The Lower Deep (13 page)

"Thanks. If I'm to work here, I ought to know more about what's going on. Anyway"—Steve frowned—"Driscoll thinks the voodoo people have it in for us here. Do you put any stock in that?"

"I don't doubt they resent your being here. Just how they may be expressing their resentment I wouldn't want to guess."

"I see. On the other hand, Driscoll wasn't talking wholly about voodoo, I'm sure. When he said we'd become a target for evil, he had something like the Devil in mind, as well. Maybe the Devil working against us through voodoo. What would you say to that approach?"

Funny, Clermont thought, how it broadened a man to talk to someone he liked and respected. He knew a good deal about voodoo, of course, and
honestly believed much of it was good for his people. The highly ritualistic services, for instance, and the sense of discipline they instilled. The
houngans
and
mambos
with their genuine knowledge of old-fashioned herbal medicine. The belief in an afterlife that held out a promise of something better than the miserable poverty so many peasants had to endure in this one.

Of course, there was evil in voodoo, as well. At least on the fringe of it, in
bocorism
and zombiism and related spin-offs. He would not deny that.

But if anyone had suggested to him yesterday that Dame Marie and the Azagon might be under attack by some force of evil not in the realm of voodoo, he might have been derisive.

Now he said quietly, "Let's look into it, Steve. Shall we?"

O
n leaving the Azagon, Louis Clermont did not go directly back to his office. He stopped his car, an old Renault which he used as seldom as he could, at the home of the Jourdans, near the school for girls where Ginette was a student.

It was one of the better homes in town, and its owner, Maurice Jourdan, was the town's leading merchant.

The woman who opened the door had been a St. Joe City beauty once, with café-au-lait complexion, doll-like features, and a superb figure—the dazzling French-African combination that made so many of St. Joe's elite women so attractive. Except for the addition of some twenty pounds of what looked like baby fat, she still retained her beauty.

"Louis, thank God you've come!" she exclaimed
in a voice really lovely, despite her near hysteria. "It's awful! Just awful!"

Knowing he could have come here before going to the alcoholics' place, Clermont felt a twinge of guilt. "You didn't say over the phone—"

"Oh, I couldn't! I just couldn't talk about such a thing over the phone!"

Clermont followed her into the house and was met in the living room by her husband, who gravely and silently shook his hand. Maurice was precisely the kind of man a woman like Leonie Jourdan could be expected to seek out and marry. Tall, physically fit and handsome, ever obedient to his wife's whims, he was at all times more inclined to listen than to talk, while she did the talking for them both.

He had begun his career as a shopkeeper in Dame Marie, then become a merchant in the capital. With the building of the resort hotel, he had thought a move back to his birthplace would add to his stature and increase his profits.

Now he knew how wrong a man could be about such things.

Maurice waited patiently for his wife and Clermont to sit before seating himself. Then he said, "I'd better let Leonie tell you what happened, Louis," and looked expectantly at his wife.

Clermont looked at her, too.

"Ginny didn't come home last night." Leonie sobbed out the words rather than spoke them. "Maurice went all over, looking for her. At quarter past two o'clock in the morning, we were just going to phone the police when Roger Etienne drove in with her. At quarter past two, Louis!"

By "police" she meant the Armée de St. Joseph, whose khaki-uniformed soldiers provided the only police protection in the island's small towns. And the Roger Etienne she referred to was the young lieutenant commanding the Dame Marie post. Clermont knew him as a friend and patient, and knew he was a friend of the Jourdans.

Clermont waited patiently for the rest of it, guessing he was about to be told that Ginny Jourdan had been picked up intoxicated. There had been reports of drinking among the town's teenagers lately. Of drug use, too. And the way Ginny was behaving, she could easily have been caught up in the flow.

He was mistaken.

"Roger found her—he found her naked at Anse Douce," Leonie said in a whisper. "He went there on a hunch, he said, to see if kids were going there now to use drugs, and he saw this girl walking alone on the beach without anything on, and it was Ginny."

"Had
she been using drugs? Or drinking?" Clermont quietly asked.

"She said no."

"What explanation did she give?"

"Only that she—that she felt like taking her clothes off and walking on the beach like that." Tears welled in Leonie's eyes. "Oh, Louis, what's happening to our little girl? She's changed so! We can't even talk to her anymore!"

"Just a minute." Clermont wished he could talk to Maurice instead, but knew he couldn't without seeming to be rude. "You say Roger found her at the cove. What time?"

"He brought her straight home and they got here after two, as I've said. At quarter past two."

Clermont did some thinking. Paul Henninger had come ashore at Anse Douce and turned up at the Azagon about three-thirty, no? And if one believed his story, only his good luck in being attacked by a fish had saved him from swimming out to sea under some kind of hypnosis until he became exhausted and went under. Then only a second stroke of luck—hearing voodoo drums in the town—had told him where the shore was.

"What time did Ginny go out last night?"

"About eight. She said she was going over to a friend's house."

"Did she go there, do you know?"

"No, she didn't." It was Maurice who answered this time. "That was the first place I went to when we felt something was wrong. She hadn't been there. Then I began searching the town for her."

"How was she dressed?"

Obviously puzzled, Maurice only stared.

"What I'm getting at," Clermont said, "has she begun to dress in a more provocative way lately, perhaps? Is she wearing more makeup? Trying to be different in looks as well as in her behavior?"

Both of Ginny's parents shook their heads. "No," Leonie said. "If anything, she's been actually—well—indifferent about how she looks lately. As if she didn't care what people thought."

"Did she go anywhere else last night? Other than to Anse Douce, I mean."

"She says no—only there. To be by herself. To think things out."

Maurice said, "I asked her what she had to think out, and she said we wouldn't understand."

Again Clermont gave a fair imitation of Lincoln in deep thought, with one long-fingered hand cupping his chin. "Anse Douce," he said then, exhaling heavily. "I wish to God I knew what's going on there. Because something is, I can tell you. Where's Ginny now?"

"I'm right here," came Ginette Jourdan's voice, crisp and defiant, from the hall doorway.

Clermont resisted an urge to jerk himself around for a confrontation. The girl's parents did that, but he merely turned his head slowly and returned her gaze in silence until her eyes stopped challenging him. "Hi," he said then, quietly. "Come on in and sit awhile, hey? Where've you been? In your room?"

She walked to the nearest vacant chair and stiffly sat down. She was the beauty her mother must have been at that age, with skin the color of gold. "Yes," she said defiantly. "In my room."

Silence.

Here, Clermont thought, watching for some clue to what might be wrong, was the brightest girl in the nuns' school, and probably the loveliest as well. Along with her mother's beauty, she had inherited a quality from her father that made her something very special. There wasn't an adequate word for it.

"Want to tell me what happened?"

"My parents have just told you." She tossed her head. "I was on the beach naked, and the lieutenant found me. He wrapped his shirt around me as much as he could, so anyone who happened to see me wouldn't be too awfully shocked, and then he brought me home."

"Any special reason you wanted to take your clothes off?" Clermont asked.

"I felt like it."

"How long were you there, Ginny?"

"Hours."

"Had your clothes off the whole time, or was that just an afterthought, sort of?"

"I took them off when I got there."

"And did what?"

"Sat and looked at the sea. Is there a law against sitting naked on a deserted beach and looking at the sea?"

Clermont shrugged. "I guess not. But tell me something, girl. Why Anse Douce? What's so attractive about that place lately?"

"Nobody goes there."

"You sure of that? I've heard otherwise. In fact, from what I heard just this morning, a certain man was there last night about the same time you were. He had his clothes off, too."

"Louis!" the girl's mother shrilled.

Clermont aimed an owlish stare at her. "As I said before, something peculiar is going on at that cove. I don't know what, but I'd say the place is being used by some people in a way it shouldn't be." He shifted his frown back to the girl. "Ginny, are you pregnant, by any chance?"

The reaction he got to that question was not what he had expected. Maurice Jourdan stiffened and sucked in a breath. Leonie looked at him in utter astonishment and gasped out, "Louis Clermont! For shame!"

The reaction of the girl herself was the most violent of all. Ginny Jourdan shot to her feet and stood there like a sapling in a high wind, glaring at him with eyes that suddenly seemed on fire with fury. For a moment there was a wild-animal look about her as she bared her teeth while retreating step by step to the door. Clermont could have sworn she snarled at him with her upper lip quivering as she whirled and ran.

"Whew!" he breathed.

"What a thing for you to say, Louis Clermont!" Leonie Jourdan's voice dripped acid.

He pursed his lips and looked at her. "Oh, don't be such a prude, Leonie. Asking a kid today if she's pregnant isn't supposed to shock her. Not if she isn't, at any rate. There's something wrong here."

An awkward silence followed. Then the girl's father said, "Nevertheless, Louis, I'm sure you're mistaken."

"I didn't say she
is
pregnant, Maurice. I only asked her."

"Well, the implication . . . I'm sure she felt you were accusing her."

It was time to change the subject, Clermont decided, and relaxed into his Lincoln slouch again. "Look, both of you. I'm going to tell you something I know I shouldn't, because I'm not supposed to discuss my patients. And when I've told you, I'm going over to the army post and have a talk with Roger Etienne. As I said before, I'm convinced something is going on at Anse Douce that ought to be looked into."

Without using names, he told them about the problems besetting Paul Henninger and George
Benson. The nightmares. The sleepwalking. The tongue-biting. Then, with a grunt of relief at having concluded a most unpleasant task, he stretched himself to his feet.

"And I urge you to have a long talk with your daughter, both of you," he said. "There's nothing I can do if she's going to spit sparks at me for asking a simple question."

Leonie's eyes filled with tears again, and Clermont relented. "Now here, here, woman." He took her hand and patted it. "Whatever the problem is, it can be solved. You try to find out what it is, and we'll work on it together."

If Ginny would let them, he thought as he departed. Because one thing he ought to do, as soon as possible, was run a pregnancy check on the girl and how in blazes was he going to persuade her to submit to one?

Louis Clermont disliked unfinished business. Leaving the army post half an hour later, he returned to his office, took care of two patients who had been waiting for him, then decided to visit the Azagon again.

This time the door was opened to him by a man with a damp and pallid face—one of those taking the cure, he supposed—and when he asked for Dr. Spence, he was led to the kitchen. Steve was there, talking to a middle-aged black man.

"Can you spare another ten minutes?" Clermont asked.

"Of course, Louis." Steve sent an oblique glance at the islander, whom Clermont had seen about town on a number of occasions. "Let's try my so-called office again."

"Who's that you were talking to?" Clermont asked as they went along the hall together.