Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 02 (27 page)

 
          
It
was not until many days later that she recognized those words of rationality
for the trap they were.

EVERY MILE IS TWO IN WINTER

It was not in winter Our
loving lot was cast!
—
THOMAS HOOD

 
          
TO EYES ACCUSTOMED TO THE MANHATTAN SKYLINE,
Dayton
was a small clean city with a scattering of
skyscrapers and no smog to speak of. It had taken Winter three days, taking the
trip by easy stages, to cross
Pennsylvania
, and by the time she was done, she was
heartily sick of the rolling landscape, the endless fields being planted with
nameless springtime crops, and the signs for Stuckey's. Pulling into the
traffic tangle that was
Dayton
's outer loop was almost a relief after the endless hours of high-speed
highway driving.

 
          
There
had been no more dreams or peculiar incidents of any sort, and though Winter
continued to do the psychic exercises from the pamphlet and drink her Centering
Tea, it was more for the help they gave her in falling asleep than for any
arcane benefits. Her physical stamina was rapidly returning, her mirror told
her she was putting back on the lost weight and softening the sharp edges of
her gauntness, and she was beginning to wonder if the "artificial
Elemental" that Truth had told her about might be nothing more than an
elaborate network of coincidences. The smaller animals she'd found could easily
have been a cat's prey, dragged so far from the place where they were killed to
seem like bloodless deaths. The deer could be chalked up to poachers. Even the
night at the Institute's lab probably hadn't happened the way she remembered it
now—and the rest? Coincidence, hysteria, bad luck—it didn't even really matter
if everything had happened as she thought it had, so long as it went away now.
Hadn't Truth said that the poltergeist would just give up and go away at some
point? Well, maybe it had. She should be glad the thing wasn't around to get up
to its old tricks with her new car.

 
          
Winter
felt more optimistic than she had in weeks. The problem hadn't been nearly as
bad as she'd thought it was after all. And besides, it was over now.

 
          
Winter
took the exit that Ramsey had indicated in his directions, and immediately
found herself in the middle of the downtown area, lost in a bewildering tangle
of secondary streets. Where was—? Oh, here it was. With a little more verve
than prudence, Winter cut a sharp left and found herself on a main street: four
lanes plus turn lanes divided by a grassy median, the edges dotted with
fast-food restaurants and chain hotels.

 
          
This doesn't look much like a residential
district. Or a business one.

 
          
She
followed Ramsey's directions until large buildings gave way to small ones and
to outlet warehouses, an area where real estate prices were lower. She'd nearly
given up hope of finding the address when—

 
          
Oh, for heaven's sake.

 
          
Why couldn't he just have
said
so?
she asked herself, even though she
knew how much Ramsey Miller liked practical jokes—assuming they were harmless
ones.

 
          
Winter
hit her turn-signal and made a left just under the sign that said miller's used
cars.

 
          
She'd
barely brought the car to a stop before Ramsey was walking out of the prefab office
in her direction. She was pleased that she recognized him, even with the new
mustache. He was of average height, with brown hair and eyes, and the years had
been kind to him; he still had the same hairline he'd had in college, and had
also escaped the swinging, pendulous beer-gut that so many men his age didn't
seem to be able to avoid.

           
Winter got out of her car and stood
beside it, waiting for him to reach her.

 
          
"What
can I do for you today?" he asked, his tone professionally polite. He was
wearing the loudest sport coat Winter had ever seen—a polyester horror of green
and yellow and orange plaid, with a few red and blue stripes thrown in for good
measure.

 
          
"You
can throw away that jacket for starters; it's the most horrible thing I've ever
seen," Winter said, smiling.

 
          
Ramsey's
face lost its expression of formal politeness and broke into a genuine grin of
recognition.

 
          
"Winter!
I told you to call me the day before you got here!" he said, enveloping
her in a hug.

 
          
"I
forgot," she said meekly, hugging him back, "and
Dayton
was closer than I thought it was. But just
look
at you."

 
          
"I'd
rather look at you," Ramsey leered, in the style of a borscht-belt comic.
"You look
tem'fic
! What have you been doing?
What brings you to my humble city?"

 
          
"I'm
looking up old college friends—you know, the group?" The
Blackburn
group, Winter meant, but Ramsey didn't take
her up on that.

 
          
"Well,
when you find Grey, give him my best—and tell him I haven't forgotten about the
twenty bucks he owes me. But come on inside—oh, don't worry about moving the
car; Mike can keep an eye on it. Lends a touch of class to the place. And if I
sell it, I'll make sure you get top price."

 
          
"Gee,
thanks," Winter said mockingly. "And it isn't even mine."

 
          
"You're
stealing cars these days?" Ramsey shot back, never missing a beat.

 
          
Ramsey's
office bore a faint kinship with the place in
Poughkeepsie
that Winter had leased her car from:
automotive calendars on the walls and clusters of tagged keys everywhere.
Ramsey gestured, indicating she should sit where she liked, and Winter passed
up the couch beneath the window in favor of one of the verging-on-antique
chairs opposite the battered metal desk.

 
          
"Soda?"
Ramsey said. Winter nodded, and he went over to a small refrigerator.
"Coke all right?"

 
          
"Great." 
She'd  never  been  one  for sweets  before—let 
alone  soft drinks—but ever since these
things
had started happening, she couldn't keep away from the
stuff. She'd developed a particular fondness for Classic Coke.

 
          
Carbonated glucose in a can. I don't even
want to know what's in it, but knowing that plumbers soak fittings in it to
get the rust off is enough for me.
Despite her flip and mordant thoughts,
Winter popped the top on the deposit can and poured the paper cup full. She
drank, and let the sugar rush flush the weariness from her body for a while.

 
          
While
Ramsey was getting his own drink, Winter took a surreptitious look around. The
bright spring sunlight beat down on the cars outside in the lot, making the
place look about as good as it ever would. Turning across four lanes of traffic
she hadn't had much of a chance to look over Ramsey's place of business as she
came in, but now Winter could see that none of the cars parked out there—with
the exception of her leased Saturn—was less than five or six years old; almost
obsolete by the standards of the market, and certainly not prime-quality
preowned
automotive goods.

 
          
It
was true that the lot was clean and well kept—as were the cars— and the
fluttering pennants and the gaudy sign lent a certain liveliness to the place,
but with her finely honed predator's instincts, Winter was willing to bet that
business at Miller's Used Cars was not so hot.

 
          
A
used-car lot. Who would have thought it?

 
          
"So,"
Ramsey said, sitting down on the side of the desk, club soda in hand.
"How've you been? As for me, I am as you see me."

 
          
"Pretty
good, all things considered," Winter said, fencing cautiously. She might
be willing to tell him about her inconvenient lapses of memory later, but at
the moment, she wanted to feel her way into the conversation—and find out what
had made Ramsey so cagey when she spoke to him on the phone.

 
          
"I
went into Wall Street," Winter admitted, expanding on her story. "I
did a whole
Bonfire of the Vanities
thing.
I survived the eighties. Now I'm . . . taking some time out," she finished
lamely.

 
          
"Don't
worry about it; you'll get another job," Ramsey said with dismaying
instinct. "Especially with your looks. You don't look a day older, you
know."

 
          
"Neither
do you." If it was stretching the truth, the truth wasn't being stretched
too far. And she liked Ramsey. She always had. Even if he did automatically
assume she'd been fired. "So, what are you doing these days?" she
asked. It was a pallid conversational gambit, but at the moment Winter was
more interested in normalcy than drama.

 
          
Ramsey
nattered on about trivia, and Winter let the sound of his voice, his look, his
gestures, carry her back to their shared days at
Taghkanic
.
The tissue of evoked memory was too fragile to bear much weight, but even
without being able to recall specific details, Winter could
sense
the time they'd spent together;
the emotions they'd all felt for each other—all five of them.

 
          
But if that's true, why didn't the others
stay together, even if I left? What happened to all of them?

 
          
More
mysteries.

 
          
"—so
after Ellie left, I got this place, and, I don't know, I think it's worked out
pretty well," Ramsey was saying. "Who can ever be sure how their life
is going to turn out at eighteen or twenty?"

 
          
"Ellie?"
Truth was roused to a sense of her social responsibilities. "I never even
asked—is there a Mrs. Miller? I don't want to come barging into your life like
an old girlfriend." Which she'd never been—she and Ramsey had been that
rarest of all male/female pairings: friends and nothing more.

 
          
Ramsey
laughed ruefully. "Mrs. Millers? Several, but none of them wants to know
me any more. I'm divorced, Winter—I just took it for granted that you knew, but
of course there's no way you could. Number Three just left about a month
ago—that was Laura. Ellie was Number Two, and Marina was the first one, back in
'eighty-three."

 
          
"Just
out of college," Winter said. They'd all been Class of '82; Ramsey had
graduated even if she hadn't. What had he gone on to do? She could almost
remember. . . .

 
          
"I
was working at the
Chicago Daily Sentinel
then, back in the good old days when I was going to have matched Pulitzers
for my mantelpiece. But you don't want to hear about that." His tone was
definite, and now Winter remembered clearly. Ramsey had been a journalism
major; he'd been the one who was going to find the truth and change the world.
"How long are you staying?" he added.

 
          
"What?"
The question startled Winter out of her reverie; for a moment the world around
her became
hyperreal
; from the slanting bars of
sunlight across the dusty goldenrod rug to the dents and scratches in the old
metal desk. Ramsey's office. The office of a used-car salesman, a stage-set in
some horrible alternate reality to the future he should have had.