Bill Pronzini - The Lighthouse

“You didn’t go after her right away?”

“I didn’t go after her at all,” Cassie said. “No, I just wanted to get out for a while, go for a drive, try to think. But there she was, pedaling along the cape road; I could see the reflector lights on her bicycle. Even then I didn’t follow her, not for a while. Then I thought, why not go out there and talk to her, try to reason with her again about the extra thousand dollars. So I did. I didn’t intend to hurt her. It just happened, that’s all, like it did with Miranda.”

The woman’s expression was distracted now, her gaze jumpy. But the pistol was still steady in her two hands. Alix desperately wondered how far she could push her. And yet she had to keep trying, had to find some way to either make her surrender the weapon or try to take it away from her. Jan’s life as well as her own might depend on it.

“Did Miranda want money too?” she asked. “Is that why you killed her?”

The question seemed to surprise Cassie. “Money? Oh, I suppose it would have come to that. What she claimed she wanted when she showed up here was advice. Advice, help, succor, sympathy. She wanted to keep the baby, she wanted Ron to pay child support. She thought I might be able to give her some… what did she call it? Insight. Some insight into how to get him to acknowledge her-that was the word she used, acknowledge her and the baby.”

Now Alix remembered two more seemingly unrelated facts. Miranda Collins had been four months pregnant when she died. And Cassie’s ex-husband, the anthropology professor who had a weakness for coeds, was named Ron.

“She’d been sleeping with Ron for two years, the little bitch,” Cassie said. “All very secret, of course, because he was such a fine, upstanding faculty member. Very secret from everybody except me. The wife always knows.”

“But why did she come to you?”

“Who knows? I don’t understand these young people; their morals aren’t like ours. Maybe she thought that since I was another woman Ron had treated badly, I’d understand her plight and we’d form a united front against him. But how could I do that, after what she’d done to me? She was the one who put an end to my marriage; she was the one who’d conceived the child I could never have with Ron.”

Cassie was breathing raggedly now. Alix clenched her fists, watching the woman’s jumpy, frightening eyes. Cassie wasn’t going to relinquish that pistol without a fight, that was clear now; and in her worked-up state, she might decide to pull the trigger at any moment. If Alix hoped to survive, she would have to make some kind of move against her and would have to do it very soon. Maybe she could drop down, throw herself at Cassie’s feet… but not from where she stood now, there was too much distance between them. Move away from the car, then, one slow step at a time. And keep Cassie talking while she did it…

“But you didn’t mean to kill Miranda,” she said, and eased one foot out in front of her. “Isn’t that what you said?”

“Oh no. It just happened. I don’t even remember doing it. Funny, though-afterward, the next day, I knew Ron would realize I’d done it, even though he didn’t know she’d come down here to see me. Because of where her body was found, so close to here. I should have taken her a long way from Hilliard, a long, long way, but I was so scared that night, I just wanted to get rid of her. But Ron never said a thing to the police. I kept waiting for him to call and accuse me and he didn’t do that, either.”

Alix had moved one full step away from the car and was about to take another. But when Cassie paused, she stood very still. She would need at least two more steps before she was close enough to hurl herself at the woman’s feet “Well, now I know the reason,” Cassie said. “I should have known it right from the first. He couldn’t risk his affair being found out. Oh, I can picture him mouthing platitudes to his colleagues: ‘How could such a terrible thing happen to such a lovely girl?’ He didn’t care about Miranda any more than he cared about any of the others. Or me. But he should have cared about that baby. He—”

Cassie broke off again, and again cocked her head to listen. Alix heard nothing except the wind in the trees outside… and then she did, she heard movement at the open door to Cassie’s right. And she saw someone come in, a shadow at first, then the shape of a man Adam Reese, holding his rifle at an angle in front of him, his clothing damp and disheveled and his eyes bright, hot, flashing a fragmented blue-and-white as they sought Alix, found her, pinned her. His lips were pulled back in a feral grimace, spittle flecking them at the comers. Then he saw Cassie and stopped moving; a look of amazement crossed his features, as if he hadn’t heard them talking from outside, as if he’d expected to find Alix there alone. His body dipped into a crouch and he started to swing the rifle’s muzzle toward Cassie.

But Cassie was quicker. She pivoted in an absurdly graceful motion, like a ballerina doll in a music box, and the pistol bucked in her hand. The sound of the shot was deafening in the confined space. Reese jerked, lost his unfired rifle, staggered with his hands coming up to his chest. Cassie fired a second bullet into him, and Alix heard but didn’t see him fall.

She had already moved by then. She was down on her stomach slithering frantically under the car.

At the doorway to the lightroom he rolled the barrel of fire sand out of the way, then unhooked the air hose and pulled the diaphone over until it was balanced on the edge of the sill. He went back up to the lantern, unhooked the hose from the compressor, hefted the unit in his arms, and brought it back down to the lightroom, where he set it in the doorway next to the diaphone.

The noise he made doing this seemed to have refueled Bonner’s rage: the obscenities and the pounding increased to another fever pitch. Bonner was still ranting when Jan descended to the trap, but stopped while he was still two risers above it. Jan came to a standstill, breathing through his mouth, listening, as Bonner must have been on the other side. He pushed up his glasses, rubbed at his stinging eyes, squeezed them shut against the gathering pain.

God, he thought, let me get through the next few minutes. Just these next few minutes.

“Ryerson! What you doing up there, you murdering son of a bitch!”

And the pounding started again, savage, rhythmic-one driving thud against the bottom of the trap every two or three seconds.

Quickly, Jan moved down the remaining steps, bent, and threw the locking bolt free of its ring, timing it so that the sound the bolt made releasing was lost in the hollow thud of wood on wood. He was turning, starting back up to the lightroom, when the next blow came. This time the door rose an inch or so in its frame, fell back with an audible bumping sound. There were no more blows-just a heavy silence that lasted five seconds, ten, while Bonner’s slow wits took in the fact that the trap was now unlocked. If he thought that his pounding had somehow broken the lock, if he didn’t suspect a trap above the trap…

The door lifted again, slowly-one inch, two. Jan tensed. And then Bonner shoved up fast and hard, threw the trap back against its hinge stops. His head and shoulders appeared in the opening, eyes wide and wild and gleaming in the weak light.

With his foot Jan shoved the diaphone off the sill, sent it plunging downward. It hit one of the steps with a ringing metallic clatter, bounced straight at Bonner, who threw his arms up in front of his face and started to cry out. The diaphone struck him on one forearm and the side of his head, knocked him backward out of sight. His cry changed into a strangled shriek that was lost, cut off, in the echoing, thumping noise of the heavy instrument and Bonner’s body tumbling down the stairs. When the sounds finally stopped, the silence that filled the tower seemed riddled with ghostly echoes just beyond the range of hearing.