“I’ve seen prettier women,” he said.
Arlen looked at him and found himself recalling the fields of France, the Springfield rifle bucking in his arms, plumes of blood bursting from strange men. He longed for it now, hungered for killing in a way he had not in the war.
The body’s decomposition was advanced by now. Nothing accelerated that process like heat, and the water in the inlet had to be damn near eighty degrees. Rebecca and Paul remained forty feet away, covering their faces. The day’s rising sun and the fact that Arlen had pulled the body most of the way out of the water had conspired to worsen an already hideous smell. Arlen could tolerate it, after the war. You grew an extra layer around yourself during something like the Belleau Wood. Or maybe growth wasn’t the right way to think of it. No, it was more shrinking than growing. A part of you that was there at the start got a little smaller. The part that viewed human life as something strong and difficult to remove from this world. Yeah, that part could get mighty small over time.
Tolliver spit into the water near the dead woman’s head and said, “Well, shit, we best get to it.”
He and the deputy pulled on thick work gloves and wrapped scarves over their faces before attempting to retrieve the body. They’d hardly cleared it from the water before Tolliver shouted at Rebecca to bring a bottle of whiskey down. When she returned, Tolliver added a liberal splash to his scarf and the deputy’s. Before he wrapped the scarf around his face again, he took a long belt of the whiskey, his Adam’s apple bobbing.
They wrestled the body into the tarpaulin and wrapped it as if they were folding a sail. Halfway through, the deputy straightened up as if someone had slipped a bayonet into his side, lifted a hand to his mouth, and then lurched sideways. He fell on his knees at the edge of the creek, splashing, and tore the scarf free just before he vomited.
Tolliver gave a sigh and leaned back and waited. The deputy purged and then stayed on his hands and knees above the creek, breathing in unsteady gasps.
“Come on,” Tolliver snapped, holding the scarf down from his mouth with one mud-streaked finger. “Let’s get it out of here before sundown.”
They finished wrapping the woman’s corpse and then carried it back through the woods and dropped it into the bed of the truck. Wet stains were showing through the canvas by the time they got it there.
“Enjoy your afternoon,” Tolliver said, wiping his hands on his trousers as he walked for the car, leaving the deputy to drive the truck. “You’ll see me again soon enough.”
He got into the car and drove away, and the three of them stood together in the yard and watched the truck with the corpse follow the sheriff through the dust and into the woods.
“Wasn’t what I expected from him,” Paul said. “I thought he’d have plenty of questions, like he did with Mr. Sorenson. Didn’t seem to have any at all with this one, though.”
“No,” Arlen said. “No, he didn’t.”
28
THEY DIDN’T HEAR ABOUT the body again until the next afternoon, when they had their first visitor from the water.
Paul and Arlen were on the dock, had fresh planking laid twenty feet out now. Paul was chest-deep in the water, hammering braces back into place, when they heard an engine. Arlen looked up toward the house automatically, thinking it was a car, but then he realized the sound was coming across the water, and when he turned around he could see the boat.
It was a motor sailer with one forward mast, sails furled, and a raised cabin making up the back third of the boat. Maybe thirty-five or forty feet long, and wide across the beam. A good-size craft, and one that had seen some weather-its white hull was pocked with nicks and gashes and streaks. Ran steady, though, the engine hitting smoothly as it came out of the Gulf and entered the inlet.
“Who’s this, I wonder?” Paul said, still in the water.
“Don’t know.”
The boat came up the center of the inlet with the confidence of a pilot who knew the waters-it wasn’t a wide stretch of water but evidently was plenty deep-and then the engine cut and the man at the wheel stepped back to the stern and let a windlass out, anchor chain hissing into the water. It was Tate McGrath.
Once the anchor was out, he straightened and stood at the stern and stared at them for a moment, then set to work lowering the small launch mounted on the stern. Coming ashore.
He got the launch into the water and then climbed down and rowed in. When he had the boat pulled up to shore, he walked past them without a word and headed up the trail to the inn.
Paul stood with the hammer in his hand and his eyes on the trail.
“One of us ought to be up there. She shouldn’t be alone with him.”
“She was alone with him for a long time before we got here,” Arlen said. “She can be alone with him now.”
He didn’t like it either, though. He had a memory of her standing in his room with one side lit by moonlight, a memory of her beneath him with her mouth close to his chest and her breath warm on his skin…
He missed the nail head and bent it sideways instead of driving it straight. It had been years since he’d done that. Many years.
Paul had started working again, but his eyes kept going to the house even though he couldn’t see a damn thing from here but the top of the roof. Arlen let him glance up there a half dozen times before he finally said, “You want to keep your head down while you work?”
They hammered away for a while, and McGrath didn’t return and no sound came from the Cypress House. Too damn quiet. There should be voices.
It was just while he was thinking this that another engine came into hearing range, a car this time. Arlen finally sighed and said, “Okay, I’ll go see who it is,” when he saw Paul staring into the trees with that same dark frown.
“I’ll come with you.”
“Like hell you will. Stay down here and keep working.”
The kid didn’t like that at all, but Arlen ignored the grumblings and went on up the trail. When he got back within view of the inn, he saw it was the sheriff’s car. Tolliver stood on the porch with Solomon Wade, Rebecca, and Tate McGrath. Arlen came out of the trees and walked up to the porch with his head down, as if he had no interest in the gathering. When he reached the porch steps he said, “Pardon,” and stepped past McGrath, who didn’t move to clear out of his way, and entered the inn without so much as breaking stride. He walked back behind the bar and into the kitchen and retrieved a beer from the icebox and cracked it open. Drank about a third of it down, standing there in the shadows, and then he took the bottle and went back out onto the porch.
He was ready to do the same routine, walk past them without a blink and return to the dock, when Wade spoke.
“Mr. Wagner?”
He pronounced it Vagner, like the composer, as Tolliver had in the jail. Arlen kept walking, said, “That’s not my name,” without a look back.
“My mistake,” Wade drawled. “Hold up. Don’t hurry off.”
Arlen turned to face them.
“Where is it you’re from?” Wade said. He and Tolliver were standing close to Rebecca, and Tate was leaning on the porch rail.
“No place near here.”
“That’s not an answer.”
Arlen took a drink of his beer. “West Virginia.”
“Really? What town?”
“It’s not someplace you’ve heard of.”
“I’ve heard of some Wagners from West Virginia,” Wade said. His face was damp with sweat, accentuating the glare from his glasses. “Only they pronounced it properly. Vagner. The ones I’ve heard of were from Fayette County, I believe. What was your father’s name?”