Deep Water (35 page)

       Wilson looked confused and angry for a moment, then lurched off in the direction of the lane. It was a minute or so before Vic heard his car start, and he waited a few moments longer to find out what Wilson was going to do, and heard the motor approaching. Vic got into his own car and started it. He was thinking that if he got rid of the other snow chain in the back of his car, the one on Cameron wouldn't be very definitely identifiable. But there was, of course, Melinda, who would be glad to identify it, and who would probably say she could identify it when she really couldn't. Vic moved his car as soon as he could, and gave Don a wave as he went by him.

       His one chance Vic thought, was that Wilson might not be able to persuade the police to dredge the quarry. But if the police were convinced that the stains were blood—and, unfortunately, they would be convinced—they wouldn't need any prodding to look in the water. Vic glanced in the mirror for Don's car. He turned off the dirt road into the highway to Little Wesley without seeing it. Don was probably having a hard time getting through the lane.

       Wilson would go to the police now, Vic supposed, just as soon as he got to Little Wesley. Vic pictured the police arriving at the house while he was calmly preparing his lunch, perhaps even eating it. He'd try bluffing Wilson again. The police already knew that Wilson was a troublemaker. The police were, after all, on his side. He might be able to discourage the police from going to look at the bloodstains, Vic thought. All it would take would be coolness.

       But he knew it wouldn't go like that. The police would take a look at the bloodstains. If they wouldn't, Wilson would inform Cameron's company, or inform Havermal.

       Vic did not quite know what to do.

       He thought of Trixie. The Petersons would take her, he thought, if anything happened to him. He stopped thinking about that. That was defeatism. Melinda would get her, anyway. That was worse to think about.

       But still he did not know quite what to do.

       He would go on about his business. That was the only way he could see it.

       He had expected Melinda to be gone when he got to the house. Her car was in the garage. Vic got out of his car quietly, without shutting the door, and went into the living room. Melinda was on the telephone in her room, and he heard her trying to end the conversation quickly, because she knew he had come in.

       She came into the room, and he knew from her face that she had been talking to Don. Her face was a confusion of surprise, triumph, and terror. Then, as he kept walking toward her, she took a step back. He smiled at her. She was dressed to go out, probably to meet Don at the Lord Chesterfield.

       "I've just talked to Don," she said unnecessarily.

       "Oh, you've just talked to Don! What would you do without the telephone?" He walked past her into her room, wrapped the wire of her telephone around his wrist and yanked it from the wall box. "Well, now you haven't got one!"Then he crossed the living room to the telephone in the hall and yanked its wire out in the same manner, so hard that the box came off the wall.

       Melinda was standing by the phonograph, really cringing against it in an attitude of exaggerated terror, it seemed to Vic, her mouth open and drawn down at the corners like a mask of tragedy. Medea, Mangler of children and castrator of husbands. Fate had overtaken her at last. He almost smiled. What was he doing after all? Walking toward her.

       "Vic!"

       "What, darling?"

       "Don's coming!" she gasped. "Don't do anything to me, Vic!" He struck her on the side of the head. "So Don's coming and who else and who else? Cameron and Charley and all the rest?"

       He struck her again.

       She reached for the cloisonné vase on the top of the phonograph, and knocked it off. Then he struck her again, and she was on her hands and knees on the floor.

       "Vic!—Help!"

       Always that cry to other people! His hands closed around her throat and he shook her. The stupid terror in her open eyes made his hands tighten all the more. Then suddenly he released her."Get up," he said. After all, he did not want to kill her. She was coughing. "Melinda—"

       Then he heard a car outside and the last barrier of his anger broke and he threw himself on her. He imagined he saw Wilson's lank figure and scowling face coming in the door, and he put all the pressure he could on her throat, furious because she had made him furious. He could have won, he thought, without her. He could have won without the telephone that had brought Jo-Jo and Larry and Ralph and De Lisle and Cameron to the house: Ralph the mama's boy, Cameron the pachyderm—

       There was a shout at the front door, and then Wilson, self-righteous, unsmiling, meddling, was bending over Melinda, talking to her. Her lips had parted. There was a bluish look about her eyelids, or was it mascara? Or an illusion? Vic heard Wilson mutter to the empty air that she was dead, and then following the direction in which Wilson had looked, Vic saw a policeman standing.

       "What're you smiling at?" the policeman demanded, unsmiling.

       Vic was about to tell him—"At faith, hope, and charity"— when the policeman took him by the arm. Vic stood up, enduring the loathsome touch, which after a moment became comical, like Melinda's panic, with his usual amenableness. Wilson was babbling behind him, and Vic heard the words "quarry" and "De Lisle" and "Cameron's blood," and he kept on walking with the men who were not fit to black his boots. He saw Trixie romping up the lawn and stopping in surprise as she saw him with the policeman, but frowning at the lawn, Vic could see that she wasn't really there. The sun was shining and Trixie was alive, somewhere.

       But Melinda is dead and so am I, he thought. Then he knew why he felt empty: because he had left his life in the house behind him, his guilt and his shame, his achievements and failures, the failure of his experiment, and his final, brutal gesture of petulant revenge.

       He began to walk with a spring in his step (the walk to the policeman's car at the bottom of the driveway seemed endless), and he began to feel free and buoyant, and guiltless, too. He looked at Wilson, walking beside him, still intoning his tedious information, and, feeling very calm and happy, Vic kept looking at Wilson's wagging jaw and thinking of the multitude of people like him on the earth, perhaps half the people on earth were of his type, or potentially his type, and thinking that it was not bad at all to be leaving them. The ugly birds without wings. The mediocre who perpetuated mediocrity, who really fought and died for it. He smiled at Wilson's grim, resentful, the-world-owes-me-a-living face, which was the reflection of the small, dull mind behind it, and Vic cursed it and all it stood for. Silently, and with a smile, and with all that was left of him, he cursed it.

The End