Bill Pronzini - The Lighthouse

“Nobody. Wrong number.”

“I heard you bang the receiver…”

“People ought to be able to dial the right number,” he said. “It’s a damned nuisance.”

He felt her eyes probing at him as he unbelted his robe, got into bed. But after a few seconds she fitted her body to his, held him, and said, “Now where were we?”

He wasn’t sure if he could make love now. But when he blanked his mind, the heat of her body and the stroking of her hands gave him an erection almost immediately. But it wasn’t good sex, at least not for him. She put herself into the act with passion and intensity, as if she were trying too hard to please him, or trying too hard to escape from whatever thoughts and fears crowded her mind. For him it was detached and mechanical. All body and no soul, brain still blank, lost somewhere inside himself, in a place untouched by the sensations of physical pleasure.

They lay in silence afterward. Alix broke it finally by saying, “I’d better get up. My turn for breakfast today. Are you hungry?”

“Ravenous,” he lied.

“French toast and bacon?”

“Great.” It was his favorite breakfast.

She got out of bed and let him watch her walk naked into the bathroom, moving her hips more than she had to for his benefit. It didn’t give him as much pleasure as it should have. He might have been watching her through someone else’s eyes. Was this the way schizophrenics felt? Detached, yourself and yet not yourself? Those blackout periods… what exactly did he do during one of them? The thought of his body in the control of some other self, some stranger, was terrifying. Why couldn’t he remember…?

He heard the rush of water as the shower came on-and half a minute later, he heard Alix cry out.

The sudden horrified shout jerked him out of bed, sent him stumbling across to the bathroom door. He threw it open, and she was out of the tub, bent over and scrubbing frantically at her body with a towel. Her bare skin was streaked with an ugly brown. The shower was still running and the cold water that came out of it was the same brown color; more brown stained the tile walls, the tub, the floor at Alix’s feet. The stench in the room made him gag.

Manure, cow shit. The water pouring out of the shower head smelled like the inside of a barn.

The significance of it didn’t register fully at first. He caught Alix’s arm with one hand, a second towel with the other, and pulled her out into the bedroom. Slammed the door to barricade them against the stench and then helped her wipe the brown filth off her body. She said in a choked, bewildered voice, “I just turned on the cold water, all I did was turn on the cold water…”

The towels weren’t doing any more good; he got the comforter off the foot of the bed, wrapped it around her, made her sit down. Then he hurried back into the bathroom, managed to get the shower turned off without letting much of the tainted water splash on him. He found the catch on the window, hauled up the sash. Breathing through his mouth, he pivoted to the sink and rotated the porcelain handle on the hot-water tap. It ran clean. But when he tried the cold tap, the water that came out was filthy.

He understood then. Novotny had fouled the well. Sometime during the night, with sacks of manure.

Rage stirred through him, but it was like no other rage he’d ever felt. Cold, not hot. And it did nothing to him: caused no tension, no pressure and pain behind his eyes. He felt no different than he had before Alix’s cry, except that most of the detachment was gone. He was very calm, very much in control of himself.

Alix was on her feet again, moving around in a stunned way, when he came out. “I’ve got to wash this off,” she said. “I’ll be sick if I don’t.” She started past him to the bathroom.

He stopped her with his body. “No, don’t go in there. You’d better clean up downstairs.”

“The water… what…?”

“It’s polluted. Somebody dumped manure into the well.”

She stared at him for a moment, then shook her head-a gesture of incomprehension, not denial. The movement seemed to let her smell herself; she made a small gagging sound. “I can’t stand it, I’ve got to wash…”

“Use the hot-water tap in the kitchen,” he said. “What’s stored in the tank is still clean.” He reached for his pants, pulled them on.

“What are you going to do?”

“Go out and look at the well. Go ahead, go on down. Take your robe so you don’t catch cold.”

She went out without saying anything else. He buttoned his shirt, sat on the edge of the bed to tie his shoes. He wasn’t thinking at all now. He didn’t trust himself to think just yet. Downstairs, he took his jacket out of the coat closet. He could hear Alix in the kitchen, filling a pan with hot water. When he stepped outside, the fog was still swirling in over the cliffs from the sea, turning the garage and the woodshed and the pumphouse into wraith-like shapes in the dull morning light. But the smell of it was moist and salt-fresh, cleansing.

He opened the door to the pumphouse, looked inside. Flakes of spilled manure littered the floor. They’d carried the rest of the evidence away with them-whatever containers they’d used. It had been easy for them, he thought. Dark night, nothing to repel intruders, not even a lock on the damn pumphouse door.

When he re-entered the house a couple of minutes later, Alix was no longer in the kitchen; he heard her moving around upstairs. He sat down in the living room and filled one of his pipes-the calabash that Alix said made him look like Basil Rathbone playing Sherlock Holmes. He was about to light it when she came down again.

She was wearing her robe, the wine-red velour one, and she had doused herself with Miss Dior cologne. The smell of it was cloyingly sweet in the cold room. Her face was pale, her expression one of contained anger. She might be emotional in the first minutes of a crisis, but she never let her emotions govern her for very long.

She sat opposite him. “What did they put in the well?” she asked. “Manure?”

“Yes.”

“It was Mitch Novotny, I suppose.”

Things had moved past the point of denial now; she had literally been struck with the truth a few minutes ago. He nodded. “Or one of his friends.”

“Aren’t you going to call the sheriff?”

“What good would it do? There’s no evidence against him, or anyone else.”

“What, then? You’re not going to confront him?”

“I don’t know. Probably not.”

Her expression had changed; what he saw on her face now was resolve. “Jan, we’ve got to get away from here. You can see that now, can’t you?”

“No,” he said, “I can’t. Running away won’t solve anything. That’s just what Novotny and the rest of them want-to drive us out. I won’t let them do that.”

“Why? What difference does it make?”

“It makes a big difference to me.”

“There are other lighthouses—”

“Not like this one. There’s not enough time.”

“What do you mean, not enough time?”

“To find another one, make all the arrangements. To get my book done before you… go off to L.A.”

“I’m not ‘going off to L.A.’ For heaven’s sake, I can postpone things with Alison, if that’s what—”

“I’m not leaving here, Alix,” he said. “Not until our year’s tenancy is up.”

“How can you expect to stay with the well polluted, no water to bathe in?”

“There are chemicals to purify the well.”

“All right, there are chemicals. But what’s to stop Novotny from doing it again? And again? Or doing something else, something worse?”

“There’s me to stop him.”

“I don’t like that kind of talk. What can you do against a man like Novotny? Against a whole village full of hostile people?”