Bill Pronzini - The Hidden

“Probably security lights.”

“We can go find out, can’t we? It’s better than sitting here freezing. If nobody’s home, we’ll drive into the village.”

In the bedroom they each held the torch while the other put on rain gear. Outside, Jay lighted their run to the carport. The storm created wildly gyrating shapes of the pines to the north, but just before he clambered in behind the Prius’s wheel he saw the shimmers of light in that direction.

The narrow lane was carpeted with pine needles and wind-torn branches, one of the branches large enough that Macklin had to ease out around it at a crawl. The stand of trees that separated Ben’s property from the one on this side was a couple of hundred yards in length; after two-thirds of that distance, it thinned out and ended at a high fence that extended out to the bluff’s edge and continued parallel to the road. Above the fence he could see the upper part of the house, portions of tall dark windows and angled roofline; the pale haze of light came from below. Wood smoke bellowed out of a stone chimney and was immediately shredded and whipped away by the swirling wind.

Shelby said, “Definitely somebody home.”

“They must have an auxiliary generator. That’s the only way they can have power when we don’t.”

The blacktop dead-ended at the base of a rocky headland that rose at the property’s far perimeter. There was a double gate in the fence, one half closed and the other half open. Drive right in? Might as well. Let the the headlights tell the people here right away that they had visitors.

He made the turn through the gate. The front of the house was dark; the light came through windows at the sides and back. Big place, modernistic in design, built of redwood and glass halfway to the bluff’s edge and partially in the shadow of the headland. Three cars sat on a parking area a short distance inside the gate: a medium-size SUV, a four-door sedan, and a low-slung sports car. Macklin pulled up next to the sports job—Porsche Boxster, looked like, a make and model he’d always coveted—and shut off the headlamps.

“Want to wait here?”

“No,” Shelby said. “I’ll go with you.”

The front door stayed closed as they hurried along a short flagstone path onto a porch shielded by a slanted overhang and palely lit by a recessed spot. Macklin found the doorbell, pushed it. A minute passed; no response. But he sensed somebody on the other side watching them through a peephole in the door. He blew on his cold hands, rang the bell again. And still the door didn’t open.

“Leery of strangers showing up on a night like this,” he said against Shelby’s ear. “Maybe I should—”

“Who’re you?” Man’s voice from inside, loud and unfriendly. “What do you want?”

“Sorry to disturb you,” Macklin called out. “We’re friends of Ben Coulter, staying at his cottage down the way. Just arrived before the power went out.”

“I asked you what you want.”

“Can you let us have some matches? We didn’t bring any and there’re none in the cottage.”

Silence. Then, “Matches, for Christ’s sake,” barely audible in a lull in the storm-throb, directed to a second person behind the door who answered in a voice too low for the words to be distinguishable. But Macklin thought it belonged to a woman.

Shelby pressed up against him, taking hold of his arm, either because she was cold or in an effort to gain sympathy from the peephole watcher. She called out, “It’s freezing in the cottage. We’d really appreciate the help.”

The woman’s voice said, clearly this time, “Oh, for heaven’s sake, just let them come in.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

A chain rattled and the door opened to reveal a slender young blonde woman dressed in slacks and a bulky knit sweater. Behind her, a big, blocky-faced man in his early forties said, “You always get what you want, don’t you, Claire?” The woman didn’t answer. When she widened the door opening, the man backed off a few paces and stood scowling. Macklin had a glimpse then of two other people in a broad sunken living room beyond a short foyer—a lean, sandy-haired male standing by the steps and a dark-haired female on a couch in front of a massive curving fireplace, both with glasses in their hands.

The blonde woman said, “Come in, I’m sorry you had to stand out there so long.” Her tone and her smile seemed almost eager, as if she were welcoming acquaintances rather than strangers.

Shelby went in first, Macklin behind her, and then she stopped abruptly. He saw why a couple of seconds later, when he had his first clear look at the big man.

There was a gun in his hand.

It wasn’t pointed at them; he was holding it muzzle down along his right leg. A large automatic on a squarish aluminum or polymer frame.

“It’s all right, don’t worry,” the blonde woman said, and shut the door against the bitter night. Then, to the man, “Brian, please—put that thing away. These people are no threat.”

“I don’t like to take chances.”

“He thinks he’s back on military guardhouse duty,” the sandy-haired man said. “Or Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry. ”

The woman on the couch said, “Why shouldn’t he be careful? We’re all a little spooked.”

“I’m not,” the blocky-faced man said flatly. As if to prove it, he opened a closet door and made the automatic disappear inside.

The blonde woman looked relieved. “I’m Claire Lomax. This is my husband, Brian. And these are the Deckers—Brian’s sister, Paula, and her husband, Gene.”

“Jay Macklin. My wife, Shelby.”

“Shelby Hunter,” she said.

Again, as always. If he neglected to add her last name in an introduction, she did it herself, immediately and automatically. And as always, it saddened him a little. Not because she’d chosen to keep her birth name—that had never bothered him—but because of what her making an issue of it subtly implied. Separate identities, linked by marriage but with a gap between them that could never be bridged.

“Shelby,” Claire Lomax said, “that’s an unusual name.”

“It was my maternal grandmother’s.”

“Mmm. Well, you must be chilled. Come in, sit by the fire, have something to drink before you go.”

“We don’t want to intrude—”

“You’re not intruding. Are they, Brian?”

Lomax said nothing. He was still scowling.

Macklin was about to decline the invitation. Seeing Lomax with that automatic had made him edgy again. There was something else, too, a kind of charged atmosphere—as if there were frictions among the four of them and he and Shelby had interrupted a tense interaction.

But Shelby didn’t seem to feel it; she surprised him by saying, “We’d like to, if you’re sure you don’t mind. I haven’t been warm since the power went out.”

“I know what you mean,” Claire said, “it’s a miserable night. Here, let me take your coats.”

“Sure, come and join us,” the dark-haired woman said. “Misery loves company.”

Her husband said, “Shut up, Paula,” without looking at her.

“Fuck you.”

Gene Decker laughed as if she’d said something funny, but the glare he directed at her was venomous. He tilted his glass, drained it in a long swallow. “I can use another drink myself.”

“So can I. God, yes.”

“You’ve had your quota, honeybunch.”

“Like hell I have. If you won’t make me another one, Brian will.”

Lomax didn’t move.

Tension here, all right. You could feel it, almost hear it—a subaural crackling like echoes from the pitch-pine logs burning in the fireplace. Whatever was going on with these people, Macklin didn’t want any part of it. But Shelby had committed them; he couldn’t just drag her out of here. Couldn’t have managed a quick exit anyhow because she’d already shrugged out of her coat. Nothing he could do then but shed his own coat, then follow her down the three steps into the living room.