BLACKWATER: V THE FORTUNE is an original publication of Avon Books. This work has never before appeared in book form. Front cover illustration by Wayne D. Barlowe AVON BOOKS A division of The Hearst Corporation 959 Eighth Avenue New York, New York 10019 Copyright © 1983 by Michael McDowell Published by arrangement with the author Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 82-90537 ISBN: 0-380-82784-0 All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever except as provided by the U. S. Copyright Law. For information address The Otte Company, 9 Goden Street, Belmont, Massachusetts 02178 First Avon Printing, May, 1983 AVON TRADEMARK REG. U. S. PAT. OFF. AND IN OTHER COUNTRIES, MARCA REGISTRADA, HECHO EN U. S. A. Printed in the U. S. A. . WFH 10 987654321 Our story 'til now... In THE WAR, Volume IV of the BLACKWATER saga, Elinor presides successfully over the Caskey family fortunes. Thanks to skillful management and the increased production demands of World War II, the Caskey sawmill prospers as never before. And, after Mary-Love's death, the family enjoys unprecedented peace among its members. Elinor and Oscar's two daughters, Frances and Miriam, form a tentative bond, and each finds a happiness previously unknown. Feeling accepted at last by her mother, Miriam returns to Perdido after a brief, unhappy stint at college, and begins working in the Caskey offices. Soon she rises to second-in-command there, having proved herself an astonishingly keen businesswoman. Frances falls in love with a soldier stationed in town, Billy Bronze, and Elinor is delighted to sanction their marriage. Oscar's uncle, James, forms a close friendship with his dead wife's sister, Queenie, and devotes himself to raising her son Danjo until Danjo must go off to war. By the time he dies of a heart attack, James has spent many contented hours visiting his grandson, Tommy Lee, in the farmhouse in northern Florida where his daughter, Grace, has settled down in a loving alliance with Queenie's daughter, Lucille. But even in the midst of so much happiness, events occur to mar the peace. Malcolm, Queenie's juvenile delinquent son, robs a country store, and has to flee town to escape the eventual wrath of his partner in crime, Travis Gann. Frances, after the terrible revenge she exacts one summer evening on the rapist of her cousin Lucille, must face her uncanny kinship with the dark side of her mother's nature. So disturbing is the revelation, that she thinks she must not marry, but Elinor reassures her. The town is horrified by the hideous fate of the rapist, and further disturbed by the inexplicable disappearance of two of its young men, which occurs shortly before Elinor returns to Perdido following a mysterious absence. Perdido, Alabama pop. 1,200 SITE OF LEVEE NAA 1. OSCAR & ELINOR CASKEY'S HOME 2. MARY-LOVE CASKEY'S HOME 3. JAMES CASKEY'S HOME 4 DeBORDENAVES HOME 5 TURK S HOME TO GULF OF MEXICO CHAPTER 58 Assessment All the Caskeys sincerely mourned the death of James Caskey. Though the man had been old and frail, no one had imagined that he would ever die. He had been the oldest of the clan, though never in any sense its leader. Perhaps if he had been in a more exalted position, everyone would have wondered, Who'll take over when James is gone? But in fact, with his death there was no reshuffling of state and station, only an acknowledgment of the emptiness he had left behind. Queenie was the one who felt most alone, and everyone treated her as if she had been a widow rather than James's sister-in-law. Her son Danjo was now married, but stuck in Germany with his German wife, unable to return because of difficulties with immigration—or so he wrote to his mother. Queen-ie's daughter Lucille had turned into the perfect "farm wife" and had no use for a life in town with her mother. Her elder boy Malcolm, whom she hadn't seen since he ran away in 1938, she presumed to be dead. The often volatile Lucille, in a sympathetic frame of mind, said, "Ma, come out to the Pond and live with Grace and Tommy Lee and me." Queenie merely shook her head, and wiped away a tear. Sister said, "Queenie, come next door and put up in Mary-Love's old room. I need me some company with Miriam over at the mill all day." Queenie silently declined. Elinor said, "You know you're welcome with us." Queenie turned down all offers, and at last ventured a diffident request: "Would it be all right if I just stayed on here? And took care of all James's old stuff? He loved this house so much!" After a minimum of discussion, the family decided that it was the perfect solution, and Queenie's old house a few blocks away, which for a couple of years had been vacant most of the time, was sold. James's daughter Grace had assumed that her father would leave the whole of his fortune to her— that was the way of the Caskeys—and she had been trying to figure out how best to distribute portions of that wealth to those who had been dear to her father. She was relieved at the reading of the will to discover that this would not be necessary. Except for some small bequests to his cook Roxie and to the Methodist Church of Perdido, James's entire fortune was divided equally among Queenie, Danjo, and Grace. The trouble was, no one knew the extent of James's fortune. Yet this lack of knowledge proved to be the solution to another Caskey problem. Ever since Billy Bronze and Frances Caskey had got married, Billy had had a great deal of time on his hands, particularly after he was released from the Air Corps. He volunteered his services to the local Veterans Administration office and four evenings a week taught radio and accounting to ex-servicemen who drifted 10 back to Perdido. But most of the time Billy felt useless, left alone all day with the women while his father-in-law Oscar and his sister-in-law Miriam went off to the bustling mill. He had declined an offer to work at the mill because he knew nothing of the lumber business. He understood that Oscar had made the job proposal only out of charity. Miriam, speaking with greater candor, had said: "We'll be glad to put you on the payroll as long as you promise not to go out and get in everybody's way." Billy wanted not only to work, but to work at something useful. Frances, however, liked having her husband at home all day. She enjoyed the fact that he could drive her to Pensacola for an afternoon movie or down to Mobile for some shopping. But she saw also that he was restless. One morning in the winter of 1946, as Frances and Billy lay in bed together, Frances turned to her husband and said, "Maybe Miriam could find you a place in the office at the mill. I know you don't know anything about trees, and you don't like working out-of-doors, but you're fine with a pencil and an adding machine." "No, no," protested Billy, "don't do that! Please don't say anything to Miriam!" "Why not?" asked Frances, puzzled. "Just think for a minute," said Billy. "Just think how hard Miriam works at that mill." "She runs it!" said Miriam's sister proudly. "That's just it," nodded Billy. "Now what do you think would happen if I suddenly started to show up there every day?" "You'd help her run it better." Billy shook his head. "No, no. Don't forget that I'm a Caskey now. So if I went to work in that office, people would start coming to me because I'm older— and because I'm a man. Pretty soon I'd have more power than Miriam, not because I was any better than her at it, but just because I was a man. Miriam 11 knows that, and she doesn't want me there. And I don't blame her for one minute." "You think that's what would happen?" "I know it," returned Billy definitely. "I am not going to interfere with your sister. She has worked long and hard. But," said Billy, taking Frances in his arms, and pressing her head against his bare chest, "maybe what I could do..." "What?" "I could keep books. That's what I do best." "But you just said that you didn't want to interfere—" "I'm not talking about the mill," said Billy. "I'm talking about keeping books for the family, being a kind of personal accountant for everybody." "You think you could do that? Daddy says that everything's so confused." "I could do it without giving it a second thought. I inherited that from my father. Keeping books is how he made all his money. He was so good at it. At night he'd go down to his office and look through the books for ten minutes. Next day he'd go out and make five thousand dollars. I never saw anything like it." Frances was so excited by the idea that she pulled her husband out of bed and hurried him down to the breakfast room. She then insisted that he explain his proposal to Elinor and Oscar. "Let me look things over," Billy said. "We ought to be able to figure out just what everybody's got. It wouldn't be a bad thing to find out what kind of shape you're all in." "Not a bad idea," said Oscar, "but I don't know where to tell you to begin, everything's so mixed up. See, we did pretty badly in the first years of the Depression and pretty well during the war. Then everybody was dying for a while, and there were wills to contend with, and who left what to who, and people borrowing from each other, and I don't know what all else. The way it works now is if somebody 12 needs some money they go to Miriam, and Miriam writes a check." "It shouldn't be that way," said Billy. "That's nothing against Miriam, but everybody should know exactly what they've got. That way nobody's going to feel cheated, and—believe me—you'll all make more money." Elinor appeared to like this idea, and asked: "What do you need?" "I need to see whatever you've got—papers, wills, deeds, bank...
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