Snowbound (17 page)

At four o’clock Hughes stopped trying to find things to do to occupy himself, left Maude to close up, and drove home through the same light, steady snow which had fallen all day. When he entered the house, it seemed filled with a tangible emptiness, and he knew immediately that Rebecca was not there. Gone into the village, he thought; probably to visit with Ann Tribucci. He listened to the empty silence and felt his depression deeper. In the kitchen he made a light scotch and water and took it into his study and sat tipped back in his leather recliner, sipping the drink and brooding.

And after a time he began to think about Peggy again, about Tuesday night in the Whitewater motel room. His scrotum tightened painfully, and sitting there, he had a full and pulsing erection: the primitive in him screaming for her—now, today, tonight. But there was no way, not until the pass was cleared. Too dangerous for them to meet in Hidden Valley and no place to meet even if they dared to risk it. She couldn’t come here to his house, and he couldn’t go to hers, and the Mercantile was no good because of its central village location. No other place—

Mule Deer Lake, he thought suddenly. The Taggart cabin.

Hughes leaned forward in the recliner, pulling it into its upright position. The Taggart cabin. Yes—and it wasn’t all that dangerous if they were very, very careful. But did they dare? Would Peggy be willing? Some of the depression had evaporated now, and an almost boyish recklessness throbbed inside him. They could get away with it, and he needed her, he
needed
her. Call Peggy, call her right now, take the chance....

Impulsively he stood up and started across the study to the extension phone on his old rolltop desk. And stopped halfway there, touched by abrupt fear. No; it was utter foolishness. They could be seen, they could be recognized, and what then? The affair would become public knowledge, and Rebecca would leave him for certain then; she would have no alternative. Public disgrace, his position in the valley irreparably damaged—he could lose everything that mattered in his life. Besides, it would only be another few days until the pass was open again. They could resume their Whitewater meetings in a week or so, perhaps next Friday or Saturday night. He could wait that long, couldn’t he?

He felt the burning, demanding ache in his genitals and was not sure that he could.

Rebecca, he thought with a kind of desperation, if only I could make love to Rebecca tonight. It would solve both his immediate problems; it would make things all right again. But the savagery of his need made it impossible; it was Peggy his body craved, Peggy, Peggy, and he would be completely and unquestionably impotent if he—

Impotent.

Impotence!

That
was the answer to his marital dilemma; it had been the answer all along. Of course: impotence, it was so obvious he had never even thought of it before. All he had to do was to tell Rebecca that certainly he wanted to make love to her, but that it was; at the moment, physically impracticable—he had for some time been suffering from sexual incapacity. He had wanted to tell her long before now, he would say, but had been too ashamed to admit it; he was seeing a doctor in Soda Grove, taking hormone treatments to rectify the problem—although to date they had been frustratingly ineffective. She would believe him; there was no reason why she shouldn’t believe him. She would be sympathetic and understanding, and there would be no more outbursts, no more periods of uncomfortable silence between them. Then, when the affair with Peggy came to its inevitable conclusion in another few weeks and he was once again able to bring himself to make love to his wife, he would tell Rebecca that the treatments had finally produced positive results. It would be just as simple as that.

Hughes felt immediate relief—one problem taken care of, he was sure of it—but the mitigation was tempered by his urgent desire for Peggy. He thought again of the Taggart cabin, of how easy it would be for them to use it as a meeting place. Nothing
could
go wrong, nothing would go wrong; the gamble was no greater than any of the others he had taken during the past seven years, and in that time no one in Hidden Valley had suspected a thing, they would have no reason to suspect anything now. A cautious hour or two, that was all, and just tonight, never again in the valley. After tonight he would be able to wait until next Friday with no difficulty at all. If he went through with it, there would be no more immediate quandaries with his personal life; he could have Rebecca and Peggy and the status quo, all his again and all tonight.

The recklessness, the excitement swept through him again. Rationalization and his hungry loins had decided the argument: he knew he was going to call Peggy and make the suggestion to her. Quickly, he went to the extension phone—and from there he could look through the study window at the darkened, restlessly clouded sky. It would keep on snowing for some time yet, the night would be very dark. Very dark. He caught up the receiver and then hesitated. What if her mother answered? Disguise his voice, that was it; put his handkerchief over the mouthpiece. He fumbled the folded square of cambric from his back pocket and draped it around the handset, at once realizing that he was being melodramatic and taking a kind of adventurous ebullience in the fact. Then he flipped open the county directory and found the Tylers’ number and dialed it rapidly.

Peggy’s voice said, “Hello?” on the sixth ring.

Hughes pulled the handkerchief away, releasing the breath he had been holding. “Peggy?”

Pause. “Matt, is that you?”

“Yes. You can talk all right?”

“My mother is over at the Chiltons. But you took a chance, calling like this.”

“I know. I had to talk to you.”

“That damned slide,” she said. “It’s going to be such a miserably long time until we can be together again.”

“It doesn’t have to be,” Hughes said fervently. “Peggy, listen, I’ve just thought of something—a way and a place we can meet.”

“You mean
here
, in the valley?”

“Yes. Tonight. I’ve thought it out, and it’s safe as long as we’re careful. Do you want to do it?”

“I don’t know, Matt. . . .”

“Peggy, I keep thinking about you, I can’t get you out of my mind. I have to see you. Please, Peggy.”

Pause. “Tell me your idea.”

“The Taggart cabin at Mule Deer Lake,” Hughes said. “The first one on the eastern shore, the one that sits by itself at the edge of the lake. Well, I’ve got the keys to it; the Taggarts always leave them with me when they go back to Red Bluff in the fall. We can spend a couple of hours there early tonight, say seven o’clock. And we won’t turn on any lights, so that if somebody does pass the cabin, they won’t know anybody is inside.”

“We couldn’t take both our cars.”

“No, just mine. You can walk to the stand of trees where Sierra Street forks into the two lake roads, going along the west slope where nobody would see you. I’ll pick you up there.”

“What if somebody notices your car at the cabin or sees it drive up? The Markhams and the Donnellys live on the eastern shore of the lake.”

“Their homes are both well down the shore. It’ll be dark at the lake—no moon; the snowing will keep visibility down —and we’ll drive to and from the cabin with the headlights off. Somebody would have to be outside and peering along the road in order to see us, and that’s hardly likely. The only other occupied place at the lake is the cabin where those two San Francisco businessmen are staying, and it’s sheltered from the road by trees. As far as the car goes, I’ll park it in the Taggarts’ garage; the entrance is open and faces away from the road, and you can’t see into it from there.”

“Somebody could still notice you leaving the village or returning,” Peggy said. “They’d wonder about it.”

“If I’m ever asked, I’ll say I decided to go for a short drive, just to get some air, and stopped for a while and walked around. That’s why we’ll meet so early—for that reason, and because of my wife and your mother too. Nobody would question an explanation like that; why should they? It’ll look like I’m alone in the car anyway, since you’ll be scooted down on the seat. Peggy, I’m desperate to see you, and I’ll take the gamble if you will. We’ll be very careful; nothing can happen if we’re careful.”

There was a prolonged silence this time, and Hughes said her name questioningly. Peggy said then, “I really don’t think we ought to chance it, but I’m desperate to see you, too. And terribly horny. Are you terribly horny, Matt?”

Hughes had an erection again. “Yes!”

“Then—all right. You’ll pick me up at the fork at seven?”

“At seven. I don’t want to have to stop but a second, so hurry as fast as you can when you see the car.”

“I will.”

They said good-byes, and Hughes cradled the handset. He was sweating. He crossed to the lamp table beside his recliner, lifted his drink, drained it, and then looked at his watch: five forty-five. Leaving the study, he went upstairs and took a shower and doused himself liberally with body talc and changed into fresh clothes; came downstairs again and ate a light supper. The kitchen wall clock told him it was six forty when he had finished—time to leave. He would have to stop at the Mercantile to pick up the keys to the Taggart cabin.

Rebecca had still not come home, and he was relieved that she hadn’t. He did not want to face her now, with his thoughts and his emotions focused on Peggy Tyler’s lush sexuality. She would be home when he got back from the lake at nine or so, and he would tell her then of his contrived impotence. In just a few short hours, he thought as he hurried out of the house, everything would again be exactly as it had always been.

Compulsively, Cain put on his coat at six fifty and went out of the cabin and started down into the village.

He walked at a desultory pace, only superficially aware of the cold night and the snow-hazed lights below. His destination was the Valley Inn, and his purpose was to buy himself another bottle of bourbon—he kept telling himself that this was his purpose. There was an unopened quart in the cabin’s kitchen that he had purchased in the Mercantile that morning—enough to last him through the long Sunday ahead—but the desolation in him had become so acute the ache was almost physical.

The past two days had been interminable. After returning from the village Wednesday afternoon, where he had learned with indifference of the avalanche and the fact that the valley was snowbound until after Christmas, he had been completely exhausted. Sleep came immediately that night; but it had been restless and shallow, and he had awakened from it gritty-eyed and stiff-muscled and despondent. He’d thought again of Frank McNeil’s accusations, and the threat of arrest for something he had not done, and the imminent arrival of probing county police. All right then, he’d decided, let them come and let them ask their questions, and when the episode was concluded, he damned well
would
get out of this Hidden Valley where people persisted in pushing their way into his privacy; he would go somewhere else, he would find a place where the people would leave him utterly alone.

Then he’d thought: But
was
there such a place? Was there anywhere in the world where people would leave you utterly alone? Or would it always be as it had become here: intrusions, invasions, interference? And would. the loneliness, the ambivalence continue to plague him wherever he went? It had seemed so simple in the beginning: just go to a small mountain village where no one knew you and no one cared to know you, and live apart, and die by degrees. For six months he had managed to do that, but now it had all started to collapse; it was no longer simple at all.

And tonight, he was going to the inn to buy a bottle he did not need, because he might need it and because it was Saturday night and he was desperately lonely for companionship that he wanted but did not want.

When he reached Sierra Street, he crossed directly toward the inn. Two and a half stories high, and a full block wide, it was the largest building in Hidden Valley. It had a double-balconied, redwood-shingled façade designed to give the impression of comfortable rusticity—alight now with its Christmas decorations—and two separate entrances: one to the small lobby and one to the restaurant-and-lounge that constituted most of its interior at street level. The upper floors were divided into eleven rooms, including the large apartment in which the Hallidays lived.

Cain hesitated in front of the restaurant-and-lounge entrance. Light glowed behind a large frosted window, and there was the sound of soft music and muted conversation from within. Apprehension fluttered in his stomach, but he went woodenly to the door and opened it and stepped inside.

The interior had a low, beamed ceiling and was bisected by square redwood supports. Waist-high partitions, topped with planter boxes of wood ferns, had been erected between the posts. The restaurant area to the right was empty and dark, chairs stacked on tables, closed for the winter season. Only the lounge on the left side was open, dimly lit by two electrically wired wagonwheel chandeliers suspended from the rafters. Eight booths with high, varnished wood backs were set along the partitions; dark leather stools flanked a leather-fronted bar against the far left wall. The rear wall and part of that behind the bar were adorned with deer antlers and glass-eyed deer heads; a glass-fronted case containing two matching and ornate shotguns, replete with boxes of shells; fishing creels and rods and corkboard displays of colored trout flies. Some fifteen people occupied the lounge, most of those in the booths. Only one man—Joe Garvey—sat at the bar, at the upper end, talking with Walt Halliday.