“The usual,’ Travis said. She nodded. “I’d like to meet her sometime.” “I don’t know if I can arrange that.” “You don’t think she’d come? Or don’t you want to ask?”
“I don’t think Creath would let her.” “How do you mean?”
He hesitated. But then he thought: well, why not tell her? He had come to trust Nancy a damn sight more than he trusted Creath or his Aunt Liza. If he owed his loyalty to anyone, he thought, it was to her.
“It’s Creath. He uses her. And I think he’s scared somebody might find out.”
He explained about the late-night visits up the stairs.
Nancy was wide-eyed, then thoughtful. She put her hands behind her head and gazed up at the canopy of oaks. “The princess in the tower,” she said faintly. “She’s a prisoner.”
“She doesn’t give him any argument.”
“Doesn’t matter. Maybe he’s blackmailing her. Maybe he threatens her.” She shook her head. “Jesus! I never did like the man. But this—!”
“We still don’t know why she’s there. Where she came from.”
“Find out,” Nancy said. Her features were suffused with new purpose. Her eyes seemed to shine in the dark. “She’s a prisoner. We know that much. And—you know what else, Travis? Maybe we can rescue her.”
He came home late, parked the car carefully, went upstairs and fell at once into a dazed half-sleep. The footsteps brought him awake again.
It was a Friday night—Saturday morning, he guessed—deep in the hinterland between midnight and dawn. Travis came awake groggily. He felt the house sighing and shifting, the wind talking in the chimney flues. It was a few days into September, the days were as hot and dry as ever but now the nights brought some small measure of relief, moon-cooled winds blowing in across the grasslands. He pulled the sheet more tightly around his shoulders and drew a deep, shuddering breath. Sleep was only a heartbeat away. But the footsteps came again and they were just beyond his door.
Creath, he thought miserably, and was overcome for a moment with an unbearable sense of oppression. It was late and dark and he felt sapped, powerless. But wait, he thought. The footsteps continued. They were light, delicate, almost inaudible. He would not have heard if they had not hesitated in their rhythm directly outside his door.
Not Creath’s footsteps. Anna’s, then. And they were headed down the stairs.
He sat up slowly. The sheet fell away.
Long moments passed. Then he heard the front door latch rasp open, the screen door yawn and subside.
His room was dark. Naked, he went to the window and raised the sash an inch.
Anna Blaise appeared on the front walk.
She was dressed in a summer blouse and skirt. His first thought was: she must be cold: The wind tousled her hair. Her eyes, shadowed, seemed to give back the obscurity of the night sky. She hesitated a moment at the sidewalk, her head turning back and forth with dreamlike fluidity, like a hunting dog, Travis thought, fixing on a scent. Briefly, she looked up at the window. Her gaze held there a moment, though it was not possible that she could have seen him. Travis did not breathe. Then, slowly, slowly, she began to move westward along DeVille into the black shadows of the box elders.
He hesitated only a moment. He threw on his pants, laced his shoes, buttoned a rough cotton workshirt. He was as gentle as he could be moving down the stairs, but he was heavier and clumsier than Anna and in his haste some noise was unavoidable. On the dark landing he jammed his knee into a newel post and suppressed a curse.
“Travis!”
His Aunt Liza’s voice whipcracked into the silence.
“Travis, is that you?” He froze.
He hadn’t made it past her bedroom.
She took him down into the front parlor. It was dark, but she ignored the light switches. In her nightgown and robe, Travis thought, his aunt resembled something amphibian, crudely draped, caught in the midst of some unspeakable transformation. Her double chin spilled over a lacy collar, her teeth were in a glass upstairs, her expression was vacant. Christ God, Travis thought, I have to leave this place— Anna—!
But his aunt said, “She is not for you, you know, Travis,” with a calm equanimity that made him wonder if she could read his thoughts.
“No,” she went on before he could answer. “There is no need to explain. I know what goes on in a man’s mind where that woman is concerned.” She sighed. She had settled into Creath’s easy chair, her head cocked in an attitude of icy, bottomless cynicism. The mantle clock ticked out seconds as she regarded him. “You’re not the only one. Did you know that? Oh, yes. There was that Grant Bevis. A married man, a respectable man, owned the hardware store over on Beaumont. He used to come sneaking around here—sneaking after Anna. Wife left him. Took the kids. Still he came.” She smiled humorlessly. “Left town when I threatened to expose him before the church. His letters to her still come in the mail, though. All different postmarks. All the same. “His ‘undying love’. Love! As if love entered into it!” Her smile faded. “And of course there is Creath. I guess you know. Don’t shake your head! This is a small household. We cannot truly keep secrets one from another. Maybe Creath believes so. Maybe he has deluded himself into believing so. But it is impossible. I’m not a heavy sleeper, Travis. I know when he goes to her. I know. …”
“If you know,” Travis whispered, “then why—?”
“Why stay with him? Why stay here in this house?” She laughed suddenly, a shrill bray, Travis worried that it might wake up Creath and bring him down here. “Stand on my entitlements, like that Bevis woman? It got her nowhere, you know. It got her alone and with children to raise in a world that does not welcome hungry mouths. Love, says the vow, and honor, and obey. Maybe love goes. Maybe honor goes, even. But there is that last. I can have that much of a marriage. I can obey.”
Shell be gone now, Travis thought. Gone wherever she is going.
“She can see into him,” Liza was saying. “She thinks to conceal it from me, but I know. I know. There is something in Creath that is drawn to her. Something left over from his childhood. Something stupid and foolish in him.” She added, a whisper, “I know that part of him. There was a time when he would look at me that way. The way he looks at her. But that was a long time ago. Years gone, Travis. Years gone. She has no right.”
“Who is she, Aunt Liza?”
“I don’t know.” She sighed again, remembering, as if she were not fully awake. Her voice took on a distant quality. “It was Creath’s doing. An odd thing. He doesn’t ever stop for hitchhikers or tramps. We were driving back from your mother’s place… that last time we visited, when it became obvious we could not visit ever again. It was late, it was after midnight, and we were on the road coming into Haute Montagne—there was no traffic—and Creath was tired of driving. And suddenly there was this woman. She stood on the sandy margin of the road. Just stood there. Not thumbing. Not doing anything. Standing. And—Travis, she had no clothes on. Can you credit that? A naked woman on the verge of the highway white as a statue in the moonlight?” She clucked. “I thought there must have been an accident. I would have urged Creath to stop… but he had already slowed down, he was pulling over before the words were out of my mouth. ‘Get a blanket,’ he says. ‘There’s one in the trunk.’ I did so. I covered her up. Creath was just staring at her like a man struck blind… and she was staring at him. I covered her up with that old woolen blanket and I led her into the car. We—took her home.”