Strawberries in the Sea (34 page)

“Yes, I guess I need another night's rest.” Look square at him, you idiot. She was blushing so under her clothes that her back felt scalding hot, her face was burning and she couldn't hide it. Fumbling, she turned the stew into a saucepan and began rinsing the container. Jamie yawned and said, “I feel thick today. I was up around three to see what the weather was, and I've been out since daylight looking for that guy. Gave up finally and came in for a mug-up.”

She managed to give him a half-natural glance over her shoulder. “Where'd you look?”

“Oh, all around Sou'west Point to see if he'd been thrown up anywhere, and then I even went over to the southern end of Brigport. Tide might have carried him that way. But no sign.”

She worked on the container as if it were really encrusted with years of soil. “Wouldn't the helicopter have seen him if he was at all visible?”

He yawned again. “Oh, most likely, unless he was buried under rockweed or wedged into a crack somewhere. Anyway, I went ashore on them to satisfy my own curiosity. I hate like hell to think of the poor guy left like that. Well, if he's carried away, the sea's as good a grave as any. I'd choose it for myself.” His solemn eyes met hers. “But hung up somewhere like an old jacket or a piece of pot warp—nope.”

She dried plastic as if it were porcelain. Jamie said, “The Coast Guard's calling off the search, so the chopper won't be back tomorrow. You know, if they'd just paid attention to us the first time we warned them off, he'd still be alive.”

“Or if you hadn't used a gun.”

“Look, we had a right. It's our island, after all. And we fired high. I hear they're saying we fired low, and Purvis'll swear to it. But they can't prove it. Anyway,” he said defiantly, “we were bound to come to blows sooner or later, the guns had nothing to do with it. That was just to get their attention.”

“Well, it seems to have done that all right.” She fastened the lid on the container and handed it to him.

“Now listen, don't
you
go sour on me. We've got enough on our hands without our folks acting as if we're the local branch of the Mafia or something. We just happened to go into the store together this afternoon and some pillar of wit and wisdom said, ‘How's things with Cosa Nostra, boys?'”

Rosa laughed. “Personally I don't think it's that funny,” said Jamie, “but it wowed them in the store.”

“It was your expression, that's all. . . . None of it's very funny, Jamie.” She was wishing so vigorously for him to leave that he should have felt it. How could he be so stupid?

“That's why I need a little sympathetic companionship,” Jamie said. “Can I come up tonight for an hour or so? Maybe we could walk over back and watch the sunset.”

Out of the intensity of her desire to be rid of him, she was able to look him in the eye now. “Jamie, I'm going to take the boat over to gas up, and then I'm coming back here and fix up a sandwich and take it to bed, eat and read, and be asleep before dark. I plan to haul tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow night, then,” he said doggedly. “It's time you started living again, Rosa, the way I told you. Walking over to Barque Cove to look at the sunset isn't much, but it's a start.”

“Tomorrow night,” she repeated. “Yes, your lordship.”

“All right. I'll gas up for you, so you can start resting up right now. And listen, if we're anywhere near each other when I stop for a coffee break tomorrow morning, I'm coming alongside. Understand?”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“
Dismissed!
” Jamie snapped, then laughed. “I feel better already. Well, I'll go tend to
Sea Star
.”

“I'm much obliged, Jamie,” she said, following him through the entry so he wouldn't delay.

“Think nothing of it.” Swiftly he kissed her cheek and at the same time squeezed her shoulder. Then he left, waving without looking back. She felt shaky and tired enough to cry. She saw herself having coffee with Jamie, the two boats lying gently together in a lee spot; she also saw herself heading down east in
Sea Star
, with Quint out of hiding and at the wheel.

She went back into the kitchen, and Quint was there at the front windows, hands braced on the window sill, trying to see past the spruces.

He twisted around. His color had turned worse than sallow. It was muddy. “Is there more than one guy with hair that yellow?” he demanded.

Without thinking she said, “His father, but he wasn't there that night.”

“I didn't kill him, then.”

“Not Jamie.”

“Then
who?
” He came toward her, his eyes bulged in a frantic stare. “Listen, the way he talked,
I'm
the only one dead, and the way he said it I began to think I
was
dead, and hung up somewhere like he said, for the gulls to pick at.” Sweat was running down his face. “Listen, was that it? Am I the only one?”

She nodded. He came closer, slowly, his thumbs in his belt. “How long have you known?”

She thought of saying, Since just now, when he came in. Her mouth was opening; she could have sworn on her life that was what she intended to say. But awed by the sweat-glazed mask she said, “Since yesterday morning, when I went to mail the letter.”

“And you didn't tell me,” he said in his husky whisper. “You came back here with a face like cream and you let me suffer.”

“I didn't think you were suffering much,” she said.

“I had to do
something
to keep from climbing the walls! I told you I can't stand being shut up, and this—this”—he took in the kitchen with a contempt that should have scarred the walls—“and woods practically right up to the windows, choking you to death. . . . Jesus, you knew, and you didn't tell me. You went through the whole stinking act. Are you some kind of a
nut?
You crazy because your old man walked out on you? Or did he walk out on you because you're crazy?”

He hooted savagely, and struck at her. Not able to take the gesture seriously, she dodged, and said, “Listen, Quint, sure I should have told you. But leave that out of it, you'd still want to be smuggled off, you'd have no way to explain hiding out here while they all looked for you, the helicopter and everything—”

The back of his hand struck the words off her lips. She tasted blood. She was his height, and strong, but she had no defense against his speed, skill, and viciousness. He said things sometimes. Obscenities. She heard but they were just so many more blows to be warded off her face, her breasts, her belly. She tried backing toward the door, but he danced around there and fended her off. He was everywhere at once. Finally she dropped, crumpling forward as she fell and curling up like a sow bug to shield herself, head to knee.

He stood over her. His breathing was loud and rasping in the room, she could hear it over the thick throbbing in her ears. “Damn cow,” he said. “Who do you think wanted
you?
All you were to me was a chance to hide out and get off this God-forsaken rock. And it turns out I didn't even need that!”

He kicked her in the side—with my moccasins! she thought as if that were the chief indignity—and walked out of the house.

She lay where she was, thinking with a calm hatred. If he comes back I'll meet him with a knife in each hand. But she needed the strength first. The shock and degradation of the attack were worse than the pain of the blows and the taste of blood in her mouth.

Gradually the pounding died down. She realized that quite a long time had gone by, and that probably he was not coming back.

She sat up carefully. Her side hurt from the kick, but not as if a rib was broken. She hurt in a number of places, especially around her cheekbones, and mouth. No teeth loosened; she'd dodged in time. Her head ached.

“Damn cow. Who do you think wanted
you?
”

She bowed her head into her arms and wept.

S
omeone was leaning over her, hands on her shoulders. If this is Jamie, she thought drearily, I wish anybody could die of shame. She tilted back her head and through swollen lids she saw Edwin.

She leaned her face against his knees. After a few minutes his hands began urging her up. His arm around her guided her to a chair at the table, then he went to the sink and came back with a basin of water. Absorbed and seemingly impersonal, he attended to her face, applying ointment where the skin was broken. She remembered doing this for Quint, and tried to think how long ago it was. The effort made her dizzy. She leaned her head on her hand. He got out ice cubes and wrapped them in a towel for her swollen mouth.

Without meeting his eyes she applied it, gingerly.

His notepad slid into her field of vision. “What happened?”

She took the pen and wrote, “Fell down stairs. Where did you come from, baby dear?”

“Lobster smack. Spur of the moment. —Did she fall or was she pushed?”

She turned her face away toward the windows and the spruces that hid the lane. Everybody disappeared beyond them eventually. Con, that day; Jamie, this afternoon, and he'd never come back once he found out about Quint. Quint—but had he gone that way?

She looked wildly around at Edwin, who nodded and began to write again.

“Drowned men rise up and become heroes. He just walked into the store and gave himself up. Performance straight out of TV western. Everybody's telling him he didn't kill anybody. He's smiling through tears and being the belle of the ball.”

“Did he say where he's been hiding out?” Her handwriting was unsteady.

“In the woods at Sou'west Point. Living on mussels and periwinkles he cooked at night.”

“His clothes could have dried out on him, but he had my moccasins. How explain them?”

Edwin smiled for the first time, and pointed across the room. Her moccasins sat neatly side by side just inside the door. “I found those in the path,” he wrote. “He showed up in bare feet. They've given him someone's shoes. . . . Mark wants to feed him, but he claims his stomach's shrunk.”

Rosa laughed scornfully, which caused excruciating pain in her lip. “The truth is, he's got a full gut. All I did was cook for him.”

Well, almost all.

Edwin wrote, “Want me to claim he broke in here and attacked you? I'd be happy to wipe away that Gee-whiz grin.”

She shook her head desolately. “I took him in and fed him. I can't get away from that.”

“Why did he beat you up? Did he try to rob you?”

“I made him mad.” She left it at that, and Edwin asked nothing more. He wrote that Quint was going ashore on the lobster smack. After that they sat there for a time. Edwin filled and lit his pipe. She was lost, not in thought, but in some chaotic limbo of words, broken phrases; the cold and heat, the light and dark of rushing cloud shadows. Grief almost that of bereavement; shame; rage; ridicule; grief returning, so chokingly bitter it was losing Con all over again. . . . She couldn't seem to settle on one thing before another swept it away.

All the time she sat immobile, leaning on her elbows, her hands cupped over her closed eyes. Edwin got up after a while and took his bag and his bedroll into his room. He came back, she heard the water pails clattering. He poured left-over water into the tea kettle and the wash basin, then went out with the two pails.

She roused herself to go upstairs and began methodically erasing any sign of Quint. She stripped the sheets off her bed and his; they'd used both. They would be boiled and bleached, and the blankets put out to air; in the meanwhile she tossed everything into the third upstairs bedroom. She opened the windows all around so that the afternoon wind could pour through like a tide. The books he had been reading, and the cards they'd played cribbage with, she would burn. She dropped them all into a pillowcase for the time being. She returned her sleeping bag to her room, and put fresh pillowcases on her pillows. . . . Half the chocolate cake was left, and Edwin could have it. It was too good for the gulls.

She carried the lamp downstairs and brought up the dry mop, though the place hardly needed it. If she'd had time and plenty of water on hand, she'd have scrubbed the floors. From the windows of the third room, she saw her water pails standing on the well curb, and Edwin was not in sight. In the late afternoon sunshine the village looked tranquilly ordinary. There was a ball game between the Percy, Dinsmore, and Campion children. A cluster of men stood talking by Philip Bennett's front porch, three of them Bennetts, she could tell even from this distance. Jamie came up by the Binnacle, hands in his pockets, heading home; the dog loped stiffly to meet him. The soft ball went wild and Jamie fielded it with an expert reach and tossed it back to a dandelion-headed girl.

The lobster smack was leaving. She didn't try for a glimpse of Quint.

Edwin had brought a box of green corn, tomatoes, cucumbers, and lettuce from his father's garden, as well as the usual steaks. Spur of the moment? she questioned. Just happened to be around the waterfront when the smack was leaving for the island? Just happened to have his bag packed, his bedroll ready, vegetables gathered, and steaks bought, and everything tucked handily under one arm?

The worst thing about Edwin's lies, or maybe the best thing, considering them from Edwin's standpoint, was that you had such a hard time challenging them.

It didn't matter, except that now he knew her disgrace, or part of it. Not the worst part. Even to obliquely refer to it, wordlessly, nauseated her because her body could still remember how it had been and would not repudiate its own rapture. How could you! How
could
you! she cried silently at herself as if at a child or sister who had disgraced her beyond tolerance.

She set the table and started heating water for the corn. Edwin returned with the two full pails, and she drank cold water thirstily, it was refreshing to her sore mouth. Meanwhile Edwin was writing. When she stopped drinking he handed her the pad.