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

Now he stops. Now the look of mortal suffering, of spiritual beauty, reappears. “In the dirt,” he says, “beside the blackened fire. My horse, old Runcipole, was nuzzling me. I thought—nay, hoped—it was the loving kiss of my dear wife.”

Addie studies his face closely. “I wish I could believe you, Harlan.”

“But you must, dear!” he cries. “You must try! There are things, Addie. Things…”

“What things?”

“Things you don’t yet understand…”

“Explain them to me then.”

“I can’t!”

“Why can’t you?”

“Because you won’t believe them, Addie. You’ll think me not in my right mind, and frankly, dear, sometimes I fear…But no, no. You must try, though, Addie, please try to believe that my intentions toward you are honorable. I’ll make it right to you. I’ll make it right, whatever it costs. I will fight for you, my dear. Fight for me. Please fight for me!”

And Addie, afraid to wholly trust him, but even more afraid to wholly disbelieve and risk a final breach, allows herself to be coaxed upstairs, where she submits and, in a grim, brief episode, becomes his wife in fact.

NINETEEN

I repeat: that pot was in the bathtub when I left.”

“Ransom…”

“Don’t say it,” he said. “I already know what you’re going to say, so do us both a favor, just say no.”

Claire turned a frustrated glance at Marcel, who looked like a man caught in the wrong place at the wrong time but honor-bound to stay.

“Ransom, sweetie, look,” she said, and at that unexpected “sweetie,” he gentled like a colt. “Story. When you called me from the airport yesterday, I was in the laundry room. I had a load sorted on the floor, I was waiting for the powder to dissolve, the phone rings, I go to get it, we talk, I hang up. You know what I did then? I went upstairs to get the hamper, and I stood there in the hall a sec, completely blank, and then, away off in the house, I heard that noise from the machine, you know that croupy little groan it makes?”

He frowned. “So what’s your point?”

“I think you know what my point is. Everybody forgets little things like this.”

“Everybody,” he repeated. “Not just drunks and crazy people.”

“I didn’t say that. Is that what I said? No, I didn’t, and you’ve got to stop jumping from some A, like maybe you forgot, to the P or Q of me accusing you of being crazy. That’s irrational. And you had been drinking—you admitted it yourself.”

Ran looked at Cell. “What did I tell you?”

“And since you bring it up…”

“Here comes the other shoe,” he said.

Claire gave him her Concerned and Earnest look, the one that made Ran feel like a receding object at the wrong end of a telescope. “Cell’s been down this road with us before,” she went on, “so I’m not going to mince words—I do think it might be a good idea for you to get your levels checked. Ever since you got here, you’ve seemed overwrought.”

Busted!

“Marcel thinks so, too.”

Ransom looked, and Marcel held his stare. Cell’s face was open; there was no trace of meanness, no gloating—of course not! When had there ever been? Yet Cell, too, seemed to be looking down on him from an eminence, like some god on Mt. Olympus regarding a poor mortal lost in the dark woods of middle life. And the worst part was, Ran knew that this very feeling—of their exaltation and his comparative debasement—was evidence that they were telling him the truth: he was in trouble, or flirting too close to the edge. Yet, guilty as he was, he still had to fight the impulse to regard them as his enemies and to tell them both to go to hell.

“Fine,” he said. “You know what, Claire? If it’ll make you feel better, I’ll go in tomorrow. But I’m telling you right now, I can get my levels checked till kingdom come and join AA and get a frontal lobotomy while I’m at it”—he could not resist tossing in this helpful shot—“but it’s never going to get that pot from upstairs in the bathtub where I left it, down those stairs and up the hallway to this table. And what if, just for kicks, as a sort of thought experiment, you considered the possibility that what I’m telling you is true, that the pot really was in the tub when I left, and here when we came back, and I didn’t move it?”

“I think I have to stick with Sergeant Thomason and the simple-explanation theory.”

“Cell?” Ran said.

“Somebody moved it,” Marcel said. “If it wasn’t you, then there was someone in the house.”

“Thank you!” said Ran. “Okay. And if there was, wouldn’t it stand to reason that that person, whoever he was, did both things: the chicken and the pot?”

“Okay, Ran, fine,” said Claire, “but why?”

“That’s exactly my question! With all the possible mischief you might make in an old house like this, what sort of burglar or vandal would choose to (a) mess up a plate of chicken and (b) move a black iron pot? I mean, on the burglar-vandal checklist, these have to qualify as pretty arcane choices.”

“So what are you saying, Ran?” Cell asked.

“Truthfully, man? I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m saying none of it makes sense. It doesn’t make sense that an animal moved it, because an animal couldn’t; it doesn’t make sense that a burglar moved it, because a burglar wouldn’t. And it doesn’t make sense that I moved it in some sort of drunken fugue state, because whatever you may think of me, I’ve never been that bent.”

“So what’s left, Ran?” Claire asked. “That pot certainly didn’t walk downstairs on its three stubby little legs.”

Ran’s brow gathered, and he didn’t answer.

“Ransom?”

“What?”

“Please tell me you aren’t suggesting that.”

“No,” he answered, in a somewhat grudging tone, “I’m not. Of course I’m not. But I will say this….” He turned to her with a reviving animation. “Since you already think I’m