goosing Mom through her snowpants. The way he sometimes goosed her when he got a buzz on was also something that had always irritated Leigh precisely because it seemed such a juvenile thing for a grown man to do. But of course she loved them both. Her love was a part of the irritation, and her occasional exasperation with them was very much a part of her love.
They were walking together through a snow as thick as heavy smoke and then two huge green eyes opened in the white behind them, seeming to float . . . eyes that looked terribly like the circles of the dashboard instruments she had seen as she was choking to death . . . and they were growing . . . stalking her helpless, laughing, squiffy parents.
She drew a harsh breath and went back into the living room. She approached the telephone, almost touched it, then veered away and went back to the window, looking out into the white and cupping her elbows in the palms of her hands.
What had she been about to do? Call them? Tell them she was alone in the house and had gotten thinking about Arnie's old and somehow slinking car, his steel girlfriend Christine, and that she wanted them to come home because she was scared for them and herself? Was that what she was going to do?
Cute, Leigh. Cute.
The ploughed blacktop of the street was disappearing under new snow, but slowly; it had only just begun to snow really hard, and the wind periodically tried to clear the street with strong gusts that sent membranes of powder twisting and rising to merge with the whitish-grey sky of the stormy afternoon like slowly twisting smoke-ghosts. . . .
Oh, but the terror was there, it was real, and something was going to happen. She knew it. She had been shocked to hear that Arnie had been arrested for smuggling, but that reaction had been nowhere as strong as the sick fear she had felt when she opened the paper on an earlier day and saw what had happened to Buddy Repperton and those other two boys, that day when her first crazy, terrible, and somehow certain thought had been. Christine.
And now the premonition of some new piece of black work hung heavily on her, and she couldn't get rid of it, it was crazy, Arnie had been in Philadelphia at a chess tourney, she had asked around that day, that was all there was to it and she would not think about this anymore she would turn on all the radios the TV fill the house up with sound not think about that car that smelled like the grave that car that had tried to kill her murder her.
'Oh damn,' she whispered. 'Can't you quit?'
Her arms, sculpted rigidly in gooseflesh.
Abruptly she went to the telephone again, found the phone book, and as Arnie had done on an evening some two weeks before, she called Libertyville Community Hospital. A pleasant-voiced receptionist told her that Mr Guilder had been checked out that morning. Leigh thanked her and hung up.
She stood thoughtful in the empty living room, looking at the small tree, the presents, the manger in the corner. Then she looked up the Guilders' number in the phone book and dialled it.
'Leigh,' Dennis said, happily pleased.
The phone in her hand felt cold. 'Dennis, can I come over and talk to you?'
'Today?' he asked, surprised.
Confused thoughts tumbled through her mind. The ham in the oven. She had to turn the oven off at five. Her parents would be home. It was Christmas Eve. The snow. And . . . and she didn't think it would be safe to be out tonight. Out walking on the sidewalks, when anything might come looming out of the snow. Anything at all. Not tonight, that was the worst. She didn't think it would be safe to be out tonight.
'Leigh?'
'Not tonight,' she said. 'I'm house-sitting for my folks.
They're at a cocktail party.'
'Yeah, mine too,' Dennis said, amused. 'My sister and I are playing Parcheesi. She cheats.'
Faintly: 'I do not!'
At another time it might have been funny. It wasn't now.
After Christmas. Maybe on Tuesday. The twenty-sixth. Would that be all right?'
'Sure,' he said. 'Leigh, is it about Arnie?'
'No,' she said, clutching the telephone so tightly that her hand felt numb. She had to struggle with her voice. 'No - not Arnie. I want to talk to you about Christine.'
PART II: ARNIE - TEENAGE LOVE-SONGS Chapter 42 THE STORM