Passage of the Night

by Amanda Carpenter

  That shook Louise's new-found composure. The fingernail tapping stopped, her pretty mouth dropped and she all but shrieked, 'You what?'

  'You heard what I said.' Kirstie turned away to look out of her window. She saw nothing of the wide city street but thought again of the hot, bright sunshine reflected off the still lake waters. She made a wry, sarcastic gesture. 'Not that he wanted to go, of course. I forced him. I was going to keep him away from you until your wedding on Saturday, but he—convinced me it was better to get hold of you so that we could all talk about it face to face.'

  'You—forced—Francis?' Parrot-like, her sister repeated the words as if they were a foreign language. Then she started to laugh. 'You're joking! Aren't you?'

  'Not,' said Kirstie, heavy with remorse, 'quite.'

  'But how? I mean—Francis, of all people—forgive me, darling, but you couldn't exactly have twisted his arm!'

  'No,' she agreed, her grey eyes empty. 'I used Dad's old gun. Oh, there weren't any bullets in it, but he didn't know that, and at first he didn't know me from Eve.'

  'But how could you?' Louise demanded incredulously. 'How dared you?'

  The shock in her sister's voice made her throw her hand out in a sudden, sharp movement. 'Oh, I don't know!' she exclaimed. 'I admit it was a lunatic thing to do, but ' Kirstie stabbed her sister with .a fierce, painful glance. She whispered fiercely, 'Maybe you just thought to cover your tracks, but you don't know how convincing you can be!'

  'Oh, Kirstie,' Louise murmured, her cornflower eyes filling with easy tears. Her right hand fluttered out to touch Kirstie's shoulder. 'And you did all that for me. I—I don't know what to say.'

  'Don't say anything.' She slid down in her seat, put her elbow to her open window and covered her eyes in an effort to hold on to her control. It was her responsibility. It always had been. She was the one who had to live with the fact that what she had done to Francis was unforgivable. 'Just don't ever do that to me again.'

  Left with nothing to say, Louise moved at last to start the car and take them home. The gaudy, multicoloured lights advertising off-licences, fast-food restaurants, late-night grocers, hotels, all flashed past them with what seemed like brilliant speed. It was a totally different world from the log cabin, and it was the real one.

  Kirstie stared at it all passing by until she was shaken out of her brooding by the light sound of Louise's sudden inexplicable laugh. 'Fancy that,' said Louise softly, as her small foot pressed down on the accelerator as they reached the freeway. The wind whipped her sister's long silken strands into a luscious, honeyed cloud. 'You and Francis spending a whole, secluded weekend up at the cabin. It sounds—it sounds so very intimate!'

  'Don't make me laugh!' Kirstie snarled, as if lashed by a whip.

  But Louise must have misunderstood and thought she meant it light-heartedly, for at that her sister laughed again.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Summer percolated into July, with no significant letup from the heat. Shirts stuck to sweaty backs, the Coke machine in the Philips Aviation offices broke down from over-use and tempers were undeniably short.

  One Friday morning, Kirstie perched cross-legged on a wooden crate in the small hold of the cargo plane and took inventory of the stock being brought aboard. She was dressed in a khaki flying suit made of the lightest possible fabric, and still she was baking. Her grandfather Whit was grumbling and roaring at the ground crew; the irascible shouts echoed up the hatch and seemed magnified in the confined space where she crouched.

  She'd volunteered for the inventory job, for, though it was physically rather uncomfortable, it was purely mechanical and left her free to huddle in a corner and let her mind wander where it would.

  It had been four smouldering weeks since the Bomb. Kirstie always referred to Louise's wedding fiasco that way. It had her shaking her head just to remember the day. The invited guests had arrived, the minister had been dressing in the choir room, Neil had been to one side talking with his best man, and Louise had refused to budge. Point-blank.

  Their eldest brother Paul had tried to reason with her. The minister had come. Neil had come. So had Grandma and Whit. They had all talked. The bridesmaids had cajoled. The minister had left and called off the wedding in a formal announcement to the congregation, while, tucked away in a corner, Kirstie had watched the commencing drama with horror and her other brother Christian had laughed.

  Something of Kirstie's perspective had changed since the time spent in Vermont with Francis, and she had begun to see a disturbing pattern developing in Louise's behaviour.

  After the ruckus had died down, after the guests had left and the wedding decorations had been dismantled and carted away, Kirstie had gone back to the house she had shared with Louise with a cold feeling in her heart, and waited.

  The scene she had expected was not long in coming. . .

  Louise came in later that evening, her eyes swollen with crying, her pretty face wearing an expression of haggard distress. When she saw Kirstie curled up at one end of the battered comfortable sofa, she made a move as if she would throw herself into her younger sister's arms, but something in Kirstie's expression stopped her.

  Kirstie watched Louise pause and drag in a deep, shuddering breath. 'Well,' said Louise heavily, 'that's it. It's done.'

  'Yes,' replied Kirstie quietly.

  The china-blue eyes flickered and one of Louise's shapely, graceful hands fluttered up to press against her wrinkled forehead. 'How could I have waited so long without realising?' Louise murmured. 'How could I have fooled myself into believing that marriage with Neil was the right thing to do?'

  'I don't know,' said Kirstie, and she was rewarded with a sharp glance.

  Louise glided over to an armchair and flung herself into it, burying her face in her hands. 'It's just that it seemed so expected. Everyone believed we would marry! His family did, Grandma, Paul, you. It was so easy to go along with it.'

  'Until the last moment, when everyone was hurt.' Kirstie didn't feel cold or condemning, nor did she sound it. She was merely detached, and she couldn't give Louise the sympathy she was so obviously angling for.

  Louise lifted her head, her blue eyes flooding with easy tears. 'Until today,' she corrected, 'when I just couldn't go through with it. No matter how painful it was, no matter how unbearable the look in Neil's eyes, I had to call it off, for his sake as much as for mine. The marriage wouldn't have worked and he would have been hurt as well. It was best to end it before we both put years into a marriage that was destined to fail. What if we'd had children? What would have happened to them?'

  'Why are you explaining all this to me?' Kirstie asked, her hands clenched on the cushion she was holding to her stomach, her mouth tight. She already knew what her sister's answer would be. She'd heard it before.

  Louise said softly, gently, 'Because you don't understand. You never would have left it until the last minute. You would have seen. You're stronger than I am.'

  Now, perspiring in the metal hold of the little plane and immersed in her gritty work, Kirstie realised that something inside her had been waiting for Louise to back out of the wedding, ever since that final confrontation in Francis's apartment. All the signs had been evident. Louise had thought she had wanted Neil, then was presented with a bigger, more glittering toy, so she'd thrown away the one she had had.

  It was not, she knew, that her sister was malicious or wicked. It was just that Louise was supremely selfish. She did whatever she wanted to do, and she justified it to whichever person she was talking to in their own language. She enjoyed acting out the required emotions. Everyone thought they knew her well, Paul, Grandma, Neil—even she had.

  Christian knew better. Kirstie had always wondered at Louise's coolness towards him, and now she knew why. Her tall, charmingly irresponsible brother saw Louise for what she really was and was unaffected, even amused by her. If it was one thing Louise did not have, it was a sense of humour. She was as incapable of laughing at herself as she was of passing a mi
rror without looking into it.

  Kirstie's newer, more complete understanding of her sister changed her definition of Francis's kidnap from being a terrible misunderstanding to a ridiculous farce, except she couldn't bring herself to laugh at it. Louise had thought she was being so clever in manipulating her, until Kirstie had gone off at the deep end and had done something totally uncalculated. Louise was not a creative thinker. There was no way she could have foreseen it.

  And Francis—an appalled sound bubbled out of Kirstie—Francis had been totally in the dark. Every incredulous look she could remember, every sign of incomprehension was now, to her, hideously appropriate. How carefully he had worked at bringing her around to a reasonable point of view! What a lunatic he must think her!

  No, Kirstie couldn't laugh about it. Depression settled in the pit of her stomach at just thinking about that whole catastrophic weekend. If she were ever to come face to face again with Francis Grayson, she would pull up the carpet and crawl right underneath. Not that it would ever happen. She had no doubt that she was enough reason to make him avoid the whole state of New Jersey.

  She wondered, cynically, how long it would take Louise to get in touch with him again. Then she told herself, as she already had, so many times, that it was none of her business. Of course she didn't care.

  Why would she?

  Footsteps stomped up to the open hatch, and her grandfather stuck his grizzled head inside. 'Hey! That's the last. Didn't you hear me?'

  The testy exclamation made Kirstie jump. She shook herself out of her reverie and stared at him. 'Sorry, no. I was thinking of something else.'

  'Well, I hope you got the tally right,' he said. 'We ain't unstacking and repacking in this heat just because you were daydreaming.'

  'No, it's all right,' Kirstie said, checking her figures. 'I got them all down. I just wasn't listening to your shouting.'

  'That's the trouble,' mumbled her grandfather, screwing his face into a frown. She stared, amused. Heavens, he enjoyed a good grumble. 'If people listened to me more, I wouldn't have to shout, would I? Well, what are you waiting for, Christmas? Climb on out of there and get this crate off the tarmac. You should have left a half an hour ago.'

  'Yes, Grandpa,' said Kirstie meekly, a smile trembling at the corners of her lips.

  His faded blue eyes twinkled at her, making a lie of his behaviour. Then he ducked back out and howled at his ground crew, 'Go on, get out of here! Go get some lunch, and give me some peace for an hour.'

  The plane was already fuelled, checked and set to go. Kirstie was given priority as she was late, and within ten minutes she taxied down the runway, experiencing as she always did an uplift of spirits as the plane rose in the air.

  An undeniable streak of mischief made her radio in to control, 'I estimate arrival in Memphis at 0200 hours '

  The radio squawked in consternation, and Paul overrode their air traffic controller to snap, 'Negative, that's an inaccurate flight plan, Kirstie. your destination in Cincinnati, repeat, Cincinnati, not Memphis '

  She smiled and put her pilot's sunglasses on. 'Just making sure you're on your toes. I'll be back around seven this evening. Who's staying to see me in?'

  There was a pause. 'I am,' said her brother, then, with disgust, 'so don't be late.'

  Because the weather was in her favour, Kirstie made up for lost time and landed in Cincinnati on schedule. She had a late lunch of coffee and sandwiches while the plane was being unloaded, then headed back to New Jersey with the setting sun behind her, humming tunelessly and switching radio frequencies to amuse herself.

  Normally the four full-time pilots, of whom Christian was one, drew straws as to who worked late on Friday, but she didn't mind making the Cincinnati run this week since she hadn't much planned for the evening. She hoped that Louise would be going out so that she could relax in peace, perhaps mess about in the kitchen fixing supper and watch some television.

  Kirstie's social circle was wide enough that she had no shortage of dates when she wanted it, but it lacked the hectic quality of Louise's lifestyle. Kirstie was just as happy soaking in a bath and enjoying her own company, whereas Louise was out almost every night of the week and resented having to stay in the odd evening to mark papers.

  Coming in the last leg of her journey, she contacted control, received clearance which by this time was just a formality as everyone else should be grounded, and she lined up for her descent.

  'Look out the window and wave, Paul,' she called in, and dipped her wings back and forth when the control tower came into sight.

  Paul's long-suffering attitude was apparent, even over the radio. 'Why me, Kirstie? I know your professional reputation. You're on time, you're efficient, polite, no hassle. It's never anyone else but me.'

  Kirstie tilted the plane to one side again. 'You're just so cute when you're teased. I wouldn't do it if I didn't love you.'

  'Try landing the plane right side up like a good girl, and behave yourself,' he said, drily resigned, against a background of laughter. 'You're on the loudspeaker and we've got company.'

  She was too startled to do anything else but comply, and she executed a perfect landing with the careless flourish of a professional, afterwards taxiing the plane to the appropriate hangar. She wondered who was at the tower after business hours. Carol sometimes came to pick up her husband, but Paul wouldn't have called family 'company'.

  Outside the plane, the waiting ground crew ran to put wheel blocks into place while Kirstie unstrapped herself and began to shut down the engine. Paul came over the air again. 'How long before you can come to the tower, Kirstie?'

  She drew her brows together and replied, 'I wasn't planning on doing the paperwork tonight. The inventory was checked, and the Cincinnati firm's happy.'

  'That's all right, leave it till Monday. You've got somebody waiting here to see you.'

  She had 'company', and her puzzled frown deepened. 'Roger, be there in five minutes.'

  Who could it be? She wasn't expecting anyone, had no date for tonight, and it was apparently nobody Paul knew. She wondered as she strolled towards the tower and main offices, pushing her sunglasses up her nose. It was still hot, and she was parched with thirst. She hoped the Coke machine had been fixed that afternoon; she'd threatened Paul with a strike if it hadn't, and she dug for some change as she walked down the hall towards it.

  The contrary machine took her money and did nothing. She slammed her frustrated fist into it, and it spat out three cans with a pathetic whine. Then it spat out all its money. She watched with amusement as the quarters spilled on to the floor.

  'Hey, Paul!' she shouted. 'The drinks machine is really broken this time, but never mind. I just hit jackpot.'

  She bent the tab of her drink back and raised her laughing gaze as someone strolled around the end of the hall. But it wasn't her brother Paul coming to investigate; it was Francis Grayson, nonchalant and bigger than life, his hands tucked in the trouser pockets of his suit.

  Shock froze her where she stood, and in the few seconds it took him to reach her she noticed a host of irrelevant things: how the burnished newness of his tan had faded, how vivid his lazy emerald eyes were, how the fitting of his suit to that athletically formed body was superb. She also had time to think of how she was attired, and curse her inevitable luck at the small battered Nikes, the serviceable flying suit, how her short hair was thrust off her heat-flushed face.

  She was glad she had her dark pilot's glasses to hide behind as he stopped in front of her and smiled slowly. 'Hello.'

  'Hello yourself.' For lack of anything better to do, she tilted her head back and drank, all too aware of his gaze on her long, exposed throat. She then told him, 'You wouldn't exactly have been my first guess as to who was waiting for me.'

  'No?' His green eyes blinked secretively. 'Who would have been your first guess?'

  She ignored that and bent to scoop up the extra Coke and the quarters. 'What can I do for you?' How have you been? Have you forgiven, and forgotte
n?

  'You can go out with me tonight.' She dropped one of the cans, and his long-fingered hand beat hers to picking it up. 'I need to talk to you.'

  Ah. Comprehension dawned at his second sentence, and she was glad she had kept what was visible of her face under tight rein. She said, 'Louise.'

  He didn't respond to that; he merely asked, 'Will you come?'

  She turned away in silence and strode for the lit control-room, with her hands full of money, and two cans of Coke tucked in her arm. Francis matched her shorter stride, and just before the doorway he put one hand on her arm so that she had to stop.

  'Please,' he said.

  She had asked herself many questions during that short silence, and one of them was whether she really would or not, so she already knew what she was going to say. 'All right. I owe you that.'

  Inside the control-room was her curious elder brother, but she wasn't about to indulge any of his obvious hints. She just deposited the quarters and extra can on the table beside Paul, while Francis handed him the third can and said goodnight. She could feel Paul's eyes boring into her back as they walked out of the room. At the doorway she glanced back in time to see him bend the tab back of the Coke he was holding, and he yelled as the disturbed brown liquid sprayed all over his face and desk.

  Laughing again, she followed Francis out to the street exit, looking at Philips Aviation through the eyes of a stranger. In comparison to any international airport, this set-up was like a toy, but it was an impressive-looking toy. Half the buildings were new, the other half pristine. The general air was one of precision and competence. That would appeal to Francis, she knew.

  She dragged to a halt by the car park, the sight of the BMW evoking an odd, bittersweet regret inside her. Francis was one stride behind, noticing her stop, and he pivoted on one heel back to her, an easy, thoughtless movement that seemed to her half completed. In her mind she finished it for him, took one step forward and threw her arms around his neck in an uncomplicated gladness.