Bill Pronzini - Snowbound

“What for?”

“So you don’t get any ideas, baby.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“No? I’ll lay it out for you then: I don’t want you carrying hammers and chisels and pry bars loose in your hands, I don’t want you even touching any of that stuff until we get back into the office, now do what I told you.”

A tic fluttered one corner of Brodie’s mouth. He turned and took the carton down and emptied the paper towel rolls onto the floor. In the hardware department, Kubion instructed him to put the box down and then turn around and lace his hands behind him. After Brodie complied, he heard tools begin to clatter into the carton, Kubion’s voice calling off the name of each. Then: “Okay, that everything you need?”

Brodie considered asking for an awl, because of the tool’s thin sharp-pointed blade; telling Kubion he might need it for work on the lock mechanism. But if Kubion saw through the lie, there was just no telling what he’d do; the last thing Brodie could afford now was to antagonize him. And Christ, even if Kubion let him have one, he’d never get close enough to stab him with it; and the round, beveled handles on the things made them too awkward for throwing, overbalanced them.

He said, “That’s everything, Earl.”

“Turn around and pick up the carton.”

Wordlessly, Brodie carried the heavy container back into the office. He set it down in front of the safe, took off his coat and gloves, and knelt beside it. He could feel Kubion’s eyes on his back as he began to sort through the jumble of tools, lifting them out of the carton one by one, trying to stall without seeming to do so.

“Vic,” Kubion said finally, “Vic baby.”

Brodie stopped stalling then and went to work on the safe.

The moment Rebecca stepped inside the church she knew that Matt was dead.

She felt it like a chill in the strained, hushed atmosphere, and saw it reflected in the staring faces of the people huddled throughout. Everyone who lived in the valley seemed to be there, everyone except Matt, and he was not there because he was dead; he had been killed somehow by the men who had kidnapped her and Zachary Cain and all these others, too. The presentiment of things being wrong, Matt’s unsatisfactorily explained absence, had planted the seed in her mind, and it had germinated swiftly with the appearance and actions of the wild-eyed gunman and his demands for information about the Mercantile’s safe. A kind of creeping mental numbness-a defensive barrier erected against the sharp stabbing edges of fear-had kept her from dwelling continually on the possibility, but now there could no longer be any resistance because there was no longer any doubt.

Matt was dead.

She stood very still and tried to feel grief, some sense of personal loss. There was only the terror and a hollow despair. Dreamlike, she watched people converging on her and felt Webb Edwards’ hand on her arm and heard him asking if she were all right, if she wanted to sit down; heard other voices murmuring but none of them saying anything about Matt, uneasily avoiding the inevitable, and so she said it for them, she said, “Matt’s dead, isn’t he?”

Ann Tribucci was at her side now. “Becky, you’d better come and sit down…”

“He’s dead, isn’t he?”

“He… yes. Oh Becky-”

Woodenly, “How did it happen?”

“You don’t want to know, not now.”

“I have to know. I don’t know anything about what’s going on. Why are we here? Who are those men? How did Matt die?”

In hesitant, succinct words they told her who the men were and what had occurred last night and today. Rebecca was beyond the point of shock; she comprehended the facts, accepted them, abhorred them automatically with a small part of her mind, but they had no immediate or cohesive impact on her and she registered no external reaction. She waited for someone to tell her about Matt, and when no one did she repeated her question: “How did Matt die?”

“Come and sit down,” Ann said again.

“I don’t want to sit down, will you stop asking me to sit down and please please tell me what happened to my husband?”

Awkward silence. Rebecca sensed dimly that their hesitancy was not solely the result of a desire to spare her the specifics of Matt’s death, that there was something else they were reluctant to reveal and which they wanted to spare her. What? she thought-and then she guessed what it must be, but this also had little distinct impact on her. Like an anesthetic, the numbness had begun spreading through her mind again.

She said in a barren tone, “Where was he killed?”

Lew Coopersmith, slowly and resignedly: “At the lake.”

“Last night?”

“Yes.”

“They shot him, is that it? Was he shot?”

“Yes.”

“Was he alone?”

The awkward silence.

“Was he alone?” Rebecca repeated.

“No one else was shot last night.”

“That isn’t what I asked. Was Matt alone?”

Pleadingly Ann said, “Becky, Becky…”

“He wasn’t alone, was he? He was with another woman, together with another woman. Isn’t that right?”

Silence.

“Yes of course,” she said, “of course he was. Who was it? No, it doesn’t matter, I don’t want to know, it doesn’t matter.”

Shuffling movement around her, toward her, away from her. Faces averted, faces staring. Pity touching her like fat, soft, unwelcome hands. She did want to sit down then and found a place without assistance. Head bowed, she thought dully: Well, that makes it all very simple, doesn’t it? No need for a decision now, no need for anything now. Matt was dead, and the truth was out; they all knew the truth at last: Matt Hughes a philanderer, Matt Hughes consorting with a local woman and doing it right here in Hidden Valley (even she would never quite have expected him to be that brash, that foolhardy; even she did not really know all of what had been concealed beneath his generous, boyish, pious exterior). How surprised they must have been-and how fitting that they should have learned it in this of all places. And what would they say if she were to tell them of the long, long line of other women, all the past deceits?

Oh yes, there had been quite a bit of goodness in him, and his death was violent and premature, and she had lived with him and slept with him for seven years; but she could not now or ever grieve for him. The well of Matt-directed emotions had run dry. She had given him everything she knew how to give, and he had left her with nothing whatsoever of value. How could she possibly mourn an unfaithful husband who had even died in the company of another woman?

Ann sat down beside her and covered one of her mittened hands, not speaking. Rebecca was grateful for that; she did not want dialogue of any kind. She sat without moving or thinking for several moments. Then, gradually, some of the numbness began to recede, and she became aware of the heavy tumescence that was Ann’s unborn child, of her surroundings, of why she and all the others were here in the church, of the things the three men outside had already done: the full horror of the situation penetrating for the first time. Fear surged consumingly in her stomach again; her fingers closed tightly around Ann’s and clung to them. Matt was dead, murdered-and what of Ann and her baby and everyone else in the valley? What of Rebecca Hughes?

What was to become of them?

Cain sat on the far edge of the pulpit, spine curved to the outer organ casing, forearms resting on his pulled-up knees. It was warm enough inside the church, but his skin crawled with cold-the kind of cold that has nothing to do with temperature.

The dark gunman’s clearly homicidal dementia had prepared him for most any contingency on the ride down from the cabin, yet the magnitude of what was actually taking place in Hidden Valley-recounted to Rebecca Hughes while he had stood listening and ignored on the periphery-had stunned and repulsed him. The concept was monstrous; you could not immediately reconcile your mind to it. Things like this can’t happen, you thought; they can’t happen to you. And then you remembered men like Hitler and Richard Speck and Charles Manson, and that all their victims must have at first experienced the same staggering disbelief, and you understood that such things could and did happen at any time, at any place, to anyone.