Росс Макдональд - The Three Roads

His face, in the quick glance she stole at it, was as dull as his voice, a closed door standing between his thoughts and her. For all she knew his mind, unconscious of the sun and wind, was trapped and digging vainly in a lightless, airless mine of memory. She thought of the pit ponies that lost their eyesight because they never saw the sun, and for a hopeless instant she supposed that Bret was lost to her forever in those subterranean tunnels. She rejected her depressed mood as soon as she recognized it, and drove five miles an hour faster.

“I didn’t hear what you said, Paula. Excuse me.”

“It was a silly remark, and I couldn’t possibly repeat it. Look, you can see the sea there between those two hills. Isn’t it blue?”

He looked dutifully at the polished wedge of sea between the hills and looked away again. His eyes were bright blue and mindless, like the sea. His attention was turned inward, looking down the dark shaft. She didn’t think explicitly that they were only a few miles from La Jolla, but his refusal to look at the sea shocked her. She was eager to show him all the things he had been missing, all the fine exhibits in the gallery of the world, and he wouldn’t even look at their own memento – the Pacific.

“What’s the matter, Bret?” her mouth said against her will.

“I’ve been doing quite a bit of thinking.”

“But what about?”

“About what I should do.”

“I thought that was all settled. You’ll stay with me and see Dr. Klifter on alternate days. The rest of the time you can enjoy yourself for a change. I have to be at the studio in the mornings, and that’ll give you a chance to do some work if you want to.”

“I don’t know whether I’ll bother with seeing Klifter.”

“But, darling! You have an appointment on Wednesday.”

“I don’t think my trouble is anything a psychoanalyst can help me with. It’s too real for that.”

“He isn’t one of your old-fashioned dream doctors, Bret. He doesn’t try to explain everything in terms of infantile bed-wetting. He knows the importance of the adult problems–”

“So do I. You see, I know what happened to my wife.”

“You remember?”

His answer was slow in coming. It seemed to her that everything hung on it, like Oedipus’ answer to the riddle of the Sphinx. The speedometer needle swung past seventy and hovered at seventy-five. The hair blew frantically about his head, but his face was as impassive as stone.

Would his face change at all if the car left the road and somersaulted down the bank of the arroyo? For a wild moment she played with the notion of giving the wheel a final twist and abandoning them both to the decision of mass and energy. A bright, windy day like this was as good a time to die as any. It would be fitting as the last gesture of her ending youth.

Almost before she was conscious of the moment, it was swept away by a deep rising hope. She caught a vision of herself years ahead living with her husband in a house with a garden and a big lawn where children and dogs could play. Her nerves leaned hard against the stability of that unbuilt house and that unconsummated marriage as she set her right foot on the brake. She turned off onto the shoulder of the highway and stopped the car. It seemed for an instant that the world had stopped, that the hills around them were waiting for a signal to move.

“Do you remember?”

“I don’t remember her death, if that’s what you mean. I remember marrying her in San Francisco.”

“How do you know about her death? Did Dr. Klifter tell you?”

“He gave me these.”

He showed her the bundle of clippings, and she felt like a dreamer whose recurrent nightmare has suddenly and incredibly become part of the real world. She looked into his face and trembled to know what was going on behind those steady eyes.

He felt most strongly a terrible pity for his dead wife, and a grinding shame. He had failed Lorraine, both living and dead. Living, he had abandoned her to violation and murder. Dead, he had forgotten her very existence, had sat snug and complacent for nine months in an animal world without memory, dreaming boy’s dreams of happiness with another woman. But the irreparable past, more fatal than any predestined future because it was unchangeable and absolute, had caught up with him and embraced him from behind.

“That’s what happened, is it?” His right forefinger tapped the papers he was holding in his left hand. She took them and looked at them, but she was so upset that she could decipher nothing but the headlines.

“Yes. Don’t you–?”

“You needn’t ask me again if I remember. I don’t. I probably never will. The last thing I remember is flying in to San Francisco and landing at Alameda in the morning. They still haven’t caught the man that killed her?”

“No. I’ve kept in touch with the police, and they’re no further now than they were then. Bret?”

“Yes.”

“Wouldn’t it be better if you didn’t let your mind dwell on this? I’m dreadfully sorry Klifter gave you those things. I shouldn’t have let him have them. I should have destroyed them long ago.”

“He did me a good turn. A better turn than you and Wright, keeping me in a fool’s paradise.”

“But this is in the past, Bret. It can’t change the present. It was sheer bad luck that it happened to us, and there’s really nothing we can do about it.”

“It happened to my wife,” he said coldly. “To us only incidentally.”

“I’m going to burn these filthy things.” She had found her lighter in the snakeskin purse that lay between them on the seat. She lit it and applied the tear-shaped flame to the corner of the clippings.

He knocked the lighter out of her hand and took them away from her.

“Damn you!” she cried. “I don’t like violence, Bret.” She controlled her anger immediately and said in a neutral voice: “You might pick up my lighter and light me a cigarette.”

“I’m sorry if I was rough.”

“Forget it.” She accepted the lighted cigarette he handed her as a further token of apology. “I don’t understand why you wouldn’t let me burn them though.”

“There are some names I want–”

“You’re not thinking of going to the police?” She tried to keep her voice steady and low, but terror lodged like a tin whistle in her throat and raised its pitch. “I went over the whole thing with them months ago, and nothing came of it.”

“I don’t suppose they’d be much help. I thought I’d look up this bartender Rollins. He might be able to tell me something.”

“Rollins?”

“He was one of the witnesses at the inquest.”

He riffled the clippings expertly, as if he had read them often enough to index them. “Here.” He pointed to a paragraph at the bottom of a column:

According to the testimony of James P. Rollins, bartender at the downtown eating-place and an acquaintance of the murdered girl, Lorraine Taylor was alone when she left the Golden Sunset Café. “She was alone and a trifle the worse for drink,” Rollins put it. “I offered to call her a taxi but she said to never mind. I figured she could make it all right under her own power.”

“He said she left by herself.” The whistle in Paula’s throat made a discordant tune. “What more could he tell?”

“Probably nothing, but I want to talk to him. Don’t you see, I don’t even know who her friends were. I’ve got to try and understand what happened.”

“But what are you going to do? There’s nothing you can do.”

“I have to prove that for myself. If I could find the man that was with her–”

“Are you jealous of a dead woman, Bret?”

“One might think you were jealous of her yourself.”