Джон Макдональд - The Last One Left

“Missy?”

“I’m... okay, Sarg. I’ve got it all now, every bit of it. Suddenly he reached very quickly and grabbed my ankle. It got me out of my trance. I tried to run and fell and yanked myself loose, and as I jumped up he came bounding up like — an animal. I knew my only chance was to dive into the water. I knew he couldn’t catch me in the water in the dark. I had on a pretty shift. Stel and I each bought one in the Nassau Shop. Mine was orange and hers was pink. He grabbed at me and caught the back of the neck of the shift. They were very loose fitting. A light material but a close weave. I felt it rip all the way down. I spun out of it and nearly fell again. I wasn’t wearing a thing under it. I whirled and dived from up there toward the sea, but then I saw the boat, too late. I was going to dive right into it. I don’t remember hitting my head at all. It was just like diving into — a huge deep snowbank. And then I was here.”

“And what day was that?”

“It was — the thirteenth. It was Friday the thirteenth. I wouldn’t remember what day it was, except Mister Bix was making jokes about it being a lucky day. That’s a spooky thing to remember.”

Sergeant Corpo counted it out on his fingers. “Miss Leila, you were eight days drifting in that boat, coming this way on that east wind! Busted head. Fevers eating the meat off you. Sun cooking the hide off you. Missy, you must be hardy as a she-gator. The life must run strong in you. Rains must have come down on you just in time to keep you going. Missy, there in’t one man in fifty’d make it through that. And you’re getting more bright and sassy every single day.”

She looked pleadingly at him. “Try to understand that this makes a big difference in — our plans, Sarg. I have to get away from here. They’ll think I was killed too. I bet Staniker thought that dive killed me. I guess it should have. He was insane, Sarg. His face just — it just wasn’t a human face any more. What if he isn’t locked up? He could be doing terrible things to other innocent people. And then it would be your fault, wouldn’t it?”

“That’s one way to think about it.”

“My brother will think I’m dead. So will Jonathan.”

“That much gladder to see you when you come running.”

“Please, Sarg! Please! Oh God, please!”

“Now there. Now you know nobody is going to go off into the dark night. There’s time to think on it.”

“The longer you keep me the more trouble you’re going to be in.”

He looked puzzled. “Looks to me like it’s just the other way around.” He stood up. “Time people should be in their beds. Anyways, you haven’t even opened up half the stuff I brang you back from town. Pretties keep a gal’s mind off her problems.”

It was night. Gordon Dale was using both halves of his mind to full capacity. He sat at his digestive ease in his leather chair, following the plot of an hour-long western on the television set, while the other half of his mind walked around and around and around the special problems in the brief he was preparing in a civil action for one of his more important clients — like a puppy circling a hedgehog looking for any reasonable place to sink his teeth.

Miriam was on the couch writing to their married daughter in Atlanta, and she said, “If he has family, I don’t see why it has to be up to you anyway.”

It was statement, but also a question. He did not want to wonder what she meant. It was one of Miriam’s small and special talents to come out with a statement so oblique, so unrelated to anything anyone had said recently, you could not ignore it. It would paste itself to some outer layer of husbandly attention and then begin to bore a hole.

“Um?” he said at last.

“Well even if they didn’t have any legal responsibility, I would think they’d want to take care of their own.”

He sighed. He put the brief back on a shelf somewhere in the back of his head. And when the ranch hands tracked the stolen horse herd out the far end of the canyon, the wind had blown the sand and covered all the tracks. So they milled around, arguing with one another.

“Whose family, dear?” he asked. “What are you talking about?”

“Oh, come on , Lieutenant!” she said.

Then Gordon Dale knew, with a certain resignation, they were to have another little chat about Corpo. He had made captain before VE day. And upon discharge he had been given a termination promotion to major. He had no patience with courtesy titles anyway, any more than he had with those uncurably boyish men who kept green the memories of college fraternity or football triumphs or Let-me-tell-you-how-it-was-at-Omaha-Beach.

“Corpo hasn’t any family.”

“Apparently that’s what he told you.”

“No, honey. Really. When I found out he was still alive after thinking he was dead all those years, the doctors said he wasn’t a danger to anybody, but he couldn’t cope without some help on the outside. They’d tried to turn up somebody, anybody, up in Georgia who’d take over. I looked in the book and found a fellow I knew from law school practicing in the area, and I had him check it out. No family.”

“Well, it certainly is strange , then.”

“Exactly what is strange, dear?” he asked patiently.

She put the unfinished letter aside. “Well, I was at the hairdresser this afternoon, and Jeanie did me. She’s the young one I told you about. Very pretty, and she’s real good too. Anyway, her best girlfriend works in that expensive dress shop out on Sea Crescent Circle. The Doll House. They have darling sports clothes. Jeanie’s girlfriend’s name is Andra something, and they call her Andy. Anyway, the day before yesterday, Wednesday, your precious Sergeant had the entire place in a turmoil.”

“Now Miriam, if Corpo gets into any kind of trouble anywhere in the Broward Beach area, the police would call me.”

“Did I say he got into trouble? Did I?”

“You said turmoil.”

“In the store. Yes. You can imagine how really weird it would be to have him walk into a place like that. At least he didn’t have that fantastic beard. But that raggedy haircut and that ghastly dent in his forehead and those stary eyes were enough to make those girls out there pretty jumpy, Jeanie said. When they asked him what he wanted, he had some little lists and he went through them and picked out one that said clothing and handed it to the clerk. When the clerk saw how many things were on it, she took it to Mrs. Wooster, the owner, so Mrs. Wooster came out of the back and told the Sergeant it would come to quite a lot of money. So he took a really fantastic roll of bills out of his pocket and said it should be enough. He had a taxi waiting outside. He said that it was going to be his little sister’s birthday up in Georgia and he wanted to send her a lot of nice things. Andra told Jeanie the list was in a girl’s handwriting, and from the sizes she was a little thing, a size eight or ten. It was quite a list. Underwear, blouses, shorts, slacks, sandals, skirts, a sweater, everything. Mrs. Wooster picked everything out, and Jeanie said Andy said she could have made it come out to twice as much money as she did, but even so it is an expensive place and it came to almost three hundred dollars. It didn’t faze him a bit. He had a drugstore list and a grocery list too. Andy told Jeanie it looked as if there was hundreds of dollars left in what Mrs. Wooster gave back to him, and after he was gone Mrs. Wooster explained about him to the girls, and how you are sort of his guardian or something, and that was why Jeanie told me about it. She started off thinking I probably knew about it. That was why I said that his family should be looking out for him.”