Strawberries in the Sea (33 page)

He looked so worried her own ambivalence was swept away, and she put both arms around him. “He's single. . . . No talk of funerals. I didn't see anybody,” she lied. “Nobody was in the store, I just mailed my letter and came away.”

“You were long enough.” The words were muffled in her shoulder.

“I looked around in the store for anything I needed. Then I waited, but nobody came. Mark Bennett was busy down on the wharf, I guess. . . . Anyway, I left.” Tell him,
tell him
.

“Look, doesn't anybody speak to you around here?” He raised his head and looked indignantly at her. “Wouldn't somebody come around to tell you the news?”

“Marjorie Percy just did, in the path. And I told her I was getting over some bug or other and needed sleep. She'll pass that around and nobody'll come near.” It was like the time when he'd come into her bed, and she'd known there was still time to stop, but she hadn't stopped; in fact, she'd made him welcome.

“But we'd better not take chances, just the same,” she said. “Come on upstairs and tell me what happened after Mick died.”

“Till we get tired of talking,” he said, following her. The thought of sex always cheered him immensely. She thought, later I'll go out and come back and pretend I just heard about Jamie.

It was a strange day, without time or change; they moved freely through the upstairs rooms in the shadowless light behind the translucent shades. An hour felt like three or four hours, but, later, half a day felt like half an hour.

After Mick died, Quint couldn't make himself go to the police, so he had gone to the fish buyer who always bought Mick's fish. He called the police and the city buried Mick. The trouble was, the dealer wanted to take Quint home with him until arrangements could be made for his care; he thought Quint was Mick's nephew, and had no idea the boy hadn't been going to school. Quint felt everything closing in on him. In new panic, he hitchhiked out of town, but a truck driver questioned him ruthlessly and turned him over to the State Police.

So the welfare people had got him after all, and he'd been made a ward of the state. “It wasn't so hellish,” he said. “Not heaven, but they didn't beat me, nobody chased me around trying to de-virginate me, I got plenty to eat, and I was in a fisherman's family. I had to go to school, but I could be around the shore in my spare time—guy had plenty for me to do, that's why he took me—and summers I was his fulltime helper.”

He'd even managed to finish high school, though he hadn't showed up at the graduation exercises. At eighteen he was on his own, working at one thing or another, never staying very long at anything. “I guess I was born to be a drifter,” he said. “But I've never been in real trouble. Until now.”

“But it was accident, and you're not caught,” Rosa said.

“I could be. You could still do it.” He laughed at her expression, and seized her.

Later he said suddenly, when she thought he was asleep, “Hey, if Danny doesn't come—I mean if he can't come—I could get aboard your boat at night and in the morning you could go to the mainland. Nobody'd question that, would they?”

“No—”

“What's the matter? You scared of being caught transporting a criminal?”

“Thinking about this coming to an end.” They were lying naked on his bed.

“Aw, listen, I want you with me, wherever I am! My woman.”

“We'd never feel so free anywhere else.”

“You feel free
here?
” he asked. “Right on the spot where the guy was killed, practically? His friends and relations all around?”

“But they think you're dead, remember? It makes you invisible.” She smiled at his angry, troubled face, and put her hand on him. Sex always diverted him; she didn't know if his ardor and staying power were natural gifts, or the fruit of his fear and desperation. But she could meet him, and did so with pride, at the same time recognizing the drive of her own desperation. He needed her, therefore she needed him. She understood that.

Now, stretching under his hands, she thought that maybe she wouldn't tell him this afternoon. What difference would tomorrow morning make? He couldn't get off the island tonight anyway. But once she told him, even though he would probably want to sleep with her again, nothing would be the same.

Unless, even though free from murder, he still needed her and not as a hiding place. . . . She couldn't think about that now. But later. In late afternoon she slid out from under his flung arm and leg, not easy to do without waking him. But he was really tired now, enough to sleep without nightmares. He hated the dark, and the light made him feel safer.

Downstairs she sponged herself off at the sink, dressed, and went out. She felt as if she hadn't been outside for a week. The boisterous southwest wind bruised the woods and carried the smells of wild apples fallen and rotting on the ground, and the honeysuckle. She walked a little way into the restless woods and sat down on a boulder beside the path, where she could watch the house. At her feet shadows shook across the spills and mosses. Crossbills chattered in the swaying tops of the spruces.

Tomorrow at this time everything would be different. He'd either be foolish with relief and gratitude, and off the island as soon as he could find a way, leaving her his thanks to remember him by (and nothing else, if she'd been lucky enough); or there was the possibility that had come to her upstairs, that he needed her anyway. That he was still the child crouched in the freezing dawn not knowing where to run.

Looking up at the shade flapping gently against the screen of his room, knowing how his brown body looked sprawled in heavy sleep, she thought that no matter what she ever did to that room it would always be saturated with what had taken place there.

Even Con had never been so fierce. But then Con had what he wanted. He wasn't trying to forget that he'd killed somebody and was scared foolish of being caught.
Scared stiff
, Quint had said once today, laughing uproariously.

Maybe that was the secret; the body frantically declaring life in the presence of death.

Supposing Jamie
were
dead. Just one year of his life had been richer than all of Quint's twenty-five. But I could enrich it, she thought. Give him whatever he thinks it takes. Some kind of security, anyway. A home, the boat, money. . . . Or why else had he crawled ashore at her feet?

Her heart didn't leap like a fish or soar like a gull at the prospect. It was simply a statement of fact, that was all.

The children were there before she knew it, triumphantly led by Tiger, who took all the credit for the discovery. The Percy boys were trailed respectfully by the Dinsmore girls; they'd brought a string of small mackerel they'd caught in the harbor.

“Mum says freeze 'em if you don't feel like eating 'em right off,” Young Ralph told her. They were all beaming. She felt surrounded by amiable elves. She scratched Tiger's back and he looked up at her with a melting gaze that reminded her of Quint satisfied.

She thanked the children, remembering not to glance up at Quint's window, hoping that he wouldn't wake up suddenly and make some quick, thoughtless move. The children wanted to talk about the whale Rob Dinsmore had seen. One of the boys said solemnly, “Hey, maybe he ate the drowned man,” and the girls shuddered theatrically and rolled their eyes.

“Mama won't let us go round the shore till they find him. Just
in case
.”

T
hey left her on some mysterious signal, darting off the way schools of minnows suddenly changed direction. She cleaned the mackerel and broiled them for supper, with boiled new potatoes and a green salad. Quint ate a tremendous meal. Afterwards they played cribbage, and he skunked her, which pleased him enormously.

“See, women aren't equal. All that stuff about Woman's Lib is so much crap.”

“I wasn't even trying,” she said haughtily. He tipped back in his chair.

“That's no excuse. But don't feel bad if you're no good at cribbage. You got other advantages, and I don't mean just bed. You're a good cook, and you also own that boat out there.”

“You still harping on that? You don't have much faith in your friend, do you?”

The front legs of his chair came down hard. “Now look, how's he going to row ashore and get me with that sea running out there? Hear that old bell?” He nodded his head toward the window. “You know as well as I do, this time of year it can keep on like this for a week. But you can get out of the harbor any time, if it's not a screeching gale. And Rosa, look . . .” He leaned across the table, and his eyes made her think of Tiger's, as the dog's had reminded her of Quint's. “We could head down east, from harbor to harbor. Or run straight from here to Isle au Haut, and gas up there and keep on going. There's a lot of space left down east, Rosa. Miles and miles of woods. Empty coves with old houses—”

“That somebody's hoping to sell to summer people for a hundred thousand,” she said.

“Hell, there's still room for us somewhere. Get somebody to sell your Seal Point property. I'll make it up to you, Rosie, I swear.” Eyes shining like Tiger's. “I'll really work and stick to it. Quint'll be dead off Bennett's Island somewhere, food for the fish and the crabs, and I'll be somebody else. I'll take a different name. Hey, let's think up a good name for me, Rosie. What's your favorite?”

She couldn't find words, there was just this overpowering incredulity at herself for actually listening; for having allowed it to reach this point. He squeezed her hands hard. “What about it, Rosie? Tell me you're crazy about me, right? And I'm crazy about you, right?” An even harder squeeze. His voice dropped to the familiar husky whisper that could brush her sensibilities like his fingertips on her body, “Let's go, love. You can gas up and pack up tonight, put me out aboard, and we can take off at daylight in the morning.”

“Quint, Mark doesn't keep the store open in the evening. If I went and asked him to come down to the wharf tonight it would look pretty damn funny. It would look even funnier if I took off at daylight in the morning without a word to anyone, and headed northeast.”

His shoulders slumped. He let go of her hands and began shuffling the cards. “Whichever way we go then, it'll look funny. If they notice every fart.”

“Not if I headed for the mainland, and then changed course.”

He came alive then, and dropped the cards. “Get ready tomorrow and take off the day after, then?”

“The day after.” She didn't look at him, drawing the cards toward her. He was out of his chair and prowling, rubbing his hands, breaking into odd yelps of laughter. “Oh, Rosie, Rosie—hey, any charts here?”

“All aboard the boat.” She began to lay out Canfield.

“I just wanted to dream a little.” He was behind her, kissing her nape, pushing his hands down inside her blouse. While she went on laying out the cards, he pulled her shirt out of her slacks and unhooked her bra. “Come on to bed, Rosie love.”

She tried to hold out, but she could not. In bed in the dusk, the world was this house, this room, and there was nothing to fear from the outside, because there was no outside, and there was no time either.

Morning came too soon. While he was still sleeping, she sat downstairs drinking fresh coffee. The day was clear and quiet. She wished that it were storming out there, so that she needn't go beyond plans. The plain fact, which she couldn't escape, was that she couldn't bear to lose Quint, she would have prolonged this forever if she thought she could get away with it. But she couldn't hide forever here, or hide him. By taking him to another place, couldn't she thus create another world as safe as the one she had made for him here?

Ah, but what was the substance of this world? He'd needed an instant shield from the consequences of his acts. Once outside it, how much would he need her? He was half-wild, after all.

She thought, I have to tell him. I have to know.

The return of the helicopter awoke Quint. He came down to go out back while she stood guard. He returned light-footed as the dancer or fighter he'd reminded her of, transfigured with mirth.

“Hey, you know how much it costs to keep that chopper going? The taxpayers are paying plenty to keep looking for me. Well, they owe me something! . . . Still, I'd rather have the cash.” He talked and talked. What price could she get for the Seal Point property? What about rigging the boat for winter scalloping or shrimping? How much did she have in the bank?

It lacerated her nerves.
Tell him, tell him
. And see the joyous explosion of freedom? How much would the money mean to him after that? Plenty, if he'd never had much.

“Hey, shouldn't you be packing?” he asked.

“I haven't much to pack. How about a cake?”

“Great! Chocolate?”

“Go on upstairs out of sight, and I'll bring it up when it's done.”

She covered it with a half-inch-thick frosting and carried it up to him with a quart of milk, hoping it would keep him quiet for a while. She returned to the kitchen and began passionately to clean the gas stove. Was sixty thousand for the Seal Point property too unrealistic?
Unrealistic!
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. She said aloud, “Rosa, you're crazier than a goddam hoot owl.”

“
Honest?
”

She turned so fast her head spun. Jamie stood in the doorway, looking pleased with himself. “Hi. I came up to see if you were dead of some mysterious tropical disease.” He came into the kitchen, holding out a covered plastic container. “Home-made beef stew. My mother sent it up to you.”

She tried not to act dazed and stupid. “Thank you very much. Thank
her
very much.” When she took the container she almost dropped it.

“You're still shaky,” Jamie said, catching it. “You look tired. Circles under your eyes.”