“Oh, my God, Marc, what am I going to do?”
He frowned, but she forestalled an explanation when Elaine returned with the water. Grateful for the cool liquid, she drained the glass and asked for another, grinning at the she-needs-me-not-you glare Elaine shot at Marc as she left.
“Can you stay?” she whispered.
“As you want,” he said unhesitatingly. “But what about her?”
Natalie coughed over another spasm of laughter. “Don’t let it bother you. She’ll love every dirty minute of it.”
“Are you promising something, or what?”
“Or what,” she said, and allowed him to ease her back onto her pillow. Elaine returned and was miffed when the offered glass was refused.
“I still think a doctor — ”
“No, Elaine,” she said wearily. “I just want to rest a minute.”
She scowled and took a position on the other side of the bed, straightening the quilt and turning back its satin edge neatly. ‘‘I’ll wait up until you fall asleep. I’m sure Mr. Clayton has to go to work in the morning.”
“Who, me?” Marc shook a cigarette from a battered pack and lighted it. “My boss thinks I’ve done enough work for one week.” He looked at Elaine and smiled innocently. “I have the rest of the time off. Been to the city, you know. Big doings down there.”
“I can imagine,” Elaine sniffed. “Well, perhaps I can get us a cup of coffee.”
“No, thanks,” Natalie said. ‘‘I’m really not in the mood. Why don’t you get back to Sam? He must be tired from his night out.”
“Night out?” Elaine seemed puzzled, then widened her eyes. “Oh, yes, that. No, not really. Just a friendly card game, I told you. I have all the time in the world. What with this . . . thing interrupting him, I don’t know when he’ll be back. And really, Nattie, you shouldn’t be staying up so late. Not if you expect to go to work tomorrow.”
Natalie was spared a comment when the phone rang and Elaine rushed to grab it from the nightstand. Then she placed a hand over the receiver. “It’s Sam.” Natalie shook her head.
“She can’t talk to you now, Sammy. No, she’s fine. Just a shock to hear about poor little Miriam. No, she can’t talk to you now. Can’t it wait until morning? Why don’t you go out and hunt up some clues or something? Yes, I’ll be here for a while. No. No. Well, if you insist, Sam, I’m sure she’ll be all right. Mr. Clayton is here with her. That’s right, the reporter. I know, Sam, I know. I’ll be right home. Right away.”
She hung up and turned to Natalie, pointedly ignoring Marc’s raised eyebrows. “That was Sam. He says he needs me home for something.” She plumped at her sagging chest and reached for the coat thrown at the foot of the bed. ‘‘I’m glad I could help, Nattie dear. I’ll call you tomorrow to see how you’re doing. Maybe you should take time off until you recover. When was the last time you had a vacation, anyway?”
“Thanks, Elaine,” Natalie said, her voice acting as hands to push her toward the door. “I appreciate your coming over. I’ll call you, okay? And tell Sam ... “ She shook her head. “Never mind. I’ll be in touch, okay?”
It was clearly not all right, but Elaine had apparently been given her orders over the phone, and she huffed out with as much dignity as remained to her. The house was silent until the front door slammed.
Immediately, Natalie threw back the quilt and sat up. Marc stared, and she was confused until she looked down and saw her blouse opened to the waist. Flustered, then irked at his schoolboy leer, she stood and worked at the buttons.
“What’s the matter? You never saw a woman undressed before?”
“Depends on the woman you want to see undressed,” he said, rising and following her out of the room and around to the French doors. “Now suppose you tell me what you meant by the cat on the roof?”
Natalie turned with one hand on the banister. “When did I say that?”
“While you were unconscious. Come on, Nat, something else happened here besides the news about Miriam. What was it?”
“Why are you home?” she countered. “You weren’t supposed to be back until tomorrow.”
“You answer my question, I’ll answer yours.”
“No,” she said, feigning a pout and sitting on the top step. “You first, me second. I have a feeling mine is going to take quite a bit longer.”
He’d been, he said, thoroughly bored with the entire week. All he’d done was sit in on charcoal pinstripes bantering and baiting about the state of the economy. Toal was present in his capacity as a multimillionaire with various important investments worldwide. But what the entire series of meetings boiled down to was a general gripe session, a demand for a change of administration in Washington, and a wondering aloud how Toal managed to keep his calm and his head above water; the Oxrun representative was apparently an exception to a financial rule.
“He’s a duck, I can tell you,” said Marc. “Never said a word the entire time I sat in — purely as an observer, you understand. He just nodded when someone looked at him, frowned when everyone else did, and acted as though he was the most bored man on earth, next to me. For the life of me, I can’t understand why Dederson wanted me down there. What a bloody waste it was!”
“So you came back.”
He smiled crookedly. “I came back. Decided to pay you a visit and found Elaine at the door. And then we found you.”
“Nice of you to come.”
“I almost didn’t. Drove past the Station three times in fact, the fog was so thick. And you know something? When I finally made the right turn, I remembered I had trouble like that twice before, after Toal’ s party. Curious.” He waved away the observation with an abortive try at a smoke ring. “Must be Freudian. I don’t like it here, my mind tells me to miss the turn-offs, and when my id reminds me I can’t go anywhere else the way the economy is, I suddenly find the way in. Psychology One. Amherst. Brilliant student, I might add.”
Natalie rested her chin on her palm, her elbow braced on a knee. Elaine had turned off the lights downstairs, and only the bulb over their heads illuminated the foyer.
“I guess I played the cavalier tonight, didn’t I?” he added softly.
She assured him he did and, after shifting to lie on her back and stare at the ceiling, she told him everything she could remember of the day.
“And it’s odd, because Sam was wrong. I wasn’t supposed to be at the library tonight. I cleared it with Mrs. Hall at least an hour before the day shift ended. At least an hour.”
“Noted,” he said, and stretched out beside her. He let a hand settle onto her stomach, hesitated until it was apparent she wasn’t going to move it. Then he began a circling motion that made her feel at once tense and loose. Muscles rippled under his touch, and there was a curious aching in her breasts and thighs. She told herself she didn’t need sign posts to show her where she was heading, but neither, oddly, did she want to go there just yet. Not tonight. At least, not now.
“Marc,” and her hand rested atop his. “Marc, I want to look outside.”
“For the cat-thing, or whatever? I don’t blame you,” he said, snapping to his feet and pulling her after him. “But first, there’s a little matter of some temptation,” and before she could stop him, he reached over and fastened the center button, one she’d forgotten. Then his face clouded sorrowfully. “A hundred years from now I’ll never believe I did that.”
The fog had not lifted, but the temperature had returned to October normal. They started at the back, Marc carrying a flashlight whose broad beam easily turned the eleven o’clock darkness into a semblance of dusk. But there was nothing they could see that served as evidence of a climbing. Moisture clung to the pillars under the deck in beaded clusters, and though they nearly touched noses to the wood, they found no scratch marks, no scrapes. Around the side of the house, then, inches at a time while the white light swept carefully over the fog-laden grass. Again there was nothing, either on the lawn or alongside the house where grass gave way to bar
e earth around the shrubs. By the time they arrived back at the front door, Natalie was ready to scream, so positive had she become that her mind had not been playing her tricks.
On the porch, she shook her collar and squealed when moisture whipped across her face and down her neck. Then she knelt and directed the light at the front door.
“Nothing.”
Marc moved beside her. “You’re right again, lady. Nothing at all.”
He took her elbow, waiting until she decided the direction: to the railing, where she stood watching as the flashlight beam was devoured by the fog. “It’s cold,” he said, but she ignored him and he settled by leaning against the post. A moment later, the street light blinked on, an instant rising of a blue-white sun curtained by a thin, shifting cloud.
A dog barked several blocks away; a patrol car wailed down the Pike toward Mainland Road. The fog seemed to sigh as though wearying of carrying its own load, and it began to drizzle. The houses across the street reflected the street light in shades of grey against gleaming black.
Finally, she swallowed and tucked the collar closer to her chin.
“I know it now, Marc. I know it as sure as we’re standing here, and I don’t know why.”
A match flared, creating shadows on his face, then dimmed to a pulsing orange ember that traced golden arcs from mouth to side to mouth again.
‘‘I’ve been trying to reason out all that’s happened, thinking there really can’t be a connection between me and what’s going on with the others. I even convinced myself that I was drunk that night in the library. But I wasn’t, Marc. I wasn’t drunk. You’ve seen me drink more than I had then. Was I drunk? Was I?”
There was, gratefully, no answer.
“Marc, either someone’s trying to drive me nuts — to drive me into a padded cell for the rest of my life — or someone’ s trying to kill me. I know it, but I can’t prove it, that that truck deliberately tried to run me down; I know, even though you saw there were no tracks, that something was out here tonight trying to break into the house, to tear me apart like ... Ben ... like Vorhees.”
“And Miriam,” he said, without commitment.
“And Miriam. Oh, my God, poor Miriam! All she wanted to do was study for some stupid course of hers. She wanted to be a university librarian, you know, so she could meet a professor and go to teas and fight politics with the other wives. Can you imagine it? Fighting politics with the other wives.” She gulped air, exhaled slowly and saw puffs of white spinning into the rain; the fog had lifted. “I was supposed to be there tonight. I was supposed to be the one that got it, Marc. Ever since I started fooling around with that computer list, Adriana has been on my back. Remember when I told you I wouldn’t be surprised if our computer time was taken from us? Well, it was. And Miriam . . . “
The cigarette rocketed into the yard, winked out instantly as it struck the grass. Another match, another orange ember.
“All right,” she said, “tell me I’m developing all the classic symptoms of paranoia. Tell me there’s nothing out there waiting for you to go home, nothing in the library that would make someone want to kill me. For God’s sake, Marc, tell me!”
She waited, biting at her lower lip, not fighting tears but an incomprehensible urge to explode into laughter. All her careful reasonings, all the rationalizations, gone in a five-minute talk with a man in a shadow. Maybe Sam and Elaine had been right all along; maybe she was pushing. herself into insanity.
Insanity.
It was, in some ways, a comforting thought.
Marc lit a third cigarette.
“Well?” she said.
“You remember that first night a million years ago when I wanted to talk to you at the party, and somehow we never got the chance?”
She nodded, thinking: the miracles were gone, only mazes left.
“Well, I was having trouble with Dederson, see. Not the tripe story kind I always grouse about, but something I think is more serious. I wasn’t here, see, when you moved into town. I came a few months later. It’s a hard place to get to know. So few people, so few doors that will open to you even if you are a member of the Fourth Estate. Anyway, I spent most of my time rewriting until the old man decided I was competent enough to handle a few articles on my own. That’s why I missed the story of your husband’s murder.” He pushed off the post and stood beside it, turning his back on the street to stare at the living room windows. “When Vorhees was killed, I tried interviewing Sam Windsor and the officer who discovered the body. I wasn’t surprised when no one wanted to talk. An embarrassment and all that. Small towns aren’t supposed to breed the symptoms of grisly big-city killings. Unfortunately, Dederson wouldn’t even let me run the story from the fact sheet the police eventually handed out. He killed it.”
“Did you talk to him? Maybe there was a reason.”]
“I talked and he listened and then he told me, plain and simple: no story, no panic. Like no one would ever hear of it if it wasn’t in his precious paper.”
“I’m sorry, Marc, but I don’t understand. What does all this have — ”
“Nat, are you tired?” She laughed once, and shrugged. “No, I guess not.”
“I mean, could you stand to walk a little with me?”
“In the rain?”
He grinned, and without thinking, she reached out and traced a finger over his lips. He took her hand, kissed it and released her. “In the rain,” he said. “It’s cold and miserable and I think I love you and I want to tell you a few things while we walk. Let’s call it a direct experience experiment.”
“Umbrella?”
“No,” and he took her arm to lead her down the steps. “Let’s get soaked and pray for pneumonia to give us a few days off.”
They walked silently to the corner, turned toward Mainland Road. The drizzle had eased, and the cool mask falling on her face felt less discomforting than soothing. It was easy for her to believe at that moment that she and Marc were the only ones left in the world.
“I don’t like not being able to write,” he said suddenly as they passed the darkened church. “And it seemed awfully unprofessional to kill a story that would have surely sold more papers. Like it or not, gore is what brings in the loot. Messy, but true. So I bugged Windsor some more, and got myself politely but firmly tossed out on my ear. I spent a lot of time walking around. I went for drives to no place in particular. That’s when I kept getting lost. Which, on the face of it, is ridiculous. How anyone can get lost around here is beyond me. But I did it.”
“The party,” she said. “Was it punishment for not letting go?”
He nodded. ‘‘I’m sure of it. And what Toal said to me that night about the statue could have been sent to the paper on a three-by-five card. Dederson gave it a four-column headline with a six-column picture. There was nothing about our adventure in the library. No comments from anyone about Vorhees’ death. Nothing. Not even a statement of what a tragedy it was for the college. Not a thing.”
“But — ”
“Wait. Don’t talk. Just walk.”
At the end of the Pike, he turned her around and pointed back toward the town’s center. “No traffic, right?”
“Sure, but for crying out loud, it’s close to midnight on a week night. Who in heaven’s name is going to be cruising around here?”
“Nobody,” he said. “And if you think about it, no one does during daylight either.”
“What?” But he said nothing, forcing her to conjure as typical a day as she could, then suddenly remembering a notion that had come to her less than a week ago: that all the traffic seemed to flow out of the Station in the morning, back again at night. And Mrs. Bradford, complaining that most of her customers were locals, and the out-of-towners who did stop seldom returned.
“Okay?” he said.
“I don’t know. I guess so.”
“Okay. Now follow me.” He turned around and, after a bus had sprayed past them, he ran to the opposite side of the highway, dragging her with him.
“Now,” he said, “take a good long look at what you see.”
She followed his pointing finger, first to the traffic light, then in a slow sweep from right to left. Mercury arc lamps were evenly spaced along the cross-state road, certainly bright enough to illuminate the shoulders for several yards around them. Yet, and she had to strain to see, the shoulders directly opposite were just as well lighted, and harder to see clearly.
“Optical illusion,” she said. “A trick of the rain and the traffic and the night.”
“Okay,” he said, pulling her farther along the road. “Now I’ll show you something else.”
“I wish you’d tell me,” she said.
“No. I don’t want you to . . . “ and they’d gone perhaps two hundred yards before he about-faced and began walking back. “You stay behind me about ten paces or so, and tell me when I’m exactly opposite the Pike. Exactly, Nat, you understand?”
She didn’t, really, but did as she was bidden. Then, “Hold it, Deerslayer!” She ran up to him and stared into his eyes. “So? Here we are.”
“Good for you,” he said, his voice hinting at a quaver. “If you hadn’t told me, Nat, I would have walked right past it. You’ll have to believe me when I tell you that when I look across the street, all I can see are trees. No Pike. No light. No corner houses. I couldn’t even pick out my office from here.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nat, you think someone is trying to kill you or maybe drive you nuts for some reason. I believe it. Now you have to believe me when I say someone is trying to keep me out of this town.”
* * *
Chapter 8
Thursday was silent as Natalie reluctantly kissed Marc good-by at the comer and watched him walk away toward his office. He’d stayed the night, sleeping in the spare room, had awakened her with a bachelor’s breakfast overcooked and under nourishing. Neither felt much like talking about the evening before. The only words passed in glances, not quite accidental touches of hands, and the careful way she held his coat for him at the front door.
The Hour of the Oxrun Dead (Necon Classic Horror) Page 11
