Against the Season (20 page)

If no charges were laid, if the details of Panayotis’ arrest were kept out of the paper, if Nick Pyros kept the episode to himself … too many of them. Whatever happened, Peter was through in this town. It was too good a story to be left untold: the bank manager and a Greek boy. Even if it didn’t get out, Feller Hill would never look at Peter Fallidon in quite the same light again, whether he believed the story Peter had told or not. For something, obviously, had put the idea in the boy’s mind, however erroneous it was. Feller Hill didn’t go to places like Nick’s. Well, Carl Hollinger did… and saw Peter buying beer for the kids. Why had he done it? He had been feeling sorry for Cole… and for himself. Then, when Grace Hill came in, he had wanted to show her how invulnerable to her insinuations he was, how freely innocent. Would Feller tell his wife? Peter tasted the bile of rage in his mouth. He was through, whatever happened. All the years of patient, negative decency to become the kind of man people could respect, whether they liked him or not, a man with authority and influence, a man with some vision… a New Yorker ad for the trust department. Peter Fallidon, from bitter little bastard angry enough to be awarded the Navy Cross, to bank manager and Rotarian in a place nearly the size of a city, back to bitter little bastard in a night. Because of a bitter little bastard who thought he saw a short cut to such salvation. There wasn’t any.

“I’ll pay his lawyer.”

Like buying the beer. The gesture of a free and innocent man. How could Feller Hill ever understand such acts, such people, as himself… or even his own wife? To be born in this town, to inherit it as a right, even without money, was to be given decency as a place to begin and to fall back on. Feller Hill could not know every time he got up on his hind legs that it was an awesome view from a dizzying height. And he had taught his sons to walk long before they would find out that their mother was a bitch, if they ever did. Two-legged creatures, all of them, Cole, too, for all his uncertainties.

Harriet. He could not bear to think of her, as he had begun to think of her. What an irony it was that the only person in town who might understand his innocence was Grace Hill, because she could understand Panayotis’ need, like her own. And, perhaps, Dina, who put up with Grace in much the same way Peter felt indulgent of Panayotis, for knowing how hard it was to choose decency instead. But Harriet? For Harriet, a ship-jumping, cock-selling kid was not even a legal problem, except that she happened to have been associated for some months with a local bank manager who…

The phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Peter?”

“Yes, Harriet.”

“I bought a roast this morning, and I wondered if you’d like to come over tonight and help me eat it.”

“Thank you,” Peter said, “but I can’t tonight. I… there’s… it’s…

“That’s all right. It was just a thought.”

“How are you?” Peter asked, automatically.

“Just fine. How are you?”

“Oh, fine.”

“Well,” Harriet said with forced cheerfulness, “perhaps some other time.”

“Yes,” Peter said.

“Good-bye then.”

“Good-bye.”

It was the only phone call that came. Through the afternoon and early evening Peter waited, trying to spend the time with some thought of what he would do, how he would hand in his resignation if he was allowed to, where he would go, but, until he knew that he would be free to make such decisions, it was impossible to formulate them clearly. At ten thirty, when he was considering taking a drink and trying to get some sleep, there was a knock on his door. The police again, he supposed, come to lay charges this time. He walked to the door and opened it.

“Feller! You shouldn’t have come over. You could have phoned.”

“I needed to see you,” Feller said, and he added quickly, “I think it’s safe to say that there’s going to be no problem for you.”

He was Peter’s age, but he looked ten years older, deep bays of skin defeating his hairline, his crop of hair sparse and graying, his mouth deeply bracketed with lines, his skin stained with customary tiredness, And tonight there was more than the usual strain in the fast-blinking eyelids, the burdened shoulders.

“Let me get you a drink,” Peter said.

“Thank you.”

Feller stood, looking at the books on Peter’s shelves, at the orderliness of all the objects in the room, until Peter came in with a drink for each of them.

“I can’t tell you how grateful I am…” Peter began.

Feller shook his head. “Pyros’ version of the boy’s story, though it’s pretty garbled still, makes it clear that he had a mistaken idea that you’d help him. The police are going to want to talk to you again tomorrow. Under the circumstances, I have to advise you that you must have another lawyer.”

“Besides you?” Peter asked.

“Instead of me. I can’t deal with the case any further.”

“I don’t quite understand,” Peter said carefully.

“It’s difficult,” Feller said.

“Of course, if you don’t want to… for personal reasons, then…”

“My wife told me tonight that you’d refused to lend her money.”

“That’s right.”

“She’s behind all this, Peter,” Feller said, and then he put his face in his hands in a shame or grief that was silent.

Peter could not say or do anything. He simply waited.

“I haven’t really sorted out the legal problems,” Feller said finally. “I don’t know whether you’ll be asked … In any case, you’ve got to have another lawyer.”

“You mean, she put Panayotis up to this?” Peter asked.

“Yes,” Feller said, and he looked at Peter. “My wife’s a very sick woman. I’ve got to do what I can to protect her, for her own sake, of course, but for mine, too, and the boys’. It may be, with psychiatric evidence…”

“Look, surely somehow together we can sort this out,” Peter said. “It’s not as if we were in a big city where nobody gives a damn. Nobody’s going to lay any charges that don’t have to be laid. You persuaded them not to charge me, after all.”

“I didn’t think you’d done anything,” Feller said. “Neither did they. It’s not the first time a kid’s jumped ship here.”

“But has”—Peter forced himself to that first name—“Grace done anything that has to be charged?”

“You’ve got to talk to another lawyer. I can’t advise you on this. I simply can’t.”

“If I’m asked to lay charges, I simply won’t do it,” Peter said flatly. “I don’t need a lawyer to advise me about that.”

“You do,” Feller insisted. “If there are simply rumors, if you don’t have a chance to clear yourself …”

“Do there have to be that many rumors?” Peter asked, who had been ready to leave town on the evidence of much less threat only hours before.

“When I got home tonight,” Feller said, “Grace was hysterical. She’d been assaulted, she said, by Cole Westaway.”

“Cole!”

“She went to Dina’s this afternoon. Cole Westaway was there. She thought you’d be in jail and told him you were—for indecent assault of a minor. He slapped her. It was only then that I realized she was the woman Panayotis was talking about; otherwise she wouldn’t have known anything about it. So I confronted her with it. She began to talk about the loan…”

“I probably should have spoken to you about that,” Peter said. “But she didn’t want you to know, and, since I couldn’t anyway, I…”

“You’ve got to think of yourself. Whatever you have to do…”

“I’m not going to do anything.”

“You must see another lawyer. I insist.”

“Feller, this is a human thing… between friends, in a human place.”

“It’s a human place all right,” Feller said bitterly. “What do you think people like the Larsons are going to do with the tales Cole’s bringing home?”

“I can handle that.”

“Can you?” Feller asked. “Not one of those people has had anything to do with me since I came home with Grace seventeen years ago. It’s a smug, cruel, narrow-minded little sewer.”

“Miss Larson?” Peter asked, battled.

“The elder Miss Larson.”

“Well, she died before I had much sense of her.”

“I keep forgetting,” Feller said.

“I’m not going to do anything, Feller. Not even resign.”

“We’ll talk about it again when we’ve both had some sleep.”

“All right, but I won’t have changed my mind.”

They stood. Peter took Feller by the shoulders. “I’m sorry as hell.”

“Yes, thanks. So am I.”

Dina tried to get Cole at home in the late afternoon and again after dinner.

“I don’t know where he is,” Agate said irritably. “He was supposed to be home for dinner, and then we were going to Nick’s. Maybe he decided he’d rather drink alone.”

Dina phoned Nick’s, but Cole wasn’t there. She had invited herself to Rosemary’s for the evening and was already half an hour late. She thought of phoning Agate again and asking her to get Cole to telephone Rosemary’s when he got in, but she didn’t want to sound urgent.

“I’m worried about him,” she confessed to Rosemary, having recounted the details of the long afternoon.

“Could he have gone to Peter’s?”

“He thinks Peter’s in jail.”

“What a sick, sick bitch she is,” Rosemary said.

“Cole needs to know that, specifically.”

“Do you want to go out looking for him?”

“Maybe if we just swung by Nick’s…”

“Come on.”

“It’s probably silly,” Dina said.

“Well, doing something silly is better than sitting around worrying about him.”

“I should have paid more attention to him this afternoon.”

“You can’t give absolute attention to everybody, Dina.”

“No.”

“I’m getting worried about Cole, Agate,” Amelia said at ten o’clock, when it was time for her to go upstairs to bed. “He doesn’t usually go off like this without saying anything. Are you sure he didn’t say anything?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Agate said. “I bullied him into saying that he’d take me to Nick’s tonight. He didn’t think you’d approve. Anyway, he didn’t want to. He’s probably waiting it out in a movie somewhere until we’ve both gone to bed.”

“You wanted to go to Nick’s?”

“It sounded entertaining.”

“You need some fun. I’ll speak to Cole.”

“You wouldn’t mind?”

“Why should I?”

“What would Mrs. Montgomery say?” Agate asked, putting on a Maud Montgomery face.

Amelia smiled. “She’s a good soul, all the same.”

“But don’t say anything to Cole,” Agate said. “I’ll just hit him over the head a couple of times with a rolling pin when he gets in. That will take care of it. Now, it’s time for you to turn in.”

“I hope he’s not late.”

Cole had no idea what time it was when he came in through the kitchen door. Nor could he have accounted for the hours that had passed. The empty ache in his stomach reminded him that he had not eaten. He stood by the refrigerator, wondering if he would attempt food, a gesture toward stopping that simple pain, anyway. He was pouring himself a glass of milk when Agate, in a light summer robe, came into the kitchen. He didn’t so much drop the bottle as simply let it go, tipping over the glass as it fell. He watched the pool of milk form around his feet over bits of broken glass.

“Why not try a beer?” Agate suggested without moving. “Or is that the trouble?”

Cole didn’t answer her.

“What’s the matter?” she asked then, going over to look at him more closely.

“I dropped the milk,” he said.

“Why?”

“Don’t know.”

“Where have you been?”

“Nowhere,” he said, not evasive, simply factual.

“Have you eaten?”

“No.”

“Well, wade out of that stuff and go sit down. I’ll get you something.”

“You don’t have to.”

It was Agate’s turn not to answer. It wasn’t alcohol, and he didn’t use anything else. But something was wrong, really wrong. He sank down in the chair, put his chin in his hands and stared ahead of him, taking no notice of Agate as she cleaned up the milk and then went about making him a sandwich.

“Dina was trying to get you earlier,” Agate said finally, as she put the sandwich and a new glass of milk in front of him.

“Oh.”

“She phoned a couple of times.”

“I wasn’t home,” Cole said.

“No,” Agate said without much energy in her sarcasm, “you weren’t.”

“What time is it?”

“About three.”

“It wasn’t in the paper,” Cole said.

“What wasn’t?”

“Thanks,” Cole said, nodding to the sandwich.

“What wasn’t in the paper?”

“What did I say?” Cole asked.

“What’s the matter with you?”

“Tired,” Cole said. “I’m awfully tired.” He picked up the sandwich and took a bite of it. Then, as if he’d just remembered, he said, “I’m sorry about Nick’s tonight. I just couldn’t make it.”

“We all have our busy days,” Agate said.

“Yeah.”

She watched him eat. It was the only entertainment he provided, having nothing more to say. He was the awful color he had been when she first met him. Any blond got such easy mileage with suffering. She could be into the last aria, TB, gout, and voice strain overcoming the final high notes, and she’d still look an ad for a good laxative. Why had Dina been trying to reach him?

“Is it something about that kid?” Agate asked.

“What kid?”

“The one who jumped ship.”

“That cock-sucking bastard,” Cole said, nearly under his breath.

“Who’ve you been playing with to learn such bad language?”

“You.”

“Me?” Agate answered in surprise. “That wouldn’t have been my first guess.”

“All of you!”

Agate looked around her. “How many of me do you think there are?”

“Stop talking to me like that!” Cole said angrily, getting to his feet.

“What in hell’s eating you?”

“I hit a woman today,” Cole said.

“I’m supposed to be impressed? Run from the room screaming? What?”

“Don’t talk to me like I’m the village idiot…”

“King Cole, from now on…”

He had taken her by the shoulders, as if to shake her, needs scattering in his eyes like broken glass, not knowing what he was doing, what he wanted done to him. Agate stepped toward rather than away from him, hands on his rib cage, not hard and breaking, simply holding him there to give him balance.