The Complete Mystery Collection

by Michaela Thompson

  Hurricane Season: St. Elmo, Florida, 1952

  Hurricane season comes when the year is exhausted. In the damp, choking heat of August and September, the days go on forever to no purpose. Hurricanes linger in the back of the mind as a threat and a promise. The threat is the threat of destruction. The promise is that something could happen, that the air could stir and become clammy, the heat could lift, the bay start to wallow like a huge humpbacked animal.

  If a hurricane came, there would be something to do besides drink iced tea on the front porch and take long, sweat-soaked naps in the afternoon; there would be something to talk about besides how hot it is. So hurricanes linger in the back of the mind.

  The town of St. Elmo is in northwest Florida on a corner of land that juts into the Gulf of Mexico. Tourists bound for Miami, or Palm Beach, or Fort Lauderdale do not see St. Elmo or know about it. In their rush to the south, they do not pass near it. They want palm trees and hibiscus; St. Elmo has scrub oak, and miles of sawgrass through which salt streams meander, and acres of pine woods. It has broad, slow-moving brown rivers lined with cypress swamps.

  Water is a presence, and people live in connection with it. They fish, or deal in oysters, scallops, and shrimp. On the beach road, there are fisheries built on pilings over the water, corrugated iron oyster shacks, shrimp boats with swathes of net. People travel by boat where the roads don’t go—across the bay to St. Elmo Island or down the sloughs deep into the river swamp.

  The beaches near St. Elmo are wide and white, unmarked except for the curving line of the sea wrack. Jerry-built piers, weathered to soft gray, stagger into the bay, and on them an occasional fisherman flicks a line.

  About seven miles out of town, opposite one of these piers—a pier bigger and more sturdy than some—is a weathered white frame structure. A sagging wooden telephone booth leans near the corner of the building, and two pumps of Gulf gas stand under the breezeway in front. Metal signs, rusting in the salt air, advertise Ice, Live Bait, Fresh Sweet Honey, Coca-Cola. Above the door, on a faded blue sign, is written Trulock’s Grocery & Marine Supply. This is the landing where the ferry Island Queen docks three times a day on its trips back and forth to St. Elmo Island. The store, and the house across the road where Lily and Aubrey Trulock live, are St. Elmo Landing.

  Across the bay, a dark green line on the horizon, is St. Elmo Island. During the twenties St. Elmo was a resort, with a reputation that spread as far away as Atlanta and Birmingham. There was a boardwalk and a hotel, the Elmo House, with gingerbread trim and red-and-white striped awnings, and a seawater pool near the ocean.

  The great days of St. Elmo were brief and have been over a long time. The Elmo House is boarded up, loosening at the joints in the wind and blowing sand. Adventurous lovers and beer-drinking teenagers have found their way inside and left crude messages. The pool, drained long ago, now contains only sand, occasional rainwater, dried seaweed, discarded egg cases from marine creatures.

  The Elmo House sags nearer to the earth. Every year, people wonder if it will survive another hurricane season.

  1

  The Womanless Wedding

  In August 1952, the St. Elmo Men’s Lodge put on a Womanless Wedding.

  The lodge members had talked about other ways of raising money—a talent show, a fish fry—but these were rejected. Donald La Grange, whose tap dancing was always the hit of any St. Elmo talent show (especially the finale to “Swanee”) was laid up after twisting an ankle chasing his bird dog through the woods. As for a fish fry, the men thought soon everybody would be fish-fried out, it being an election year. There hadn’t been a Womanless Wedding in St. Elmo since ’48, when Eldred Segrist ruined everything by setting his wig on fire with one of the candles. It was time for another.

  Ticket sales were brisk at fifty cents apiece. The St. Elmo Elementary School auditorium would be full. Although he had vowed never to do it again after what had happened the last time, Luke Draper agreed to sing his falsetto “O Promise Me.” And despite his reelection campaign against a strong challenge by LeRoy (“Gospel Roy”) Mclnnes, the First Baptist choir director, Congressman Robert (“Snapper”) Landis agreed to be the preacher.

  The preacher was a good role for Snapper. It was fairly dignified, since he wouldn’t have to mess around with wigs and falsies; but he’d also get to use his politician’s voice and might even get to work some words about the Communist Threat into the invocation.

  On the evening of the performance, people gathered in the sandy schoolyard, avoiding the heat of indoors. Teenaged girls in freshly ironed sundresses giggled and eyed the teenaged boys draped over parked cars. Children, oblivious to the heat, screamed and chased each other while their mothers watched languidly. Men greeted each other with uneasy camaraderie and talked about the frogs they’d gigged the last time they’d gone frogging, or how many squirrels they’d shot recently.

  Male laughter drifted from the lighted classroom where the wedding’s cast was getting into costume. With the onset of deep dusk, the mosquitos got bad and drove everyone indoors.

  Lily and Aubrey Trulock arrived while the crowd was trooping into the auditorium. The room was filled with the slapping sound of hard wooden seats being folded down. At either end of the stage, in front of the threadbare red curtain, were white florists’ baskets filled with balloons. Lily hadn’t much wanted to come, she told herself. It was, after all, seven miles in and seven miles back to the Landing. But Aubrey was a lodge member, even though he hadn’t been to the meetings (or much of anywhere else, except his apiary) since his heart attack. He hadn’t said anything, but Lily believed he wanted to come, and since he’d been willing to walk out and get in the car, she supposed she was right.

  Now that they were here, though, she felt irritated. Instead of going down to the first two rows of seats, where his lodge buddies were waiting to cheer on their fellows, Aubrey hung back and sat meekly by her in the middle of the auditorium.

  “There’s Jack. Don’t you want to see Jack?” asked Lily, fanning herself with her church fan, a cardboard picture of Jesus Risen from the Tomb stapled to a wooden stick. She glared at his perspiring pink forehead as, eyes downcast, he shrugged. “I expect Jack would like to see you,” she said.

  When she got no response she craned her head around to survey the crowd.

  Lily liked to keep up with what was happening. She was a wiry woman in her mid-fifties. Her skin was dark brown and roughened by years of exposure to the coastal sun, her light green eyes surrounded by wrinkles from squinting in the glare. She could run a boat, pump gas, open oysters. She had more energy than it took to keep a store, and she used it to stay abreast of events.

  Wesley Stafford was across the way, she saw, standing slightly apart from a crowd of Methodist youth. Wesley, a ministerial student from Montgomery who had worked with the young people for the summer, looked ill at ease. His companions seemed to be cracking jokes among themselves and ignoring him. She had known from the beginning, Lily told herself, that Wesley was too gawky and intense to make an impression on the youth, since they had been spoiled last year by a young music minister who played the banjo. Something about Wesley—with the short sleeves of his shirt flapping around his thin arms, his hair wildly cowlicked, his eyes behind glasses fixed in a nervous stare—reminded Lily of the flamingo on a postcard her friend Theo had sent her from Miami once. Wesley’s elbows, she realized, looked like that flamingo’s knees.

  Wesley’s gaze was fixed on the back of the room. Twisting her head, Lily saw Diana Landis slouched against the back wall of the auditorium. Lily clucked. “Snapper’s girl is here,” she whispered to Aubrey, and turned to look again. Diana had never dressed in a manner appropriate to a congressman’s daughter. Tonight she had on shorts and a peasant blouse that seemed to be a little too large, since it was slipping off one shoulder. Her hair was a tangle of black curls around her sullen-looking olive-skinned face. It was a mystery to Lily why the men kept after her the way they did. Maybe it was her wild reputati
on.

  Diana could be trusted to embarrass her father if she possibly could. She had undoubtedly lost him votes in the churches, where Gospel Roy was making the most of it. But if Diana had lost Snapper votes in the churches, it was possible she’d made up for it in the bars, where her acquaintance was widest. Most of St. Elmo, it seemed to Lily, swore by one or the other institution.

  Gospel Roy had been out to Trulock’s Grocery & Marine Supply to discuss the matter. “I’m not one to talk about a man’s kin,” he’d said, leaning so close Lily had smelled the Vitalis on his wavy gray hair. “But I say, a state congressman has to set an example. When you got a weak link—well, Joe McCarthy’s been showing us what can happen when you got a weak link.” (Of Gospel Roy’s six children, one was a football star at Auburn, one was a lay preacher, and all the rest sang in the First Baptist choir.)

  It hadn’t occurred to Lily that Diana Landis might be part of the International Communist Conspiracy, but she supposed she could see some logic in it. Diana was a weak link where men were concerned, and any male International Communist who visited St. Elmo could probably get well acquainted with her without too much effort. The best Lily could think of to do was give Roy a free NuGrape and say, “I don’t know, Roy, I got to have time to think it over.” And with that Roy had had to be satisfied.

  The thwack of flesh on flesh interrupted Lily’s reverie. She turned to find Aubrey swaying, after a slap on the back from Snapper himself, who was wearing the red galluses and gaudy ascot of his preacher costume. Snapper’s blue eyes were bright in his ruddy face, and his slicked-back hair, Lily thought, looked suspiciously blacker than it had when he in his turn had been out at the store calling Gospel Roy “a good man—don’t get me wrong, Miss Lily—but being able to blow a pitch pipe and wave your hands around while a congregation sings ‘Rock of Ages’ ain’t a qualification for the state congress.”

  “How you doing, young fella?” he said to Aubrey.

  Aubrey pinkened. “What say, you snapping turtle?”

  “What’s this I hear about you being laid up?”

  “Heart attack last year.”

  “You take care, now. Don’t let them bees get the best of you, old son,” said Snapper, his eyes sweeping the crowd. He winked at Lily. “Miss Lily, you look after my young friend here. Don’t let him get bee stung.” Before Lily could speak, he was off down the aisle, waving to someone else. Aubrey, Lily noticed, was still flushed with pleasure.

  “Nice of Snapper,” Lily said.

  “He’s a fine old boy,” said Aubrey, and Lily realized how seldom these days she heard him volunteer an opinion.

  “You should go on down and speak to your friends,” she said, but Aubrey had lapsed into his usual uncommunicative state, eyes downcast and hands lying limply on his knees.

  It was time to begin, anyway. Behind a screen down front Cora Baker, the only woman participant—no man in St. Elmo knew how to play the piano—launched into “The Wedding March.” A few giggles rippled across the auditorium, and the Womanless Wedding was under way.

  Afterward, when the fuss had died down, many St. Elmo residents said the wedding had started out the best they’d ever seen. The parade of bridesmaids—each flinging “her” false curls about and daintily holding up skirts made of everything from red velvet winter curtains to croker sacks—had been better than ever. At the height of it, one of the balloons stuffed in Otis Walker’s blouse burst, and the laughter as half his bosom flattened could have been heard as far away as St. Elmo Island.

  Snapper stole the show as the preacher. He clowned, forgot his lines, and worked the names of prominent St. Elmo citizens into the service. He pinched several bridesmaids on the behind, and J. D. Lyons, the matron of honor, hit him with J. D.’s wife’s beaded reticule. When the father of the bride marched down the aisle carrying his shotgun over his shoulder, Snapper brought down the house by trying to hide beneath the pulpit and then behind the bridesmaids’ skirts.

  Then came the bride—Jasper Middleton, weighing two hundred fifty pounds at least, wearing a lace tablecloth for a veil. Jasper’s painted lips were pursed, he had a beauty mark on his cheek, and he minced along blowing kisses to the crowd, his hairy arms straining the seams on a pair of mitts his mother had crocheted especially for the occasion.

  At just that high point, all hell broke loose. Over the laughter that greeted Jasper’s progress down the aisle, a hoarse and desperate-sounding voice cried from the back of the auditorium, “Help! Come help! The swamp is on fire!” and Bo Calhoun, his face and clothes smoke-stained, pushed past Jasper to the front of the auditorium.

  Lily thought at first that Bo’s entrance, ill-timed as it was, was part of the show, perhaps some sort of blackface interlude. It took her a second or two to realize that Bo wasn’t even a member of the lodge. And when he raced past her, she smelled smoke on his clothes and saw sweat and what looked very much like tears, although this was hard to credit, on his face.

  Probably more than half the audience, when they heard Bo say the swamp was on fire, knew he meant his family’s moonshine still, the biggest in the county. Bo hadn’t reached the stage before many were on their feet. One of the wedding party—the fire chief, who was playing the mother of the bride, wearing a mop for a wig, started to run, stepped on the hem of his long skirt, and fell to his knees, knocking the mop askew. “You watch out, Harold! That’s Mama’s Eastern Star dress!” screamed his wife from her seat in the third row.

  “The swamp’s on fire!” Bo yelled again. He glanced around wildly and ran back up the aisle.

  By this time, people were heading for the doors. Jasper, the bride, who hadn’t quite reached the stage when Bo arrived, dropped his bouquet of baby’s breath into someone’s lap, yelled, “You-all come on!”, and charged up the aisle in Bo’s wake. This galvanized the rest of the wedding party, which, grabbing off wigs and pulling up skirts to expose hairy legs and feet shoved into high heels, stumbled after him.

  The casualties, totted up later, were not serious: several broken shoe heels, a bottle of bourbon smashed when it fell out of a flower arrangement, a sprained wrist, and a broken collarbone resulting from a fall off the stage. The stage was clear inside of ten minutes and the auditorium was half-empty. Somebody had the presence of mind to pull the curtain, and Cora Baker struck up the recessional.

  Lily had no trouble figuring out what had happened. Bo had discovered the fire at the family’s still, and—failing to rouse the volunteer fire department, or knowing in the first place nobody would be there—had come to the place where he could summon the most manpower the quickest.

  “Guess the Calhouns’ still blew up,” she said to Aubrey. From outside came the sound of tires screeching. A few remaining members of the wedding party milled about. The “country cousin” removed flaxen braids and scrubbed morosely at blacked-out front teeth, and one of the bridesmaids mopped his face with a lace hankie.

  “My Law,” said the woman sitting next to Lily. “It sure does look like to me they better do a minstrel show next time.”

  Lily stood up and beckoned to Aubrey. “We might as well go on home,” she said. “I reckon that does it for another Womanless Wedding.”

  2

  A Proposal

  “What time is it?” asked Bo Calhoun.

  He was standing in the tiny cabin of Diana Landis’s boat in his undershorts. He was a powerfully built man with auburn hair, freckles across his nose and shoulders, and a bony face.

  It was two days after the Calhoun family moonshine operation had been destroyed by a fire that, the Calhouns agreed among themselves, had been started by dynamite. They had had enough stills dynamited by the law to know the signs. This time, though, it hadn’t been the law.

  “You hear me?” Bo said.

  The cabin had a bunk on one wall, a counter with fishing equipment strewn over it on the other. Diana Landis lay naked on the bunk, her elbow crooked over her eyes. “Oh my God,” she said.

  “Don’t start up,” said B
o. “I asked you a question.” Diana removed her elbow and turned her head toward him. “You want to know what time it is? I’ll tell you what time it is,” she said. “It’s time you did something about this situation, that’s what time it is.”

  “Didn’t I ask you not to start up?”

  “You don’t understand.” Diana sat up, huddled in a corner of the bunk. “I love you, Bo.”

  Bo didn’t move.

  “Things are different now. It’s a lot more important now,” she said. “There may be reasons why I have to get out of town.” Her voice shook on the last words, and she put her hand over her mouth.

  “What are you talking about?” Bo walked to the bunk and sat down.

  Diana slid near him. “I can’t tell you,” she said. “I just have to be with you. You told me how mean Sue Nell is, and how I make you happy. Now I need you, really bad.”

  Bo picked up cigarettes and matches from the floor beside the bunk and lit up, squinting against the smoke. “Have you done something?”

  She pounded the bunk with her fist. “What if I have? Why should you be with that ugly red-headed bitch and not with me?”

  His upraised hand moved swiftly toward her face, but in the end he simply grasped her chin and shoved it to one side. “Watch out,” he said.

  Diana’s eyes were red. “Please tell her, Bo.”

  “Tell me what you did.”

  She shook her head. “Nothing. Nothing. I just want to be with you so much.” She bent her head.

  Bo looked at her. His face changed. He put his arm around her shoulders and drew her close. Minutes passed before he said, “I can’t do it, Miss Di.”

  She shuddered but said nothing. At last she said, “Not today. But soon.”

  He didn’t respond. Burying his hand in her hair, he said, “Did you write me another poem?”