Chapter 7
Melody didn't know any Spanish, but Ken Burke's variety was impressively fast. He even indulged in some colloquial banter with the waiter, over and above the business of the menu, and was rewarded with a couple of laughs that seemed genuine. She got the impression that he was showing off for her benefit.
Melody decided not to beat around the bush. As soon as the waiter had gone, leaving a cold beer for Ken and a Cook for herself, she said: "John suspects that you're a notorious Indiana bank robber, in hiding."
"Well, he's only off by four or five hundred miles," Ken laughed. "I come from Kansas, originally."
"That doesn't answer the bank robber part," said Melody, who was certain that he wasn't; but would rather have liked it if he was.
"He wouldn't be much of a novelist if he didn't have a vivid imagination," Ken parried.
It interested her that he knew what John did; she supposed some local gossip had told him, perhaps the agent who had rented him his house. But it didn't answer her question, so she said: "And what do you do?"
"I loaf and invite my soul. No-don't get mad," he said hastily, even though she wasn't. "I'm a construction engineer. I've been working on a highway In Brazil for the past three years, and-well, I just don't feel like working for a while, that's all."
The gazpacho arrived. Ken made a production out of tasting it and commenting on it, perhaps to distract her from further questions, but Melody was not easily distracted. When he ran out of things to say about what was to her just a bowl of cold tomato soup, she said:
"It still seems odd that a young, good-looking man with probably a lot of money to spend would hole up in a godforsaken place like this. I mean, if you're really nuts for Florida, why not go to Miami, or Fort Lauderdale, and pick up girls, and all that?"
"Well, thanks for the young and good-looking. That'll give me some comfort tonight when I take my daily ration of Geritol."
"Be serious."
He threw up his hands in mock surrender. "Okay, okay. If I was looking for wild nightlife, I'd go back to some of those construction camps in the jungle. I was tired. Worn out. I felt like being alone for a while, getting in some fishing and swimming, and this looked like a good place to do it. Satisfied?"
"You make me sound like a district attorney," Melody protested mildly. "I was just trying to put you at ease by getting you to talk about yourself. That's what it says you should do in all the teenage advice columns I read."
Ken smiled wryly. "I'll bet you read more substantial things than that. How come you call your father 'John'?"
"What?"
"I was just trying to put you at ease," he chuckled. "You know, I haven't told him, but I'm his biggest fan. I've read everything he's written. I particularly-"
"Not everything," she interrupted.
"Hm? I thought I kept pretty good track of them. He's written a dozen books, hasn't he?"
"Plus fifty that you never heard about. He used to write pornographic novels under pen names like Dick Strong and Rod Harder until he started selling stuff under his own name. I Was Daddy's Darling, by Katya Roksoff-I bet you never heard of that one, huh?"
He shook his head, smiling uncertainly. "I'll be darned," he said. The revelation seemed to make him uncomfortable, and he said, "How do you like the food?"
"It's hot," she said. She'd just begun to eat a tamale, and it was making her eyes water.
"It's supposed to be. This is really not such a bad place. Your mother died in Mexico, didn't she?"
"How did you know that?"
"I'm sorry. The thought just popped into my head. I shouldn't have blurted it out like that."
"It doesn't bother me. I was just a kid then, nine or ten. But what I want to know is, how did you find out about it?"
"Some article I read about your father. How did you happen to be there?"
"Well, backpacking was just starting to get popular. John thought it would be a good gimmick for selling a travel article, backpacking with the whole family through the Yucatan Peninsula, looking at the old ruins and all like that. He even had a contract, I think, from some magazine. But it turned out to be more than we could handle. And then Mama caught the jungle rot, and that was the end of it."
He looked sincerely troubled when he said, "You talk about it in a very offhand way."
Melody had learned that she could fluster Ken by smiling, so she smiled. "I'm sorry if I sound hard-hearted, Ken, but it was a long time ago. I hardly remember her. And the things that I do remember aren't very nice."
"I didn't mean to criticize. It's none of my business," he murmured, looking flustered.
"I ought to make you understand, though. One of my earliest memories of Mama-there was some kind of commotion downstairs. It was late at night. I went out to the front door and she was out there in her nightgown, cleaning off the steps with a toothbrush, and Daddy-I used to call him Daddy when I was little-was trying to get her back into the house."
"I-" Ken began, even more flustered.
"No, let me explain," Melody said, neatly putting down her fork. "I didn't understand it, of course, so from the beginning it just scared me, scared the hell out of me, and alienated her from me, so that I just couldn't relate to her as a mother. Even when she was well-which was most of the time, really, but I could never know when she'd start acting strangely again. Like the time I found out she'd burned all my dolls in the fireplace. I must have been six then, or seven. Later the spells got worse, and more frequent, and she would disappear for days, and sometimes John would have to go and pick her up in some awful place, some cheap motel where he'd been having a fistfight with somebody she picked up in a bar."
"Please," he said, now more pained than simply flustered.
"But then, before we went to Yucatan, she'd had one of her good spells for a long time. I don't remember this myself, not entirely, just pieces of it, but John's talked about it when I've asked him to. Anyway, the hike was supposed to be like the beginning of a new life. Back to nature. Fresh air. All that. Those were things that Mama liked when she was well. Knit the family closer together. I don't know, I'm babbling, aren't I? Well. It didn't work that way. She started going off the deep end again, out in the middle of nowhere. We had already started for the nearest town, which was about twenty miles away, when she came down with a fever. She couldn't walk, and John couldn't carry her, and by the time he got help back there, she was dead. So I'm sorry if I don't sound all broken up about it."
"I'm sorry, Melody. I really am."
She wondered what he was sorry for: having brought up the subject, or for the death of her mother. She decided not to ask. She believed she'd ended on just the proper note, leaving him in just the right state of confusion and embarrassment. She returned to her tamales, confident that her face was giving nothing away.
She'd told him just how it had happened, but she hadn't told him all of it. They'd set out for help early in the morning, she and John, but they'd progressed at a leisurely pace. Toward noon they'd stopped. To gather flowers. It had been a strange afternoon, wandering in the jungle, picking flowers. John had seemed in a sad mood. She'd known what was going on, but she hadn't questioned it, not then and not since. It had been the thing to do.
They camped out that night, got a late start the next morning, and didn't reach the smelly village with its roofs of galvanized iron until evening. It wasn't until the next afternoon that John and the stretcher-bearers got back to the place where they'd left her and by that time, of course, she was dead.
"He married again, didn't he?"
Melody glanced at him sharply. She thought she'd succeeded admirably in getting him off the subject of her father, but he was apparently not to be deterred.
"Yes. To a woman named Leila Byrnes. We never got along very well."
"Well, I can see I've offended you with my curiosity. All I can say is that I've fallen out of the habit of making small talk with beautiful young American ladies."
She wasn't offended. But she knew that almost everybody misread her face, seeing coldness or hostility when her feelings were merely neutral. What he had done was to further pique her curiosity about his motives.
"I spoke shortly about Leila because I don't have much to say about her."
"I'm interested in her," he said, smiling, "because I'm interested in your father. You don't know what it's like, spending three years in a stinking jungle, speaking and thinking in Portuguese, and then finding a book in your own language that sort of seizes you and takes you right out of your day-to-day concerns. Your father's books were like that. So I read all the articles about him that I could get. And then, by chance, I found myself living next door to him. So, I thought I might get to know him, satisfy some of my curiosity. Well-it all sounds sort of dumb, doesn't it, when I lay it all out like that?"
"Sort of," Melody agreed maliciously. "If you could hear him bitching and moaning about his work, and sneering at the people that he imagines read his stuff, then you might feel differently. It might do him good to talk to you. He pictures his typical reader as a forty-year-old ribbon clerk in Des Moines who has sweaty palms and bad breath and would like to lead a life of romantic adventure, only he has a wife and three kids who won't let him. And now here's you, with a mahogany tan and steely eyes, just back from building bridges with your bare hands in the Amazon jungle, and you get off on his books."
Ken laughed hard, so hard that he drew the eyes of everyone in the place.
"You're wonderful," he said. "I think you've inherited some of your father's way with words."
Ken had paid the check, and now he led her from the restaurant, taking her arm lightly. She'd noted with approval that he'd had only one bottle of beer with his meal. John had a tendency to get sloshed in restaurants. There was a lot about Ken that she approved of. She liked his looks. She liked his attentive manner. She liked the certainty with which he moved, the way he filled up the space he occupied.
The one thing she didn't like was the way he'd turned the tables on her, asking all the questions when she'd hoped to do just that. Perhaps she could still remedy this.
He held open the passenger's door of his nondescript rental sedan. "We have time yet before you turn into a pumpkin," he said. "Would you like to go for a drive?"
"Of course," she said brightly, and that seemed to fluster him again.
While he strolled to the driver's side, she undid three buttons of her blue chambray shirt. She hadn't made up her mind yet whether she would entice him into fucking her, but she was inclined to think that she would.
She found him attractive, but that was only part of it. She'd met other attractive men, and yet she'd never been unfaithful to John. But she was very angry with John this evening: for his possessive attitude toward her while he was at the same time fawning over Carol. And Carol had made it clear, by urging John to let her go with Ken, that she couldn't get rid of her fast enough. She knew what she and John were doing now, back home.
But Ken's attractiveness and her anger with John and Carol didn't account entirely for the sexual itch she felt. Much of it was due to the fooling around-that's how she thought of it- that she'd done with Carol today. It had been an amusing diversion, amusing mostly for the impact it had had on Carol, but it hadn't been satisfying. It had been like trying to fill herself on dainty hors d'oeuvres. She still hungered for the main course. John, of course, would be exhausted by the time she got home.
They had been driving for a while on the landward side of the bay. Maybe Ken didn't know it, but the street they were now traveling had been dead-ended by the construction of the causeway. Boatyards lined the street to the right, a few fishermen's bars and bait and tackle shops stood in the marshland to the left. Maybe he did know it. She didn't tell him.
"Are you still angry?"
She laughed. "I never was."
"You seem thoughtful."
"You reminded me of things to think about. I hadn't thought about them for a long time."
"You've used that phrase before, 'a long time,' 'a long time ago.' Jesus. A long time, to me, is twenty years, but that's longer than you've lived. Has your life been that dull?"
"Not at all. But it's about to get exciting, when you drive into the bay."
"Huh?"
"Look where you're going."
"Oh. Yeah. I guess this really shows me up for a tourist, doesn't it," Ken said, braking at the barrier across the road. Instead of turning, he cut the engine and the lights.
"Or something."
"I'll take you home now, if you want."
"I didn't say that. Give me a cigarette."
She expected him to reach for her, but he didn't. He stayed scrupulously to his side of the seat as he offered her a cigarette and lit it. She moved closer to him.
"It's the generation gap," she said. "That "long time' business."
"Funny, I don't notice that with you. Any gap. You seem awfully grown up. I find myself forgetting how old you are, just not noticing it."
"That could get you in trouble" she said, stretching her arms back, letting her unbuttoned blouse gape a little.
He cleared his throat. He shot her a glance that seemed nervous. Maybe he'd been in the jungle too long. Maybe he'd acquired a taste for heavy equipment operators. She wondered.
He surprised her by saying: "You were telling me about Leila."
"No, I wasn't, but what the hell. She was from Kansas, too. You did say you were from Kansas? She was outgoing and effervescent. And I'm not. So we didn't get along-no, I won't say that. We just didn't become very close, that's all."
"She died of some strange fever too, didn't she?"
"There was nothing strange about it. Twenty other people died of it at around the same time. It's called viral encephalitis. Mosquitoes carry it. Mostly it kills horses, but some strains of it kill human beings, too."
"You seem to know a lot about it."
"There was a lot about it in the papers. And I was kind of interested, because it did kill my stepmother, after all."
"I've read about it, too. Mostly it kills children, or very old people who can't resist it."
"But not all the time. Obviously. This subject is kind of depressing. Do you mind?"
She inched a little closer. Still he made no move to touch her.
He asked: "Do you love your father?"
What the hell! It was with some difficulty that she maintained her composure and said, in a neutral voice, "He's a father."
Now, at last, he slipped his arm around her shoulders and clasped her right arm. He stated: "He beats you, doesn't he."
So that was it. She looked away from him, out the window. A big cruiser was churning close by, blotting out the far-off lights of Lunalia Beach as it passed close inshore. She saw it before she heard the throb of its engines coming across the still water.
"I hear you sometimes," he said. "It seems ... well, it's none of my business-"
"Oh, Ken," she sobbed, turning and burying her face in his shoulder.
"Hey. Hey. Hey, now. It's okay," he said, patting her shoulder while she squirmed closer, gluing herself to his body.
"Ken."
The awkward patting motion became a rubbing, a stroking that progressed down her spine. She made herself shiver at infrequent intervals, and he drew her closer, as if for warmth.
"It's all right, baby. It's okay."
As if by accident, she let her hand brush his crotch. His cock was as stiff as a board. She smiled into the secret darkness of his shoulder and let out another shuddering sob.
She lifted her face to his. As she expected he would, he kissed her; but unexpectedly, he did it almost savagely, violently. He held her so hard that her ribs began to hurt, but she did nothing to discourage him. Her lips parted after a moment, as if reluctantly, and she managed to shrug her shirt wider open until she knew that one of her breasts was bare. His stroking hand soon encountered it and captured it.
No longer pretending that her touch was accidental, Melody slid her hand to his prick and began stroking it through the tightly stretched material of his jeans. It wasn't long before the cloth over the bulging head grew wet.
He broke off the kiss and stared at her. He seemed alarmed.
"We can't ... " His voice trailed off as he took his hand from her breast and made a clumsy effort to rearrange her blouse.
Melody thwarted his efforts by undoing the final buttons and shrugging out of the blouse entirely. "Of course we can," she said. "Don't you like me?"
"Like you? Jesus, I want you so bad it hurts. I haven't been able to sleep at night since the first time I saw you. I ... you've been driving me nuts."
"Then don't be silly," she said, snuggling against him again and trying to renew their kiss.
He avoided kissing her, but he seemed not to notice that she was deftly unbuckling his belt.
"Wait a minute. Wait. It's wrong. You're just a kid, I'm old enough to be your father. And it's unfair to you. Just because your father beats you and keeps you on a tight leash, you shouldn't give yourself to the first guy that comes along. I like you-I don't want to take advantage of your rotten home life."
He seemed to notice for the first time that she was trying to take his pants off. He made an effort to keep her from pulling down his zipper, but she was determined, and he was reluctant to use sufficient force.
"You're not taking advantage of me. I want you because I want you," she said, and this time he didn't try hard enough to avoid meeting her eager lips.
She slid her hand between Ken's hard belly and the elastic of his undershorts. The shorts were slimy with the ooze from his cock. Soon her hand was encircling the hard, swollen circumference of his hot tool. The promptness and intensity of his arousal aroused her, too; it was far more pleasing to her than any of his awkward verbal compliments had been.
Having paid his respects to conventional morality, Ken was now willing to assist nature in taking its course. He undid her jeans and peeled them down over her hips with her underpants. She shrugged and wiggled to assist him while she continued to work on his clothing.
When she was fully naked, sprawled half in his lap, he thought to make a nervous survey of their surroundings. There was some activity at a bar a few hundred yards back down the road, but immediately around them was only darkness and the night sounds of the marsh, the hum and whir of traffic on the causeway almost above them.
He laughed at his own nervousness. "I Haven't made out in a car since-since I was eighteen, I guess."
"I never did. Do we have to get in the back seat?"
He gave her a cautious look. "You have ... done it ... "before, haven't you?"
"That's a hell of a question to ask a beautiful young lady like you said I was. Anyway, what's the difference?"
"I don't want to-I mean, I don't want you to do anything, you know, drastic, because this ... " we ... that is, ... "
"Try it in Portuguese," she said, giving his cock a sudden, brisk rub. "You're saying that this isn't very important between us, ships that pass and all that stuff, and I shouldn't let you bust my cherry on such short acquaintance. Is that what's bothering you?"
He looked acutely uncomfortable and made some tentative attempts at speech.
"Don't let it bother you," she concluded, taking his hand and directing it down between her thighs.
He kissed her again. His fingertips stroked her pussy lightly, maddeningly. She pressed his hand down much more firmly, encouraging him to rub her clitoris hard. Irregular spasms began to contract the muscles of her belly. She kissed him so hard that their teeth clicked together almost painfully. She could feel her hot juices percolating out around his fingers as he probed and caressed and fondled her bare cunt.
"No, we don't have to go in the back," he muttered.
He slid from under the steering wheel and took her in his lap as he moved to the passenger's side. He guided her to straddle his thighs with her knees as she faced him. She reached down to take his prick in her hand and direct it upward as she sank down on it. She felt it pushing the petals of her cunt apart, then slipping it easily. She wiggled all the way down, sighing.
"Figuring out things like this, I guess that's one of the advantages of being an engineer, huh?"
He laughed as he shifted around to make sure every last inch of his cock was inside her. "I'll have to show you how to do it in a Volkswagen sometime," he murmured, his lips brushing her throat as he kissed his way down to her breasts.
"Show me how to do it here," she sighed, beginning to grind her hips in a slow orbit around the hard, upright axis of his prick. She groaned as she felt it slipping and tickling and rubbing inside her pulsing vagina.
He was scratching all the itches that had been inaccessible to Carol's tongue and fingers, the hungers that the older woman had merely intensified. When his lips touched her nipples, she felt a shock-wave of pleasure that seemed to vibrate straight down to her tingling cunt.
He eased up and down against the seat of the car, his movements somewhat cramped by his position but nonetheless delightful to her. He twisted from side to side, adding a corkscrewing motion to the straight up and down movements of his bulging cock. His hands gripped her ass, raising and lowering her on he hot, slippery pillar of flesh that filled her up.
Melody had noticed that his prick wasn't as big as John's, but that happily proved to be no impediment to her enjoyment. Once it was inside her, it seemed entirely big enough for the job it was doing. Her position, too, allowed her to take it in just as deep as she possibly could. Having read John's dirty books, she'd always imagined that an oversized cock was the principal requirement for a girl's satisfaction, and she was delighted to find that this wasn't true.
She lavished every bit of her precocious skill on Ken's prick, clutching it and rubbing in the slithery confines of her agile cunt. John had often told her that she had an almost superhuman talent for fucking, that she had muscles in her cunt that other girls just hadn't heard about, and she was determined to give Ken the full benefit of her ability. She could tell by the tightening clutch of his fingers, by his sharp gasps of pleasure and surprise, by his efforts to drive his cock ever deeper into her clasping quim, that she was succeeding.
Even though she was able to calculate the effect of what she was doing to him, her calculation was far from cold ... She had set out to entice him deliberately, almost dispassionately, but now every tingling nerve and straining sinew of her body was involved in this hot, slathering fuck. She knew that she was going to come if only he could hold out a little longer, and it exhilarated her to know that even a man she didn't particularly care about could take her to such breathtaking heights of pleasure.
She pushed and pulled and humped ever more vigorously, and he matched her desires with his ever-harder thrusts and twists. The springs of the seat creaked, mingling with their gasps and the squishing sounds of their fucking to create what seemed like an overpowering din in the close confines of the car.
He increased the tempo, surging ahead of her, vibrating his stiff prick wildly inside the scalding, syrupy bath of her quim. She felt herself dissolving, becoming a part of the wave that was sweeping her away, riding to its crest and exploding in a surge of dazzling foam. Only by a supreme effort of will did she hold back the screams that threatened to rip themselves out of her throat, the howls of passion that would have told Ken exactly what he'd been overhearing when he'd thought that John was beating her. But she couldn't restrain the whimpers and moans and deep-throated groans that bubbled up from the depths of her being as she felt his hot seed spurting and spattering inside her and felt the pulsing of her vagina like a gigantic heart.
Once it was over, Ken began to worry again about discovery. He put his clothes on hastily, urged her to do the same, but she took her time about it.
He seemed not only worried but embarrassed, and at last he said with a wry smile: "I feel kind of foolish. Worrying about your virginity."
"So now that you know I'm a wicked woman, are you going to make me walk home?"
His look was pained, almost anguished. "I didn't mean that! My God, Melody, I only meant to say that I've never had a girl like you before-you were just wonderful-and I feel-well, inadequate, I guess."
"You did just fine," she said, leaning over to kiss the angle of his jaw, "I wasn't faking, you know."
Now that they were dressed, he made no move to start up the car. She could sense that there was something he wanted to tell her, but that he had strong reservations about doing so. She decided not to say anything, but she held his hand, a deliberately planned gesture of intimacy. That seemed to tip the balance. He squeezed her hand and said: "Melody ... "
"What's wrong, Ken?"
"I don't know where to start, but I guess I've got to start somewhere. I'm not exactly what I seem to be."
He paused, as if expecting some kind of prompting. She squeezed his hand again, and that seemed to satisfy him.
"The thing is, when I set out to do this, I never expected to meet somebody like you, somebody that I'd ... get involved with. It's been eating me up for two years, this thing I set out to do, and now it's all confused. On account of you. I just don't know what to do anymore, but I guess the first thing I have to do is to level with you."
He studied her face for a moment. She returned his gaze. He apparently found whatever he was looking for in her eyes, and then he announced, "My name isn't Burke, Melody, it's Byrnes. Leila Byrnes was my sister."
She had seen that one coming a mile away, but she widened her eyes slightly and stared at him with what she hoped would look like amazement.
"But why? Why didn't you just introduce yourself?" she asked.
"This is hard for me to say to you, Melody. I never would have told you at all if I hadn't found out how your father treats you. I think it's wonderful that you can still be so ... so loyal to him, despite that. But what I have to say now, this is just between you and me. Understood?"
"All right, Ken, I won't tell John, if that's what you mean, but-"
"I'm certain that he murdered my sister," he interrupted.
"Ken! That's just not true."
"I know it's an awful accusation to make, honey. I'm not making it lightly. My sister was twenty-four when she died. She'd always been healthy, active, vital-effervescent and outgoing, those were the words you used. And yet she succumbed to a disease that generally claimed only infants and old people, or those who already had some chronic illness. In record time, too, something like six hours. The symptoms were more consistent with strychnine poisoning than they were with encephalitis."
"But the coroner-"
"That's just the point I was going to make. The coroner was an undertaker by trade-an elected official with no medical training whatsoever. I got the tip-off from one of your father's own books, where a character murders his wife because he knows he can get away with it under that kind of elected coroner system. No autopsy was performed in the book, either, and the victim was cremated-just as in real life. Putting it in a book like that, it's an extreme example of the kind of vanity that all murderers have."
"But-why? They got along fine, Ken. It wasn't as if she was rich or anything ..."
"She had a five thousand dollar insurance policy, and from what I've found out about your father's circumstances at that time, it was enough to commit murder for. But there you're presupposing a rational motive, and maybe there just wasn't any. Why did Bluebeard kill his wives?"
"Wives?"
Ken sighed. He stared out through the windshield for a long moment. Then he turned back to her and said: "You told me you don't remember that trip to Yucatan very well, Melody. Could it be possible that what killed your mother wasn't a fever at all? Isn't it possible that your father didn't go for help as quickly as he might have, or that he went for it by a roundabout way? And there again, there was no autopsy."
"I remember that much about it, Ken. We went for help as quickly and directly as possible. And my mother did have a fever, I know that."
"I don't want to contradict you, Melody, but maybe a nine-year-old isn't the best kind of witness on those points. And from what you told me this evening, your father had even more of a motive than money-and in your mother's case, there was some money involved, too."
"But even if any of this is true, Ken-and honestly, I just don't believe it-what do you hope to accomplish by coming on like an undercover agent?"
"I don't know, baby, I really don't know," Ken said, shaking his head slowly. "Maybe I knew when I came here. I had the sort of idea you mentioned, being an undercover agent, a detective, but I've found out that it just isn't my line of work. I hoped to catch him off guard, to uncover some kind of evidence. Mainly I just wanted to see him and find out what kind of a man he really is. I think I've found that out. I found it out when I first heard those screams coming out of your house."
"You aren't going to ... to ... "
"Kill him? I thought about that a lot, down in Brazil. I thought about it a lot more when I came back here and started to piece the story together. I bought a gun. I've still got it-but ... No, Melody, to answer your question honestly, I can't kill him. I don't even feel anger anymore, for the past few months I've just felt a sort of dull sickness inside. Until tonight. Until I found you."
They stared into each other's eyes for a long time, and then Melody permitted him to kiss her.