Bill Pronzini - The Lighthouse

It was the car. She half ran to it, around to the front, and bent and looked at the grille, the bumper. Thinks maybe I hit something else last night, he thought dully. Then he thought, much more sharply: Did I? He went there himself, looked himself-looked for dents, scrapes, broken headlights, broken signal lights. Looked for blood.

Nothing. There was nothing to see.

Alix faced him again, and some of the rigidity had left her; but the look on her face and in her eyes was still the same. Fear, and something else, something darker, primitive. She put both hands on his arms, as if re-establishing contact between them.

“Where were you all night?”

He found words this time, forced them out of the rusty cavern of his throat. “Down the road a few miles. A lookout… I spent the night there.”

“Another bad headache?”

“Yes. Alix, why are you here? How did you—?”

“I walked. I was worried about you.”

“This morning?”

“Yes. Jan, listen to me—”

“Nothing else happened at the light?”

“Not there, no. On the cape road, a mile or so from here.”

Something began to crawl inside him-a thin worm of dread. “What do you mean? What happened?”

“There’s been another murder. Mandy Barnett. Somebody ran her and her bicycle off the road last night and then strangled her.”

He couldn’t comprehend it at first; refused to comprehend it. All he said was, “No.”

“It’s true, I found the body. I’ve already called the state police. ”

He shook his head. “No,” he said again.

“Now you listen to me,” she said. She gripped his arms more tightly; he could feel the bite of her nails through his coat. “I want you to go out to the lighthouse. Right now, before the authorities come, before anybody sees you here.”

“And leave you alone? Why?”

“The way you look, that’s why. The way you’re acting. I don’t want them to see you like this.”

It was seeping into him now, the full awareness of what she had told him and what she was getting at. A sudden chill wracked him. “You don’t think that I—?”

“I don’t think anything.” She said it urgently, in a tone of voice he had never heard her use before. She kept looking out toward the empty highway, her head cocked to one side, listening. “I don’t want them to think anything either. I don’t want them to see you like this and I don’t want them to know you weren’t home last night.”

“You mean… lie to them?”

“That’s just what I mean. I’ll say you were at the lighthouse all night and you say the same thing. You were with me the whole time. Now go, hurry!”

She was pushing him toward the car as she spoke. He wanted to resist and yet he didn’t, he couldn’t. He opened the door, bent his body in under the wheel.

“Wash your face and change your clothes when you get there,” she said. “Try to get a grip on yourself.”

“I’m all right now. Alix, I didn’t, I couldn’t…”

“I know. Just go, go!”

She slammed the door, and he started the engine and drove away from her, out onto the still-deserted highway. In the rearview mirror he watched her grow smaller, less distinct in the mist; it was as if pieces of her were being consumed by it, so that only diminishing fragments-part of her face, one blue-coated arm, the lower halves of her legs-remained. And then they, too, were gone, and he was turning past the sign that said CAP DES PERES LIGHTHOUSE, 3 MILES, CLOSED TO THE PUB-Llc, jouncing along the rutted cape road, alone again in the darkening gray.

I didn’t, I couldn’t…

Could I? he thought.

Did I?

She watched Jan closely as they talked with the state homicide detective, Frank Sinclair. He was sitting in the single chair near the woodstove, his head backlit by the side window. The comparative darkness of the room accentuated the paleness of the skin around his beard, made his cheekbones seem more prominent. His face was immobile as Sinclair posed his questions; only his eyes gave any hint of his inner upheaval.

She wanted to believe that Sinclair saw Jan’s agitation as nothing more than the normal reaction of a man who has been awakened from a supposedly sound sleep to the unsettling news of another murder. Jan was adept at hiding his true feelings behind his professorial facade-from others, at least. What she saw in his eyes were emotions much more complex than simple shock. And one of them was fear.

“Mrs. Ryerson?”

She blinked at Sinclair, realizing she’d lost the thread of his questioning. He was a chubby man dressed in a gray tweed jacket and gray slacks; his mustache was the only distinctive feature in an otherwise bland face, and that only because it grew more fully on the right side than on the left. He seemed sensitive to the defect, because periodically he stroked the sparser side-as if it were a defenseless animal in need of comforting. To the casual observer, his appearance might have been deceptively reassuring, but her artist’s eye picked out the determined ridges of muscle around his mouth, the sharp intelligence concealed beneath the bland exterior and thick dark-rimmed glasses. When he’d questioned them after the murder of the hitchhiker, she had recognized and been made wary by those qualities. After close to an hour with him this morning, she had come to regard him as a man who would be a dangerous adversary.

She cleared her throat and said, “I’m sorry, I’m afraid I didn’t hear what you said.”

His mouth twitched reprovingly; he patted the left side of his mustache as if it were responsible for the twitch and he wanted to calm it. “I said that I’d like to go over the chronology of events another time, to make sure I have everything straight.”

“All right.”

Sinclair looked down at the notepad he’d been writing on. “Now, Mrs. Ryerson, you say you couldn’t sleep, so you got up early and went for a walk?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Was there any particular reason for your sleeplessness?”

“No. I was just… restless. Things on my mind.”

Sinclair cocked his head interrogatively.

“The book my husband and I are working on,” she said.

“Ah, yes. A history of North American lighthouses, isn’t it?”

“Yes. He’s writing it and I’m illustrating it.”

Sinclair nodded. “What time did you leave on your walk?”

“Close to seven.”

“And your husband was asleep at the time?”

“He was, yes.”

“Mr. Ryerson,” Sinclair said to Jan, “were you aware your wife had gone out?”

“No. I’m a very sound sleeper.”

“And you were stilj asleep when she came back and told you what she’d found?”

“Yes.”

Again Sinclair consulted his notepad, allowing the silence to build. Jan was also looking at it, as if trying to read what the detective had written there. Then his gaze flicked up and over to Alix. There was a vague glassy quality to them, she thought, as if they were filmed with a thin layer of ice. But Sinclair wouldn’t have noted that. Or had he?

The questioning continued. Why had Alix walked so far this morning? Because she’d wanted to exercise. What had made her notice Mandy’s bicycle? Why had she gone as far as that circle of pines looking for the girl? On and on, some of the questions asked more than once, in subtly different guises. Then he shifted gears and asked again about the trouble they’d been having here at the light. Alix had explained it once, holding nothing back; it would have been foolish not to, and it diverted suspicion away from Jan, perhaps to where it actually belonged.

“Mr. Ryerson,” Sinclair asked, “why didn’t you call us when these things started happening-the polluted well, the rats in the pantry?”