They found a quiet spot and sat down.
Your cue, she thought.
And he came in right on cue. His arm went around her and his mouth went to her ear.
“You’re a beautiful girl,” he told her. “Really beautiful. And sweet. I like you very much, April.”
That was funny. Why did he tell her these things? She could not have cared less whether he liked her or not, whether he thought she was beautiful or not. Saying these things would not help him to get her to go All The Way.
He kissed her and she analyzed the kiss, being quite cold and clinical about the whole thing. He gave her breast a squeeze and again she was the keen analytical mind, the sexual scientist adding and subtracting and observing phenomena.
His hand went under her skirt and touched her. And she was surprised
She had expected the cold, analytical attitude to last throughout the whole procedure.
It did not.
Her response astounded her. The reaction was immediate and unexpected, a sharp charge of sensation that overwhelmed her. Automatically she felt herself stiffening with passion and pulled him close, her young body yearning for him.
At four-thirty on the dot she returned to her own house, her purse under one arm and all the leaves brushed from her skirt and sweater. She walked in the front door and called hello to whomever might be home. Everyone was out—Link was somewhere, Dad was at the drugstore, Mom was at another meeting.
She went upstairs, changed her clothes, got a small suitcase from the attic. She filled the suitcase with clothing then added most of the five-hundred-odd dollars she’d gotten from the bank. Purses, she knew, got snatched—presumably by purse-snatchers, she guessed. Her money would be safer in the suitcase.
Bill Piersall was going to be a celebrity, she thought. He’d managed to get to her, and she’d given him a time he probably would remember for quite a while. Now, when she suddenly dropped out of the picture, he would be able to give everybody the last word on April North. This would bring great honor upon his head, by all the rules.
And Jim Bregger was the goat. She could just see his face when he turned up at eight o’clock and found out she was gone. He would be burning, all right—two hours away from a shot at April North, the notorious April North who was nothing but a sex-hungry nymphomaniac, as everyone in Antrim plainly knew.
And she could hear the ribbing he would take:
Man, if it wasn’t for you she’d still be around. Why, she had a fling with Piersall and it was great, see. And then she thought of having to do it with you and it was too much of her. She couldn’t stand it, Jimbo. So she cut out. You ruined it for everybody, Jimbo. Why, we all could have cut ourselves a piece of the cake, there was plenty to go around. But you had to louse it all up.
She laughed.
She snapped the suitcase shut and carried it downstairs. Her purse was slung over her other arm. Nobody saw her when she left the house, and no one saw her walking down Schwerner Street to the edge of town where it became Route 68. There was the place where the bus stopped, and a bus would be along soon. The bus would carry her to Xenia, where the Pennsy stopped on the way to New York.
She stood at the bus stop. After a few minutes she fumbled in her purse for a cigarette. She was kissing the town goodbye, and the old injunction against smoking in public hardly seemed to apply to her. She found a cigarette, put it in her mouth and lit it with the third match she scratched. The wind put the first two out, but on the third try the flame held and she drew smoke into her lungs. She shook the match out, threw it away, closed her purse, and let out a stream of smoke.
To hell with Antrim, she thought. To hell with the whole crowd of narrow-minded bastards. To hell with all of them. They could ruin her reputation but they could not ruin her. She would leave them. She would go to New York, where nobody knew her, and she would do whatever she damn well wanted to do. They could take this town and stick it, as far as she was concerned.
She shifted her weight from one foot to the other. She was slightly nervous now. Suppose someone should pass her while she was waiting for the bus? She was hardly standing in an inaccessible spot. Route 68 was simply an extension of Antrim’s main thoroughfare, and anybody could pass by now and see her there. Suppose a relative came by—what could she do?
She would just have to work it out, she thought. She could tell him she had to take a run into Xenia to buy a book for school, something like that. And by the time her parents found out her lie their knowledge would do them no good. By then she would be on the train for New York and they would not be able to find her.
She barely noticed the sports car. She was lost in thought and hardly looked up when it churned by, heading into Antrim. But she did look up when brakes squealed and whined. She saw the sleek foreign car spin around in its tracks, making a sharp U-turn and pulling to a stop in front of her.
She stared at the driver.
He was no one she had seen before. If she had seen him, she would certainly have remembered him. He looked vastly different from the sort of people she was used to.
His hair was long and jet black. He had combed it lazily back over his head. His skin was deeply tanned, his features sharp and distinctive. His black mustache was neatly trimmed—it gave him a rakish look.
But his eyes were the main feature, as far as she was concerned. No eyes had ever looked at her with that combination of tacit approval and total self-assurance. It would not be quite accurate to say that his eyes undressed her. It was more that they probed beneath her skin.
“I see you’re going my way,” he said lazily. “Hop in, girl.”
3
FOR a long moment she could only stand, stunned. She watched as he leaned easily across the front seat to open the door for her. The door swung free and she looked at the open door, at the empty bucket seat, and at the man who was still eyeing her appreciatively.
“Get in,” he said. “I won’t bite. Not unless you want me to, at any rate.”
“I was going to Xenia,” she said finally.
“I’ll drive you there.”
“I was waiting for the bus.”
“The bus costs forty cents,” he said agreeably. “I don’t have a meter in this thing yet, so I’ll drive you free of charge. Besides, I drive much faster than buses.”
“But—”
“Hop in, girl.”
“Where do I put my suitcase?”
“On your pretty dimpled knees,” he said. Come on.”
She seemed to have no will of her own. Automatically she climbed into the car, sat in the comfortable bucket seat, propped her suitcase up on her lap and closed the door. The man behind the wheel slammed the sports car into gear, let out the clutch and put the accelerator on the floor. The car leaped forward and she felt herself thrown forcibly against the back of her seat. The car picked up speed and the wind played with her hair, tossing it around recklessly.
She wondered who he was, where he lived, how old he might be. He was obviously several years older than the crowd she went around with, probably in his early or middle twenties, yet there was a distinctly youthful air about him. Well, she thought, it really didn’t matter. He was giving her a ride to Xenia and that was all. She would probably never see him again.
“You’re going to Xenia,” he said. “Right?”
“That’s right.”
“Why? What’s in Xenia?”
“A railroad station.”
“Going on a trip?”
“To New York.”
He nodded slowly. “When will you be back?”
She didn’t even think of lying to him. “I won’t be back,” she said. “I’m going to stay in New York.”
“Why?”
Was he going to ask her questions forever? “Because I don’t like Antrim.”
“God above. Does anybody like Antrim?”
“Some people may.”
“So you’re running away from home. That’s what it amounts to, isn’t it?”
&nbs
p; “I suppose so.”
“God above,” he said again. He turned to look at her and she avoided the intensity of his gaze. “What’s your name, girl?”
“April.”
“Is that all?”
“April North.”
“April North,” he repeated. “A good name. I like it.”
“Thanks. I’ll keep it.”
He laughed, loud clear laughter that rang above the throbbing of the car’s engine. When he turned to look at her again she felt his eyes rubbing over her breasts like friendly hands. Her breathing speeded up and her hands trembled in her lap. She had never felt like this before. Just by looking at her he could set her nerves on edge.
And she did not even know his name.
Abruptly he swung the wheel, pulling the sports car off onto an asphalt road. He pressed harder on the accelerator and the car took up the challenge, racing along the black pavement like an angry demon. She saw the speedometer needle hover for an instant at eighty, move onward past ninety, close to one hundred. She had never gone so fast before. The thought occurred to her that she ought to be frightened, but somehow she was not scared at all. She felt intuitively that he knew what he was doing, that he was a good driver and nothing would happen to them.
She said, “This isn’t the way to Xenia.”
“It’s a short cut”
She knew he was lying but did not want to argue with him. She leaned back in her seat, enjoying the ride, abandoning herself to the tug of the wind at her hair and the excitement of speed. The low-slung car hugged the ground—this was far more exciting than riding in a regular car, far more exhilarating. She looked at his hands on the wheel, saw how he concentrated on the act of driving with all his being. It was as though he and the car were two parts of a single mechanism, she thought.
When he turned from the asphalt road and onto a gravel road, she knew beyond any possible doubt that they were not going to Xenia. He was probably going to take her somewhere in the country and seduce her, she decided. Maybe he would rape her if she refused, or else toss her out of the car to walk home. Well, he had no need to worry. She would give in, if that was what he wanted. If she could give in to Bill Piersall, she could just as easily give in to this man. At least he looked as if he had a better idea of what to do than Bill did.
Besides, she admitted, she was excited. Evidently the boys in Antrim were right, because she was excited and ready for sex. It was ridiculous—she didn’t even know this man. But she knew that she would do whatever he wanted her to do.
The car stopped with a screech of rubber. “We’re here,” he announced. “Get out of the car, April.”
“Where are we?”
“At my house. Do you like it?”
She stared. The house was set back some fifty yards from the road at the peak of a sharp hill, and it was unlike any house she had ever seen in Antrim. The architectural style was dramatically contemporary, somewhat in the manner of Frank Lloyd Wright, and no one else in the area had a house remotely like it April had seen similar homes in the movies and on television. But shoddy one-floor ranch homes were as close as Antrim permitted itself to come to the twentieth century.
This house was startlingly but pleasantly different. Sharp planes of brick and glass thrust themselves at odd angles. A circular courtyard made a mouth out of the house’s front entrance. The landscaping was precisely suited to the house and strengthened the impression that the structure had grown from the ground itself.
“Well? Do you like it?”
“Yes,” she said honestly. “I like it very much.”
“It’s my home,” he said. “The architect who designed it was a classmate of mine at Chicago. Before I was thrown out, that is. I’m glad you like it”
“Do you live with your parents?”
“My parents are dead.”
“Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” he told her. “I’m not. I didn’t like them. Come on inside, April.”
On the flagstone path leading to the front door, she remembered for the first time that she had been on her way to Xenia. She mentioned this.
“I can’t take you to Xenia,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Because you’re running away from home. Now if I helped you run away from home, I would be contributing to the delinquency of a minor. You can’t expect me to do that, can you?”
“Then you should have let me take the bus.”
“But then I didn’t know you were running away. I want to talk to you, April. We’ll sit in my living room and drink a drink or two and you’ll tell me why you want to run away. That’s all. Fair enough?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re being silly,” he said. “Look, you’ve said that you like the house. Wouldn’t you like to see how the inside looks?”
He did not wait for an answer. He took her suitcase in one hand and her arm in the other and led her to the door. He shouldered the door open and led her inside, closing the door after her. “There,” he said. “Like it?”
The interior of the house matched the exterior in the sharpness of its contemporary lines. But April would not have believed that such an angular sort of house could seem so warm within. The floors were of highly polished wood, with high-piled rugs placed here and there across the huge living room. The furniture was wood and steel, the wood deeply-grained and the steel black and shiny. In the huge flagstone fireplace at one end of the living room logs were piled, ready for the iron lighter at one side.
“It’s very nice,” she said lamely.
“I’ll get you a drink. Scotch all right?”
“I guess so.”
“Have a seat, April.”
She sat on a couch that turned out to be far more comfortable than it looked, while he went to the bar and poured drinks. He came back, stopping on his way to flick a switch on the wall. Music filtered into the room, coming, it seemed, from all sides. It was modern jazz, penetrating and insistent. He handed her a drink and sat beside her on the couch.
“I suppose you wonder who I am,” he said.
“That’s putting it mildly.”
He laughed again. “My name is Craig,” he said. “Craig Jeffers. I’m very rich, as you’ve probably guessed, and I’m very wild, as you’ve probably guessed, also. I live alone here. My parents lived in Dayton, where my father made an enormous amount of money. I’m not sure just how he made the money, although I suppose he made it by giving some poor slobs the wrong end of the stick. He was that sort of a bastard.”
April said nothing.
“He’s dead now,” Craig went on dispassionately. “I’m not unhappy about it. He killed mother two years ago, then put a bullet through his own brain. You probably read about it. It even made the wire services and of course the local press had an absolute blast with it.”
She remembered, dimly. Headlines had screamed, local industrialist kills self, wife. She nodded dutifully and took a sip of her drink. She was not used to straight liquor, but this was very smooth and she did not choke on it.
“That’s the story of my life,” he said. “What little there has been of it so far, at any rate. I’m twenty-six. I live here because I want to. I’ve been all over the United States and through most of Europe. I’ve watched bullfights in Spain and I’ve slept with Paris whores. I’ve raced cars in California and I’ve gambled in Miami. I live here, in this horrible section of the horrible state of Ohio.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to, April. Because this is my home, perhaps. I have my house and I have my car. Do you like the car, by the way?”
“Yes.”
“It’s a Mercedes-Benz 300-SL. It handles like a dream and goes like hell. I like it too.”
He tossed off the rest of his drink and set the empty glass on the coffee table. He took out a pack of cigarettes and gave one to her, keeping another for himself. He lighted both of them and they sat side by side smoking. She drank more of her drink. The liquor
was making her feel pleasantly lightheaded. She sipped and smoked.
“That’s my story,” Craig said suddenly. “Now it’s time for you to tell me yours.”
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“Nothing?”
“I live with my parents and go to high school in Antrim. That’s all there is to it.”
He arched his eyebrows. “You were on your way to Xenia,” he said. “From there you were going to take a train to New York, and you weren’t coming back. Now don’t try to tell me there’s nothing more besides the fact that you live at home and go to high school in Antrim. You have to do better than that, April.”
She stared into her glass of scotch, avoiding his eyes. Her story was not the kind you went around telling to people, she thought. But by the same token he was not the sort of person you usually ran across. And there was something about him that made her want to open up, something that somehow inspired her confidence.
“It’s not a pretty story,” she said.
“Few stories are. Not the interesting ones, at any rate.”
“And I’m not as sweet and innocent as I seem.”
“Well,” he said, “thank God for that.”
She laughed. The drink was working now, loosening her up, letting her unwind. And the music, the insistently pulsating jazz, was also working. She looked around the room, deciding that she felt at home here, that she was comfortable. She looked at Craig and decided that he was the most exciting man she had ever met. She could not imagine why he would want to waste his time talking to her. He could have any girl in the world, she told herself. And he could do more than talk to them.
“All right,” she said slowly. “I’ll tell you.”
When she had finished, he stood up from the couch, took her empty glass and carried it to the bar. He dropped two fresh ice cubes into the glass and added a healthy splash of scotch. He made a drink for himself, brought back the two glasses and gave her one.
“To the new April North,” he said.
They touched glasses and she took a drink. She was somehow much calmer now. And glad that she had told him.