to me.”

  He gave that a nod.

  “Well, there you are,” she said. “My reasons. You said you had your own decision to make. You can make it with those in your mind.”

  He was waiting for more, expecting her to say something else, to implore him toward silence or trust, but instead she turned and walked almost soundlessly across the floor, opened the door, and slipped back out of the room.

  25

  THE NEXT MORNING they finished the generator shed and began work on the dock, and Arlen’s eyes wandered constantly, looking for Solomon Wade or Sheriff Tolliver or Tate McGrath and his sons. No one came. Paul sensed his distraction and
asked after it, and Arlen dismissed it as a headache. He had a bandage on his hand from Rebecca’s bite, but Paul didn’t inquire about that.

  She’d asked nothing of him. Told him her story and slipped back out of the room. What she wanted, evidently, was only his silence. She wanted her fourteen—now thirteen—days to wait until her brother’s release. No other help had been requested, no other plan shared.

  It was at lunch that Paul asked about the clock.

  The thing was massive, with a brass frame set in a beautiful piece of walnut that sloped away on both sides, its hands stopped dead on midnight. Arlen had seen it the day they’d entered with Sorenson but paid little attention to it then or anytime else.

  “My mother ordered that clock,” Rebecca said, and though her eyes were empty her voice seemed to be coming from somewhere out at sea. “She loved it. It’s been broken for years now.”

  “Maybe I’ll have a look,” Paul said.

  “I think you’d have to know about clocks.”

  “That’s what we all said about the generator, too,” Arlen pointed out.

  “Exactly,” Paul said. “Arlen, help me get that down?”

  The kid wanted so badly to have something to do for her. Let me help you seemed to issue forth from him like a constant shout, as if by helping her enough he’d convince her of something. I’ll show her that she needs me, he’d said. Now Arlen wanted to grab him and shake him and shout that he had no damn idea what she needed and what it could cost him. Her needs went beyond any that Paul could imagine. Her needs involved people who cut off a man’s hands and presented them to her in a box wrapped with twine, like a gift.

  “Arlen?”

  “Yeah,” Arlen said, blinking back into the moment. “Sure.”

  They brought a ladder in and, with Paul on the ladder and Arlen standing on the bar, got the whole piece down. It weighed less than the generator but not by much. Paul studied the casing and then went in search of a screwdriver. When he was gone, it was just Rebecca and Arlen in the barroom. She looked at him in silence for a few seconds and then said, “You’re still here.”