Cain said finally, “Yes, what is it, Mrs. Hughes?”
She found words then and pushed them out diffidently. “May I come inside? It’s terribly cold out here.”
He hesitated, and then shrugged and moved aside so that she could step in past him. The cabin was warm, fire in the hearth; but it smelled of liquor and stale cigarette smoke, and when he closed the door, cutting off the scream of the wind, it seemed too quiet. She was conscious of the snow that had blown into the room, that still fell fluttering from her parka; she wanted to say something apologetic about it, but the only words that came to her were acutely inane: I’m getting snow all over your floor.
Cain was standing with his back to the door, watching her, waiting silently for her to tell him why she was there. Instead, Rebecca said, “Quite a storm, isn’t it?” and those words seemed just as inane as the other, unspoken ones. She began to feel awkward and incredibly silly.
He said, “Yes, I suppose it is.”
“Well-I hope I’m not intruding. I mean, you’re not… busy or anything, are you?”
“As a matter of fact, I was.”
“Oh. Oh, I see. I’m sorry, I didn’t know…”
“It doesn’t matter. What did you want to see me about?”
“Nothing in particular. I just… I thought you might like to have some company tonight.”
His barlike eyebrows lifted slightly. “Oh? Why?”
“I don’t know, I just thought you might. I’m alone too this evening, you see, my husband is… away, and it seemed like a good idea to-” She broke off, realizing how wrong that sounded; she looked away from him and then said almost desperately, “I was feeling lonely, and I wanted someone to talk to.”
“Why me, Mrs. Hughes?”
“I had the idea you might be lonesome too, that’s all.”
Something flickered in the depths of his eyes. “I’m not lonesome,” he said harshly. “I live the way I do by choice.”
“Does that mean you don’t like people?”
“I prefer my own company.”
“Would it be prying if I asked why?”
“Yes, it would.”
“Well I’m sorry.”
“Do you make a habit of calling on men you hardly know when your husband is away and you’re feeling lonely?”
“Of course not…”
“What would he say if he knew you’d come here tonight?”
Rebecca felt her cheeks begin to flush. “What are you getting at? Do you think I came for some… special reason?”
“Did you?”
“No. I told you, I only wanted some companionship.”
“You won’t find it here, in any variety.”
“So you’re inviting me to leave.”
“To put it bluntly, yes.”
Bitter, defensive anger welled inside her; words tumbled out unchecked, mirroring her thoughts. “Oh, we can really put it bluntly if you like. We can say, ‘You’re a bitch, Mrs. Hughes, I don’t want anything to do with you, Mrs. Hughes, find someone else to go to bed with, Mrs. Hughes.’ That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?”
Cain seemed to wince slightly. His voice a little softer, he said, “There’s no need to-”
“Of course, how thoughtless of me to bring it out into the open like that. Well, I’ll just be going. Thank you so much for your time, Mr. Cain. It’s been very pleasant; it isn’t every day I get to feel like a cheap whore.”
She moved gropingly to the door, fumbled at the latch, and got it open. The sudden gust of wind and snow was like a slap. She ran out and across the yard and down the road: staggering and reeling in a surrealistic coalescence of white and black, the sound of it now raging in her ears like mocking, hysterical laughter.
When she reached the house, an interminable time later, she was asthmatically breathless and trembling uncontrollably. Inside, she stripped off parka and scarf and mittens and boots and flung them into the closet; ran upstairs and into the bedroom. Slacks and sweater and undergarments were icy-damp against her skin, and she shed them urgently and located the warmest nightgown she owned-a heavy flannel-and put that on and got into bed. The shaking refused to abate; her teeth chattered, her body crawled with chills. She tried to smoke a cigarette, could not get it lighted, and finally threw it to the floor, burrowing deeper under the blankets. Cold, cold, trembling, cold…
And after a while, when it became unbearable, she turned her face into the pillow and slid one hand down beneath the covers and pulled the hem of her gown up over her hips; parted her thighs and began to massage herself harshly with her fingertips-a kind of rhythmic self-flagellation. In less than a minute, she climaxed; and her body, at last, was still.
Rebecca rolled onto her side, drew her knees up to her breasts, and willed herself into a sleep fraught with dismal dreams.
Twelve
The blizzard continued to gather strength as the night progressed, dumping huge quantities of snow on Hidden Valley and on the high, steep cliffs through which County Road 235-A passed down into the valley. The last two cars to traverse the road-crawling ten minutes apart shortly before 1 A.M., like yellow-eyed animals in the storm-belonged to Matt Hughes and Peggy Tyler, returning from the Whitewater motel. Both sets of tire tracks were obliterated almost immediately.
More hours passed, and still the blizzard remained relentless. Drifts built higher and higher along the cornice at the near, lee side of the western cliff crown, while the screaming wind dislodged other snow from unsheltered places and hurled it downward into the pass in lacy white spumes. Long since rendered impassable, 235-A had a covering of more than eighteen inches by five o’clock.
At five thirty the blow reached its ultimate savagery. The scattered lodgepole pines clinging to the top of the western cliff were bowed double like genuflecting pilgrims, and the swollen cornice collected ever-greater amounts of heavy snow. It went on that way for a time-and then, just before dawn, the low-hanging clouds that sailed continually eastward on the high-altitude currents began to develop fragmentation lines, like amoebas about to reproduce. The snowfall decreased steadily until it was a thin, fluttering curtain. Gray light filtered into the sky, lengthening visibility, giving substance to the bloated shadows along the crown of the western wall.
The blizzard was over; but the destruction it had fomented was only just beginning.
First there was a rumbling-a low-pitched, throat-clearing sound. The overburdened cornice shuddered, shaking whiteness as if a buried giant had awakened and were trying to rise; slender vanguards spilled free in frothy cascades. The rumbling grew louder, and louder still.
And the entire cornice gave way.
Billowing snowclouds choked the air like white smoke, and a massive tidal wave of snow and ice and rock flooded downward with a thunderous, vibratory roar that was as loud as a bomb blast in the early-morning stillness. Granite outcroppings were ripped loose as though they were no more than chunks of soft shale; trees were buried, uprooted, or snapped like matchsticks and carried along. And in a matter of seconds, the plunging mass filled a section of the pass the way a child would fill an excavation in the sand…
Lew Coopersmith sat bolt upright in bed. The deafening noise rattled the bedroom windows, reverberated through the big, shadowed room. He struggled out from beneath the bedclothes and moved in sleep-drugged motions to the window; but from that vantage point he could see nothing to explain the sudden explosion of sound, now lessening into small, receding echoes.
The door connecting his bedroom with that of his wife’s burst open, and Ellen rushed in. Her round, handsome face pale and frightened, silver hair braided into a long queue down her back, dressed in an ankle-length white nightdress, she was a ghostly figure in the semidarkness. “Dear heaven, Lew,” she said, “what is it, what is it?’