Dead Low Tide by John D. MacDonald Read Free Book Online

back to the car and drove home. He was just a hair over thirteen pounds. I cleaned him, wrapped him in the freezer paper Christy had given me, tossed his inedible parts in the creek, and carried him down to Christy’s. Twenty feet from her place, I could hear her singing. I winced. She couldn’t carry a tune in a bait bucket, but it was good to know she’d lost the blues.
    I yelled through the screen and went in. I unwrapped him on the kitchen table and he was admired, and she wrapped him up again and found room for him in her two-by-four deep freeze. I built us a drink and we discussed what we’d stuff the fish with, for baking. She was intent on oysters, so I finally agreed to go sloshing out on the flats Sunday morning and get a batch of them, provided she’d make the stuffing. We matched to see whose kitchen we’d mess up right now, and it came out mine, so she told me to go back and fix more drinks and she’d shower and be over with her share of the groceries. She came over wearing more clothes than usual and smelling soapy, with the ends of her hair curled and damp.
    “I,” she said, “am dressed in this sedate fashion because movies are frigid on the inside, and that’s where you are taking me.”
    I handed her a drink. “That suits me perfectly—on one condition. That we make it the late show and get back here well after midnight.”
    She sat on the table. “Why?”
    “An unwelcome guest is coming. Mrs. John Long.”
    She stared at me. “Aha! Fatal charm. Serves you right.”
    “No, look now. Seriously, Christy. It is something of a mess.” She listened while I went through the whole thing. How I had gone out there and stumbled right over the information she wanted to know. I went through all my reasoning, including why I wanted to be away when Mary Eleanor arrived.
    “Andy, I’m going to borrow your car and go to the movies alone.”
    “Do you
want
me to get in a jam? Do you
want
me to be here when she gets here?”
    “I think it would be terribly, terribly rude not to be here. But there’s another thing. I think it’s wrong that John Long hasn’t told her. I think you ought to tell her.”
    “That’s John Long’s business, isn’t it?”
    “Men are so darn stupid, and they try to be so darn noble, Andy. Any wife wants to know a thing like that. Women are stronger than you men think. It isn’t fair of him to deny her the opportunity of helping him shoulder some of the—fear and the worry. So you’re going to hint what the trouble is.”
    “Now, look, I’m not—”
    “I’m starving. Fix another drink and let me cook.”
    Once we were eating, we went at it again, but she was weakening my resolutions. Maybe I would be doing both John and Mary Eleanor a favor to let her know, at least by indirection. I used all my arguments, about how she might go to pieces, how it was none of my business, etc.
    “Andy, you just hint around the edges, and if she starts to go to pieces, you be careful.”
    “You can’t hint to a woman and then shut up.”
    “Oh, just lie, then. That’s easy for you, you know.”
    In despair, I moved over to the subject of Joy Kenney. I covered that topic.
    “Hmm,” she said, getting up to get us more coffee.
    “What’s with this
hmm
?”
    “Pretty, you said. Very pretty, from that tone of lechery you used, describing her.”
    “Lechery? Not McClintock.”
    “Yes, McClintock. And why I should feel at all jealous, I’ll never know. Obviously, McClintock, he has been embroiled with that female.”
    “Embroiled?”
    “Think of a better word, and stop inanely repeating mine. A little passing affair. Ha! A typical male indoor sport. And now she has angled her way into the office, and he doesn’t dare do anything about it. Or maybe he doesn’t want to do anything about it.”
    “Why do you have to go to the movies? You know all the plots by heart.”
    She didn’t hear me. “Isn’t it typical, though. Just what a man would do. Be right on the verge of