“What’s wrong, Grandma?”
She shook her head dismally, unable to speak. She looked up at Nathan, and Jerry stared sullenly at the young, handsome president of the bank.
“I take if you were just making a payment on your loan—the one that’s already overdue,” said Nathan.
“No,” said Jerry defensively, though he rankled beneath Nathan’s sarcasm: “Not yet. We got to wait until next week after the first berries sell. Bernes were late this year. I made a little installment on it, though, and—”
“Your ‘installments’ don’t amount to much, Jerry, twenty-five dollars a week on the three hundred fifty that’s due every month. That doesn’t work out just right, you know. You ought to have studied your arithmetic a year or two longer. If I don’t get a check soon, I’m just gone have to start proceedings...”
“Listen, Mr. Redfield,” cried Jerry, incensed: “We made every payment on that loan for the last three years —now we’re a couple of weeks late and you’re already talking about ‘proceedings’? What kind of ‘proceedings’? My granddaddy paid a mortgage on that place for thirty years, and when he died, my daddy finished paying it off. They never missed a payment. So why are you pushing this?” He looked about the bank in wonder, as if expecting someone to step forward to explain.
“Nathan Redfield!” gasped Evelyn at last: “Your daddy never spoke to me like this, and you shouldn’t either! Your daddy never spoke to his customers this way!”
“My daddy is laid up in the bed, Miz Larkin, and he’s not likely to get out of it to speak nice to you either. My daddy just don’t have a thing in the world to do with it any more.”
“Grandma, let’s go,” said Jerry, taking her by the arm, and pulling her up out of the chair. Casting angry agitated glances all around, they hurried out the door.
When Nathan returned to his desk behind the mahogany railing, a couple of the other officers came over to him, and leaning forward on their spread hands, said: “Hey, Nathan, what was all that about? Were you giving Evelyn Larkin a hard time, or were you just putting in your order for berries?”
Nathan tapped his desk blotter with the eraser of an unsharpened pencil. “She wanted to increase her loan, extend it three more years, and get five thousand dollars more. I told her we’d have to wait and see what this year’s crop was going to be like. She didn’t like that. She didn’t want it for the farm, she just wanted to buy Jerry a new Oldsmobile Toronado. And what that kind of thing costs, you and me and the Cantonment track couldn’t raise on July the Fourth weekend.”
The officers laughed at Evelyn Larkin’s impossible request, and returned to their desks, already embellishing the story that they would relate to all who might be interested.
Chapter 9
At ten o’clock that Friday morning, Jerry Larkin telephoned the sheriff’s office, and left the message that Margaret had not returned, that they had received no news of her, and that Evelyn, in grievous disappointment, had taken to her bed. Jerry had called the doctor, and was awaiting him now.
When Ted Hale returned from watching Belinda practice cheerleading at the high school stadium, he took this information with displeasure. Hysterical women of an advanced age were a great nuisance. You had to deal with them carefully, and hope they didn’t have heart attacks while you were just standing there.
Margaret Larkin, Hale believed firmly, was not missing, but had stayed over at someone’s house because of the storm, if she had been a couple of years older, Hale would have suspected that she was simply shacked up with some boy in a fourteen-dollar-a-night motel on Pensacola Beach, with pink walls and concrete floors.
This kind of thing had happened before. It was his duty to search for the missing girl, but it would all be so much wasted effort. After the second full day of investigation he would hear, from somebody unconcerned, that the girl had come back for supper the previous night and the family had not bothered to call him up.
At any rate, he didn’t intend to start knocking on doors, or posting the girl’s photograph on telephone poles yet, though he wouldn’t admit this to Evelyn Larkin. An easier and more promising course was to talk to Ed Geiger, who knew everything that went on in Babylon.
Geiger had been recently widowed and his new independence agreed with him. He went fishing every afternoon, leaving the store in the capable hands of Annie-Leigh Hooker, his late wife’s young niece.
Geiger was almost bald, and his entire head was burnt bright red. His shape was irresistibly suggestive of a watermelon stood on end. At work he wore white short sleeved shirts with a string tie, and dark striped pants from suits the jackets of which he had discarded. When he went fishing, Geiger changed his dark striped pants for khaki trousers with zippered pockets that he filled with live bait.
He was a pleasant, easygoing man, and considering that fishing was harmless, he had but one vice: gossip, He had stored more information on the inhabitants of Babylon and northern Escambia County than the welfare department, the Social Security Administration and the IRS put together. What he didn’t know probably hadn’t happened, and what he couldn’t predict probably wouldn’t come to pass. There was however nothing supernatural in his omniscience, for Geiger was reliant upon sources for his extensive knowledge: small, specialist, tributary gossips fed into him every day. He learned about the black population from his maid, who talked to him volubly over his lunchtime meal, standing cross-armed in the kitchen doorway while he bolted the food she had prepared for him. He knew about everyone under the age of twenty-one from Annie-Leigh Hooker, and via Ginny Darrish, principal of the high school, Geiger kept tabs on the intrigues among Babylon’s “society.” What these three females didn’t know, the sheriff did,
Ted Hale trusted Geiger, and knew that if he prefaced his questions with the admonition to say nothing for a time, Geiger would respect it. The sheriff walked easily out of the town hall, and entered the sporting goods store. He nodded to Annie-Leigh, a scrawny girl with thick, shortcut black hair. She sat on a high stool behind the counter, playing with a jackknife, and doing the crossword in the Pensacola News Journal.
“Hey, sheriff,” she said in her drawling voice: “What can I do for you?”
“Is Ed around?”
“You come to arrest him for his evil ways?” she said slyly.
“Ed’s got no evil ways, Annie-Leigh,” laughed the sheriff “Is he in back?” He nodded toward the closed door to the storeroom-and-office.
Annie's dull black eyes glistened suddenly; she closed them and sighed: “They didn't find Margaret, then?”
“How'd you know?!” cried the sheriff. He had spoken hardly two words, and the girl already knew why he was here.
“Easy. Jerry called this morning. I told him I hadn’t seen Margaret. Jerry said they didn’t know where she was. Their car was parked out front when I came to work, so I figured they must have gone to see you. Miz Larkin’s the type to get upset, and of course,” she added, “I don’t blame her. Now you’re here, not wanting to buy bait or anything, just wanting to see Ed, which leads me all to believe that Margaret hasn’t made it home yet.”
“You getting to be too much like Ed,” said the sheriff in a low, awed voice. “I don’t think I’m even gone be able to walk past your plate glass window no more without your being able to tell the whole town where I’ve been, where I’m going, and what I bad for dinner three days ago.”
“That’s right,” said Annie-Leigh, “you better go out the back way from now on.” She hopped off the high stool, and opened the door into the back. “Ed!” she called briefly: “Sheriffs here to talk about Margaret Larkin. Come on out!”
Annie-Leigh turned back to Male: “I’m worried.” She raised her eyebrows impassively: “Margaret knows how Miz Larkin worries, and if she could get back, she would have. Hell and high water—’scuse my language— and all that. And she surely would have called. That’s why I’m worried.”
Ed Geiger appeared at the door, and nodded to the sheriff. Hale returned
the nod, but continued to speak to Annie-Leigh: “Let me ask you something—”
“No,” said Annie-Leigh flatly, not allowing him to finish: “She wouldn’t have. And it doesn’t really matter whether she would have wanted to or not. Margaret loves her grandmother too much to worry her, and there’s nobody like Evelyn Larkin when it comes to worry.”
“You didn’t even let me ask the question!” protested Hale.
“Ted,” said Geiger, “Annie-Leigh is right. Margaret Larkin didn't go off with anybody at all, I mean, at least not of her own free will. Because if she had, she would have made up an excuse. Evelyn Larkin would have believed it, Jerry wouldn’t have, but they wouldn’t have been bothering you, in any case.”
“Well,” said the sheriff, reluctant to be convinced that the simplest explanation for Margaret’s disappearance was impossible, “Who has she been seeing lately?”
“Margaret doesn’t go out with boys,” said Annie-Leigh. “She hasn’t had but one date since Christmas, and that was with the Gillis boy, and the only reason she went out with him is because his daddy owns the garage where Jerry sometimes works, and Jerry asked her to do it for Mm. And she was in that night by ten o’clock, they couldn’t even have seen a whole double feature out at the Starlite if she was home in bed by ten o’clock. But you know, sheriff,” Annie-Leigh went on, with her head cocked to one side, “Jerry told me that she was supposed to be over at the school yesterday helping Mr. Perry with something or other, Mr. Perry’s sort of cute, and I think Margaret has a little bit of a crush on him. She was his assistant when he directed the eighth grade graduation.” “I'd go talk to Warren Perry if I was you, sheriff,” said Geiger.
“Ed,” said the sheriff: “Margaret was supposed to be on her way home, on her bike, just about the time the rain started.”
Geiger nodded: “I was out by the Styx bridge about that time. I felt three drops and packed up. I’m scared of lightning on that river, don’t mind the rain, but it looked like lightning. I came back here, didn’t see anybody on a bicycle. Up there at the red light, I pulled up aside of Ben Redfield with two six-packs on the front seat, but I didn’t see anybody else. It was Coors that Ben had, and I bet he drove all the way to Pensacola to get ’em. Nobody ’round here will carry Coors.”
The sheriff nodded and turned to go. “Well thanks, ya'll. It’s a good thing for the city budget that you two don’t charge for your information.”
He started cut of the store, shaking his head, but was brought to a halt by Geiger’s voice. It was the fisherman’s habit to hold something back for the end, a last fillip of gossip to show that the extent of his knowledge had been underestimated: “Of course, I don’t know how upset Evelyn Larkin really was this morning, if right after she goes in to report her own granddaughter missing, she runs direct across the street to the CP&M to take out a loan of six thousand six hundred and fifty dollars to buy Jerry a sky-blue Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme to ride back and forth to Pensacola in.”
Sheriff Hale looked questioningly at Ed Geiger and Annie-Leigh Hooker. “Is that true?”
“Probably not,” said Annie-Leigh: “It sounds like Miz Larkin, ’cause there’s nothing she wouldn’t do for Jerry and Margaret, but she was upset—I talked to Jay Neal this morning—and it doesn’t sound like Jerry either. He was with her, and he wouldn’t have let her do it. Besides, an Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme costs a lot more than that.”
“Where’d you hear it?” demanded Hal of Geiger,
“Leilah Tompkins told me when I was over at the bank this morning. She didn't say where she got it. ’Course, Nathan turned Evelyn down flat for the loan.”
“That don’t make no sense at all,” said Hale,
“I’m real worried,” said Annie-Leigh. She and her uncle exchanged glances, but would say nothing more to the sheriff.
Chapter 10
Shortly before noon, Sheriff Hale drove around again to the high school. He was disappointed to find that Belinda had already finished with cheerleading. Only three cars remained in the parking lot: the aquamarine Vega belonging to the principal of the high school, and two that he did not recognize. He had hoped to find Warren Perry, in order to ask him about the previous afternoon.
Hale decided that as long as he was here at the high school, he might as well talk to Ginny Darrish. It was possible she possessed information she had not yet turned over to Ed Geiger.
Ginny Darrish was the wife of the more prominent of Babylon’s two lawyers, which is to say that Charles Darrish had secured the business of James Redfield and the CP&M bank. Ginny was a good principal, not because she was anything like an administrator, but because teachers and students alike were fond and protective of her. She was a cheerful and pastel woman in her late forties. Her fleshy skin was bright pink, her eyes a translucent vivid blue, and her hair a shining silver. Everything about Ginny Darrish—her makeup, her clothing, her automobile, her entire house—was created, or bought, or painted, or redone in light soft colors. A particular powder that she wore left in Ginny’s wake a scent as soft as her unwrinkled cheeks.
People in Babylon, who found fault with everyone, objected to Ginny Darrish on three counts: She was an unrepentant gossip, she didn’t go to church, and she reveled in superstition. Ed Geiger was a bigger gossip than Ginny, and other women in Babylon had never seen the inside of a hymn book or the topside of a pew, but no one lived within such superstitious rigors as did Ginny Darrish. She wouldn’t drive on the night of a new moon; she wouldn’t open an umbrella indoors; she wouldn’t kill a spider; she wouldn’t begin any project on a Friday; she crossed her fingers whenever she went over a bridge. On a pantry shelf she kept three decks of tarot cards, two Ouija boards, a magic pendulum on a silver chain, and a stack of pamphlets that told her how to read the future from tea leaves, cloud formations, lines in the hand, and insect populations.
But on the whole, she was a kind and friendly woman, whose only real enemy in Babylon was Nathan Redfield. James Redfield’s first wife was Ginny’s maternal aunt, and had she died childless, and if James Redfield had not remarried, Ginny would have stood to inherit the CP&M bank and all the old man’s accumulated wealth. Her probable share was reduced to very little after the birth of his two sons, and shortly after Nathan’s return from the Air Force, he and Ginny had a falling-out over even that promised little. Nathan swore he would see to it that Ginny received nothing at all. But Ginny knew that the size of her legacy expanded and contracted with the tenor of Nathan’s relationship to his father; James Redfield, if he was displeased with his son, called in the lawyer— Ginny’s husband—and upped Ginny’s percentage of the take. She stayed out of the argument now, reckoning that Nathan’s ill temper would do more than her own blandishments, but had reserved one of the three sets of tarot cards to predict how she would fare in the old man’s will, as the sole living relative of his first wife.
The sheriff found Ginny in her office, just beyond the front door of the school. She motioned him inside, and he closed the door behind him. Briefly, he told Ginny about Margaret Larkin’s disappearance. She listened silently, her pink brow furrowed beneath her silver hair.
‘‘Well,” she said at last, “Margaret was here yesterday afternoon, sitting at a table in Warren’s room, helping him record supplies. He’d count and she’d write down. I saw ’em about three, when I went down the hall to the ladies’ lounge. Warren’s car was still here when I left about four. He’ll be here today too, but not till one.”
The sheriff nodded.
Ginny Darrish tapped a lavender fingernail against her coral lips. “Where you think Margaret is?” she said.
Hale shrugged. “Maybe she went to the beach. Maybe she just forgot to call her grandmother. Maybe she tried? and they weren’t home, or the lines were still down.”
“No,” said Ginny shortly: “I don’t know what happened, but it wasn’t that. Margaret knows how her grandmother can worry. Margaret would have hired a troop of Girl Scouts to ford the Styx if the phones did
n't work and the bridge was out, but she would have let Evelyn Larkin know where she was.”
“You think?” asked the sheriff.
Ginny Darrish nodded cannily. “You think she went off with some boy, don’t you?”
“Maybe,” said the sheriff warily, “maybe that’s what she did.”
“Margaret Larkin is fourteen, Ted. She’s just going into the ninth grade. If she’s dating at all I don’t even know about it. And in any case, I certainly don’t think she went off with a boy.”
“I sort of wish that was what happened though, Ginny, ’cause that would mean the girl is all right. Fourteen-year-old girls have run off before.”
Ginny eyed the sheriff severely. “Not fourteen-year-old girls who had grandmas like Evelyn Larkin.”
“Anyway,” said the sheriff, after a moment, “I want to speak to Warren. Maybe he knows something. I imagine that girl’s just sitting safe and dry somewhere, but we still got to find her.”
“Listen, Ted,” said Ginny, “as soon as I can leave here, I’m gone hightail it out to see Evelyn. She must be out of her mind.”
“She’s not in too good shape,” said the sheriff, and shook his head.
Ginny nodded: And I’m gone take my lucky sledgehammer out there, and hit her over the head with it, ’cause that’s about the only thing that's gone calm her down if Margaret isn’t back yet.”
Chapter 11
After dismissing her cheerleaders at eleven-thirty, Belinda Hale had driven home, showered and changed. Then leaving a lengthy and complicated note for her father, which did not tell him where she was going nor when she would be back, Belinda drove to the Redfields.
She entered the house through the kitchen, where she cheerily greeted Nina at the stove. Belinda had seen, when she first came to the Redfield house, that it was essential that she be on Nina’s good side. Nina’s weak spot was Mr. Red, and when Belinda made it clear that her primary loyalty was to the old man, Nina extended her affection heartily to the young girl.
Cold moon over Babylon Page 7