The Cypress House(40)

“I don’t like this,” Paul whispered. “We ought not leave her—”

“Shut up,” Arlen said, his own nerves making his voice harsh. “We’ll do as she asked. She knows what to expect; we don’t. You in a hurry to chat with the sheriff again?”

That quieted him, and they slipped out of the trees and back down to the dock. Paul settled on one of the floor planks, with his feet dangling in the gap where others were missing.

“We could fix this dock easy enough, if she had the lumber,” he said.

“I expect we could.”

“And isn’t anything to that boathouse but basic carpentry—roof repairs, wall reinforcements, that sort of thing.”

“Sure isn’t.”

“So we could do it.”

“Sure could.” Arlen was distracted, thinking of that group up at the inn.

He lit a cigarette and looked at the boy’s slumped shoulders and then out at the wooded inlet. The sun had disappeared, vanished beneath the waves of the Gulf, but a faint pink smudge along the horizon remained, fading fast to shadow. The air was the sort of warm that made you comfortable, ready to stretch out and watch the stars rise as your eyelids became heavy.

A heron slid in, sleek and swift as a bullet, then hit the shore across from them and stood on spindly legs, studying the water. If you looked away from it and then back, the bird was tough to find, a pencil-thin shadow amid the backdrop of plants. Deeper in the woods, insects trilled and creatures rustled.

“She’s ready to pay us,” Arlen said. “And it won’t be much, but it’ll put us on a train and send us back to Flagg Mountain.”

“Arlen,” Paul said as the last glowing remnants of the sun slid beneath black water, “I can’t leave her.”

“Can’t leave her?”

Paul nodded, still with his back to Arlen. “Rebecca. I can’t leave her.”

Arlen closed his eyes and sucked deep at the cigarette, too deep, enough so the smoke that touched his throat was hot and harsh. He swallowed down the cough that wanted to rise, kept his eyes squeezed shut.

“Tell me why.”

“You know why.”

“Paul… that’s a mighty beautiful woman. One could have a son near as old as you. And I understand what you see in her. She’s the kind that would weaken the knees of most men. But she’s also in a situation that you can’t be a part of.”

“What do you mean? What do you know about it?”

“Those men up there, son, they aren’t good men. And Wade? You think he’s running a legitimate business through here? Hell, the man we rode in with was a damned bootlegger. What do I know about the details of her situation? Nary a thing. But I know the gist, and that’s enough.”

“Even so, I’m not leaving her. I feel like I’ve been traveling through time to get here, Arlen, just to find her. And now that I have… I can’t leave.”

Paul’s voice was thick, and the sound of it made Arlen open his eyes and look at the boy and then away, out across the dark waters and into the breeze that fanned toward them from the west.

“Son, she’s more than ten years older than you. Fifteen, maybe. She’s a grown woman.”

“That doesn’t mean a thing. She’s alone out here, Arlen, and I can tell she’s awful tired of being alone. I can see that clear as anything.”

“She made the choice to stay out here.”

“I don’t know that she did. Lots of people in this country are doing things they didn’t choose to do, things they have to do. And I’ll tell you something else: she doesn’t show it, but she’s scared. I saw that the day before the hurricane came in, when I helped her board up the windows.”

“Lots of people are scared of hurricanes.”

“She’s scared,” Paul repeated, “but it’s not of a hurricane.”

Arlen didn’t say anything. Paul turned and faced him, his jaw set.

“She’s lonely, and she likes me.” As if that ended the discussion.

“She does like you. I can see that. But it’s in a different way than—”

“How do you know?” Paul snapped. “How do you know what she feels? You married? You ever been married?”

There was a long silence, and then Arlen said gently, “You’re fixing to marry her?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Don’t twist my words on me like that. I’ll make that easy on you, and we both know it. What I’m saying is that I like her. I like her in a way… Arlen, I can’t even tell you the way.”

Arlen understood, though. Had seen it rising since they’d landed at the Cypress House, but now that Paul was trying to put it into words it set off a warning in his head, a sense of a new trouble joining those he already had.