He sat down in the easy chair where Elaine usually sat, and he said, “She feels you're recovering nicely.”
Gwyn nodded and forked buttered noodles into her mouth. They had little taste, but more than anything else she had eaten in the last day and a half. She worked at the dish until she had emptied it, which seemed to take forever. Recently, she felt as if her entire lif e consisted of sleeping and eating, and that only the former was not an arduous task.
“I hope your illness didn't have anything to do with the sailing we did the other day,” Groves said, when she had begun to eat the warmed chicken breast on the largest plate.
She looked up, surprised. “How could it?”
“I don't know,” he said. “But you seemed to get sick right after that, so I thought perhaps—”
“Hasn't anyone told you what's wrong with me?” she asked.
“Why should they?”
Gwyn considered this a moment. She should have known that neither Uncle Will nor Elaine would gossip about her to the help, yet she had automatically assumed everyone in the house knew about her ghost. She was relieved that Ben, at least, had been kept in the dark.
“Believe me, Ben, I really enjoyed being on the Salt Joy with you,” she said. “It was the nicest day I've had in a long time. My illness has nothing to do with that.”
“What a relief!” he said. “Well then, maybe we can go out in the boat again, when you're feeling up to it.”
“I don't see why not.”
He peered at her tray with an exaggerated look of anger. “You've hardly touched your chicken, so don't put your fork down yet.”
She laughed and said, “You'd make a very good mother.”
“I try,” he said.
Because she had not taken a sleeping tablet since that morning, and because Ben's presence was considerably more vital, in an undefinable way, than Elaine's was, she found herself more alert, her mind functioning in less of a haze than it had for the past forty-eight hours. Inevitably, then, she began to think about the ghost and about all the things that might be connected with it, and she broached a tangent of the subject with him.
When she'd reached her dessert, she said, “Do you know any of the fishermen who've been giving Uncle Will trouble?”
“A bad lot,” he said.
“Which ones do you know?”
“Younger, Abrahams, Wilson, nearly all of them.”
“Is it true they threatened Uncle Will?”
“They did, all right.”
“How?”
“In vague, but definitely meaningful terms,” he said.
“Do you think that they'd carry through on those threats?”
He grimaced and said, “They're not an easy group of men to get along with, and they don't hold their anger well. Yes, I believe they'd have gone through with the threats if Uncle Will hadn't reported them to the sheriff.”
Outside, night had fallen; the remnants of an orange sunset lighted a half inch of the horizon on the far side of the house but did not light the sky beyond Gwyn's windows.
She ate several more spoonfuls of the same kind of chocolate pudding which she'd been served for lunch, then said, “Do you think they'd be the kind to strike out at me, when they saw they couldn't easily get at my uncle?”
“What do you mean?”
She couldn't tell him without mentioning the ghost, and she did not want him to know about that, because she was still pretty sure that it was only an illusion, the symptom of emotional instability.
He said, “Do you mean would they hurt you?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“Not likely,” he said. “At least, I don't think they'd stoop so low as to carry a grudge against innocent bystanders. Why? Has something happened?”
“Nothing, really,” she said.
“Then why did you ask?”
She ate another spoonful of chocolate pudding and, rather than answer him, asked another question. She said, “What do you know about International Seafood Products?”
He looked at her strangely and seemed, at first, unable to find a response. “What do you mean?”
She finished her pudding, enjoying the taste of the last few mouthfuls, and she said, “I understand that ISP wants to build a seafood processing plant nearby.”
He nodded. “ISP wants to, and the fishermen want them to — but everyone else in the area is dead set against it.”
“Why?”
“The filth, of course.”
She said, “As I understand, ISP wants to build a modern plant that wouldn't foul the sea or the air.”
“You've heard wrong, then.”
“But don't they have a plant like that operating up in Maine?”
She thought that there was a look of deep anxiety on Ben's face, though she couldn't imagine what he had to be anxious about. He leaned forward in the easy chair and finally began to reply, when the telephone rang, somewhere downstairs.
“That's Mr. Barnaby's private line, in the study,” he said. “I'll have to go down there to answer it. I'll be right back.”
He departed before she could say anything, and she heard him taking the main stairs two at a time.
Ben picked up the study phone and said, “Hello?”
“It's me,” Penny said. She was calling from the house phone, in the kitchen, to give him an excuse to get out of Gwyn's room, according to plan.
He sat down heavily in Will Barnaby's leather chair, behind the desk, leaned his elbows on the blotter and said, “Elaine told me that the kid would be dopey — from all the drugs she had this morning and from her own state of mind.”
Apprehensively, Penny said, “And she isn't?”
“Depends on your definition of 'dopey,' he said. “She's not her usual self, to be sure. But she's a damn sight more alert than I expected her to be.”
“What happened?”
He said, “She got inquisitive. She wanted to talk about the fishermen, and I think she was close to telling me about you — about the ghost.”
“But she didn't?”
“Not quite. However, she did ask me what I knew about ISP, and she proved to be damned knowledgeable on the subject.”
“You don't think she knows?”
“No. Maybe she suspects something… though she musn't know just what. She thinks maybe the fishermen are behind the ghost.”
Penny said, “Ben, maybe we shouldn't go through with it.”
“It's not that bad,” he said. “I didn't mean to put you on edge, Penny. I only wanted to warn you that she's not a walking zombie, like we thought she'd be at this stage.”
“She may catch on—”
“No, she won't,” he said. “She'll tumble for it, and we'll break her down tonight for sure.”
“Well—”
“Think of all that money,” he said.
“I've been thinking of it for a hundred years.”
“We're too close now to back off.”
She was silent a moment, then said, “You're right. I'm going to go up there now and scare the hell out of that kid.”
“That's the stuff.”
“You be ready, according to the script.”
He said, “Have you ever known me to miss a cue?”
“Never.”
“Okay, go to work, love.”
The final act had begun.
NINETEEN
When darkness came to Jenkins' Niche, it brought Paul Morby with it, more of a ghost than Penny Groves could ever have been. For eight years, Morby had been a member in good standing of the United States Army's Green Berets, one of the world's most deadly, violent and insidious guerrilla warfare fighting forces. He'd spent four long years in Vietnam, having completed more than three hundred missions into enemy-held territory, all of which ended in success. He had killed men, and he had suffered no remorse, for that was what he had been trained to do. When he finally checked out of the service and came home, it was clear to Morby that his fortune lay in the use of those tricks and talents which the army had taught him, and he applied the methods of war to domestic, personal problems — for a fat fee. He had worked for out-and-out criminals, for borderline operators, and for men who were ostensibly honest, such as William Barnaby. Thus far, he had never had to kill anyone for money, and he avoided those jobs in which murder was almost essential or highly likely. He burned down houses, set up banks for men who wanted to rob them, and committed a dozen other prosecutable felonies, all without regret. The Green Berets preferred men with few scruples, then bred the last dregs of honesty from them. It was not in Paul Morby, then, to be sorry about anything that he did. When he came into Jenkins' Niche, just after dark, he did so with only one thought: do the job right, earn the money.