“What woman around here have we lost sight of?” Cecilia asked.
Ed spat, frowned. “Lost sight of ’em all, as far as I’m concerned, the way everybody around here keeps to their-selves. Sea Mount women don’t trade in my store. They gotta waste gas driving to Half Moon trying to save a coupla pennies.” He grinned sourly at Cecilia. “Ain’t seen you for a bit, Cecilia.” He made a point of looking at her feet. “Nope, you got both this morning.”
“This is no joking matter, Ed Grimes,” Cecilia said stiffly. “Now listen, we’ve got to get the authorities. Joe, you go for the Sheriff — no, Ed, you better go back to the store and call the Sheriff, get a deputy out here. Hughie and Angelo, you stay here, see that the waves don’t — well, wash it away. While I look around.” She hesitated delicately. “You never know, there might be more.”
“I often wondered why a big strong guy like Tony decided to die,” Big Joe said. “Now I know. Mrs. Lordalmighty, I’m gonna tell my wife and nobody else. And she’s not going to touch our telephone, either. I don’t want my kid mixed up in any part of this. Tell ’em the dog found it.”
Ed put a contemplative gaze on Cecilia. “You got plenty breath. Why waste ours?” He turned and swung his long loose-hinged legs over the sand toward the cliff. Big Joe followed. After a moment so did Angelo, calling back, “I don’t see nothing. You tell ’em that. I got fish to sell.”
At the cliff top the three men grouped briefly around Mr. Watanabi, the flower grower who lived deep in the valley. They pointed to the beach. Then the four headed toward the highway.
“Cecilia, I apologize for them,” Hughie said gently. “They haven’t got any respect and courtesy — it’s a terrible thing not to have respect. No doubt they had bad training when they were children. Besides, like Ed said, people in Sea Mount keep to themselves. They don’t get used to talking to each other.”
“One of ’em knows something,” she said spitefully. “Or can make a guess about it. Maybe they know what woman has suddenly left town, isn’t seen around her yard or—” Her voice trailed off. No smoke in Silas Williams’ house? Could Silas have — did this belong to Laura Williams?
“Hughie, how old would you judge this woman to be?”
Hughie’s arms lifted helplessly. “Who can tell? Sea water. Sand scrubbing the skin.”
“Laboratories can. They’ve got tests and things. Hughie, you wait here and watch. I’ll go telephone. I’ve got nothing to hide. Like maybe Big Joe and Ed have.”
“Cissie, don’t say that, Big Joe and Ed—”
She whirled on him, her face red and furious. “Don’t call me that, Hughie Cornfeld! Don’t you ever call me that! Nobody gave you the right — nobody ever had the right! Tony was always doing that, he knew it made me mad, so don’t you start! Not even Tony had the right.”
“Please, Cecilia, please, dear Mrs. Pigazzi.” Hughie’s hand gently touched her shoulder. She flung it off. “It slipped out — no meaning to it. I have the highest respect. It’s like everybody calls me Hughie. I don’t mind when they’re nice and friendly with it.” He tried to laugh. “I was finished with Mr. Hugh David Cornfeld a long time ago. I like Hughie. Dear Mrs. Pigazzi, please, you run along now, take care of things, and I’ll watch.”
Mollified, she pouted her lips, then lifted them in a one-sided smile. “Well. Okay. But it bugs me to be called that. Kids did it when I was little, all my seven brothers and sisters, I was the youngest. Only they really meant sissy. Turned me into a fighter. I jabbed my table fork into my oldest brother’s hand once when he called me that. Okay, Hughie, keep an eye out.”
Cecilia panted up the path and hurried to the public telephone booth outside the Grimes General Store and Garage. As she entered, Ed Grimes stuck his head out the door of his store and yelled, “I done it!” Then he vanished behind the slammed door.
“Damned old fool!” Cecilia said loudly. She walked slowly back to the lot beside Hughie’s shack, climbed into her station wagon, and waited for the officers to arrive.
When she saw a Sheriff’s car approaching she hastily left the station wagon and hightailed it down the cliff path. Hughie was far down the beach, bending down, digging in the sand, poking his hand into his bucket of sea water. Blast the man, he couldn’t wait to dig those clams! Her gaze scoured the sand, searching for that small and terrible object. It wasn’t to be seen. “Hughie!” she screamed.
“It’s gone, he’s lost it!” she said frantically to the Sheriff’s men, now close behind her. “He’s let the ocean get it!”
Her agile mind pounced on a new thought — maybe Hughie? For all his soft and gentle ways, maybe Hughie? Maybe Hughie, living like a bachelor even though he was married, or used to be, got carried away; men were crazy anyway.
Then she saw it. Lone and pitiful, disguised by rubbings of sand. Its humanness had vanished; it was now a mere object, displayed as though the beach were a macabre museum. She pointed to it. “No, it’s still here. There.”
But as she told Hughie later, should a busy woman have put aside her housework and hung around for this? A couple of men strutting around in uniforms and saying, “Hum-m-m, did you discover any more of the body, Mr. Cornfeld? Oh, the boy found it, where’s the boy? That your house up there? You see any strangers around? Hear any cars drive up in the night? Hum-m-m.” Then after walking around in circles on the sand, like dogs looking for a soft spot to take a nap: “Well, we’ll get it checked in the lab — age, how long dead, so on. But unless more of the body is found — well, we don’t keep toeprints on file.”
“I could do better myself, and me with no salary like they get,” she told Hughie when they left.
“I don’t doubt it,” Hughie agreed. His large sad eyes surveyed her, from her thick wavy hair, round face with its full lips, down over her sturdy body. “You’re a very vigorous lady.”
“I’m not bragging, it’s just plain truth,” she said, bridling pleasurably at his inspection. “They need a good woman in that Sheriff’s office. Hughie, I think I’ll run along now, I’ve got work to do.”
“And I can get my clams,” Hughie said patiently.
Cecilia sat for a few minutes in her station wagon before starting the engine, cogitating on how to manage a casual visit to Silas Williams’ house. To be casual was difficult, seeing she had been there only once in the twelve years she had lived in Sea Mount. That other time to ask for a rosebush slip, the frosty-faced Laura giving it to her and then saying after barely a minute of chat, “Good day, Mrs. Pigazzi.”
The station wagon jerked forward, slowly drove to the Williams house, and parked.
Still no chimney smoke. No fire in the cook stove. “Eggs,” said Cecilia, and nodded her head approvingly at her shrewdness. “They’ve got hens. If they’re home I’ll tell ’em I’ve run out of eggs and can’t stand the store-bought ones.”
She went to the rear of the house to be less visible to the scattered houses on the slope. She tapped on the back door, primly straightened her sweater, and squinted through the glass in the door. Involuntarily she jumped back. Silas and Laura Williams were sitting at the kitchen table, not a speck of food on it, no dishes, nothing. They were just sitting, turning their heads and staring at her.
Laura got up and opened the door. Cecilia sucked in her breath and took another step back. A long lethally sharp butcher knife was in Laura’s hand. “Yes, Mrs. Pigazzi?”
“I–I wondered if you had any spare eggs you’d sell. I ran out and you know those eggs at the store, they break the minute they hit the pan.”
“No, Mrs. Pigazzi,” Laura said flatly, evenly. “This morning I cracked all our eggs and ran them down the sink. You may tell everyone in Sea Mount and clear to Half Moon Bay that I shall continue to do this, and worse, until Mr. Williams buys me a gas range. You may also tell them that Mr. Williams and I are both on a hunger strike. And unless he becomes reasonable they are likely to find us dead here soon. At the table, starved to death, with a stocked cupboard and seventy-five thousand dollars in the bank.”