Bill Pronzini - Snowbound

Some of the conversation seemed to have abated behind him, and he sensed that others in the room were also looking at him. He felt conspicuous, like something curious on display. Get out of here, he thought urgently, they don’t want you and you don’t want them, you don’t want any of this; go back to the cabin, be alone.

He swallowed his drink, dropped the cigarette into an ashtray, caught the bottle off the bar with his left hand, and moved hurriedly to the door. Turning out of it, he walked with rapid steps and head down to the corner-and ran into the woman just coming out of Lassen Drive from the west. The left side of his body bumped hard against her and threw her off-balance, so that she seemed about to fall into the packed snow at the curbing. Automatically Cain flung out his right hand and caught her arm, steadying her.

It was Rebecca Hughes.

She stared at him through the lightly falling flakes, and her mouth crooked into a bitter smile. “Well,” she said, “we do seem to keep running into each other, don’t we, Mr. Cain? Literally, this time.” She shrugged off his hand and started away from him.

The shame he had experienced on Wednesday returned all at once, the loneliness made a plaintive cry, and he heard himself say impetuously, “Wait Mrs. Hughes, wait, listen I’m sorry, I’m sorry I ran into you just now and I’m sorry for the way I acted the other night, I had no right to do that.”

It stopped her. Slowly, she turned to face him again. Her features smoothed somewhat, and the bitterness was tempered now with surprise and a wary puzzlement. She did not say anything, looking at him.

The act of speaking seemed to have had a strangely cathartic effect on Cain. He said again, heavy-voiced, “I’m sorry.”

Rebecca continued to look at him in steady silence. At length the wariness faded, and she sighed softly and said, “All right. I’m hardly blameless myself for the other night; it was foolish of me to have gone in the first place.”

“You only wanted what you said-some simple companionship; I suppose I knew that all along. But it’s not the same for me, can you understand that? I don’t need it. ”

“Everyone needs it, Mr. Cain.”

“All I need is to be alone-that’s all.”

Rebecca asked quietly, “Why did you all of a sudden decide to apologize to me? You just… looked at me on Wednesday afternoon. You didn’t say anything at all then.”

“I couldn’t.”

“Why couldn’t you?”

“I don’t want to talk to anybody.”

“You’re talking to me now, on your initiative.”

“Yes,” Cain said. And then, abruptly and without prior thought: “Maybe… maybe you do have to have conversations with somebody once in a while, maybe you can’t help yourself. It’s all a matter of words.”

“Words?”

“They pile up inside you,” Cain said. He felt vaguely lightheaded, now. “Thousands of words piling up and piling up until there are so many of them you can’t hold them in anymore; they just come spilling out.”

“I’ve never thought of it that way before, but yes, I can understand what you mean.” She paused. “And I guess the same is true of emotions and needs and frustrations, isn’t it? You can’t bottle them up forever either; they have to find an outlet of some kind.”

“No. No, just words. Too many unspoken words.”

Rebecca studied him for a time. “I was on my way home,” she said. “Are you going back to the cabin now?”

“Yes.”

“We could walk together as far as my house.”

No, Cain thought. And said, “All right.”

They went across Sierra Street and started up Lassen. In a sporadic way they talked of the slide, only that and nothing of a more personal nature. The spontaneity was gone; the flow of words from within him had ebbed into a trickle of words. Cain felt himself retreating again-wanted it that way, did not want it that way. When they reached the drive of the Hughes’ house, he said immediately, awkwardly, “Good night, Mrs. Hughes,” waited long enough to glimpse the small, brief smile she gave him and to hear her say, “Good night, Mr. Cain,” and then turned away. He sensed, as he continued rapidly along the road, that she was watching him; but he did not look back.

All the way up to the cabin he was aware of the sound of the wind in the surrounding trees-the lonely, lonely sound of the wind…

Peggy Tyler reached the stand of red fir just above the lake roads fork at ten minutes before seven. Her mother had returned from the Chiltons just after Matt’s telephone call, and Peggy had told her she was going for a walk and then to the inn for a while. At six twenty she had left the house, at the western end of Shasta Street, and had turned right instead of left and slipped through the thick growth of trees well to the rear of All Faiths Church, circling toward the fork. She had seen no one, and she was certain no one had seen her.

She positioned herself at the bole of one of the firs nearest Mule Deer Lake Road, shivering slightly inside her furtrimmed parka, and looked down into the village. Shining hazily through the thin gauze of snow, the lights seemed more remote than they actually were. The streets were typically deserted, and car headlamps were nonexistent.

Now that she was here, waiting in the heavy darkness and the kind of whispering quiet you found only on mountain nights, she was more nervous than she had been earlier. But it was an anticipatory feeling, born not of apprehension but of exhilaration. The past few days had been oh-so-deadly dull, with nothing to do except to watch barely discernible images flickering on the television screen and nowhere to go except out into the very environment she so passionately hated. The prospect of an adventurous balling session in what was literally her own backyard was intoxicating: a lovely and audacious private joke to be played on all the smug little people who lived in this damned valley, one of the few experiences of her life in the Sierra that she would be able to look back on with fondness and pleasure.

Of course, there was a certain hazard involved, though not nearly as great for her as for Matt. She didn’t give a hair what Hidden Valley thought of her, her mother included, and she didn’t give a hair for Matt’s saintly reputation; if their affair were discovered, it surely wouldn’t have any real effect on her long-range plans. The only consequence of discovery, as far as she was concerned, would be that the goose who laid the golden eggs would be dead: no more generous cash presents like the thousand-dollar Christmas surprise. Still, she wasn’t worried. If Matt was willing to chance it-and it wasn’t really much of a chance, the way he had outlined it-then she was too…

A pair of lights moving in the village intruded on her thoughts, and she saw that a car had swung onto Sierra Street just beyond the Mercantile. It passed the church, and even though she was unable to distinguish the make, she knew it would be Matt’s. Behind the car, the village streets still appeared empty. She swiveled her head to look south along Mule Deer Lake Road; the wall of night there was unbroken.

When the car approached the stand of fir, it slowed almost to a crawl. Peggy waited until it had drawn abreast of her hiding place and then hurried out and opened the door and slipped inside. The dome light did not go on, Matt had done something to the bulb-clever Matt! She curled her body low on the seat, whispering a greeting, as the car picked up speed again.

He reached out a hand and stroked her hair. “Peggy,” he said, “Peggy, Peggy.”

She smiled and moved over, resting her head on his thigh, the fingers of her right hand stroking over his knee. His breathing came fast and heavy and she sensed the front of his trousers begin to bulge. He said thickly, “There’s not a soul on the streets. I made sure of that before I pulled out.”