“But what was the splash?” Patricia asked.
“Miss, you’ve got me. But you haven’t heard all of it yet. About twenty minutes later, just about a half mile above the old Counsel landing, there’s some lousy puddle-jumping motorboat right in the middle of the channel. He can’t seem to make up his mind where he wants to go, and I’m trying to ease past him without tearing down all the timber along the bank, when all of a sudden I’m damned if there ain’t another ker-splash there under us in the same place!”
Griffin whooped with laughter. “Skipper,” he called back, “some day you’re going to start believing those stories yourself. Then you’ll be tough to live with.”
“It’s the Gospel, Hutch—”
“I’ll bet it is! But listen. I want you to check something for me. I keep thinking I’ve got some kind of phony vibration period here. As if the wheel was off balance. You feel it? Wait’ll I rev her up .”
He advanced the throttle. Captain Shevlin listened, his head cocked to one side. “Sounds as smooth as an eel to me.”
Griffin shook his head, frowning. “Maybe so. But I’ll have the yard put her through the vibration test again.” He glanced suddenly around. “Hello. We’re off Seabreeze. We got to duck in here and unload your audience, you sea-going Uncle Remus.”
Fifteen
Reno cut the outboard motor and let the boat drift silently. They were nearly up to the second fork in the channel, where he had first heard the explosions the day before.
“We’ll take it the rest of the way on the oars,” he said. “No use advertising any more than we have to.”
She nodded, and they exchanged seats. It was midday now, hushed and stifling out in the dimness of the timber and glaring with malevolent brassiness along the channel where there was no protection from the sun. As the forward motion of the boat died, and with it the artificial breeze, they felt the heat close in on them with its weight.
Back at camp she had changed into darker slacks and shirt, at his insistence. “You can see white a mile through that timber,” he said. “And we don’t know what’s up there. Or who.”
He pulled with long, even strokes of the oars, skirting the brush along the bank, and when they spoke at all it was in lowered voices. They were tense, as if the very stillness of the place were somehow deceptive and they expected something to break it at any instant.
“You always have the feeling you’re being watched,” she said quietly.
Or about to be shot at, he thought without putting it into words. With a cold stirring of anger he remembered the shooting of the day before and the mysterious explosions he had heard. But there might be nothing at all up here now, he reminded himself. That was yesterday.
When they came up to the place where she had hidden the boat before, he pulled it in under the branches and tied it up. He helped her out, and they remained for a moment in the concealment of the foliage along the bank, staring out across the timbered bottom. It was as peaceful as eden. Yesterday’s violence was only a bad dream.
He walked ahead. They circled the bend of the channel and came out near the water again at the point where she had pulled him from the entangling limbs of the windfall. He looked out at it, thinking that but for her his body would be lying there now below the dark surface of the water.
“What is it?” she asked softly, behind him.
“I was thinking of something I read about the Chinese once. If you save somebody’s life he belongs to you and you have to take care of him as long as he lives.”
Just for a moment her eyes were very soft; then he saw the old faintly bantering smile come into them, and she said, “Aren’t you lucky this isn’t China? Think of having to live on a school teacher’s salary.”
Then, before he could reply, she went on, “The place where I found the lighter is just another hundred yards or so. Hadn’t we better go on?”
“Yes,” he said. She took the lead, and they moved ahead through the trees and low hanging underbrush along the bank, going toward the bend of the bayou above them. That was where the first shots had come from, and he was certain the explosions had been just beyond it. She slowed in a moment, searching the ground.
“It was right here,” she said. They stood in a small opening in the underbrush some twenty feet back from the bank. There was no trail, however, and the hard earth showed no tracks.
“You’re sure this is it?” he asked, gazing around.
“Yes.” She pointed. “The lighter was lying right there by that clump of grass. And I remember that dead tree, the one that’s leaning over and caught in that oak.”
He walked over and squatted down, examining the ground closely. Then he could see it, the faint outline where something had lain. It had rained since the lighter had been dropped there. But there was nothing else. He went over all the ground carefully. Then he walked out to the bank and examined the edge of the water for some distance, looking for any indication a boat had been pulled up there. He could see none.
He walked back to where she was standing, and shook his head at her questioning glance. Conscious of bitter disappointment, he wondered if this lead would evaporate into nothing the way all the others had. Counsel must have been here, but there was absolutely nothing to indicate why, or where he had been going. He took out two cigarettes and lit them. She sat down on a log and he squatted on his heels in front of her, watching as she took off the long-vizored cap and ran her fingers through her hair.
“I looked all around when I came back the next day,”
she said dispiritedly. “I couldn’t find anything either. Except that tree—the one somebody had cut down.”
“Oh.” He had forgotten about the tree. Again he was faintly puzzled; it was a stupid place to cut wood, this far from a road. “Which way was it?”
“Over there.” She turned and pointed away from the bayou. “You can’t see it from here.”
“O.K. We’ll have a look at it before we go back,” he said without much interest. “But right now let’s go up beyond that bend. Maybe we can find out what they were trying to blow up.”
It was only a short distance, cutting across the point. Almost unconsciously they began to hurry as they caught glimpses of open water through the trees ahead. They came out onto the bank at an opening in the trees and looked out across the flat and glaring expanse of water. Nothing moved anywhere; it was as desolate and uninhabited as all the other bayous.
They looked at each other, and he shook his head. “It’s crazy,” he said, baffled. “This whole country is crazy. I know this is where that dynamite was set off. But what in the name of God could they have been blowing here?”
She turned suddenly, and pointed toward the water close to shore. “What’s that white thing floating there? In the edge of those weeds.”
He walked over and looked. “Just a dead fish,” he called back. It was floating belly up.
“There’s another one,” she said, pointing off to the left. She was walking up the bank now. “And two more.”
He looked down the other way and in a moment had counted a half dozen. Picking up a long stick, he raked two of them ashore and turned them over. They were carp, not yet beginning to decompose, and there were no marks on them.
She came over and stood behind him. “That’s odd, isn’t it?” she said, puzzled. “Why do you suppose they all died?”
“Concussion,” he said succinctly.
“Oh. You mean the dynamite?”
“Right. We can quit wondering where those explosions were. They were right here, under water.”