Things had been mighty peaceful ever since. So peaceful that she’d taken to humming a little ditty to herself while she worked. She was humming it when she carried the tart lemonade out to the front porch. But she stopped humming it when she saw Charlie sitting there in the shade of the cottonwood tree, wiping his sweaty face with his handkerchief.
“Morning, Maude,” he said. “Made some fresh lemonade, I see.”
Mrs. Rakubian stared at him goggle-eyed for a few seconds. There wasn’t a mark on him, not a mark!
“Something wrong, Maude?”
Mrs. Rakubian didn’t answer. She put the lemonade down on the porch table, went into the house, took the varmint gun off the rack, walked back out to the porch, and let Charlie have it with both barrels. Then she fetched the wheelbarrow and trundled what was left of him to the dry well.
“You stay dead this time, Charlie Rakubian,” she said after she’d dumped him again. “Thirty years of you haunting me alive was bad enough. Don’t you dare keep coming back to haunt me dead too. This time you stay put.”
But Charlie didn’t stay put. He was back again the next morning, all smiley and chipper, like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth and the hatchet and varmint gun hadn’t durned near taken his head off twice.
Mrs. Rakubian was ready for him, though. She’d decided not to take any chances and it was a good thing she had. She didn’t let him say a word this time. As soon as she saw him, she took Papa’s old Frontier Colt out from under her apron and shot him right between the eyes.
“Now I’m not going to tell you again, Charlie,” she said when she got him to the well. “Don’t come bothering me no more. You’re dead three times now and you’d better start acting like it.”
She had a day and a half of peace before the sheriff’s car drove in through the farm gate and stopped right in front of where she was sitting under the cottonwood tree drinking tart lemonade. The driver’s door opened and Charlie got out.
Mrs. Rakubian was used to his tricks by now. She stared at him in disgust.
“Maude,” Charlie said, “I got some questions to ask you. Seems Ed Beemis, the mailman, and Lloyd Poole from the gas company have disappeared and they was both last seen out this way—”
She didn’t let him finish. She yanked Papa’s Colt out from under her apron and let fly at him. One bullet knocked him down but the other ones missed, which allowed him to crawl to safety behind the sheriff’s car. Then durned if he didn’t pull a gun of his own and start blasting away at her.
Mrs. Rakubian flung herself into the house just in the nick of time. She locked the door behind her, reloaded Papa’s Colt, and took the varmint gun down and made sure it was loaded too. Then she waited.
For a time there wasn’t much noise out in the yard. Then there was — a regular commotion. Cars, voices... why, you’d of thought it was the Fourth of July picnic out there. Pretty soon Charlie started yelling at her over some contraption that made his voice real loud, only she didn’t pay much attention to what he was saying. Instead she yelled right back at him.
“You Charlie, you go back into the well where you belong! Go on, git, and leave me be!”
Charlie didn’t git and leave her be — not that she’d expected he would, after all the times he’d come back from the dead to devil her. So she was ready for him again with Papa’s Colt and the varmint gun when he busted down the door and come in after her.
She thought she was ready, anyhow. In fact she wasn’t, not with just six bullets and two loads of buckshot. Mrs. Rakubian took one look at what come piling through the door, screamed once, and swooned on the spot.
It was Charlie, all right.
But the sneaky old booger had brought a dozen other dead Charlies along with him.
Smuggler’s Island
The first I heard that somebody had bought Smuggler’s Island was late on a cold, foggy morning in May. Handy Manners and Davey and I had just brought the Jennie Too into the Camaroon Bay wharf, loaded with the day’s limit in salmon — silvers mostly, with a few big kings — and Handy had gone inside the processing shed at Bay Fisheries to call for the tally clerk and the portable scales. I was helping Davey hoist up the hatch covers, and I was thinking that he handled himself fine on the boat and what a shame it’d be if he decided eventually that he didn’t want to go into commercial fishing as his livelihood. A man likes to see his only son take up his chosen profession. But Davey was always talking about traveling around Europe, seeing some of the world, maybe finding a career he liked better than fishing. Well, he was only nineteen. Decisions don’t come quick or easy at that age.
Anyhow, we were working on the hatch covers when I heard somebody call my name. I glanced up, and Pa and Abner Frawley were coming toward us from down-wharf, where the café was. I was a little surprised to see Pa out on a day like this; he usually stayed home with Jennie when it was overcast and windy because the fog and cold air aggravated his lumbago.
The two of them came up and stopped, Pa puffing on one of his home-carved meerschaum pipes. They were both seventy-two and long-retired — Abner from a manager’s job at the cannery a mile up the coast, Pa from running the general store in the village — and they’d been cronies for at least half their lives. But that was where all resemblance between them ended. Abner was short and round and white-haired, and always had a smile and a joke for everybody. Pa, on the other hand, was tall and thin and dour; if he’d smiled any more than four times in the forty-seven years since I was born I can’t remember it. Abner had come up from San Francisco during the Depression, but Pa was a second-generation native of Camaroon Bay, his father having emigrated from Ireland during the short-lived potato boom in the early 1900s. He was a good man and a decent father, which was why I’d given him a room in our house when Ma died six years ago, but I’d never felt close to him.
He said to me, “Looks like a good catch, Verne.”
“Pretty good,” I said. “How come you’re out in this weather?”
“Abner’s idea. He dragged me out of the house.”
I looked at Abner. His eyes were bright, the way they always got when he had a choice bit of news or gossip to tell. He said, “Fella from Los Angeles went and bought Smuggler’s Island. Can you beat that?”
“Bought it?” I said. “You mean outright?”
“Yep. Paid the county a hundred thousand cash.”
“How’d you hear about it?”
“Jack Kewin, over at the real estate office.”
“Who’s the fellow who bought it?”
“Name’s Roger Vauclain,” Abner said. “Jack don’t know any more about him. Did the buying through an agent.”
Davey said, “Wonder what he wants with it?”
“Maybe he’s got ideas of hunting treasure,” Abner said and winked at him. “Maybe he heard about what’s hidden in those caves.”
Pa gave him a look. “Old fool,” he said.
Davey grinned, and I smiled a little and turned to look to where Smuggler’s Island sat wreathed in fog half a mile straight out across the choppy harbor. It wasn’t much to look at, from a distance or up close. Just one big oblong chunk of eroded rock about an acre and a half in size, surrounded by a lot of little islets. It had a few stunted trees and shrubs, and a long headland where gulls built their nests, and a sheltered cove on the lee shore where you could put in a small boat. That was about all there was to it — except for those caves Abner had spoken of.
They were located near the lee cove and you could only get into them at low tide. Some said caves honeycombed the whole underbelly of the island, but those of us who’d ignored warnings from our parents as kids and gone exploring in them knew that this wasn’t so. There were three caves and two of them had branches that led deep into the rock, but all of the tunnels were dead ends.