He felt gutted. So near its finish after all these years, his biography of E. J. Watson seemed invalidated, wasted, in the half-light of Rob’s story, with its implicit validation of what Daniels had so vilely called “Watson’s Nigger Payday.”
And Rob? If Rob survived and were miraculously set free to be a fugitive, where would he hide? There would be no sanctuary at Gator Hook, far less Caxambas. The old man would be entirely dependent on his brother, for who else would look after him? Next week? Next month? Next year?
Lying there hour after hour, his mind struggled against Speck Daniel’s insinuation that Lucius … that in the end, it might be best for everyone—Rob in particular—if Rob Watson were … to disappear? How could Daniels imagine that Rob’s own brother might harbor such an unnatural idea! Surely this came from his own ugly misanthropy and bitter feelings, his disappointment in his own half-crazed, doomed son!
But after midnight, started up from restless sleep, Lucius was breathless with deep anxious guilt that in his heart, at least, he had betrayed his brother. Why had Speck’s insinuations so upset him, unless his shock and outrage were not honest? Was a craven and exhausted hypocrite named Lucius Watson so willing to believe that death would come as a relief and mercy to Rob Watson, setting him free from a badly broken life?
Speck Daniels had forced his nose into an unsuspected seam in his own nature, an inadmissible twinge of regret over the fact that someone—Rob—had survived to bear witness against their father. Would Daniels have hinted at Lucius’s ambivalence if the scent of that ambivalence had not encouraged him? Did he truly intend to set Rob free or—imagining he understood Lucius Watson’s secret wish—did he mean to let those others kill him? This would have to be settled first thing in the morning. Lucius tossed and twisted, only to sink away toward the night’s end, harried by dreams. Across the cove where moonlit water danced like crystals in the mangroves, a night heron gave its strangled quock, to unknown purpose.
At first light, he awakened, unsure where he was, cobwebbed by dreams. The mangrove delta, still guarding the nighttime, lay in darkness. Squatted on his heels by a new fire, Whidden Harden was making coffee. The blond head at one end of the bed rolls would be Sally, and the blind man was the amorphous lump beyond.
Speck Daniels’s ancient cabin boat was gone.
Lucius dragged himself half-sick from his damp bedding and wandered clumsily toward the point. Far out on the Gulf, the dark cloud rims were edged with pewter, and the sea, roiled to a smoky green by distant storm, was smooth after night rain. On this shore where the innocent young victims had been lifted from the sandy shallows, he mourned for Rob and for the waste of his own life, which over the night seemed to have lost all purpose.
At the fire, without looking up, Whidden Harden handed him hot coffee. Respecting each other’s silence, warming their hands on the cups, they hunkered together as they had so often when Whidden was a boy.
“Does he ever say good-bye?” Lucius said at last.
Whidden shook his head. “Likes to stay one jump ahead and sometimes two.”
Awakened before daybreak by the kick and quiet burble of Speck’s motor, Whidden had gone down to the water and unhitched the bow line from the driftwood stump and waded out with it. In cool water to his waist, he stayed the old boat against the drag of current while they shared a smoke. Speck told him he was heading for the Bend to help his crew with the last loads. “Keep these people away, you understand me?” When Whidden nodded, Speck insisted, “Don’t you cross us, boy. This ain’t no kind of picayune deal we’re talkin here. With all the money and big men that’s tied up in munitions, it ain’t got to go very far wrong before somebody comes up killed.” He flicked his cigarette butt toward the blanket lumps by the dead fire. “Them, for instance.”
“Your own baby daughter, Speck?”
“Maybe her first,” Speck said with a sour smile.
Sifting this, Lucius found no clue to Speck’s intentions. He dredged his brain for the worst implications of what he’d said to Speck, and the way he’d said it, down to the last inflection, knowing the while that none of this mattered, it was all too late. Rob Watson’s fate was in Daniels’s hands, and Daniels was on his way to Chatham Bend. The one hope was the plan to release the hostages this afternoon. Was it only despair that made him certain that for whatever reason, this release would not occur, and that Daniels had known this when he proposed it?
When Lucius questioned him about Speck’s promise to let his brothers escape to Mormon Key, Whidden looked doubtful. Maybe Speck’s men would go along with that, and maybe not. But in case there were six mouths to feed at Mormon Key this evening, Whidden said, they should go fishing.