Puzzle for Pilgrims by Patrick Quentin Read Free Book Online Page B

I couldn’t see her face, but I could imagine it.
    “You!” she said.
    Marietta smiled her blank smile. “I never know how to reply when people say ‘you’.”
    “I might have guessed.” Sally whirled around. Her grabbing little hands caught my sleeves. She glared up at me, her eyes still hectic. “It’s Marietta. The glass, the cigarette butts. It’s Marietta. You’re just another of Marietta’s—”
    “Quiet,” I said.
    Her fingers dug into my coat. She was trying to hurt me. She couldn’t.
    “You’re on their side. You’re just a goddam complacent husband. Why didn’t I guess it? Marietta got you the way she’s got every other man in Mexico. And you’ve been laughing at me. All the time, you’ve been on their side, laughing at me.”
    Marietta was watching her, more curious than anything else.
    I said, “I still think you’d better go home, Sally.”
    She wasn’t listening. She was abandoned to fury as if to a lover.
    “You’ll be sorry.” She lunged away from me, staring at Marietta, including her in her malice. “All of you. You’ll be sorry. Tomorrow, I’ll make you pay. If it’s the last thing I do. I’ll make you pay.”
    She swept her hand over her forehead. The gesture was as corny as Matilda, the Beautiful Shopgirl. But it didn’t make her any less authentic and horrible. She started for the door, her high heels tap-tapping. She reached it. She tugged it open. Then she turned to Marietta, the yellow coat swaying capelike around her shoulders. Bare malignancy was in her eyes.
    “Tomorrow,” she said, “you’ll be in jail.”
    And she laughed.
    I could hear the laughter fading as she clattered down the iron stairway to the patio.
    Marietta dropped onto the sofa. Now Sally was gone, the springiness had left her. She looked tired and white.
    “Nice girl, Sally,” I said.
    “Such original phrases. I’ll make you pay if it’s the last thing I do. She should copyright it.” Marietta glanced up, shaking the dark hair back. “Got any tequila left, Peter?”
    I poured her some. My hand was unsteady. Sally had done that to me. I felt suddenly tired of them all—of Marietta, even of Iris. What did they think I was, anyway, expecting me to work their miracles for them? The Virgin of Guadelupe? Marietta had gone off with her gun-toting citrus-grower. Why the hell hadn’t she stayed with him? Why the hell did she have to come breaking into my house, submitting me to that final, outrageous scene?
    Marietta wasn’t drinking her tequila. She was twisting the glass in her long hands.
    “Aren’t you going to ask me why I came?”
    “I don’t care,” I said. “I’m past caring. I just figure this place has become a seminary for frustrated females and leave it at that.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    She sounded so doleful that it moved me. I crossed and sat down at her side. I took her hand. After Sally, she was so nice to touch.
    “Don’t be sorry, Marietta. What happened? Where’s your gunman?”
    She looked up at me. Her eyes were dark. Suddenly she started to shiver.
    “He wanted me to go home with him.”
    “No.” I kidded her. “A man wanting to go home with you? I can’t believe it.”
    “Those hands.” She was shaking now like a thoroughbred terrier. “So big. Red hairs on the wrists.”
    The enigma of her had never been more tenebrous to me than at that moment. I thought of Sally’s spat accusation that Marietta had made a fool of every man in Mexico. I thought of Marietta herself, calmly dating Jake to meet us in the Delta without telling me, calmly letting him maul her, calmly going with him when what he wanted was obvious. That fitted with my own conception of her—Marietta, the easy, cosmopolitan sophisticate. But here she was back on my hands, shaking, babbling of red hair on wrists, like a nun who had escaped violation by a pin’s breadth.
    I kept her fingers in mine. I said, “Baby, do you English girls have to be told about life? Guys with red hair and