Night Songs (7 page)

    He grinned. With luck, maybe there'd be another one, and this time it would be… he grunted, scratched his hair, his chin, a spot just below his belt. The hell with it. He didn't give a damn. Let themselves kill each other off, all of them. And that was something he knew he could drink to.

    

    

    Out near the horizon the fog began to move.

    In serpentine coils it drifted low over the water, riding the swells and bending away from the breeze; pockets formed here and there in the deepest troughs, eddying, expanding, shredding when an explosive gust reached down from the black; and soundlessly rising it masked the light of twilight in a writhing gray cloud.

    In the trees, too, it stirred once the temperature had lowered, teasing translucent ribbons around boles and deadfalls, surging over roots thrust up from the ground. It settled in hollows and resembled cauldrons gently simmering; it sought shrubs to weave them shrouds; it found saplings and gave them cloaks; and it reached out from the shadows like specters seeking form.

    It was chilled, but not cold; it was hunting, but not hurried; and it sat beyond the low breakers like a veil not yet drawn.

    

    

    The passing of the light was joined by the slow seeping of warmth from the sand. Fifteen longboats were ranged evenly along the beach, and three shallow pits had been dug in which fires had been built. The flames were not high, but they were sufficient to create shadows, temporary black ghosts that rippled like whispers across footprints and faces and brought an almost phosphorescent glow to the breaker's caps.

    Colin stood with his back to the dunes. He was wearing a heavy, gray Irish sweater, his jeans were rolled to midcalf, and his feet were bare. He stood beside Garve Tabor, who was dressed the same, and whose thinning sandy hair was atangle over his brow. Garve poked the unruly forelock back into place every so often as a matter of habit, after which he would pull his belt up over his slight paunch whether it needed the adjustment or not.

    To their right the dunes leveled, and Gran's shack was just visible in the gloom.

    "She sure has a sense of the dramatic," the chief said, his voice almost too soft and husky for a man his age, nearly fifteen years older than Colin but not looking it at all.

    "She's frightened," Colin told him. "She doesn't want to lose all she has left."

    Tabor, whose face in the distant firelight glow gave evidence of his Navaho heritage, shrugged and looked at his watch. "She's not the only one who's lost people, you know."

    "Yeah."

    Tabor raised an eyebrow. "Hey, this is your first funeral." He nodded.

    "Ah, no wonder you've got the jitters." He nodded. "Makes you think we're kind of barbaric and all that, right?"

    "Not exactly, no."

    "Weird?"

    "That, for sure."

    Tabor looked to the water, his profile sharp-edged. "It's a comfort, though. My mother's out there, a couple of uncles. It beat all to hell having them dropped into the ground with mud dumped on them. That, to my thinking, is definitely barbaric."

    They waited, and Colin wondered what Peg was doing. Probably finishing the supper dishes. He would call her when he got back. He didn't realize he was staring toward town until he saw Garve watching him, smiling. He shrugged, and the chief laughed.

    "You shouldn't wait too long, Col. It does a hell of a job on the man's ego when the woman has to do the proposing."

    "Really? Is this from the local expert?" From the waiting mourners he picked out a tall woman with blonde hair rippling to her waist. "Does it mean you're going to ask Annalee soon?"

    Annalee Covey was Dr. Hugh Montgomery's nurse, a widow whose husband of three years had been killed in Vietnam when his fighter copter had been shot down a month after the pull out. Two years later, and to no one's surprise, she made it known she was tired of living alone, and she also made it clear to those who pursued her that she wanted one man of her own or no man at all. Garve was scared to death of her. She was a head taller than he was, more aggressive, and, he claimed, too damned liberated for her own good. It had taken Colin only a few months to understand that his friend was torn between the comfort and imagined safety of an old-fashioned woman and the relatively exotic allure Annalee posed. The chief also felt guilty because Annalee's husband had been his best boyhood friend, and it seemed to him too much like incest.

    "Well?" he said, turning away to hide his smile.

    "We weren't talking about me, Rembrandt," Garve told him.

    "No, I don't suppose we were." He cleared his throat and scanned the beach, scanned the sky, and shivered.

    Garve laughed quietly. "You feel it?"

    "Feel what?"

    Garve waved vaguely toward the horizon. "Screamer's coming."

    Colin looked skeptical. Despite his years here his friends were still testing to see how much he would swallow. "What arc you talking about? What's a Screamer? A ghost?"

    The chief laughed again. "No. Carolina Screamer. A late fall storm that comes up from the Carolinas so fast you barely have time to get. A lot of wind, the tides run wicked high."

    "You mean a hurricane?"

    Tabor shook his head. "No. What it does, see, it pushes the water ahead of it, damn near drowns the island. Folks board up their windows and light out for the mainland, most of them. Lasts about a day, you don't even know it's been unless you forgot to put the car in the garage."

    "Sounds great," he said sourly.

    "It can be fun, if you're careful."

    "Oh, that's marvelous." He looked sideways at the policeman. "And you can sense it?"

    "Some can."

    "You?"

    Garve chuckled and shook his head. "Hell, no. Heard on the radio there was a low forming off the coast. We haven't had a Screamer since… since you've come on. I figure we're due."

    Colin checked the sky again, the water, and said, "I can't tell you how lucky I feel." Then he looked down at the beach, at the people still gathering. "Funny, I thought I saw Cameron."

    "He slipped away about fifteen minutes ago."

    Colin grunted his surprise.

    Garve spat dryly. "Doesn't make any difference. He was here to be seen, that's all. Slap a few backs, whisper in a few ears. I expect his buddies are waiting for him at the restaurant."

    "Oh, you know about them?"

    Garve glanced at him oddly. "Do you?"

    He gave a brief account of Cameron's phone call, letting the tone of his voice provide the commentary needed.

    "Well, well," Garve said. He pushed his hat to the back of his head, and slipped the fingers of his left hand into his hip pocket. "Old eagle eye doesn't miss much, m'boy. It's in the genes with us law folk. There are two of them, actually. Came over this morning. One guy doesn't weigh a hundred pounds, I bet. He's Mike Lombard and his specialty is real estate law. He lives in Trenton and drinks cocktails with the governor. The other one, he has a knife scar from his gut to his throat, and his expertise is political persuasion. The way I hear it, they're looking to Bob to provide them with a donation for their retirement fund."

    "Interesting. But shouldn't you be after them or something?"

    Garve laughed quietly. "Col, this isn't the Old West. I can't give them twenty-four hours to get outta town just because I don't like their faces. As long as they don't get Cameron to do something real stupid, all I can do is make them very unhappy to see me in their shadows."

    Colin would have replied but he realized the mourners were staring past him to the shack. He turned slowly. The door was open, and a few second's watching brought Lilla into focus.

    Garve sighed relief. "Time, I guess. Listen, maybe you'd-"

    He nodded, took his hands from his pockets and trudged across the sand.

    

    

    Eliot Nichols glared into the tiny office and dared the phone to ring again. Then he locked the door behind him and rushed to the green patrol car. With everybody and their brother wanting to know if a Screamer was coming (and too damned lazy to listen to the radio), he'd have to speed so as not to miss the funeral. And if he was going to be chief one of these days, attendance was a social must.

    Midway along Neptune Avenue, far beyond the darkened gas station-the last business on the street- he passed between the Rising Sun Motel and the Seaview, both constructed in the shape of an H, windows boarded now for winter and the parking lots deserted and filled with dead leaves. He glanced at them automatically, though he really wasn't looking. The Rising Sun was a meeting place for the worst of the island's teenagers. Though they'd never been caught, he knew they generally broke into the second floor rooms in back to party, drink themselves stupid on beer, do a little dope, do a little sex. There weren't many of them, a half dozen tops, and it usually happened only four or five times before the owners returned in spring. But it galled him to know they were there at all. Laughing at him. Not giving a damn. Just biding their time until they were legally old enough to get off the island. They were decidedly unlike the rest of the local kids, and he had a hard time understanding how they got that way.

    A hundred yards later he saw Warren Harcourt sitting on the pebbled verge, hat in hand, legs splayed, feet bare, head bowed and nodding. With a groan, he pulled over and climbed out. Shaking his head, he slammed the door shut and hitched up his belt. Harcourt didn't move. Nichols stood over him for nearly a full minute, waiting for a reaction. When the man refused to acknowledge him, Nichols groaned again.

    "You idiot," he said, grabbing the taller man's shoulders and yanking him effortlessly to his feet. "Don't you know there's a funeral tonight? Don't you have any respect for the dead?" He punched Harcourt's arm sharply, and had to reach out quickly to keep him from falling.

    Harcourt belched.

    "Damn it, Warren, why don't you get your butt on home?"

    The lawyer blinked several times. "Wanna see Gran," he said. "I wanna see Gran."

    Nichols didn't know whether to laugh or kick him. "Gran," he said with exaggerated care, "is dead. For God's sake, that's who they're buryin'! Jesus, you know that."

    Harcourt swiveled around to face him, his dark eyes brimming with tears. "Dead?"

    The deputy nodded. "Burying him?"

    "Aw, Warren, come on! You heard what I said."

    The attorney reached several times for his topcoat lapels, failed, and let his hand dangle at his side. He swallowed. "They're not… are they burying him at sea?"

    "Where the hell else, huh?"

    For a moment the liquor seemed gone from the man's system, so much so that Nichols took a step back and frowned.

    "Does Lilla know this?" Harcourt asked sharply. "Does she know what they're doing?"

    Nichols stared, frowning.

    "Well, sir, does she know?"

    He put a hand to his forehead and rubbed slowly. He'd seen this happen before: One moment the lawyer was so out of it he could barely stand, the next it was as if he hadn't had a drop in his life. It spooked him. It really spooked him.

    Harcourt belched again.

    "That's it," Nichols muttered. He took the unsteady man's arms and spun him around toward town. Another moment for consideration and he gave him a harsh shove. "Go! Go on, damn it, before I run you in and throw away the key."

    Harcourt lurched forward five or six feet, regained his balance, and walked a half dozen feet more. Then, abruptly, he turned and slipped his hands into his topcoat pockets. He was just beyond the reach of the patrol car's headlights, a shadow barely formed, and Nichols could have sworn he looked almost normal.

    His voice was deep, and perfectly steady. "He won't like it, you know. He won't like it at all."

    Nichols turned away, more spooked than before, and looked up to the stars. Damn, he thought, wouldn't you know it. Gone more than a week and now the damned fog is coming back.

    

    

    Matt had asked her again: "Mom, why don't you and Mr. Ross get married?"

    And again she'd answered truthfully: "Don't know, darlin'. Maybe because there's a time for things like that, and this isn't it."

    It had sounded weak when she said it and Matt had finished his chocolate pudding in silence, cleared the table and gone up to his room when she'd pardoned him from doing the dishes. He wanted to finish the picture of the gulls, he'd told her; he wanted it done by Monday so Mr. Ross could tell him what he'd done wrong and what he should practice on. And when she was alone she washed the plates and listened to the radio, humming when she recognized a melody, shutting the music out when she didn't. Afterward, she wandered into the study where she opened the store ledger and stared at the columns, the figures, the black and red ink.

    She held a ball-point pen in her right hand and tapped the retractor knob against her teeth.

    Ten minutes later nothing had changed-the store was still solvent, no hints of financial disaster, and she might even be able to give one of her two clerks, Frankie Adams, a slight raise for the winter. If, she amended, he kept his nose clean. She smiled. She might as well ask for a million tax-free dollars. Though the boy was ambitious, and a decently hard worker, he was also enthralled by the local godhood, Carter Naughton. As long as Cart suffered the younger boy's presence, Frankie was going to be a problem. Well, maybe the raise would turn him around. Her good deed for the year.