The Devil May Dance by Jake Tapper (books to read fiction txt) 📗

Lawford. “Firewater, squaw, smoke-um big peace pipe.”

“Different kind of climax, Peter,” Davis said.

Charlie looked back at Tom Sawyer’s Island. He heard a woman’s laugh echoing across the water. He knew exactly why he was there: If he could save Violet, he could redeem himself with Margaret. And then he could quit drinking and get his dad out of jail and be the man Margaret believed he could be. Not this other man, the one he was on his way to becoming.

“We need to get over there,” he said.

Chapter TwentyLos Angeles, California

April 1962

Margaret drove slowly on Sunset trying to spot where Charlotte Goode lived. It was two thirty in the morning.

“I think this is it,” Margaret said, pulling the car to the curb and hopping out. Sheryl Ann Gold sleepily followed her, probably trying to will herself into the right state of mind for the potentially dangerous situation before them. As soon as Charlotte’s phone had gone dead, Margaret called Sheryl Ann and pleaded for her company.

Goode’s house sat behind a row of palm trees. The front door, beneath a brick porch, was bracketed by lanterns, now dark.

“I can’t see anything,” said Sheryl Ann.

Margaret took out her cigarette lighter and held it in front of her; she could make out a stairwell leading to a cellar door.

“This must be it,” she whispered.

She walked slowly down the steps, at the bottom of which the door was ajar. Margaret looked back at Sheryl Ann, then slowly pushed it open and felt around on the wall for the light switch.

The room inside had been turned upside down: pillows gutted, cushions torn apart, papers strewn, drawers open. Margaret and Sheryl Ann cautiously stepped through the small living room. The kitchen was just as torn up—cabinets emptied onto the floor and the oven and refrigerator left open, casting light onto the disarray. Margaret kept walking, quietly, to the bedroom; she steeled herself before turning on the light, glancing over her shoulder and feeling a reassuring pat from Sheryl Ann.

Margaret turned on the light.

Charlotte Goode lay on her bed, her eyes and mouth open. Her shirt and the sheets were smeared with blood.

“Je-sus,” exclaimed Sheryl Ann, jumping back.

Oh no, Margaret thought. Oh God, no. Her heart began to race. She ran to the bed and felt Charlotte’s neck for a pulse.

There was none.

Margaret felt as if her insides were being torn out. She started to cry. Sheryl Ann put her arms around her, attempting to comfort her. After a minute had passed, Sheryl Ann patted Margaret on the shoulder to bring her back to the urgency of the moment, not just its tragedy.

“We should call the police,” Sheryl Ann said. “Where’s the phone?”

Margaret looked around the room, then back at Goode. “It’s around her neck,” Margaret said, pointing to the cord that circled Goode’s throat and trailed onto the floor on the other side of the bed.

Sheryl Ann walked around the bed, picked up the receiver that dangled at the end of the cord, and lifted it to her ear. “No dial tone,” she said.

Margaret looked down at Charlotte. She noticed weird blood smears on the sheet near her right hand. Circles and lines. She ran around to the far side of the bed to take a closer look.

The Mark Twain Steamboat was anchored for the night, but Davis noted that a Tom Sawyer Island motorized raft appeared to be bringing some guests from the island. The raft could fit thirty visitors, but the captain was depositing only four back on the mainland, two men and two girls. The men were in their sixties, tripping and stumbling, wearing coonskin caps, guffawing and grasping at their dates. The two girls were done up in raunchy Disney-squaw garb—fringed leather bikinis and skirts, eagle feathers, braids.

“All aboard!” said the raft operator, a young man in an unkempt country-boy Huck Finn costume.

“I’m way too sober,” Lawford said as they all climbed on.

“We have heap big firewater on the island,” the raft operator said robotically, cranking up the motor and steering the craft to Tom Sawyer Island.

“It’s weird how no one seems to notice you two,” Charlie said. “I mean, not only no autograph requests, but it’s as if they don’t recognize you!”

“No one notices anyone because this event isn’t happening, man,” Davis observed. “You’re not here, I’m not here, no one is here.” The raft operator nodded approvingly.

As they chugged forward, Charlie could see more of the island, some of which was illuminated by tiki torches and lanterns. A fishing pier sat by the docks, adjacent to an old mill, and off in the distance at the northern tip sat what appeared to be a cabin on fire. Beyond the party sounds of music, murmurs, and revelry came the rhythmic warpath drumbeats of the Ugga-Wugga Wigwam tribe from Peter Pan.

The operator tied the raft to a post in the Tom’s Landing dock and as Charlie disembarked, he noticed shapes on the muddy shore illuminated in the moonlight. It was a young woman on her back, naked from the waist up, gazing patiently if dead-eyed into the sky, and a big, broad, heavy, hairy man on top of her.

The sight transported Charlie back to a night in France during the war. Along with the rest of First Battalion, 175th Infantry, Charlie landed at Omaha Beach on June 17, 1944. He and Company K seized Isigny-sur-Mer, secured the bridge over the Vire River, recaptured Saint-Lô, and proceeded northeast. By late August, Charlie and his weathered platoon had reached a bank on the eastern estuary of the Seine River southwest of the Pays de Caux. The nearby city, German-occupied Le Havre, was France’s biggest channel port, and beginning in the early evening of September 5, the Royal Air Force dropped almost ten thousand tons of bombs on the town, destroying more than 80 percent of the buildings and killing two thousand French civilians. Soon, from the ocean, the monitor HMS Erebus and battleship HMS Warspite began pummeling the port town with more than