Flight to Darkness (20 page)

Those three days had been an orgy and they
gave promise of an endless procession to come. And the work came,
too, it felt good to work. And I didn’t dream. Leda mentioned the
dream a lot, but we didn’t dwell on it.

I hadn’t known she’d told my brother all that
she had. But thinking about it, I saw it was the best
way.

She’d always been open about everything.
Perhaps a little too much so.

There was a place not too far from the barn on
the main road called the Sea Breeze Drive-in. I stopped there for
coffee and a hamburger once in a while. Norma’s photography shop
was nearby and it was necessary that we should eventually
meet.

We did. Me with my coffee and Norma at the end
of the line in her car, with a milk shake. She came
over.

“
Hey, Eric. You’re still
alive.”

“
Cut it out. I’ve been meaning to
get around and see if you—”

“
You can cut that out. Anyway,
Lenny stops by. He’s told me all about everything. Gay old time,
eh, Eric? Don’t let a chisel slip, will you?” She watched me. “You
look pale, Eric.” When she walked away her hips flirted with the
soft wind which came in over the Gulf.

Driving back to the barn, Lenny drove up and
stopped me as I was turning into the sand road.

He was drunk, in his ubiquitous pink
shirt.

“
Going to town,” he said. He winked
and showed me the singles, hitched one shoulder. “Wanta thank you
for that there statue. Hit shore is a beaut. Got ’er in my bedroom,
now.”

“
Fine. Keep it up. It’ll get you
someplace.”

“
Whyn’t you come on over sometimes?
Ain’t seen my new place, Eric. Hit’s different.”

“
I’ll bet.”

He gunned the motor on his crimson fireball.
“Well, gotta get goin’.” He winked again and went on off down the
road.

Back at the barn I felt somehow flat, empty,
washed out.

I walked into the studio and looked at the
statue I was doing of Leda. It was taking a lot of clay, but she
wanted it that way. “Of me, Eric. All the way—the way you feel it!”
So she could see what I felt and what she’d really look like when I
got around to working in the marble. Because usually they were
smaller. It was a damned fine piece of work. I’d caught something
of her force in the pose, her carelessness—her
wantonness.

She’d probably be around soon. Suddenly I
didn’t want to see her for a while. Thoughts of the funeral had
lowered my spirits.

I went and got my swimming shorts, put them
on, grabbed a towel, and headed for the Gulf. Maybe some salt water
and sunshine would bring me around. God knows, something had
to.

I walked on down the sand road and on over to
the beach.

Chapter 16

It was dark by the time I returned to the
barn. Coming down the sand road, I noticed a light lit in the
studio and a large sedan parked in the road beside the barn. At
first I didn’t recognize it, then I recalled seeing the same car
parked in Frank’s drive when I first came home. His car. Must be
Leda had come over and was waiting for me. It was likely she’d had
a long wait. I’d spent the rest of the afternoon until now on the
beach, thinking. The only conclusion I’d reached was that something
had to be done.

Either I left the Cypress Landing, or Leda
managed a divorce. One or the other, I preferred the latter but had
about made up my mind to the former. Except that I had decided to
fight. Half of the money from the family, half of the business, was
mine. I had to have it because I needed it, was entitled to it.
There were ways and I chose to find them. I’d been too easy going.
I’d let things slide already, because of Leda. This was going to
cease. Maybe it was hazy in my mind, but it was something to work
on.

Entering the kitchen, I called,
“Hello?”

No answer. Still in my swimming shorts, I
tossed the towel over a chair. I was foggy. I’d fallen asleep out
on the beach and slept for a long while. I pushed open the door
leading into the studio.

It was very bright in there. I’d arranged
electric fixtures so I could work at night. They were all turned
on. What I saw wasn’t nice. But I only saw part of it at
first.

The clay figure of Leda was smashed to a pulp.
It had literally been torn down and trampled into a flattened mass
on the floor. It was covered with a man’s footprints. Wire and wood
jutted from the mangled clay. There wasn’t a solitary feature
left.

Then my breath left me. On the floor by the
couch was Frank, sprawled out. Beside him was the largest of the
wooden mallets from the rack on the wall.

I didn’t breathe with the loud pumping of my
heart. I went over and looked at Frank.

You didn’t need to look far to see he was
dead. His head was smashed almost as badly as the clay. Blood
covered him, the floor, the couch. Tufts of hair and blood clung to
the wooden mallet.

For a long while my brain screamed nameless
things. My ears rang from the blood in my head. I bent down, looked
at Frank, stood, weaved around the floor.

He’d been wearing a white suit and he had been
my brother for all my life up until the other day. So he was still
my brother, really. I had hated him enough to kill him. But now I
knew he’d still been my brother.

I went back, felt his hand. It was cold. The
lights glared. But nothing sank in and it was crazy. Yet, it was
true. My brother dead—murdered.

Like in the dream with the wooden mallet.
Smashed. And if there was relief inside me, it was rapidly
supplanted by a sharp, terrible fear. Days at the hospital rushed
back, with Prescott seated at his desk, trying with all his might
to tell me something I couldn’t believe. And now—what would
Prescott say, do?

Frank’s eyes were half-closed and he still
wore the remains of the adhesive across his nose. But his nose had
been flattened for sure, now.

I held my hands out, stared at the trembling.
I inspected them, not wanting to tell myself even what I searched
for.

Then, slowly, it began growing inside me. It
was very still in the barn. Outside the wind softly buffeted the
roof and walls and if you listened hard enough you could hear the
cars passing on the main road, and between the sound of the cars
the faraway hiss of the Gulf against the beach.

Frank was murdered. It hadn’t happened just
recently, either. He’d been dead for some time.

I tried to tell myself somebody had done it,
maybe to frame me. Who had I seen since the funeral besides Norma,
Leda, Lenny?

Nobody. I’d gone to a remote spot on the beach
and stayed there till I’d returned. I’d seen nobody. And I had
slept. I couldn’t remember dreaming. Maybe you didn’t remember
dreaming when you really didn’t dream.

Stop it! It wasn’t pretty at all, this
picture. . . . The husband comes to the sculptor’s studio, grows
insanely jealous because of the nude statue of his wife who’s been
seeing the sculptor regularly. He smashes the clay image and the
brothers fight. During the fight the husband is killed with a
wooden mallet, pounded to death, his head smashed to a
pulp.

And I could almost hear a voice saying, “Yes,
Eric Garth was a patient here. Yes, he dreamed all the time that he
killed his brother with a wooden mallet.”

And all Cypress Landing knew how Frank and I
felt toward each other; the fight we’d had on the eve of Mother’s
funeral.

I heard the car coming down the
road.

For an instant panic took hold. Then I
realized I had to stay calm until I could think it out. That was a
laugh. Think it out was a laugh. I grabbed for the wall switch and
cut the lights, went into the kitchen and out the back door. I
grabbed my towel from the chair in the kitchen as I
passed.

It was Leda in the yellow convertible.
Convertibles were in season. Death was in season. Death bloomed
dark in the dooryard. Black petals.

Leda was out of the car and approaching me
before I could reach her.

“
Hello, darling. Give us a
kiss.”

I kissed her. It was like kissing the trunk of
a tree.

“
What’s the matter, Eric? You all
right?”

“
Nothing. Been working. Thought I’d
take a swim.” Then I cursed myself. That was the wrong thing to
say. That could mean I’d been at the barn. “I’ve been walking for a
while. Figured maybe the water’d do me good.”

“
I know something that’ll do you
more good.”

“
Oh.”

“
I came over earlier this
afternoon. You weren’t here. Frank sure put up a row,” she said
with a laugh. “I told him off. Told him I’d come over here whenever
I chose. Hell with him.”

“
Sure.” My throat was thick and my
heart pounded like fury.

“
Come on, let’s go inside. I want
to look at myself.” She chuckled. “I mean what you’re doing, of
course.”

“
Don’t you want to come for a
swim?”

“
It’s getting cold,” she
said.

“
We could take a walk.”

“
What’s the matter with you,
anyway?” She cocked her head and looked at me, frowning. Then she
let go and started for the barn. She wore a light coat over her
dress and it bellowed with the wind.

You don’t know what to do at a time like that.
You stand there and you can’t act. She paused halfway to the door
and stared at my car parked on the other side of the barn. “Say,”
she said. “I thought that was your car over there.” She pointed
toward Frank’s sedan. She strolled toward it, hands thrust deeply
into her coat pockets. Then she paused, turned, looked at me.
“Frank’s here,” she said. “That’s his car.”

I couldn’t speak.

“
Is he here now?”

“
I don’t know. No. He’s not. I
don’t know.”

She hurried to the kitchen door, flung it
open. It was dark. She switched on the kitchen light by the
door.

“
Don’t go in there,” I said. “Come
on, Leda!” I ran toward her. She went on through the kitchen into
the studio. I reached her side just as she flicked on the switch.
The studio was abruptly brilliant and she screamed.

She stood there looking down at Frank, or what
was left of him, and screamed.

She turned to me, grabbed me, buried her face
against my chest. “My God, Eric,” she said. “You’ve gone and done
it. You’ve killed him!”

“
Don’t say that!”

“
Oh, my God!”

“
Shut up.” I shook her. She was
trembling. I shook her some more. Her eyes were large and round,
the pupils jet-black.

“
The dream. That crazy dream.” Her
breath came in little sharp gasps. “You’ve got to tell me. Don’t
try to hide it from me. Did you kill him, Eric?”

“
No.”

She looked down at the body, twisted quickly
back to me. “Murder,” she said. “It’s murder.”

She didn’t have to tell me that. Any hope I’d
had of peace exploded and I knew what I was in for.

“
The Hewitts,” she said. “Sure.”
She looked at me. “Oh, Geez, murder.” She pulled me toward the
kitchen door. “Quick, let’s get out of this room. I can’t stand
it.”

“
What about the
Hewitts?”

“
They had it in for
Frank.”

I recalled what Clyde Burkette had
said.

“
They’re a backwoods family,” she
said. “Frank gave them a big loan, then when they couldn’t keep the
payments up, he settled for their land and home.”

“
Has he done this before? To anyone
else?”

She nodded. “Yes. But it’s all
legal.”

“
Sure.” I could feel the body lying
there on the floor. Death was legal, too. Frank had found out just
how legal. I couldn’t have done this. But Leda—what did she
believe? Could I have done it? Or had somebody like the
Hewitts?

We went into the kitchen. I turned off the
lights in the studio and we stood there in the kitchen looking at
each other. She was very pale and though I tried to think, my mind
was a rushing blank. There were so many things that could be done,
that had to be done—and quick. But I didn’t know what to
do.

“
You’ve got to run,” she said
simply.

“
Run? Are you crazy? That’d be
admitting the worst. You know that.” I paced up and down the
kitchen floor. If my world had been crashing around me before, it
was nothing compared to how I felt now. More and more it did dawn
on me how well I was implicated in this. And the more time I wasted
the worse it became for me. Because had I done it? I didn’t think
so, but the dream had been a strong thing.

“
Yes,” she said. “But you don’t
have to admit. It’s obvious what happened, Eric. It would be to
anybody. All right, say I believe you didn’t do this.” Suddenly she
grew paler still and sank into a chair. Her lips were dry. I went
to the cupboard and reached for the whiskey bottle. Back there by
an old can of coffee was a forty-five automatic I’d treasured for
years before the war. Only the other day I’d had it out, cleaned
it, fired a few rounds down by the bayou. I knew the clip was full.
The pistol’s black shape stood quietly in my mind as I closed the
cupboard door.