Phantom Nights (11 page)

"Tell Bobby to get here as fast as he can."

"Are you okay, Mrs. Gambier? If it's an emergency, I could have Tuck or Owen over there in two shakes."

"It's really family business. I only want Bobby."

To the kitchen.

The key to lock the back door hung on a cup hook beside the keys to her Plymouth coupe. In the two years they'd lived on West Hatchie, Cecily had never locked any door. This lock was old, and the key wouldn't turn. Maybe some oil . . . but she would have to go out to the garage, which was twenty yards away. The speed of her heart dizzied her. She worked the key frantically in the frozen lock. Not only wouldn't it turn, now she couldn't pull it out.

Behind her in the kitchen the refrigerator door opened. She looked up and saw Alex reflected in the glass half of the kitchen door, taking a quart of milk from the top shelf. He was already in the house—where, basement?—and she hadn't known.

Her choices now were to confront him—Alex was looking at his wastebasket that she had brought downstairs—or open the door, walk outside, and wait for Bobby in the yard. And that was the same as being run out of her own house by this . . .
boy
who didn't belong there in the first place.

Cecily stayed by the door, her hand on the knob. "Yes, I found it," she said. The migraine jewel inside her head winking again like a lighthouse mirror, so hurtful she squinted her eyes.

Alex looked blankly at her, and again at the wastebasket. Standing there with the fridge door open, milk bottle in his hand, little smear of chocolate bar bought at the picture show in one corner of his mouth.

The phone rang.

Bobby
, she thought. His presence, although at the other end of a telephone wire, still distant from the house, gave her courage.

"Put that milk back and get out of here," Cecily said, taking a step toward Alex. "That's Bobby calling. And when I tell him what you've done . . . Get
out
. Now. I don't care where you go. I never want to see you again!"

His flaky lips parted in astonishment. He started to shake his head, then shrugged, confused and defensive.

Now Cecily, urged on by the ringing phone, continued through the kitchen as if stalking him, and Alex backed up, staring in consternation at her overheated face. Upstairs, Brendan let out a wail, probably disturbed in a dream. He usually slept through wet pants. But Cecily jumped to another conclusion.

"Were you in the nursery?
What did you do to Brendan?
"

Alex found this new accusation—although the other one was a mystery to him—unnerving, and Cecily's own nerves, her show of incoherence, panicked him. He turned to the message board on the wall beside the fridge and the pencil hanging there on a string and began to scrawl on the notepad fixed to the board. In his haste he lost his grip on the bottle of milk. Some of it splashed across Cecily's bare feet. Cecily kept moving toward the telephone in the hall. She had cleared the doorway when Alex caught up and pulled her back into the kitchen. He wanted her to read the note he had ripped from the pad, but Cecily rounded on him in a panic equal to his and slapped him hard across the mouth, splitting his lower lip. Blood flew, but still he wouldn't let go until she screamed in his face.

"If you ever hurt my mother or my child, I WILL KILLYOU!"

Her fury staggered him, and his grip slackened. Cecily tore free of Alex and stumbled into the hall, stubbing a big toe on the doorjamb. She hopped twice and fell to her knees by the hope chest, lifted the receiver from the hook of the upright telephone.

"Cecily?"

"Bobbbbbbyyyyy."

"What's wrong?"

Crouched beside the chest, she looked in terror over her shoulder, thinking the worst: Alex now with knife or cleaver in his hand instead of a pencil, intent on shutting her up. But she didn't see him in the kitchen. The back door stood open. She heard her mother in the hall upstairs. Cecily's head was exploding, and she sobbed.

"Bobby, it's Alex. He went crazy tonight. Tried to kill my mother. And he . . . put his hands on me. Bobby, Alex put his hands on me!"

F
or the early part of the evening on that Saturday night, Mally Shaw had had company: a middle-aged man (late fifties probably was more accurate) who had notions of courting her. His given name was Herschel, but he had been called "Poke Chop" all of his life. They were related in some vague way Mally had never troubled to sort out. In the colored community Poke Chop had status: he was a 'cumulating man. Until recently he had been a letter carrier earning good Federal wages until fallen arches prompted his retirement. Among his accumulations were farmland, thirty beehives, fruit trees, a good well, a sound house filled with Sears Roebuck furniture and a late-model Oldsmobile. His most recent wife had gone to her rest two years ago; adult children had migrated to the big cities and he was lonely. Poke Chop had a wide rubbery face like a deflated inner tube and a picket-fence grin. He brought Mally treats such as pickled pigs feet or comb honey when he came to call, and played his banjo for her. Mally recopied in a good hand the letters he wrote to his scattered brood with a carpenter's pencil and served him spice cake.

There was no chance she was going to marry him, should he get around to popping the question, or marry anyone else, but following his visits Mally always felt a little down in the dumps, adrift in the vacancies of her life.

There was now a heavy stirring in treetops that had scarcely moved for the better part of a week of swelter. The sky lighting abruptly behind those trees like gunfire from ambush. Thunder. Rain was pushing in, a belting storm. Mally felt the effect of falling barometric pressure in her sinuses. She wrapped up what was left of the spice cake and stored it in her breadbox, then went to the bathroom to wash up, sitting on the edge of her tin bathtub to shave her legs.

The glass in Mally's bedroom window was vibrating, and the willow tree thrashed outside. Her Crosley radio was full of static, and so was her hair when she brushed it, finding herself lugubrious in the tarnish of the dressing table mirror. She put on cotton pajamas and a Chinatown kimono her father had bought for her when he attended a medical convention in San Francisco right after the war.

She went to the front of the house to close windows, and in a spray of atmospheric electricity discovered Alex Gambier on the front porch, chest heaving as if he had just finished the
Tour de France
, his young face kinetic with strife.

Of all nights
, Mally thought. But hadn't she asked for this?

"Best bring your bike up to the porch if you're coming in," she said, trying not to sound put-upon.

She went to the kitchen and unwrapped the spice cake again. The cake went well with a tall glass of buttermilk, which he drained without pause while sitting on the edge of one cushion on her bamboo sofa, tilting the cushion up behind him. He winced as the cool milk bathed the serious cut on his swollen lower lip. She poured a second glass and re-covered the crock with cheesecloth. Sat opposite Alex while approaching thunder gave some of the framed pictures on her wall the heebie-jeebies.

When Alex had drunk his fill and seemed calm enough to describe to her the events that had him racing to her house again, she gave him the bread board, her writing pad, and a mechanical pencil. He laid the board across his knees and hunched over it for several minutes as if he had committed to composing another epic tale. Writing with such vehemence he broke the pencil lead twice. Mally wished for a Chesterfield, but she had to be careful what she spent her money on, with no immediate prospects for employment.

Alex handed her the pad suddenly and got up to pace. The air outside was momentously still for half a minute or so. Then big raindrops spattered down like pennies on the roof. Mally gave Alex a thoughtful look before she began to read his page and a half.

"If you've got to go," she said, mindful of the quantity of buttermilk he'd put away, "you can use my toilet. You'll get soaked to the skin outside."

Nearly as soon as she'd spoken, the wind rushed into the hollow where she lived, bringing with it a crackling deluge.

While he was in the bathroom, she read all that Alex had wanted to tell her. Mally put the pad facedown on the oval table next to her chair and thought,
Lord 'a mercy, what goes on in that house?
It seemed to Mally that Cecily Gambier had smacked Alex in the mouth for no good reason. Otherwise Alex was outright lying and mooching around looking for sympathy where he could find it. Which contradicted most of what she instinctively felt about his character.

Mally wasn't given time to think about that. She heard the swash of a car approaching the house. Bright headlights were almost on top of her porch. She had other visitors.

B
obby Gambier walked downstairs after looking over the ogre-footed tub in the guest bathroom, seeing that carefully slicked-over bottom for himself (the small amount of water Bernice had run into the tub had slowly leaked out). Power was off in their house and up and down the street; the storm that had swung their way to break the heat if not put an end to the drought was still pounding them after almost twenty minutes.

Cecily and Bernice were together in the parlor, where Bobby had got a camp lantern going. Cecily rocked the fretful Brendan, hiding his face from the lightning. The two women looked at Bobby, who didn't sit down. His face was grave.

"I could never have believed that of Alex."

"Haven't I tried to warn you?" Cecily said, too emotionally sapped to put any sort of recrimination behind her words. It was a simple statement of fact.

Bobby turned to leave the parlor.

"Where're you going?"

"Find my brother, Cecily."

"And leave us alone here?"

"Les Owen will be sitting outside in his prowler while I'm gone."

Bernie put a hand on her daughter's arm while Bobby walked out.

"We'll be all right, darling. This is between Bob and Alex now. Let it be settled tonight, for everyone's sake."

Cecily, her brain lurid from headache, handed Brendan over to her mom, turned, and buried her face in a tasseled pillow. So Brendan wouldn't be further upset, hearing his mother weep.

Bernice joggled the baby against her breast, looking calmly around the parlor during the eerie winks of lightning, thinking how best to rearrange the furniture to accommodate her baby grand piano. Which she couldn't play anymore; but she could teach, and she'd observed that Brendan had the hands to be a fine pianist. Start him early enough, who could tell how far he might go in competitions?

Ten Big Ones

Catahoula Leopard Dogs

A Style of Murder

T
wo
men wearing hats and slickers came out of the car in Mally Shaw's yard and, leaning against the slash and flash of the rainstorm, holding tight to their hats to keep them from flying off, hurried up her porch steps.

Mally looked out through the oval glass of her front door, which was covered with an opaque curtain, saw revealed by lightning the Pontiac Eight that had briefly visited two nights ago, and picked up the shotgun that was nearly as tall as she was. With her other hand she hooked up the chain latch and backed away from the door.

Thumping of their booted feet on the floorboards of the porch.

"Mally Shaw!"

"Who are you, and what do you want?"

"Sorry to be bothering you this time of night, Mally! It's Leland Howard! I need to talk to you."

"Take off your hat," Mally called back, "but stay where you are! I have a shotgun."

"All right now, Mally, all right. No cause for alarm. Like I said, just want to talk to you."

She already knew his voice, but she wanted to see his face. When the hat came off his wavy blond head, that vanity pompadour flattened some, she pulled back one side of the curtain to look more closely at him. Rain light on his face, drops falling from the end of a hound-dog nose. No way to avoid getting wet out there. She couldn't tell anything about the tall man standing behind and sideways to Leland Howard, perhaps looking over the homely things collected on the porch. And the blue-and-white boy's bicycle.

"Who is that with you?"

"Oh, it's just my man, Jim Giles. Does most of my driving for me."