Beneath the bridge the water was dark and still, some fifty yards across and overhung with trees. One of the arms of Counsel Bayou, he thought, trying to remember the map he had studied. It connected with the larger, dredged Bayou that was the ship channel, off to the left, and there should be another arm of it crossing the highway a mile or so ahead. Then he saw the other sign on the right, just beyond the bridge. “Gulfbreeze Camp,” it read. “Cabins. Boats. Live Bait.” The road swung off the highway into the oaks, and as he made the turn he caught glimpses of buildings and the sheen of sunlit water somewhere beyond.
One weathered building contained a lunchroom and a store with a gasoline pump out in front, and behind it, along the edge of the bayou, a row of cabins squatted dejectedly under the trees with their backs to the water. Weeds poked their way up through the ubiquitous shell paving in places and all the buildings needed a coat of paint. Dying on its feet, Reno thought, as he got out of the car.
He went into the lunchroom. It was empty except for a blonde girl in a white apron sitting at one of the stools rasping her nails with an emery stick. She glanced languidly up at him as he came in, and got up to go around in back of the counter.
“Yes, sir?” she asked, raising her eyebrows a little. They were plucked to a thin line, and the somewhat petulant small mouth was a crimson splash of lipstick.
“Cup of coffee,” Reno said. As she was drawing it he noticed a large mounted bass over the door going out into the store at the other end of the counter. Good eight pounds, he thought.
“They catch that around here?” he asked, nodding.
She put the coffee down and glanced indifferently at the fish. “I reckon so.”
“Nice bass.”
She shrugged. “Is that what it is?”
Fine front man for a fishing camp, Reno thought. But maybe bass just don’t do anything to her. “You got a vacant cabin?” he asked.
“Sure. Lots of ‘em.” She was studying her nails again.
I can understand that, he thought. “I’d like to rent one, if it wouldn’t trouble you too much. How much are they?”
“By the day or week?”
“By the week.”
She appeared to look at him for the first time. “Alone?”
“That’s right.”
“Eighteen dollars, I think. You can talk to Skeeter. He’ll be back in a minute.”
“Skeeter?”
“Mr. Malone. He owns the place.”
He wondered if Mac had talked to her. It was a girl living at this camp who saw the car and boat parked in front of the inn. And where was it he first began to get the hunch that Conway was Robert Counsel? It couldn’t have been from this girl, though, because she wouldn’t remember that much about Counsel. She wasn’t old enough. He had been gone from here for nine years, and she wasn’t over twenty-two or twenty-three. But somewhere down here Mac had found out a lot of things. Too many things, he thought.
“Business a little slow?” he asked, stirring the coffee.
“Lousy. Except on week ends,” the girl replied. A car pulled up in front and he could hear a man come into the store. “There’s Skeeter now, if you want to talk to him.”
He paid for the coffee and went through the door into the other room. The shelves were filled with groceries, and a long showcase contained fishing tackle, mostly cheap stuff from the looks of it, the kind of things vacationers and tourists bought. The man was behind the opposite counter at the cash register.
He glanced up at Reno with the briefest of nods, a thin, tough slat of a man dressed in khaki trousers and shirt, the sallow face and small black eyes as devoid of expression as a closed door. “What can I do for you?” he asked.
“I’d like to get a cabin for a couple of weeks if the fishing’s any good,” Reno said. “How’re the bass hitting?”
“They been taking some. Mostly with live bait, though. Water’s pretty warm.”
“Well, I’ll give it a whirl.”
He paid a week’s rent in advance, and Malone came outside with him, carrying the key. Getting into the car, he followed the lank figure around the corner of the building and along the row of cabins. It was the last one, directly behind the store building and next to the boat landing, where a half-dozen skiffs were tied up. Malone unlocked the door and they went in. It smelled musty, but the bare pine floor looked clean. It contained a bed and an old dresser with one of the drawers missing, and a door at the back opened into a small kitchen with a wood cookstove and an oilcloth-covered table. The door at the right of the room led into the bathroom, which had a small window looking out toward the boat landing.
“Hot water tank’s hooked to the cookstove,” Malone said. “If you don’t figure on doing any cooking, you can get hot water to shave with up at the kitchen.”
“O.K.,” Reno said. They went out and stood for a moment on the small porch, squinting at the white sunlight. “Boats are extra, I suppose?”
Malone nodded. “Two dollars a day. I’ll bring down a pair of oars.” He went off toward the store and Reno began carrying in his duffel from the car. Malone came back in a minute and leaned the oars with their leather guards against the wall of the porch.
“Take any boat you want,” he said, jerking his head toward the landing float.
“Thanks.” Reno leaned against the door and lit a cigarette. “Lots of water back up in there, I guess.”
Malone took out a plug of tobacco and whittled off a corner with his knife. “Never fished here before?”
Reno shook his head. “I’m from out of state.” He jerked a hand toward the license plate of the car.
“I wouldn’t go too far, then, without a guide. Them bayous wind all over hell, and a man could get lost if he didn’t know ‘em.”
“Why’s everything around here named Counsel?” Reno asked casually. “The roadhouse over there, and the bayou?”
“Counsels used to own all of it. Rich family.” Malone spat out into the yard, the black eyes flashing at nothing.
“But not any more?”
“Don’t own any of it now. Ain’t but one of ‘em left, anyway, and nobody knows where he is. In the pen, probably, now he ain’t got enough money to keep him out of it.”
Not one of the old family friends, Reno reflected. If Conway was Counsel and he was coming back here, it probably wasn’t to see Malone.
After the other had gone he finished unpacking and took off the suit he had been wearing, slipping on khaki trousers and a T shirt and an old pair of Army shoes. Going out on the porch to escape the stifling heat inside the cabin, he squatted in the shade and opened the tackle box. He took the reel out of its cloth bag and began methodically to oil it, his mind busy with the same old rat race of thought.
You figured out the answer to one question, and a dozen new ones sprung up to take its place. You could see now why Conway had brought his own boat, if he had to have one for some reason he alone knew. It figured if you added it up that way: Conway was Counsel, he’d grown up in this country and everybody would know him on sight, if he tried to rent one he’d be recognized, and presumably he didn’t want anybody to know he was here. But that still left the big one. Why had he needed a boat?
And the new one, Reno thought. If everybody knew him, how was it possible he’d been here since the twentieth of July without anyone’s seeing and recognizing him? He considered it, and knew there were a couple of good answers to that. Maybe he wasn’t here any more, and hadn’t been since that first night. And maybe he was dead.
And in that case, who was doing all the shooting?
Impatience; took hold of him and he was no longer able to sit still. He slid the reel back in the tackle box. And stood up. One thing I can do right now, he thought, is to find that road where he turned off the highway. Setting the box back inside the cabin, he locked the door and was just going out to the--car when he heard a boat. The sound was different from that of an outboard, and he looked curiously up the bayou.