“Not really. It was so cold this morning that I wanted to keep the windows shut.”
“But you’re working with strong solvents. Don’t the fumes...?”
“Right. I almost fainted on top of this moldy wizard painting.”
“Wear your warm sweater and keep the windows open... I passed by Angus Crawford’s place today.”
“I heard about poor old Angus.” Julian emptied one can and picked up another. “The water filled his house?”
“No, it only flooded the first floor.”
“Then why didn’t he just walk upstairs?”
“That’s what I wondered.”
Julian stopped pouring, adjusted the choke, and pulled the crank to start the noisy roar of our power source.
“He could have slipped on the wet steps and fallen, hit his head, drowned.”
“Could have.”
Our generator, from which extension cords snake all throughout the house, runs the washing machine but not the dryer, so Julian had to string a clothesline across our back porch.
Living a lot more like my grandmother than I ever wanted to, I carried our wet laundry outside and started pinning it up. At least I had those new-fangled clothespins with the wire hinges.
We’re slogging through the usual rainy New Orleans January and I have to take clothes down and hang them back up several times to get enough cumulative sunlight to dry them. Pinning up our towels, I sang, “No phone, no lights... not a single luxury...”
The Gilligan’s Island theme refers to “Robinson Caruso.” Of course “Caruso” was a tenor. The stranded guy was “Crusoe,” but the song required a three-syllable name. Also, the sitcom was about a bunch of ignoramuses who never heard an opera or read Defoe.
Except maybe for “the professor,” who was brilliant and handsome. If I had been “Ginger” or “Mary Ann,” I would have set up hut-keeping with the professor. I wonder why they never thought of it.
Julian opened the door behind me. “Let’s pay a condolence call on Doug Crawford.”
Young Doug Crawford and his friend Steve Marks were both wearing nothing but jeans and bronzer. They looked like an ad for a “Meet Friends” phone line.
“Margo and Julian!” They swung the door open wide. “We’re so glad you’re back.”
“We’re glad you’re back, too.”
“I can’t say we ever left, really.” Steve stepped around one of the dozen scented candles illuminating the living room. “Our apartment in Lakeview was totaled, so we slept at the deputy station for a month. Then, when the water receded, we moved here. Upstairs, of course.”
“The first floor must have been ruined,” I said. “But I see you’re bringing it back.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Doug agreed. “We tore out the old Sheetrock the first week and put up new the second.”
“We’re going to enclose the back porch and make it into a sunroom.” Steve waved. “The whirlpool tub will be right over there.”
“That old kitchen table will be gone, gone, gone, replaced by an island, with stainless-steel sinks. And our copper-pot collection will hang up there. You see that?” Doug pointed to three paint cans on the counter. “My father was about to redo this kitchen in white. Zinc white! Can you imagine? It’s all going to be ‘Prudent Primrose’ now.”
Steve picked up a brush and fanned the bristles. “We’ll get ourselves a spread in New Orleans magazine. Bet on it.”
“We were trying to understand your father’s terrible accident,” Julian said. “We asked ourselves, why didn’t he just walk upstairs?”
“Oh, but he did. Let me show you.” Doug pointed to the staircase and we all followed him up to the second floor. “Dad must have lived up here by himself for three or four days. He had a generator out on that balcony off the bedroom. He’d stocked jugs of gas, bags of freeze-dried food and bottled drinks.”
Julian stepped out onto the balcony and leaned over the gas cans. “Your father’s generator is like ours. It wouldn’t take more than eight gallons a day, even running constantly.”
Doug and Steve looked at each other. “So?”
“I see three empty twenty-gallon cans. He could not have used all that gasoline in three or four days.”
Doug’s Adam’s apple moved. “Then the cans couldn’t have been full when he started.”
“That would explain it.”
Once back on the sidewalk, Julian stepped up to examine the scrawled writing. He opened our car doors with the remote.
“Margo, the glove compartment. Get the flashlight and my kit from work.”
“Check.”
The “kit from work” is just a box with nothing in it but cotton swabs and a bottle of paint solvent. Julian opened the solvent, which smelled strong enough to make me dizzy even out in the fresh air, and addressed himself to the code on the door. I stepped back to the car as he dipped the swab in and applied it to the center of the “D” for “Dead.” He dabbed carefully in a tight circle and in less than a minute, a black smear emerged from beneath the white.
I held my breath and came in for a close look.
“That was the slanted center line of a zero!”
Julian heaved a sigh and knocked on the door twice, above the “1 D.” In a few seconds, we heard running footsteps. Doug pulled open the door, then saw Julian’s smear and gasped. Steve appeared behind his shoulder and went pale.
“We can reconstruct the events here.” Julian capped his bottle. “The Guardsmen came on September fifth, but Angus wouldn’t have let them rescue him in any case. When they rode their boat down this block, calling for survivors to carry to safety, he would have turned off his generator, hidden upstairs, and kept mum. The Guardsmen would mark the house empty and move on.”
Doug nodded slowly, as if in a trance.
“Your father was still alive when you got here a few days later. You killed him and left him in the water. Who would notice one more drowning victim during the greatest natural disaster in the country’s history?”
Steve opened his mouth, then closed it as Julian continued.
“Crawford already had some white paint in the kitchen. You used some of it to paint over the line in the zero, which you turned into a ‘D,’ and wrote the number one beside it.”
“That was taking some chance, doing it out in the open,” I put in.
“The neighborhood was still troubled. The lights were all out and there was no one around to see them but maybe a cat.”
“It was me!” Steve stepped out on the porch. “I did it.”
“Oh, shut up!”
“No, Dougie. I want to tell the truth.” He beckoned us back into the vestibule and lowered his voice. “Please try to understand. We had been thirty hours without sleep, living on coffee and donuts, pulling people off their roofs and carrying them to dry land. I wanted to sack out, but Dougie just had to steer the boat over this way and make sure his father was all right. ‘Why?’ I asked him. ‘Your old man doesn’t care if you live or die.’”
“I thought he would be proud of me. Everyone else told us we were heroes.” Doug rubbed his eyes. “We saw the code on the door, the zero meaning no one was inside. But I knew Dad was just hiding. He wouldn’t leave. So I used my old key to get in and he heard us and came down the stairs. I was so glad to see he was all right. I ran to him but...”
“He just started blasting at Doug.” Steve made two fists. “Got red in the face like a monster. Kept cursing and screaming how he was ashamed of his miserable excuse for a son. And poor Dougie was...”
“Yeah, I was breaking down,” Doug admitted weakly. “I was so exhausted, I could hardly stand up, and then I expected him to welcome me with open arms, but with all that...”