[Oxrun Station] The Bloodwind (11 page)

"You could have called me."

It took her a moment to say, "No. Not this time. I
guess it was all that pressure and stuff, too much drinking, too much imagination. I mean, I was beginning to think there were spooks and goblins out there to get me, and every one of them had Ford's fizz painted all over
them."

"Fizz?
Did you say fizz?"

She pushed her free hand back through her hair.
"Fizz.
An old Cagney term for puss."
She waited, but he made no comment and she stuck her tongue out at the receiver. There were times when she wondered if
his sense of humor passed only in one direction. "Any
way," she said into the silence, "I had to get away for a while. I thought I'd be gone the whole weekend, but . . . I came back.
Late.
Greg, so many things have happened lately, and somehow I lost the ability to
handle it. So it was either go down to the city or lock
myself in a closet.''

"Yeah," he said, "I know exactly what you mean.
So.
Are you okay now?"

"Fine," she said.
"Just fine."

"Good. That's good."

"It sure is."

"Great." Her grin became impish. If there was some
thing else he wanted to say she wasn't going to drag it
out of him. He'd have to do it on his own. "So what are you going to do today?"

"Work," she said, glancing over her shoulder to the
hallway. "A project I have here that's pretty important
now."

"Oh really?"
And she frowned at the abrupt frost on
the line. "Got
yourself
a commission or something?"

"No," she said sharply, not caring if he bridled. "No, it's not, Greg. A private
thing,
and something I can't talk about until it's done, all right?"

"Sure, sure.
I know what they are."

I'll bet, she thought uncharitably.

"So."

"Buttons," she said.

"Huh?"

"Sew buttons. Something my mother used to say when I was a kid."

"Oh." A crackling, then, and she was puzzled until
she heard it again; he was opening a pack of cigarettes.
"Say, Pat, is this work of yours going to last very long?
I mean, I don't suppose you'd be done in time to catch a show over in Harley.
Maybe a couple of drinks after?"

She almost accepted, but she sensed a fine edge on his temper and did not want to spend the evening
walking on eggs. Especially when she knew her present
mood wouldn't fade.

"Pat?"

"Greg, I'd like to, really, but I want to get this done as soon as I can."

"It's really that important."

"Yes. At least it is to me. And as long as I feel like
working again, I don't want to waste it." Her laugh was forced. "You know how it is, Greg. Strike
while
the iron's hot or it all turns to crap." She waited. He said nothing. "You do understand, don't you?"

"Sure I do, Pat. You know I do." A rustling, then,
as he changed hands. "Well, look, I'll
—hell, there's
someone at the door. Hey, I'll call you tomorrow,
okay? Maybe we can go for a drive, watch the
snowbuggies
tear up the wildlife, okay?"

"Sure, yes. As a matter of fact, I'll probably have cabin fever by then, so I'll need to get out. Call me around noon, okay?"

"You got it, Pat. And Pat . . ."

"Yes?"

"I, uh . . . I'm glad you're all right. You really had me worried for a while there."

"I had me worried, too. Talk to you tomorrow."

The connection broken, she lowered her feet to the
floor again and leaned back until the chair tilted, bumped
against the doorframe. Her ankles hooked around the
legs. It was incredible, and not a little enervating, what
an admixture of feelings she had when she spoke to him
over the phone.
Motherly and antagonistic, challenging
and daring, exasperation and quiet.
She was positive
he'd been about to tell her at last that he loved her, and
had backed away as he had every other time. Now,
however, she did not feel angry,
nor
relieved. Angry
because he'd failed to give voice to his feelings; re
lieved because it had always produced in her a need to run, to fend him off, embattled as she was with memo
ries of Leonard and their idyll that had died so suddenly. He'd never harmed her, never cheated on her; what they had had simply eroded because they'd no
foundation except short-lived romance. And when Lauren
had been born . . . and had died
...
not even joy or
sorrow could pull them together for more than a moment.

It had been, simply put and simply
meant,
a mistake.

And she didn't want to make that mistake again.

The chair thumped back to the floor and she rose,
grabbed Homer from his perch and wandered into the
workroom, shaking off Greg and the call and a fuzzy
image of Leonard the moment she stepped over the
threshold.

Into a room small and oddly shaped, hooking around
into an el at the back, a narrow windowed space that
could easily have been made into a closet if it hadn't
been for the door leading to never-used back steps. That
part of the room was behind the mirror on the landing, and she knew from a single visit that Mrs. Evans had
turned her identical space into a sewing room filled with
bolts and scraps and the smell of a hundred spools of
thread.

The floor was covered by the cheapest rug she'd been able to find, one that wouldn't mind being layered with
fine dust. The walls were papered in stripes and roses,
the left one partially stripped until she'd given up and left it. Pedestals, workbench, an easel, rolls of canvas
and stretching boards
—this was a haven for comfortable
chaos.
Neither the window in the el nor the one practi
cally jammed against the wall shared with the bathroom
were curtained or shaded, and
the sun just starting its
winter dive to the west filled the room so brightly she
had to squint until she could see.

Greg. She shook her head once and pulled a smock
off a wall peg, shrugged into it and set Homer on a tall barstool, just to the right and behind a matching stool-
and-wide-board that held a fifteen-inch cube of grey-
white marble. Most of it had been chiseled and chipped
to sharp pieces on the floor, leaving behind all of Homer's mirror-twin save its
hindlegs
. Its body was already as detailed as she'd wanted, its face complete but for the eyes and the teeth. Sh
e stood in front of it and stared over at Homer. “
Doesn't have your personality," she said, grinning as she rubbed her palms together for starting. "And if
he doesn't like it, you know
I'm
going to use it to bash
in his head.''

She walked around the stool slowly, a finger reaching out now and then to remind
herself
of a correction, of a
speck in the stone she considered polishing out. Then
she reached for a rag and dusted lightly its cocked head,
looked down at the block where its feet were still
embedded. That first, she decided, and the face last.
Because once the face was done she would want Greg to see it, and she didn't want him spoiling things by
making jokes about her method. It was bad enough he pulled every chestnut from the fire
—
This
looks easy; all
you do is chip away everything that's not what you're
doing;
it would be worse if he didn't appreciate both the
work and the hope behind it.

"And that," she said to Homer, "is why we haven't
been in here for a while. You know, a shrink would love me, he really would. Avoidance-approach, isn't
that what they call it? God, it's been so long, Homer, I
can't even remember."

She leaned closer, blindly reaching out to pick up the
chisel.

"You know, pal, I'm glad you didn't go with me
yesterday. You'd hate the city. Too big, too noisy,
they'd want to run you through a Xerox and stick you in
a Times Square shop window for the tourists or some
thing. Better you should stick to the kitchen, you know?"

She started at the uncompleted block, envisioning the
paws, matching them with Homer's, searching again for
flaws that might crack the entire piece to dust.

Then she blinked and straightened and stared right at
Homer
.

"
What.
. . ?"

The chisel dropped to the floor unnoticed as she
turned and hurried back to the kitchen. Stood in the
doorway and saw
herself
coming in for breakfast.
At
the stove.
At the cupboards.
Pushing Homer aside while
she ate and had her tea.
Pushing Homer aside while she
cleaned up afterward.
Setting Homer on his shelf . . .
setting Homer on his shelf . . .

"No."

She walked around the table, searching the floor, the
counters, even looking down the crack between the
refrigerator and the stove.

"No,
damnit
!"

But yesterday (yesterday, or a hundred years ago?) she had run upstairs with the glove she'd found in the
box, with Homer in her handbag. Homer had gone to
his shelf, and the glove had been tossed onto the table.

Now the glove was gone, and Homer had been moved.

LESS than twenty minutes on her hands and knees in kitchen and bedroom convinced her she'd not find the
glove, and it took far less than a second to dispel any thought that she'd been mistaken. It had been there.
On
the table.
And Homer had been placed on his shelf before she'd left.

Which meant that someone had been in the apartment
while she'd been in New York.

She dropped heavily onto the sofa in the
livingroom
,
hands clasped between her knees as she stared blindly at
the coffee table.
A pile of magazines on the right,
ashtray in the center, a half-read paperback novel on the
left.
She saw none of it. There was only a streak of
enhanced light from the windows
arrowing
across the
dark wood to the filigreed raised edges. It blinded her, but she did not turn away. It shimmered, seeming to drift away, then winked out and back when a large bird passed between it and the sun. She saw none of it.

What she saw instead was a shadow, features and
edges indistinguishable as it slipped through her home
— her
home!
—and made its way into the kitchen where it
picked up the glove and moved the statuette from one place to another. Again and twice more she followed it,
shaking her head in bewilderment because it made no
sense, no sense at all. There was no question, of course,
but that it had to have been Oliver. Without a single bit
of his trappings he was more like a child than a twenty-one-year-old student flirting with manhood. She recalled
a day last spring when he'd come to class without his
Stetson, trembling like an addict without his drug. Some
one on the quad had snatched it on the run, and it
wasn't until Ben had tracked the prankster down and
retrieved it that Oliver had been able to think straight,
to work. Pat hadn't quite understood it then, and she
did not understand it now. He was much too old to rely
on such charms, certainly too old to continue retreating
into a romanticized era where his own ungainly size
would have been a symbol for strength, not ridicule. He
was much too old, and yet obviously not old enough.

Her hands slapped her thighs and she rose, hesitant
until she saw his
trapising
through what was hers,
without her permission, breaking in like a common
criminal for a lousy
goddam
glove.

She called Harriet, learned the two boys were with her, and instructed the three of them to remain where they were until she arrived. Her coat fought with her,
her hands fumbled through the pockets until she remem
bered the wind had taken her cap that night. Well, she thought as she stomped angrily down the stairs, at least
I'm not calling it a monster anymore.

Across the street and up the block to High, over to Fox Road and she stood in front of a Victorian much
like her own on a much smaller scale. Evergreen shrubs
lined the porch that ringed the house, and the pines in
the front yard were a good thirty feet over the roof.
Harriet was standing at the front door, waiting, smiling
anxiously and rubbing her hands together against the
chill.

"Hey, Doc," she said as Pat took the steps. "We're
—"

Pat brushed past her and turned right into the parlor,
a room turned into a tropical forest by hanging ferns
and potted rubber plants, the greens of the carpet and
furniture, the tinted shades that as far as she knew had
never been lifted. The house was warm, too warm for
her taste, and she had her coat unbuttoned before she'd
stopped walking.

Harriet hovered at her side, confused, her left hand
pulling at the buttons of her plaid shirt, then dropping to
rub against the snug fit of her jeans. Ben was sitting in
a large wing-back in front of the
farside
windows, his
legs crossed, a glass of dark liquid in his hand. He
smiled, though a glance to Harriet asked the obvious
question. Oliver was by the fireplace.
Cowboy shirt,
jeans, black boots, and his gloves poking from his right
hip pocket.

"Hi, Doc," Ben said, shifting as though to rise.
"You weren't in class yesterday. You're not sick, are
you?"

"No," she said. She stared at
Fallchurch
.

Oliver tried and failed to meet her gaze, half-turned
to poke a pointed toe at an andiron.

"
Oliver,
how could you," she said quietly. "How could you do it?"

Harriet moved past her to sit on the couch, straggles of hair slipping over her eyes. She licked at her lips,
looked to Ben, who shrugged and sat back, sipping at
his drink.

"Oliver."

"I'm sorry, Doc." The voice was much smaller than
the body from which it issued, just barely under control
and its sentiment totally false.

"If you're sorry, why did you do it in the first place? Why couldn't you have waited? Is it that damned important? I mean really, Oliver, is it that so goddamned
important?"

Harriet gasped, and Pat glared at her, wondering if she had been there, too.

"Yes," Oliver said then, stronger, jamming his hands
into his pockets and leaning his shoulder against the
mantel. "Yes, it is that important. And if you don't mind me saying so, Doc, it seems to me you should have known it."

Unbelievable; it was absolutely unbelievable. And in
catching the look that passed between Ben and the girl
it was evident they were on Oliver's side, condoning
the break-in in spite of the trivial reason.

"I'm sorry," she said coldly, "but I fail to understand how
—"

"Aw, shit, Doc," Ben said in disgust, thumping his
glass down on the floor beside his chair. "Jesus Christ,
you know damned well how we feel about this.
Unless
you're so wrapped up in your new department that you
don't notice us anymore."

"We?" she said, ignoring the jibe.
"We?"
She looked
to Harriet, back to Ben and lifted a hand. "What . . . what do you two have to do with
—
"

"I told you," Oliver said. "Didn't I tell you she didn't care? Didn't I tell you, huh? She can't even see
us anymore. We're just faces now, just like the rest of
her students. Hell, I told you."

Pat put a hand to her forehead, the other gesturing for
silence just as Ben started to speak. "Wait a minute," she said. Her eyes closed briefly, opened, looked at each of them in turn. "Wait a
minute,
just wait one
little minute here. Why do I get the sudden feeling none
of us know what we're talking about?"

"The call," Oliver said, almost sneering.
"As if you
didn't know."
He moved off the hearth and stood in
front of Harriet. "You couldn't wait to tell her, right?"
Harriet denied it with a shake of her head.
"Couldn't wait.
Soon as I hung up you called her, right? Before
we got here, and now . .
."He
waved a disgusted hand
toward Pat.

"What call?" Pat said.

Oliver opened his mouth, closed it, a fish gulping air.
"The . . . call."

"Oliver, I don't know anything about any call. I was
talking about your glove."

He slapped quickly at his pocket, pulled out his
gloves and held them toward her. His bewilderment was
comical as he showed them to his friends, and Pat took
the moment to sag into an armchair that faced the front
windows. She folded her hands loosely over her stom
ach and crossed her legs. Behind her, a fern tickled the
back of her neck.

"You don't know about the call," Ben said.

Pat shook her head. "But as long as you're all talking about it and getting angry at me for it, you might as well tell me what it's all about, don't you think?"

"Oh . . . shit," Oliver said, his shoulders sagging as
he skirted the coffee table and dropped to the cushion
beside Harriet.

"Never mind," Pat said wearily. Her head tilted
back until it rested against the chair and she was look
ing at the plaster ceiling. "I think I can guess."

"It's not that we doubted you," Ben began; but
when she looked at him without moving her head he cut
himself off and glared at his knees.

"But you do," she said quietly, knowing she sounded
like a teacher about to scold, knowing how she sounded
and not caring at all. "You doubted
—and maybe you still do doubt my intentions—so one of you—Oliver,
I'd say—called Mr. Curtis at the Spartan Gallery either
yesterday or today. I imagine you thought your earnest
ness would goad him into a decision in your favor. Knowing Curtis as I do, though, he was probably very
polite and gently enthusiastic and told you he would let
you know his decision before very long. Then, as an afterthought, he suggested you get in touch with me and
have me call him at my earliest convenience.
Preferably
on Monday, if it would be all right with me."

"Christ," Ben muttered, "you must have been stand
ing right next to him."

Pat couldn't answer for a moment. She searched the
ceiling and the hearth for strength, lowered her gaze to
Harriet and asked her with a look why she had allowed
Fallchurch
to make such an ass of himself. Harriet,
however, did not hear her; she had taken Oliver's hand and was patting it maternally. God save me,
she thought, and reined in the anger that was too close
to explosion.

"You may have blown it, you know," she said,
looking down to her hands. "Curtis does not take pres
sure well. He doesn't take it at all."

"I didn't threaten him or anything," Oliver said sullenly. "I was polite."

"That and fifty cents will get you a cup of coffee in
the luncheonette," she told him.

"Great," he said. "I can't drink the damned stuff."

There was a pause during which Pat considered scream
ing and wringing the boy's neck; the contemplation
wrested from
Her
when Ben began to laugh.
A nervous,
high-pitched laugh that infected his friends and caused
her to smile.
Incorrigible, she decided as she covered her mouth with a palm. I don't know why I bother to put up with them.

She waited until they were done, then pushed
herself
out of the chair and bunched her hands in her coat pockets. "Now listen to me, you three," she
said,
her
stern tone only half mocking. "I can honest to god
understand your impatience. I'm not that old that I don't remember, as someone reminded me only a couple of days ago. But you really are going to have to
trust me. God knows what Curtis will do now, but I'll
call him first thing Monday and mend any fences that
might have been knocked down. Meanwhile, keep your
minds on your work, okay? Leave the arrangements to
me.
All right?
All right."

She left with an upward jerk of her head and walked slowly back home, enjoying the sharply fresh air and thinking of the harsh city odors she'd once thought were so wonderful, until she'd had something much better for
contrast.

With her head down and taking short, less purposeful strides, it took her nearly five minutes before she was at the front walk, watching as
Linc
Goldsmith used a
short-handled broom to knock snow off the porch rail
ing. "Beautiful day," she said brightly as she headed for the door.

"Some say," Goldsmith muttered. He was bundled
in a faded hunting jacket and heavy corduroy trousers, a pumpkin-covered hat jammed down over his head, ear-
flaps untied and angled out from the sides. His long bony face was pinched red from the cold, his hawk's
nose threatening to stab into a thick upper lip.

"Why, Mr. Goldsmith," she admonished. Futile,
she knew, but she felt too good to resist. "I mean, how
can you
say that when the snow had stopped, the birds are out, the children are playing . . . it's almost like
Christmas, wouldn't you say?
A brisk walk for the blood, a cup of hot soup."