A Hidden Place by Robert Charles Wilson Read Free Book Online Page A

‘misfit’.”
    “Oh,” she said.
    “It’s not fun.”
    She said, “They’re gone now, Travis.”
    “Sometimes you win. Mostly they win. There’s more of them.”
    She rocked him. She put her hand on his forehead. “Dear God. This isn’t new to you, is it?”
    “No,” he said.
    “What were you?” She stroked his hair. “What could you possibly have done?”
    He said nothing.
    She said, “Was it something about your mother?”
    She thought at first he wouldn’t answer. But then, softly, he said, “Everyone knew.” He drew a breath. “I guess I was the last to know. Isn’t that strange? That I should be so close to her and not know—not even suspect!”
    He sat up and faced the darkness. She had to strain against the noise of the river to hear him.
    “We had no money. I knew that. We had loans out on the property Every year a little deeper in debt. I knew that, too. But the other thing. …” He took Nancy’s hand, and his grip was frighteningly tight. “I thought they were friends, her men friends she called them, and sure they stayed sometimes— stayed the night even—but I didn’t know—I was only a kid—I didn’t know they paid. …”
    And then she was holding him, because he could not contain his weeping, and a chill had crept up from the river.

Chapter Four
    T ravis thought often of Nancy Wilcox. But his thoughts returned almost as often to Anna Blaise, to what Nancy called “the mystery.”
    Creath let him borrow the Model A for an evening (after he’d promised to bring it back with the tank full—it was three-quarters empty when he’d climbed in) and he picked up Nancy at the Times Square. They drove far beyond the town, driving for the sake of putting miles in back of them, Nancy watching with a kind of rapt eagerness as the road unfolded. “Like flying,” she said. “I wish we could just keep going forever.”
    September was already a week old. The wind that carried back her hair was cool and fragrant. When they were thirty or forty miles out of Haute Montagne, Travis pulled over and parked them under a stand of bur oaks. There was no other traffic on the road and the stars seemed immensely bright. They had escaped the aura of the town; it was easier to breathe here, Travis thought.
    “See much of Anna?” Nancy asked.
    He had expected the question. She had taken an interest almost as intense as Travis’s own. She’s one of us, Nancy had said the week before, whether she knows it or not. An outcast. It’s like the three of us are connected somehow.
    “The usual,” Travis said.
    She nodded. “I’d like to meet her sometime.”
    “I don’t know if I can arrange that.”
    “You don’t think she’d come? Or don’t you want to ask?”
    “I don’t think Creath would let her.”
    “How do you mean?”
    He hesitated. But then he thought: well, why not tell her? He had come to trust Nancy a damn sight more than he trusted Creath or his Aunt Liza. If he owed his loyalty to anyone, he thought, it was to her.
    “It’s Creath. He uses her. And I think he’s scared somebody might find out.”
    He explained about the late-night visits up the stairs.
    Nancy was wide-eyed, then thoughtful. She put her hands behind her head and gazed up at the canopy of oaks. “The princess in the tower,” she said faintly. “She’s a prisoner.”
    “She doesn’t give him any argument.”
    “Doesn’t matter. Maybe he’s blackmailing her. Maybe he threatens her.” She shook her head. “Jesus! I never did like the man. But this—!”
    “We still don’t know why she’s there. Where she came from.”
    “Find out,” Nancy said. Her features were suffused with new purpose. Her eyes seemed to shine in the dark. “She’s a prisoner. We know that much. And—you know what else, Travis? Maybe we can rescue her.”
    He came home late, parked the car carefully, went upstairs and fell at once into a dazed half-sleep. The footsteps brought him awake again.
    It was a Friday