“Huh?”
“Come with me, Romeo.” She yanked me by the sweaty hand, and we walked down a hallway. It took a jog and we were suddenly at our room. She had the key and was working it in the door.
“You’re not mad at me, are you?” I asked.
“What for?” she said.
“Just because I was polite to that girl.”
“She’s not a girl. She’s thirty-five if she’s a day.”
“So are you.”
“You always know just the right thing to say.” She opened the door and smiled tightly and gestured for me to go in. I did.
Jill began undressing, and I sat on one of the twin beds looking at her while she did. When she was down to her wisp of a bra and her sheer panties, she said, “If I hadn’t come along on this trip, you’d be cozying up to that little flirt, wouldn’t you?”
“Don’t be silly.”
“Was that a gun in your pocket, or were you just glad to see her?”
“Hey, there wasn’t anything in my pocket!”
I got out of my clothes. Turned out the lights. Sat back down on the bed.
“You have no right to be jealous,” I said. “You’re the one who’s leaving me, after all.”
“I have to. My job in Port City is finished.”
“A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.”
“I have to work, Mal.”
“There are other jobs. You could find something in Port City, or anyway the surrounding area.”
“And you could pack up and come with me. You’re a writer — you can work anywhere. Nothing’s keeping you in Port City.”
We’d had this conversation dozens of times, in minorly varying forms. My next remark would be that I had property in Port City — not only my house, but the farmland my parents had left me, which I had to keep an eye on, and... well, anyway, that’s what I would normally say next. And she had something to say that came after that, but to hell with it. An impasse is an impasse.
“We weren’t going to talk about this,” I said, “this trip.”
“I know.”
“So how did we get onto it?”
Her voice was a little sad as she said, “I guess I can’t stand the thought of, after I leave, you taking up with some little chippy the minute I’m out of the city limits.”
“Chippy?” I said, savoring the word. “Chippy? I was thinking more of finding some floozie. Or perhaps a hussy. Or maybe a bimbo; yeah, that’s the ticket. I think I’ll find me a bimbo to take your place, the minute you leave town.”
“Very funny,” she said, and there was enough moonlight filtering in through the window for me to see that she was indeed smiling a little.
“What do you want to do about these twin beds?” I asked.
“Push them together,” she said.
“Good idea.”
I moved the nightstand out of the way, and we mated twin beds, and then we just plain mated.
“We should have made a fire,” she said, snuggling with me in my twin bed.
“What do you call what we just did?”
“You know what I mean. It’d be very romantic, the fireplace going in this otherwise dark room.”
“ ‘Otherwise dark room,’ huh? Pretty fancy talk. You must hang around with a writer or something.”
She snuggled closer. “An author,” she said.
“We’ll have our fire tomorrow night. Forecast says it’s going to get colder and maybe snow some, over the weekend.”
“An author who talks like a TV weatherman,” Jill amended, then sat up in bed and stretched; the moonlight made her body look smooth, bathed it in ivory.
“I’m going to take a shower,” she said, yawning.
“Do you want to get dressed and take in Pete’s movie, after?”
“I don’t think so. I’ve seen Laura a million times. Anyway, I’m bushed. You can go if you like, though.”
“You’d trust me?”
“For the next couple hours or so. Your powers of recuperation being what they are.”
“You couldn’t have trusted me that long when I was twenty-five.”
“Well, Mal, you’re thirty-five, like the rest of us, and I’ll trust you till midnight.”
She slid out of bed and padded barefoot into the bathroom and the sound of the shower’s spray soon began lulling me. I lay there trying to decide whether I wanted to get out of bed and get dressed and take in that flick. I was fairly keyed up, despite the long day. But the sheets felt cool and the blankets warm and the bed soft and the phone woke me.
It was only a minute or so later; the shower was still doing its rain dance. But the phone, over on the table by the window, was ringing.
I sat up, yawned, tasted my mouth (which in one minute had accumulated the unpleasant film and sour breath of a full night’s sleep) and bumped into things as I made my clumsy way across the room to the insistent phone.
“Yes,” I said.
“Mal? Curt. I hope I didn’t wake you — it’s early yet, I didn’t expect you to sack out so soon.”
“Me, either.” He sounded a little hyper. “What’s up?”
“I wondered if you’d mind doing double duty tomorrow.”
“How so?”
“You have a speech to give, but after that, we need to fill Rath’s slot with something, remember?”
“Yeah...”
“I was hoping you and Tom and Jack could throw together a sort of panel on the resurgence of the hard-boiled private-eye in mystery fiction.”
“That’s a mouthful, Curt... but, sure. Why not?”
“I knew you’d come through for me.”
“You sound a little frazzled.”
“Mary Wright’s upset with me. She’s an efficient young woman, but she doesn’t deal well with surprises, or with changes of plan. She doesn’t know how to think on her feet, like us mystery writers.”
“I do most of my thinking sitting down, but I know what you mean.”
“Anyway, I promised her I’d get everything rescheduled tonight. That way she can sleep soundly, I guess.”
“Well, anything I can do to help out.”
“Much appreciated, Mal. I guess I screwed up, thinking I could depend on that pompous ass Rath to play my corpse.”
“The only thing you can depend on that pompous ass to be,” I said, “is a pompous ass.”
“You’re right,” he said, laughing a little. Then he sighed. “This thing is starting to get to me. I just hope we don’t get snowbound.”
“Why, is that what they’re predicting now?”
“Yeah. Heavy snow tonight or tomorrow. Is it snowing out there?”
I glanced out the window. It wasn’t snowing; there was nothing out there, except two people standing on that open walkway bridge, in the gazebo. They seemed to be arguing.
“No snow,” I said.
“Yet,” he said fatalistically.
We hung up, and I stood there a moment looking out at the moonlit lake and cliffs and evergreens.
But those people in the gazebo got in the way of any peacefully reflective moment.
The two figures were both heavily bundled in dark winter clothing, one of them, at left, a stocky figure in a red and black ski mask — probably, but not necessarily, a man. The other, at right, was bareheaded and obviously a man, or one very short-haired woman. Two figures standing on the gazebo at night was hardly remarkable, even if they were arguing — except these figures were going beyond that, shoving each other around. The bareheaded guy gave Ski Mask a shove that about knocked him (or her) off the bridge — a fall of about a story and a half.
Ski Mask managed to keep his/her balance, and the shoving stopped, but the body English of the two figures was even more disturbing. They were, indeed, arguing. Violently. Their gestures, at least, were violent.
It wasn’t my business, but I couldn’t not watch; and I felt oddly removed from it — distant — as if I were the audience and they were the play, an ominous pantomime, as the thick pane of glass that separated me from the outside was keeping the sound of the argument from getting in. I couldn’t hear them argue, but I could watch them. Which I did, my face tensed, my eyes narrowed, watched the quarrel turn into something ugly.