Deadly Welcome (4 page)

He read the lawyer names and the doctor names on the second-floor windows of the Gordon Building, and a lot of them were different, but a lot of them could be remembered.

The Castle Theater was closed, boarded up. There was a new dime store. And now they had parking meters.

He looked at Ducklin’s Sundries. It was bigger. It had taken over the feed store, and the whole front was an expanse of cream and crimson plastic and big windows. He parked in front of it. Getting out of the car and walking in was one of the most difficult things he had ever done. It was frigidly air-conditioned. An old man who looked vaguely familiar stood by a big magazine rack mumbling to himself as he read a comic book. Two young women sat at the counter with their packages, eating sundaes. There was a pimpled young girl in a yellow nylon uniform behind the counter, scraping the grill with a spatula, slowly and listlessly. A young man sat on his heels by a center counter, taking items out of a carton and stacking them on a shelf. Alex Doyle knew no one.

He walked to the counter and slid onto one of the red stools. The pimpled girl glanced at him and dropped the spatula, wiped her hands on her apron and came over.

“Coffee,” he said. “Black.” When she brought the coffee he said, “Is Joe or Myra around?”

“Joe? Myra? I don’t get it.”

“Mr. or Mrs. Ducklin,” he said.

“They don’t own it any more,” the girl said. “You want to see the owner, it’s Mr. Ellman and he isn’t in.”

The young housewives had apparently overheard the conversation. “Pardon me, but Joe Ducklin died a long time ago. Oh, ten years anyway. She ran it for a while and then she sold out, a couple years later I guess it was. It’s kinda creepy, somebody asking for Joe. Pardon me. I mean it just sounded creepy. You know.”

“I used to live here.”

She was a heavy young matron, hippy, with a rather coarse face and a dab of chocolate on her chin. “I’ve been right here my whole life long, so if you lived here I guess maybe I ought to know you.” She laughed in a rather disturbingly coy way.

“I used to work in this store,” he said.

The other woman peered at him intently. “You wouldn’t … you couldn’t possibly be Alex Doyle? You must be!” She was a sallow blonde with a long upper lip.

“You’re right.”

“Well, I wouldn’t guess you’d know me because I was just a little bit of a thing, but I sure remember you coming over to the house to see Jody. Jody Burch. I’m one of Jody’s kid sisters. I’m Junie. Now I’m Junie Hillyard. I don’t know if you remember Billy Hillyard. And this here is my best girl friend, Kathy Hubbard, who used to be Kathy King.”

“I … I don’t remember Billy Hillyard, except as a name. But I certainly remember Jody. Does he live here?”

“Jody’s dead,” she said. “He liked the navy so good he stayed in, and it was just three years ago and he was on a supply ship and they were loading something and something broke and they dropped it on him. It was a terrible thing. He had thirteen years in and he was only going to stay twenty.”

“I’m sorry to hear it.”

“It just about broke us all up. His wife is married again. She sure didn’t wait long, that one. She wasn’t local so you wouldn’t know her. A Philadelphia girl.”

“Does Myra Ducklin still live in town?”

“Why, she surely does! She’s right over on Palm Street in that house they always had. I just remembered you’re kin to her, somehow, and you used to live there so I guess I don’t have to tell you …”

She stopped abruptly and her eyes grew round, and
Doyle knew that she had suddenly remembered all the rest of it. She leaned close to her friend and whispered to her, rudely and at length. Then Mrs. Kathy Hubbard turned and stared at him also.

They had finished their sundaes and their money was on the counter. They stood up and Junie cleared her throat and said, “Are you really sure Mrs. Ducklin would want to see you?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Are you on a vacation?”

“I might move back here, Junie. Care to advise me?”

“Maybe you’d feel more at home if you settled down at Bucket Bay, Alex Doyle.” They walked out with great dignity. And stared at him through the windows as they walked toward their car with the packages. Junie had the intense look of the confirmed gossip. The self-righteous gossip. That Alex Doyle has come back here, bold as brass, and what are decent people going to do about it? He had the nerve to speak to me. Robbed his kin and they let him run away into the army and here he is right back again after all this time. Cheap sporty shirt and snappy slacks. Tough looking.

He put a dime beside the empty cup and as he got up and turned to go, a big old man, sweaty and slow-moving, came in out of the sidewalk heat, patting his broad forehead with a blue bandanna. Jeff Ellandon. Perennial mayor of Ramona. Fifteen years heavier and slower.

He looked at Doyle with shrewd old eyes, stuffed the bandanna in his pocket and said, in a voice frayed and thin with age, “Guess I should know you, son. Guess my memory is about to give out on me. You one of the Bookers?”

“Doyle, Judge. Alex Doyle.”

“Well sure now. Bert’s boy. There was you and Rafe, and he was the older one, got drownded with Bert that time. Mother was Mary Ann Elder from up in Osprey. Come and set, son.”

Alex followed the man back to a small booth and sat facing him. He ordered another cup of coffee and Judge Ellandon had a double order of chocolate ice cream.

“Been away for some time, I’d say, son. You were the one had that trouble. You worked right here, come to think of it. Joe Ducklin was a second cousin of your daddy. I remember Joe cussin’ you almost right up to the time he died. Stingy old rascal. He and Spence Larkin were the closest men in town. The way I figured it, you were just collecting back wages, son. I guess you can see the town ain’t changed much.”

“I saw a lot of new stuff when I drove in, Judge.”

“I guess we must have had maybe fifteen hundred people when you left and we haven’t got more than seventeen, eighteen hundred right now. Everybody else growing up big north and south of us and we keep poking along. No future here, son. It’s those dang Jansons.”

It was a story Alex had long been familiar with, the favorite gripe of local businessmen and boosters. At the turn of the century a wealthy sportsman named Janson had come down from Chicago to fish. He bought land on the north end of Ramona Key and built a fishing lodge. When Alex had been little the kids believed the old corroding structure was haunted. It had burned down when he had been about nine years old. Janson had been the one who financed the causeway and bridge to Ramona Key. And he had so believed in the future of the area that, for a sickeningly small sum, he had purchased all of Ramona Key except for a three-quarter-mile strip of Gulf to bay land just opposite the causeway, all seven miles of Kelly Key, and huge mainland tracts on either side of the sleepy fishing village. Janson had died during the first World War, and the estate had been tied up in litigation for many years. At the time of the Florida boom there were plans to subdivide and sell off the Janson lands, but the boom collapsed before any action was
taken. Since then any attempt to buy any Janson land had been met with stony indifferent silence.

“They still won’t sell any off, Judge?”

He snorted with ancient fury. “Got all the money in the world. Don’t want more. Don’t give a damn the town is strangled. Can’t grow except to the east into the piny woods. Nobody’s going to come in here with big money and put up the kind of stuff that’ll bring the tourists and make the town grow, not with that little bitty piece of Gulf front that’s the only part them Jansons didn’t buy.”

“Are you mayor now, Judge?”

“Lord, boy, it’s been a mighty long time since I was mayor. Or anything else. I was on the County Commissioners a while, but it like to kill me running over to all those meetings in Davis all the time. Seventy-one-mile round trip to argue about if we should buy a two-bit record book. I couldn’t get no place political after Spence Larkin died. You know we were close, and just about anything he wanted to happen in this town, it happened. Anybody try to cross Spence and they’d find out he picked up their paper from the bank and he’d start in a-squeezing on them.”

“When did he die, Judge?”

“Let me look back now a minute. Yes, that was in nineteen and fifty. Seems he had a gut pain he didn’t pay enough attention to, and he finally went up to Tampa and they checked him over and said they wanted to operate. So he come back and he was busy as hell selling stuff and getting all his business stuff straightened away. And he went back up there and they operated and he up and died the next day. There was me and one or two others and his family that felt sorry about it, but the rest of the town went around sort of trying to hide a big grin. He was a man didn’t give a damn for making himself popular.”

“Did Jenna get down for the funeral?”

“Lordy, no. They never knew how to get hold of her fast. But she found out somehow and she was down here about two weeks later, storming around. Come in a great big car along with some funny-looking people. She’d done her hair red and she wore the tightest pants ever seen around here, son. Didn’t even stay over the night. Just found out from her folks that the will said she was to get one dollar, so damn if she didn’t go over there across the street to Wilson Willing’s office and collect the dollar and take off. Buddy Larkin didn’t make the funeral either. He was off there in Korea running up and down them hills with the marines. The only family here was Betty and her ma. Betty was seventeen then, thereabouts. Well, sir, old Angel Cobey, he was running the boat yard for the heirs, and when Buddy came back home it didn’t take him long to find out Angel was stealing the family blind. Buddy brought a marine pal of his back, name of Johnny Geer. So they pitched in and they did fair with it, but they didn’t begin to do real good until about fifty-four when Betty come home from college in Gainesville and pitched in too. Buddy is good on the mechanical end, but it’s Betty’s got more the head for business like Spence had. Of course their ma, Lila, she’s got no more head for business than a water turkey. Spence had left the business awful run down. He wasn’t interested in it. Now, Lordy, they get boats in there from all the way from Tarpon Springs to Marathon, boats where people want the work done right and done reasonable. They turned it into a corporation so Johnny Geer could get a piece of it, and they wrote Jenna to see if she wanted in and she said she didn’t want no gifts.”

“Judge, I’m a little confused on this thing. What for would they want to run that boat yard? After what Mr. Larkin must have left?”

“Well, I’ll tell you what Spence left, son. He left that house on Grove Road all free and clear. And a thousand
shares of bank stock you can’t sell and hasn’t paid a dividend in years. And a pretty good new Cadillac. You remember that was about the only thing he ever bought himself, a new car every year and run the living hell out of it. And about eleven thousand in cash. And the boat yard. Oh, and some little pieces of acreage. No-account land.”

“Where did it all go anyhow?”

He chuckled. “Good question, son. The tax folks would like to know too. By God, you never saw such digging. Like to tore up half the county looking for Spence’s money. Thought they were about to turn up an old coffee can with a million dollars in it. There’s some kind of tax action been dragging along in the courts.”

“Do you think he hid the money, Judge?”

“I know he had plenty that never showed up. The way I figure it, Spence wasn’t quite ready. He counted on some more time. But he got cut off too quick. Son, it was one hell of a funeral. About half of Tallahassee down here, and folks out of county government from all over hell and gone. Ole Spence had put the screws to most of them and the word was they come to make sure he was really dead. When they lowered the box, you could dang near hear the big sigh of relief. Me, I liked old Spence, mean as he was. You just had to understand him. His daddy fished commercial all his life and when they buried him they bought a used suit coat and a new necktie. And borrowed the white shirt. Spence and me were a pair of raggedy-ass kids in those days, and that didn’t bother me as much as it did him. It bothered him a lot. And so he spent his life correcting that state of affairs. And he was one hell of a lonely man the whole time. Seems like Jenna was the only thing really meant anything to him outside of the money. But she had that wildness in her. Got it from her grandma, Spence’s mother, I’d say. That woman kicked up her heels all
over three counties afore work and kids ground her down. And the only kid lived to grow up was Spence.”

“And then Jenna came back for the second time,” Alex said.

“She surely did. Just about a year and a half ago, with her important husband in such bad shape they had to ambulance him from Tampa airport all the way down here. She’d been down ahead of him and rented the old Proctor cottage out on the beach and fixed it up some, and then went back and got him. It had been in the
Davis Journal
about her marrying him, but you couldn’t get folks around here to really believe it. But they believed it all right when she showed up, better than seven years after Spence passed away. Maybe she came back here to prove she’d done good. I don’t know. But she come back a lady, son. In dress and talk and manners. You never hear such gabbling and cackling as the women did. Said she looked hard in the face, but I couldn’t see it. She looked fine to me. Didn’t mix much, not with him so sick, but she saw a lot of Betty and Buddy and her ma. She was nursing that colonel back to health. And she kept it up about six months.”

“I saw some of the newspaper stuff when she was killed, Judge. It sort of hinted she’d been living it up.”

“Out of the clear blue she shows up one night over there in the Spanish Mackerel on Front Street, Harry Bann’s place. The Mack ain’t changed since you were here, son. It’s rough and tough most of the time, and gets worse when those people down to Bucket Bay come up to town to raise hell. So she had some drinks and she played the jook and the pinball and the bowling and didn’t leave until the bar closed and then she didn’t leave alone.”