The Lower Deep (27 page)

"W
ell
, are you going to tell me?"

George Benson glared at his wife over the breakfast table but did his best to keep any trace of irritation out of his voice. What came through was only a hint of mockery.

Alice finished her coffee and lit a cigarette. It was Saturday; no school today. "You've already told
me,
haven't you, George? I was with a boyfriend."

"I'd like to hear you admit it."

"Then I admit it. Of course. I was with a boyfriend."

"You never did go to Cap Matelot, did you?"

"No.

"You think it was smart of you to tell me that particular story? Especially about going there on the daily bus? You must have known I'd talk to someone who was on that bus, sooner or later."

Alice merely smiled at him.

"Who is the boyfriend?" George asked. "Or do you have more than one?"

"Bill."

"Nobody in St. Joe is named Bill, for Christ's sake. Bill who?"

"Smith, of course." She smiled now at her own cleverness.

"All right, so you won't tell me his name. So where does he live? Here in town?"

"Oh, I'm not about to tell you that, George. You might challenge him and get hurt. You'd be no match for Bill, believe me."

The conversation had been going on at this pace for some time now, and George was beginning to regret having begun it. On arriving home yesterday after his talk with the fisherman, he had actually made up his mind not to say anything.

After all, what did it matter, except to his pride? He had been reasonably sure all along that Alice was not visiting her schoolteacher friend all that often. That, in fact, Germaine Doret most of the time was merely covering for her when she had a date. The truth was no surprise.

But he had begun wondering who in Dame Marie the boyfriend might be, and then, though he had gone to bed determined not to say anything, had lain awake half the night trying to come up with a name. And this morning, on finding Alice at the breakfast table when he walked into the kitchen, he had not been able to control his tongue.

Alice gazed at him now with an air of studied innocence. "Really, George," she said, "you ought to have an affair, too."

"Thanks."

"I mean it. I know you despise me. You have from the very beginning, almost. But there must be someone you could find happiness with, if only in bed."

George thought of the hours he had spent with Danielle André, in bed and out—the wonderful, lifesaving hours that kept him from going crazy in this small town, with a wife who might as well be a stranger. "I'll think about it," he said.

"You do that, George. And now if you'll excuse me—" Rising, she gazed at him without expression for a few seconds, then walked out of the kitchen. When she left the house five minutes later, George wondered where she might be going on a Saturday. Of course, Saturday was market day in Dame Marie. But she hadn't carried a shopping basket.

The word "divorce" had not entered into their dialogue, he realized. The entire conversation, in fact, had had an air of unreality about it, as though its real substance, dark and sinister, lay like a waiting shark under the surface. Pouring himself another cup of coffee, he let himself think about it and became convinced he was living in a kind of fairy tale. Not a kids' kind of fairy tale but one of those with monsters and demons. A moment later his phone rang and he learned from Ginny Jourdan's father that Ginny had been found.

"Dr. Clermont has taken her to that private hospital-in Le Cap for observation," Maurice Jourdan
said. "Leonie and I thought we ought to call you before going there. You worked so very hard trying to help us find her."

It was strange, George thought, that Ginny and Alice had disappeared at the same time. The Cuban fellow at the alcoholics' place, too. This was Saturday. All three of them had vanished the same Thursday night, more than a week ago. Yes, strange. To dismiss it as a coincidence would be to stretch the law of chance to the breaking point.

Well, he had a job to do, no matter what. Today he would be trying to teach his people new ways to make and use fish traps. They made pretty good ones out of bamboo, even if the things did resemble coffins, but heavier ones could be used in deeper water where the bigger fish hung out. He had to talk to them about it, get them using their imaginations. That was becoming a big part of his job now, wasn't it?—tossing out ideas for his guys to chew on.

Before leaving for work he took two aspirin tablets, blaming his talk with Alice for having given him a brute of a headache.

While George Benson was talking with his wife that morning, Lieutenant Roger Etienne and one of his men drove to Pointe Pierre in the army jeep and walked along the shore to Anse Douce. Their destination was the gully in which Etienne had found the girl.

"I know damned well she was naked when I first spotted her running," the lieutenant said. "She must have had her clothes hidden there."

"Sir, it couldn't be she just looked naked in the rain?"

"Uh-uh. If she'd had on those blue jeans and that blue shirt then, I mightn't have seen her at all."

The rain had stopped during the night, but it was still a gray morning as the two men made their way along the shore. No sun had appeared. A soaring pelican suddenly folded its wings and plunged headfirst into the sea, to emerge with a wriggling fish in its beak. One of the biggest crabs Etienne had ever seen reared out of a patch of seaweed to challenge him with wildly waving claws, then fled when he kicked at it and missed. A village dog, probably on the prowl for a meal of dead fish, emerged like a ghost from the sea grapes, saw them, and slunk back out of sight.

The two khaki-clad men made their way down to the coral castles in the gully bottom, and after a few moments of peering around, Etienne located the sandy strip where Ginny Jourdan had drawn attention to herself by accidentally kicking an empty beer can. "What we're looking for ought to be somewhere near here," he said.

The area contained many potential hiding places because of the coral chunks. Someone had once remarked that those chunks must have been deposited here by a cosmic dump truck. Whatever their origin, they came in all shapes and sizes and rested every which way, forming pockets, tunnels, fissures, crevices, even a number of small, dark caves.

It was in one of the caves that Etienne, using a flashlight, bent to examine the sand. "Dion, look here."

Halting beside him, the other looked down. "Footprints. Many of them. This place has been used often, sir."

No rain could fall here, nor would any seawater come this far up the gully unless driven by a storm more severe than Anse Douce had known in recent months. The sand therefore was soft, and most of the prints were blurred. Studying the few that were fairly distinct, Etienne said with conviction, "Both men and women, Dion. Note the difference in size. Or maybe boys and girls, eh?"

"Maybe, sir."

"Some barefoot, some with shoes."

"Right, sir."

On hands and knees now, studying the prints at close range, Etienne reached out and picked up something that winked in the light of his flash. "What's this?"

His subordinate bent to peer at it. "Just a cheap name-pin, sir. They sell them in Le Cap. Most likely some kid dropped it while they were having a party."

Etienne frowned at the thing in his palm and shook his head. With the flashlight he examined it more closely, turning it over and peering at the back of it.

"You're wrong, Dion. This isn't any cheap trinket; it's sterling silver and must have cost plenty. And look here at the name."

"Alice?" Dion said. "I don't know any Alice in Dame Marie."

"Yes, you do."

"I do?"

"The wife of the fishing fellow, George Benson."

"S
teve, you don't look too good."
As Steve Spence rose to greet him in the Azagon's library, Louis Clermont frowned at him with real concern. These days Clermont had the run of the "alcoholics' place," as he still called it, and no longer stood on ceremony when calling. "Feel all right, do you?"

"No worse than I've been feeling for days now."

"Same thing? The headaches?"

"You know, I wish I could accurately describe the feeling." Steve pressed his palms to his temples, lowered them, and shook his head in defeat. "It's not a headache, exactly. There's pressure and pain, yes. But the worst of it is the feeling I have that someone or something is—well, if I believed in ESP, I'd say someone was bombarding me with thought waves."

"What kind of thought waves?"

"Suggestions. Persuasions. But evidently my receiving equipment isn't what it might be. I'm not getting any clear messages. At least, not yet."

"Had any urges to go swimming?" Clermont asked with a scowl.

"Yes. And you remember that business of Paul's holding his breath? I've caught myself doing that." Which, Steve recalled wryly, had been embarrassing a few nights ago. In bed with Nadine Palmer, he had fallen asleep and begun getting a powerful message to stop breathing. Suddenly he had found himself wide awake, gasping, with Nadine bending over him and frantically shaking him by the shoulders.

Louis Clermont blew out a breath of his own and spent a few seconds gazing at the library shelves—probably without seeing them—before he spoke again. Then he said, "Paul Henninger still wants to stay here does he?"

"He seems as anxious to stay now as he was to get away. It's quite a thing, the way he's changed."

"And encouraging, in my opinion—for what my opinion may be worth in any of this. I wish to God some of my other charges would reverse themselves. George Benson said today his headaches are just about destroying him. Nothing I've tried on him seems to work. And the Jourdan girl at the hospital. I see her every day—hell, Beliard is threatening to put me on the staff there—and she's not responding, either."

"She still won't say what happened to her?"

"Won't talk at all about the eight days she was missing. Not even to her parents. Maybe she doesn't know what she did, though I'm inclined to think she does. I wonder if your Dr. Driscoll is any good at this kind of thing."

"What kind of thing?" Steve wondered whether Clermont, too, might be having trouble getting down to specifics.

The older man's smile was a tired one. "All right. Touché. Let's just call it fading away. At the hospital we've sat around for hours like monks at prayer, trying to come up with some answers, and we're getting nowhere. She's been there five days now and won't talk, gets weaker every day, actually seems to have lost interest in living." He turned to the door. "But I stopped by to check on Paul, and you asked me yesterday to have another go at Mendoza. How are they?"

"I think you can skip Mendoza. Aside from being disgusted with himself for not being able to remember where he went, he's back to normal."

"What about your other problem people? Morrison, Wynn. The other two or three you've mentioned from time to time."

"No change there, far as I know."

"Funny." Clermont rubbed his Abe Lincoln beard. "I think if I were having their problems, I'd want to get the hell out of here, and fast. Others have left, you've told me. What's holding those people here? What made Paul change his mind about leaving?"

"Maybe the same thing that's giving them the headaches and nightmares," Steve said mechanically, then considered the significance of his re
mark and looked at Clermont more intently. "And maybe that isn't such a stupid idea, Louis. What do you think?"

The older man shrugged. "The mind-control thing again, eh? You're saying that whatever is out there, trying to take people over, is also making them want to stay here so the process can go on?"

"Could that be it?"

"Better ask Driscoll. I'm just a country doctor. How is Tom, by the way?"

"He's busy as a mother hen, doing a fine job. Getting him involved again—your idea—was good medicine. But about the mind-control, Louis—isn't there a lot of that in voodoo?"

"There's some, I'm sure.
Bocors
go in for it in a big way, I've heard. Witch doctors, that is. Look." Clermont had risen from his chair. "I believe I'll look in on Henninger. Come with me, why don't you?"

They found the Azagon's manager in his room, reading a book from the library they had just left. Other books were scattered untidily on the floor around the chair, and among them Steve noticed the St. Joseph newspaper that contained the story of the
Ti Maman's
disappearance.