Cape Fear (4 page)

“Then hang up,” Sam said.

There was a sound like that of a rather underfed horse tumbling down the rear stairs. Bucky and his best friend, Andy, churned across the kitchen and out the screen door and down the steps, heading for the barn. The cylinder on the screen door sighed.

“Hello, Dad,” Sam said. “Hello, Son. Hello, Andy. Hi, Mr. Bowden. What are you boys up to? Why, we’re on our way to the barn, Dad. Fine. Run along, boys.”

Nancy, listening raptly to the voice on the other end of the line, had kicked her right sandal off. With her bare toes she was absently trying to work the latch on the cupboard under the counter. Carol had opened the wall oven and she was looking in at whatever was in there, her expression dubious and unfriendly. Carol was a good but emotional cook. She talked to the ingredients and the utensils. When something did not work out, it was not her fault. It was an act of deliberate rebellion. The darn beets decided to boil dry. The stupid chicken wouldn’t relax.

Sam freshened his tall drink and took it over to the trestle table. He spread out the evening paper, but before he started to read he took a look around the kitchen. Carol had had a strong hand in the design. There was a lot of stainless steel. It was a big room. It took in the original kitchen, pantry and storeroom. A center island, with sink and burners, divided the work area from the eating area. The cupboards and cabinets were of dark pine. A big window looked out at the wooded hill behind the barn. Graduated copper pots hung against a pine wall. There was a small fieldstone fireplace near the trestle table. Sam had not been impressed at first. He had not felt comfortable in the room. Too magaziney, he had said. Too coppery quaint. But now he liked it
very much, and it was the most used room in the house. The rather severe dining room, with its white woodwork and walls of Williamsburg blue, soon became reserved for state occasions. The trestle table seated five comfortably.

When Nancy hung up and retrieved her sandal, Sam said, “Hear you have some competition, Nance.”

“What? Oh,
that
! Mother told you. She’s an utterly rancid little thing. All frilly and with the cutetht little lithp and dreat big boo eyes. We all suspect she’s trying out for Alice in Wonderland. The boys were positively clotted around her. A monstrous sight. Nauseous. And poor old Pike. He has absolutely no conversation, so all he could do was circle around her, bunching all his muscles. I’m in no sweat.”

“Now there is an enchantingly feminine expression.”

“Everybody says that,” she said pityingly. “I’ve simply got to study. Really.”

“What comes up tomorrow, dear?” Carol asked.

“History exam.”

“Will you want any help?” Sam asked.

“Maybe on dates, later. I despise learning all those flabby old dates.”

He looked at the doorway through which she had gone. Such a precious and precarious age. Half child and half woman. And when she was all woman, she was going to be extraordinarily lovely. And that would create its own special set of problems.

Just as he was finishing the paper, having saved Pogo for last, he heard Carol dialing. “Hello, Liz? Carol. Is our middle child being reasonably civilized? … They are? Good. Your Mike is a perfect angel when he’s here. I guess they all tend to react that way … Could I, please? Thanks, Liz … 
Jamie? Dear, I don’t want you and Mike to goof off on the studying. You hear?… All right, dear. No elbows on the table, no audible chomping, and home by nine-thirty. Goodbye, honey.”

She hung up and turned and gave Sam a guilty glance. “I know it’s stupid. But I started worrying. And it’s so easy to phone.”

“I’m glad you did.”

“If I keep this up we’re all going to turn neurotic.”

“I think it’s a good idea to keep a closer check on them.”

“Would you please call Bucky and send Andy home, dear?”

At nine o’clock, after seeing that Bucky was bedded down, Sam went down the hallway to his daughter’s room. There was a fresh stack of records on her changer and the music was turned low. Nancy was at her desk, book and notebook open. She wore her pink terry-cloth robe. Her hair was rumpled. She gave him a look which implied that she was utterly exhausted.

“Ready for dates?”

“I guess so. I’ll probably miss half of them. Here’s the list, Daddy.”

“Do you even write numerals backhand?”

“It’s distinctive.”

“It sure is. Don’t they teach handwriting anymore?”

“It has to be legible. That’s what they say.”

He went over to the bed and moved the indispensable kangaroo and sat down. She had got Sally for her first birthday, and it had shared her bed wherever she was ever since.
She no longer chewed the ears. There was very little left to chew.

“Do we do this to the background music of the gentleman with all the adenoids?”

Nancy leaned far over and turned off the player switch. “I’m ready. Wheel and deal.”

He went through the list and she missed five. After twenty minutes she had them all, no matter how he mixed up the order. She was a bright child and highly competitive. In her own special way her mind was keenly logical, orderly, not creative. Bucky seemed to be more like Nancy. Jamie was the dreamer, the slow student, the imaginative one.

He stood up and gave her the list, hesitated, and sat down again. “Parental department,” he said.

“I think I have a very clean conscience. At the moment, that is.”

“This is instruction, honey. Strange-men department.”

“Gosh, we’ve been over that a zillion times. Mom too. Don’t accept rides. Don’t go off in the woods alone. Don’t hitchhike ever. And if anybody acts funny, run like the wind.”

“This is a little bit different, Nance. This is one specific man. I’d half decided not to tell you, but I think that would be a little stupid. This is a man who hates me.”

“Hates
you
, Daddy!”

He felt slightly annoyed. “It is possible for somebody to hate your mild, lovable, shabby old father.”

“I didn’t mean it like that. Why does he?”

“I was a witness against him a long time ago. During the war. Without my help, he wouldn’t have been convicted.
He’s been in a military prison ever since. Now they’ve let him out. And he’s in this area. Your mother and I believe he came out here one day a couple of weeks ago. He may do nothing at all. But we have to assume he might.”

“Why did they put him in jail?”

He looked at her for a moment, gauging her fund of knowledge.

“Rape. She was a girl your age.”

“Golly!”

“He’s not as tall as I am. He’s about the size of John Turner, and just as big around as John, but not as soft. He’s bald and quite tan, with very white, cheap-looking false teeth. He dresses poorly and smokes cigars. Can you remember that?”

“Sure.”

“Don’t let any man answering that description get anywhere near you for any reason.”

“I won’t. Golly, this is pretty exciting, isn’t it?”

“That’s one word for it.”

“Can I tell the kids?”

He hesitated. “I don’t see why not. I’m going to tell your brothers. The man’s name is Cady. Max Cady.”

He stood up again. “Don’t study too long, chicken. You’ll hit the exam better if you get plenty of sleep.”

“I can’t wait to tell all the kids. Wow!”

He grinned at her and tousled her hair. “Big deal, hey. Drama enters the life of Nancy Ann Bowden, subdeb. Danger stalks this scrawny lass. Tune in tomorrow for another chapter in the life of this American girl who smiles bravely while—”

“
Stop
it, now!”

“Want your door closed?”

“Hey, I nearly forgot. I saw Jake in the village. He says he’s got room to pull the boat out now, and you know how he is, so I told him to go right ahead and we can work on her this weekend. Is that all right?”

“That’s fine, chicken.”

When he went downstairs Jamie was back home. Carol was in the process of shooing him off to bed. Sam told him to wait a moment.

“I just told Nance about Cady,” he said.

Carol frowned and said, “But do you think … Yes, I see. I think that’s wise, Sam.”

“What’s happening?” Jamie demanded.

“Listen very carefully, son. I’m going to tell you something and I want you to remember everything I say.”

He explained the situation to Jamie. Jamie listened intently. Sam concluded by saying, “We’ll tell this to Bucky too, but I’m not sure how much difference it will make to him. He lives in his own Martian world. So I want you to stick closer than usual to your little brother. I realize that may cramp some of your fun, but this is for real, Jamie. This isn’t a television show. You’ll do that?”

“Sure. Why don’t they arrest him?”

“He hasn’t done anything.”

“I’ll bet they could arrest him. The cops have guns, see, that they’ve taken off dead murderers. Then they go up to the man and they shove a murder gun in his pocket and then they arrest him for carrying a gun without a license and put him in jail, see. And then they put the gun in the
laboratory and they look at it through a thing and they find out it was a murder gun and so then they electrocute him, real early in the morning sometime.”

“Brother!” Carol said.

“James, my boy, the reason this is a very fine country is because that kind of thing can’t happen. We don’t jail innocent men. We don’t jail people because we think they might do something. If that could happen, you, Jamie Bowden, might find yourself in jail sometime because somebody lied about you.”

Jamie thought it over scowlingly and then nodded. “That Scooter Prescott would have me locked up in a minute.”

“Why?”

“Because I can do twenty-eight push-ups now, see, and when I can do fifty I’m going up to him and I’m going to punch his fat nose.”

“Does he know that?”

“Sure. I told him.”

“You better go to bed now, dear,” Carol said.

At the foot of the front stairs Jamie turned and said, “But there’s one trouble. Scooter is doing push-ups too, darn it.”

After he was gone Carol said, “How did Nancy take it?”

“Intelligently.”

“I think it’s wise to tell them.”

“I know. But it makes me feel a little ineffectual. I’m the king of this little tribe. I should be able to go put the fear of God in Cady. But I don’t see how I could. Not with this office-type physique. He looks like he’s got muscles they haven’t named yet.”

“Is that Marilyn?”

He went out into the kitchen and let her in. She waggled and beamed at him and flounced over to her dish, stared with shock and disbelief at its emptiness, then turned and looked up at him.

“No dice, girl. You’re on a diet, remember?”

She slooped disconsolately at her water dish, trudged over to her corner, turned around three times and sighed as she collapsed onto her side. Sam sat on his heels beside her and prodded her stomach gently with his finger.

“Got to get your girlish figure back, Marilyn. Got to get rid of that flob.”

She rolled an eye at him and the long red brush of tail flapped twice. She yawned, with a little yowl at the end of the yawn, exposing the long white ivory fangs.

He stood up. “A great savage beast. Dismayed by kittens. Bedeviled by vicious squirrels. Every day is a hard day, Marilyn, for a four-year-old devout coward, isn’t it?”

The tail flapped dreamily and she closed her eyes. He wandered back into the living room, yawned. Carol looked at him and yawned.

“I caught it from Marilyn; you caught it from me.”

“So I’m taking it to bed.”

“Make sure Nance has hit the sack,” he said. “I’ll be right along.”

He turned off the lights, started to lock the front door and then opened it again and went out into the front yard, strolled down toward the road. Rain had washed the air clean, and it had the smell of June and the promise of summer. The stars looked small and high and newly polished. He heard the dwindling snarl of a truck on Route 18 and,
after it died, the remote song of a dog on a far-off farm across the valley. A mosquito whined in his ear and he waved it away.

The night was dark and the sky was high, and the world was a very large place. And a man was almost excessively small, puny and vulnerable. His brood was abed.

Cady lived somewhere in this night, breathing the darkness.

He slapped at the mosquito and walked back across the damp grass to the house, locked up, and went up to bed.

SIEVERS REPORTED TO SAM
in his office at ten on Thursday morning. He sat in his very still way and did not change expression as he spoke in his flat, bored voice.

“I picked him up at six o’clock coming out of the rooming house. He walked to Nicholson’s bar three blocks down Market Street. He came out alone at seven-thirty and walked back and got his car and drove to Nicholson’s and double-parked and blew the horn and a woman came out and got in the car with him. A fat blonde with a loud laugh. He drove back to the rooming house and put the car in the back where he keeps it and they went in together and came back out about forty minutes later. They got in the car and I followed them. He started turning too many corners. I couldn’t tell if he’d made me or he was being cute or maybe they were just looking for a place to eat. I had to hang ’way back. Finally they headed out of town on Route 18. He
turned onto a secondary road. No traffic. He bluffed me by slowing ’way down after he was around a bend. So I had to pass. When I was out of sight I turned off and cut the lights, but he didn’t come along. So that means he was cute. I came back fast, but he had too many choices of turns. So I went back to Nicholson’s. He goes there a lot, I found out. They know him only as Max. The woman is one of those Market Street characters. Bessie McGowan. Not quite a prostitute, but so close the difference doesn’t show. He brought her back at three in the morning to the rooming house. He was okay, but he nearly had to carry her in. I knocked off and went back at ten-thirty yesterday morning. He came out at a quarter of twelve, drove to a delicatessen and took a sack of food back to the room. At five o’clock he drove her to one of those beat-up apartment hotels on Jefferson Avenue and went in with her. They came out at seven and she’d changed outfits. They went back to Nicholson’s. He came out alone at nine and started walking. He headed down toward the lake front. He was having fun. He’s awake every minute. He’s cute and he’s good. He can see in all directions at once. And he can move. I lost him. I thought I’d lost him. Then he lit his damn cigar right next to me. I nearly jumped out of my shoes. He gave me a good look and grinned and said, ‘Nice night for it,’ and walked back to Nicholson’s. He took her to dinner at a steak house five miles out of town by the lake. They got back to the rooming house at three again. So I guess they’re still there. I goofed and I’ve got no apologies. What do you want next?”