Floating Dragon

by Peter Straub

  Martin struggled to stay on his feet, and bounced forward another step. The water was up to his chin. He lifted his feet from the stony floor and paddled his arms. That was all the swimming he knew how to do. “Tommy!” he yelled when he realized that his feet could no longer touch the bottom. His brother paid no attention, but continued swimming toward the buoys. Martin paddled a few feet farther out. His shirt felt heavy, heavy. His head went under, and he desperately inhaled half a pint of burning seawater. Spluttering as his head surfaced again, he windmilled his arms, taking himself farther out past the end of the breakwater. Then his head went under again. A huge black shape opened its mouth and darted toward him.

  Thomas kept swimming until his arms were too heavy and slow to lift—he had gotten more than fifty feet past the buoys. His body felt warm and tired. He let his head slip under the water, jerked it up when water splashed into his nose, did another overhand stroke, and then slid backward into the water as if something on the bottom were sucking him down.

  * * *

  Half an hour after the first Bloody Mary was poured at brunch in the Sawtell Country Club, a woman named Rae Nestico-Bell carried her beach chair down to the far end of Gravesend Beach to get away from the noise of a volleyball game eight teenage boys had set up near her original place. Besides the shouts and the flying sand, what drove her away were the leers and stares the boys directed her way whenever they thought she might be looking at them. Mrs. Nestico-Bell had reached the first of the boundaries that mark off the private beaches, and she was just putting down her chair at the edge of the seawall below the Van Horne house when she saw two oddly shaped bundles of sand and weed rolling in the waves directly before her. She dropped her chair and took a step forward. From one of the bundles a white foot extended. She clenched her hands in front of her mouth and began to call for help, at first so quietly that the boys playing volleyball did not hear her.

  These images, the screaming of a woman in a bikini and the happy pounding of eight teenage boys down a stony beach, marked the true ending of the events of Saturday, the seventh of June, in the year 1980. The first threshold had been crossed.

  2

  Naked Swimmers

  1

  By Monday, the ninth of June, word had spread through town that the killer of Stony Friedgood and Hester Goodall had been shot to death while committing a burglary on the Golden Mile; no one in the police department had expressed this view publicly, but off-duty Hampstead officers in bars on the Post Road and Riverfront Avenue talked about the way a gutsy little doctor named Wren Van Horne walked into his living room with a pistol and shot down an armed housebreaker—who had his gun out, ready to kill the owner! That was the deciding point. “You wait,” these officers breathed into the receptive ears around them, “there aren’t going to be any more killings in Hampstead for a long time. We’re done with that guy.” The bartenders and the other customers went home and told their wives and husbands and parents that Hampstead was safe again, and the wives and husbands and parents went out to their grocery stores and bowling alleys and Nautilus exercise rooms and dance classes and told their clerks and instructors and partners that Hampstead had nothing to worry about anymore. The monster who had savaged Mrs. Friedgood and Mrs. Goodall was dead. “Of course we’ll never be able to prove it,” the policemen had said in the bars, and “Of course they’ll never be able to prove it,” the wives said to their hairdressers and vendors of baguettes, “but he had to be the man. Why, he wasn’t even from around here! I heard he was from Florida . . . from New York . . . from Illinois.”

  Sarah Spry answered the phone at her desk on Monday morning and heard Martha Gable, one of her oldest friends, babble for ten minutes about somebody getting shot and somebody having a bagful of antique silver and somebody not being a problem anymore, and finally had to say, “Martha, I think you’d better slow down and spoon-feed me. I can’t make head or tail out of this.” When she finally got the story out of Martha, she cursed herself for not checking in with the desk officers at the police station as soon as she arrived—she usually did, but this morning her editor had hit her with the news about the O’Hara boys and suggested that before she met Richard Allbee for his interview, she might swing over to the O’Hara house and talk to the boys’ mother.

  “And what would be the good of that?” she had snapped, still trying to see around the deaths of those two kids—kids she had seen about once a month since they had been born.

  “You’re a friend of the O’Haras, aren’t you?” Stan Brockett asked her.

  “So what?” she nearly yelled. “You want me to ask Mikki O’Hara how it feels to have her children drown? Do you want me to ask her how the death of her children will affect her work?”

  Mikki Zaber O’Hara was one of Hampstead’s many semi-professional painters. She had shows and openings in local galleries; her husband, a gem appraiser with an office on Gramercy Park and another in Palm Springs, had had a studio built for her in their attic, but she sold paintings almost entirely to her family and her friends.

  “No,” Stan Brockett had said. “Her work never was anything but deep-dyed shit, and you know it. I want you to ask her what her kids were doing out on the beach around three in the morning.”

  “What do you mean, three in the morning? Mikki O’Hara would never have let her kids play outside at that hour.”

  “The coroner says that they must have entered the water around then. So ask her about it.”

  “I’ll do it,” Sarah had agreed, “but only because I know you’re wrong. And her paintings are beautiful. I’ve got one hanging in my living room.”

  “Then you’d better keep reviewing her openings,” Stan Brockett said. “Try to set it up for around two, two-thirty, okay? I want to see both pieces by six tonight.”

  And that gave her about an hour and a half to write each piece, which would not be a problem for her; and she still had the whole morning to do the “What Sarah Saw” column and her review of the White Barn Players’ production of Hot l Baltimore. She was assembling the information for her column when the telephone rang; she picked it up to hear Martha Gable incoherently trying to tell her that the killer of the two women had been shot by Dr. Wren Van Horne in a burglary attempt.

  “I heard it from Mr. Pascal at Everything Bread, and he said that he had heard it from a customer who had heard it from a policeman,” Martha Gable said. “So I wanted to call you and see if it was really true. But, Sarah—the policeman said it was true. He said we’d never have to worry about that man again.”

  As soon as she could get Martha off the phone, Sarah called Dave Marks at the police station. Dave Marks was the desk officer on duty when Sarah came to work most mornings, and over the years they had worked out a mutually satisfying relationship. Dave Marks gave Sarah any important information from the previous night, and she got his picture into the Hampstead Gazette whenever she could. When the Gazette ran its pictures of the Memorial Day parade, there was Officer Dave Marks striding prominently along with his fellow officers; when the Gazette ran a piece on teenage drinking late at night on Sawtell Beach, there was a picture of Officer Dave Marks leaning on the guardrail at the beach parking lot, looking youthful and authoritative. Sarah got her information before any of her competitors at the Norrington Highlife or the Patchin Advocate, and Dave Marks got a lot of attention from female police buffs who thought he was a celebrity.

  “This guy was Gary Starbuck, and he was a biggie,” Dave Marks told Sarah. “He’s been breaking into houses all his life, traveling all over the country. I betcha this Starbuck guy had about six, seven hundred thousand scattered here and there in various accounts. We’re going to open his house up so the folks can walk through and identify their property—we think he’s done at least twenty burglaries in Hampstead since he arrived. You oughta see his place, Sarah. It’s like some kind of a cave, all that stuff he’s got in there. I guess he just ran out of luck. Dr. Van Horne shot him once, and that was all it took.”

&n
bsp; “Will Wren Van Horne have to answer any charges?” Sarah asked.

  “Hell, no,” Officer Marks said. “He shot Starbuck in the commission of an armed robbery. The son of a bitch had his weapon right in his hand. Van Horne’ll be lucky if the chief doesn’t bring him down to the station, declare a press conference, and give him a medal. Cops all over the country have been looking for this guy for at least fifteen years. It’s funny—he was just like his father. This guy’s old man lived just the same way. Work a town, fence all the stuff, move out fast, rent a house somewhere else. He was caught once, over a forty-year career, and did fourteen months in jail. The old man dies two years ago, in a nursing home in Palm Beach, he leaves his kid a pile of money, and the kid carries on where he left off. Like it’s the family business, you know?”

  “Did Starbuck do the murders?” Sarah asked bluntly. “I hate to say it, but he sure doesn’t sound like the type.”

  Dave Marks was quiet for a long time. Then he sighed. “I had three calls about that already this morning. People wanna believe what makes them happy, you know? We never related Starbuck to the murders, and we never will. There might be a couple of our guys who think he was the one, but you know what that is, Sarah? It’s hard for a cop to face that a guy like that is actually running around free. Every day he isn’t caught is like another insult, see?”

  “Yes, I see,” Sarah said. “I was afraid of that. But a lot of people are going to believe that they don’t have to worry about a stranger showing up at the door anymore.”

  “If it’s a stranger,” Dave Marks said. “Well, let’s get off that subject. You want the rest of the stuff or do you want to wait for the file?”

  “Anything big?”

  “A traffic fatality. A Leslie McCloud of Charleston Road. McCloud was going about the speed of light up I-95 and killed a couple of kids from West Haven coming home from New York.”

  “Was he drunk?”

  “There was enough booze in him to float a navy,” Dave Marks said.

  “I’ll wait for the file.”

  “He was some kind of big shot.”

  “I’ll still wait for the file.”

  2

  Patsy had heard nothing of Gary Starbuck’s sudden end, nor that the murders were now supposed to be solved. She had not been to a hairdresser, to an exercise room or a dance class or even a grocery store since Saturday night. She had returned home from Graham Williams’ house not long after one-thirty, seen with no surprise that Les was not home, and went to bed in the spare room. She had noticed that his clubs were gone: Les would play golf all day, then eat at the club and sit in the lounge until closing time. He would be getting angrier and drunker, drunker and angrier. Tomorrow he would boil over, and begin beating her again.

  This time she would fight back, Patsy vowed. This time, she would not go into a defenseless crouch. She would kick him—this time she would kick him in the balls, if he gave her half a chance. At Graham Williams’ house, she had gone through an extraordinary array of emotions, from terror to humiliation to love, and what was most extraordinary to her was that the other three were not threatened or disgusted by all that had happened to her. They were simply calmly wonderfully there: they accepted her. If she had shown so much of herself in front of Les, he would have ordered her out of the room. Somehow, that she’d had a fit (setting the cause aside, for the moment), that she had then passed out and afterward experienced unhesitating love for the two men who had made sure she wouldn’t concuss herself or swallow her tongue, that then she had apparently found that she had a telepathic link with a teenage boy—somehow Les would have seen all this as primarily a threat to his job.

  That was not at all how the wife of a corporate vice-president was supposed to spend her Saturday night. Even through her deep exhaustion, Patsy felt rage—Les had put her into a straitjacket, her marriage had walled her up within iron conventions. She now remembered all the discussions Les and she had had soon after their marriage. –You can’t act like that, Patsy, Les had said. –Like what? –Like you were acting with Johnson (or Young, or Olson, or Gold). –I wasn’t acting any special way at all. –I know, but it looked like you were flirting with them. And if enough people think you were flirting with Johnson (or Young, or Olson, or Gold, or any of the twenty other young executives Les had climbed so expertly past), then we’ll never get the Chicago posting.

  Les had got the Chicago posting, rising so far above Johnson and the others that he could see the molt in their hairlines, they had moved to an apartment twice the size of their New York apartment, Les could afford to buy five new suits and a fistful of new striped neckties, he had his name on the door and a Bigelow on the floor . . . and he had started hitting her. He had four drinks instead of one when he came home from the office. He stopped talking to her; he had stopped even listening to her. He worked nine-hour days, ten-hour days, then twelve-hour days. On the weekends he played golf with clients, with accounts, never with people; Les had stopped knowing people.

  Because of one client, he took up skeet shooting. Because of another, he started going to the Bears games in the fall. Another got him into the Athletic Club. Les McCloud was ambitious and successful and admired. When he came home at night to the woman who had known him when he was only ambitious, he had his four drinks, grumbled about her plans for dinner, and started to short-circuit. Then she could see the Les driven desperate and half-loony by the twelve-hour days, the constant pressure of reports and decisions and responsibility. And then he started to hit her.

  If he tries that again, Patsy swore to herself, I won’t just kick him in the balls, I’ll go after him with a knife. He can’t come in loaded after playing golf all day and decide that it’s time to show little Patsy who’s the boss. I’ll stick a knife in his arm if he tries that again.

  It was as if the entire history of her marriage since Les had objected to the way she spoke to Teddy Johnson gave license to that image—herself jabbing a long carving knife into her husband’s arm. She fell asleep with that picture in her mind, where it simmered in an angry glow of moral satisfaction.

  Just past four o’clock in the morning, Bobo Farnsworth, still working double shifts, woke Patsy up to tell her that her husband had died in a fatal accident in the east-bound lanes of highway I-95.

  * * *

  Patsy knew that once Les had been good, as good anyhow as his world and character permitted, and that his goodness had been starved to death on what his career fed it. His onetime shyness had turned into social bullying, as on the night of the horrible dinner party with the Allbees, Ronnie, and Bobo; his sunniness had turned to calculated heartiness; his humor had turned to acid; and his unaffected love for her had turned to grumpy jealous possessiveness. She mourned what there was to mourn. She had felt a moment of shocked guilt that around the time Les had immolated himself in his Mazda she was imagining pushing a knife into his arm, but that guilt lasted only long enough to be recognized. In some sense Les had stopped being her husband the day she had refused to make lunch for him—the day she had met Tabby Smithfield during Dr. Lauterbach’s hour—and that momentary guilt had not earned enough to pay its way. It was for some other woman, not for her. If she felt guilt, it was for the teenagers Les had killed.

  * * *

  On that Monday, Patsy had the morning to fill before going to the funeral home to consult with Mr. Holland. She did not look forward to the meeting. Mr. Holland was a fussy little man who had been so well trained to his profession by his father and grandfather that he never betrayed any human feeling whatsoever—he was a propriety machine, and if he had ever had any idiosyncrasies they had been ground to dust many years before. Mr. Holland knew the McClouds, and he was not going to be happy with the idea of cremation. Not only would he want to sell her an expensive coffin, he would want to avoid a scene with Les’s parents.

  Patsy opened Les’s closet, a cedar-lined walk-in a few steps from the bed. He had claimed it for his own immediately after they had moved, giving her the dark
er, less convenient closet next to the bathroom door. Here hung his twenty suits, his ten jackets, here were his fifteen pairs of shoes in a neat row, each stuffed with a wooden shoe tree. In wooden cubicles his shirts and sweaters made neat stacks. From a hook beside the ranks of suits dangled four pairs of suspenders, one with a pattern of death’s-heads. Drawers concealed stacks of starched pocket handkerchiefs and ironed socks.

  I will cremate him, Patsy said to herself. I will.

  She brushed her fingers against the sleeve of a dark blue cashmere jacket, and then jerked her hand back. The soft material felt like a rebuke.

  What could she do with all these clothes? Give them to his parents? Goodwill? She had to select the suit to give the undertaker.

  She did not want to touch his clothes, and she did not want to go to Bornley & Holland to see Mr. Holland, she did not want to put up his parents and listen to them going through the inevitable cycle of criticism and mollification. (I don’t like to say this, Patsy, but is your house always so messy? Of course, I know you young women see things differently now.)

  If I had any character, Patsy thought, I’d give the clothes to Goodwill and put Bill and Dee in a motel. Laura Allbee would have been capable of such a gesture.

  Patsy wandered back down the hall to the spare bedroom. It was here that she was most comfortable. She supposed that when Bill and Dee came, she’d have to give them this room and move back into that other room, so redolent of Les and her marriage. She ripped the sheets off the bed she had been using, and put on her newest, prettiest ones.

  * * *

  Patsy was walking toward the living room when the phone began to ring.

  When she lifted the receiver, she heard a man’s voice saying, “Patsy? Patsy McCloud? This is Archie Monaghan.”

  “Oh, yes. Hello.” The name was barely familiar.