Owen gave another nod and then pulled open the door. The wind was blowing hard out of the south, and it caught the door and wrenched it from his grasp and banged it off the wall. A spray of rain showered in and soaked the floorboards before he got his hand on the door again and slammed it, and then both Arlen and Rebecca moved closer to the bar so they could watch him.
He ran across the yard with his shoulders hunched. Watching him go, Arlen had the bad feeling again, dark images flickering through his mind-gunfire opening up from inside the car and dropping Owen out there in the mud and the rain; the window sliding down as Owen approached and a knife blade glinting ever so swiftly as it snaked toward his throat.
I wish I’d checked his eyes closer, Arlen thought. I didn’t see anything, he was looking me full in the face and I didn’t see anything, but maybe I didn’t look hard enough…
Nothing happened, though. The door to the sheriff’s car swung open and then Owen had a black case in his hand, same sort of case that Walter Sorenson had carried. He stood beside the car, head ducked against the rain, and said a few words. Arlen couldn’t see Tolliver from behind the door, but Owen looked relaxed enough. The rain was a help. Made any tension on his part easier to explain, as if he just wanted to get the hell back inside and out of the downpour.
It wasn’t but thirty seconds before Tolliver slammed the door and Owen turned and began running back toward the house. Rebecca let out a breath, and Arlen looked over his shoulder at her and realized she’d been sharing his dark thoughts. He managed to get a grin on his face.
“We’re good,” he said. “All right? Wade thinks your brother is in league with him, and he thinks he’s got you owned by fear. They aren’t waiting on trouble. Not from us.”
She nodded, but her face was pale and she couldn’t match his smile.
The door swung open, and then Owen was back inside and dripping rain all over the place, his blond hair turned dark with water and plastered over his forehead and down into his eyes. He gave them a stare and lifted the case high.
“Here we go,” he said.
Arlen nodded. “Here we go.”
They counted the money back in the kitchen, hidden from windows. Arlen saw the stacks of bills inside and thought of the money he’d worked so hard and saved so long to gather, those 367 stolen dollars. He wondered if they were included in this pile.
Rebecca did the counting. She fingered the bills swiftly and familiarly and didn’t say a word as she riffled through the stacks, kept a silent count in her head until the last bill had touched the edge of her thumb. Then she turned to them and said, “Ten thousand.”
“Ten thousand dollars?” Arlen echoed. He’d been watching her count it, had seen the bills with his own eyes, but he still wasn’t sure he believed the number. The CCC paid thirty dollars a month. There were more than twenty-five years of work sitting in that simple black case.
“Yes,” she said, and then, for the first time, she smiled. “He’s not going to like losing it.”
“Hell,” Arlen said, “he’s going to lose something else he’ll like even less.”
Somehow that got them all to laughing. It wasn’t a healthy kind of laughter. More the sort born out of fear, jangling through nerves strung tight as bowstrings, but it felt good all the same. They had their laugh together, and then a particularly strong racket of thunder struck and shook the walls of the inn and they all fell silent again.
“Paul gets his cut,” Arlen said. “I’ll give it to him, and I’ll take him to a train station and see that he gets on one headed far from here.”
“How much are you intending to give him?” Owen said.
“Half.” He said it flatly. Owen rocked his head back and stared with wide eyes.
“Bullshit, he gets half. He’ll be gone ’fore anything even starts to happen! He ain’t playing a role in this, ain’t helping, ain’t-”
“He gets half,” Arlen said, and there was a challenge in his voice that shut Owen’s mouth for once. He went tight-lipped and angry and stared at Arlen with distaste, but when he spoke again his tone was softer.
“There’s four of us here,” he said. “Fair split would be twenty-five hundred. That’s more than fair.”
“That boy’s got a mother was counting on CCC checks,” Arlen said. “He’s got to look after her and himself. He gets half.”
Owen started to shake his head again, but Rebecca cut in.
“That’s fine,” she said. “That’s right.”
She counted out half the money and placed it in a burlap bag and handed it to Arlen. He put it on a high shelf behind a sack of flour and then he and Owen both watched as Rebecca replaced the rest of the money in the black case and fastened the latches and set it beneath the table.
“One day left,” she said.
42
PAUL RETURNED AT THE height of the storm. The rain had lessened just a touch, but the lightning and thunder were gathering energy, the walls and windows of the inn trembling consistently, wind howling in off the Gulf. It wasn’t yet sundown but might as well have been; no sun would shine on this day again. The three of them had returned to the barroom, ostensibly to discuss the plan, break down each movement and time it out to the last second. Nobody had much to say, though. It was as if the delivery of the money, that first squeeze on a trigger nobody else even saw, had somehow silenced them.
Instead they sat and listened to the storm and drank. Arlen and Owen passed a bottle of whiskey back and forth, and even Rebecca had a short one. Her eyes moved from the beach to the fireplace to the clock, flicking from place to place as if taking inventory.
“What’s on your mind?” Arlen said.
“I was thinking that it really isn’t such a bad place.”
It was the same notion he’d had that morning, working on the boathouse.
“I came to hate it, you know,” she said. “To almost blame the physical location for everything that was happening here, for everything that had happened. But you know what? My parents were right. It’s a gorgeous spot. It will be special someday. Someone will probably make a nice living doing just what my father always hoped to do here. They will be different people, though, and it will be a different time. Right now, it’s as if this place is infected. The sickness will pass. But no time soon. No time soon.”
Arlen nodded. She wasn’t alone in those thoughts, and they weren’t limited to this place. It was an infected world right now. He remembered reading newspaper pieces about the black dust that had risen in the plains and driven farmers to take shelter in the ground, dust clouds so mighty that they’d drifted all the way across the country and darkened the skies above New York. It was a hell of a thing. Grasshoppers had descended over the same farms like a biblical plague, picking crops to shreds and ruining any hope of a cash harvest. At the same time banks were going under and women and children standing in breadlines, and young men like Owen Cady and Paul Brickhill were willing to throw in their lots with the Solomon Wades of the world because they saw no other way to climb out of the trenches in which they lay.
It would pass, though. Arlen believed that, had to believe it. You kept your head down and you weathered what this life brought you and believed it would pass. He looked at Rebecca now and thought, You are all that I need. She was, too. Through all the hell that might come to pass in a few short hours, he had no qualms about staying around to endure it. Just the chance to be with her, it was enough. It was something the likes of which he’d never hoped to find.
A memory caught him then, Paul in the darkness on the dock while Tolliver and Tate McGrath prepared to kill in this very room. Paul saying, I feel like I’ve been traveling through time to get here, Arlen, just to find her.
Damn it, why did it have to afflict them both? Why couldn’t love be parceled out evenly and easily?