SERVICE STATION ATTENDANT KILLED IN CHRISTMAS EVE HIT-AND-RUN, this headline read. A single column followed. The story ended with the Libertyville Chief of Police theorizing that the driver had probably been drunk or stoned. Neither he nor the Keystone made any attempt to connect the deaths, which had been separated by almost ten miles on the night of a screaming blizzard which had stopped all traffic in Ohio and western Pennsylvania. But I could make connections. I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t help it. And hadn’t my father been looking at me strangely several times during the morning? Yes. Once or twice it had seemed he would say something—I had no idea what I would say if he did; Will Darnell’s death, bizarre as it had been, was nowhere nearly as bizarre as my suspicions. Then he had closed his mouth without speaking. That, to be up front about it, was something of a relief.
The doorbell chimed at two past two.
“Come on in!” I yelled, getting up on my crutches again anyway.
The door opened and Leigh poked her head in. “Dennis?”
“Yeah. Come on in.”
She did, looking very pretty in a bright red ski parka and dark blue pants. She pushed the parka’s fur-edged hood back.
“Sit down”, she said, unzipping her parka. “Go on, right now, that’s an order. You look like a big dumb stork on those things.”
“Keep it up,” I said, sitting down again with an ungainly plop. When you’re cast in plaster, it’s never like in the movies; you never sit down like Cary Grant getting ready to have cocktails at the Ritz with Ingrid Bergman. It all happens at once, and if the cushion you land on doesn’t give out a big loud raspberry, as if your sudden descent had scared you into cutting the cheese, you count yourself ahead of the game. This time I got lucky. “I’m such a sucker for flattery that I make myself sick.”
“How are you, Dennis?”
“Mending,” I said.” How about you?”
“I’ve been better,” she said in a low voice, and bit at her lower lip. This can sometimes be a seductive gesture on a girl’s part, but it wasn’t this time.
“Hang up your coat and sit down yourself.”
“Okay.” Her eyes touched mine, and looking at them was a little much. I looked someplace else, thinking about Arnie.
She hung her coat up and came back into the living room slowly. “Your folks—”
“I got my father to take everyone out,” I said. “I thought maybe,” I shrugged—“we ought to talk just between ourselves.”
She stood by the sofa, looking at me across the room. I was struck again by the simplicity of her good looks her lovely girl’s figure outlined in dark blue pants and a sweater of light, powdery blue, an outfit that made me think about skiing. Her hair was tied in a loose pigtail and lay over her left shoulder. Her eyes were the colour of her sweater, maybe a little darker. A cornfed American beauty, you would have said, except for the high cheekbones, which seemed a little arrogant, bespeaking some older, more exotic heritage—maybe some fifteen or twenty generations back there was a Viking in the woodpile.
Or maybe that isn’t what I was thinking at all.
She saw me looking at her too long and blushed. I looked away.
“Dennis, are you worried about him?”
“Worried? Scared might be a better word.”
“What do you know about that car? What has he told you?”
“Not much,” I said. “Look, would you like something to drink? There’s some stuff in the fridge I felt for my crutches.
“Sit still,” she said. “I would like something, but I’ll get it. What about you?”
“I’ll take a ginger ale, if there’s one left.”
She went into the kitchen and I watched her shadow on the wall, moving lightly, like a dancer. There was a momentary added weight in my stomach, almost like a sickness. There’s a name for that sort of sickness. I think it’s called failing in love with your best friend’s girl.
“You’ve got an automatic ice-maker.” Her voice floated back. “We’ve got one too. I love it.”
“Sometimes it goes crazy and sprays ice-cubes all over the floor,” I said. “It’s like Jimmy Cagney in White Heat. “Take that, you dirty rats.” It drives my mother crazy.” I was babbling.
She laughed. Ice-cubes clinked in glasses. Shortly she came back with two glasses of ice and two cans of Canada Dry.
“Thanks,” I said, taking mine.
“No, thank you,” she said, and now her blue eyes were dark and sober. “Thanks for being around. If I had to deal with this alone, I think I’d… I don’t know.”
“Come on,” I said. “It’s not that bad.”
“Isn’t it? Do you know about Darnell?” I nodded.
“And that other one? Don Vandenberg.”
So she had made the connection too.
I nodded again. “I saw it. Leigh, what is it about Christine that bothers you?”
For a long time I didn’t know if she was going to answer. If she would be able to answer. I could see her struggling with it, looking down at her glass, held in both hands.
At last in a very low voice, she said, “I think she tried to kill me.”
I don’t know what I had expected, but it wasn’t that. “What do you mean?”
She talked, first hesitantly, then more rapidly, until it was pouring out of her. It is a story you have already heard, so I won’t repeat it here; suffice to say that I tried to tell it pretty much as she told it to me. She hadn’t been kidding about being scared. It was in the pallor of her face, the little hitches and gulps of her voice, the way her hands constantly caressed her upper arms, as if she was too cold in spite of the sweater. And the more she talked, the more scared I got.
She finished by telling me how, as consciousness dwindled, the dashboard lights had seemed to turn into watching eyes. She laughed nervously at this last, as if trying to take the curse off an obvious absurdity, but I didn’t laugh back. I was remembering George LeBay’s dry voice as we sat in cheap patio chairs in front of the Rainbow Motel, his voice telling me the story of Roland, Veronica, and Rita. I was remembering those things and my mind was making unspeakable connections. Lights were going on. I didn’t like what they were revealing. My heart started to thud heavily in my chest, and I couldn’t have joined in her laughter if my life had depended on it.
She told me about the ultimatum she had given him—her or the car. She told me about Arnie’s furious reaction. That had been the last time she went out with him.
“Then he got arrested,” she said, “and I started to think… think about what had happened to Buddy Repperton and those other boys… and Moochie Welch…”
“And now Vandenberg and Darnell.”
“Yes. But that’s not all.” She drank from her glass of ginger ale and then poured in more. The edge of the can chattered briefly against the rim of the glass. “Christmas Eve, when I called you, my mom and dad went out for drinks at my dad’s boss’s house. And I started to get nervous. I was thinking about… oh, I don’t know what I was thinking about.”
“I think you do.”
She put a hand to her forehead and rubbed it, as if she was getting a headache. “I suppose I do, I was thinking about that car being out. Her. Being out and getting them, But if she was out on Christmas Eve, I guess she had plenty to keep her busy without bothering my par—” She slammed the glass down, making me jump. “And why do I keep talking about that car as if it was a person?” she cried out, Tears had begun to spill down her checks. “Why do I keep doing that?”
On that night, I saw all too clearly what comforting her could lead to. Arnie was between us—and part of myself was, too. I had known him for a long time. A long good time.