Deadly Welcome Read Online Free PDF Page A

to stay twenty.”
    “I’m sorry to hear it.”
    “It just about broke us all up. His wife is married again. She sure didn’t wait long, that one. She wasn’t local so you wouldn’t know her. A Philadelphia girl.”
    “Does Myra Ducklin still live in town?”
    “Why, she surely does! She’s right over on Palm Street in that house they always had. I just remembered you’re kin to her, somehow, and you used to live there so I guess I don’t have to tell you …”
    She stopped abruptly and her eyes grew round, andDoyle knew that she had suddenly remembered all the rest of it. She leaned close to her friend and whispered to her, rudely and at length. Then Mrs. Kathy Hubbard turned and stared at him also.
    They had finished their sundaes and their money was on the counter. They stood up and Junie cleared her throat and said, “Are you really sure Mrs. Ducklin would want to see you?”
    “I wouldn’t know.”
    “Are you on a vacation?”
    “I might move back here, Junie. Care to advise me?”
    “Maybe you’d feel more at home if you settled down at Bucket Bay, Alex Doyle.” They walked out with great dignity. And stared at him through the windows as they walked toward their car with the packages. Junie had the intense look of the confirmed gossip. The self-righteous gossip. That Alex Doyle has come back here, bold as brass, and what are decent people going to do about it? He had the nerve to speak to me. Robbed his kin and they let him run away into the army and here he is right back again after all this time. Cheap sporty shirt and snappy slacks. Tough looking.
    He put a dime beside the empty cup and as he got up and turned to go, a big old man, sweaty and slow-moving, came in out of the sidewalk heat, patting his broad forehead with a blue bandanna. Jeff Ellandon. Perennial mayor of Ramona. Fifteen years heavier and slower.
    He looked at Doyle with shrewd old eyes, stuffed the bandanna in his pocket and said, in a voice frayed and thin with age, “Guess I should know you, son. Guess my memory is about to give out on me. You one of the Bookers?”
    “Doyle, Judge. Alex Doyle.”
    “Well sure now. Bert’s boy. There was you and Rafe, and he was the older one, got drownded with Bert that time. Mother was Mary Ann Elder from up in Osprey. Come and set, son.”
    Alex followed the man back to a small booth and sat facing him. He ordered another cup of coffee and Judge Ellandon had a double order of chocolate ice cream.
    “Been away for some time, I’d say, son. You were the one had that trouble. You worked right here, come to think of it. Joe Ducklin was a second cousin of your daddy. I remember Joe cussin’ you almost right up to the time he died. Stingy old rascal. He and Spence Larkin were the closest men in town. The way I figured it, you were just collecting back wages, son. I guess you can see the town ain’t changed much.”
    “I saw a lot of new stuff when I drove in, Judge.”
    “I guess we must have had maybe fifteen hundred people when you left and we haven’t got more than seventeen, eighteen hundred right now. Everybody else growing up big north and south of us and we keep poking along. No future here, son. It’s those dang Jansons.”
    It was a story Alex had long been familiar with, the favorite gripe of local businessmen and boosters. At the turn of the century a wealthy sportsman named Janson had come down from Chicago to fish. He bought land on the north end of Ramona Key and built a fishing lodge. When Alex had been little the kids believed the old corroding structure was haunted. It had burned down when he had been about nine years old. Janson had been the one who financed the causeway and bridge to Ramona Key. And he had so believed in the future of the area that, for a sickeningly small sum, he had purchased all of Ramona Key except for a three-quarter-mile strip of Gulf to bay land just opposite the causeway, all seven miles of Kelly Key, and huge mainland tracts on either side of