Back to Wando Passo, David Payne [little red riding hood ebook .TXT] 📗

border into unpleasantness, a country there’s no returning from. The uptick of arousal is slipping irretrievably into the past now, ever farther away. Something is failing, going terribly wrong. Addie will not catch up. Any chance of this is past. Harlan must realize this and stop. He must wait for her, but Harlan has been waiting all his life, he can’t wait anymore. This woman is his wife.

He’s pushed her back onto the bed. Like a lamb at slaughter, Addie gazes up, imploring with her eyes, but Harlan, slow to entertain the possibility of disappointment, ignores her look or misinterprets what he sees. His weight on top of her is crushing. Addie finds it hard to breathe. And now he’s reaching down between them. He finds himself and shoves it in her like the handle in a churn. There’s a drumming sound in Addie’s ears. She feels burning, tearing. Oh, the size of him. Oh, the hurt…

“Harlan, please, please be tender….”

“I will. I am,” he whispers in a perfunctory tone, like someone talking in his sleep.

“No, it hurts! Stop. Stop!” Panicking, desperate for air, she shoves him with both hands.

And now he heeds. He lifts away. He looks at her and blinks.

“Please…” Her face is anguished; she’s wheezing, small pants, not of passion, but of grievous damage. “I have to catch my…breath….”

And her expression is clearly different, very different from the one he has expected to receive. In Harlan’s hazy ginger eyes the spark of play has dimmed. It is, in fact, extinguished. The eager, childlike, reckless something that seeks confirmation of its effect in others and doesn’t entertain the possibility of disappointment encounters now, in his new wife, a disappointment it is, finally, all too familiar with.

He pulls out of her, away. He sits, in a null state, on the edge of the bed, staring into vacancy.

“God,” he says, “oh, God…” With both large hands, he covers his large face.

“I’m sorry, Harlan, you must teach me,” Addie says. “Let us try again.” She touches his shoulder.

He pulls away. “How you must despise me….”

“No,” she says, appalled. “No, dear…”

“God…oh, God.” There’s such loathing in his voice. Is it for her? For a moment, Addie can’t quite tell. But, no, it’s for himself.

Harlan rises now. As he starts toward the door, he stumbles and goes down on one knee. Looking crippled, defeated, he pulls upright, using the doorknob as a crutch. He disappears into the darkened bath.

“Harlan?”

He doesn’t answer.

In the silence, Addie realizes the drumming is real and coming from outside.

A door opens on the hall. Footsteps, rapid footsteps, pass the door.

“Harlan?”

Gone.

Downstairs, the front door opens. She’s at the window as a swath of light falls on the lawn. And there is Harlan, striding off into the park, into the black shadows of the trees, like one of them.

Hurriedly, she puts on her dress and follows.

From the piazza steps, she sees him by the stable, lighting a cigar with nervous hands. Angry at the match, he curses it and waves it out.

A black man with a lantern—is it James?—leads Runcipole out of the barn. The restive stallion tugs backward at the rein, as though resentful to be importuned at such an hour. When the groom tries to soothe him, Harlan pushes the man aside. Cinching the saddle girth himself, he mounts.

“Harlan!” Halfway across the lawn, she cries his name, and Harlan stares toward the shout with a cold concentration in his face, the way a warrior regards his enemy across a plain. As she walks, then runs in his direction, Addie stumbles, and Harlan rides away in the direction of the firelight through the trees.

A hand now firmly takes her arm and helps her from her knees.

“Where has he gone?” she asks, recognizing Jarry, who has come out of his cottage.

“You’d best go in the house,” he answers with the look he gave her on the dock, a look of foreknowledge and compassion that Addie understands far better now.

“Please,” she begs. “I’m asking for your help. Tell me where he is.”

“I’m trying to help you,” Jarry answers. Gently, firmly, he leads her to the house.

It is hours later, when she’s finally drifted into fitful sleep, that Addie hears footsteps in the hall. They pause outside her door.

“Harlan?”

They move away again. By the time she opens the door, the hall is empty. On the floor lies her book, her Byron in red morocco. Only when Addie lights the lamp does she see the feather and open to the place it marks.

From the wreck of the past, which hath perish’d,

Thus much I at least may recall,

It hath taught me that what I most cherish’d

Deserved to be dearest of all:

In the desert a fountain is springing,

In the wide waste there still is a tree,

And a bird in the solitude singing,

Which speaks to my spirit of thee.

Her eye floats upward to the title: “Stanzas to Augusta.”

SEVENTEEN

Whap. Whap. Whap.

“Mr. Hill?”

Ransom turned and saw the officer staring through the kitchen screen under a shelved hand.

“Finally,” he said to Marcel, not inaudibly. “Come in.”

“Sergeant Tommy Thomason,” said the heavy-gutted country man, whose egregious comb-over seemed somehow out of keeping with the compassionate Weltschmerz in his face. “This here’s Officer Johnson.” He nodded to a youthful black companion with a military formality of bearing and a weight lifter’s build, who regarded Ransom and Marcel as though he hoped this call might blossom into the heroic crisis he’d been training for for years. “Dispatcher said you had some kind of break-in?”

Ransom moved aside to let them see. When she’d brought Hope and Charlie in the house, Claire had found the kitchen a shambles—almost literally so. The chicken, which Ran had left mounded on the platter, was strewn everywhere. Torn hunks had been thrown against the walls and cabinets, leaving shiny tracks of grease. Here and there on the floor, small deposits of meat had been regurgitated together with broken bits of bloody bone.

“Dag,” said Thomason, advancing. “Something sure made a mess.