Charles Williams - Go Home, Stranger

Just the routine press release, he thought. And that trailer swam away without any help. He looked at the portraits again, while the waiter brought their menus. “Grandfather, father, and son. Is that it?”

“Yes. The father was killed on the Italian front during the First World War. But not until after he had married. An expatriate American girl studying voice in Milan. In the winter of 1918 she came back here to have her baby. Robert Counsel was born in the same upstairs room as his father and grandfather. I understand there is a dice table there now. He didn’t have any father, of course, and his mother’s devotion to him was, from what they say, very close to neurotic.

“Daniel Counsel—the grandfather, and from all accounts a regular old pirate—was still alive then. I think he died in 1925. The family still had plenty of money, but it must have been a very lonesome life for a small boy, and maybe even a little unhealthy. They spent part of the time in Italy, and when they were here on the plantation he never went to school. Private tutors, mostly English, at least until he was of high-school age—”

She broke off suddenly. Five musicians had come in through the archway and were taking their places on the stand just beyond the small dance floor. It wasn’t this, however, that had stopped her. He followed her gaze and saw a tall, red-haired young man bearing down on them.

The redhead stopped, glanced carelessly from Patricia Lasater to Reno and back again, and grinned. “Howdy, Miss Patricia. How y’all?” He winked at Reno, and said, “Yankee artist, looking for local color. Expects everybody to have a cawn pone in his mouth.”

“Mr. Reno, Mr. Griffin,” she said. Then she added, “Mr. Griffin flies a speedboat.”

Reno stood up and they shook hands. He was conscious of a lean and reckless face, and cool green eyes with perhaps just a shade too much self-assurance. The well-tailored white linen suit and blue tie and handkerchief reminded him suddenly of his own indifferent clothing. What the hell? He thought. Who cared for her opinion?

“You don’t mind if I sit down for a minute, do you?” Griffin asked. “I’ll buy a drink. You can’t eat on an empty stomach. Before Reno could nod assent he pulled out a chair and motioned impatiently for a waiter.

“I was just telling Mr. Reno a little about the house,” Patricia said.

“Oh. Interesting place,” Griffin looked at Reno. “You don’t live around here, then?”

“No,” he replied. “Just on vacation. Bass fishing.”

“Oh, bass!” Griffin dismissed them with good-humored disdain. “Come down to my place and I’ll take you out in the Gulf for some real fishing. Tarpon and kings.”

Patricia looked up at this. “Is your new boat ready to go?”

“Sure. Came down from the yard yesterday. Taking it outside for a shakedown tomorrow or the next day. How about coming along?”

“I’d love it. You can go, can’t you, Mr. Reno?”

Reno looked uncertain. “You too. I meant both of you,” Griffin said, nodding.

“Well, sure. Thanks. I’d like to,” he said. Why? He wondered. Haven’t I got anything better to do than go yachting with these characters? But you never knew where you’d find what you were looking for. And she was going.

Patricia Lasater asked, “Do you think they’ll ever find out what happened to the other one? Have you heard anything yet?”

Griffin shrugged. “Not a word. It’s just one of those things they’ll never solve.”

Reno tried to keep the sudden stirring of interest from showing in his face. Another missing boat? “How’s that?” he asked casually. “Somebody liberate one of your boats?”

Griffin stared at Patricia with burlesque amazement. “Pat, this man’s from Mars. He hasn’t heard about our explosion.”

Patricia made no reply. Reno glanced across at her and saw her face had gone strangely still.

“Explosion?” he asked.

The redhead nodded. “It’s a wonder you didn’t read about it. Big mystery. Made all the papers, and even a blurb in Time.”

“I’ve been in South America,” Reno explained.

“Oh. That accounts for it.” Griffin grinned briefly, and then went on. “A man—or maybe it was two men, they never could be sure—stole one of my boats one night, and it blew up out there in the ship channel.”

“Gasoline tank?”

“Gas tank, my foot! High explosive. You should have seen the few pieces of it they found. . . . But maybe I’d better go back to the beginning. You’re trapped anyway; you can’t run without leaving your dinner, and Pat.

“You see, I run a small boat service down the channel below here; a little towing, oil barges and that sort of stuff. I also have a speedboat I rent to young bucks who want to give their girls a thrill, and I had a charter boat for offshore fishing. I live there on the dock, and don’t keep a night watchman because I’m usually around somewhere. Well, one night in May—the tenth, I think—I had to go into Waynesport for something and didn’t get back until after midnight. The charter boat—a twenty-seven-foot cabin job—was gone. Just gone, like that. I’d barely started inside to call the Coast Guard and the Sheriff when I heard the roar, up the channel. At first I thought the Mid-Gulf refinery had let go. It’s up above here about ten miles.

“This whole end of the country was in an uproar in a few minutes, people calling the Coast Guard and the Highway Patrol, and each other. There was a big crowd here at the Counselor that night, and they could tell the blast was somewhere near on the channel because it rattled the windows. People were out in cars, prowling around the country without even knowing what they were looking for, and the Coast Guard had boats searching the channel. And just before daybreak they found it—”

“Could you sort of play it down a little, Hutch? The next part, I mean?” Patricia interrupted quietly, her face pale.

“Sure.” Griffin patted her hand soothingly, but when he looked around at Reno his eyes were full of sardonic amusement. “Anyway, you’ll see why they were never sure whether it was one man in the boat, or two. It happened in the edge of the channel, near some overhanging trees. It stripped them, and blew out a hole in the bank. They found pieces of planking out in the fields. The only thing left of the boat that was recognizable was the motor, and that was on the bottom in the mud.”

“But what did it?” Reno asked.

Griffin leaned back in his chair and shook his head, smiling. “You tell me. They don’t have any more idea right now than they did the morning they found it.”

“But,” Reno insisted, “the men?” Didn’t anybody ever figure out what they were trying to do?”

“No. And not only that. To this day, they don’t even know who they were. They’re pretty sure there were two, but nobody’s ever turned up missing.”

For a wild instant Reno thought of Robert Counsel; then the idea died. This was in May, Griffin said, and Counsel hadn’t come down here until the twentieth of July.

“But they must have some theory,” he said. “Didn’t anybody ever come up with an idea?”

“Oh, sure,” Griffin replied easily. “Theories were a dime a dozen. There was the floating mine brain storm, first. You remember there were Nazi subs in the Gulf early in the war, potting the tankers, and a lot of people figure now they might have laid a few mines and that one of ‘em drifted fifteen miles up the ship channel. As a theory, it’s pretty sad.

“The unexploded torpedo idea was about the, same. They sink, anyway, I understand. And besides, when the explosives experts came down to look at the pieces, they blew all these theories sky-high; They proved the explosion came from inside the boat. Something about pressures, and the direction some of the bottom planking had ruptured—what little they found.”