He understood then. Novotny had fouled the well. Sometime during the night, with sacks of manure.
Rage stirred through him, but it was like no other rage he’d ever felt. Cold, not hot. And it did nothing to him: caused no tension, no pressure and pain behind his eyes. He felt no different than he had before Alix’s cry, except that most of the detachment was gone. He was very calm, very much in control of himself.
Alix was on her feet again, moving around in a stunned way, when he came out. “I’ve got to wash this off,” she said. “I’ll be sick if I don’t.” She started past him to the bathroom.
He stopped her with his body. “No, don’t go in there. You’d better clean up downstairs.”
“The water… what…?”
“It’s polluted. Somebody dumped manure into the well.”
She stared at him for a moment, then shook her head-a gesture of incomprehension, not denial. The movement seemed to let her smell herself; she made a small gagging sound. “I can’t stand it, I’ve got to wash…”
“Use the hot-water tap in the kitchen,” he said. “What’s stored in the tank is still clean.” He reached for his pants, pulled them on.
“What are you going to do?”
“Go out and look at the well. Go ahead, go on down. Take your robe so you don’t catch cold.”
She went out without saying anything else. He buttoned his shirt, sat on the edge of the bed to tie his shoes. He wasn’t thinking at all now. He didn’t trust himself to think just yet. Downstairs, he took his jacket out of the coat closet. He could hear Alix in the kitchen, filling a pan with hot water. When he stepped outside, the fog was still swirling in over the cliffs from the sea, turning the garage and the woodshed and the pumphouse into wraith-like shapes in the dull morning light. But the smell of it was moist and salt-fresh, cleansing.
He opened the door to the pumphouse, looked inside. Flakes of spilled manure littered the floor. They’d carried the rest of the evidence away with them-whatever containers they’d used. It had been easy for them, he thought. Dark night, nothing to repel intruders, not even a lock on the damn pumphouse door.
When he re-entered the house a couple of minutes later, Alix was no longer in the kitchen; he heard her moving around upstairs. He sat down in the living room and filled one of his pipes-the calabash that Alix said made him look like Basil Rathbone playing Sherlock Holmes. He was about to light it when she came down again.
She was wearing her robe, the wine-red velour one, and she had doused herself with Miss Dior cologne. The smell of it was cloyingly sweet in the cold room. Her face was pale, her expression one of contained anger. She might be emotional in the first minutes of a crisis, but she never let her emotions govern her for very long.
She sat opposite him. “What did they put in the well?” she asked. “Manure?”
“Yes.”
“It was Mitch Novotny, I suppose.”
Things had moved past the point of denial now; she had literally been struck with the truth a few minutes ago. He nodded. “Or one of his friends.”
“Aren’t you going to call the sheriff?”
“What good would it do? There’s no evidence against him, or anyone else.”
“What, then? You’re not going to confront him?”
“I don’t know. Probably not.”
Her expression had changed; what he saw on her face now was resolve. “Jan, we’ve got to get away from here. You can see that now, can’t you?”
“No,” he said, “I can’t. Running away won’t solve anything. That’s just what Novotny and the rest of them want-to drive us out. I won’t let them do that.”
“Why? What difference does it make?”
“It makes a big difference to me.”
“There are other lighthouses—”
“Not like this one. There’s not enough time.”
“What do you mean, not enough time?”
“To find another one, make all the arrangements. To get my book done before you… go off to L.A.”
“I’m not ‘going off to L.A.’ For heaven’s sake, I can postpone things with Alison, if that’s what—”
“I’m not leaving here, Alix,” he said. “Not until our year’s tenancy is up.”
“How can you expect to stay with the well polluted, no water to bathe in?”
“There are chemicals to purify the well.”
“All right, there are chemicals. But what’s to stop Novotny from doing it again? And again? Or doing something else, something worse?”
“There’s me to stop him.”
“I don’t like that kind of talk. What can you do against a man like Novotny? Against a whole village full of hostile people?”
He made no response. A thin silence built between them, like ice formed over rough water. When Alix broke it, it was as if the veneer of ice had been shattered by the weight of something heavy.
“Maybe you can stay here under these conditions,” she said in a deliberate voice, “but I don’t think I can. I mean that, Jan-I’m not prepared to deal with much more of this.”
“Do what you have to.” The words tasted bitter in his mouth, but he had no trouble saying them. Odd. He was still terrified of losing her, but the fear had been driven down deep inside him by this new threat.
“Jan,” she said, and stopped, and then started again. “Jan, don’t do this to us. Don’t let them to do this to us. It isn’t worth it. We’re what matters, not this lighthouse, not anything else.”
He was on his feet, with no conscious memory of having moved out of his chair. “I’m going to light the stove and make some coffee. We’ll both feel better after we’ve had some coffee.”
He went into the kitchen without looking back at her. There was no looking back anymore, he thought. No looking ahead, either. Soon enough there would be no looking, period. Now was what counted. The right here and the right now.
Alix
It seemed as if she spent all her time behind the wheel of this car, driving but getting nowhere, agonizing but resolving nothing. But she had to get away from Cape Despair this morning, if only for a little white-away from the stink of manure, away from Jan and his cold anger, his remoteness. It was behavior she’d never seen in him before, and it worried her far more than if he’d ranted and cursed and smashed things. She didn’t let herself think about the implications of it. If she did, it would only unnerve her even more.
When she reached the intersection with the county road, she turned automatically toward Hilliard. It was only when the familiar, run-down buildings appeared ahead that she realized what she was doing and wondered why. There was nowhere for her to go in the village, no errand to run, no friend to visit.
But there must have been a purpose, an obscure need, buried in her subconscious: when she reached the laundromat, she turned without hesitation onto the side street just beyond it-the one that climbed the hillside to the community center and the church. The street curved up past shabby frame houses that seemed to cling tenuously to the slopes, then curved again under an arching canopy of tree branches. Just beyond the trees, on a knoll to the right, was the red-brick community center. It was shuttered and deserted, almost abandoned-looking, but a large bulletin board on its front porch was covered with notices of future events. Alix slowed the car as she passed, glancing up at the building’s bell tower. Birds-some kind of smallish brown ones-came and went there; it was probably their nesting place.
Behind the center was a thick stand of pines, and above their tops she could see the white steeple of the church silhouetted against the sky. The sky itself was streaky, with patches of blue showing through the gray-the first break in the dismal weather all week. She followed the road through a sharp S-curve and up the hill to the church.
It had been her destination all along, but she felt odd as she stopped the car in front. She wasn’t especially religious, hadn’t attended services in years. But the minister, Harvey Olsen, had seemed approachable when she’d met him in the general store; if there was anyone in Hilliard she could talk to, wouldn’t it be a man of the cloth?