Deadly Welcome by John D. MacDonald Read Free Book Online

had been out. And he had taken them out of the gill net until his arms had been like lead. But it hadn’t done anybody any good. They’d been getting seven cents a pound, but it dropped to five and then three and then a penny, and then you couldn’t get rid of them. And they had been buried under fruit trees and rose bushes all over town.
    The Sunday school picnics had nearly always been at the Proctor cottage where the colonel was now living. And you showed off by swimming out as far as you dared, pretending not to hear the Reverend Mountainberry bellowing at you to come back.
    Up the beach a little farther was where you and Ed Torrance set out all those stone crab traps that year and did so well. And the stone crabs bought that American Flyer bicycle, and Joe Ducklin got so sore because he thought the money should have gone for clothes.
    A vivid world, every inch of it known. And now, as in childhood, the rest of the world did not exist, except as colored maps and faraway names. He had been out into a lot of that world, but now it did not seem real. It was like something he had made up. This was the home place, and the bright borders of it were thosefarthest places you had been when you were a kid. Beyond the borders was a hazy nothingness.
    The Gulf was flat calm, the day strangely still—without thrash of bait fish, or tilting yawp of terns or the busy-legged sandpipers.
    He heard, in the stillness, a distant rumbling of the timbers of the old wooden bridge, and the sound of a rough automotive engine, coming closer, running along the sand and shell road between the cottages and the bay shore. He heard it stop directly behind the cottage. He got up and walked back to the kitchen door and looked out through the screen and saw a battered blue jeep parked next to his old gray Dodge. A sign on the side of the jeep said,
The Larkin Boat Yard and Marina—Ramona, Florida
.
    A girl had gotten out of the jeep. She stood for a moment, looking toward the cottage, and then came toward the back door.

chapter   THREE
    She was a girl of good size and considerable prettiness, and she came swinging toward him, moving well in her blue-jean shorts and a sleeveless red blouse with narrow white vertical stripes and battered blue canvas topsiders. She had been endowed with a hefty wilderness of coarse blond-red hair, now sun-streaked. She was magnificently tanned, but it was the tan of unthinking habitual exposure rather than a pool-side contrivance of oils and careful estimates of basting time.
    She stopped at the foot of the two wooden steps and looked up at him through the screen, and smiled in a polite and distant way. There was, he thought, an interestingsuggestion of the lioness about her face, the pale eyes spaced wide, a sloping heaviness of cheek structure, a wide and minutely savage mouth.
    “I’m sorry to bother you.”
    “Doesn’t bother me a bit. Come on in.”
    She came into the kitchen, a big, strong, vital-looking woman, and when she was on his level he knew that if she were to wear high heels, she would stand eye to eye with him.
    “Myrtle should have remembered this. Mrs. Carney has been letting us use the cottage to change in when it isn’t rented. And we left some stuff out here. Maybe you’ve run across it and wondered about it. Here’s the extra key. I don’t imagine you want a stranger having a key to your castle.”
    “Some castle. I haven’t found anything. I haven’t looked around much.”
    “Just some swimming gear in that little closet off the living room. Suits and fins and masks and towels. I ran into Myrtle on Bay Street and she said she’d just rented it. I’ll get the stuff if it’s all right.”
    “It isn’t going to be in my way. I’m not going to use that closet. As far as I’m concerned, you can leave it right here and come on out with your husband and swim any time you feel like it.”
    “I come out with my brother. We couldn’t impose on you that way, really.”
    And suddenly