Cold moon over Babylon Page 3

  During this last, Belinda had advanced slowly down the steps. She now stood in the yard, smiling up at Evelyn and Jerry: “If I see Margaret on the way back, I’ll tell her you’re waiting for her.”

  “I just want her to get back ’fore the rain starts,” said Evelyn.

  “It’s not gone rain,” said Jerry.

  “Radio said it was,” said Belinda, and climbed into her car. She backed quickly out of the driveway and spun off toward Babylon. She honked the horn in farewell, and they saw her hand fluttering a moment over the roof.

  “That girl talks like a five-dollar lawyer,” sighed Jerry: “I got tired out just sitting here listening to her go on.”

  “She sure is pretty though,” said Evelyn, and smiled at her grandson. “Maybe she’d like to go with you to the Starlite Drive-in one night, Jerry. Why don’t you ask her?”

  “Oh no, Grandma, I—” He turned away blushing. “You know,” he said, to cover his embarrassment, “I haven’t seen her much in that car before—she must have just gotten her license. And I’ve seen her in it everywhere these past few days.”

  “Well, she probably just turned sixteen. Margaret won’t even be fifteen until October—the twelfth of October.” Evelyn sighed and rose from her chair. “I’m going in to start supper. Margaret’s sure to come back before I get it on the table. She’s not late, not ever.” She leaned forward, and rubbed the top of Jerry’s head affectionately. “You stay out here and wait for your sister. But you come inside if you start to see lightning.”

  Evelyn gathered her sewing and the clothes that Belinda Hale had brought, and went into the house. The screen door slammed lightly behind her.

  Jerry walked into the yard and dropped his head back, staring dizzily into the boughs of the pines far above him. Two drops of water splashed thickly against his cheek. He knew it had already begun to rain; it took a while before falling water worked its way through the thick pine canopy. He walked slowly to the highway, and saw that the asphalt had already turned black with moisture. His unobstructed view here of the shedding cloud cover told him that it was a storm that had blown up from the Gulf. Then, in confirmation, he heard the low-pitched thunder breaking to the south, over Babylon.

  Chapter 4

  The piney woods begin well inside the municipal boundaries of Babylon. The southern portion of the town is more densely populated, while the blacks, the two dozen or so Creek tribesmen, and very poorest of the whites have settled into the upper half of the township. Their run-down, unpainted houses with sagging porches are set well back from the road, deep among the pine trees. Chickens scratch about the foundations, and emaciated dogs sleep inside the abandoned automobiles that lie rusting in every side-yard.

  On Thursday the first of June, the sullen silent children of these impoverished families stared at Margaret Larkin as she hurriedly pedaled along the Styx River road, in the last few moisture-laden minutes before the storm broke.

  The houses became less frequent as Margaret approached the town limits. She stopped only once, to speak to a middle-aged black woman who stood beside her mailbox at the side of the road.

  Margaret balanced on one foot, but did not dismount; she greeted Nina by gasping her name, then paused to catch her breath.

  “How you, Margaret? How’s your grandmama?”

  Evelyn Larkin, about three years before, had suffered a slight stroke, and Nina had nursed ,her for a month afterward. Since that time, Nina had never failed to inquire after the old woman’s health.

  Margaret replied that her grandmother was well, and invited Nina out to the house to pick all the blueberries she wanted, before the season became very busy.

  Nina thanked Margaret for the invitation, and then both turned briefly to watch a vehicle approach and pass them on its way out of Babylon. It was a lumbering black hearse, about twenty years old, that had been converted into a fishing wagon. Half a dozen cane poles stuck out the back.

  “Well,” said Nina, “I don’t know who that is, but they crazy to be going out right now. Fish bite in the rain, but they don’t bite when there's lightning started. And you better get on home, honey, ’cause it looks bad for tonight. I sure hope it don’t do nothing to your berries—”

  Margaret laughed, a little nervously.

  You go on now, child,” said Nina. “And you tell your grandmama I’m thinking about her, and next time she comes into town she ought to stop and speak, and not just drive by.”

  Margaret replied that she would relay the message, and then hurried off toward home. She was outside the town now, and there were no more houses between her and the Styx River. The trees were dark beneath the gathering lowering clouds. A single car passed her; it had an Alabama license plate.

  Margaret increased her speed when she felt the first few drops of rain. The wind in her ears deafened her. She glanced behind her several times to make sure that no car was coming up. The Styx River road had no shoulder, and she was forced to ride on the asphalt. Because the edge of the paving was ragged and broken away in places, she traveled in the middle of the lane.

  She knew every slight turn in the road, could identify many single trees by the distinctive pattern of their branches, and was familiar with every clearing and small rise that she passed. This exact knowledge of the road made the trip shorter, for she always knew where she was and how much farther she had to go. She sighed with relief when she began to turn the bend that would bring into view the Styx River, the bridge that crossed it, and the second story of their farmhouse on the other side. She had a good chance now to make it home before the rain began in earnest.

  Margaret sailed around the bend without pedaling; the bridge was only fifty yards away. She was always a little nervous to cross it, and was careful to pass over with her eyes focused on the road beyond. She particularly avoided staring into the black water that flowed beneath the uneven planking.

  But her attention was distracted by a movement in the brush by the side of the road just ahead. She imagined that some ’possum or ’coon, disturbed by her approach, was about to take flight. She began to brake in case the animal ran in front of her.

  A man leapt out of the dense shrubbery. He dashed into the middle of the road. His movement was at first so rapid that she could make out nothing of his appearance but that he was very dark. Then he was still, with his strong legs placed wide apart over the center line, his long arms rigidly outstretched to halt her. Above his black pants, the hair on his chest was so thick, the skin beneath it so deeply tanned, that she did not immediately realize he wore no shirt. Covering his head was a black leather hood, tight-fitting and fastened on the side, with slits cut above the eyes and nose. The mouth was zippered shut.

  Margaret swerved to avoid him, but forgot to release the brake, and she spilled sharply onto the pavement, with the bicycle falling on top of her. She burned where she had scraped her legs, arms, and side. She kicked the bicycle off her, and called faintly for Jerry to come and help her.

  She struggled to raise herself, but stumbled again with the pain of her fall. The man lunged forward, lifted the bicycle and heaved it into the bushes.

  Margaret was on her feet, dazed, staring wildly across the bridge. She could see the window of her grandmother’s bedroom, and again called, this time more loudly, for Jerry.

  She hobbled toward the bridge, but stumbled when she looked behind her. The man in the black leather mask was almost on top of her. From behind, he took her by the shoulders, and lifted her from the ground. She tried to twist free, but his grip pinned her arms to her body. She kicked at his legs with her heels, but he held her at such a distance that her thrashings were ineffectual.

  The raindrops were sparse but heavy, the familiar prelude to a substantial prolonged downpour.

  Margaret trembled violently as they approached the bridge. She screamed but knew that Jerry would not hear her. She had learned as a little girl that voices did not carry from one shore of the Styx to the other. The sound was swept downstream. Two cars
had passed in the last ten minutes: the fishing hearse and the car from Alabama. Why didn’t someone else come along? How could this happen within sight of her own house?

  The man’s gloved fingers had cut off the circulation in her arms. Margaret was ready to faint. She began to lose the sense of her situation. She stared in front of her, at the familiar bridge, the Styx River, and the window of her grandmother’s bedroom. Her head wobbled and the scene jerked dizzily before her. It was strange, she thought involuntarily, to be carried about like this. She turned her head around, and choked with fright when she found the black leather mask almost touching her face. She could have counted the teeth in the zipper that was closed over the mouth. The eyes were black and flat, and seemed lashless. Individual drops of rain spattered violently against the taut black leather.

  Her head jerked back, and she began to scream—in hope, for ahead of her, on the other side of the bridge, she had heard a car horn. There was someone else on the road, and maybe the horn meant that rescue was coming. Her grandmother had seen what was happening from her bedroom window, and sent Jerry down. Jerry had jumped in the car, and rushed out. He was blowing the horn to tell her he was on his way—

  But it wasn’t the horn of their car, she knew, and it wasn’t Jerry. Margaret hoped her grandmother hadn't seen anything from the window. To see her granddaughter attacked might well have brought on a stroke. But if it wasn't Jerry, who was it?

  Despite her continued struggles, her captor had advanced onto the bridge, but he halted at the sound of the horn. Margaret was confident that he would let her go now, and conceal himself in the shrubbery. She would limp home across the bridge, and tell her grandmother that she had had a little fall on her bicycle.

  Margaret drew in her breath as she was lifted higher and turned sharply in the man’s arms. How could a man be so strong? she thought. How could he—

  Directly beneath her now were the slow, muddy waters of the Styx, and the sandbar where she and Jerry had once dug for pirate treasure—and left off for fear of coming upon their parents’ corpses. The river was pockmarked with rain. Drops caught in her eyes, and she blinked them away. But while she was blinking, she was let go. She twisted her head around, and saw the sandbar come swiftly nearer. She thought of the pirate chest of gold and jewels that she and Jerry had never found, and she thought—

  After the man in the black leather mask had hurled Margaret over the side of the bridge onto the sandbar beneath, he dived into the high grass that grew at the end of the bridge, and remained motionless while the powder- blue Volkswagen passed over, and around the bend toward Babylon. The black lashless eyes behind the mask narrowed and followed the receding car.

  Margaret Larkin lay unconscious on the sandbar. The man in the leather hood climbed out of the grass and hurried into the trees. He emerged presently onto the road with a length of coarse rope. He picked the bicycle out of the bushes and carried it over to the side of the bridge, and then flung it over the railing so that it landed squarely atop the girl’s frail body. The downturned pedal gouged deeply into her belly; she jerked and shuddered. The back wheel spun against her upturned cheek, shredding the flesh.

  The man slid down a clay bank to the river, and then jumped across to the sandbar. He dragged Margaret and the bicycle entirely beneath the bridge. With a pocket- knife he ripped her clothing open, front and back, but removed none of it. Thick blood welled up in the long gashes cut on the young girl’s body. He laid the bicycle flat, and placed Margaret on top of it. With the rope he had brought along, he secured her neck to the handlebars, her waist to the frame, and her feet to the back wheel.

  He tested the ropes by pulling on the knotted portion over Margaret’s belly. The girl’s eyes flashed open, expressionlessly, and then closed slowly. The man waded a few feet off the sandbar into the water, and laid Margaret and her bicycle carefully onto the surface of the black swirling stream. He watched them sink slowly into the narrow channel in the middle of the river. Margaret’s torn clothing fluttered briefly in the water, but did not sustain any air that would have impeded the submergence.

  The man stood patiently on the sandbar beneath the bridge until no more air bubbles rose, and then stealthily climbed back up the clayey bank, and disappeared into the forest.

  A few minutes later, the converted hearse pulled out of a long disused logging track, and moved back down the road toward Babylon, Its windshield wipers moved furiously against the driving rain.

  Part II

  Missing Margaret

  Chapter 5

  One or two others were perhaps larger, but no house in Babylon was so impressive as James Redfield’s. The banker had built it at the insistence of his second wife, who died five months after she had walked through the front door with a complaint on her lips about the height of the concrete steps. Located at the end of a forest- surrounded cul-de-sac, the house was long and low, with cream-colored stuccoed walls and large dark-wood double doors with ornate brass handles in the Spanish style. All along the rear, the bedrooms and the den were walled with sliding glass that opened onto small patios, the pool, or the pine forest.

  Land in back sloped down to a small nameless creek with gurgling rapids. Between the house and the four-car garage was an enormous swimming pool, enclosed by high stuccoed walls covered with white wisteria. James Redfield’s pool, the first in Babylon and still the largest, had been thought a breathtaking extravagance—almost a wickedness—in 1955.

  The house was located on the fashionable western side of the town, and the ten acres belonging to James Redfield abutted on the municipal boundary of Babylon. Just beyond the creek in back, the old man’s substantial holdings began, nearly eight thousand acres of timber land between Babylon and the Perdido River. Few poaching hunters trespassed on this boggy land, despite the plenitude of wildlife; it was thought dangerous because of snakes and quicksand. For a few years in the late fifties, a moonshiner had operated his stills in a clearing about a mile from the Redfield house, but the apparatus inexplicably exploded and killed him. The woods were supposed to be haunted by his ghost, but no one would swear to having seen the specter. James Redfield had never allowed logging here, because he didn’t like chain saws and he didn't need the money; but within the past year he had been quietly approached by Texaco and offered a staggering sum to allow test rigs on the acreage nearest the river. Jay, only twenty miles to the east of Babylon, was a little oil boom town now, whose nighttime skyline was bright with flares from producing wells. The Texaco representative had assured James Redfield that no other landowner around Babylon had yet been approached, and he was asked to keep the negotiations secret for the time being. James Redfield was being particularly slow about these transactions in order to annoy his son Nathan, who was greedy for Texaco royalties; the old man himself had no use for the money.

  Although the underbrush had been cleared and diseased trees felled, James Redfield’s house still appeared to be isolated in the midst of the pine forest. The tall slender trees had swayed insistently and with a low-voiced moaning all the afternoon.

  In the hour before a thunderstorm, the color of the forest deepens: the pine needles take on a dense vibrant greenness they possess at no other time, the slender trunks go black, and the leaden sky above sinks lower by the minute.

  Belinda Hale pulled her powder-blue Volkswagen into the knob of the cul-de-sac, jumped out, and ran toward the side of the house. She pushed open a narrow wrought- iron gate, and stepped into a small patio. This space was about fifteen feet square, bordered with azaleas bearing the brown withered blossoms of the March flowering. Two chairs and a glider of wrought iron had been painted glossy black recently. The flagstone paving was covered by brown pine needles.

  A portion of the patio was protected by the overhang of the house. Beneath this, and in front of the sliding glass doors that led into his bedroom, sat James Redfield, impatiently tearing apart tufts of pine straw that had fallen beside him onto the seat of the glider.

  James R
edfield was seventy, but looked older. His last accident, complicating the injuries he had received in another seven years before, had left him a very old man. He moved about only with difficulty, and most often in a wheelchair, had endless difficulties with his digestion, and suffered vastly in comparison with his few pleasures. Belinda Hale was the principal one left to him.

  “You late, Miss Pie,” said James Redfield, with narrowed eyes and reproachful sternness. His voice was high, a drawling wheedle, a deliberate parody of the tremor of an ancient man. He had affected it when he retired— again, to annoy his sons—and it had become his natural voice.

  “I told you not to call me that, Mr. Red,” cried Belinda, and turned to slam the iron gate behind her. She looked back at the old man: “I’m fat, and I know it, but I don’t appreciate your calling attention to it...”

  “Pretty soon, Miss Pie, I'm gone look out my window, and see your daddy carting you up here in a wheelbarrow.”

  “I did not come here this afternoon to talk about how much I weigh,” said Belinda, with feigned huffiness, “but what I do want to know is what you are doing out here when the bottom is going to fall out of the sky in two minutes and forty-five seconds?”

  “Nina brought me out here just before she left. She didn’t want to do it, Miss Pie, so I don’t want you to say anything about it to her, because I said you were sure to show up before the rain started. And here you are, just like I said you’d be.”