Rose Marie is trying something a little different, serializing a book she has written, "The Evil Men Do." Each month she will be sharing a chapter with you. As the months go by, you will be able to go back and re-read previous chapters if you wish to. We both welcome your thoughts on both the book itself and the process we are trying. So — jump in!

Judy and Rose Marie Zurkan

The Evil Men Do

by Rose Marie Zurkin

Chapter One — The Marsh

Something woke him. Not the clock radio.  He kept his eyes closed, hoping not to hear the sound again, willing away the possibility that it was happening again. Here, in this peaceful place.  The land had become the subject of controversy now between developers and environmentalists, but it had never been the scene of violence, of a rape. Yet the crime had occurred twice already. He rolled over in bed, listening to the sound of insects and frogs outside his window, hoping he had been dreaming, fearing he would hear that other sound again, dreading what it meant.  He opened his eyes. The sky was still dark, but beyond the green ribbon that was the marsh, invisible now, red tinged the black water.  "Red sky at morning, sailors take warning."  A storm was brewing. 

He heard it again, no mistake this time — a scream. He jumped out of bed. He shouldn't have waited to hear it again. They had started since Prudhomme's death, these rapes at the salt marsh, victims transported there for the rapist's sick purpose. He had to wonder if they and Prudhomme's death were connected, but how could they be?  He pulled on the jeans that lay on the chair beside the window, shoved his feet into the sneakers laying by the door, and hurried out, running toward the figures visible against the lightening sky. He should have been more quiet, but how could he be, hurrying as he knew he had to. He was making too much noise, racing through the long grasses on his way to the half mile of shoreline amidst the three miles of trails that comprised the salt marsh, stumbling in his haste to stop the horror. The razor-edged spartina cut his arms, but he was almost there. Not fast enough, though.

One of the figures, the man, looked up, then darted away, plunging into the water and jumping into an outboard sitting a few feet out past the soft sand. Stu heard the motor start, and then it was gone, disappearing around the cove. Though he could still hear the motor, he could no longer see it. Cursing himself for being in too much of a hurry to pick up his cell phone and take it with him, he raced to the recumbent figure on the sand. "Are you all right?" Knowing what a stupid question it was. Of course she wasn't all right.

Sobbing, she sat up, drew up her knees, sliding back on the wet sand. Afraid: She didn't know him. Stu dropped to the sand beside her. He didn't know what to do, feared touching her, unwilling to alarm her further. "I heard you scream. What happened?"

"He attacked me."

"You know the guy?"

She shook her head. "Never saw him before. I work the candy counter at the movies. He was there when I came out and grabbed me. The boat was right there too. At the marina behind the building." Stu nodded. "It was late, nobody was around. I'm always the last to leave." The cinema was at the beach, a five minute walk from town, isolated after the show ended.

Stu extended his hand. "You want to come home with me for a minute—till I call the police."
"No," she said. "Who are you?"
Stu told her his name. "You know I'm not him. I live over there."  He gestured to the beach house, deserted looking behind the dune.

"Well…" She took his hand and let him pull her up. He realized that she was still dressed. As if she had read his mind, she said, "he didn't have time to ... do anything. You ran out so fast." Looking down, she said, "I'm sorry.  I know you're not him. It's just…"

Stu nodded. "It's okay.  I understand," he said. "The movie's usually over by midnight. How come you stayed so late? Knowing he's out there. I mean, it's happened before." He refrained from pointing out that the last victims also had been abducted and taken to the marsh. 

She didn't say, and he didn't push. Just before they reached his house, she murmured, "I didn't want to go home."

What was all that about, he wondered, but it was none of his business so he let it go. The cottage door was open and they went inside. He pointed to the kitchen and said, "make yourself coffee, tea, whatever. I'll call the police."  Which he did. "They'll be here in a few minutes."

"I made tea," she said.  "You want a cup?"

He preferred coffee but said, "sure."

"I guess I was lucky," she said.

"Lucky I was home."

"He must be the one," she said, referring to the rapist who had already attacked three women in a scant couple of months. 

"You'll be able to give the police a description," Stu said.

"Not a very good one. It was dark," she apologized.

"Height, weight at least," Stu said.

His marsh, tantalizingly near his beach house, was so near he'd come to think of it as his own backyard. Now not only was it the subject of a struggle between opposing forces of development and conservation, but it had become the scene of attacks by a rapist.

The police arrived and took the girl away. Not that it mattered, but Stu never did find out her name. Against her objections, they insisted on taking her to the hospital first to make sure she was telling the truth when she said she hadn't been attacked. Stu thought they should believe her, but nobody asked him. On the contrary, they looked suspicious, as if they suspected him of something, even after the girl told them that he was the one who had saved her. They asked him if he could describe the man, but Stu had the impression only of someone big and heavy, someone who knew how to operate a boat, which didn't help. Who didn't know how to operate an outboard motor living so close to the beach on Long Island?  

What would Prudhomme have said if he knew about the rapes? He was a developer who had planned to develop the marsh and would have used the rapes to prove that the marsh needed to be cleaned up.  Eliminated.  As if the rapist wouldn't find somewhere else to do his dirty work. Was that the motive? Since Prudhomme's alleged suicide, Stu hadn't heard anything more about those plans. A surprise. Stu's father wasn't the only one who came down hard on the side of development. The uncles did too, and so did Reed, Prudhomme's partner. Stu expected Reed to come pestering him sooner or later to start working on the plans he had worked on with Prudhomme. Stu had never been part of the fight against the development, but lately something had been stirring in him, and he was feeling like he wanted to get involved, had to be involved. Not to help the developers. To stop them.

He told himself he wanted to do it for Janet. She wasn't even here, but he knew she would be against developing the marsh if she knew about it. Too bad she didn't know. It might have brought her back. So those were his two objectives — stop the marsh from being destroyed by greedy developers and prove that his father's death had not been suicide, but murder. Because he was sure it was. There, he said it. To himself only so far, but that was the first step.

The radio he'd set to wake him clicked on in his empty bedroom, from which he heard a news commentator reporting — in the breed's even tones — on the latest environmental disaster, a tank in Galveston Harbor leaking oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Efforts to staunch the flow had so far proved unsuccessful. In the war between progress and the environment, progress had struck another blow.

A moment later, the commentator dispensed with the national horrors and moved on to the international ones, which were even worse.  Stu reached over and turned off the radio, wondering why he bothered to set the alarm. He didn't HAVE to get up, didn't have a job he had to go to. Instead, he painted, calling himself an artist and earning his workaholic father's scorn while he was alive. Lately, however, it wasn't enough for him. When had it started, the discontent.  But he already knew. It had started after Prudhomme's death. 

He threw out the remains of tea the girl had handed him and made coffee. He didn't feel like painting, hadn't felt like it for a while now, was through deluding himself that it was his calling yet without it what would he do? What would take its place? Without the painting he'd have drifted aimlessly up to now, hitchhiked through life. At least while he held a brush in his hand he sat in the driver's seat. Some things he had learned in the last few years anyway. He wished he could explain this to Janet, make her understand that he was a different person now. She had left a year ago. Would she ever come back? He wondered how things were going with her, if she'd heard about her father's stroke.  That, if not the development planned for marsh, would force her return.

But how had he got on that subject anyway. Did even the clock radio make him think of her? A bad sign. Especially if she was never coming back. Was she coming back? Would he know if she did? He'd stayed here but had lost his contacts. Even his old friend Anthony hardly spoke to him anymore.   Nobody was around to tell him if she returned. Nor about Prudhomme, how he really died, who killed him. And why.

His sneakers off, kicked off at the door, again he padded to the window and looked out. The view did not lift him up, as it usually did.  Instead, he remembered the two people struggling. What made the attacker take them here? There were other secluded areas on Long Island Sound. He'd have to keep his eyes open in case it happened again. Why didn't the police patrol the area? 

The windows faced north. Consequently, he used the room as a studio as well as a bedroom.  Outside, a hall led straight to the front door. The rooms flowed into one another railroad style, first the living room, then the kitchen, then a tiny bathroom, and last the bedroom/studio. He liked living in small rooms.  Apparently, so did his father, lately anyway. Prudhomme had moved into the office where he died, using the shower and makeshift kitchen there instead of returning home to the big house upstate where Stu's grandfather still lived, if you could call it living.

The thin ribbon of marsh, visible from every window, had always fascinated Stu. He had painted it many times, trying to catch the exact color of that fresh green against the milky sky. Skies were rarely blue here anymore. Even on fair days, the Long Island power plant dispersed clouds into the atmosphere that seemed to become a permanent part of the atmosphere. So much development had already taken place. Development, a euphemism for the wanton destruction of the landscape. At least the marsh remained intact. So far. No thanks to Prudhomme and his ilk.

The view did not inspire him to find an answer to his questions yet did help in some indefinable way. Everything that serves no purpose but is there, inanimate and changeless—rocks, sand--comforted him, seeming to ensure the world's ultimate survival. 

He frowned, remembering something he had read in the paper recently, something concerning the struggle over the marsh. He'd meant to ask Prudhomme about it—he would certainly be involved in any development of the marsh. But Prudhomme was dead. Stu could not ask him anything ever again, and Reed seemed to know nothing about it.

In the months that had passed since Prudhomme's alleged suicide, life had gone on as usual, proving that Prudhomme had not been so indispensable as he and nearly everyone else whose life he touched had thought. The police expressed satisfaction with the verdict of suicide, and why not? They had enough to do to solve New York City's obvious homicides, and no one in the family had expressed any doubt.  Except for Stu, but no one listened to him, and why should they. Living in a shack out on Long Island, what could he know?

Prudhomme's brothers, almost as rich as him, but only because of the name and not because they had done anything to deserve it, had made suicide seem plausible, and nobody but Stu had challenged them. A shot to the head in an office abandoned by everyone else before the July 4th weekend. Why should he, Stu, only son of the deceased businessman, not be satisfied too.  And if he wasn't satisfied, then why initially had he been so reluctant to take the next step, make the logical connection. Without telling anyone else at first, the police, the uncles, he made up his mind, made the connection. Not suicide. Murder.

No one guessed what he planned to do, no one knew he had already begun his own investigation.  He had nothing but guesses, a sense of wrongness, a misgiving, but he was determined to do something, continue until he was satisfied one way or the other. He'd have to tell Sharon, however, and he planned to do it soon. He was ashamed of himself for relishing the idea of telling her. Beautiful Sharon. Stu met her for the first time when the will was read, but she was at the scene on the night of the tragedy. She had found the body. If he told her he suspected murder, would she think he suspected her? Although he refused to say the word, suicide, still he hesitated to utter the more deadly word, murder.  

Sharon's beauty and especially her youth had surprised him. Obviously, Prudhomme, old as he was, had no trouble getting women, but why not? He was good-looking, still had his hair and all of his teeth, exercised regularly. He could afford to let the drones like Reed spend the requisite hours in the office for him. Though, to do him justice, even when he didn't have time to exercise he looked as if he did. His skin was fresh and taut as that of a much younger man. No, his success with women could not be attributed to wealth alone. Rather like a natural law, natural and inevitable, Prudhomme should always get anything he wanted. 

Sharon, who found the office open, walked in and found Stu's father lying on the floor, had kept calm, telephoned the police, explaining that he'd called her and asked her to meet him there. Sharon hadn't planned to attend the reading of the will but had been asked to be present as she had been found to be a legatee, a fact that infuriated Prudhomme's brothers. Stu recalled her asking why the police had stopped investigating and thought it possible that she too questioned the verdict of suicide. After the discovery that the revolver that killed him was his own, that everyone else could prove they had left the office, that nobody could figure out a motive, it seemed there was nothing more to say. In addition, Prudhomme had started seeing a doctor recently, a psychiatrist, who, without releasing any details, insisting on protecting his patient's privacy even in death, divulged enough to persuade them that Stu's father was in the throes of a crisis. The fact that Prudhomme had recently changed his will to include Sharon indicated to the police and others that he had death on his mind. Why had he done it unless he knew he was going to die soon?

Sharon herself was an enigma, not the sort of woman, Stu thought, to fall for a man like Prudhomme. A professor of art at her age. What had she expected him to do for her? A careful man, he never would have risked another marriage. If he'd wanted to remarry, he'd have done it long before. No, marriage would have been out of the question. Prudhomme was not the marrying kind. Yet he had left Sharon money, an act that shocked Stu (not to mention Reed and the uncles). Stu half expected Prudhomme to have cut him off, as he'd threatened many times to do, but in the end he had not. He didn't approve of Stu's choices. He wasn't sure of Stu, of the unknown element which Stu might have inherited from the mother he never knew, of what Prudhomme called Stu's softness.

No one had ever called Prudhomme soft. Painting was all right in its place, as a hobby. The old man himself dabbled. But painting was not a career for a robust young man. Now that Stuart himself was having doubts about his choice of a career, he regretted that Prudhomme had not lived to see him "come to his senses."

Prudhomme never made a move without a detailed investigation and lengthy debate over possible consequences. Singleminded, however, once he made up his mind he rarely changed it.

Needing to start somewhere in his investigation, only he hesitated to call it that, even to himself, Stu decided to phone Sharon and tell her what he thought, see what she thought, if he was right about her agreeing with him. Sharon would be easy to start off with as she had been close. She might even have some idea as to the motive. At any rate, Stu expected her to approve of his attempt to unearth evidence that would cause the police to question the verdict of suicide. Besides, he wanted to see her again. 

Prudhomme had not been the sort of man to die violently, and he did not deserve the notoriety that violent death had brought him, the ignominy of pathologist and press, the mean suggestions and speculation from the attendant vultures. He had earned a stately demise, doctors in attendance, Stuart, the errant son, standing at the foot of the bed vowing to mend his ways at last. He was not the sort of man deliberately to circumvent pomp and circumstance even if he could and would have enjoyed the prospect of a large funeral unblemished by any hint of scandal and a long, respectful obituary in the leading newspapers, if only he did not have to die to make them happen.

Check Next Month's Issue for Chapter 2

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