Джон Макдональд - The End of the Night

“This is sort of a package deal,” the man said.

“I’ll sell the land for exactly what I paid for it,” Dallas Kemp said. “If the whole idea doesn’t appeal to you, it will probably be a long time before anybody else comes along to whom I’d be willing to show it. I want the land and the house to go together, to the right people.”

“Is this such an artistic compulsion with you that you’ll resist any changes we may want to make before we ask for bids?” the man asked.

“I’ll make all changes that do not disturb the basic design, the unity of the house. I do not make that sort of change for any client.”

The woman turned to the husband and gently grasped the lapel of his tweed jacket. “I want the package deal, darling. Without ever knowing us, this very good and very honest young man made our house. I want this wonderful house and this wonderful hillside so badly my darn knees are weak and funny. If we don’t have it, to live in, to be in love in — because it’s the kind of a house that has to have love in it — I’ll be wistful all the rest of my life.”

The man flushed slightly and grinned at Dallas Kemp. “I guess there’s only one answer to that. We’ll go ahead with it.”

“I’m glad,” Kemp said. “I want to see the house built. It’s too good a thing to be wasted.”

After they talked for a time of arrangements, they walked back down to the automobiles. As they stood by the cars, the woman brought up Helen Wister. Dallas Kemp was sorry she had done so, because later she would learn more about the people living in Monroe, and she would remember being unconsciously tactless and it would bother her, because there was kindness in this woman. He knew it was only a product of coincidence and idle conversation when she said, “Isn’t this the area where that terrible thing happened way last summer? Where that man was murdered and that doctor’s daughter was kidnaped?”

“No. That happened out on the other side of the city.”

“I read where they had electrocuted those horrors a couple of weeks ago. What was that girl’s name, anyway?”

“Wister. Helen Wister.”

“Did you know her, Mr. Kemp?”

“Yes, I knew her.”

“It must have been such a terrible shock for everybody around here. I guess you people will always remember the details of a thing like that, I mean you’d be more likely to remember it than we would, living out in Seattle and just reading about it in the papers. Did they shoot her?”

Dallas Kemp was able to turn away from them by using the device of turning his back to the spring wind to light a cigarette. When he turned back he knew he was under control.

“As it was reconstructed, Mrs. Dennrig, and according to Stassen’s story, she fell and hit her head when they abandoned her. The autopsy showed only minor head injuries. Death was by drowning. Apparently she came to in the night and perhaps tried to stand and fainted. You could call it murder, but they weren’t tried for that.”

“What... what horrible irony,” the woman said. “It... almost makes it worse, somehow.”

“Yes,” Dallas Kemp said. “She was alone and they were gone. It almost makes it worse.”

Dallas Kemp lied to them, told them he had some more measurements to take. They drove back to the city. He walked up the hill and leaned against the trunk of an old silver birch tree, his hands in his pockets, and looked at where the house would be.

He stood there and he wished he was old. He wished he had come back across time to look at one of the very early things he had designed, one of the good things. He had the feeling that when he had become old, thoughts of Helen would then have a nostalgic, drifting sweetness, like sachet and old love letters, and an old man could smile and remember the good parts.

But it was too close. He was trapped in this bitter segment of his life, and he could move away from it only with the agonizing slowness of the minute hand on the clock. Time pressed him close to all the vivid memories of her.

On the way back to town, during a time of inattention, he suddenly saw a brown puppy prancing out into the road directly in front of him, joyously ignoring the panic scream of children in the yard, ears flopping, too lost in his game to consider disaster.

Kemp wrenched the wheel, yelped the tires and awaited a soft small thud. It did not come. When he was well beyond that place, moving slowly, he looked in the rear-vision mirror and saw a man pulling the craven puppy from the road by the scruff of its neck, whacking its stern with his hand.

Kemp drove on, but within a mile he was trembling so badly he turned onto a quieter street and let the car drift to a stop by the curbing. He did not believe he could have endured killing the dog. He felt he had been spared one final, unbearable thing.

He closed his eyes and rested his forehead against the top of the steering wheel. For a moment he felt on the very edge of perceiving and understanding some cosmic equation which balanced a logic of love, innocence, accident and death. But it was gone before he saw its shape.

Kemp straightened up, and, after a little while, he remembered how to start his car, and he drove the rest of the way back into the city.