[Oxrun Station] The Bloodwind (4 page)

She stared at the trees, at the snow, at the distant road. A long time she'd been looking at that view; and 
a corner of her mouth twitched in a half-smile. Thirteen
 years, if you count the two 
sabbaticals,
 and the half-
year she saw nothing but the funeral of her child.

Married at twenty-two, divorced at twenty-seven, be
reaved at thirty-one. 
A hell of a progression.

"Knock, knock."

'Who's there?" she said without turning to the door, refusing to acknowledge the startled jump of her pulse.

"It's not a joke, Pat. I'm just too lazy to lift my precious hand."

Greg was tall without slouching, his hair an unkempt
 
thicket of premature grey that somehow managed to add
 
youth to a face smooth and slightly flushed. Underneath
 
an open, paint-soiled smock he wore a blue-splattered
 
shirt, grey trousers and wide brown belt, and cordovan
 
shoes that should have been discarded the first time a
 
brush had dripped across their laces. He was smiling
 
anxiously, and she waved him in, pointed to the coffee
 
he poured for them both.

"This is rotten," he said, 
grimacing
 his first sip. 
"You ready?" He took the bandy-legged wooden chair
 she kept by the door.

"Nope."
 
She tasted the coffee, spat and put it down.

"Good. We should do well, don't you think?"

She swiveled round to face him, delighting in the imp
 
that seldom strayed from his eyes. "I had an accident last night."

He frowned. "You didn't say anything when
—"

"I didn't know." She told him about the dent, though
 
she still didn't tell him about how she had been followed.
 
No longer convinced of it herself now, she decided she
 
didn't need one of Greg's patient lectures. "I swear to
 
you, two drinks at dinner and no more, ever again."

"Wow," he said softly, and shook his head slowly.
 
"You're all right, though?"

"Sure." Her smile was cock-eyed. "As well as can 
be expected, given the day." She pulled open the center
 
drawer and took out a pencil, tapped it once on her knee
 
and rolled it between her fingers. "I'll tell you, Greg, I
 don't mind admitting this is driving me nuts. I mean, the whole tiling is making me absolutely paranoid." 
She caught herself, and waved away the question that
 came to Greg's expression. "I just don't understand why Constable has to wait. Why can't we have the meeting now and get it over with, huh?"

"Because he thought you'd shove one of your kids 
into one of your sculptures, 
that's
 why. Like Vincent
 Price in 
The House of Wax,
 and all that."

Her throat constricted. "You think they turned us
 
down?"

He shrugged. "I don't know, Pat. I honestly don't
 
know."

She chewed absently on the eraser. "I think he hates
 
me. Ford, that is. Constable doesn't care one way or the
 
other."

"No," Greg said, stretching his legs and crossing 
them at the ankles. His voice was naturally low, a
 
rough-edged complement to her own deep timbre. "Ac
tually, if the truth be known, you scare him."

"Me?"

"Now, Patrice," he said, cautioning against lying to
 
someone who knew her better. "Come on, come on."

"No, I can't buy it, Greg. What he's afraid of is the
 
expense. Setting us up in a separate department will 
mean hiring at least two more full-time people, giving
 you and me at least promotions, and
—"

"All right," he conceded, "that's part of it too.
 
But 
you know damned well that isn't all of it, not by a long
 shot."

She looked at him thoughtfully. He'd joined the faculty only four years ago, a multi-degreed artist who'd
 
grown weary of the games he'd had to play with the larger galleries. It wasn't sour grapes because of no 
talent; he just didn't have the stomach for the competi
tion he had to face. At first, Pat had thought him a 
quitter and had been scornful for retreating into teach
ing; then she realized there was something else, some
thing that had unnerved him and made him leery of going
 
on. She still didn't know what it was, but she knew he
 would tell her sooner or later. It was in the way he 
would look at her when he thought she wasn't watch
ing; in the way
 ... 
in his way of building a friendship
 
between them so he could begin the unburdening.

She was patient. She could wait.

Meanwhile, a second look showed her hints of exhaustion tightening the folds around his eyes. When she
 
lifted an eyebrow in silent query, he shrugged and drained his cup. "No sleep."

"You were drunk," she accused lightly.

"I was passed out," he admitted with a rueful laugh.
 
"I don't know how the hell I got home, believe me, 
and I kept waking up every hour or two. The damned
 
tree outside my window kept hitting the pane. I almost
 went out and cut the thing down."

"That would be just like you," she said. "Get straight
 
to the root of the problem."

He glared. "That's terrible. You 
oughta
 be shot." 
Then he blew her a halfhearted kiss and left, wasn't ten
 feet down the corridor before a pair of young women 
fell in beside him, laughing instantly at something he
 
said, gesturing as if they had a mobile canvas retreating
 before them.

Pat watched until the doorframe cut them off. And
 
wondered how many of those girls Greg had taken into
 
his bed.

"Oh, nasty," she scolded. Her right hand brushed 
over an end of the collar tie, tugged at it lightly before
 she closed her eyes tightly, 
snapped
 them open. A 
groan at feigned aches in the small of her back and she
 
stood, stepping around the desk to fetch her books from
 
their shelf. 
A finger to her chin, scratching.
 Thinking
 
about Greg, the younger women who constantly sur
rounded him . . .

. . . 
and
 someone was watching her.

She tensed, her shoulders pulling back as if expecting
 
a blow. Slowly, all the while telling herself she was 
being paranoid again, she turned to face the door. Two
 
young men were standing on the threshold.

Her smile was as relieved as it was warm. "Yes," 
she told them before they could ask. "I made the call
 yesterday."

Oliver 
Fallchurch
—blond curls, pudgy, a half-grown
 
beard—clapped his hands once; Ben Williams—lean and
 
dark-haired, his left sleeve pinned up at the elbow— only nodded. Suddenly they were shoved aside and 
Harriet Trotter nearly spilled into the office. Her face
 
was flushed in embarrassment, her freckles so thickly
 
sprayed they made her otherwise pleasant face seem
 mottled and scarred.

"Some 
sonofabitch
 goosed me," she complained in a
 
high-pitched, too-young voice.

Oliver shrugged disinterest, and Ben lifted the stump
 
of his arm as evidence of innocence.

"The three of you ought to be locked up, you know
 
that," Pat said. The boys stepped aside as she left, 
flanked her in the corridor with Harriet scrambling behind. "I spoke to the gallery yesterday, as I promised,
 and everything seems to be going well. Spartan is a 
good place, fair, and the pictures of your work seem to
 have pleased them."

"Then the show isn't really set," Oliver said glumly.
 
He wore what Pat had come to think of as his only set
 
of clothes: a blue-and-pearl-button cowboy shirt, jeans
 
too snug for the breadth of his rump, and black boots
 
with pointed toes. "I knew it. I knew it was too good to
 
be true." The accusation was evident: 
you didn't try hard enough, Doc.

"For god's sake, Ollie, she didn't say that," Ben said.

"Yes, I did," she corrected, averting her gaze from 
the pain in his face. Someone, she thought then, ought to teach him how to shave; the sight of all those nicks
 and scabs always made her queasy. "It isn't set, not 
yet. But I have an appointment with Mr. Curtis in two
 
weeks, so I'll bring him a few of the pieces and let him
 see them firsthand." When Ben groaned his disgust, 
she slowed and punched at his arm, not entirely in jest.
 "Look, I've told you a hundred times, when a gallery 
like the Spartan shows this kind of interest, it's only a
 
matter of time. To be honest, I'm aiming for June. A
 
pretty fair graduation gift for the three of you, don't you
 think?"

"Only if someone buys something," Harriet said behind her.

Pat turned, frowning. Normally, the redhead was
 
overenthusiastic, if anything. Today, however, there 
were shadows under her eyes and a tremor at her lips,
 
and her arms had folded a large notebook against her
 shirt-straining chest.

"Oh, don't mind her," Oliver said. "She claims a
 
hurricane almost took off her roof last night."

Pat stopped abruptly, and Harriet had to sidestep to
 
avoid a collision. "What?"

"Well, it's true," the girl insisted, her glare defiant 
as the others moved on. "I couldn't sleep, you know? I
 
went down for something to drink, down in the kitchen,
 
and I heard something outside. I thought it was a cat at
 
the garbage can, so I turned on the light and
 ..." 
She
 took a deep breath, suddenly wary. "At least I thought it was a tornado. Not a hurricane, a tornado. It was right there in the middle of the back yard.''

"A dream," Pat said, turning quickly and walking.

"I was awake, Doc!"

"Something 
like
 a dust devil, then."

"Huh?"

She smiled. "For heaven's sake, Harriet, you've seen
 
them before. It happens all the time. A freak wind current, that's all."

"Yeah," the girl said, obviously unconvinced. She muttered harshly under her breath and 
strolled
 ahead,
 
leaving Pat alone in the corridor, sweeping around the
 
back of the auditorium toward her studio. She tried not
 
to think. In spite of philosophers and psychologists 
there was still such a thing as coincidence in this world, and the dust devil, snow devil, whatever the hell it was,
 
could easily have spun its way into her own path last
 night before dissipating in the snowfall; Harriet, after 
all, only lived one block over. It was her own drunken
ness that had exaggerated what she'd seen, just as 
half-sleep and shadows had done it for the girl.

But she wondered if Harriet had heard the throaty
 
grumbling.

PAT slowed the station wagon when her stomach
threatened to disgorge the lunch she'd taken quickly in
the Union cafeteria. Her tongue touched at her lips
nervously and her eyes began a rapid blinking. She
swallowed- She gulped for air. She guided the car to the
curb and rested her head against the steering wheel's
rim. Alongside her, in the park, she could hear the faint shrills of children skating on the L-shaped pond.
And she wept.

A small rowboat in the bay off Bristol.

A smaller child determined to prove her mother really
didn't know what a fine sailor she was.

Dark water.
Dark wind.

Pat stood at the stone embankment and watched as a
young man scrambled into a sailboat, a frail thing, a
tiny thing, and breasted the swells. She might have
screamed, she might have been shouting, all she could
think of was Lauren and the spanking the child would
get for frightening her so.

The young man
—
Paul? Andrew?
—
cupped his hands
around his mouth and called for Lauren. The girl turned,
the girl waved, the girl stood in the center of the small
rowboat in the dark water and faced the dark wind,
hands on her hips proudly.
Black hair.
Black eyes.
Summers with her mother, the school term with her father in San Diego.

She was eight years old when the first wave unbal
anced her, eight years old when the second capsized the
boat.

She was eight years old when, two hours later, her
body washed ashore, and it took almost a full day
before Pat understood Lauren wasn't pretending.

Too much.
It was really too damned much. What on
earth did they expect of her, all those people clamoring for her attention, all those eyes glued on the clock, all
those hands touching the stone and trying in vain to turn
it to art?
And watching.
Always watching her every
move, hoping that by examining the crook of her hand,
the grip on the mallet, the cock of her head, they would
know how she did it and be able to do the same. They would know, so they watched.
Watching.
Every minute
of every class until she'd dismissed them early and ran
out of the building. Into the Union where she'd taken a
table at the loneliest corner. No one sat with her, but
she knew they were watching.
Whispering.
Knowing
what she had faced already today, knowing what the
dean had in store for her later. They knew, and they
watched, and before she had done she could no longer
taste whatever spread across her tray.

She had driven less than a mile down Chancellor
Avenue toward the village when she realized she was
being followed. Yet there was nothing substantial to
prove her suspicions. Hers was the only car on the road,
there was no one standing just back of the trees, there
was no one ahead, waiting in the road.

Following.
Closer.
Close enough to touch.

As the young boy had been
—Paul?
Andrew?—when
he'd reached out for Lauren and the boat had gone over.
He'd panicked, lost control, and the moments wasted
before he'd stripped off his clothes and leapt into the
bay were the moments it took for Lauren to drown.

Close enough to touch, while Pat had stood gripping
the stone wall and screaming until she tasted blood in
her mouth.

She swallowed hard and straightened, swiping the
tears from her cheeks with the trembling backs of both
hands.
One.
The other.
Diving into her handbag to root out a tissue.
Daubing.
Blowing her nose.
Scanning the
road in both directions, trying to discover who it was
who followed.

My god, she thought; my god, my god.

She coughed, and hiccoughed. She blew her nose
again and tossed the tissue out the window. It would be
just her luck now to have Fred Borg come by in his
patrol car and give her a ticket for littering; or worse,
Chief Stockton and his granite voice, granite face, lean
ing in the window with a laconic Down East lecture.

Then she grabbed hold of the wheel at nine and three
and pushed until her elbows had locked. Fool, she told
herself then; you're a half-baked fool and you're going
to blow it all if you don't stop feeling so sorry for
yourself. But it had all come down on her so suddenly,
and with such intensity, that she really didn't blame
herself for wanting to flee. On the very day the class
decided it was going to spy on her, on the day Harriet
told her about the tornado, on the day Constable would
tell her volumes about her future, on this day Lauren
would have been sixteen.

Her wrists began to throb.

And the longer she sat there punishing herself the
more she understood she was using the girl's birthday
only as an excuse. She was preparing herself for failure,
reeling in snippets of blame and tying knots she could point to as stumbling blocks unforeseen. It was natural,
it was not extraordinary, and if she didn't get moving
she was going to be late for her afternoon seminar.

It was only a matter of minutes, then, before she had parked in front of the house and was up the stairs to her
apartment. The idea had been ridiculous from its in
ception just before noon, but the longer she scoffed at it the more she couldn't shake it loose. And when she had
fled the cafeteria it was the first thing she had thought
of to give her flight direction.

Homer snarled on his kitchen perch.

Pat grinned at him and ran a thumb along teeth she
had made quite deliberately sharp.

"You," she told him, "are coming with me. If you
don't bring me luck, I'll use you to bash Constable's
skull."

She jammed the statuette into her handbag and took
the stairs down two at a time. Laughing to
herself
.
At
herself.
Depression and gloom lifting when she burst
onto the porch and saw Kelly angrily kicking a flat tire
at the rear of her car.

"That's not the way to do it, my dear," Pat called
out, unable to keep a grin out of her voice. Kelly was,
like her roommate Abbey, prone to hysterics over me
chanical failures, gnats, and boy friends who didn't
show up precisely on time. The younger woman claimed
it was her Latin background, though Pat could not
imagine anyone
more blond
, more fair-skinned, more
schoolgirlish
than Kelly.

"Oh, Pat!" she wailed, racing to the steps with her
mittened
hands clasped to her chest. "Pat, if I don't get
back to the bank on time today I'm going to lose my job."

"So change the tire. Surely you know how to do that."

"The spare's gone flat."

Pat searched for sympathy, could find only the toler
ance of a mother toward a scatterbrained child. She shook her head slowly and descended to the walk, slipped an arm around the woman's waist and turned her back toward the street. "Listen," she said, lower
ing her head, "if you swear to me on whatever it is you
hold sacred that you'll have someone from King's get a
tow truck over here to take care of whatever needs taking care of, I'll let you drive me back to
—"

"Oh my god," Kelly said in relief, and hugged Pat
tightly, the beret-capped head barely reaching her shoul
der, "you've saved my life."

"Just be careful," Pat told her sternly as she took the
passenger seat and handed Kelly the keys. "This thing may be new, but it's got personality. It doesn't like
maltreatment.''

Kelly, however, was beyond listening. She jerked the
bench seat up as far as it would go, virtually rested her chin on the rim of the wheel as she charged away from
the curb. Pat closed her eyes and mumbled a brief prayer, opened them when they pulled into King's a
few minutes later and listened as Kelly charmed the mechanic on duty into heading over to Northland in
stantly, if not sooner. Then they were out on Chancellor
and speeding east toward the school.

"I haven't seen Abbey in a while," Pat said, trying
to give her mind something else to think about besides
the driving. "Is she all right?"

"Oh, you know how it is," Kelly said, a practiced twist of her right hand flipping her air-fine hair back over her shoulder. "She thinks she's in love with this
guy from Hartford.
Insurance, yet, if you can believe it.
She spent the weekend with him up at Stowe, and now
she's trying to decide if she's going to marry him."

"She certainly works fast."

"She thinks that about every man she meets, al
most," Kelly said sourly. "And every time it happens I
have to bail her out. It gets pretty tiring after a while,
you know what I mean? I mean, she's like a kid, for god's sake."

Pat's nod was carefully neutral, remembering as she
did the intense infatuation the woman had with Greg
Billings only last summer. Greg had taken her out a few
times, and each evening Kelly (or so she claimed) had been kept up until dawn with a blow-by-blow descrip
tion of every move Greg had made, every word he had
said. Pat, too, had grown weary of the affair by the time it had ended, and angry with herself for even
hinting at the notion she might be jealous.

"So how are the Musketeers?" Kelly asked.

Pat grabbed the edge of the seat when the station
wagon hit a small patch of ice and its tail swerved
alarmingly.

"Coming along," she answered when her voice returned.

"Nice people."

"Sure are.
A little frustrating, though."

Kelly laughed. "I can imagine.
Y'know
that cowboy
one, Oliver?
I think he has the
hots
for Abbey."

"Like hell."

Kelly looked at her, surprised.
"Hey, no kidding!
Whenever you're not around that pickup of his is always at the curb. In fact, he even tried to take her to work a few times."

A pause.
"Well, did he?"

"I don't know," she said, shrugging. "I'm not her jailer, you know."

Another moment's silence, another patch of ice.

"Handles nice," Kelly said approvingly.

"Yes."

"Guess she was drunk or something."

"What?
Who?"

Kelly glanced over, back to the road.
"Oh, sorry.
Thinking out loud, I guess.
About that accident last night."

Pat squirmed into the corner, as much to look at
Kelly more easily as to avoid watching the road speed
ing dangerously at her. "What accident?"

"Honestly, Pat," Kelly said with a tolerant grin.
"Don't you ever listen to the radio up there? For heav
en's sake, how do you know what's going on in the
world?" She shook her head slowly. "Well, last night,
out on Mainland, some girl wrapped herself around a
telephone pole." Her voice lowered in a parody of
mystery.
"In a little car just like this, in fact.
At least,
that's what I gathered from the report I heard. Right
smacko
into a pole, killed her right away. The way I figure it, she was over to Harley and fell asleep or
something, see. The guy on the radio said it happened
just after midnight." She gave an exaggerated shudder.
"It was dumb, you know. I mean, who goes out drink
ing on a Wednesday night, anyway?
In the middle of the week.
Stupid.
Poor kid."

Pat looked away, distantly sorry for the accident
victim and feeling her own mortality much closer to
home.
She sniffed, felt herself relax somewhat as Kelly
slowed to take the college entrance.

"
Kelly,
did you . . . that is, I was going to stop by this morning on the way out to work, but I guess you
and Abbey had already gone. I, uh, wanted to apologize
for last night. I mean, for the noise I must have made
coming home."