by Farris, John
He listened to the music of the little carousel in the park, the nougat-rich Southern voices of strollers below his balcony, and thought about his project. Qualms were not unusual at the start. They came and went until he was well established in the lives of those who had been strangers. That might take days, or a few weeks. Until the half-life of the one he was pretending to be changed from shadows to flesh. It was like learning a foreign language. He was not yet thinking like Dr. Joe Bryce, lately out of Africa and having a hard time adjusting to the change.
Joe went back inside, closing the balcony doors. He drew the lacy curtains but not the drapes and lay down on the four-poster bed, glanced at his reflection in an oval mirror on the opposite wall, then turned on his side and picked up a Pamela Abelard novel, her latest, which was called Honor's Flame. The novel had been number two on the New York Times Book Review hardcover best-seller list the previous Sunday. There were 585 pages, which he'd read in an hour and a half. Honor's Flame had to do with a rice planter, a sea captain, and a tempestuous young widow in Charleston, South Carolina, who, in the 1790s, seemed to be two hundred years ahead of her time with her feminist sensibilities. The sea captain raped her, the rice planter could only get it up with slave women, and Honor, the title heroine, made a fortune in the indigo business before marrying a Scottish laird with strong shoulders and "tawny hair that curled thick as liquid gold over the high collar of his lace shirt."
Her prose was as boring as a minuet, and she had never met a cliché she didn't like. But she could write good dialogue, which gave her characters more flair than the predictable story lines merited.
Honor's Flame was, according to the brief biography on the back flap of the book jacket, the author's sixth novel. She had published her first at the age of twenty-three. Pamela Abelard still looked very young in the color photo on the back of the book. She'd been born and raised in the Palmetto State, and now made her home in Nimrod's Chapel.
There was more from a recent Publishers Weekly. Her first five novels, all international successes, had sold thirteen million copies. A new contract with her pub-usher called for four more Flame books, with an advance payment against royalties of fifteen million dollars.
The carousel went round and round. In the gathering dark Joe heard a fragment of song from some minstrel of riotous feeling. The soft night wind was as seductive as ether. Joe was hungry, but not ready to go out yet. He stared at the painted tin ceiling, pondering what he knew about Pamela Abelard from the reports of the investigative agency that had done his homework for him.
It wasn't quite enough to say that she was a very private person. Pamela Abelard was literally reclusive. Her publishers and literary agents had never met her. She never gave interviews. The president of her fan club (Pam's Pals, eight thousand members) had spoken to her only a few times, on the telephone. She didn't have a passport, or even a driver's license.
Five years ago, when her earnings from the early best-sellers began to accumulate, she had purchased from a local bank the deed to two hundred acres of the heart of what was known as the Barony, an original land-grant plantation established by her ancestors in the early 1700s, and which once had taken up most of the seven thousand acres of Chicora Island. There she now spent nearly all of her time, turning out a new historical fiction approximately every two years.
He studied the jacket photo of Pamela Abelard again, although he'd done this so often since initiating the project that he could have drawn a likeness from memory. It was not a heavily airbrushed studio portrait; in contrast to other women authors in her status bracket whose aging faces had been transformed for the camera by hours of makeover and accomplished lighting techniques, Pamela Abelard seemed appealingly natural. Probably the photo was a blowup of a snapshot taken by a friend. Sunlight was hot on her brow and cheekbones; her eyes were slightly, tantalizingly narrowed as if from glare as she looked into the camera lens. She had gray or very light blue eyes. Her eyebrows were much darker than her hair. There'd been a strong breeze, and her hair glowed with red highlights in the strands whipped across her forehead. A few freckles were visible. She had good facial planes, a strong Scots chin with a hint of a crease, and a wide mouth—not smiling, but quizzically amused. And she might have been a little shy about being photographed. Something unaffected, raffish in her appearance. Her only flaw was a pair of jug-handle ears, but they didn't detract from her casual beauty, the Huck Finn sincerity and naturalness.
Abelard's image on the back of Honor's Flame fused with the vision Joe had had of her on the transom of the fishing boat at sea. And as always this made him uneasy, feeling a little out of control of the project before it had begun. He felt inadequately prepared and, even worse, impulsive, drawn to her for reasons more tragic than sentimental. As if their lives had already intersected, and her appearance had been more than a hallucination—he pitched the novel away and groaned. That was the kind of nonsense he didn't subscribe to, but which Abelard apparently found of interest, having fashioned a book around the theme of reincarnation. Eternity's Flame, number three or four in her oeuvre. He'd read them all so fast, the story lines became a jumble of hot-blooded, resourceful heroines and men with great bodies and shady pasts. Women loved bastards, as a movie producer of Joe's acquaintance had once remarked. It was one of the secrets of the success of his pictures, and it probably had a lot to do with the popularity of Abelard's books.
Joe smiled. There were all kinds of bastards, and probably she had known her share. She was too good-looking not to have had a lot of men around. Even in a backwater like Nimrod's Chapel, where she'd chosen to sequester herself to pursue her art. She wasn't married, but undoubtedly she was engaged to or sleeping with someone. Joe wondered how long it would take for him to get rid of his rival. But that had never been a problem, and it didn't worry him now.
Chapter Ten
From a piece she had contributed to a writer's magazine, Joe knew that Pamela Abelard liked to get cranked up at about nine-thirty in the evening, after an eight-o'clock dinner. She dictated for two, sometimes three hours, almost without a pause. The dictation was transcribed daily by her assistant, but the author never looked at the pages until the first draft was finished. Then she put in three or four months of rewriting, until she was satisfied. Given her work routine, Joe thought that the best time to find her at loose ends might be in the morning, so he left Nimrod's Chapel after a breakfast of pecan muffins, soft-boiled eggs and hominy grits and drove across the causeway to the Barony.
Barbara Ann, at the Planter's House, had told him to look for a general store and ask for directions, because there was a nearly total lack of road signs on the island. The hard road, as she called it, went north and east toward Chicora State Beach. The other roads were little more than sandy lanes mixed with shell, and sometimes it was difficult to make out the turnoffs for all the palmetto thickets and hardwood forest.
He had rented a four-wheel-drive Jeep Laredo at the Myrtle Beach Jet Port on his arrival the day before. There had been some rain on the short drive down the coast to Nimrod's Chapel, but today was clear and mild, the estuary steaming as the sun burned away layers of morning mist thick as cake icing, revealing fishermen in their small boats among the dark cypress snags, great birds floating through the mist in a silence as profound as the moment before the dawn of time.
The general store he'd been directed to find shared a crossroads with a roadside market that sold pecans by the bushel basket, pumpkins and colorful calabashes. A barefoot local artist had set up a display of his work in front of his dilapidated Volkswagen van: oil-on-velvet paintings of Jesus, Elvis Presley and unicorns the complete canon of redneck spirituality. The store had fish-bait boxes on the porch, and smelled musty-sweet inside from the dozens of sugar-cured hams hanging from six-by-six beams.
An old Negro man with a liver-spotted bald head the color of beeswax and an old white man whose eyes were magnified by glasses the size of automobile headlights interrupted their checkers game by a luminous fro
nt window and told him, more or less, how to reach the Barony. There were forks in the road to reckon with, they couldn't agree how many, and marshes to cross, and then keep an eye out for the old 'Piscopal cemetery. "The church, of course, burnt to the ground in 1915. That's not right, Henry? How would you know, you wasn't born then. Anyhow, you take the right-hand fork at All Saints', and—I'm the one telling him now, Henry, would you give me a chance to finish—and not more'n half mile pert near the cutoff t Mariah beach, there's a grove of live oak planted straight as astitch 'longside the road to the gatehouse of the Barony. Where that book writer woman lives, and be damned if we don't get half a dozen folks a day in here wanting directions. But that's the summertime, mostly. Ain't had nobody, it's three-four days now, asking about her. Where you from, son?"
"Africa."
"You don't say. That your home?"
"No, I was working there."
"Henry here, his great-grandmother come from Afnca.
"She did. That's a fact."
"What did you do there, in Africa?"
"I'm a doctor. Children's doctor. I worked with a French group called Médecins Sans Frontières. Doctors without borders."
The high-yellow Negro, Henry, looked at his partner for a few seconds.
"Reckon we ought to tell him the right way to go, Allard."
Allard nodded. "If he's a doctor, then it would be okay."
Joe said, smiling, "That's some routine you fellas have for the tourists."
"Well, you know," Henry said. "Can be a bother, they walk around the plantation without they be ask. Look in windows with them cameras. Don't care for nobody's privacy. Dr. Luke, he ask us to kindly misdirect as many folks as we can. We ain't got nobody so lost they have to call out the bloodhounds. Sooner or later, they all winds up down at the beach."
With what he hoped were the right directions in mind, Joe followed a mule-drawn wagon for half a mile, made a little better time on a hard-packed dirt road to a three-story freestanding chimney of fire-blackened brick that was nearly overgrown with Carolina jasmine. He crossed a blackwater slough on an old brick bridge, heading southeast with the sun in his face. The air was sultry. There were a few shacky houses along the wandering road, mailboxes; abruptly he came to a marsh beyond which the bay was visible in a hazy light through islands of cypress. He was going due south, with live oaks on the east side of the improved road, which was a mix of dirt, sand and crushed shell, The road was only about a car and a half wide but it had been graded recently to smooth out pot holes and allow for good drainage.
Within sight of the bay again, in an area of fallow fields and woodlots, he came to the Barony. A couple of black men were at work repointing the formidable brick gateposts. The iron gates stood open. Along the road to the house, which had been built with its back to the widest part of Pandora's Bay, a couple of dump trucks were parked at a lean on one side of the roadway embankment. Men with chain saws were clearing a stand of longleaf pine near the road, and a stump-grinder added to the racket.
Someone who might have been a foreman glanced at the approachingJeep, then left the men in hard hats he'd been talking to and stepped onto the drive, gesturing for Joe to stop. He was a big black man. For October the humidity was high, and his blue work shirt already was sweat-stained. The tab on a sack of tobacco hung from one breast pocket. Instead of a hard hat he wore a black baseball cap with a red bill. He had bad knees and walked as if hampered by leg irons, but he looked to be the sort of man who'd been a juggernaut in his youth: hard, fast, merciless.
"Good morning, suh," he said, in a voice that might once have been plush velvet, but now had a few snags in it.
"Morning," Joe said. "What's going on?"
The big man leaned on the sill of Joe's window, dripping sweat. Scar tissue pulled tight the corners of his eyes, the of which were a burnt-almond color."Oh, Dr. Luke, he's lately taken up polo. We're clearing out all the slash growth to make room for a practice field and a new horse barn."
He looked past Joe at the copy of Honor's Flame on the other seat. He smiled gently, like a bouncer sizing up potential trouble.
"You ain't the decorator fella from Charleston, is you?"
"I'm from Chicago. I've been out of the country for a couple of years. I was hoping I could get Miss Abelard to sign a book for me before I go home. It's a birthday gift for my sister in Fond du Lac."
The man nodded thoughtfully, took his hands off the windowsill, straightened and reached into his pocket for the sack of smoking tobacco. He had tissue-weight wrinkled papers in his other shirt pocket. He began to roll a cigarette for himself. His hand movements were graceful for someone who looked as if he'd broken every knuckle at least once.
"Yes, suh. She'll gladly do that. But you needs to leave the book with me. I'll see that she gets it, and sends it on to you."
Joe glanced in the rearview mirror; saw a Range Rover on the road outside the gates of the Barony, making time, leaving a cloud of dust behind it. The decorator fella from Charleston?
"You sure are hard to find out here," Joe said pleasantly.
The big man finished rolling his cigarette, sealing it with spit, and felt for matthes.
"Reckon I couldn't find my way round Chicago, if I chanced to be there." He also looked at the oncoming Range Rover, and started to frown.
"As long as I've driven this far," Joe said, "I'd like to say hello to my favorite author. I've read everything she's written."
"Sure, sure, I understand. But Miss Abby, she can't take the time, sit and chat with everybody, wouldn't get no work done." He heaved a sigh. "So if you'll just let me have your copy—"
He was distracted by someone yelling in the field. "Yo, Walter Lee!" He turned and stared, trying to make out what was being said to him, but the smoky stump-grinder roared again like a badly tuned motorcycle.
"Be right back," Walter Lee said to Joe. He tucked the cigarette he hadn't had the chance to smoke between an ear and his baseball cap and went down the six-foot embankment to the field at a hobbled lope, waving his arms.
The dusty green Range Rover was coming up fast behindJoe, and the driver didn't seem to be in a mood to stop or even slow down. The Range Rover's horn sounded.
Joe pulled out around the first of the dump trucks, intending to make room for the oncoming vehicle. As he angled past the high fender of the other truck he misread the slope of the embankment and the back end of his Laredo slid in the loose shell and sand. Nothing he couldn't handle easily with four-wheel drive. Then he saw at the base of the embankment the stumps of some pine trees that had been felled but not removed, recognized an opportunity and seized it as the Range Rover blasted by him.
He gave the wheel a sharp turn right and the slide was accelerated. Instead of shifting into low and pulling out of it, he pumped the brake, shifted into reverse, and went bumping backward down the embankment, stopped with a crunching jolt atop a couple of the jutting stumps and switched off the ignition immediately. He didn't know where the gas tank was, but the crash might have ruptured it. The Laredo was tilted slightly to the driver's side. He opened the door and stepped down into some mud from a recent. He sank into it just past the cuffs of his khaki Dockers.
The Laredo was hung up firmly on the stumps, the right rear tire a foot off the ground. The gas tank seemed tobe okay. The bumper had been bent slightly in the collision, but provided there was no damage to the rear axle or ball joint, the Laredo might be drivable once it was yanked up off the stumps and set down on the road. But that would take a while, even if there was a tow truck in the vicinity.
The stump-grinder and the chain saws had stopped as the men working in the stand of pine trees paused to consider his predicament.
"Lord, Lord," Walter Lee said in a weary voice.
Joe shrugged, looking baffled and a little angry.
"I was just trying to get off the drive to make room for that Range Rover."
"I know. I allow it wasn't your fault, mister."
"My name's Bryce. D
r. Joe Bryce. Who was that driving the Rover?"
Walter Lee said reluctantly, "That was Mrs. Thomason. She don't have a whole lot of patience, you see." He added, almost under his breath, "And not much sense sometimes." He rose from his examination of the undercarriage of the Laredo. "Muffler's about tore off. Look here, I'll get some of the boys, and we'll try to lift the back end up off them stumps."
"I'd appreciate that. But I don't want to risk, driving it until I'm sure there's no real damage. Could I find a phone somewhere?"
Walter Lee looked atJoe's mud-covered Nikes. "You want to call a tow, take it to the garage? Sure. Listen, I'm real sorry what happened. Say you is a doctor?"
"That's right. And you're Walter Lee."
"Walter Lee Clemons. I looks after things round here."
Joe offered his hand. He could palm a basketball, but Walter Lee could probably have palmed a wrecking ball. "Nice to meet you, Walter Lee."
"What I'll do, I'll walk on up the house with you and call the rental-car people. They got their own arrangements with a garage in town. Bring that rental agreement along, if you please." He turned to one of the hired hands. "Y'all see what you can do while I'm gone."
Joe reached into the Jeep for the rental agreement fixed to the sun visor, and picked up his copy of Honor's Flame. Walter Lee didn't say anything about the novel. They walked up the drive toward the house, with Joe squishing every step of the way. He would have been more comfortable barefoot, but the crushed-shell drive would have shredded the soles of his feet. Walter Lee labored, breathing through his mouth.
"What weight did you fight at?" Joe asked him.
"Oh, two-fifty. Two thutty-five, when I could get down to it."
"Did you ever fight anybody good?"
"No. I was on the hamburger menu, worked the training camps some. Archie, Jersey Joe, Floyd. Well, there was this Puerto Rican boy; he got a shot at Ali one time. I know I whupped him, but they done give it to him on points anyhow. That was in Ponce, Puerto Rico, you see, and they wasn't about to let the hometown boy lose." Walter Lee squinted at Joe in a shaft of sunlight where the shell road became a, circular brick motor court arranged in a herringbone pattern around an old magnolia tree and a marble fountain. "I allow you been in the ring some yourself."