Snowbound by Bill Pronzini Read Free Book Online Page A

spiraled inside her, and she couldn’t go through with it, she simply could not go through with it. She pushed away from him, flushed and ashamed, straightening her skirt and blouse, putting on her coat, not looking at him at all then; and even though he did not protest, was in fact nonchalant in his mild defeat, she had had the abased feeling that he was silently laughing at her.
    She left Reno the next morning, not explaining to Rae because Rae knew by looking at her what the trouble was, and came back to Hidden Valley filled with the sense of resignation. There had been no more flings. . . .
    Aimlessly Rebecca left the bedroom and went downstairs, along the hallway into the bright copper-tone kitchen at the rear of the house. Again, she did not turn on the lights. She rummaged through one of the pine cupboards over the drainboard, looking for the coffee, and then remembered she had used the last of it during the afternoon—that was why she had called Matt, for God’s sake. No coffee then, and how about a nice hot cup of tea? Yes, fine, and it did not matter in the least that she hated the taste of the stuff.
    She filled a kettle with icy tap water, set it on the stove, and went back to stand in front of the drainboard, waiting in the darkness for the water to heat. As she stood there, she found herself staring through the window over the sink, through the snowy dark and the ghostly pines at the faint haze of light in the cabin five hundred yards farther up the slope. Zachary Cain, reticent recluse, she thought. Never talks to anyone, seldom leaves the cabin. According to Matt, he buys five or six bottles of whiskey a week, which means he sits up there and drinks alone, and I wonder why, I wonder who he is?
    When the water finally began to boil, she made the cup of tea and laced it liberally with sugar and carried it into the living room. As she sat again on the couch, she continued to wonder about the man named Zachary Cain—who he was, why he drank so much, what his reason was for coming to a place like Hidden Valley. And, even though it didn’t really matter, couldn’t really matter, if he too were somehow lonely.

Five
     
    Lying not-quite-drunk in the darkened cabin bedroom, Cain felt a sense of acute loneliness that was for the first time disassociated from Angie and Lindy and Steve.
    The day had been another of the bad ones, filled with painful memories of his family that deepened what was an already mordant despair. But with the coming of darkness, those were not the only memories which had plagued him. Inexplicably, he found himself thinking of things he had locked away in a corner of his mind for the past six months.
    There was his work, his abandoned profession. He had been an architect—a good one, a dedicated craftsman—and he recalled how it had been and how you could lose yourself in mathematics and blueprints and sheer creativity, and the way you felt when you saw one of your designs taking shape in wood and glass and stone, standing complete, an entity you alone had conceived.
    There were the friends with whom he had willfully severed all relations, by disappearing from San Francisco without word shortly after the accident: Don Collins, another senior employee of the architectural firm for which he had worked and his closest friend; Bert Rhymer, whom he had known since their collegiate days at Stanford; Barry Kells, Fred Gaines, Walt Yamaguchi. And all the easy confidences they had exchanged, the interests they had shared, the laughter they had known.
    There were the simple pleasures and relaxations, the little things that rounded out and made complete a man’s life: the look of San Francisco, the multifaceted jewel of lights that was The City on a warm spring or summer night; drinking ice-chilled beer and fishing languidly for bass beneath the cottonwoods and willows on the narrow waterways of the San Joaquin Delta; sailing on the Bay on bright windy afternoons, venturing under the Golden Gate