Nathan and Ben scrambled out of the way, and the car was precipitated forward, its bottom scraping harshly against the graveled earth, It moved not at all in the manner of a vehicle rolling down an incline, following gravity and momentum, but as if laboriously pulled with chains. The station wagon dropped nose-first into the Styx. It righted and sank after only a few moments.
Nathan stared at the water until the last of the air bubbles had broken blackly on the surface of the river. He smiled then and said: “Let’s get back.” He ran down the bluff, and hurried along the level track, not once glancing behind.
“Nathan,” cried Ben, hastening to catch up. “Nathan, please take that mask off. You don’t need it any more.”
“I’m just filthy!” cried Nathan, and reached up to unzip the hood at his neck. After removing and thrusting it into his back pocket, he wiped the sweat from his brow. “Good,” he said easily: “That’s all taken care of.”
Ben shook his head miserably: “Hey, Nathan, what we gone do now?”
“Nothing,” replied Nathan: “We don’t have to do anything. Everything is fine now. They’re not gone find that car where it is—the river runs deep there, nobody ever comes up to this part of the river. And even if they do find it in about a million years, they’re not gene know we had anything to do with it.”
“But everybody in town knows Evelyn Larkin thought you were the one who murdered Margaret.”
“And everybody in town thinks she was crazy to say that,” argued Nathan with a ghastly smile.
“But,” said Ben cautiously, “you did kill her, didn’t you?”
“Yes” said Nathan calmly: “But nobody knows that. And nobody’s gone find out. Not unless you tell somebody, that is,” he added lightly.
Ben shrugged and bit his lip; he took the implied threat seriously. “I’m not saying anything about it. I never said anything about those rattlesnakes, and I wasn’t hardly ten years old. If I could keep a secret then, I guess I can keep a secret now.”
“I guess you can,” said Nathan meaningfully.
“Nathan—”
“What?”
“Let me ask you though: Why did you kill Margaret Larkin?” Though they were alone in the forest, Ben whispered.
“Oh,” smiled Nathan, “just because...”
Part VI
The Coffinless Dead
Chapter 30
Ted Hale woke on Thursday morning, the eighth of June, oppressed with the knowledge that Margaret Larkin had been murdered exactly one week before, and that he had no idea who her killer was. The two suspects hardly deserved his consideration. Warren Perry was a small dark pusillanimous thing, always nervous about the pistol in Hale’s holster, even after the sheriff had assured him that it was unloaded. And Nathan Redfield was under the most cursory suspicion only because Evelyn Larkin was so adamant in her accusations of the banker, not because there was any possibility of his being the murderer.
The sheriff had not seen the Larkins since Tuesday, and he was conscience-pricked for that. This was, after all, an important case. It had been picked up by the Pensacola and Mobile papers, and he had heard that it had been written up in Sunday’s Tallahassee Daily Democrat. Unsolved murders were rare in Babylon. In the past ten years, several homicides had gone unpunished, it was true, but in each case, Hale had known the identity of the murderer and the all too justifiable motive. But Margaret Larkin had perished cruelly by vicious hands, and without sure reason. Hale didn’t at all care for the uncertainties of the case, and he wished that it would solve itself or go away.
Shortly after eight o’clock, while Belinda was still blearily wandering about the house, unable to decide whether to drink a glass of milk aid coffee or take a bath first, Hale got into the patrol car, and drove out to the Larkin blueberry farm. The morning was wet and warm, and the already high sun promised a sultry uncomfortable day. He raised the windows and turned on the air conditioner.
He noted the place, just before the Styx River bridge, where some animal had died bloodily, but the carcass had been dragged off into the Highway grass by scavaging animals. From the amount of blood, Hale assumed it had been at least a very large raccoon.
Turning into the Larkin driveway, Hale drove slowly up to the house, surprised not to see the station wagon there. He got out of the cruiser, walked first to the back, to make sure that the vehicle was not simply parked out of the sight of the driveway, and then he knocked on the back porch. No one came. The door was hooked, and he peered between the latticed boards. Evelyn's chair was pushed beneath the deal table, on which several hundred empty green cartons were neatly stacked. The morning light filtered unsteadily over the porch, and gleamed softly on a small puddle of water beneath Evelyn's chair. This only caught Hale's eye when the liquid suddenly drained away through crevices in the painted floor, leaving a black and grainy residue.
Hale turned thoughtfully down the back steps. He moved slowly around the far side of the house, glancing apprehensively at the curtained windows. Obviously that water had only just been spilled or it would have drained away before. Who was inside? And why did no one come to the door?
At every window, Hale paused, watching to see if the curtains moved. He had the uneasy feeling that someone stood concealed behind each set of drapes, but the intuition was just as strong that it was neither Jerry Larkin nor his grandmother that moved inside the house, window to window, matching his progress around the house.
Male mounted the front steps with every appearance of courage, and had raised his hand to knock, when his motion was arrested by a small sturdy click in the lock of the house door, as if the key had been turned. Someone was on the other side, but Hale could see nothing through the rusting screen and the white-curtained panes.
A trickle of black water, abruptly commencing, flowed out from underneath the door. Hale leapt backward, instinctively avoiding it. The water formed a small shallow pool with a vibrating surface, and then began to seep down between the floor boards to the sandy ground beneath the porch.
The sheriff watched nervously for a full minute as the water poured out beneath the door, slowly, deliberately, a gallon or more of the black impure liquid. Its odor was slight but noxious.
He balled his fists, uncurled them, then drew out his unloaded pistol, but was too frightened to call out.
The last of the water drained away, and he didn't dare look up at the small curtained panes in the wooden door behind the screen.
Hale waited for about fifteen seconds for the flow of water to begin anew, but it did not. He pulled open the screen, and with some trepidation, turned the knob of the wooden door. It was unlocked—whoever was inside the house had wanted him to enter. The realization was not reassuring. Kale's great desire was to turn and scurry to the patrol car. He could return later with his deputies, he could satisfy himself with telephoning. Jerry would answer, and all would be in order.
Hale cautiously pushed the door open with the barrel of his pistol. On the small blue rug before the door was a damp black stain. Hale stepped carefully over it. He eased the door shut behind him, found that the key was in the lock. He touched it, and his fingers came away with a black stain that he wiped with distaste on his trousers.
Hale paused, listened intently, heard nothing but the floor creaking beneath his shifting weight.
“Miz Larkin! Jerry!” he called weakly, and glanced into the two dimly illumined rooms on either side of the tiny entrance hall.
Hale flicked the overhead light in the parlor, and planting himself in the middle of the room, turned in a slow circle. Nothing appeared out of place. He moved to the window that looked toward the Styx River, and pulled the curtain aside slightly; beneath his fingers, the edge of the material was stained with the same black silt that he had found on the key. He drew his hand quickly away; whoever had turned the key in the door had also pulled back the drapes.
Looking around more carefully now, Hale found the stain everywhere: on the cushions of the couch, on the mantel
, on the walls beneath a framed photograph of Margaret. He hurried across the entrance hail to the dining room, ashamed of his own fearful haste.
A single chair had been pulled out from the head of the table, and the black damp stain covered the seat. Hale didn’t look for more, but stumbled toward the kitchen.
Here the white tile floor, the white metal cabinets, the white linoleum counter tops, ail the white porcelain appliances bore the black amorphous stains, finely grained black dirt, damp and faintly gleaming. The light noxious odor that he had caught on the front porch was stronger here.
The door onto the back porch was open, and he staggered out there, reaching for the latch. Something had been in the house, was still perhaps inside with him. He had to get out. Certainly Jerry and Evelyn weren’t there, and in any case he wasn't going upstairs to look for them. He had caught sight of the black stains on the stairs leading to the second floor.
He could come out later with his deputies. He could send his deputies out alone. He—
There was a noise behind him, in the kitchen—a soft wet slap, as of a sodden sponge falling to the floor. Hale had already unlatched the back door, but be turned instinctively and stared into the kitchen. A tiny naked arm, gray and wet dangled over the edge of the sink. The slender fingers unclutched slowly out of a fist as it slowly drew back into the basin.
Without thinking, Hale rushed back into the room. He reached out for the hand as it slipped over the edge and flopped wetly against the porcelain. The forearm withdrew easily into the drain, but the hand from the wrist down was still visible.
Hale picked something up out of the drain—a fork as it turned out—and stabbed at the gray hand, that looked small and bloated. It broke loathsomely open like a jellyfish, and the liquid drained away immediately, leaving behind a black stain on the porcelain. Hale fled the house.
Chapter 31
“Insects!” cried Ted Hale to himself as he drove away from the Larkin blueberry farm. His sweaty hands slipped on the steering wheel, and over and again he told himself that all he had seen in the house was due to “insects!”
He had seen nothing, he told himself, nothing but mildew on the furniture and on the walls. Thai was because of the house’s proximity to the Styx coupled with the recent heat. It probably happened out there every year, and no matter how good a housekeeper Evelyn Larkin was, she couldn’t keep out the mildew. A house damaged by flood, as the Larkin house had been, could never be set entirely back to rights.
What he had seen in the sink, however, was insects. How one insect, how a thousand insects moving in concert could form the likeness of a human arm and hand Hale couldn’t determine. How they could explode into brackish water, Hale had no idea. But these questions the sheriff set conveniently aside. It was a comfort—more than that, it was a psychological necessity, that he believed that whatever he had seen in the kitchen was only insects. It wouldn’t have happened if the Larkins had good screens.
Hale did not return directly to the station, but went home first, to change his clothing, which was soaked through with nervous perspiration. From the kitchen, where Belinda sat groggily nursing her milk and coffee and leafing through an old copy of Glamour, Hale dialed the Larkins number, and allowed the telephone to ring twenty times before he gave up.
“Who you calling like that, Daddy?” said Belinda.
“Old Miz Larkin...”
“Don’t sound like she’s there.”
Hale shook his head sadly, but did not tell his daughter that he had already been out to the farm.
Hale realized now that he must return to search the second floor of the house. He could think of no reason why the Larkins would not be home early in the morning at the first peak of the blueberry season. The car was gone, so they were off somewhere, but perhaps it was only to put flowers on Margaret’s grave, a week’s anniversary of flowers.
He dialed the number again; still no answer. He determined to drive by the cemetery to see how recently the flowers had been laid on the grave. If they were not fresh, he would send his deputies out to the house, and let them go up the stairs. Maybe his deputies weren’t susceptible to mildew; maybe the insects in the sink would have dispersed by that time. Perhaps Evelyn and Jerry Larkin would have returned.
Hale kissed his daughter, returned to the cruiser, and drove eastward through town to the cemetery where Margaret Larkin was buried. The flowers on her grave were wilted; they had not been placed there that morning. Preoccupied, he drove then to town hall, but on impulse, went first into Ed Geiger’s store, and asked him if he knew any reason Evelyn and Jerry might not be at home this morning.
Geiger shook his head. He was troubled that he did not know, for it seemed a peculiar thing that wanted explanation. Reluctantly, he referred the sheriff to Ginny Darrish. “She’s keeping close with Evelyn Larkin these days, and she might know. I haven’t heard a thing, not a thing about the Larkins since day before yesterday.”
Hale went to his office and made several telephone calls, the first to the high school, though he doubted that, in the summer, Ginny Darrish would be in her office so early. The second was to the Darrish home, where there was no answer either. He called Charles Darrish in his office, and asked the lawyer if he knew where his wife could be reached.
“Ted,” said Darrish: “I would suppose now that she’s well on her way to Tallahassee. There’s a meeting of some kind with the State Board, and she said she doesn’t think that she’ll be back until late tomorrow night. I don’t expect her before then, because I imagine she’ll stop in Pensacola on her way back. You know that steak- and-seafood place out by—”
“She wouldn't have taken Evelyn Larkin with her, would she?” Hale asked cautiously.
Darrish laughed, “No, she didn’t say anything about it, and I don’t imagine she would have. I mean, if it was just a day trip, maybe she would have taken Evelyn along, to get her mind off things and all, but Ginny’s staying at the Ramada tonight with a woman from over at Jay, so I don’t much imagine that Evelyn is with her. Why?”
“Well,” said Hale: “I was out there this morning, and there was nobody around. It seemed funny, that s all. Car’s gone. It seemed funny that both Jerry and Evelyn were gone, at this time of year I mean. I was just thinking that Ginny might have some kind of idea where they might be.”
“You make a breakthrough on this case? You find out who killed Margaret?”
“No,” said Hale: “I just wanted to make sure they were all right, that’s all.”
“Why shouldn’t they be?”
“No reason,” said Hale: “It just seemed funny that they weren’t there.”
“Well, I tell you,” said Darrish, after a small pause: “I tell you where they might be, now.”
“Where?” said Hale quickly.
“Now I don’t know if you knew it, you might have heard it from Ed Geiger, because I know Ginny sometimes tells him things, but yesterday Evelyn and Jerry came by here, asking me to represent them against Nathan Redfield, and of course I was nice to 'em and all, but there was nothing I could say but no. Now Evelyn get all heated up and upset about it, and said she was going to Pensacola to see some other lawyer about it, and find somebody who would represent her.”
Hale considered this, and then asked: “Did she say who it was she was going to see?”
“No. I asked her, just curious and all, but she wouldn’t say. I don’t know who she was going to try to get. I guess she could just go through the yellow pages under ‘Lawyer,’ but I don’t know where they were going to get the money for a retainer. I mean, if I had taken ’em on, I wouldn’t have charged—Ginny wouldn’t have let me —but I wasn’t about to start proceedings against Nathan Redfield for murdering Margaret Larkin.”
“No,” agreed Hale, “of course not. But if they went down to Pensacola yesterday, they ought to be back by now.”
“Well maybe,” said Darrish: “But maybe not.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, Jerry was
saying something about relatives in Pensacola, and staying there for a few days, keeping Evelyn away from the house and so forth until she gets over Margaret a little. I hope he can keep her down there, being away from the house will do her more good than anything else right now.”
“You think Jerry’d stay away during the berry season?” asked Hale.
“Well,” said Darrish, “I think he’d do just about anything for his grandmother. She was out in the hall for a few minutes, and he said something to me about arranging for the place to be sold. It doesn’t make any money any more, he said, and every season they were going deeper in debt. I told him he ought to give me a call from Pensacola if he wants to sell the place, and I'd put it up.”
“I see,” said Hale, after a moment. “Listen, Charles, if Jerry does call, you tell him to give me a call too, at the station, at home, it doesn’t matter. I want to talk to him for a minute...”
“I’ll do that.”
“And listen, Charles—”
“What?”
“You might not have such an easy time unloading that place.”
“Why not?”
“That house is not in such good condition as I thought. The time the Styx rose a few years back, I think it did something to the place—”
“Did what?”
“Damp rot,” said Hale slowly: ‘That’s all, I guess, just damp rot.”
Chapter 32
Charles Darrish was not so instinctual a liar as to be able to fashion extemporaneously the story that he had told Ted Hale of the probable whereabouts of Evelyn and Jerry Larkin, He only repeated what Nathan Redfield had told him to say in case anyone asked. Darrish had without much difficulty convinced Hale of the plausibility of the fabrication, but Darrish didn’t know how he was to explain it to his wife when she returned from Tallahassee the following night. Ginny Darrish would know that the Larkins had no relatives in Pensacola, and would not accept the tale that Darrish had told the sheriff.
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