Mermaids on the Golf Course by Patricia Highsmith Read Free Book Online Page A

maybe even two of Tom’s photos would make it in the afternoon edition of the Evening Star, Craig was thinking. Craig shot up the rest of his roll, aiming at any place—at a cop reassuring an elderly woman, at a girl rushing from a narrow passageway into Main Street where the bus was, and being greeted by a man and woman who might have been her parents.
    Then Craig went home to develop his roll. He lived with his parents in the home where he had been born, a two-story frame house in a modest residential area. Craig had turned his bathroom—itself an adjunct to the house when he had been fifteen—into his darkroom. All his pictures looked dull as could be, worse than he had expected. No action in them, apart from a cluttered street scene of people looking bewildered. Still, Craig presented them at the office of Kyanduck’s Evening Star about half past noon, imagining that Tom Buckley had got there a few minutes earlier and with better photos.
    Ed Simmons bent his balding head over Craig’s ten photographs. The big messy room held seven people at their desks, and there was the usual clatter of typewriters.
    “Got there a little late,” Craig murmured apologetically, not caring if Ed heard him or not.
    “Hey! You got Lizzie Davis? With her folks! —Hey, Craig, this one is great!” Ed Simmons looked up at Craig through horn-rimmed glasses. “We’ll use this one. Just the moment after —running out of that alley! Beautiful!”
    “Didn’t know her name,” Craig said, and wondered why Ed was so excited.
    Ed showed the photo to a man at another desk. Others gathered to look at the picture, which was of a girl of twenty or younger, with long dark hair, her white blouse partly pulled out of her skirt top, looking anxious as she rushed forward towards a man and woman approaching her from Main Street.
    “This is the girl who was nearly raped. Or maybe she even was,” Ed Simmons said to Craig. “Didn’t you know that?”
    Craig certainly hadn’t heard. Raped by whom, he wondered, then the snatches of conversation that he heard enlightened him. The third holdup boy, who was still at large, had dragged Lizzie Davis off the bus and into an alley and threatened to stick a knife in her throat, or to rape her, unless she kept her mouth shut when the police came up the alley. The police hadn’t come up that alley. In the picture, Lizzie’s father, in a pale business suit and straw hat, was just about to touch his daughter’s shoulder, while her mother on the right in the picture rushed towards the girl with both arms spread.
    Now he saw, in the upside-down photo on Ed’s desk, that the girl’s eyes were squeezed shut with horror or fear, and her mouth open as if she were crying or gasping for breath.
    “Was she raped?” Craig asked.
    The reply he got was vague, the implication being that the girl wasn’t telling. So Craig’s photo appeared on page two of the Kyanduck Evening Star that day, and one by Tom Buckley of a local cop with two of the holdup boys on the front page. Both photographs had a two-column spread.
    Craig pointed out the photo to his parents that night at the supper table. Craig didn’t make it every day, or even every week, a photo in the Evening Star or the Kyanduck Morning News. His father knew Ernest Davis, the girl’s father, who was an old customer at Dullop’s Hardware, where Craig’s father was manager.
    Craig received thirty dollars for his picture, which was the going rate for local photographs, no matter what they were, and Craig mentioned this, with modest pride, to his girlfriend Constance O’Leary, who was called Clancy. Craig, twenty-two and ruggedly handsome, had three or four girlfriends, but Clancy was his current favorite. She had curly reddish blonde hair, a marvelous figure, a sense of humor, and she loved to dance.
    “You’re the greatest,” Clancy said, at that moment diving into her first hamburger at the Plainsman Café, just outside of town, where the jukebox