Color Him Dead (7 page)

“Oh!”

It was no more than a sound in her throat, the cry of a lost and frightened little girl. She recovered quickly, anger replaced surprise, and her cheeks flamed red. She jerked up her shorts and held them together with one hand. Her other forearm she pressed across her breasts.

“Get out of here, whoever you are.”

Her tone was an imperious command; this tone he knew, but in the past it had held a strain of urgency, shrill and uncertain. Now it held only a quiet menace; Edith had learned to live with power.

He didn’t move; he didn’t speak. His stomach was tight, and his muscles trembled with a dozen movements formulated and then aborted. None of them were exactly what he wanted to do; so he did nothing.

He watched the color of her face deepen to an angry red. Now comes one of those screaming tantrums, he thought. In a moment she’ll pick up the nearest object and throw it, shouting gutter abuse from those full red lips.

But her hands were full. To zip up her shorts would require both hands, and this meant exposing her breasts. To put on the halter she’d have to release her shorts. Getting off the beach would have meant even greater exposure, and it would also be leaving the field in defeat. Edith would never do that.

He felt his mouth spread in a grin.

Edith felt a chill of alarm. The smile was wrong, out of context; it didn’t fit the bearded, salt-crusted face, it didn’t warm the cold blue eyes that pierced her skin like needles—

She darted a look at her dinghy, pulled up onto the sand ten yards away and moored to a jutting boulder. She longed to escape, but she saw herself sprinting across the sand, struggling to hold up her shorts from falling to her knees, dropping articles of clothing, losing a shoe….

Slowly her initial shock gave way to an icy contempt. She reached down and pulled up the zipper of her shorts, making no effort to conceal her breasts. I
will show him that he is totally unimportant to me, a species of vermin beneath notice.
She picked up her halter, slipped the straps over her arms, and cradled her breasts with a smooth, rolling shrug. She tied the halter and spoke with regal contempt.

“Now that there’s nothing more to see, why don’t you leave?”

His smile seemed to grow thinner, but she wasn’t sure. She couldn’t look at him with the sun blazing in her eyes. The scene was becoming weird and unreal. She sat down on the sand, drew her knees up into the circle of her arms, and looked out to sea.
I’ll ignore him and maybe he’ll go away.

A gull shrieked overhead; a pelican made a crumpled dive into a breaking wave. This man was adding a final sordid touch to an already unpleasant homecoming. She thought of Doctor Kohlmetz in Geneva, with his ponderous German way of intoning clichés: “I have every confidence in your recovery, Mrs. Barrington, but you require rest and quiet. Your husband told me about your private island, and I must say it sounds ideal.” Inside her mind Edith had screamed:
Ideal! For God’s sake, didn’t he also tell you it was the island that did this to me? If I go back
—But she had looked at Ian, and he had smiled his velvet smile, and she had remembered that there were worse places than the island….

So she’d returned, and all would become as it had been before: Ian back in the bush, ruling like a feudal lord behind the walls of Diamond Estate; Doxie performing his labor of love, watching with eyes which never raised themselves above her breasts. She’d come here for the sun, but now this man had come to gaze as Doxie gazed. But he was bold where Doxie was shy; he was arrogant where Doxie was sly. He made her feel awkward and lumpy. Seeking something to busy her hands, she picked a cigarette out of the can, tapped it against her thumbnail, and lit it. She pulled too deeply and coughed.

He chuckled.

Sudden anger made her forget her decision to ignore him. She whirled and bit off the words: “I see you can laugh. Can you talk too, or are you a complete fool?”

She didn’t see his lips move; his words seemed to come out of the air surrounding him, flat and hard and crackling across the space between them.

“I can talk, Edith. Don’t you know me?”

She shaded her eyes against the sun and squinted up at him. She remembered Doxie’s words in the salon just before they’d reached the island: “There’s a squatter here who calls himself a painter. If you’ll watch through the port, you can see him leave.” And Doxie had strode off like St. George in search of a dragon, only to return and report in disgust that the man had fled.

“How could I know you?” she asked. “I’ve been away two years.”

“We met a long time ago, Edie. Remember?”

With his use of her nickname, the pieces fell into a pattern so familiar that she felt a weary sense of
Déjà-vu.
Would they never stop coming back, these old lovers from the past?

“No,” she said coldly. “And if you know my name, you must also know that my husband owns this island, including that rock you’re lying on. If you leave now, I’ll say nothing to him. But if you persist in sitting up there like a gawking baboon—!”

She bit her lip and turned away. Her words had only brought a sleepy smile to his lips. She felt the blood pound against her temples. She started counting:
One … two … three
… A manta ray broke from the water two hundred yards away, so huge that her breath caught in her throat. It arched up into the air, its twelve-foot wings glistening with rubbery wetness, then struck the water flat with a resounding
plop!

Ten.
The counting had helped. She turned, ready to face the man in calm, imperious dignity.

But he was gone.

“Coward,” she said aloud. It had been too easy; she had only to throw up the shield of the Barrington name, and that rugged man had retreated.

She lay back and turned her body up to the sun. How well did he know me? she wondered. What use did he make of me? Did he love me? She teased her memory, but the door to her past remained closed. She gave up trying to remember him; it was a nagging frustration, like a sneeze which never quite matures, but forever rises up in the throat.

The sand felt good on her back. Impulsively she untied her halter and pulled it off, then unzipped her shorts and kicked them off her feet. She rolled onto her stomach and wriggled her body against the sand. She opened her legs, then closed them. The sand lumped up between her thighs, warm and intimately caressing. The sun pressed gently against her back, the breeze drew soft fingers up and down her legs, the world held her in a soft, loving embrace….

A metallic scraping penetrated her half-sleep. She lifted her head and saw the bearded man bending over her dinghy.
“What are you doing?”

He straightened and dropped something into the pocket of his shorts. He turned, and a smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. “Putting your boat out of action.”

Her lips went dry. “What’s … the point of that?”

“So we can talk in peace. Don’t you want to talk?”

He came toward her with one hand braced against the rock, hopping along on his right leg. In the back of her mind, behind the chill of fear which paralyzed her muscles, she thought: he must have stepped on a spiny sea urchin. Then she saw the long red scar on his leg and the way he held it stiff, as though the bones were fused together. He’s crippled, she thought, and there’s another vicious scar on his side and another on his face and …

Oh God, I don’t like this at all!

She rolled over and sat up, not even trying to cover her body. She had an impulse to run, but the man was lowering himself onto the sand five feet away, between her and the dinghy. Just sit and wait, she told herself; don’t do anything to upset him. He wants something from you and it’s more than a chat, otherwise there’d have been no need to sabotage the boat.

“Tell you what, Edith,” he said pleasantly, as though humoring a child. “We’ll sit here and play a little game. You look at me and try to remember me, and I’ll tell you when you’re getting warm.”

She tried to swallow, but there was a hard lump in her throat. She watched him reach down the front of his shorts and pull out a flat package wrapped in oilcloth. He untied the string and peeled away the oilcloth, revealing a layer of transparent plastic. He began removing that, slowly, but without waste motion, as though he had planned each move far in advance. The plastic came off, and beneath it was a layer of canvas. She stifled an impulse to giggle. It’s a trick package, she told herself; he’ll get it all unwrapped and there’ll be nothing inside but an old potato. She had a weird feeling that he had given her a time limit; she must remember who he was before he finished unwrapping the package or else …
what?

She felt perspiration trickle down her spine and between her breasts. She would never remember, she knew that. But what can you do? she asked herself. The prima donna act doesn’t work; you tried that and he just grinned at you. The Barrington name didn’t stop him from tearing up your boat. So okay, maybe he gets what he wants, it won’t kill you. As the old Chinese saying goes, you might enjoy it if you relaxed.

Calmly, now that she had mentally prepared herself, she lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out slowly.

“I know the answers.”

His hands stopped, poised above the package. “Yes?”

“You waited three weeks in the radar shack. You hid from Doxie so you could catch me alone and helpless on this rock.”

“And violate your fair white body?” He shook his head. “No, Edith. I’ve been there and back. I can’t make the scene again.”

His hands resumed unwrapping the package, but his eyes held hers. She saw that he was telling the truth; he didn’t desire her, he didn’t even look at her as a female. Suddenly she felt ashamed of her own nakedness; her body seemed pulpy, obscene … defenseless.

“Goddamn you!” she cried, feeling the tears burn behind her eyelids. “You come on like an old lover, but I can’t remember!”

“You aren’t trying,” he said softly. “Think of me without the beard. Think of me as a married man with a wife and a kid and a family. You destroyed it, Edith. You wiped me clean and fixed it so I could never begin again. Remember?”

The wrappings were gone, and in his lap lay a leather case four inches square. He pressed the catch and opened the case. She glimpsed the oily gleam of blue steel—

She moved without plan, leaping up and sprinting for her boat. She thought she was clear, but he caught her ankle and twisted. She fell with a jolting thump. The landscape tilted and the sky darkened. When her vision cleared, he was on his knees beside her holding the tiny gun in his hand.

“You see it, Edith?” His voice was a hard rasp which pinned her to the ground. “I brought it all the way from Billings, just so I could send a lump of lead right into the center of your heart.”

She gasped. “You can’t—”

“Get away with it?” He shrugged. “I think I can, but it doesn’t matter. I swam out here, and nobody knows I came. Doxie thinks I’ve skipped out. There’s a white shark who visits these waters every evening, and he’ll take care of you. They’ll find your boat tied up, figure you went for a swim and got caught. Simple?”

In despair she thought: This is no impulse; he brought the gun such a great distance, and planned so perfectly …

“I am …” she began, then swallowed a lump which felt like a live coal sliding down her throat. “I am not the woman you think I am.”

“Don’t, Edith,” he said sadly. “Don’t tell me that.”

“But it’s true! I couldn’t have done … what you said. At least tell me where … when it was.”

His lips pulled back from his teeth. “You can’t have forgotten, Edith. We lived together for nearly six months. You wanted to marry me, but there was this problem of your husband. Then one night your husband was murdered. You told the jury it was me—”

“But … I’ve never been married before!”

“Hell. And I suppose you never had a baby.”

His hand snaked out and seized her leg, flipping her onto her side. She. felt his fingers tracing the faint lines on her hips and buttocks. “And what are these marks?” Suddenly she was on her back again, and his face was so close she could see the separate granules of salt in his beard. “You were in labor twelve hours, Edith. But you were only fifteen and you didn’t know how to stop the marks. Later you had me rub oil on them. Remember?”

“They told me …” she licked her lips. “They told me I’d once had a baby. But I don’t rem—”

His hand was a blur, seizing her hair. “If you say that once more …”

“Fool! It’s true!” She jerked free and sat up, yelling through a veil of hair. “Ask anyone here what’s the matter with Edith Barrington. They’ll tell you what happened two years ago. Ask Doctor Ainslee, he’ll tell you. Ask my husband, he’ll tell you.”

“You tell me, Edith.”

“I flipped, that’s what happened. I went kooky, I wigged out. They hauled me away and shot me full of electricity. Every time I started screaming, they gave me another jolt. Finally I shut up because I forgot what the hell I was screaming about.” She paused to let the vague horror of the treatment rooms fade, then went on. “And by that time I’d forgotten everything else. Now I’m blank. People come up to me on the street and say hello Edith, and I say hello right back even though I don’t know them from Haile Selassie. A man pats me on the ass and asks, ‘When are we taking another cruise together baby?’ but he’s a stranger, everyone’s a stranger. And you’re the strangest one of all, but I never did anything to you….”

He lowered his eyes to the gun, looking at it as though it were a pet mouse which had died in his hand. He spoke, and for the first time his voice was uncertain.

“If you really had amnesia, you’d go back over your past and try to regain your memory.”

“I did. My husband took me home to Texas—”

His head came up. “You mean Nebraska.”

“No, Texas. I visited the ranch where I was born, and talked to my mother and father—”

“Your father! He killed himself when you were fourteen.”

“Now really, this is too much. Wouldn’t a father know his own daughter?”

He brushed that aside with a wave of his hand. “You left the farm the same day your father shot himself. You went to a town in Wyoming. You got knocked up by a traveling salesman who said he was a student. You followed him to Indianapolis, found out he had a wife and three kids and was damn near broke, so you settled for room and board and expenses until you had your kid. When it came you put it out for adoption and forgot it. You started to work for the store, and within two years you married the owner, old Nils Nisstensson.”