The sailcloth shroud - By Charles Williams Page 0,43

think desperately unhappy. I could sense it, even though we couldn’t talk to each other the way we used to. I saw him only once a year, when I went out there for two weeks after school was out. We both tried very hard, but I guess it’s a special kind of country that fathers and very young daughters live in, and once you leave it you can never go back. We’d play golf, and go riding, and skeet shooting, and he’d take me to parties, but the real lines of communication were down.”

She realized that he hated the desert. He was in the wrong world, and he was too old now to go somewhere else and start over. She didn’t think he drank much; he simply wasn’t the type for it. But she thought there were lots of girls, each one probably progressively younger, and trips to Las Vegas, even though he would have to be careful about that in the banking business.

She was a senior in college that January in 1956 when the call came from the sheriff’s office. She flew out to Phoenix. “I was afraid,” she went on, “and so was Grandfather. Neither of us believed they’d ever find him alive. Suicide was in our minds, though for different reasons. Grandfather was afraid he’d got in trouble again. That he’d taken money from the bank.”

“But he hadn’t?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “Naturally, it would have been discovered if he had. He even had several hundred dollars in his own account, and almost a month’s salary due him.”

There you are, I thought; it was an absolutely blank wall. He hadn’t stolen from the bank, but he’d deliberately disappeared. And when he showed up a month later as Brian Hardy he was rich.

She had fallen silent. I lighted a cigarette. Well, this must be the end of the line; I might as well call the FBI. Then she said quietly, “Would you tell me about it?”

I told her, playing down the pain of the heart attack and making it as easy for her as I could. I explained about the split mains’l and being becalmed, and the fact that I had no choice but to bury him at sea. Without actually lying about it I managed to gloss over the sketchy aspect of the funeral and the fact that I hadn’t known all the sea-burial service. I told her it was Sunday, and gave the position, and tried to tell her what kind of day it was. She gave a little choked cry and turned her face away, and I looked down at my cigarette when she got up abruptly and went out in the kitchen. I sat there feeling rotten. Even with all the trouble he’d got me into, I’d liked him, and I was beginning to like her.

Well, I’d known all along it wasn’t going to be easy when I had to face his family and tell them about it. And it was even worse now because, while she knew in her heart that it was her father, there could never be any final proof. That little residue of doubt would always remain, along with all the unanswerable questions. Was he lying somewhere out in the desert, or under two miles of water in the Caribbean Sea? And wherever he was, why was he there? What had happened? What was he running from?

Then suddenly it was back again, that strange feeling of uneasiness that always came over me when I remembered the moment of his burial, that exact instant in which I’d stood at the rail and watched his body slide into the depths. There was no explanation for it. I didn’t even know what it was. When I reached for it, it was gone, like a bad dream only partly remembered, and all that was left was this formless dread that something terrible was going to happen, or already had. I tried to shrug it off. Maybe it had been a premonition. Why keep worrying about it now? I’d already got all the bad news.

She came back in a minute, and if she’d been crying she had carefully erased the evidence. She was carrying two bottles of Coke from the refrigerator. “What are you going to do now?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Call the FBI, I suppose. I’d rather try convincing them than those gorillas. Oh. I suppose this is pretty hopeless, but did you ever hear of a man called Bonner? J.