put his finger on. “Not that I was surprised. I knew you had been out of the room. That’s the bad news. I’ve known for a long, long time, Paul.”
He should feel angry and dismayed, he supposed. She had known, known almost from the start, it seemed ... but he could only feel that dreamy, floating euphoria, and what she was saying did not seem nearly as important as the glorious quality of the strengthening light as the day hovered on the edge of becoming.
“But,” she said with the air of one returning to business, “we were talking about your car. I have studded tires, Paul, and at my place in the hills I keep a set of 10X tire chains. Early yesterday afternoon I felt ever so much better—I spent most of my time up there on my knees, deep in prayer, and the answer came, as it often does, and it was quite simple, as it often is. What you take to the Lord in prayer, Paul, He giveth back a thousandfold. So I put the chains on and I crept back down here. It was not easy, and I knew I might well have an accident in spite of the studs and the chains. I also knew that there is rarely such a thing as a ‘minor accident’ on those twisty upcountry roads. But I felt easy in my mind, because I felt safe in the will of the Lord.”
“That’s very uplifting, Annie,” Paul croaked.
She gave him a look which was momentarily startled and narrowly suspicious ... and then she relaxed and smiled. “I’ve got a present for you, Paul,” she said softly, and before he could ask her what it was—he wasn’t sure he wanted any sort of present from Annie—she went on: “The roads were terribly icy. I almost went off twice.... The second time, Old Bessie slid all the way around in a circle and kept right on going downhill while she did it!” Annie laughed cheerily. “Then I got stuck in a snowbank—this was around midnight—but a sanding-crew from the Eustice Public Works Department came along and helped me out.”
“Bully for the Eustice Public Works Department,” Paul said, but what came out was badly slurred—Burry furdah Estice Pulleygurks Deparrent.
“The two miles in from the county highway, that was the last hard patch. The county highway is Route 9, you know. The road you were on when you had your wreck. They had sanded that one to a fare-thee-well. I stopped where you went off and looked for your car. And I knew what I would have to do if I saw it. Because there would be questions, and I’d be just about the first one they’d ask those questions to, for reasons I think you know.”
I’m way ahead of you, Annie, he thought. I examined this whole scenario three weeks ago.
“One of the reasons I brought you back was because it seemed like more than a coincidence ... it seemed more like the hand of Providence.”
“What seemed like the hand of Providence, Annie?” he managed.
“Your car was wrecked in almost exactly the same spot where I got rid of that Pomeroy creep. The one who said he was an artist.” She flapped a hand in contempt, shifted her feet, and there was that wooden clunking sound as one of them brushed some of whatever it was she had down there on the floor.
“I picked him up on my way back from Estes Park. I was there at a ceramics show. I like little ceramic figurines.”
“I noticed,” Paul said. His voice seemed to come from light-years away. Captain Kirk! There’s a voice coming in over the sub-etheric, he thought, and chuckled dimly. That deep part of him—the part the dope couldn’t reach—tried to warn him to shut his mouth, just shut it, but what was the sense? She knew. Of course she knows—the Bourka Bee-Goddess knows everything. “I particularly liked the penguin on the block of ice.”
“Thank you, Paul ... he is cute, isn’t he?
“Pomeroy was hitchhiking. He had a pack on his back. He said he was an artist, although I found out later he was nothing but a hippie dope-fiend dirty bird who had been washing dishes in an Estes Park restaurant for the last couple of months. When I told him I had a place in Sidewinder, he said that was a real coincidence. He said he was going to Sidewinder. He said he’d gotten an assignment from a magazine in