These boats drew hardly any water, and were often powered by a military-surplus aircraft engine or a converted automobile motor, with a propeller above the stern set to blow backward and power the boat over narrow stretches of flat land as well as shallow swamp water. The large propeller whirled inside a wire cage to prevent anyone from accidentally reaching or walking into its blades. Doing that would be like stumbling into a giant blender.
At full throttle an airboat roared like a plane and gave passengers the sensation that they were flying at high speed an inch off the ground or water. Sometimes they were. Carver remembered that Verna’s father had made his living taking tourists for airboat rides before his death last year. The airboat by the dock was dusty, had thick, leafy moonvine intertwined with the propeller cage, and obviously hadn’t been moved for a long time.
Not far from the house sat a rusty Ford pickup truck that might have been drivable, but didn’t look as if it had been moved for quite a while, either; but Carver remembered seeing it parked near The Flame.
He walked across the bare plot of ground in front of the house. The earth was dry and packed hard, without the slightest vegetation, as if weed and grass killer had been sprayed on it to hold back the swamp. Racketing with the screams of cicadas, the swamp bent green and malevolent around three sides of the low house, which seemed to be hunkered down, threatened and cowering.
“I ain’t never shot nobody before,” Verna Blaney said. “It’d be a new and interesting experience.”
She was standing on the porch with a double-barreled shotgun cradled in her arms, tucked beneath her high and ample breasts, which were straining the seams of a yellow cotton dress.
Carver stopped walking and stood very still about fifty feet from the porch steps. Verna was barefoot and had a puffy, sleepy look about her eyes, as if she’d been taking an early afternoon nap and he’d awakened her. Or maybe she’d still been asleep from the night before. Late to bed, late to rise… was that the real Verna?
“What do you want?” she asked. And she asked it as if Carver didn’t have much time to frame an answer.
“I want to talk.”
“I don’t want to listen. Get out. Fast. Now!”
Carver leaned on his cane, didn’t move as if to leave. “You’re being unreasonable, Verna.”
“I don’t think so. You ain’t the first man to come out here way to hell and gone to see me. And it ain’t because they enjoy the drive, or my company. They don’t have to look at the scar, they figure, or listen much to what I got to say. It’s the body they think is just fine. And a woman like that, with that mark on the side of her face, why she’d be just aching all over for male companionship.”
Carver was getting the idea. Verna Blaney thought she knew men through and through, the single-track, rutting beasts that peopled her dreams. He thought about her living all these years there alone with her father. He wondered about Ned Blaney. What kind of father had he been to give her that impression of men? What had he done to her? Or maybe there was something to what she said, considering some of the male Solarville natives Carver had seen. Might the Malone brothers have been two of Verna’s crude and carnally intent visitors?
“I only want to ask you a few questions about Sam Cahill,” Carver said.
Verna was running a hand down the shotgun’s twin barrels now, curving her fingers around them lightly, almost sensually. Carver couldn’t help it; his eyes flicked downward and up, taking in her ripeness. Something exotic that had grown in the swamp, primitive and dangerous.
She’d expected his involuntary reaction; it seemed to confirm something. She glared icicles at him. “Put a bag over her head,” she spat. “You ever hear that expression, mister? Put a bag over her head and she’d be a good fuck?”
“I’ve heard it,” Carver said.
“So’ve I. Most all my life.” She turned her head defiantly for a moment so Carver had to look at her scar. “Damned propeller from a swamp boat my pa was tinkering with did this, when I was only twelve. They said I was lucky to be alive, still have my head.” She was holding the shotgun at the ready now, aimed at a spot on the ground not far in front of Carver. “I ain’t so sure of that.”
“The scar isn’t as bad as you think,” Carver said. “And plastic surgery-”
“Good-bye,” Verna Blaney said in a flat voice.
“At least you’ve got two good legs,” Carver said.
Oh-oh, the wrong thing to say, considering what Verna was sure he was thinking.
“And don’t bother coming back,” she said sternly. She took a step toward him and aimed the shotgun.
Carver felt the flesh bunch up on the back of his neck. He used the cane more nimbly than he thought he could and backed up several steps, staring at the black eternity inside the gun barrels. This was a tortured woman he’d caught at a bad time, one who saw before her a member of the sex she feared and distrusted. And she’d obviously had experience in handling a gun. A body sunk in the swamp’s quicksand might never be found.
The shotgun’s long barrels didn’t waver.
It was too nice a day for death. Carver continued his retreat.
When he was on the gravel driveway, near his car, he finally turned his back on Verna Blaney. He opened the door and tossed his cane on the seat.
“Mister!” Verna called, as he was about to lower himself into the Olds.
He turned, standing balanced by supporting himself on the open door, one hand on the warm chrome windshield frame.
“I don’t know anything about Sam Cahill,” she said. “Haven’t seen him in a long spell. Don’t want to. Don’t want to see you again, neither.” She raised the shotgun and fired a blast into the treetops. Birds screeched and flapped into the sky, like a scene from an old Tarzan movie; something Carver didn’t recognize gave an animal scream deep in the swamp.
He climbed the rest of the way into the Olds and drove away from there in a hurry. Verna Blaney still had the shotgun’s other loaded barrel to use against her fear and pain, and Carver’s flesh and blood.
He’d known women like her; she wanted male companionship more than she would admit to herself, and she hated men for that persistent desire, and for shunning her because of her scar. For what one or more men had done to her. Making her different. She was twisted and agonized in her loneliness.
And maybe able to kill.
When Carver got back to the Tumble Inn, he found Edwina sunning herself by the pool. She and two skinny, preteen boys in the deep end were the only ones there. One of the lads appeared to have an erection.
“Where have you been?” she asked, lowering her oversized sunglasses and peering coolly up at Carver above the frames.
“I wanted to talk to Verna Blaney.”
“And did you?”
“Not in any way productive. She ran me off her property. Threatened to shoot me. I would say she hates men.”
“Or would like to think so,” Edwina said. Savvy. Catty.
“I thought she might have some idea where Sam Cahill is, but if she does, she isn’t willing to share it.” Carver felt a bead of perspiration play over his temple, run down his cheek to tickle the side of his neck. Like an insect. He wanted to get in out of the heat. “Had lunch?” he asked.
“I was waiting for you.”
“Get dressed and we’ll drive into town,” Carver said. “Have us a bite. Maybe talk to Chief Armont again.”
Edwina hitched up the top of her suit and stood up from the chaise longue. The two boys splashing around at the other end of the pool took time out from any pretense and gaped at her in unabashed admiration. Carver thought they were developing good taste young.