In Cold Pursuit
her head and face.Into a world limited to the sound of their breathing, hers straining through sobs, his savage, shot a new sound, rocketing, two-noted. An emergency vehicle. Unlikely as it seemed, someone had heard her cut-off scream and called the police.
It froze the boy—somehow her senses defined him as that—for the seconds that counted. She ran for the end of the driveway, or thought in her stumbling process that she ran, and only realized when she reached it that the police car or ambulance or whatever it was had shot by the mouth of the street and had nothing to do with her at all.
She looked wildly over her shoulder. The front door of the house was closed—had the wind blown it shut? Had she left it on the latch? Was he in there, waiting for her to come back and telephone for help? She couldn’t think clearly; she couldn’t even see clearly. She raced a bent wrist across one eye and then the other, and it came away sticky. Then, knowing that he was not in front of her, she began her effort at running again.
2
AUTOMATICALLY, because she had grown up among people so optimistic that they expected to win national contests and thought the police would forget all about that parking ticket, Mary Vaughan felt a little jump of alarm at the keening warble that began to swell in the night when she was a mile from home.
She reassured herself at once, a process she had to go through so often that the proper arguments unfolded neatly in her mind. Jenny didn’t smoke, so it could scarcely be fire, and heart attacks or other seizures were rare among eighteen-year-olds.
There had been an armed robbery in the neighborhood a month ago, when a nice-looking couple pleading a need for a telephone because they had just passed an inert body by the roadside had suddenly produced a gun, tied up the elderly woman who had let them in, and gone methodically through her house. Mary had told her cousin about that, pointedly, because Jenny seemed to feel that after New York, Santa Fe was a harmless backwater.
The warble was on top of her now, along with flashing lights, and it was a coronary unit, hospital-bound. Still, Mary could have sworn at herself for forgetting, once more, that she could not reach her house by the usual route; a whole stretch of road was being disembowelled. She found a shoulder wide enough for turning, drove a half-mile back, was momentarily confused at a crossroads which looked different at night in a beginning rain, was finally home.
“Jenny?” She needn’t have bothered to call reassuringly as she used her key; the living room was shadowy and untenanted, and the shower rushed obliviously. An odd scent wafting from behind the bathroom door suggested that her cousin had been doing something exotic in the way of face-creaming first.
In her bedroom, Mary changed out of her dinner clothes and into a housecoat. She had already decided against—the point of the dinner—throwing in her lot with the art director who had left the advertising agency at the same time as she, in the course of a reorganization, and the man who would be putting up most of the money for a new agency. She knew Al Trecino only by rumor and reputation; in the flesh, cold and larcenous under the easy-going charm he wore like the fisherman’s sweater which was his trademark, he gave her the shivers.
Jenny stayed in the shower. Mary dismissed a few thoughts about her water bill, and in the kitchen— she felt like a hospital dietician—inspected the quiche lorraine she had made for her cousin’s dinner.
A very small wedge had been cut out and the rest sealed neatly under foil. The lettuce left washed and ready had evidently been consumed, but not, according to the testimony of a squeezed half-lemon, with salad dressing.
Mary reminded herself to take this philosophically and returned to the living room, furnished in stone-blue and rose-brown against its white walls, and switched on more lamps. Somewhere during the past few minutes she had recorded the sound of another siren—had the warning flares on that disrupted section of road been extinguished by the rain, and an unwary motorist plunged in?—but she had spent all her personal concern earlier. She was home, Jenny was safe, someone else was clearly in charge out there.
“Hi.” Jenny arrived in the doorway, wearing a long high-necked challis robe with a ruffle at the yoke, long black hair straying about her shoulders. “How was your dinner?”
“Orange duck,” said Mary, pithily as concerned that particular restaurant. “If God had intended . . .” It was as foolish not to show a faint reproach as it would be to exhibit anxiety. “You don’t seem to have eaten much of yours.”
“It’s awfully rich,” said Jenny defensively. She was eyeing the television set. “There’s supposed to be a weird old movie on. Would it bother you . . . ?
“Not at all.” Even after a week it was possible at odd moments—as now, when she subsided onto the floor and clasped her arms around her drawn-up knees—to be shocked at Jenny’s emaciation. She was probably five-feet-seven; she weighed eighty-odd pounds. The robe seemed in some perverse way to delineate her boniness rather than conceal it, like generous folds slung over a skeleton.
The telephone rang while a list of credits was rolling over the screen to the accompaniment of a sagging sound-track, and Jenny turned an alert face. Mary answered: it was the art director, and as she could tell from his overly hearty tone that he was not alone, she was circumspect in her refusal.
“That’s a real disappointment. . . . Well, it was a nice evening anyway, wasn’t it? Wonderful dinner.”
Obligingly, because Ben was married and had two children and could not afford to be scrupulous about the source of Al Trecino’s money or his way with any women in his path, Mary carried out her