Paula, facing it alone, no way to turn, no hope at all of aid...
Paula, whom he had never seen with her head bowed in fourteen years of marriage, defeated, broken, destroyed...
God, why hadn’t he come home early that night? He drew a long shuddering breath and walked out into the hall.
Paula was dead: dead, dead, bloody dead, and there was nothing he could do about it.
Was there?
Chapter 11
Debbie drew a deep shuddering breath and pulled back from Rick’s embrace. “Darling — please. We mustn’t. I have to go in now.”
“Just a little while longer,” he pleaded. His hand again sought her breast through its protective cup of brassiere.
“No, please, Rick. I just... you know, it’s just...”
Rick sighed in mock resignation and removed his hand. Debbie, her face flushed, quickly closed the top three buttons his agile fingers had undone. Her hands were shaking slightly. Rick smiled his special smile, and hopped out of the driver’s side of the Triumph. Then, as Debbie quickly smoothed down her rumpled skirt, he stuck his head in under the canvas top on his side. “Just so long as you aren’t sore,” he said.
When he got around the back of the car to open her door, she said, “You know I’m not, darling.”
The smile she flashed was so full of future delights that Rick caught his breath sharply. When she slid out, he enjoyed an exciting glimpse of her legs well beyond her stocking tops. That was one thing about the old Triumph, all right. It made them show what they had. He put his arm around her waist as they went up the walk together to Forrest Hall.
He started up the steps with her, but Debbie drew him along the front of the porch into the shadows cast by the supporting columns. “So you won’t forget me before next time, Ricky,” she said.
She raised her face to his; when their lips met, her tongue darted into his mouth for a moment. Her breathing was short and quick when she finally drew away. Rick said, “Tomorrow night, Deb?”
“I’ve got to spend the weekend with my folks,” she said. “They don’t even know I signed up for summer school yet. Classes start next week, so we’d better wait until Friday — a week from tomorrow.”
“Week from today, actually,” said Rick. “Eight o’clock. Here.”
“Okay.” She pecked him quickly on the mouth, slid from his automatic attempt to embrace her, and trotted up the steps. On the porch she stopped to blow him a kiss, then went in quickly, catching the screen door so it wouldn’t slam. Safely out of sight inside, she leaned against the wall to get her breath. Wow! Even her legs felt weak!
Friday. She’d made it a whole week as a sort of self-discipline. She went quickly to the door again, and looked out. Rick, erect and clean-limbed, was climbing into the Triumph. This was going to be some summer! She couldn’t tell her folks, of course, that she’d signed up for summer school because she’d suddenly realized that she didn’t want to spend the whole summer on the other side of the Bay, in San Leandro. Where Ricky wasn’t.
Debbie floated up the stairs to her room. The dorm was nearly deserted, except for the senior girls who would be graduating on Sunday, because the summer session classes didn’t begin until Wednesday.
She started to undress. It really would be a fight not to let Ricky do whatever he wanted to her; just his touch seemed to make fears and inhibitions and hesitations melt. She was glad she was going to be attending classes, because she always studied hard and that would help keep it from getting out of hand. She’d almost given in to him last July, out by Sear’s Lake that time when he’d gotten her blouse off and her bra pushed up and everything, and had almost lost him because of it. He’d dropped her completely for nine months, until he’d called in April about getting Professor Halstead’s address. She was glad, really, because it showed he wasn’t just interested in what he could get from her.
Funny. It had started over again with Professor Halstead, and now his wife was dead and the professor was living all alone out in that big house by the golf course. She remembered Paula from that faculty-student tea: a mature blond woman with a really marvelous figure despite her age. Debbie bet the professor really missed her. Look at the way Ricky, who had hardly known her, had reacted to her suicide.
Debbie stopped with her dress halfway over her head. Paula Halstead and... Ricky? That was silly, of course, but... But it would explain so many things that had bothered her in the past weeks. Like that sort of flimsy reason he’d had for wanting to see her alone. How broken up Ricky had been at her death.
He could have met her downtown, sometime... or in a bar. She knew he sometimes went into bars, because he had shown her the false ID that Heavy Gander had gotten for him somewhere.
She finished undressing very quickly, and got into her flannel pajamas. What if... She bounced into bed, sat with her arms clasping her up-drawn knees. What if Paula had killed herself because... because Rick hadn’t shown up that Friday? That would explain so much.
Debbie’s lips thinned and her eyes became calculating. Was she in competition for Rick with the dead woman? A mature, exciting woman who could have wrapped an inexperienced boy like Rick around her... well, around her finger?
Debbie might not be a mysterious, slinky, smoldering blonde: but she had a good figure if she did admit it herself, and she was right here, right now. Alive and warm and... yes, available, if that was going to be what it took to erase the image of the older woman.
Driving away from the dorm in his flashing red car, Rick pressed the cigarette lighter and turned the radio to a San Francisco pops station. His cigarette canted up at a jaunty angle as he approved his image in the rear-view mirror.
That Debbie, she was something else! Insipid, had he thought? Wow. When she’d Frenched him there, by the porch, he’d thought he was going to cream his jeans. Somehow he was going to get into her pants. A motel? She wouldn’t go to one with him. Not now, not yet. Maybe his folks’ cabin down by the ocean? Take it slow, talk her around to it? He shouldn’t have dropped her last summer, but she hadn’t been much then.
The lighter popped, he steered one-handed to light up, sending the car in squealing playful sweeps down the deserted drive. She really turned him on, old Deb; not like Paula Halstead had, of course, but...
His mood dissolved. He shrieked the car into the down-ramp to El Camino. Now, at nearly midnight, there were great black gaps in the traffic. The beat pounded out sure and strong from the radio. Paula Halstead. He still could remember that second time, her throwing her head back and forth while he’d been doing it. No other chick in his admittedly limited experience had come on that way with him.
Goddamn it, it wasn’t his fault, what she’d done afterward. At least now, with the ma of that kid on the bike scared shitless, they were safe. If only he could forget about what had happened afterward, to Paula. It shouldn’t have been that way. Shouldn’t have been at all. He should have met her someplace nice, alone, in a bar, maybe. Streaking down the highway, he let his imagination roam.
Sure, a fancy cocktail place with thick rugs and soft indirect light-would see her, send a drink down to her, she would move over and start talking with him. Her husband couldn’t satisfy her, she’d saying, where they put a little napkin down under each woman’s drink. He and then she’d invite him over to her motel room. In the room they’d...
Rick slammed on the brakes, shrieked sideways down a hundred feet of concrete, watching with almost clinical detachment the on-rushing rear of the car he’d almost tailgated. He straightened her out, got into the right lane. Goddamn old creep, barely moving! His hands were shaking a little. Cup of coffee? Sure. Relax a minute. Ahead was the little café where Debbie first had told him about Paula’s suicide. That had really been a shock. But as far as he was concerned, Paula had never happened. He’d never laid eyes on her. Safer that way.