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On the burnt-out end of an August afternoon, following a summer of drought and fish kills and dried-out marshland that was turning to ceramic, I drove down to the tip of Cypremort Point with a young uniformed deputy named Sean McClain, who had seven months’ experience in law enforcement and still believed in the human race and woke up each day with birdsong in his head. He had been raised in a small town on the Louisiana–Arkansas line and had an accent like someone twanging a bobby pin.
At five a.m. the same day, we had received three 911 calls about a woman screaming from somewhere at the southern end of the Point. One caller said the scream came from a lighted cabin cruiser. The other callers were unsure. The sun was up when the responding deputy arrived. Nobody at the docks or boathouses had heard or seen anything unusual. I could have written the entire incident off, but any time three people report a scream, they’re calling not about a sound but about a memory that lives in the collective unconscious, one that goes back to the cave. When we are alarmed to the degree that we have to tell others about it, we’re dipping into a primal knowledge about the darker potential of the gene pool. Or at least this has always been my belief.
I pointed out Desmond’s house to Sean.
“That’s where that famous movie guy lives at?” he said. “That’s something else, isn’t it?” I’m sure what he said contained a message, but I had no idea what it was.
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sp; “Yep, that’s where he lives part of the year,” I said.
“Is he one of them Hollywood liberals?”
“Ask him. If he’s home, I’ll introduce you.”
“No kidding.”
“But let’s do some work first.”
“You bet,” he said. He looked earnestly out the side window at the camps and the palm trees and the oaks hung with Spanish moss. “What are we looking for, anyway?”
“If you see a dead person facedown on the beach, that’ll be a clue.”
I parked the cruiser on the roadside, and we walked down to the water’s edge. The tide was on its way out, the strip of sandy beach slick and rilling with water and tiny crustaceans in the sunrise, the bay glittering like a bronze shield. We walked to the end of the Point, then five hundred yards back north. I saw a tennis shoe floating upside down in the froth. I picked it up and shook out the sand and water. It was lime green, with blue stripes on it, size seven.
“Bag it?” Sean asked. He was slender, over six feet, his shoulders as rectangular as coat-hanger wire inside his shirt, his stomach as flat as a plank. There was an innocence in his face I hoped he would never lose.
“Why not?” I said.
We walked into Desmond’s yard and mounted the double flight of wood steps to his front door. I had not seen Desmond in years and wondered if it was wise to invite the past back into my life or into his. I rang the chimes. In retrospect, I wish I had not.
• • •
THE HOUSE WAS L-shaped and built of teak and oak, with spacious rooms and sliding glass doors and a widow’s peak and a railed deck like the fantail on a ship. The sun was a red ember in the west, the clouds orange and purple, a water spout twisting as brightly as spun glass on the horizon. Desmond shook my hand, his grip relaxed and cool, with no sign of the power it actually contained. “You look good, Dave. I have a roast on the rotisserie. You and your young friend, please join me.”
“I’m a big admirer of your films, Mr. Cormier,” Sean said.
“Then you came to the right place,” Desmond replied.
Sean could not have looked happier. Desmond closed the door behind us. There were potted plants all over the house. The rug was two inches thick, the furniture made from blond driftwood, the chairs and couches fitted with big leather cushions, an onyx-black piano by the sliding glass doors, a Martin guitar and a golden tenor sax propped on stands. But the most striking aspect of the decor were the steel-framed photos extracted from the films of John Ford. They ran the length of the corridor and one wall of the living room.
“We got some 911 calls about a woman screaming early this morning,” I said.
“Some kind of domestic trouble?” Desmond said.
“Could be. Maybe the scream came from a cabin cruiser,” I said. “Know anybody with a cabin cruiser who likes to knock women around?”
“At Catalina Island I do. Come out on the deck. I want to show you something.”
I started to follow him. Sean was staring at a black-and-white still shot from the last scene in My Darling Clementine. “That makes me dizzy.”
The still shot showed Henry Fonda in the role of Wyatt Earp, speaking to Cathy Downs, who played Clementine Carter, on the side of a dirt trail that led into the wastelands. In the distance was a bare mountain shaped like a monument or perhaps a rotted tooth, its surface eroded with perpendicular crevices. The antediluvian dryness and immensity of the environment were head-reeling.
“The woman is so pretty and sweet-looking,” Sean said. “Is he saying goodbye to her?”
“Yes, he is,” Desmond answered.
“I don’t get it. Why don’t he take her with him?”
