underground fire; it was impossible to miss. But he said, “There’s more to it than we know.”
“Bound to be. That’s why we have to find out.”
“How?”
“Talk to her. Follow her.” She exhaled a cloud of smoke, tossed the butt out into the roadway, a small cometary arc. “See where she goes.”
She could not have missed the attraction Travis felt toward Anna. Travis was a poor liar. And yet, he thought, she is capable of suggesting this.
Maybe it was her way of testing him. Or, he thought, of testing herself.
He thought of what she had said in the strawberry fields last month: I believe it’s possible to love more than one person….
“It’s chilly these nights,” she said suddenly. Far off, the westbound train wailed. Travis pressed up close to her, put his arm around her protectively. Her cotton dress was like silk under his big hand. She turned toward him, and they kissed, and there was something in the urgency of it that made Travis aware that she had decided to go all the way with him tonight.
He touched her small, perfect breasts. After a time his hand worked up under her dress. He was almost feverish with the wanting, and when she laid herself back against the burlap sacks and he entered her it was like an electric shock of pleasure. He climaxed rapidly. Nancy shuddered under him and he realized, distantly amazed, that she must be experiencing some equivalent fulfillment. Gasping, he told her he loved her.
Maybe he did. It was not a lie; she would have recognized a lie. But he was far less certain than he made himself sound.
Doubt had crept into him even as he performed the act. He loved her, at the very least, for what they had done together, but even that was compromised: it had been too easy, he thought, she gave herself too easily. Women ought not to do that. He looked away as she straightened her skirt. What disturbed him, and what he found hard to admit even to himself, was that the face that had flashed in his mind in that moment of climax had been, not Nancy’s, but Anna’s: her pale china skin; the eyes huge and dark, violated but aloof; her strangely unassailable purity burning in him like fire.
Chapter Five
S eptember crawled on, the cries of the trains acquiring that special autumn melancholy, and at first Liza Burack believed she might have contributed toward the salvation of her sister’s son.
If not the salvation of his soul he refused to go to church with her, claimed his mother would not have approved), then at least his worldly salvation. She had savored the thought, troweling in her backyard garden those long last-of-summer afternoons. / have helped save him, she would think, down on her knees among the gladioli and the fragrant black earth. It was a good thought and in those moments she could almost believe it made everything worthwhile … her fall from grace with the Baptist Women, her sister’s death-in-sin, even Creath’s terrible and unacknowledged private weakness. Even that. I have helped save him.
But she lay awake now in the postmidnight silence of the bedroom, her eyes like beacon lights, moonlight shining on her oaten dresser and Creath beside her like a dead weight; and when she heard Anna’s small footsteps on the landing and then, a few moments after, Travis’s—then she knew she had in fact lost.
She started up after him. By God, she thought, he doesn’t understand! If he understood he would not be chasing after her! If he understood—!
But no. She had told him once. And she had known by his eyes that he did understand. This was no normal woman and his feelings for her were not normal feelings.
And yet he had chosen to follow her.
Strange words flashed in her mind.
Witch. Demon. Succubus.
She went to the door of the bedroom, opened it a crack. There went Travis, a black shadow past the stairwell. And there, hear it now, the click and whine of the front door.
Liza Burack sank back into the bed, defeated.
Travis is lost, she thought, the
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