The living room was empty.
Leadenly, Eve looked at the blank walls.
She wondered again about that night in August, and again she told herself that he really truly was going on a trip alone, and that he was coming back to her at the end of that trip. And this she believed, and this she would always believe until the day she died.
One of the moving men came to her. He wiped his forehead and said, “That looks like it, lady. Is there anything else?”
Eve shook her head and said, “No, there’s nothing else.”
And then she walked out of the house and did not even try to look back at it.
The girl with Roger Altar was a honey blonde with bright blue eyes. She unbuttoned her blouse and said, “This is a great house. I’ve never been in a pad like this one. I really dig it.”
“Good,” Altar said. “I had it built just so you could dig it.”
Outside the bedroom windows, the woods were a riot of fall color. The girl threw her blouse over a chair and walked to the windows. “It’s the end,” she said. “Who ever thought nature was so crazy? Did you design this house?”
“No,” Altar said.
“Who designed it?”
“A man named Larry Cole,” Altar said.
“A friend of yours?”
Altar hesitated. “Yes,” he said at last. “A friend.”
“We can really have a ball in this house,” the girl said. “This is the absolute most. Crazy!”
“Yeah,” Altar said.
For a moment his mind had gone back to the night of the hurricane and the last time he’d seen Larry. And for a moment he was possessed of an impulse he’d had ever since that night, a desire to rush to the telephone and call the widow of his architect and say, “Eve, I want you to know how sorry I am. Eve, I want you to know how much I thought of your husband. I just want you to know.”
He had never made the call. And once, sitting down to write a letter to Eve Cole, he had discovered that he — a professional writer — could not put what he felt into words.
The girl went to the big bed and rolled on it luxuriantly.
“Sunlight and love,” she said. “What a wild mixture!”
“Would you like a drink?” Altar asked. “I can use one.”
“Sure,” she said. “I’m game for anything. I dig this pad.”
Altar mixed the drinks silently. The girl stretched her arms to the ceiling, ecstatically digging the pad all over again. He handed her one of the drinks.
“Where do you get ideas for books?” she asked him.
“Oh, you just get them,” he said.
Someday he would make that call. Someday, he promised himself, I will call Eve Cole and pay my respects. Someday before it’s all forgotten.
“Let’s ball,” the girl said.
The pavement was covered with fallen leaves of red and yellow and orange and russet and gold. She walked with her head bent, and the wind grasped at the leaves and sent them rasping along the pavement, parting in whispers before her high-heeled stride. Her blonde hair blew free in the wind. With one hand, she held her collar pressed to her cheek, covering the small scar. High in the naked treetops, the wind sang a wild, keening song.
There was a wind on the night he died.
She could remember it rattling the front door of the small luncheonette. She could remember the young boy who sat at the end of the counter with a cup of coffee. She could remember the storm flailing the streets, and she could remember clenching and unclenching her hands in her lap as the clock steadily advanced past eleven. At twelve o’clock, the proprietor told her he was closing and asked her if she wanted a lift home. She had refused with an ever-mounting sense of dread, and then had stood in the doorway of the closed luncheonette and watched the storm gradually subsiding. By one o’clock she knew that he was not coming to her, and she went home. She learned of the accident from Betty Anders the next day. She almost screamed aloud, and then with carefully disguised anguish, she listened to the details. The news was all over Pinecrest Manor. She heard the story a hundred times that day, and that night she wept in the darkness of the bedroom and Don made no move to console her. When she awoke the next day, the Cape Cod seemed empty. She kept waiting for the telephone to ring, but it did not. She kept waiting for his voice and his expected “Hi,” but it never came. She cried again. She could not seem to stop drying. In the middle of a simple household chore, the tears would suddenly spring to her eyes. She cried for a week, and then there were no tears left to shed. Then she felt only the terrible emptiness of being alone again.
Now, walking with her head bent, with the leaves scattering before her on the pavement, she wondered if things did really end after all, if everything always came to a suddenly terrifying halt. She wondered about her own life, about the long empty years ahead, alone. And she shuddered, hunching her shoulders against the wind.
A car pulled up alongside the curb. She did not turn to look at it. Slowly, the car cruised next to the sidewalk, rolling slowly with her pace. The horn honked. She did not look up. The horn honked again. She paused and then turned to look at the car and the driver, squinting into the afternoon sun.
“Hello, Margaret,” the driver said.
She recognized him and smiled nervously. “Hello,” she said, her voice very low.
“Want a lift?”
She hesitated. In the sun-washed interior of the Oldsmobile, Felix Anders was smiling, his eyes very green, his teeth very white.
“Come on,” he said.
She hesitated another moment. Her lashes began to flutter. She pressed her coat collar into her cheek with her right hand. Then she moved swiftly to the car door and opened it. She leaned over stiffly. In a very cold voice, she said, “I’m only going as far as the center.”
Felix Anders smiled.
“Sure,” he said. “Get in, stranger.”