“It’s the truth, isn’t it? Why, any other woman would be scheming and planning how to get rid of me. But not you, Connie. Not you. Love is bigger than expediency, isn’t it?”
“If you say so, George.”
“Read any good books lately?”
“George, right now you seem... more like yourself. You’ve been so odd, you know.”
“I’ll be my very own true self very soon now.”
“Are we going to move away from here?”
“I think so.”
Her voice became wheedling. “Darling, before you make up your mind for sure, let’s go up to the cabin for a long week. Just the two of us. There won’t be anybody around at this time of year. We can walk in the woods. Oh, we’ll have a wonderful time.”
“Just the two of us?”
Her eyes grew as opaque as gray glass. “Call it a second honeymoon,” she breathed.
That would be ideal for them. Not difficult to arrange at all. So many ways to do it up there. I could almost see Louie Palmer pushing me off the high front porch onto the lake-front rocks and then lighting a cigarette in his Bogart way, saying, “I’ll run along. You drive out and make the phone call. Remember, he complained about feeling dizzy and you told him not to go near the steps.”
There would be a deep satisfaction in that for them. An end of tension. It had failed the first time. Their frozen world would begin to revolve again.
“A second honeymoon,” I said...
In the late afternoon I took the car down to the station. Conner, the owner, was there as well as Louie Palmer. Louie was in his coveralls, his sleeves rolled up over muscular fore-arms, a smear of grease on his chin near the corner of his mouth, a lank end of black hair curling down across his forehead to the black eyebrow. He avoided meeting my eye.
“Taking a little trip,” I said heartily to Conner. “First one since my accident. Have Louie check the tires, steering arms, kingpin, front wheel bushings, please.”
“Put it on the rack, kid,” Conner said in his husky, domineering voice. I wondered how much Conner’s constant scorn was a factor in Louie’s bold play for big money. I watched the coveralls tighten across Louie’s broad shoulders as he ducked under the car. How had it started? A few sidelong glances? The realization that the Corliss woman was coming around oftener than strictly necessary? Then, probably, “I guess we better road-test it, Mrs. Corliss. Just move over and I’ll take the wheel.”
How does it start?
“Change the oil, sir?” Louie asked.
“No thanks, kid,” I said. I rasped that “kid” across him, saw the color creep up the back of his neck.
I waited, and when he was through I tipped him a quarter. He looked as if he might throw it in my face. “Buy yourself a beer,” I said. “Try the Unicorn. I hear that’s a good bar.”
His mouth sagged a little, and the color left him. I grinned into his face and turned away. Louie was jumpy.
“Take it easy, Mr. Corliss,” Conner advised.
“I’ll do that,” I said. “Made myself a promise that I’ll never drive over forty-five again, and I’m sticking to it.”
Beyond Conner I saw a puzzled look on Louie’s lean white face.
I went over right after dinner. Miranda was waiting for me. Her eyes seemed deeper in her head, their glow strong and steady. The wide lips were parted a faint fraction of an inch. It added to the breathlessness of her words. The spring within her was wound as tightly as the key could be turned. A deb waiting for the grand march. A horse player waiting for the sixth race. An animal watching, from a limb, the trail beneath.
She shut the door and leaned against it. “Tonight?”
“Yes, tonight.”
She shut her eyes for a moment. With her eyes shut she had a corpse face.
“How? Tell me how. Quickly!”
“They think I’ll be gone. They think I’ll be gone overnight. We’ll come back.”
“They’ll be together?”
“Why not? They have planning to do.”
“But how?”
“Electricity.”
She looked disappointed. “Is — is that a good way?”
“The best. Clean and quick and final.”
She nodded slowly. “Yes, I can see a lot of ways how it could be. But I won’t just watch, will I? I’ll be part of it.” You there, little girl! Get into that game of musical chairs with the other children.
“You’ll be part of it. I promised.”
“Do they have a good chance of catching us, blaming us?”
“Not a chance in the world.”
“Oh, good! And later... we’ll go away.”
“Far away.”
“How much time is there?”
“Three hours. Four.”
“Long hours to wait, George.”
“We’ll take a ride. That’ll kill time. Come along.”
She had not sat beside me in a car before. She was unexpectedly feline, a part of her that I had not noticed. She sat with her legs curled up under her, partly facing me, and I knew that she watched, not the road, but my face, the glow of the dash lights against it, the pendulum swing of the streetlamps.
“Scared?” I asked.
“No. Something else. Like when you’re a child. You wake up in the morning. Another day. Then you see the snow on the windowsill and it all comes with a great rush. The day after tomorrow is Christmas, you say. One more day gone. Yesterday it was the day after the day after tomorrow. Now it’s getting so close it closes your throat. That’s how I feel. Getting one at last that isn’t a sick one.”
She inched closer so that the hard ball of her knee dug against my thigh. The musky perfume was thick in the car.
Without turning to see, I knew how her eyes would look. “We’ve never had to say much, have we?” she asked.
“Not very much. We knew without saying. A look can say everything.”
“Later we can talk. We can say all the words that ever were. Good words and bad words. I’ve said bad words when I’m alone. I’ve never said them out loud to anybody. And we can say the other words too, and it won’t be like after reading a story.”
“How do you mean?”
“Oh, murder. Death. Kill. Blood. Bodies. I kill, you kill, we kill. The way you had to learn the Latin words in school.”
“Conjugations, you mean.”
“That’s what I was trying to think of. Miranda Wysner, conjugate the verb to kill. I kill, I shall kill, I killed, I had killed, I should have killed.”
She laughed. Her fingers shut on my arm above the elbow. “Think about it, George. Like swinging a big shining white sword. You swing it at evil and you tell yourself that’s why you do it, but all the time way down inside your heart you know that it isn’t the reason for it, it’s the act itself.”
I was on the road north out of town. She looked out the windows.
“Where are we going?”
“We’ll just go north out of town up into the hills and then swing around and come back.”
She was silent. I drove ever more rapidly. The road climbed and then began to gather unto itself a series of gentle curves that later would grow hard, the shoulders popping and crackling as the car threw itself at them.
I knew the landmarks. At the crest I slowed down, my arms tired from the strain. I started down the other side. The rising whine of the wind grew louder. The needle climbed. Sixty-five, seventy, seventy-five.
“We’re killing the two of them, you see,” I yelled above the wind. “We can’t make the curve coming up. You wanted a part of it. You’ve got it, baby. You’ve got it. I left a letter with Mallory to open if I should die. It’s all in there. They’ll never worm out of this one. Electricity will kill them, all right. Courtesy of the State of New York, baby.”
I saw the white posts of the curve in the farthest reach of the headlights.
Her scream filled the car, filled my ears, drilled into my soul. “Faster, Georgie! Oh, faster!” Wild ecstasy, beyond the peak of human endurance.