The Night Awakens: A Mystery Writers of America Anthology - Couverture souple

The Perils of Pond Scum

Two minutes after it happened, I wasn't sure it had. I could see the glass on the door from the broken picture, I could feel the throb in the back of my head where it had snapped into the wall, but I could also see and feel Jeffrey, his face contorted with shock, his hand trembling as it touched my face.

"My God, Hannah, look at us. Do you see what you've done? Is this how you want it?"

I pushed his hand away, trying to focus. What had I done? I had walked into the dark apartment. My apartment. Jeffrey's voice had come at me. Where have you been? I'd reached for the light, but something had kept me from it. Hands. Strong. Angry. Had they grabbed me? Thrown me? I'd crashed backward into the wall. I knew that much. I'd crashed into the wall, and the light had come on, and there was Jeffrey.

Jeffrey. In my apartment. A week after I'd told him I needed some time alone.

"Forgive me," said Jeffrey now. I could see the rise and fall of his chest under the shirt as he struggled to calm himself. "I frightened you, didn't I? I wanted to talk. I let myself in. But you upset me, Hannah. I had no intention of -- " He broke off and dashed a hand across his face. "Are you all right?"

I felt my head and winced.

"You're not. Here. Sit down." He led me to the couch and sat beside me.
Skillful, gentle fingers probed my scalp. That was one of the first things I'd
loved about Jeffrey. First the wide, easy smile, but second had been those competent, reassuring hands.

No, it couldn't have been his hands.

Jeffrey stopped probing and smoothed back my hair. "Not even a goose egg. But you see what can happen. I'm sorry I barged in and frightened you. This isn't me tonight. But this isn't you, either. This isn't like you, sneaking around."

"I wasn't sneaking around. I went with Ellen and Paul to -- "

"You can leave Ellen out of it, Hannah. We know Ellen wasn't there, don't we? It was you and Paul. But Ellen's part of the problem, too, isn't she? Your sister doesn't like us spending all our time together, does she? I don't know why you listen to her. That's where the problem lies. You don't need time alone. We need time alone. Just the two of us, without all this
interference. I know what we'll do, we'll go the cabin."

"Jeffrey -- "

"Hush." Jeffrey leaned back, bringing me with him until my cheek rested on the hard plane of his chest.

"You know I'm right, Hannah. You don't solve problems by hiding from them. We'll get out of the city, go to the cabin for the long weekend on Saturday. We'll be alone. We'll talk. We'll sort this out." While he talked, his hands, those hands, stroked my hair, my neck, my face.

I knew I should move, get up, ask him to leave. Why did it suddenly seem so hard, so pointless, so...so silly? And what if Jeffrey was right? Maybe if we were alone, if there was no third party to make him angry, if I didn't make him angry...And what had he done, after all? He'd gotten jealous. It was flattering, really.

Jeffrey's hands gripped my shoulders and eased me sideways. "Look, you're right. You need time of your own. I can see that. I'll go now. I'll pick you up
Saturday."

When he picked me up on Saturday, and I saw the fresh haircut, the face shaved to the bone, the jacket I particularly loved that made him look so broad in the
back, I thought of Harry's. That's where we'd met, Harry's Tap. Jeffrey had worn that jacket at Harry's. Everything had been fresh and new at Harry's. Jeffrey had met me, wanted me, wooed me.

"We're getting a good early start," said Jeffrey now. He smiled at me from the driver's seat, that smile I'd first met at Harry's. "Or should I say a good fresh start?"

A fresh start. To go back to the way it was at Harry's. Suddenly, the weekend ahead of me glimmered brightly.

My daydreams dissolved as Jeffrey started talking, filling me in on the history of the cabin. It belonged to Jeffrey's father, divvied his way in a nasty divorce settlement. It was a treasure beyond compare, said Jeffery, sitting virtually alone in the middle of two thousand acres of conservation land. Most of the year, it sat there empty, waiting for Jeffrey's father to remember he owned it and blow down the expressway for a getaway summer weekend with most of the people you'd expect him to want to get away from. He brought business associates, politicians, friends, acquaintances, anyone he could find, said Jeffrey.

Except Jeffrey.

But Jeffrey didn't seem to resent this parental neglect as much as I thought he might. He talked calmly of arranging with his father, once he came of age, for his own time at the cabin. July and August were his father's. The off-season months were Jeffrey's own. Usually, because of the risk of frost, Jeffery
drained the pipes and closed up the cabin the last weekend in September. It was only the unseasonably warm October, a true Indian summer, that had prompted the late visit this year.

At first, as Jeffrey talked about the cabin, I listened attentively -- how there were plenty of deer, fox, trout. How there were no phones, electricity, neighbors. But as the sun beat through the windshield and the tires hummed over the highway and Jeffrey's voice rose and fell, I began to feel drowsy. I closed my eyes.

I woke when we hit the first rut in the dirt road.

"You just missed Fairnham," said Jeffrey.

"Fairnham?"

"Our last sight of civilization. If you could call it that. A post office, a laundromat, and a town hall."

I looked around. On either side of me was nothing but wilderness -- deep, black, wild. Huge pines blocked the light from overhead, and thick seedlings
and bull briars and dead stumps obliterated the ground.

We rattled in and out of the ruts for what seemed like another ten miles, until Jeffrey suddenly yanked the wheel hard right and we plunged into the trees.

I gasped.

Jeffrey laughed. "Almost there now."

When I'd collected myself, I could see that we weren't forging a new trail through virgin forest, as I'd first supposed, but were actually following a faint track through the pine needles and dead leaves. It seemed to go on forever, the forest crowding closer and closer on each side, until finally, just when I was sure if I didn't see sky or light or air I would suffocate,
I saw the glimmer of the water through the trees.

The car rolled to a stop fifty feet on.

"Like it?" asked Jeffrey.

I didn't answer right away. I wasn't sure. If I looked straight ahead, the gloom of the woods seemed to have disappeared as if someone had waved a magic
wand, and the sun stretched a welcome pool of light across the surface of the pond. A narrow dock of rough planking bridged the gap between sun and cabin, but when I turned to look at the cabin itself, I saw that neither sun nor water had penetrated that far. The cabin was nestled in shade so dark it seemed like night, and the deeply stained clapboards of the porch wrapped what I could see of the doors and windows in even blacker shadows. I felt Jeffrey's eyes swivel in my direction.

"Well, Hannah?"

"I...yes. It's...the pond...it's beautiful."

He grinned. "Wait till you see the inside." He pulled me after him up three stone steps to the cabin. When I stepped onto the porch, the floor gave slightly under me. Jeffery pulled a rusty key from his jacket pocket, scraped it into the lock, and the door opened with a moan. He stood back, and I stepped inside.

It smelled of must. A pale green light oozed through a crack in the shutters and wobbled across the floor, illuminating what the previous tenants had left us chewed mattress batting, empty seed casings, mice droppings. My eyes traveled to the farther wall.

A pair of beady black eyes stared back at me.

I shrieked.

Two paces took Jeffrey across the room. He snatched something off the wall, pulling it into the light. The glass eyes of a stuffed fox gleamed at me.
Jeffrey laughed. He put the fox down and showed me around.

The room we stood in seemed to be most of it -- living area to the left of the wood stove, with an iron cot for a couch and a wooden crate for a table. The
kitchen was to the right of the stove -- a wood table, two chairs with missing rungs, a small ice box, a sink complete with rusty pump, a metal cupboard. A
collection of fishing rods hung suspended from the rafters.

Jeffrey led me into the bedroom. The bed seemed to fill it, with no more than a foot to spare all around. I looked for the bathroom and found it through a crack in the shutters, a box like a wooden phone booth twenty yards off in the pines. I must have peered through that cracked shutter a long time.

Jeffrey spoke from behind me. "Who's out there?"

"No one. Aren't there any neighbors at all?"

"Not anymore. I told you, we're smack dab in the middle of conservation land. Our cabin and the Blakes' down the beach were the only ones here before the park came in. By law, we both have lifetime use, but Blake abandoned his a couple of years ago. Come on. You clean up while I open up. The broom's behind
the ice box."

Jeffrey went out, and almost at once I heard the sound of creaking boards as he removed the shutters. The light that filtered in through the trees did little to lighten the dark rooms. I found the broom and swept up the mouse residue. I unpacked our sheets and made the bed. By the time I'd filled the kitchen cupboard with our provisions, Jeffery was no longer there.

I stepped out onto the porch. No Jeffrey. The sun was high above the towering trees, but I could see the spot where it would later disappear behind them, off
to the west, and I felt a moment of panic. I didn't want to see this place without the sun. I crept onto the dock and looked along the beach. I saw a second dilapidated dock a hundred yards to the left but no signs of life. Jeffrey had been right. Our lone neighbor was gone.

I turned around and called, hoping I'd defeated any sounds of panic. "Jeffrey!"

"Down here." The voice came from underneath the cabin somewhere. "Pipes are all right. Try the pump, will you?"

I went inside and pumped the handle. Rusty brown filth sputtered out into the sink.

"Keep going," said Jeffrey behind me. "It'll clear."

He disappeared again, but by the time I'd pumped the water clear, he was back with an armload of wood.

"I'll have to cut more. We'll need the stove nights."

Nights.

Suddenly, I felt the need of air. Sunlight. "Could we take a walk?"

Jeffrey followed me out. I stood on the dock and looked left and right. The choice was clear. To the east, the white sand beach disappeared into choking
reeds and undergrowth twenty yards beyond our dock, but to the west, the sand stretched in a welcoming crescent all the way to the absent neighbor's dock
and beyond. We stepped o the dock and walked west.

Sun or no sun, I found myself reaching for Jeffery's hand. As we neared the Blake cottage, his fingers tensed in mine.

"What's the matter?"

"There's a chair on the porch."

"Oh? You think he's here?"

"No. He hasn't come in years. And there's no car. I just never noticed that chair before."

Jeffrey stared at the cabin, and I stared with him, curious. It seemed much like ours, only smaller, if that were possible, with the same dark clapboards and tiny windows, but the sticks and leaves on the roof, the rip in the screen door, made it seem somehow lonely and forlorn.

Jeffrey seemed to find it the same. He turned us around. "Come on, let's go back. We've got work to do."

Jeffrey assigned me my usual chores -- washing the dishes, making the stew. After I'd figured out the ways and means of the primitive kitchen and the stew was bubbling on the stove, I stepped outside and was surprised to see most of the day was gone. The sun brushed the tops of the trees. I could hear the sound of Jeffrey's ax behind me in the woods somewhere. I walked out on the dock and sat down, my feet dangling just above the water, watching the sun disappear.

Suddenly, one of the tall, dark posts on the distant dock moved. Something splashed out of the water, danced into the air, flopped back into the water.

After I saw the fish, I noticed the black rod, arching between the long shadow of the man on the dock and the fish. I watched, fascinated, as the rod dipped and reared, the man rocking with it, until the fish blasted out of the water again. It gave one last sharp, silver twist in midair and seemed to grow wings. The rod snapped backward, the fish soared in a graceful arc and splashed into the pond, free.

I hadn't meant to clap. The sound seemed to echo over the water like a small burst of cannon fire. The shadow on the dock turned in my direction. I felt the
dock tremble under my feet, and Jeffrey spoke from behind me.

"So he is here."

I turned, surprised at his tone, the words more hissed than spoken.

I touched Jeffrey's arm. "So he's here. It doesn't matter."

"Doesn't matter? Of course it matters. That was the point. I wanted us to be alone."

I laughed, waving a shaky hand at the miles and miles of blackening woods. "I think we've got enough room."

Jeffrey looked down at me. The lumpiness in his jaw eased as he smiled. The odd sunless panic I'd felt moved off. He put his arm around me, and we walked together up the dock.

Just before we stepped onto the porch, I looked again for the fisherman, but he was gone.

The lantern helped. So did the wood stove. So did the bubbling stew. So did Jeffrey, the old Jeffrey, the Jeffrey of Harry's Tap, talking and laughing and
reaching across the rickety table to touch my hand.

Once the stew was gone, the plates washed, the wine glasses refilled, he stood up and led me to the cot. He propped the pillows behind him, pulled me down
against his shoulder. "Now," he said. "Let's hear it. What's wrong? What's happened to us, Hannah? Or should I ask what's happened to you? I still feel the same. And you know, deep down inside where it counts, I think you do, too."

"Jeffrey," I said, and stalled. It must have been the wine. My mind seemed to have slipped into neutral.

"That's it, then. I was right, wasn't I? It's not us. When it's just the two of us, away, alone, there's nothing wrong. You belong with me, Hannah, can't you see that?"

"I...yes...sometimes..."

The arm around me tightened. Was he angry? I didn't want Jeffrey angry. And now, right now, it did seem that I belonged there with him. The wood crackled comfortably in the stove, the lantern warmed the dark wood walls, Jeffrey's hands warmed my skin, and any misgivings I might have had about him seemed to recede with the black woods.

But I slept badly that night, just the same, too alert to woods noises and cabin smells and phantom visions. When daylight came, I did better and was
still in a muddled half-doze when Jeffrey's lips brushed my cheek at nine.

"I have to run into town for ice. Stay put. The coffee's on the stove."

The words hardly registered. I only snapped wide awake when the car engine roared. "Jeffrey!" I grabbed my robe and raced onto the porch, but I was seconds too late. The car's brake lights winked once through the trees and were gone.

But the sun was there, a glorious lemon balloon floating over the treetops, already dispelling the shadows and warming the air. I went inside for coffee and brought it out onto the dock. I stretched my toes to the water. It was surprisingly warm. When I finished the coffee, I went back inside, put on my...

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