Blowback(35)

Well all right, I thought then, savagely. I threw my own towel down and took off my shirt and went to the lake and waded out a few steps and dove in. It was plenty cold, cold enough to leave me gasping when I surfaced, but I was not going to let that affect me; I splashed around until I got used to it and finally began swimming in a hard steady crawl-fifty yards out and back, sixty yards and eighty and a hundred. When the complaint in my lungs became too severe, and my legs and arms started to stiffen up, I rolled over and floated on my back and stared up at the curved slice of the moon, resting.

I was still angry.

But not so much at Cody, now, as at Angela Jerrold. What made a woman like that tick? The feeling of power? The need for constant attention? Sex itself? Or was it simply that she was a man-hater-string them along and then sit back and watch them emasculate themselves over her? Whatever it was, she seemed to be the kind who can keep on getting away with it, who foment disaster wittingly or unwittingly and walk away from it untouched.

Well, there was nothing I could do about it. You can't change human nature and you can't live other people's lives; all you can do is turn your back on it at a distance, worry about your own problems. Cliches, every one-but a cliche is really nothing more than a statement of well-known fact. Right? Right, you fat old bastard?

I rolled over again and swam a while longer, but the anger still would not go away, nor the feeling of uneasiness; the only thing that went away was the last of my strength. I paddled in and rubbed myself down with the towel, and wondered if I was tired enough to sleep now, and knew that I wasn't. I sat down on the outcropping of rock and listened to the crickets and swatted mosquitoes.

And wanted a cigarette for the first time since last night. Badly.

Just hang in there…

Despite the heat, I began to feel a little chilled from the iciness of the lake water. Maybe Harry wants to play a few hands of gin rummy, I thought, and got up again and went up the path through the trees. The porch light on the Jerrolds' cabin was out now and the radio was silent. Small favors. I padded on among the dapples of moonlight and shadow.

Fifty yards from Cabin Five, I heard the sharp slap of a screen door closing. It came from Bascomb's cabin, and I thought: So he finally got back-and did not think anything else about it until I came out in front of the place. Then I saw that it was still dark, although the door behind the screen was now standing partially open; the area was wrapped in stillness. I stopped as I had on the way down, frowning, and stood looking over there.

When a man comes back to his cabin, I thought, he turns on a light somewhere, he doesn't just rattle around in the dark or jump straight into bed. So why didn't Bascomb put a light on?

Maybe he hadn't come back at all, maybe he had been inside there all along and decided to go out. But then, why hadn't I seen him or at least heard him on the path? Because he went the other way, deeper into the woods? There was no path back there and the growth was pretty thick for late-night strolling.

I waited another thirty seconds. Silence, darkness. Come on, I told myself, what the hell difference does it make where Bascomb is and what he's doing? He's not with Mrs. Jerrold, that's all that concerns you.

But the edginess had sharpened now inside me, and the stillness seemed unnaturally acute-and I stopped fighting my impulses and walked slowly across the open ground between the path and the cabin. I climbed up onto the porch, not trying to be quiet about it, and put my face close to the screen. Blackness, the vague shapes of furniture; there was nothing else to see.

“Bascomb?” I called softly.

No answer.

I rapped on the wall beside the door, but that got me nothing either. A faint prickling cold settled between my shoulder blades. I reached out compulsively and tugged the screen door open, pushed the inner door wide with the tips of my fingers. Hot, stale air stirred sluggishly against my face, thick with the smell of dust.

“Bascomb?”

Only the dull echo of my own voice.

I slid my left hand around the jamb and along the wall until I located the light switch. Flipped it up and blinked against the sudden pale glare from the ceiling bulb. I realized I had been holding my breath and let it out audibly as I scanned the room, the bath alcove beyond the open door at the far end.

Empty.

That stagnant air was the kind that accumulated when a place was shut up during the summer for a day or more. But Bascomb could not have closed himself in here all that time, half-suffocating, because Harry and the sheriff's deputy had not found him in this morning. Then where had he been and where was he now?

And who had been in here a few minutes ago?

I looked over at the bed. It was rumpled, blankets sleep-kicked into a tangle at the foot On the table was a plate with two pieces of bologna curled up and dried out like dead insects, and a glass half-filled with what looked to be flat beer. A pair of corduroy trousers was draped across the back of one chair, and on another, near the bed, was an open suitcase that contained several items of neatly folded clothing. Against the left-hand wall were two small oil paintings, one of them mounted on an easel, both of them done in bright bold colors that depicted Eden Lake at dawn and in the late afternoon. And on the floor next to the easel, lying with its pages fanned out at opposing angles like a collapsed tent, was Bascomb's sketchpad.