The Woman Who Married a Cloud: The Collected Short Stories by Jonathan Carroll Page A

was suddenly miles wide. There was such silence between us. It told me no; in her mind, I still deserved no trust. That was so shocking after all those years. I would have gone to my grave thinking I had been bad once, but slowly, slowly, I had become all right again in my wife’s heart. Wrong. Like one of those ghastly accidents in nuclear power plants, my almost with Glenda Revelle had spoiled the earth around us for a thousand years.
    “Scott!”
    “What?! I’m going to find Beenie. I’m going to talk to her and find out what the hell she’s doing. Then I’m going to come back here and dig out what other poisons you’ve got inside you.”
    I don’t like driving in the snow, because I never feel like I have full control over the car on icy roads. But you can bet your behind I drove that day. I drove too fast, and a couple of times fishtailed going around turns. Beenie had never gone home early, much less ten minutes after arriving, but her unhappiness today didn’t concern me. I would leave her alone as soon as she told me about the dead girl’s manuscript, and where she’d found letters I’d burned years ago.
    Strange as it sounds, it didn’t cross my mind that these circumstances were bizarre and verging on the impossible. I knew I’d given Annette’s book to the cops and had thrown the black letters into the fire. Despite that, here they all were again, back on earth to accuse and alarm. Yet I wasn’t spooked; I was irate! Who was this woman to dredge my past and come up with the only things I wanted to stay buried a fathom deep? I wasn’t a bad man, damn it, but these two memories said I was. Insensitive and selfish, a pedantic lecher who cared little for most people and too much in the wrongest way for others.
    We have friends who live on Plum Hill. Houses there are old and big, and most have long sweeps of lawn right down to the lake. Groucho Marx had spent a summer there, and was purported to have said it would have been a nice place if it hadn’t been so beautiful. Whenever there, I always marvelled over the way the buildings, like powerful elder statesmen, sat up on that hill and knew they were impressive even if you had no idea whom they belonged to. Now and then, Roberta and I talked about what it’d be like to live on Plum Hill, but in our hearts, we knew it wasn’t for us. What would we do next door to Peter Dawson, who owned the biggest newspaper in the state? Or Dexter Lewis, the junk-bond king? These were people you saw in town on Saturday wearing freshly ironed khaki pants and denim shirts, getting a haircut or buying a hammer at the hardware store. You nodded at each other and perhaps said a few pleasant, shoot-the-breeze words while waiting in line for the cashier to get on with it. But outside, the “Plums” drove off in their new Mercedes, while you dug in your pocket for the keys to a Chevy that hadn’t been washed in some weeks. The world of difference doesn’t rip you apart, but, once in a while, you stand by the door of your car a little too long and give a small sigh.
    I stopped at a gas station and used the book in their phone booth to find her address. “B. Rushforth—Plum Hill 67a.” I assumed the small a meant the difference between her gatehouse and the main. The sky had started the morning blue, but had slipped down grey-white to almost brown by the time I entered the Plum Hill gates and started looking for numbers. A large black labrador retriever ran out of a driveway and followed the car, barking awhile until he lost interest a few houses down and wagged his tail back home. Sixty-three, 65, 67. The name on the mailbox was none other than Samuel Morgan, sole owner of the Morgan Computer Company. You know the one I’m talking about—each machine costs millions and is the darling of the US Defense Department? I think the man is still in his thirties, but is reputed to be astronomically wealthy. Beenie rented her house from this guy?
    The driveway wound up and