[Oxrun Station] The Bloodwind (13 page)

By midnight the grizzly's canines were finished; by
one her eyes had grown so tired they felt in danger of
crossing. She grinned at her work and swept the dust
and the chips onto the floor. Tomorrow would be soon
enough to take care of the cleaning. Then she wandered
into the kitchen and pulled a bottle of brandy from the
cupboard over the refrigerator, filled a juice glass half
way and toasted her reflection in the dark-framed win
dow. As she lifted her glass to drink, however, a tiny
piece of marble fell from her hair into the liquid. She
blinked at it stupidly, sighed and fished it out with a finger. Not exactly the most sophisticated method of
taking care of a problem, but one she was used to,
forever finding chunks and fragments of stone in her
purse, in her car, even in her pockets. It was an occupa
tional hazard, and one of the tiny-reasons-made-huge
that had caused Leonard to leave her.

Greg, on the other hand, thought it a fascinating
characteristic, an identification of her which belonged
to no one else. He had, in fact, been with her and the
trio on several afternoon excursions to the quarry. And he'd confessed to her once that, like the trio, he'd gone
back there on his own, alone, just to stare at the gaping hole in the hillside, just to wonder about things that to
someone else would not be important.

Leonard would have called it a rock pile, she thought
without malice; a rock pile, and nothing else.

The smile that parted her lips grew slightly melan
choly; she'd been thinking an awful lot about her ex-
husband these days, another sign of the pressure she'd finally dug out of with her trip to New York. There was
no affection there, however, except one for a distant,
onetime friend one seldom saw anymore. A wondering,
as she did every other June about those in her high school graduating class.
Which of them had become
real estate salesmen, which policemen, which outlaws.
Which of them, like her, had finally shucked the conventions taught so diligently by her teachers and had discovered there was a living out there in the world that was defined in a much larger sense than by the size of a paycheck or a white-cottage mortgage or the number of
children one had before one was thirty.

Not many, she guessed as she replaced the brandy and set the glass in the sink. Not many at all.

There was a knock on the door as she moved slowly
toward the bedroom. She stopped, listened, thinking perhaps it was Harriet returned with another episode to
be unburdened of. A glance at the digital clock on the
nightstand told her it was almost two, and a moment of
tension stiffened her spine until she heard a voice whis
pering her name. She grinned and took her time answering. Laughed aloud when she yanked open the door and
Greg took a step backward, as if expecting a blow.

"You do know what time it is," she said, stepping aside and waving him in.

"I am not drunk," he insisted, heading directly for
the sofa without taking off his coat. He sat primly, hands
in his lap, knees and ankles together. "I am not drunk."

"I believe you," she said, still grinning, the scent of
bourbon strong in his wake. "But I repeat: you do know what time it is,
don't you
?"

He nodded, and leaned back, his hands slipping to
the cushions on either side of his hips. "I was enjoying
a small tot, as it were, in the Inn, as it were, when I
thought about you cooped up here all day. I decided it was time you were liberated." He struggled out of his
coat and dropped it on the floor. His shirt was dark
flannel, opened midway to his abdomen, yet he still
slipped a finger under the back of his collar and tugged
at it as if he were being choked. "I said to myself that it
wasn't fair you should be abed on a Saturday night.
At
least not alone."

"Greg," she said carefully.

A grandiose wave was meant to dispel her objection.
"I am a dear and close, though not so old, friend, am I
right? Who else to lay your troubles to?
Who else to spill your guts to in such a time of tribulation?"

"You've been taking lessons from Danvers on the
sly, you bastard." She sat beside him, just out of reach.
"Greg, why didn't you go home?"

He closed his eyes, his head resting on the sofa's
arched-wood back. "I missed your voice."

"You have a telephone."

"I might have gotten you out of bed."

She coughed back a laugh.

"Your car is parked at the curb," he said then, his
voice quiet, the words not quite slurred. "Dangerous.
You should keep it in the driveway."

She frowned for a moment, shook her head to rid
herself of the curious impression he was at once scold
ing her and sounding relieved. She leaned closer to him
and touched his arm. "Greg, what is it? Is it that girl,
Susan?"

"Who?"

"Susan. Susan Haslet.
The one who was killed in the
accident."

His face creased in an effort to think. Then: "No."

She couldn't resist it
—she slid next to him and kissed
his cheek lightly, laid a hand on his chest and slipped her fingers under his shirt. "What?"

He stirred, but kept his eyes closed. "I was thinking," he said.

"Good."

"I was thinking about you. I was thinking ... I couldn't figure out why it was that so much of your
work sold when I can count on the fingers of two hands
how many of my things have left my easel. I was
thinking that maybe you had some kind of potion,
something you gave buyers to loosen up their wallets. I
was thinking ..."

When he paused she pulled away, not shocked but
somewhat pained at the bitterness that had crept into his
tone. He sounded so much like Oliver it was uncanny,
and she had to resist the urge to slap him as hard as she could. An urge that passed the moment she saw his lips
grow taut as he fought to bury a smile.

"I was thinking all that, you see, and decided it was
sour grapes." His eyes snapped open, and his hand slipped to the back of her neck. She did not resist. "You asked me if I'd been drinking."

"Shut up," she said, and kissed him.

"I was," he said, making her laugh and back away. He sighed loudly. "Drinking and expostulating and
making a damned fool of myself so I decided I needed some salvation." His hand went to the top button of her
shirt. "You either have a hell of a case of dandruff or
you've been working."

She grabbed his hand and pressed it hard against her
breast. "If you don't shut up, Greg ..."

His lips brushed her cheek, her ear. "You work too
hard."
Moved to the side of her neck.
 
"Much too hard."
To the hollow of her throat.
"You smell like
stone."
Hands unbuttoning the shirt, lips to the rise of her breasts.
"All work and no play." Her bra parted in
the front.
A chill across her flesh, pleasant, anticipation.
"You need someone to protect you against all work and no play." She shrugged the shirt off her
shoulders, concentrating on his touch while her hands
moved to pull his shirt from his waistband. "I decided it was all sour grapes and I'm going to accept your favor for the next joust."
Lips.
To her own, to her chin, to her throat.

She let a small groan slip from her, laced her hands
through his dark hair as he slipped past her breasts to
her stomach. She pulled up her legs and worked them to
either side of him, waiting, waiting, until the warmth of
his breath against her stomach made her swim out of the
dream she thought she'd fallen into.

"Greg?"

He turned his head slowly to rest his cheek on her
navel.

"Oh . . ." She would have said "damn," but he wouldn't have heard her.

THE snow
untrapped
by the shadows of the trees
was brilliant, daystars caught in a crust of white that
spread unbroken over the fields beyond the village.
Skeletons of orchards, stands of pine,
a
few shaggy-
coated horses were the only dark elements in an otherwise pristine valley. Even the ridges thrown up by the
plows on the verges had not yet been completely con
taminated by passing traffic; and out here, along Cross
Valley Road, the odds of that happening were considerably small. Most of the homes east of this road were
farmhouses, most of the people either members of the
stoic and hardy few who refused to give in to the larger
combines in other parts of the state, or recent settlers
who allowed the fields to go to seed, content only in the
block-style buildings and the fieldstone fireplaces and
the open spaces where their children and their imagina
tions would run without danger. There were a number
of spurs off Cross Valley, each digging closer to the
back wall of hills, only one of which had a name
— Pointer's, over which Greg drove his VW with confi
dence born of the extremely lucky and the marvelously
foolhardy.

Pat adjusted her sunglasses, muttering every time the
loose temples allowed them to slide toward the center of
her nose. She had kept her coat buttoned snugly, her
muffler snugly wrapped, since the car's heater had given
up working just after they'd thumped over the railroad tracks. The windows, then, had been cracked to prevent
the windshield from fogging, and though the day was
gorgeous and the breeze bracing, she didn't really care
to add pneumonia to the outing.

The outing itself was startling enough.

Sometime during the dark morning hours she had
managed to get Greg undressed and into her bed. Her
mind fuzzy with sleep, her lips working at a laugh that
never quite came to surface, she'd fallen in beside him
and snaked an arm under his neck. Drifted off, and had
awakened with his left palm cupping her breast. She'd
kissed him and he'd moaned in his sleep, kissed him
again and let her hand slip tickling between his legs.
Kissed him a third time, tasting the inside of his lips with her tongue and opening her eyes to find him staring at her.
She'd almost laughed, held it in check until he had realized he was awake and made love to her.
Gently.
So slowly she wasn't sure he would be
able to finish. But he had done.
And had done it again.
Then rested her head on the center of her pillow and had padded off to make breakfast.

Two hours later he suggested they forget whatever plans they had decided on for the day and drive out to
the quarry. She had refused him admittance into the workroom, and his none-too-subtle curiosity was suffi
cient reason to get him out of the house. When she
agreed, shoving him back toward the kitchen, he nod
ded as if he'd known it all along and proceeded to
organize a gathering of sustenance, the prime ingredient
of which was a Thermos filled with brandy.

"Unless," he said loudly over her halfhearted pro
tests, "you believe that Connecticut has a contingent of
St.
Bernards
. My dear, suppose we get lost, huh? Sup
pose the wilderness engulfs us and we are trapped in the
vicious and uncaring arms of an unrepentant Nature."

"Oh my god," she said, "you've been reading Jack
London again."

"You can bet on it, love," he said, and had hustled
her out the door almost before she'd had time to snatch
up her keys.

The quarry had been her idea, for no reason other
than she enjoyed the quiet. Greg had protested mildly,
had yielded when she threatened to be "in a mood." Now they had climbed into the forest, the road losing its blacktop and becoming a concrete-hard dirt trail
barely wide enough to allow the car through. Branches
scraped over the roof, shrubs scratched the sides, and
she winced whenever they passed over a low thicket of
browned weeds topped with
speartips
of ice. The rattle
made her nervous; they were already a considerable
distance from the nearest house, and she didn't relish
the thought of the VW breaking down and forcing them
to walk all the way back. With civilization so near, she had
forgotten how desolate this area of the hills could be.

And how quiet now that Greg had stopped his chatter
and was concentrating on keeping the vehicle from
dropping into a ditch or colliding with a boulder cloaked
with heavy snow.

The road banked sharply to the right. Widened, and
the young trees to either side marked a place once
cleared and used. A series of five old sheds on the right
had been weather-stripped of their paint, a sixth and
seventh had collapsed in the past from the weight of the
seasons. On the left were two chimneys, nothing more.
A half-mile further on and the road dipped, all that
remained of a railroad spur that had taken quarry blocks
down to the depot for shipping. She had once spent an
entire Saturday trying to locate the tracks, had con
cluded someone had ordered the rails and ties taken up
once the mining had ceased.

And then, abruptly, the road climbed for a hundred
yards, leveled, and Greg braked slowly to keep the car
from skidding.

"God," she said breathlessly as she pushed open the
door, "I should have come out here sooner."

The abandoned quarry was two hundred yards across,
less
then
one hundred wide, and a sheer drop from
where she stood of sixty or more feet to the surface of
the water. The sides were sheer-faced stone still show
ing the marks of explosions and cutting, inter-spaced
with saplings and brush that somehow made it all seem
much more forbidding. The woodland came directly to the edge, save for this one area where Greg had joined
her, an open cage, she had first thought, to keep in whatever lived down in the pool.

During the summer she had expected to find any
number of students and local kids using it for swim
ming, but not once during any of her visits had she
discovered signs that even picnics had been held here. It
had been abandoned, then, not only by the miners, but
also by the village; a short-lived enterprise that had
yielded low-grade granite and a few tons of marble unobtainable elsewhere and quickly snapped up for the
village's municipal buildings.

The snow crunched beneath Greg's workman boots.
He stood behind her, one hand on her shoulder.

"You really do like it here, don't
you.
"

She nestled her head back against his chest. "Yep,"
she said. "It's a getaway place, if you know what I
mean. A good place to scream when throwing dishes
doesn't work."

He chuckled and squeezed her shoulder tightly.
"For
you, maybe.
For me it's kind of spooky, don't you think? I mean, all the times you've brought me out here, I've never seen a single animal or one lousy bird."

"No kidding," she said. "I've never noticed."

The road angled downward slightly, leveled again at
the base of a six-foot grey boulder the wind and the rain
had scoured into the vague shape of a throne. At its
front there was a wide seat and armrests, and Pat quickly
dug and brushed off the snow so she could take her
place and stare out over the quarry. Greg, who distrusted
the slippery ground that only ran another eight feet before
it plunged over the edge, stood to one side, his hands deep
in his pockets, his chin tucked into his muffler.

"Crazy," he muttered.

A faint echo.
Fainter still, the chorus of intermittent
voices the wind wrung from the gaps that pocked the
walls.

"There," She said, pointing to her right. "Over there is where I found the stone for Homer. I nearly
killed myself climbing down when I saw it." She smiled
at the memory, fear gone and replaced by amazement.
"It was wedged in a crack, but I knew what it was as soon as I saw it. I had to have
it,
you know what I
mean, Greg? Nothing was going to keep me from get
ting it."

Greg leaned forward at the waist, squinting. "You're
right. You could've been killed."

A silence, then, as he pulled out the Thermos and
poured a dollop into its red cap. He passed it to her and
she drank, hugging herself delightedly at the fire in her
gullet. She
sighed
her content, not wanting to frown
when she saw how uneasy he seemed, as if the drop to
the white-covered frozen surface were pulling at him
with invisible, tempting fingers. They hadn't been here
together since last fall, last October, but she was posi
tive he hadn't reacted this way then. Not that it mattered. He could have been covering up in order to impress her. This made it a good sign, that he was
relaxed enough not to have to play foolish courtship
games.

"It's like you told me once, about your paints," she
said, quietly, not wanting to disturb the quarry's soft
singing.

"What?"

She grinned. "Sorry. What I mean is
—you're always
telling me how involved you get in your work, how the
paints sometimes feel as if they're alive, directing the brush to the right places.
Like you don't even have to
think about it."

"Rare," he said, making her realize then his frown
was merely a squinting against the
snowglare
. "It doesn't
happen very often."

"Oh, not with me," she said. "Not with me. Once I
get the stone the way I want it, once it's checked out for
flaws and I can really
see
what I'm going to do in there . . . well, it's like there's blood there in veins no
one can see but me. When it's all done it's almost alive,
figuratively. If it isn't, it's just stone. And it looks like
just stone. And it sits there like a lump, just waiting for
me to smash it."

As she'd spoken she'd begun to lean forward, and the
slight downward slope of the seat soon had her slipping
until she gripped the broad armrests and yanked herself
back.

"You think that dumb bear's alive then?"

She laughed. "To tell you the truth, there are days when I wonder. I'm just glad he can't talk."

"Ah hah," he said, slipping behind the throne and peering over its top at her, making her twist and crane
to see his grinning face. "You tell secrets to it, do you?"

"Everything.
No holds barred."

He crossed his forearms on the top and rested his chin on it. "
Y'know
, Oliver told me once there are
people who believe, who used to believe that stone has a life force just like trees and grass and people. I think
he was going to try to make a statue of you and ravish it
at night."

She stuck out her tongue at him. "He has Harriet, and dozens of other nymphs, my dear. He certainly doesn't need a woman almost twice his age."

"Ah, but he's mad about you, you know. He really is."

"Greg, please."

"No, I mean it. You should hear him and Ben arguing about the right way to get into
—''

She scooped up some snow and tossed it at him, slid
off the seat and hurried around it. He was laughing,
brushing the snow from his collar and hair. His smile
drained with the mirth in his eyes, however, when he
saw her standing there, hands on her hips.

"What do you have against Oliver and Ben?" she
asked. "It seems that all you're doing lately is running
them down. It isn't fair. It really isn't fair."

The day was spoiled. The serenity of the quarry had
been shattered by his unthinking jibes: If he'd only been
sober last night, if he'd only been there when Harriet had come crying to her, maybe he wouldn't feel quite so ... so damned superior.

"Hey, Pat, wait a minute."

From mirth to confusion to sullen anger.

"No. No, I'm not going to wait a minute. I want to
know what they've done to you that you're so mean to
them now. As I recall, you couldn't get enough of their
company last year. Whenever they weren't talking or working with me they were having coffee in the Union
with you. Now, all of a sudden, they're my enemies,
they're against me, they're using me . . . what the hell's going on, Greg?"