Town of Masks (18 page)

Hannah stared at the door as it closed behind her. Presently shadows seemed to stir across it, sometimes writhing, the play of the wind on the window shade and beyond it the sun behind the trees, shapes against the sun, Hannah thought, dancing to the tune of a demoniac fiddler, a player upon nerves, upon heart-strings … the contagion of dancing, the contagion of the power to whirl men into a dance … Hi-ho, Elizabeth, step lively and you’ll see the tune I’m whipping up for your lover—(an excellent fiddler, Mr. Walker)—look at him dance! Here he is and here he isn’t. There he was and there he wasn’t the night that she was killed. Making poetry. Don’t make me laugh. Making love and I’ll believe it. Bold love or secret? Secret? Good! Twice-over I’ll believe you. But what will it do to the buxom witch he works for? What a tale to tell, and I’m the boy to tell her. Spin around, Hannah Blake, and I’ll play it again all for you. You’re a fool, and women are fools and men their masters. I’ll bet he’s got ’em spotted from here to Pensacola, the latches off a dozen doors for him.

The shadows writhed again. Oh, sweet Dennis … all love and poetry. Women you didn’t know for knowing them so well. An art of both, he made, his kiss on the hand at first, a dozen hands and a dozen mouths … and breasts … your breasts are pale moons stung each with a kiss. …

She grew nauseous with loathing, her flesh seeming to shrivel as though something leprous were creeping over it. She groaned and turned again to the wall. Her head was fevered. She humped to the edge of the bed and rolled her forehead against the cold, hard plaster. It was the hard coldness of the dead. Only once had she felt it, her lips to her father’s forehead, bidden by the command of a weeping mother to whom all there was of the man lay stonelike. Was the flesh all to those who had known the flesh? The spirit nothing without it?

Oh, yes! How soon forgot the spirit, the body once removed. … A woman dead—a tight game of bridge, Frank. What a charity death when the living are dead. I was kinder to you than I knew, Maria. You knew. That’s why you waited. No protest. She put her fingers to the wall. The stone, the cold, cold stone. It has no pain. My head is heavy on the pillow, a little while, heavier, stonelike. My arms I can scarcely lift, leaden, my legs are weighted. Love has unbound my limbs! Love has fettered them, mired them, chained them to the earth …and no more dreaming. Heavy, heavy, night-bound, a black and shapeless pit. Utter darkness. Sleep.

W
HEN HANNAH AWAKENED IT
was to the first song of the birds beyond her window, the room itself blue-purple in the predawn light except for a night lamp on her dresser. Sophie had turned it on and left in its filmy glow a tray, a lovely composite for a still-life, Hannah thought—the slender pewter jug, the cup and saucer, and an orange. It was Sophie’s measure of the needs of a sick stomach.

Hannah got up, the weariness, the illness gone. What a healer, sleep! She drew the blinds. The garden was shimmering with dew, and in the sky, the last stars clung beyond the reach of dawn. And who could despair of the dawn itself, she wondered, going to the eastern window, its gleaming shield tipping back the night.

She hastened to the bathroom and washed, the warm water and then the cold, a stinging pleasure, and the rough towel pricking up the life-lust in her. In her robe she went downstairs and put on the kettle. Returning to dress, she paused at the open door of one of the guest rooms. Sophie asleep there. She went in on tiptoe and looked down on the ball-like shape, the girl’s hair wild on the pillow, but her face smooth and as soft as cream. She wore faded polka-dot pajamas for which she had gone home and returned for the night to be within Hannah’s call.

This is goodness,
Hannah thought. She picked up the clock from the table at the child’s bedside. The alarm was set for six-thirty. Hannah shut it off. She went to her own room and returned with the tray, leaving it on the table with the clock next to the jug. She felt almost gleeful herself then, retreating and dressing quickly. She made a quick pot of coffee and boiled two eggs. The taste of them was good, but the fresh, clean air of morning better as she stepped outdoors and filled her lungs with it. Dawn, and Hannah Blake born of the morning at the age of forty-seven. The birthday of her life.

She took the car from the garage and drove through the still-sleeping town, startling a rabbit on High Street. A rabbit on High Street, she mused. It was as though the brick and mortar were gone, or not yet built, and the street a rutted path, the car a horse. What a way she would have had with a horse, she thought, the reins easy in her hands—a great dappled steed, snorting, charging at her command, rearing up to match her will with his, and merging then their two wills to conquer the wind and space.

She turned off High Street and down the ravine lane. The docks were awake, alive with the scurry of the fishermen’s preparations. She left the car and pulled her coat tighter against the damp wind. The sun was behind the town, the docks in shadow, but far out beyond where the silver mist turned golden, the peninsula at the mouth of the Cove was a knob of sunlight, the windows of the lighthouse there a burst of gold, and the water a molten streak pouring into the shadow.

The fishermen hauled in their ropes and revved their choking motors, their collars buttoned against the wind. Here and there, one caught sight of her and lifted his hand in salute. She hailed them back, her hands in her pockets for warmth. She watched for O’Gorman to come down the hill. His son was there before him, the boat ready. The man came then in long strides, his pipe shooting smoke like a whistle.

“O’Gorman, ho!” she called out in their manner as he approached her.

He took the pipe from his mouth and touched a finger to the peak of his checkered cap. “You’re up at the shriek of dawn, Miss Blake. How are you, ma’am?”

“I’m fine, Dan, and you?” His name came as easy as butter.

“As fit as a man can be torn from his bed in the middle of the night. A cursed way to earn a living.” He called out then to the boy: “Warm her up, Michael! She’ll be spitting carbon that’d bounce from the lake’s bottom.” He grinned down at Hannah. “When we’re doing the evacuation, will you get the town down here at this hour? I think not.”

“Would it be an imposition, Dan, to ask you to take me out in the boat with you as far as the lighthouse? I want to see where we’ll be landing during the evacuation.”

“It would not and if it was, I’d do it. But it’s a mile walk back.”

Hannah smiled. “By land or water?”

He stuck his pipe back in his mouth. “’Tis a mite closer by water,” he said slyly—“and only knee-deep to a giant like you.”

She kept pace with him down the dock. “It’s Saturday,” she said. “I’ve time enough.”

“Aye, and tomorrow’s Sunday, God be praised.”

He went into the boat ahead of her and bade his son hand her down. Hannah moved from one of their hands to the other, and the boat shifted under her step. “I’ll sink it,” she said.

“Not under twenty your weight, but she’ll balk like a mule with a woman astride her.”

Hannah sat on the bench opposite him at the helm of the boat, beyond the great box shape at the rear into which the boy emptied a barrel of ice.

O’Gorman revved the motor, waiting. “She’ll spit diamonds instead of carbon this morning.” He cupped his hands over his mouth then, and shouted down the docks. “Take us out, you, McGovern! I’m setting the lady down at the point!”

The boy flung the line down to his father. “Christ and Peter,” he said.

“Christ, Peter, and John,” the father said, as though it were a litany.

Along the docks, one boat and then another put off, the smell of gas fumes spoiling the air. O’Gorman pulled in last a few yards behind the next in the fleet. Hannah watched the shore line, scrub pines and dunes beneath the cliff, mile after mile of them, until sight failed.

She leaned toward O’Gorman. “Has the sheriff called off his dogs?”

The big man frowned. “Aye, off all but poor Annie. They’ve flattened her.”

“Did he arrest her?”

“Arrest or no, they’ve got her in the county jail.”

“He’ll call it a costly arrest one day,” Hannah said.

“Then he’ll call it in hell,” O’Gorman said. “Thank God there’s a place like it for the likes of him.”

“Is that the most you have to say in her defense?” said Hannah.

“I can say from now till sundown and it won’t release her. And as for him, I could vote twice in the same day and not defeat him. He’s the power of the state behind him, and till he gets better than her, he’ll hold poor Annie.”

“Ignorance makes a fine conniver,” Hannah said. “We’ll see if he’s still holding Annie by sunset.”

O’Gorman squinted into the sun watching her. “We’d never forget it, could you get her off, Miss Blake. I’ll stake my life on her innocence.”

And I mine if needs be,
Hannah thought. “Do you believe in signs, Dan? There’s a white bird flying up.”

O’Gorman scarcely glanced at it. “It’s a carrion.”

B
Y THE TIME HANNAH
reached the county seat that morning, Annie Tully was not in need of her services nor of those of a lawyer. She had been held overnight on suspicion of complicity in the murder of her employer, and since the evidence was insufficient, and his persuasions ineffective, Walker had to release her. Still, Hannah thought, she was glad she had come—not only to receive Annie, but to encounter Walker in his own den.

“We’ve had our little talks in many places, haven’t we?” Walker said. He was half-sitting on his desk. “Sit down, Miss Blake. I suppose you’d like to take the little lady home?”

“I should think it would be a kindness,” Hannah said.

“Well I had a chauffeur myself ready for the drive. But small thanks I’d get in Campbell’s Cove, anyway. So you’re welcome to the credit of rescue.”

“Don’t you think anything is ever done out of charity, Mr. Walker?”

“Many things. For example, my wife is brewing a strong cup of tea for Annie right now, and they’ll have it right in the living-room. We have our share of the jail for living-quarters. That’s charity, wouldn’t you say? The tea, not the living-quarters.”

“From the heart,” Hannah said.

Walker lit a cigarette. “You don’t like me very much, do you, Miss Blake?”

“Is it important to a policeman that he be liked?”

“Only that he be trusted,” Walker said.

Hannah glanced up at him.

He smiled. “That’s what I thought. And next to trust, there’s reliability. What else can I do for you, Miss Blake?”

Hannah studied the buckle on her purse. “The theory you propounded yesterday—how much of it was based on fact?”

“Aren’t you in a better position to answer that?”

“I mean the part about the other women—from here to Pensacola you said.”

“If you mean does he have a record for extortion, no. But victims in a racket like that don’t make complaints easily. Take yourself, for example; would you make a complaint?”

“I have nothing of which to complain.” He grinned. “Here we go again.”

“Where did you get Pensacola? Or is that a pet town of yours?”

“No. I asked the kid where he came from last. Pensacola. I checked with the authorities there. He spent the winter sailing a boat for a woman there. He was the crew, she was the passenger. I don’t want to draw the inferences for you. You told me I had a dirty mind.”

Hannah swallowed her revulsion. “What else?” He shrugged. “That was enough for me. If you care so much about it—you’ve got money—why don’t you put an investigator on it? I can recommend one.”

“I don’t care that much. Personally. I’m thinking of Elizabeth Merritt.”

The sheriff cocked his head. “More charity?”

“I’m a friend of the family’s.”

The sheriff threw back his head. “Ha! Are you telling me that, or are you trying to tell it to yourself, Miss Blake? I know spite when I see it. Look, I don’t give a damn. I like to see young cocks get their spurs clipped. A lot of people have tried to take a nip out of mine, and if some of them hadn’t had a good bite, I wouldn’t be sitting in a crummy sheriff’s office today. Eight years ago I was set for state commissioner of police. And don’t underestimate my qualifications.” He dropped the cigarette on the floor and put his foot on it. “That hatchet massacre Matheson told you about at your town meeting—he gave you word for word what I gave him when I took over, by the way. He didn’t say it came from me, of course. But the devil can quote scripture without crediting the Almighty as they say. I got caught in that hatchet case. I went in with a record as clean as a baby’s soul and I came out smeared from the bottom of the barrel of every muckraking politician in the state. Now I play ball. Do you understand? I play ball with every bastard that’ll bounce it back to me.

“There’s something I want to tell you out of this. I’m not just sounding off. When you’re going to do a dirty job, do it. But when you’re talking it over with yourself, call it a dirty job. That way you can live with yourself.”

“If you want to,” Hannah added.

“Suicide’s not as common as you might think. We wouldn’t take the gaff from somebody else we take from ourselves, not for a day, we wouldn’t.”

“In somebody else it’s a sin,” Hannah mused. “In ourselves, expediency. I could go to school to you, Mr. Walker.”

Walker smiled. “What do you want to do about the boy—get rid of him or crucify him? Or both?”

“Nothing drastic,” she said. “I should think getting rid of him would be adequate. Out of the town, I mean.”

Walker removed the cellophane from another package of cigarettes. “Firing him wouldn’t do the trick?”

“I doubt it. He might find another job if he wanted to stay badly enough.”

He ran the cellophane between his front teeth. “How old is he?”

“Twenty-four.”

“Do you know his draft status?”

“No. And he’s a pacifist.”

“By that do you mean a conscientious objector?”

“I suppose. I don’t know.”

“It doesn’t matter. God knows, he looks fit enough to me,” Walker said. “I can put in a good word for him if you like.”

“With his draft board?”