Deadly Welcome by John D. MacDonald Read Free Book Online Page A

he knew the reason why she had seemed so curiously familiar to him. She was Jenna, cut from a bolder pattern. And more forthright than sensuous, more grave than mischievous. He wondered why he had been so slow to recognize the obvious.
    “Aren’t you Betty Larkin?”
    “Yes, and I’ve seen you before. A long time ago. And I just can’t remember. Myrtle didn’t tell me your name.”
    “Doyle. Alex Doyle.”
    Her eyes widened and she lifted her hand to her throat. “Of course! Of course! And you haven’t changed so terribly much. Golly, I had such a horrible crush on you, I don’t see how I could have possibly forgotten.” Her color deepened under her tan.
    “This isn’t flattering, Betty, but I just can’t remember you at all. I knew Jenna, of course. And I can remember Buddy a little bit. But you’re a blank.”
    “I used to go into Ducklin’s and make a lemon dope last just about forever. But the big football hero wouldn’t have had any time for eleven-year-olds. Oh, I was a living doll, Alex. Nearly as tall as I am now, and I looked like something made out of broomsticks. We went to all the home games and some of the out of town ones. Every time they wrote anything about you in the
Davis Journal
, I’d cut it out and paste it in a book. With appropriate comments in my diary. Isn’t it crazy the things kids do?”
    “It sure is. But I’m flattered anyhow.”
    “Have you been in town long?”
    “Just since mid-morning. Haven’t seen anybody to talk to except Judge Ellandon. Sat with him in Ducklin’s and got a briefing on the local picture. I can’t offer a lemon dope, but the beer I bought ought to have a chill on it by now.”
    “Sounds good. Right out of the can or bottle, please.”
    He opened two cans of beer and they took them out onto the small screened porch. She asked him what he’d been doing, and he told her just what he’d told the judge. And then, as though sensing what he’d most want to know, she began to talk of his friends. Who had married and who had died and who had moved away. Who had children and who had been divorced. Having an older brother and sister had given Betty a better working knowledge of his age group than she would otherwise have had. There were only a very few names he could recall that she could not tell him about.
    He was astonished that so many of them had movedaway. When she started to tell him about Jody Burch he said, “I heard about that. Junie was in Ducklin’s with a woman named Kathy Hubbard. She told me about Jody. It’s a damn shame. And then, all of a sudden, she remembered the dirt about me. And got a little nasty and took off.”
    “Junie is a terrible pill, Alex. Too bad Billy Hillyard ever married her. She’s full of virtue and civic works, but the truth is her home and her kids bore her. That’s why she’s on so many committees.”
    He said, into the sudden silence, “Well, when the big hero fell off the pedestal, it sure must have raised hell with your diary.”
    She grinned at him. It was a good grin that slanted her eyes and wrinkled the tan nose. “It blighted my life. I was your valiant defender, Alex. I got in more darn kicking, scratching, snarling, hair-yanking fights over you. I couldn’t
bear
to have anybody call you names.”
    “But I guess they did.”
    “They certainly did. You were drinking and you weren’t used to drinking, and you’d never been in trouble before. I couldn’t understand why people were so … vicious about it.”
    “Don’t you know, really?”
    “No,” she said, frowning.
    “I was Bert Doyle’s kid. A kid from Chaney’s Bayou which was just about a half step better than Bucket Bay. I was from down there where they throw the trash and garbage off the front stoop into the bay, down there where they fish all week and get stinking drunk on Saturday night. My old man and my brother drowned in the Gulf and my old lady scrubbed in the kitchen at the Ramona Hotel until she died, and it was too damn