THE KILLER, page 5
“It certainly suits me,” said Mother Bocock. “I wish the others had been as gentlemanly as you, Mr. Farrow.” Farrow's eyes were deep in the girl's. Involuntarily but with instinctive meaning, his gaze dropped to the cotton material holding her ripe bosom, lower to the slight gully of the frock across her lap. The girl stiffened almost imperceptibly, tightening her thighs together, and when he brought his eyes up to hers again, a sort of electricity between them shamed them both. It was as if they sat before each other naked.
Mother Bocock was saying, “About the next thing was when Clel came home from Chicago. Two years ago, September. For once he was tired of traveling and all he wanted was to settle down here and farm the land and maybe take a few furs out of the Okefenokee. He would've made a good living and we were all right pleased.”
Marget said she would see about getting dinner and left the room. Farrow watched her go. He thought about last night when she had undressed for Sam Augustine, ready to make love to him, but she had drunk too much. Mother Bocock said warmly, “And that was when Clel and Marget got married. Not that it was anything sudden. They'd been promised all their lives. She's a fine girl, and loyal. She left the university to come back here and live with us just because she thought Clel's folks might need her. No mother could ask for a finer daughter-in-law and no husband could ask for a more loving wife.” Suddenly, “You will stay for dinner with us, won't you, Mr. Farrow? Marget's setting a place.”
He hesitated and Mother Bocock said, “Afterwards I'll show you something about Clel, something the rest of them ain't ever seen or suspected.” That settled it. The dining room was directly behind the living room and they all ate around a huge circular table. It was a leisurely filling meal, and the Negro Des ate the same fare in the kitchen. Afterward Des returned to his vigil and the two women did the dishes while Daddy Bocock and his guest sat in peace in the living room. Daddy Bocock showed his scrapbook of news clippings about Clel and Farrow examined it politely, unable to forget that Walter Stennis kept the same kind of scrapbook.
Then Daddy Bocock had fallen asleep in his chair and the rattle of dishes ceased from the kitchen and Mother Bocock returned, wiping her hands, to usher Farrow out into the dogtrot. Marget had vanished. Mother Bocock said, “I hope you can make people understand, Mr. Farrow. About Clel, just how alive he was —is. Yet he never did anything to anybody, unless they harmed him first. He was never one to constantly be smoking and drinking and carousing around.” She winked. “Not that the girls wasn't always chasing him.”
The bedrooms were all on the south side of the dogtrot. She opened the door to the rear one. “Keep it just the way it was,” said Mother Bocock tenderly. “He may come home someday.”
Farrow didn't say anything. All the maternal love in the big old woman had blinded her to the terrible fact that Clel Bocock could never come home. He looked around the small room and was disappointed. The place was obviously unused but as scrupulously neat as the rest of the house. A spool bed, a dresser, a single-shot rifle on the wall, dungarees hanging in the box closet. But there was nothing special that Farrow could see; any of the Bocock sons might have grown up here, the older brothers who had become honest citizens of various towns. In the frame of the dresser mirror were wedged a couple of snapshots of young Clel. One was a publicized crooked-smiling picture in the familiar black sport shirt with white piping, the curly black lock self-consciously emphasizing his pale forehead. The other showed a ten-year-old boy with a spoiled round face, thick lips unsmiling, looking childishly savage. He wore a little cowboy hat and a bandanna around his neck and—already—a toy oilcloth holster on his hip, his chubby hand on the cap pistol.
“This is what I mentioned, Mr. Farrow,” said Mother Bocock. She had opened a bottom drawer. “You're the first to see these—outside of the family, of course. All the picture postcards Clel ever sent me. I get them out and look at them right often.”
Farrow untied the string with rising interest. Despite what Mother Bocock had said about Clel writing frequently, there weren't many cards and the messages were brief hasty scrawls. “Dear Mother . . . Your loving son, Clel.” No two cards came from the same place. Farrow examined both sides of all of them, especially those from places that the news stories hadn't given much play as part of Bocock's past history. One card had a picture of a Chicago hotel where he had worked as a bellhop; Farrow couldn't remember the hotel's having been mentioned in Stennis' clippings and reports. Another showed a municipal building in Cedar Rapids; Bocock had worked nearby on a wheat combine, according to the message. Another, with a desert scene, claimed that Clel Bocock had got a job as geologist with a Standard Oil field expedition. The postmark on that one was Barstow, California.
The messages were nearly all in the same vein: “Feeling fine and hope that you and Daddy are the same. Got a swell job now. Soon as this deal comes through I'll be sitting pretty. . . . Your loving son, Clel.”
The final card was dated nearly a year and a half ago. after Clel had married Marget Ingram and then wandered off again. It was postmarked Cleveland and its tone was less breezy than before. “You know nobody is going to push me around for long. Have been thinking I need a change of luck (ha-ha!). Maybe try it with Little Jumbo again. Had fun in those days and I still think there is my fortune to be made.”
“Who or what is Little Jumbo?” Farrow asked. Mother Bocock shrugged. “I don't remember he ever got around to telling any of us. Clel often had a pet name for people he liked.” She chuckled a little self-consciously. “Around home here he used to call me Sugar.”
Again Farrow felt the pang of dislike for what he was doing to these people. Then he heard Marget's step along the dogtrot, walking rather heavily for her. Farrow moved to get a window view. He saw her crossing the back fields toward the south. She wore short boots and a denim skirt and a shirt. She carried a light rifle and she glanced back toward the house as she disappeared among the tupelo trees.
Mother Bocock, tying up her picture cards, hadn't seen. Farrow took the opportunity to thank her for her trouble and to make his good-bys. She was reluctant to see him leave, wished he were going to be in town more than a couple of days, and walked with him as far as the veranda. Daddy Bocock still slept in the living room, his false teeth making faint rhythmic noises.
As Farrow got into his car, Mother Bocock called, “Now, you do right by Clel, mind! Come back and see us!” Farrow waved.
He drove south on the highway until he was out of sight of the farm. Then he parked off the road and plunged into the undergrowth. He moved swiftly, but silently too, with all his veldt-bred caution.
He crossed the girl's trail as he had planned. The marsh grass was still slightly bent where she had walked moments before. He followed the track until it ended at the edge of a silent lagoon. There were marks on the bank where a narrow boat had been launched and poled away. For a long while he crouched by the spot, waiting. But Marget didn't return and there was no expedient way to follow her. Not today.
Thoughtfully, Farrow returned to his car. For the first time he could feel the excitement of the chase warming his blood, hurrying his pulse. And he no longer felt so bad about his treasonous meal with the Bococks. He had a strong happy idea that they had fooled him up till now, and that Clel Bocock had come home to the swamp, after all.
Chapter Six. THURSDAY, MAY 3, 2:00 P.M.
FARROW WAS A patient man. The next day, Thursday, he returned to the lagoon on the edge of the swamp and seated himself behind a rampart of wild muscadine. Through the viny tangle he had a good view of the duck punt dragged up on the bank, a long slender boat that drew only four inches. He began his wait in midmorning. The sun blazed higher and higher and he sat immobile, moving only to brush away chiggers.
He had spent the night before in his Waycross hotel room, remembering to lock the door. He had slept despite the lumber mill. Today he didn't much resemble the tweedy British journalist who had visited the Bocock farm. He wore a battered felt hat, a faded khaki shirt mottled with old sweat stains, and waterproof breeches. His moccasins reached to his knees. They were more silent than boots, better than boots for this soggy vlei country, as he thought of the swamp. He had hunted the Rufiji River delta for hippopotamus, and this region was much the same. From his neck hung binoculars and across his lap lay his light carbine.
As the humid afternoon approached two o'clock he heard Marget coming. He smiled a little. He hadn't been certain that her excursions into the swamp were a daily occurrence. If she hadn't appeared today he would have kept his vigil the next day and the next. Every hunting instinct told him her movements had a purpose.
He watched her pole the duck punt onto the still waters of the lagoon. A few yards from shore she stopped propelling the boat and let it drift. She stood there gazing back the way she'd come, head slightly cocked, listening. Farrow felt satisfied. She had no intention of being followed, which meant she had a destination in mind. He sat like a big brown cross-legged statue, mottled by leaf shade, hardly breathing at all. Yet, unaccountably, he had a strong and strange desire to take deeper breaths as he looked at her, suck coolness clear down into his belly. It angered him, even as his loins warmed esoterically. He couldn't understand why the mere sight of the girl should. make him feel like an animal. She was pretty and well made, but he had seen many more deliberately carnal women in his lifetime. But his hands tingled with perspiration as if he were caressing her thick yellow hair, and he watched the rise and fall of her breasts against the loose white shirt she wore. She was dressed in the same light-blue denim skirt and low boots he had seen the day before, and again she carried her small-caliber rifle.
Finally Marget tossed her head and leaned into the stern pole of the punt. She had convinced herself she was alone. The shallow boat darted silently over the lagoon and Farrow was glad to learn, from the length of her strokes, that the water wasn't more than waist deep. As soon as she was out of sight around the first bend, he got to his feet and began to follow along the bank, bending low to take cover advantage of the high marsh grass. He reached the bend in time to see her disappear down a sluggish channel to the side. He approached the channel even more cautiously, followed its sinuous course through thicker undergrowth, and sighted her again. She was halfway across another smaller lagoon, her punt pointed toward a narrow gap in the dahoon holly trunks growing out of the water on the opposite shore.
Farrow circled and located her exit through the holly trees. But the next lagoon forked, and there was no indication which route Marget had taken. He wasn't perturbed. He looked around for an observation point and chose a moss-hung cypress that was taller than its neighbors. He swarmed up the thick trunk. When he was straddling a suitable crotch, he unslung his binoculars and scanned the tangled tropical vegetation.
He didn't expect to sight the girl herself. He was looking for signs of her passage along the labyrinth of waterways, a freshly broken branch or a boat trail through the white and gold lilies that mantled the lagoons in many places. He searched through the glasses for a while and then, magically, the punt with her yellow-haired figure glided into his circle of vision from beneath an overhang of cypress and tupelo. Marget poled onto the clear expanse of a small circular lake. She was headed for an island on the other side, a flat spit of white sand covered with scrub growth.
Farrow climbed to earth and began to trot along the southern fork of the lagoon. When it narrowed, he leaped across, plunging into black mud up to his ankles. He left the lagoon, traveling across marshy land in a direct line for the tiny lake. When he was nearly there, by guess, he climbed another tree, angering an industrious woodpecker. From here he had a clear view of the island, less than a hundred yards away now.
The sand spit was thickly grown in saw palmettos and slash palms; along the richer marginal ground there stood an occasional live oak or magnolia tree. Marget had beached her punt near one of the oaks, a dead gray giant blasted by some long-ago lightning bolt. She was standing at the water's edge, listening again. Farrow's heart beat with quick even throbs of expectancy. His binoculars brought her face so near that he could see the wary pucker of concentration between her eyebrows, the taut lines of her throat.
Then she turned to the cleft oak and groped her hand into its hollow, searching for something within. After a moment her hand came out empty. She started to turn away. And at that instant a man's hand reached around the trunk of the tree and closed over her wrist.
Farrow saw her mouth screaming before he heard the wail of terror. Then his body went rigid as he watched her struggle with the man who had seized her. A big blond man, his dapper sport suit muddied about the ankles—Sam Augustine of Chicago. Augustine was shouting at the girl as they wrestled, perhaps trying to calm her. But Marget broke out of his arms, kicking madly, twisting toward the rifle she'd left in the punt. Her flying skirt caught on a gnarl of oak trunk and held her trapped for an instant while Augustine caught her by the hair. He jerked her head back and cuffed her viciously across the face. She fell backward on the sand.
Farrow let his binoculars drop against his chest. He raised his carbine, his face a mask as it strained toward the sight. Augustine stood unaware over the unconscious girl, scowling down at her while he got his breath. Farrow lowered his sight from Augustine's heart to his leg and deliberately put a bullet through the blond man's calf.
The clean crack of the carbine and Augustine's scream of pain mingled in echo across the swamp. He reeled and fell but was up again at once, dragging his left leg, trying to escape what he couldn't see. Farrow didn't fire again. Augustine, floundering with panic, careened into the palm growth and across the island, out of Farrow's vision. In a moment Farrow could hear him splashing through the water, then the crackle of underbrush as he reached the lake shore. Marget lay unmoving.
Farrow slipped to the ground and waded into the lake. The cool water, dark brown from the acid of decaying vegetable matter, came only to his hips. A mat of dainty floating white-heart flowers broke about his legs as he slogged across.
He knelt on the sand by the girl. Her eyelids were beginning to tremble as she carne close to consciousness. A faint pink color glowed on her cheek and lip where she'd been struck. She was sprawled on her back, sand in her hair, one knee upthrust. The oak gnarl had ripped the denim skirt nearly to her waistband, baring the bent leg completely. Farrow thought he'd never seen any flesh so helplessly nude as her round thigh, as pale and fine-skinned as her forehead. He growled, “Damn you,” and shoved her knee down so he could cover her leg with the skirt. Then the girl was staring up at him and he was embarrassed, seeing himself through her eyes, a clumsy foolish hulk.
But she didn't know what he had done. She whispered, “I don't know—“ She sat up quickly, her eyes narrowing with recognition.
He said, “Don't be alarmed. I wasn't the one who hurt you.”
“I know that. Where is he?”
“He ran off. I—ah, frightened him away.”
“Oh.” Marget dropped back to her elbows and a leftover sob of fear caught in her throat and then they stared at each other fixedly. She said slowly, “I reckon I should say thank you. But I don't know. I don't know about you.”
He didn't say anything.
She said, “What you told us yesterday wasn't true. I could feel it then. You could no more be a newspaperman than you could fly. I knew you weren't even if he hadn't said you weren't.”
“Sam Augustine told you that?”
“Just now. He sneaked out here. You sneaked out here. You all watch me all the time.” She had a temper and it was beginning to redden her cheeks. But her voice remained soft and easy. “Who are you? How do you know him?”
“I've told you my name. I learned Augustine's name the night I took you home.”
Marget blushed and glanced away for a second. “Well he tells me you're after del. He claims I'm selling Clel out to you. You are after Clel, aren't you? I can see it in your eyes. You've got the same look in your eyes that Clel has sometimes.”
The comparison made Farrow uncomfortable. He sat back on his heels and said coldly, “I did save you from him, you know. Twice”—a deliberate foul—“if you choose to count the other night. But you prefer to believe what he tells you.”
She blushed again and shook her head irritably. “I'm sorry. I'm grateful for what you've done. Both times, I want you to understand.”
The torn skirt had slipped away again. They both became aware of it at the same instant and Marget sat bolt upright, covering herself quickly. But the gesture was more damning than the exposure; the idea lingered, encompassing them against their wills, an aura of sensual compulsion that clung and grew. The wild solitude they shared at that moment had an almost insidious freedom. The half-recumbent girl, the man squatting over her . . . Farrow drew back sharply, but it didn't alter the primitive contrast between soft flesh and hard.
She tried to smile casually. “I have kind of bad luck with my clothes whenever you show up.” It didn't sound as lighthearted as she had intended. When her words trailed off they were alone again in the swamp's silence, which wasn't a stillness but instead the faint booming of a hundred natural sounds, the sough of embracing trees, the splash of water fowl, the singing of birds, and the. distant bellow of an alligator, all mingled in a waiting, yearning spirit whisper that might have been the sound of the blood in their two bodies.
Farrow, afraid of the knowledge of his own fierce heat, got to his feet.
The girl said sharply, “Don't touch me!” She had given herself away; they both knew it.
He towered over her, his shadow across her quickened breast. He said, “You know bloody well I haven't touched you.” '
“I know. But . . .”
“But what, Marget?” He hadn't meant to use her name.
“I don't know what you think.” She dropped her gaze to his feet. “Sam Augustine. He called me and asked me to meet him in town. He said he was Clel's friend. I went up to his hotel room that night and he said he wanted to market the bonds Clel took from that Albany bank—so Clel would have hideout money, he said. He wouldn't believe I don't know where Clel is. He gave me a drink. I only took a couple of sips, but the next thing I knew I was ready to pass out.”
