Deadly Welcome (3 page)

He took the heavy folder back to his hotel. By eight o’clock that evening he had absorbed all of it. He knew how Jenna had died. He knew what they wanted him to say to Crawford M’Gann. With the instinctive caution of long training, he left the folder in the hotel safe and went out into the April evening to walk the sultry streets during the first heat wave of the season.

He had come back a long way, from autumn in Uruguay to spring in Washington. And further than that. Back to the pine and palmetto scrub lands, and the night sounds of that land. The whippoorwill and the mourning dove singing counterpoint to the dirge of the tree toads. Water lapping the pilings of the decaying dock
and slapping the old hull of the net boat. The grinding whine of skeeters close to your ear. And, often, the muted grunting bray of a gator back in the slough.

He walked steadily, unaware of direction. There had been all the years of painful accretion of the new identity. He had thought it all so sound. He had believed it to be the real Alex Doyle. But now it was all beginning to flake away. Bits falling from a plaster statue to reveal once again that scared, confused and indignant kid.

He wondered what it had been like for Jenna to go back. What special torment it had been for her. Because she had been the first to leave. Six months before he left. They had been but one day apart in age, and he had been the elder. Left with a sailor, a Tampa boy on leave who kept driving all the way down to Ramona in a junk car to see her, and had finally driven away with her and never come back. A town scandal. That Larkin girl. The wild one. And old Spence Larkin had been nearly out of his mind because she had been the eldest child and his favorite. A mean and stingy old bastard. Treated the younger two like dirt and was always buying something for Jenna.

The wild one. Talk of the county. They couldn’t control her. A little blonde with so much life in her, body turning to perfection at thirteen. All that recklessness and that high yell of silver laughter in the night. Up and down the county, carloads of them, at a hundred miles an hour, heaving the beer cans and the bottles into the ditch. Go way up to a dance in Venice and, the very same night, roar on down to the south, to a dance in Fort Myers.

He remembered how he’d known her without knowing her. Daughter of Spence Larkin. Old bastard has more bucks squirreled away than you’ll see in your whole life, Doyle. She’d come in with a gang and sit at the counter at Ducklin’s and she’d say, “Hello there, Alex.” But
they didn’t know each other. And he would hear them talking dirty about her, at Ducklin’s and at the school. “You don’t have no chore getting the pants off Jenna, Herbie. She don’t wear none, boy.” It would give him a feeling of sickness and anger, and he didn’t want to hear it and yet he did.

Then, in the Arcadia game in his sophomore year, when Bowers was hurt and they sent him in, he became a personage. He’d had his full height then, one inch over six feet, but he had weighed only a hundred and fifty-five. But it was all hard, fibrous muscle, and there had been a lot to prove, and this was the time. The chance.

And he had become part of the group, running with them when he had time off from the store, accepted. In the group with Jenna, and closer to her. Didn’t think she would say yes to a date, Didn’t ask for one. She asked him. Spence had given her a fast little runabout. He had taken it in on a trade at the boat yard and had it put back in shape. She asked him, in the store, on a Saturday night when they all stopped in. Asked when the others were talking and couldn’t hear. “Come to the yard tomorrow morning, Alex. About ten. We’ll try out the
Banshee
. Make a picnic out of it.”

They took it down the bay, down between the mainland and the south end of Ramona Key, and then out through the tidal chop and Windy Pass, and then, running outside in the Gulf down most of the deserted length of Kelly Key and anchoring it just off a wide white beach, anchoring it in the shallows and wading ashore with the beer and food and blankets and her little red portable radio. A strange day, unbelievable that he was alone with her. They took turns changing to swim suits behind a screen of sea grapes. Casual talk and some laughter. Swimming and sandwiches and beer. A strange day of mounting tensions, in glance and accidental touch. With the strain mounting between them until,
at dusk, she was in his arms whispering that she thought he would never never try. He had been scared as well as wanting. He hoped they had been wrong—all that talk. He hoped they had been making it all up about her.

But she rolled away and took off the damp green and white swim suit and she was there for a little time to be looked at, and he somehow did not want to look at her but could not look away, until she rolled back to him with a little raw laugh and hungry mouth. He was virgin yet felt he should be gentle and tender because she was such a small girl. But tenderness was not her need. And even as he held her in that ultimate closeness, he had known with a wisdom beyond his years that he still did not know Jenna Larkin, that perhaps no one could know her. And in this union she had contrived, he was but an instrument of her restlessness and protest.

He drove the little
Banshee
home through dark familiar waters, her head on his shoulder while they sang old songs, sleepy with the sun, the swimming, the beer and the love. Very sophisticated. Making no direct reference to what had happened between them. Her car was at the yard, and when she dropped him off at the Ducklin house and responded so completely to his kiss, he asked her when he could have another date, sensing that “date” was now a new word for him.

“I don’t know, Alex. Sometime, I guess. You ask me, hear?”

“I’ll ask you.”

When he was in bed with the lights off that night, it all seemed unreal, and he tried to encompass the enormous realization that It had finally happened to him, and It had happened with Jenna Larkin. He lay in the dark with his eyes wide, and went over each vivid fragment of memory right up to the point where he had not been aware of anything in the world, and beyond that to where he had been aware of her again, watching him with a strange intensity. He tried to think how the next
date would be, and he tried to feel anticipation. But he merely felt sleepy and uncomprehending, and subtly soiled.

He tried to date her again, but he had little time off, and when he did, she was busy. And about two months after the picnic trip in the
Banshee
she was gone. With the sailor. The talk about her was worse after she was gone. Once he came close to joining in, letting them know that he hadn’t been left out. But at the last moment he had turned away, bitterly ashamed of himself.

Since that time he had often wondered if Spence had found her and brought her back to Ramona. The dossier on Jenna, part of the thick file Colonel Presser had given him, answered the question. She had not come back. It covered the years from when she was eighteen until she was thirty, when M’Gann had met her. Had he read it about some strange woman he would have thought it unsavory in the extreme. A marriage and divorce. Modeling for life classes and seedy photographers and unsuccessful commercial artists. Singing with third-rate groups and in grubby joints. A police record of sorts. The minor night-time offenses for which you can be picked up in Seattle and Biloxi, Buffalo and Scranton. But it was all because she had been so alive … and restless.

So how had she felt when she had gone back? As the colonel’s lady. Full of an uneasy bravado? Amused, perhaps? Why had she gone back there at all? There had been no need.

After lunch the next day he got the folder from the hotel manager and went to the Pentagon. He told them
he had decided to do it. He did not tell them why. He did not tell them that he had learned in the long and sleepless hours of the night that if he did not go back he would spend the rest of his life in a half-world where neither identity fitted him, neither the old nor the new. He could not say that this was, in a sense, his own search for Alexander Doyle.

When he said he would rather not take the file with him, they both questioned him sharply until they were satisfied that he had retained all the information he needed to know. “And what about a cover story, Mr. Doyle?”

“I’ve got one that I think is very ordinary and very foolproof, sir. I know South America pretty well. And I know heavy construction equipment. On my last assignment I was working outdoors. And I look it, I guess. A lot of single men take construction jobs abroad for the high pay, and then go back to their home towns. If I had the passport and necessary papers to show I’d been in Venezuela for the last three years …”

“Sounds good enough. Get rolling on that, Jerry. Mr. Doyle, what will be your public reason for going back to Ramona?”

“Tired of knocking around. Got a few bucks saved up. Looking around with the idea of maybe setting myself up in a small business. If it hasn’t changed too much, I’ll rent a cottage out on Ramona Beach. That will put me closer to Colonel M’Gann. After I get established, I’ll have to play it by ear. Maybe I can line up some kind of temporary job that will make it easier to get to the colonel. I’ll need mobility, Colonel Presser. I think the best thing would be to fly to Tampa and pick up the right kind of clothes there and a used car. I don’t think I was expected to amount to very much. Except for having some cash, I don’t think I want to disappoint them.”

“You sound bitter, Mr. Doyle.”

“A little. Maybe. But I’ll be a lot less conspicuous than if I went into town driving a rental sedan and wearing a suit like this one, sir.”

“You are absolutely right, Mr. Doyle. I approve the plan. It isn’t theatrical. You won’t be tripped by the casual question. And you can look and play the part, I’m sure. When can we have his papers ready, Jerry?”

“By tomorrow noon, Colonel.”

“We want you to take all the time you need to handle it carefully, Mr. Doyle. I think three thousand dollars would be ample.”

“More than enough.”

“How would you take it with you? Traveler’s checks?”

“Alex Doyle, construction bum, would wear a money belt, sir. Or he wouldn’t have any cash to bring back with him.”

Presser laughed his approval. “Come in a little before noon tomorrow.”

He bought the three-hundred-dollar Dodge off a Tampa lot late on Monday afternoon, the thirteenth day of April. He didn’t want to arrive in Ramona after dark, so that evening he drove down as far as Sarasota and found a second-class motel south of the city on the Tamiami Trail. Ever since he left Washington he had been trying to fit himself into the part he would play.

That night, when he was ready for bed, he carefully inspected the stranger in the bathroom mirror. The sandy hair had been cropped short and the gray at the temples was now practically invisible. The eyes were a pale gray-blue. It was a long face, subtly stamped with the melancholy of lonely tasks. A big nose and a stubborn shelving of jaw. A sallow facial texture that took a deep tan and kept it. Twisty scar at the left corner of the broad mouth. A flat, hard, rangy body, with big feet and knobbed wrists and big freckled hands.

He studied the stranger and said quite softly, “Banged
around here and there. Have driven shovels and Euclids and cats. And some deep-well work.”

The face looked back at him, passive, somewhat secretive, with a hidden pride and hint of wildness.

He stretched out in the dark and listened to the trucks go by just beyond his window. There was a band of moonlight in the room. And air scented with diesel fuel and jasmine. This was home land. And different. Sarasota had turned from sleepy village to busy tourist center. Ramona would be changed too. But not as much. It was miles off the Tamiami Trail.

Tomorrow he would drive into town, right down Bay Street. His hands were sweaty. He could hear the knocking of his heart. And he was a kid in a cell in Davis, wondering what they were going to do to him.

At ten o’clock on Tuesday morning he turned off Route 41 onto State Road 978, moving slowly through the bright hot morning, through soaring throngs of mosquito hawks, through flat scrub land with occasional oak hammocks and some tall stands of slash pine. The last time he had come over this road he had been going the other way, fast, in a back seat between two deputies, dog-sick and trying not to sniffle. They had stopped to let him be sick at the side of the road while the deputies talked in soft slow voices about the hunting season. He remembered wondering if they were wishing he’d try to run.

About four miles from town he came upon the first change. A huge tract had been cleared and shell roads had been put in, but now the scrub was growing up again. A big faded sign said that it was
Ramona Heights. Florida Living at a Reasonable Price. Big Quarter-Acre Lots at $300. Ten Dollars Down. Title Insurance. See Your Broker
. The roads were named after the states of the union, and the road signs were so faded as to be almost illegible. He could see a few scattered houses,
small cinder-block structures painted in brave bright colors.

Farther on he came on new houses where it had all been pasture land, and then some drive-ins and motels and a small shopping section. More houses, and a new school of blond stone and glass, with the yellow buses ranked outside it. And then, ahead of him, he could see where the trees started, the big live oaks, bearded with Spanish moss, that shaded the east end of Bay Street. They were the memorial oaks, planted right after the first World War, and to him they had always marked the edge of town.

He drove along the shade of Bay Street, past the old frame houses and the old stucco houses of the boom of long ago, and he read the forgotten names of the side streets. And then he was back in sunlight again, where the street widened, looking along the three blocks of the business center toward the blue water of Ramona Bay, bisected by the causeway and old wooden bridge that, as a continuation of Bay Street, provided access to Ramona Key and Ramona Beach.

The old hotel was still there with its broad porches, but the stores across from it had been torn down and replaced by a chain supermarket set well back, a big parking lot, orange parking lines vivid against asphalt, in front of it. Cars dozed in the sun. A pregnant woman walked tiredly toward a dusty station wagon, followed by a boy in a soiled white apron pushing a supermarket cart containing two big bags of groceries. A grubby little girl sat on the curbing in front of the telephone office, solemnly licking a big pink icecream cone. Cars were parked diagonally in the sun on either side of Bay Street, noses patient against the curbing. There was a new bright plastic front on Bolley’s Hardware. Where Stimson’s Appliance had been there was a big shiny gas station where two fat red-faced men stood drinking Cokes and watching an attendant check the oil on a Chrysler with Ohio plates.