Read Online Hot Spot by Charles Williams - Free Book Online

her.
    “Where are you?” I asked.
    “At the drugstore. I thought I’d go to the movie, but again I may not. I’m sort of restless—you know how it is. So I might go for a ride.”
    “Yes.”
    “Maybe up the highway about five miles to where a road turns off to the right and goes over to an old sawmill. It’s not hard to find. Once you get on the road you can’t get off.”
    I put the phone back on the cradle. She’d said it, all right. Once you got on the road you couldn’t get off.
    I tried to eat some dinner, but it was straw and it choked me. I walked restlessly up the sidewalk, going nowhere. Sutton was in front of the pool hall with a handful of numbers from a tip board, reading them and throwing them on the sidewalk. He nodded and we looked at each other. I thought of what he had said to Gloria Harper. He liked his laughs so well, why not shag him one in the mouth and watch him laugh his teeth out? Why not mind his own business? He wasn’t shoving me around, was he? And I wasn’t Gloria Harper’s mother.
    I got in the car. Why try to pretend I wasn’t going out there? Did I think I could kid myself? I found the road without any trouble. The moon wasn’t up yet, and it was very dark under the trees. The old sawmill was on the side of a wooded ravine a mile or so from the highway. I saw a dilapidated shed and a pile of sawdust in the headlights, but there was no other car. I cut the lights and sat there, waiting, but I was too restless to sit still very long and got out and walked around.
    I heard the car coming then. It stopped under the trees and the lights went off. The ceiling light came on momentarily and I knew she had opened the door to get out. I walked over. I could see her very faintly, just the blur of her face and the blonde head, but she couldn’t see me at all.
    “Where are you?” she asked.
    I didn’t answer. I stepped closer and reached out and put my hands on her. She gasped, and turned, her arms reaching out, groping for me. I kissed her roughly and her arms tightened about my neck with an urgent wild strength in them. She twisted her face a little to one side and her mouth whispered against my cheek, “Harry, I just had to see you.”
    She was partly right, anyway. She just had to see somebody.
    We were in the car with moonlight spilling into the other side of the ravine. “Do you love me, Harry?” she asked.
    “No,” I said.
    “Well, that’s a fine answer. You might at least say you did.”
    “Why should I?”
    “I just thought it might sound better that way. It don’t make any difference, though, does it?”
    “No.”
    “I suppose you think I’m in love with you, don’t you?”
    “And why would I?”
    “Because I’m here. Well, let me tell you—”
    “You don’t have to tell me. I know why you’re here. But you don’t think we’re going to get by with much of this, do you?”
    “Why not?”
    “And you’re the one who asked me if I’d lived in a small town.”
    “It’s all right. He’s at a lodge meeting.”
    “It’s dangerous as hell. You know that.”
    “I notice you’re telling me that now. You didn’t say anything about it a couple of hours ago.”
    “You didn’t expect me to think then, did you?”
    She laughed. “How’s about another kiss, and to hell with the sermon.” She was a witch, all right. She leaned back against me with her head in my arms and her feet on the window, bare legs a faint gleam in the darkness.
    “Why’d you marry him?” I asked.
    “I don’t know. Maybe I was just getting scared. I’d been married twice before and it didn’t work out, and I was trying to make a living out of a crumby little beauty shop and not getting any younger. I’d known him a long time. He used to come and see me when he was in Houston. It was a kind of a—arrangement, I guess you’d call it. And then, after his wife died—” She paused for a moment, and then went on irritably. “Oh, hell, I don’t know. He just kept after me