Cry for the Strangers (19 page)

Harney Whalen walked into his office and settled into the chair behind his desk. He shuffled through some papers, but Chip Connor wasn’t fooled. Something was on Ham’s mind.

“Kind of quiet, aren’t you?” Whalen finally asked.

“Nothing to say. All quiet.” He paused a moment, then decided to goad his chief. “Quiet as a funeral,” he added.

Harney looked up at him then, and leaned back in the chair. “Is that supposed to be a hint?”

“I guess so,” Chip said mildly. “How was it?”

“A funeral’s a funeral,” Whalen said. “First time I’ve ever been to a double one with no bodies, though.”

“Lots of people?”

“Not really. Old Man Riley.”

“Granddad? That doesn’t surprise me.” Chip grinned. “Sometimes I think he has a fixation about funerals. Like if he skips one the next one will be his. I suppose Tad and Clem were with him?”

“Yup. Those three and me, and four other people. Bet you can’t guess who the other four were.”

Chip turned it over in his mind. From the way Whalen had said it, it must not have been anyone he was likely to think of. Then it came to him.

“Not the Palmers?” he asked.

“Right on the money,” Harney said. “Now you tell me. Why would the Palmers be at that funeral? Hell, hardly anybody was there and everybody in town knew the Shellings better than the Palmers did. So why’d they turn up?”

“How should I know?” Chip asked. “Why did they?”

“Good question,” Whalen said sarcastically. “Guess who’s going to find out the answer?”

“I see,” Chip said heavily, standing up. “You want me to go on over there and have a little talk with Palmer?”

“Right,” Whalen replied. “No rush, though. Anytime before tomorrow will be fine.”

He watched his deputy leave and wondered how Chip would handle the situation; wondered, indeed, why he even wanted Glen Palmer questioned. Doc Phelps had said Miriam Shelling killed herself. But Harney Whalen didn’t believe it. There was something more—something else happening, and Harney was
sure that it involved the Palmers. It was just a hunch, but Harney Whalen trusted his hunches.

The Palmers walked the few blocks to the service station, paid an inflated repair bill without comment, and drove back to Sod Beach in silence. The silence was respected even by the children, who seemed to know that for the moment they should be quiet Glen turned the Chevy off the main road and they bumped over the last hundred yards into the clearing where their cabin stood.

“Can we go out on the beach now?” Robby begged as he and Missy scrambled out of the back seat.

“Don’t you think you ought to go to school?” Rebecca suggested.

“Aw, it’s after lunchtime already.” Robby’s face crumbled and Rebecca softened immediately.

“Well, I don’t suppose one day will hurt you,” she said. “Why don’t you let Scooter out before he ruins the house completely?” Before she had finished the words Missy and Robby were racing to the door of the cabin. A moment later the tiny puppy tumbled happily out to chase the children. Glen and Rebecca watched the scene until the trio disappeared around a corner toward the beach, then went inside.

“Damn that dog,” Rebecca said as she saw the pile in the middle of the rug. They had given up trying to confine the puppy to a box after the first day, when he had earned his name by chewing a hole through every box they had put him in, then scooting under the nearest piece of furniture, waiting for someone to chase him. Also, the name was close enough to that of the disappeared Snooker that the puppy would
respond even when the children slipped and called him by their previous pet’s name. All in all, the puppy had worked out very well, and the Palmers had been spared the task of telling the children what had happened to the spaniel: since Scooter’s arrival, they both seemed to have forgotten the black-and-white mutt. The only problem was Scooter’s recalcitrance at learning the basics of being housebroken. Rebecca found a scrap of newspaper and gingerly picked up the pile, took it outside, and dumped it into the garbage can.

“Want to go out on the beach?” she asked Glen when she came back in. “The sun’s about to break through and you know how I feel about the children being out there by themselves.”

Glen looked at his wife speculatively. This was the first time she had let them play on the beach at all since the day Miriam Shelling had died. He decided to approach the subject obliquely.

“Are you glad we went to the service?” he asked.

Rebecca seemed surprised by the question. “Well, of course I’m glad we went. I was the one who insisted we go, remember?” Then she suddenly realized what he was getting at. Instinctively, she started for the door, then stopped herself.

“It really is over, isn’t it?” she said.

“It was over as soon as it happened, darling,” Glen said gently. “But you needed that service just to tell you so.”

“I know,” Rebecca replied. “And I don’t mind telling you that I feel pretty silly about it now, but it really shook me up.”

“Well, at least the kids have the beach again. I don’t
know about you, but I was beginning to go a little crazy with them and that puppy underfoot all the time.” He opened the ice box. “Tell you what. Let’s make some sandwiches and have a picnic on the beach. I’ll forget about going back to the gallery and you forget about whatever you were going to do this afternoon, and we’ll have a little wake for the Shellings, just the four of us.”

“We’re not Irish,” Rebecca protested.

“We can pretend.” Glen grinned. “Besides, you know as well as I do that those kids are going to have a million questions. So we might as well make a party out of answering them.”

For the first time in days Rebecca’s depression suddenly lifted and she realized she was once again happy to be at the beach. She hugged Glen and kissed him firmly.

“What’s that about?” he said after he returned the kiss.

“Nothing in particular. Just to let you know that I appreciate having such a wonderful husband.” She looked out the window just in time to see the clouds break and the sun pour through. The leaden-gray sea suddenly turned a deep blue, and the green of the forest sprang to life. “The storm’s over,” she said. “I can hardly believe it.”

“I wouldn’t believe it if I were you,” Glen said. “According to the old-timers I’ve heard talking around town, the last few days have just been a prelude. The real storm’s been sitting out there waiting to come in.”

Rebecca made a face at her husband. “Well, aren’t you just the prophet of doom?”

“Only repeating what I heard.”

“And do you believe everything you hear?” Rebecca teased. “Come on, let’s make hay while the sun shines!”

Clem Ledbetter set aside the net he was working on and shook a cigarette from a crumpled package he fished from his pants pocket.

“What do you think?” he said to no one in particular as he lit the cigarette and took a deep drag on it.

“You gonna work or smoke?” Tad Corey asked. “I know you can’t do both.”

“I was thinking about Miriam Shelling,” Clem said, ignoring Tad. “It just don’t make any sense to me.”

“Lots of things don’t make sense.” Mac Riley set aside his work and pulled out his pipe. As he carefully packed it from an ancient sealskin tobacco pouch, he peered at Clem. “What is it in particular?”

“Miriam Shelling. It just don’t make sense, her killing herself. She just wasn’t the kind of woman to do something like that.”

“What makes you such an expert?” Corey asked. “You and her closer than you let on?”

“Shit, no. It’s just that she didn’t seem like the type, that’s all. Me and Alice knew Pete and Miriam as well as anybody around here and if you ask me, the whole thing doesn’t make any sense.”

“Pete Shelling was a fool,” Tad Corey said vehemently. “Anybody who stays out alone like that is a fool.”

“That may be,” Clem said. “But Pete was a good fisherman and you know it. He ran a good boat—I never once saw
Sea Spray
but what everything wasn’t in order. Not like some people I could name whose boats look like pigsties.”

Tad refused to rise to the bait. “Kept his boat too neat if you ask me,” he said.

“Maybe so,” Clem said doggedly. “But someone who kept his boat as neat as Pete Shelling did just isn’t likely to let himself get caught in bis own nets. And Miriam—well, she knew what she was getting into when she married Pete. Any woman who marries a fisherman knows. So when something like that happens they don’t go out and kill themselves.”

“Well, what’s done is over with,” Tad replied. “I don’t know why we’re wasting time talking about it. Pete Shelling never did fit in around here, and I for one don’t give a damn about it one way or another. As for Miriam, well, Harn Whalen says she killed herself, and that’s that.”

“Is it?” Mac Riley’s quavering voice inquired. “I wonder.”

He’d set his pipe down as he listened to the two younger men talk, but now he picked it up and relit it. He puffed on it for a few minutes. Clem and Tad had begun to suspect that the old man had drifted off in his own mind when he suddenly started speaking again.

“I remember something that happened a long time ago, not so very long after you two were born. There were a couple of people here, a man and his wife. Don’t know where they came from—fact is, I might never have known—but anyway, he was a fisherman. And one day I found his boat drifting off Sod Beach, just about where that feller found Pete Shelling’s boat. He was caught in his nets, just like Pete Shelling.”

“So?” Tad Corey asked. “I don’t see what’s so strange about that. The currents off that beach get pretty wild
sometimes, and it isn’t that hard to lose control of your nets if you don’t know what you’re doing. So two people die there the same way in forty years. I don’t see how that means anything. If it were two people in a month, say, or maybe even a year, that’d be one thing. But forty years? Shit, Riley, the only thing that surprises me is that there haven’t been more.”

“You didn’t let me finish my story,” the old man said patiently. “A couple of days after I found that man his wife died.”

“Died?” Tad asked. “What happened to her?”

“Hanged herself,” Riley said quietly. “I ain’t going to say it was from the same tree as Miriam Shelling used, but you can believe me when I tell you it wasn’t far from it.”

The two younger men stared at the old man, and there was a long silence. Finally Clem spoke.

“Were they sure it was suicide?”

“Nobody had any reason to doubt it,” Riley said. “But if you ask me, what happened to them and what happened to the Shellings is a little bit too close for comfort.”

“But it doesn’t make any sense,” Clem Ledbetter said softly.

“Doesn’t it?” Riley mused. “I wonder. I just wonder.”

Tad and Clem exchanged a worried glance, but Riley caught it.

“You think I’m a senile old man, don’t you?” he asked them. “Well, I may be, and then again, I may not be. But I can tell you one thing. That sea out there, she’s like a living thing, she is. And she has a personality all her own. The Indians knew that and
they respected her. The Indians believed that a spirit lives in the sea and that she has to be appeased.”

“That’s bullshit,” Corey said.

“You think so? Well, maybe you’re right. But what the Indians said mates a lot of sense when you think about it. We get a lot from the sea, but what do we ever put back? Not much of anything. It’s not that way with, say, farming. Farmers take a lot out of the soil, but they put a lot back in too. Well, the Indians thought the same thing was true of the sea. You had to offer it something in return for all it gave you. And they did. Out there on what they used to call the Sands of Death.”

“I’ve heard the stories,” Clem said.

“About what they used to do to strangers out there? Sure, everyone’s heard those stories. But there are other stories, stories that aren’t talked about so much.”

“For instance?” Clem asked.

“When I was a little boy, I remember my father telling me the old Klickashaw customs. One of ’em had to do with fishermen that died at sea. The Indians didn’t believe in accidents. Not a’tall. If somebody died there was always a reason, likely an offended spirit. The story was that if a fisherman died, it meant the spirit of the sea was angry.”

“What did they do?”

“They made a sacrifice,” Riley said quietly. “They took the wife of the fisherman out to the Sands of Death and offered her to the sea. Usually they hanged her in the woods out there, but sometimes they just strangled her or broke her neck and left her on the beach.”

“Jesus,” Clem breathed softly.

The old man smoked his pipe for a while and stared out at the calm sea. “Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?” he said finally. “I hadn’t thought about that story for years, not until Miriam Shelling died. But I wonder. I just wonder if maybe the Indians didn’t know some things we don’t know. We live off the sea here, and what do we do in return? Dump our garbage in. I suppose we can’t blame the sea if she wants something more every now and then.”

“You mean you believe those old Indian stories?” Tad gasped.

Riley looked sharply at the younger man. “Got no reason not to,” he said. “And a lot of reasons to believe them. I’ve been living with the sea for most of a century now and one thing I’ve learned. Never underestimate her. You may think you’ve got her by the tail but you haven’t. Any time she wants to, that ocean can pick herself up and smash you down.

“At night, usually,” he went on, more softly now. “You have to be particularly careful of her at night. She can be smooth as glass, and you almost fall asleep. But that’s what she wants. She wants you to relax. Then all it takes is one good wave and it’s over. She’s got you. Just like she got Pete Shelling, and that other fisherman so long ago.”

“And their wives too?” Tad scoffed.

“That’s the beach,” Riley replied. “And it’s just as dangerous as the ocean, particularly at night when the tide’s high and the wind’s blowing. The Indians used to call them the night waves. It was when the night waves were coming in that they made their sacrifices. …”

He trailed off and there was a long silence while
Corey and Ledbetter digested what Riley had told him.