Dragonfly

by Farris, John

  Thomason was momentarily concerned. Mr. Phipps had not been satisfied with the resolution to the problem which he, Thomason, had insisted on. Mr. Phipps hadn't wanted to leave Joe alive at the beach house, in spite of the doctor's insistence that so much damage had been done to Joe's parietal lobes he would be dwelling out there on the lunatic fringe for the rest of his life. Mr. Phipps was understandably dedicated to the proposition that no witnesses insured a secure future.

  He thought about it, and decided that it hadn't been Mr. Phipps, just a look-alike old truck in the rain. They had been doing business going back twenty years, and Mr. Phipps had always appreciated the wisdom of his approach to the problems a professional man sometimes encountered. Hit-and-run, deadly but untraceable drugs, an attack on a lonely road—those were the safe bets. So a couple of potentially disastrous malpractice suits had never made it into court, due to the sudden unavailabilty of the plaintiffs; Paul Huskisson had not married Abby, and Joe Bryce's suspicions would sound like so much psychotic babble, if anyone was paying attention to him after the first five minutes. Too bad about Adele; but there was no way to know how much Joe had told her. And her unexpected presence at the beach house did provide a more compelling ending to Joe's intrusion in their lives.

  There were whitecaps on Pandora's Bay; Thomason had to wait twenty minutes while the swing bridges were open, allowing for a flotilla of pleasure and commercial watercraft heading upriver to safer anchorages inland. Along Front Street in Nimrod's Chapel most of the business establishments were nailing up plywood on the windows that face north and east, taping other windows. Emergency shelters had been opened at theYMCA and in the high-school gymnasium; these buildings were on the highest ground in the vicinity, but still only about twenty feet above sea level. The stormsurge, which was like a huge bubble atop the normal tide, was due around four o'clock that afternoon. It was expected to be as much as eight feet above high tide.

  That would be high enough to flood the lobby of the Planter's House Hotel, where he stopped to pick up mail and the package he'd been expecting from the pharmaceutical house of Anderlingen in Zurich.Dependable Fed Ex had delivered it bright and early. Thomason chatted with the hotel's manager, who was overseeing the removal of some valuable lobby piecesand area carpets to the hotel's mezzanine, then returned to his Dodge truck in a considerably better frame of mind and dropped around to the Coleridge and Laster funeral home.

  Walter Lee, having had no sleep for the previous forty-eight hours, had finally dozed off on a lyre-back sofa provided for him in the viewing room where Frosty Clemons lay on aquamarine silk in a lacquered mahogany coffin. It was going to be a seven-thousand-dollar funeral, when the weather permitted, and Thomason had already written the check. Frosty looked like a complete stranger without her gold-rimmed glasses. Cinnamon-colored, her broken neck concealed by the high lace collar of the old-fashioned dress they had put on her.

  Walter Lee snored, broke off, whimpered in his sleep, shifted restlessly on the sofa. New black shoes, size fifteen, were aligned on the mulberry carpet in front of the sofa.

  "How's he holding up?" Thomason whispered outside to one of the relatives, a petite, severely bowlegged woman who wore elbow-length white kid gloves and carried a prayer book.

  "He's a broken man," she said, with a gloss of tears in her eyes.

  "The girls are okay?"

  "They gone to stay with Walter Lee's sister in Sumter till this storm blow itself out."

  "Well, I just wanted to stop by, tell Walter Lee we love him and we loved Frosty too, and he's in our prayers."

  "God bless you, Dr. Luke."

  On the sofa in the viewing room Walter Lee stirred among the floral remembrances and gasped; his eyelids trembled. He raised his head and had a glimpse of Thomason as he walked away down the oak-paneled and softly lighted hail. He was like the remnant of a nightmare to Walter Lee, who sat up, panting, and stared at Frosty in her coffin.

  "Told you!" he said. "Told you, Frosty, you didn't know what you was dealing with."

  He put a hand into the wallet pocket of his suit coat. The new black suit was a size fifty-two long, so the revolver with the two-inch barrel he carried there made no visible bulge when he stood up. Which he did now, and walked achingly across the carpet to go down on his bad knees, holding on to the pistol in his pocket with one hand and sobbing, the side of his face pressed against the lacquered mahogany. It reflected his agony like a dark mirror. Walter Lee sobbed Frosty's name again and again.

  "Oh, God! Just tell me the right thing to do. I know it was him. But they ain't no bringin' Frosty back. Lord,, Ijust don't know what I has to do!"

  Overcome, Walter Lee began to thump his head against the side of the coffin. The heavy, solid blows echoed through the nearly deserted funeral home. The bowlegged little woman stood in the doorway with tears running down her cheeks. She was joined bythe funeral director and one of his assistants. But they all stood in the wide doorway and didn't venture in. No one had the nerve to speak to Walter Lee or disturb him in his grief and rage.

  The two deputies from the Chicora County Sheriff'sOffice were wearing yellow slickers with hoods that glistened in the gray sheets of rain sweeping the porch of the beach house. There was lightning in the turbulentgray-green sky. Ten-foot waves were rolling in two-thirds of the way up the beach, with enough power to shake the house on its foundation. Whitecaps were visible all the way to the darkening horizon.

  Joe held the door open a few inches, his shoulder braced against it.

  "We're just packing up now! We'll be out of here in ten minutes!"

  "I'd advise you not to take any longer than that!" one of the deputies hollered. "All the roads and bridges could be under water in the next half hour! How many are you, sir?"

  "There's three of us!"

  "Is your vehicle operating okay?"

  "Yes."

  "Better get going, then!"

  "We've got power lines down on Hamrick Road!" said the other deputy, listening to his walkie.

  They made their way off the porch as Joe forced the door shut. He turned around, face dripping, and moved his head until all of Charlene came into view, sitting on one of the steps to the second floor.

  "Charly, we have to get out of here. And we have to take Adele with us." He turned a little more, to where the body lay on one of the couches. They had covered her with a blanket, as if she were sleeping.

  Charlene raised her head. "I can't go. I have to wait here. They're coming for me here."

  "Charly, no. That's—it's like a dream you had. Nothing's coming but the hurricane. It'll destroy this house."

  She shook her head, peaceable but stubborn. "You don't understand. It wasn't a dream. I was awake all the time. They took my nightgown off and I was lying on a table in the Mother Ship. The air smelled good, it was like after a hard rain, so fresh. They did it with a glass rod they put in my vagina. They inseminated me. I'm going to have one of their babies. That shows how much they love and respect me. The Higher Beings would never let anything bad happen to me."

  "Please, Charly. I have to get back to the Barony. Abby's in a lot of danger, she has to be in a hospital."

  Charlene thought about it. "Why?"

  "One of the drugs Luke's been giving her is a dangerous paralytic. It's leaking from the reservoir. A little of it has reached the brain stem. If he injects any more of the paralytic, she'll die."

  From the way Charlene was looking at him, Joe knew she didn't follow. Didn't care to understand. She put her head in her hands, squeezing.

  "Yes," she said, and then after a long pause, "yes" again.

  The house had begun to shake with each violent gust off the sea. It was necessary to speak very loudly to be heard over the droning of the wind.

  "Charly, we don't have any more time!"

  "Please be quiet! It's important. They're trying to get through to me." She squeezed her head tighter still, fingers digging in near her temples. She moaned softly.

  Joe consid
ered his prospects of forcibly removing her from the beach house. Half-blind, with his proprioception dangerously affected, he would have to fight Charlene and the howling bitch of a wind every inch of the way, then keep her in the Jeep while trying to drive. The alternative was to hit her good and hard while she was distracted, right on the button, and knock her out.

  He started across the floor, slowly, bumped a chair in the void to his left, stumbled. Charlene dropped a hand between her knees, watched him cautiously. Once again he had lost half of her to the void. He stopped and moved his head to the required degree and there was the rest of her; she was holding the old revolver that had killed Adele in her right hand, aiming it at him.

  "No," she said. "Don't try to make me go with you! My place is here."

  "Easy does it, Charly."

  "Get out while you still can!"

  "Charly, I'm disoriented! Sick to my stomach. I can't make it without you."

  "You have to. You'll be punished if the Higher Beings find you here too. Don't come any closer! Luke taught me to shoot. It was the good thing he taught me. The Bad Thing—I don't have to do the Bad Thing anymore, just to make him happy. And he can go to h-hell."

  "Come with me, Charly!" Joe took another step toward her. With no change of expression or other warning—but as if her hatred and fear of her husband suddenly had become a more inclusive indictment—she shot him.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  "What are you doing?" Lizzie asked nervously, watching her cousin transfer from Rolling Thunder to the side of her bed and reach for a trapeze bar that was suspended parallel to the bed. The public-utility electricity had been cut off at midmorning as the outer winds of Honey began to howl in earnest around the Barony. Two emergency generators kept the lights and television sets on and the twin refrigerators in the kitchen running, but they weren't powerful enough to operate the air-conditioning units. The air in the closed-up house was sultry, and they both were filmy with perspiration in Abby's room, despite the action of the ceiling fan and a small fan on top of her wardrobe. Abby's face was rigid with concentration as she extended her arms and hung on tightly to the bar.

  "I'm getting up."

  "You can't—"

  "I did, night before last. At the beach house. I was dreaming that I walked—"

  "But then I—woke up on the beach, a long way from the house, Lizzie! I was standing by the edge of the sea. Alone. Nobody helping me. That was not part of a dream."

  "What happened?"

  "As soon as I—realized what I was doing, I couldn't do it anymore. I fell down. But I'm going to stand up now. I can! I know I can."

  "Maybe I should get Luke or—"

  "Not home yet. He called on the cellular. He had to take a big detour; there was a live wire down somewhere."

  "Joe's not here, either."

  Abby looked at the bar above her head, and ventilated like a power-lifter about to tackle a quarter ton of iron. "I don't… understand... where he could be."

  "I looked outside from the kitchen a few minutes ago," Lizzie said, and concluded apprehensively, "You can't see ten feet from the house because of the rain. This is going to be a bad one, isn't it?"

  "You scared?"

  "Yeah."

  "We'll just stick together, Elizabeth Ann. Everything's okay. This house is built like a fort. The shutters are an inch thick. Okay… here I... go!"

  Abby pulled up hard, halfway. Her face was splashed with red, her arms trembled. Once her bare heels were off the floor, her knees turned in.

  "Liz! I need a... butt-boost."

  Lizzie kneeled between Abby and the side of the bed and put both hands under her butt, then lifted until Abby, vertical but wobbly, swinging a little from side to side before she settled down on her heels again, gained some control of her situation.

  "I don't think—"

  "Shut up, shut up, I'm gonna do this! Let go now."

  Lizzie, still crouching, dropped her hands and backed up. Abby bit her lower lip, trying not to sway. "This is hard—oh God, this is hard!"

  "Why do you want to do this now? There's no place to go."

  "Lizzie, I'm—thirty-two years old. And I've still got—everywhere to go."

  Saying this, Abby released the bar with her left hand. For a couple of seconds she was stable, and motionless; then the swaying began again. She twisted halfway around, clinging desperately to the bar, her face goingfrom red to magenta. Through sheer willpower she managed to align her body perpendicular to the pegged-board floor. She looked at her feet to make sure they were straight and in line with her hips.

  Lizzie watched her fearfully. "Don't let go, Abby. Let me—"

  Abby let go, and promptly collapsed half on top of Lizzie. A wild elbow caught Lizzie in the mouth.

  "Fuck! Did I hurt you?"

  "Yes," Lizzie mumbled, tasting blood and beginning to cry.

  "Lizzie—Lizzie, I felt something! I really did."

  "What?"

  "The floor! Something's happened, Lizzie. The soles of my feet, my toes—I was feeling the floor!"

  "How does my lip look?"

  "Just a little cut. Don't wipe it off on your shirt."

  "It's your shirt. I borrowed it."

  "Oh, well, in that case, go right ahead and get it all bloody."

  "Are you gonna do this again?"

  "Yes. You're damn right. I'm going to do it again."

  In a blinding, centerless, torrential universe, tinted by lightning the color of mortified flesh, hell had been raised to the status of watery limbo.

  Mr. Phipps didn't see the gray Jeep Laredo coming at him on the beach road until it was too late to avoid a collision.

  Neither the Diamond T truck nor the Laredo was traveling at more than twenty miles an hour. The Laredo was running without headlights. A flash of lightning revealed Joe's face behind the wheel just as Mr.Phipps took evasive action. The impact was on the right side of his pickup truck as it left the road and plunged up to the hood ornament in the rising waters of the intertidal marsh. Without a restraint Mr. Phipps was slammed against the steering wheel of the pickup. The door on his side remained closed. Mr. Phipps hit his head on the windshield column and lost his glasses.

  The impact crumpled the front end of the Laredo; the airbag on the driver's side of the Laredo protected Joe from further injury, but he was stunned, and for a few seconds he couldn't move. The pickup had appeared to him out of the hemianopsic void on his left side just as both vehicles reached a bend in the road.

  He wouldn't have been able to drive at all without the telephone poles on the right side to give him some idea of where the edge of the shell road was. In the gray opacity and screaming wind the sky had vanishedand the earth was half-drowned. Gnarly live oaks and cypress trees writhed like supplicants praying in a ghostly cloister at the ending of the world. Lightning flashed and thunder was so loud it hurt the eardrums. Charlene's casual shot had scorched his right shoulder like a hot poker and punched out a piece of glass in a beach-house window. In his last glimpse of her as he went out the door and was blown off his feet on the porch, she was still sitting on the stairs to the second floor with the revolver dangling from her right hand, as if she'd already forgotten about it.

  Sitting in the Laredo, Joe tried to restart the engine. It started, but judging from the racket under the hood things were grinding together or flying apart. Heturned the ignition off and opened the door cautiously. The wind caught the door and nearly flung it off the hinges. The cold rain on his unprotected face felt like needles. It wasn't coming from just one direction anymore: the rain swarmed all around him, a maelstrom. He could barely see.

  Except for the lightning, he would have been helpless; just another drowner in the quickening hurricane, which at the height of its power could obliterate entire islands, turn old-growth forests to kindling and sweep oceangoing freighters so far inland they had to be torched for scrap. But so much lightning accompanied this phase of the storm that he was able, in spite of the visual handic
ap, to retain some sense of direction.

  Joe recognized, through a streaming cracked window, the shape of the driver in the front seat of the old Diamond T pickup. He seemed to be moving, but it could have been an illusion prompted by the overwhelming, theatrical flashes of lightning. Even when he shielded his right eye the rain was all but blinding. He couldn't be sure that this was the man who had murdered Frosty Clemons and Adele Franklin. He didn't care to take a closer look. His fear was of what lay behind him, a lethal tidal surge; his dominant instinct was to find shelter, and fast.

  He'd been on the road in a torrent, the Laredo almost whipsawing in the wind, for several harrowing minutes. He couldn't see the house, but he thought he must be within a few hundred yards of the Barony.

  He was crouched with his back to the wind. In half of his visual field there was tumult; in the other half nothing at all. His nerves were at break-point as he set out up the road, not daring or even able to walk erect, totally unaware of what his left foot and leg were doing. Driving had been difficult; walking was a comedy of horrors. Every faltering step invited disaster. And he felt as if he were drowning with each breath he took.

  He lost count of the times he fell, and struggled back to his feet. He looked back once, and couldn't find the crashed vehicles on the road. What did that mean? Occasionally, in the hemianopsic void, he thought he saw tiny glowworms, hair-thin and isolated. A phenomenon. he couldn't account for. What if he lost the other side of his visual field? He was desperate for clarity, for air and space.

  There seemed to be more trees where he was, including some tall pines that were swaying in arcs of sixty degrees or more overhead. At some point he had wandered off the beach road. Now he was in a vale or ravine, where he was protected from the brunt of the wind. Looking up, he saw the crude barrel of a Columbiad cannon and realized how much off course he was. He had reached the old Confederate breastworks on Pandora's Bay. The path from the breastworks went around by the inlet where the Wayfarer was, then continued to the cemetery and the gardens of the Barony. The distance, he remembered, was about six hundred yards.