The Lighthouse

by Bill Pronzini

Cassie was silent.

  Alix said softly, “Why, Cassie? Why did you do it?”

  “Why? She wanted too much, that’s why. The first time she came here and said she knew about Miranda, I gave her the five hundred dollars she asked for. She said she’d go away, but she didn’t. She came back for more.”

  Miranda, Alix thought. According to the newspaper stories, that had been the name of the murdered hitchhiker-Miranda Collins. Then she remembered another fact from the news stories: Miranda had been a student at the University of Oregon. The university located in Eugene, Cassie’s former home. The university where her former husband had taught.

  “Mandy knew you’d killed Miranda,” Alix said. “That’s it, isn’t it? That’s why she tried to blackmail you.”

  “She saw me put Miranda’s body out on the cape that night. God knows why she was out there. Wild little thing. She should have known better.”

  Yes, Alix thought, she should have known better. But Mandy had wanted so desperately to get out of Hilliard, and her attempt to extort money from Alix-the information she’d wanted to sell must have been nothing more than things she’d overheard Novotny and her father and the others plotting to do against the outsiders at the lighthouse. How foolish she’d been. And how dearly she’d paid for her foolishness.

  Alix said, “How much more did Mandy want?”

  “A thousand dollars. I don’t have that much money. I told her that when she came here the other night, while I was working late at the gallery. But she didn’t believe me, oh no. She pranced around in there, saying I must have money, look at all the expensive artwork for sale, and then she started batting the windchimes, tossing one of the big driftwood birds in the air, and she dropped the bird and it broke one of my nice chambered nautiluses. I couldn’t let her get away with that. I took her by the throat, I slapped her, I told her I’d kill her if she didn’t leave me alone. It scared her. She pulled away and went running out of the shop.”

  It must have been immediately afterward that the girl had called the lighthouse, probably from the phone booth at the rest area down the road. By then she’d realized she had mixed herself up in something she couldn’t handle. She’d been afraid to talk to her parents about what she’d done; she couldn’t call the police because it would have meant confessing to blackmail. So in her panic she’d called the one person she thought might help her, might perhaps give her the extra money she felt she needed to leave Hilliard-the woman who hadn’t turned her in for attempted extortion, Alix Ryerson.

  “You didn’t go after her right away?”

  “I didn’t go after her at all,” Cassie said. “No, I just wanted to get out for a while, go for a drive, try to think. But there she was, pedaling along the cape road; I could see the reflector lights on her bicycle. Even then I didn’t follow her, not for a while. Then I thought, why not go out there and talk to her, try to reason with her again about the extra thousand dollars. So I did. I didn’t intend to hurt her. It just happened, that’s all, like it did with Miranda.”

  The woman’s expression was distracted now, her gaze jumpy. But the pistol was still steady in her two hands. Alix desperately wondered how far she could push her. And yet she had to keep trying, had to find some way to either make her surrender the weapon or try to take it away from her. Jan’s life as well as her own might depend on it.

  “Did Miranda want money too?” she asked. “Is that why you killed her?”

  The question seemed to surprise Cassie. “Money? Oh, I suppose it would have come to that. What she claimed she wanted when she showed up here was advice. Advice, help, succor, sympathy. She wanted to keep the baby, she wanted Ron to pay child support. She thought I might be able to give her some… what did she call it? Insight. Some insight into how to get him to acknowledge her-that was the word she used, acknowledge her and the baby.”

  Now Alix remembered two more seemingly unrelated facts. Miranda Collins had been four months pregnant when she died. And Cassie’s ex-husband, the anthropology professor who had a weakness for coeds, was named Ron.

  “She’d been sleeping with Ron for two years, the little bitch,” Cassie said. “All very secret, of course, because he was such a fine, upstanding faculty member. Very secret from everybody except me. The wife always knows.”

  “But why did she come to you?”

  “Who knows? I don’t understand these young people; their morals aren’t like ours. Maybe she thought that since I was another woman Ron had treated badly, I’d understand her plight and we’d form a united front against him. But how could I do that, after what she’d done to me? She was the one who put an end to my marriage; she was the one who’d conceived the child I could never have with Ron.”

  Cassie was breathing raggedly now. Alix clenched her fists, watching the woman’s jumpy, frightening eyes. Cassie wasn’t going to relinquish that pistol without a fight, that was clear now; and in her worked-up state, she might decide to pull the trigger at any moment. If Alix hoped to survive, she would have to make some kind of move against her and would have to do it very soon. Maybe she could drop down, throw herself at Cassie’s feet… but not from where she stood now, there was too much distance between them. Move away from the car, then, one slow step at a time. And keep Cassie talking while she did it…

  “But you didn’t mean to kill Miranda,” she said, and eased one foot out in front of her. “Isn’t that what you said?”

  “Oh no. It just happened. I don’t even remember doing it. Funny, though-afterward, the next day, I knew Ron would realize I’d done it, even though he didn’t know she’d come down here to see me. Because of where her body was found, so close to here. I should have taken her a long way from Hilliard, a long, long way, but I was so scared that night, I just wanted to get rid of her. But Ron never said a thing to the police. I kept waiting for him to call and accuse me and he didn’t do that, either.”

  Alix had moved one full step away from the car and was about to take another. But when Cassie paused, she stood very still. She would need at least two more steps before she was close enough to hurl herself at the woman’s feet “Well, now I know the reason,” Cassie said. “I should have known it right from the first. He couldn’t risk his affair being found out. Oh, I can picture him mouthing platitudes to his colleagues: ‘How could such a terrible thing happen to such a lovely girl?’ He didn’t care about Miranda any more than he cared about any of the others. Or me. But he should have cared about that baby. He—”

  Cassie broke off again, and again cocked her head to listen. Alix heard nothing except the wind in the trees outside… and then she did, she heard movement at the open door to Cassie’s right. And she saw someone come in, a shadow at first, then the shape of a man Adam Reese, holding his rifle at an angle in front of him, his clothing damp and disheveled and his eyes bright, hot, flashing a fragmented blue-and-white as they sought Alix, found her, pinned her. His lips were pulled back in a feral grimace, spittle flecking them at the comers. Then he saw Cassie and stopped moving; a look of amazement crossed his features, as if he hadn’t heard them talking from outside, as if he’d expected to find Alix there alone. His body dipped into a crouch and he started to swing the rifle’s muzzle toward Cassie.

  But Cassie was quicker. She pivoted in an absurdly graceful motion, like a ballerina doll in a music box, and the pistol bucked in her hand. The sound of the shot was deafening in the confined space. Reese jerked, lost his unfired rifle, staggered with his hands coming up to his chest. Cassie fired a second bullet into him, and Alix heard but didn’t see him fall.

  She had already moved by then. She was down on her stomach slithering frantically under the car.

  Jan

  At the doorway to the lightroom he rolled the barrel of fire sand out of the way, then unhooked the air hose and pulled the diaphone over until it was balanced on the edge of the sill. He went back up to the lantern, unhooked the hose from the compressor, hefted the unit in his arms, and brought it back down to the lightroom, where he
set it in the doorway next to the diaphone.

  The noise he made doing this seemed to have refueled Bonner’s rage: the obscenities and the pounding increased to another fever pitch. Bonner was still ranting when Jan descended to the trap, but stopped while he was still two risers above it. Jan came to a standstill, breathing through his mouth, listening, as Bonner must have been on the other side. He pushed up his glasses, rubbed at his stinging eyes, squeezed them shut against the gathering pain.

  God, he thought, let me get through the next few minutes. Just these next few minutes.

  “Ryerson! What you doing up there, you murdering son of a bitch!”

  And the pounding started again, savage, rhythmic-one driving thud against the bottom of the trap every two or three seconds.

  Quickly, Jan moved down the remaining steps, bent, and threw the locking bolt free of its ring, timing it so that the sound the bolt made releasing was lost in the hollow thud of wood on wood. He was turning, starting back up to the lightroom, when the next blow came. This time the door rose an inch or so in its frame, fell back with an audible bumping sound. There were no more blows-just a heavy silence that lasted five seconds, ten, while Bonner’s slow wits took in the fact that the trap was now unlocked. If he thought that his pounding had somehow broken the lock, if he didn’t suspect a trap above the trap…

  The door lifted again, slowly-one inch, two. Jan tensed. And then Bonner shoved up fast and hard, threw the trap back against its hinge stops. His head and shoulders appeared in the opening, eyes wide and wild and gleaming in the weak light.

  With his foot Jan shoved the diaphone off the sill, sent it plunging downward. It hit one of the steps with a ringing metallic clatter, bounced straight at Bonner, who threw his arms up in front of his face and started to cry out. The diaphone struck him on one forearm and the side of his head, knocked him backward out of sight. His cry changed into a strangled shriek that was lost, cut off, in the echoing, thumping noise of the heavy instrument and Bonner’s body tumbling down the stairs. When the sounds finally stopped, the silence that filled the tower seemed riddled with ghostly echoes just beyond the range of hearing.

  Jan was out on the stairs by then, peering downward, trying to bring the gloom at the bottom of the stairs into focus. He was ready to dislodge the compressor, send that hurtling downward, too, if necessary-but it wasn’t necessary. Bonner lay twisted below, unmoving, the diaphone canted across his legs so that only his upper body and his feet were visible.

  The sudden release of tension made Jan’s own legs feel weak, rubbery, as he descended. Bonner’s weapon, an ax handle, lay on one of the steps partway down; Jan bent to claim it before he went the rest of the way. When he got to where Bonner lay, the silence that had built around him was thick, no longer echoing, broken only by the faint thrumming duet of the wind and the fire outside.

  He bent to look more closely at Bonner, afraid that he’d killed the man; the last thing he needed right now was a death on his conscience, even the death of a tormentor. But Bonner wasn’t dead. There was a bloody gash on the side of his head where the diaphone had struck him, and one of his legs was bent at an angle that could only mean a bone had shattered; but his mouth was open and he was breathing in ragged, painful gasps.

  Jan swallowed against the taste of bile, stepped over him and out into the wreckage of the living room. Holding the ax handle cocked at his shoulder, he looked into Alix’s studio, then hurried through the kitchen, cloakroom, pantry. All of them were empty. He went through the pantry door, around to the front yard. Stood for a moment to let the icy breath of the wind clear his head, dry the sweat on his body.

  The station wagon was a blackened hulk inside a dying ring of fire. Beyond it, the garage was sheeted by flame, burning hot and smoky from the paint and oil and chemicals stored inside. If the wind had been strong, gusty, there would have been a danger of the fire spreading to the lighthouse. But it had died down, changed direction-capricious wind. What sparks and embers blew free were being carried away to the southwest, out to sea.

  In the fireglow he could see that the grounds were as deserted as the house. Outside the fence, the road-as much of it as his narrowing vision could make out-also appeared to be empty. Nobody here now, just Bonner and him. Just him.

  But he couldn’t stay here, couldn’t just wait, because he couldn’t be absolutely sure Alix had made it safely to a telephone. He’d been right about Bonner-but what if he’d been wrong about the others?

  He began to run.

  It was a hard run at first, but he couldn’t keep up the pace. He was out of shape, and exhausted from the tension and exertion of the past two hours, and his head ached, throbbed with every step. He was worried that the fresh exertion would bring on the bulging, or worse, one of the blackout periods. Or that he would drop from sheer fatigue.

  He slowed to a trot, then to a fast walk, and when he had his wind back he began to trot again. The night was black around him, streaked with fog. Anything more than a few feet away appeared to him as smears and blobs. He kept swiping at his eyes, poking and pinching at them in a vain effort to widen his field of vision.

  He had gone a mile or so-he had no real sense of distance, nor of passing time-when he came around a bend in the road and one of the larger blobs ahead of him materialized into Reese’s van. He came to an abrupt halt when he recognized it, then warily moved closer. It was angled off on the side of the road, lightless, the driver’s door yawning open.

  Abandoned here, he thought. Why?

  He went around to the driver’s door, leaned inside. Empty. The ignition lock was empty, too; whoever had been driving it-Reese? — had taken the key. Frustrated, feeling a new surge of anxiety, he backed out and stood indecisively for a moment, knuckling his eyes, staring ahead into the blurry darkness.

  Alix, he thought then.

  And once more he began to run.

  Alix

  She lay flat on her stomach, her cheek pressed against the cold concrete. The floor under the car was slick with motor oil; the smell of it made her want to retch. She closed her throat against a surge of bile, remained perfectly still.

  She could see Cassie’s bare feet and the hem of her robe several yards from the car; she could also see the crumpled body of Adam Reese, the splotch of blood on the front of his jacket. Cassie hadn’t turned, hadn’t moved since she’d shot Reese-as if the act had momentarily paralyzed her. It was another few seconds before the feet moved, turned once again toward the car with such suddenness that the robe puffed out to expose thick ankles. There was a quick intake of breath, and then “Alix? Where are you?”

  Alix held her breath.

  Cassie’s voice rose querulously. “Where did you go?”

  After a moment the feet moved out of Alix’s line of vision, back toward the front of the car, shuffling like those of an old woman. She turned her head then, peered out the other side. There was a line of cardboard cartons some four feet away, with a space large enough for her to wriggle through between two of them. She was too confined here under the car; if Cassie realized where she was, there would be no way to defend herself, no way to escape a bullet. Behind those boxes, she would still be protected, yet have more freedom of movement.

  But what if she made sounds and Cassie heard them? With that overhead light on, she would make a perfect target, even with the car between them The side door slammed resoundingly. When the echo died, the silence was once again acute.

  Alix lay motionless, taking in small amounts of air through her mouth. Her chest ached, blood pounded in her temples. She realized she was still clutching Mandy’s headband; her fingers pressed the beads as if she might be about to say a rosary.

  You’ve got to move sooner or later. Do it now, while she’s still over by the door.

  She made herself move in the direction of the cardboard cartons. She was almost to the rear wheel when she saw an old bathroom plunger lying behind it. It was good-sized, with a wooden handle two feet long. Not much of a weapon,
but better than nothing.

  Inching along, she stretched her arm out until her fingers could just touch the handle. Then she lay still again, listening. Heard nothing except the heavy silence. But once she came out from under the car, exposed herself in the light… that damned ceiling bulb hung right over the car…

  Smash it, she thought then. It hangs down low, you can reach it with the plunger… and in the dark you’ve got a much better chance

  … smash it!

  She crawled forward, took a firm grip on the wooden handle; her head was out from under the car now. Behind her, on the other side of the car, Cassie moved and then called, “Alix?” again. The sound of her name drove her the rest of the way out from under, up onto her knees.

  Cassie heard her, shouted something unintelligible just as Alix located the bulb, and lunged up at it swinging her club.

  But her first swing missed high, hitting the cord instead and setting the light swaying and dancing crazily; light swirled, weird shadows climbed the walls and then fell back again. Cassie fired a shot, but in her haste her aim was off-line: the bullet cut a furrow across the top of the car to Alix’s left with a sound like fingernails dragging down a blackboard.

  Wildly, Alix swung again at the swaying light. She lost her grip on the plunger as she did so, but in flying out of her hand it struck its target. The bulb shattered; the garage was plunged into darkness.

  Another shout from Cassie, but no more shots. Alix dropped to her hands and knees again, crawled behind the row of cardboard cartons. When she’d gone as far as she could she got up in a crouch and extended her hands into the darkness around her, searching for another weapon. At first they encountered only empty space, then she felt a lumpy plastic shape, probably a large sack of potting soil or fertilizer. Her touch stirred up what was inside and a faint but pungent filtering of dust tickled her nostrils. She put a hand up in a vain effort to stop a sudden sneeze.