The Zebra-Striped Hearse Read Online Free PDF Page B

them.”
    “You’re an insufferable man.”
    “While I’m being insufferable, you may be able to clear up a small discrepancy for me. I noticed that the shaving kit in the bathroom has the initials B.C. on it. Those initials don’t go with the name Burke Damis.”
    “I never noticed it.”
    “Don’t you find it interesting?”
    “No.” But the blood had drained out of her face and left it sallow. “I imagine it belonged to some previous guest. A lot of different people have used the beach house.”
    “Name one with the initials B.C.”
    “Bill Campbell,” she said quickly.
    “Bill Campbell’s initials would be W.C. Who is Bill Campbell, by the way?”
    “A friend of Father’s. I don’t know if he ever used the beach house or not.”
    “Or if he ever existed?”
    I’d pressed too hard, and lost her. She dismounted from the rail, smoothing down her skirt, and started away from me toward the beach house. I watched her go. No doubt she was a simple person, as she said, but I couldn’t fathom her.

chapter
5
    I DROVE BACK up to the highway. Diagonally across the intersection, a large fading sign painted on the side of a roadside diner advertised Jumbo Shrimp. I could smell grease before I got out of the car.
    The stout woman behind the counter looked as though she had spent her life waiting, but not for me. I sat in a booth by the front window, partly obscured by an unlit neon beer sign. She brought me a knife and fork, a glass of water, and a paper napkin. I was the only customer in the place.
    “You want the shrimp special?”
    “I’ll just have coffee, thanks.”
    “That will cost you twenty cents,” she said severely, “without the food to go with it.”
    She picked up the knife and fork and the paper napkin. I sat and nursed the coffee, keeping an eye on the blacktop road that led up from the beach.
    The overcast was burning off. A sun like a small watery moon appeared behind it. The muffled horizon gradually cleared, and the sea changed from grey to greyish blue. The surf had begun to thump so hard I could hear it.
    Two or three cars had come up from the cluster of beach houses, but there had been no sign of Harriet’s green Buick. I started in on my second cup of coffee. Refills were only ten cents.
    A zebra-striped hearse with a broken headlight came in off the highway. It disgorged, from front and rear, four boys and two girls who all looked like siblings. Their hair, bleached by sun and peroxide, was long on the boys and short on the girls so that it was almost uniform. They wore blue sweatshirts overbathing suits. Their faces were brown and closed.
    They came in and sat in a row at the counter, ordered six beers, drank them with hero sandwiches which the girls made out of French loaves and other provisions brought in in paper bags. They ate quietly and voraciously. From time to time, between bites, the largest boy, who carried himself like their leader, made a remark about big surf. He might have been talking about a tribal deity.
    They rose in unison like a platoon, and marched out to their hearse. Two of the boys got into the front seat. The rest of them sat in the back beside the surfboards. One of the girls, the pretty one, made a face at me through the side window. For no good reason, I made a face back at her. The hearse turned down the blacktop toward the beach.
    “Beach bums,” the woman behind the counter said.
    She wasn’t talking to me. Having nursed two coffees for an hour, I may have been included in her epithet. The coffee, or the waiting, was beginning to make me nervous. I ordered a therapeutic beer and turned back to the window.
    The woman went on talking to herself. “You’d think they’d have more respect, painting a hearse in stripes like that. They got no respect for the living or the dead. How they expect me to make a living, bringing in their own food?
I
don’t know what the world is coming to.”
    Harriet’s car appeared, coming out of a tight curve, halfway up