An Air That Kills (5 page)

MacGregor's quarters were dark. When there was a week­end party going on he kept aloof, disdaining what he called the shenanigans, and appearing only when Galloway and his guests wanted to use the boat.

Turee parked his car between two jack pines and the two men began walking toward the lodge, single file and in step, like a pair of convicts chained together by invisible irons. Only one light was burning, in the main room downstairs, and the fire in the grate was barely alive.

Hepburn had gone to sleep in the red leather lounging chair, a book on his lap. He woke up at the sound of the front door opening, squinted across the room and said crossly, “About time somebody showed up. I feel as if I've been conducting a one-man wake.”

Turee raised a sardonic eyebrow. “Maybe you have.”

“No luck finding Ron?”

“He's not at home. We called Esther and she hasn't seen him or heard from him and doesn't seem to care one way or another. Then we talked to Thelma.” He shot a glance at Harry to see if he would react to the name, but Harry was standing in front of the dying fire, his back to the room. “Thelma says Ron came by to pick up Harry, they had a drink together and some talk and then Ron left, pre­sumably to come up here.”

It was merely the skeleton of the truth. Only an expert could add the flesh and blood and muscle and all the vital organs that would make it a whole, borrowing a little here, a little there, from Thelma, from Harry, from Ron, from Esther, from all the other people who had affected all these people. A truth is as complicated as a man. Constructing and articulating a skeleton is not enough. It must be made to live.

So now what, Turee thought. What do I do now?

Hepburn provided a temporary answer. “You fellows want a drink?”

Harry had turned from the fire and picked up a magazine from the drum table. The magazine was an old
Maclean's
left over from the last time the lodge had been occupied, October of the previous year. The sight of the date sent a spasm of pain across Harry's eyes.
Last year
, he thought.
Last year at this time I was happy. I owned the world. Only last year . . .

On a sudden impulse he folded the magazine and threw it
with vicious accuracy into the center of the fire. It began to smolder.

“Now what the hell did you do that for?” Hepburn said.

“I don't know.”

“There was an article in it I wanted to read.”

“Sorry.” The magazine had caught fire. Harry watched it burn with a kind of bitter satisfaction. Last year was over. “It's late. I'm tired. I'd better be going to bed.”

“I've just made you a drink.”

“I don't want it.”

“You need it, Harry-boy.”

“No thanks. It's been a long day. Good night.”

“Take it easy, Harry-boy.”

“Oh yes. Sure.”

He dragged himself upstairs, leaning heavily on the ban­ister as if his legs had withered. A minute later Turee heard the dropping of shoes, the squeak of springs, a long sigh.

Hepburn handed Turee his drink. “What's the matter with him, anyway?”

“What he said. A long day.”

“Baloney. I've never seen Harry tired in my life.”

“Now you have.”

“There must be a reason. Something's up with Thelma, maybe?”

“Maybe.”

“Thelma's a funny girl, if you ask me.”

“I don't have to ask you,” Turee said, staring gloomily into the fire, trying to imagine what Thelma was doing right now. Planning? Weeping? Having second and third thoughts, or sleeping peacefully in the conviction that she'd been abso­lutely right the first time? It was impossible to tell.

“But I guess all women are.”

“Not all. Nancy's different.” Turee believed this, and would continue to believe it until the next time he and his wife had a misunderstanding.

“You're prejudiced.” Hepburn finished his drink and laid his empty glass decisively on the stone mantel. “Well, any­way, thank God I'm
not married. On which cheerful note I shall depart.”

“Go ahead. I'll turn out the lights.”

“Perhaps you'd better leave a couple of them on in case Ron . . .”

“Oh. All right.”

“Goodnight, Ralph.”

“Goodnight.”

Hepburn hesitated, stroking his chin. He was already beginning to need a shave, his eyes were red from too little sleeping and too much drinking, and his flannel shirt was dirty and lacking a button.

Why, he looks like a bum, Turee thought. Maybe he is. Maybe they all are, and this is no place for me. I should be home with my family, not up here pretending to be like the rest of them.

“Go to bed and get some sleep,” he said roughly, irritated by his own thoughts. “God, what a night this has been.”

“It's not finished.”

“Well, finish it.”

“O.K., but don't go into one of your
famous grouches. That's not going to help. We're all in this together.”

FIVE

The following morning, a few minutes after eight o'clock, Turee was awakened by the heavy pounding of the lion's-­head knocker on the front door and the simultaneous ring­ing of the old cowbell that served as a mess call. Making little noises of distress, he reached for his shoes and put them on. This was all the dressing he had to do because he had, like the others, slept in his clothes. It was part of the tradition of these weekends at the lodge, originated many years before by Harry Bream. (“Makes me feel sporty,” Harry had said. “Roughing it and all that.”)

Feeling somewhat less than sporty, Turee stepped out into the hall, where he met Winslow, wild-eyed and trembling, his back pressed against the wall.

“My God,” Winslow croaked. “I'm dying. Dying.”

“There's some bromo in the bathroom.”

“My God. That bell. Tell it to stop. My ears . . .”

“Pull yourself together.”

“I'm dying,” Winslow said again and slid down the wall like a puppet whose strings had broken.

Turee stepped fastidiously around him and went on down the staircase. The encounter had done nothing to dispel the feeling he'd had the previous evening, that he didn't belong in this place, with these people. Though they were old friends, they seemed, under stress, to have become strangers, and their ways of living—or, in Winslow's case, dying­—were alien to him. As he walked down the stairs the air from the room below rose up and struck his nostrils, and it seemed to him subtly poisonous, smelling of stale drinks and stale dreams.

He drew back the heavy wooden bolt on the front door and opened it, half expecting to see Ron.

During the early morning hours the wind had died down and the temperature had dropped. The ground was covered with hoarfrost glittering so whitely in the sun that, by con­trast, Esther Galloway's skin looked very dark, as if she had quite suddenly and unseasonably acquired a tan.

She appeared to have dressed in a hurry and not for a trip. She was hatless, the shoes she wore were summer shoes without toes, and the Black Watch plaid coat she had clutched around her was one Turee remembered from a long way back. Esther always made such a point of elegance that it was a shock to see her looking quite ordinary, if not actually dowdy.

“Why, Esther.”

“Hello, Ralph,” she said crisply. “Surprise, surprise, eh?”

“Come in.”

“I intend to.”

He held the door open for her and she came inside, peel­ing off her gloves and agitating her head as if to shake the frost out of her hair.

“My ears ache. I drove with the windows open to help keep me awake. Silly, I guess.” She laid her gloves on the mantel between two empty glasses left over from the night before. Then she picked up one of the glasses and sniffed with distaste. “Gin. When will Billy Winslow ever learn?”

“That's a difficult question.”

“Did you have a nice party?”

“Not very.”

“Ron—he's not here, of course?”

“No.”

“No word at all?”

“None.”

“Damn his eyes.”

Some time during the early morning the fire had gone out, and the room was so cold that Esther's breath came out in little clouds of mist like smoke from a dragon's mouth.

Turee thought it suited her mood admirably.

“Damn his beady little eyes,” she said. “All right, start making excuses for him, as usual, why don't you?”

Turee didn't answer because he was afraid of saying the wrong thing and there seemed no possible right thing.

“The way you fellows stick together, it's a scream really.”

“Sit down, Esther, and I'll go and put on some coffee.”

“Don't bother.”

“It's no bo—”

“MacGregor's coming over in a minute to set the fires and make some breakfast.” She turned and looked carefully around the room, one nostril curled very slightly. “The place needs an airing. It smells.”

“I hadn't noticed.” He had, though.

“I didn't expect him to be here, of course. I don't even know why I came except that I couldn't go back to sleep after you called last night, and I hate waiting, waiting and doing nothing. So I drove up here. I don't know why,” she repeated. “It just seemed a good idea at the time. Now that I'm here I realize there's nothing I can do, is there? Except possibly help nurse a few hangovers. How's yours?”

“I don't have one,” he said coldly.

“It couldn't have been a very good party, then.”

“I said it wasn't.”

“You could have another one today. Perhaps I'll even be invited to join in for once?”

“It's your house.”

“All right, I'll invite myself. We'll all sit around and be jolly until His Nibs decides to reappear.”

“You think it's that simple?”

She turned and addressed him very slowly and distinctly, as if she were talking to someone quite deaf or stupid. “Ron has complete identification papers in his wallet and his car registration fastened to the steering wheel. If there had been any accident I would have been notified. Isn't that correct?”

“I suppose it is.”

“There's no supposing about it, surely. When an accident happens, it's reported immediately. That's the law.”

It hadn't seemed to occur to her, and Turee didn't men­tion it, that laws could be broken.

Sounds of rattling and crashing from the kitchen indicated that MacGregor was at work making breakfast. This was not part of his regular duties, and Turee knew from past experience that MacGregor would make himself as objection­able as possible; the coffee would be like bitter mud, the bacon burned and the eggs unrecognizable except for bits of broken eggshell that would crunch between the teeth like ground glass.

“MacGregor's in a sour mood,” Turee said lightly. “We'll probably all be poisoned.”

“At this particular moment I wouldn't care.”

“Esther, for Pete's sake. . .”

“Oh, I know—you think I'm a drag and a droop. You think I always go around with a long face, spoiling for a fight.”

“I don't . . .”

“You're Ron's friend, naturally you're on his side. I have to admit, I guess, that Ron makes a pretty good friend. But he's a lousy husband.”

“Spare me the details.”

“I wasn't going into details,” she said flatly. “I was just about to make a generalization.”

“Go ahead.”

“Oh, I know you loathe generalizations, Ralph. You prefer intimate statistics like how many tons of mackerel were shipped last month from Newfoundland.”

Turee's smile was wan. “Let's have the generalization.”

“All right. Some men just shouldn't get married, they have nothing to give to a woman, not even the time of day. Oh, they can bring her an expensive diamond watch so she can tell the time of day for herself, but that's not
sharing
anything.”

She sat down on the leather hassock in front of the unlit fire as if the sudden release of emotions had exhausted her, like a blood-letting. “I wanted very much to come up here with Ron this week end. Not that I'm particularly keen on fishing or even outdoor life, but I thought it would be fun to do the cooking and eat in front of the fireplace and take walks in the woods with Ron and the two boys. I asked him if I could come along and he didn't even take me seriously, the whole idea was so incredible to him.”

She paused to take a long breath. “Why, the boys hardly know this place. They've only been here three times. Ron keeps making excuses—the boys might fall over the cliff, they might get bitten by a snake, they might drown, etcetera. But the real excuse he never mentions—the boys might in­terfere with him, they might want something from him that can't be bought with money, they might demand two or three ounces of Ron's very own self. They might even take a bite of his precious hide, not knowing, as I do, that it's quite unpalatable and indigestible.”

“Esther . . .”

“That's all. I've finished.”

“I don't mean to shut you up.”

“You do, of course. But it's nice of you, anyway, to say you don't. I blab, don't I? But not to everybody. I wouldn't dream of saying any of these things to Billy Winslow or Joe Hepburn or even to Harry. They're a pretty stupid lot.”

Turee was inclined to agree but he didn't care to encourage her in a new subject. He said, “You need some hot food and coffee, Esther. I'll go and see how MacGregor is getting along.”

MacGregor was getting along exactly as Turee had antici­pated. The bacon was already burned, the eggs were having convulsions in the skillet, and the odor of coffee was sharp as acid. MacGregor, wearing a chef's apron over his grease-­stained overalls, was trying to sedate the eggs with liberal doses of salt and pepper.

“I'll take over,” Turee said.

“What say, sir?”

“I'll carry on from here. You go and set the fire in the main room.”

“Things got a mite burned,” MacGregor said with satisfac­tion, as he removed the apron and handed it to Turee. “It's the will of the Lord.”

“It's a funny thing that whenever the Lord picks some­thing to be burned He chooses you as His instrument.”

“Aye, sir, it's peculiar.” He headed for the main room, whistling cheerfully through the gap between his two remain­ing front teeth. He had scored a victory, not just a personal victory, but one on behalf of all employees over all employers, and while Turee was not exactly an employer, still he was lined up on the same side. That was good enough. Let the bastard eat burned bacon. It was the will of the Lord.

After breakfast they sat in front of the pine-wood fire MacGregor had built and drank the bitter coffee out of heavy stone-ware mugs. Food and warmth had improved the situa­tion. The pinched look around Esther's mouth and nostrils disappeared, and the uneasy little animals that Turee had felt moving around in his stomach were temporarily placated.

There was no sound at all from the upper rooms. Either Billy Winslow had gone back to sleep, or else his own predic­tion had been accurate and he had died. In either case, Turee didn't much care at the moment. The heat and color and movement of the flames held him in a kind of pleasant stupor. He listened to Esther talking the way one listens to background music, recognizing the songs but without paying any real attention. Esther's songs were about her two boys, Marv and Greg, and their latest pranks, and such was Turee's state of mind that he was able to listen without even
want­ing to cap her stories with stories about his own children.

“ . . .
are you paying attention, Ralph?”

“Eh? Oh, certainly, certainly.”

“Well, don't you think I'm right?”

“Absolutely.” This was safe enough. Every woman wanted to be told she was absolutely right, especially if she had some doubt of it.

“Well, she got quite unpleasant about it. She said I shouldn't spank either of them, no matter what they did. She said I shouldn't even
threaten
to spank them, that it would destroy their confidence in me, and that I was simply indulging my own anger. Now I ask you, how can you bring up two normal, lively boys without a spanking now and then?”

“I wouldn't know. I have four girls.”

“That's a different matter. Girls are more—well, you can
reason
with them.”

Turee was extremely surprised to learn this. “You can, eh?”

“Besides, she's got her nerve telling me how to bring up my children when she doesn't even have any of her own.” Esther paused long enough to take a sip of coffee. “It's funny about that.”

“About what?”

“She's so crazy about children,” Esther said, “why doesn't she have some of her own?”

“Who?”

“The
who
we've been talking about.”

“I must have missed the name.”

“Thelma. She's so crazy about children, it's funny she doesn't have any of her own.”

Turee rose and went over to the fire and kicked one of the logs with his foot. The pleasant stupor had vanished; the background music had turned into a loud cacophonous modern symphony, and he was compelled to listen to it carefully, to make sense out of it, distinguish the parts and players—­Harry moaning on the trombone, Esther nagging at the drums, Thelma crowing through the clarinet, Ron off-stage with a silver whistle waiting for his cue. And the conductor out to lunch.

“After all, she's still young and healthy,” Esther said. “Harry makes a decent salary, and he's just as fond of children as she is, I think. Don't you agree?”

“I haven't given it much thought.”