“Well,” Mike Harrison said, “shall we be on our way now?”
“Whatever you say,” Katherine said, standing arid buttoning her coat. “We'll have to stop at my car and pick up my bags before going to Owlsden.”
“Fine,” he said. “There's a storage compartment in the Rover that's big enough to move a household.”
“Now you take care of her,” the waitress warned him. “Don't you give her one of those insane roller-coaster rides like you give everyone else.”
Harrison grinned.
“You hear me?” the woman asked.
“Sure enough, Bertha. I will treat our Miss Sellers as if she were a carton of eggs.”
“See that you do, or you better not come back in here while I have a frying pan handy.”
Harrison laughed, took Katherine's arm and escorted her from the restaurant.
The wind struck hard against her flushed face. The temperature hovered just above zero and, with the chill factor of the wind figured in, must have been a
“There she sits,” Harrison said.
He pointed across the street to a large, sturdily-built vehicle that looked like a cross between an armored car and a jeep. It was parked by the grass circle in the center of the square. The snow that had sifted over it in the few minutes he had been in the restaurant, had obscured the windscreen and softened the brute lines somewhat. Still, it was obvious that no amount of snow could stop this workhorse altogether, for it looked almost like power personified, a machine of pure force.
“What do you think?” he asked, obviously proud of the Rover.
“I'm no longer worried about reaching Owlsden,” she said. The wind snatched her words from her mouth and carried them away, but not fast enough to keep him from hearing her. He smiled and nodded. “Does it have a heater?” she asked.
“All the luxuries,” he said, taking her elbow and leading her across the slippery street. He put her in the passenger's side and went around to get behind the wheel.
The engine started the first time he tried it, a noisy, roaring behemoth of an engine.
“Not as quiet as a Cadillac, perhaps, but able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.”
She laughed and settled back, relieved to be in Mike Harrison's hands.
He drove into the street, circled the park and started out of town in the direction of the narrow road that lead up to Owlsden, his hands tight on the wheel, his driving experienced and sure.
“Not even a little skid,” she said.
“Wait until we start up the mountain!”
“Remember what Bertha said.”
“Don't worry,” he said. “I'm not going to give you a heart-stopping thrill ride. In this weather, I don't need to.”
Then, for a moment, there was an awkward silence, since all the banal conversation about the weather and the Land Rover had already been exhausted and neither knew the other well enough to know what to talk about next. He broke the silence after a minute had passed. “I wouldn't think a young, attractive girl like yourself would choose to move into a place like Roxburgh.”
“That's where the job is,” she said, lightly.
“There are other jobs, surely, in places with more lights, more glamour and more things to do.”
“Solitude appeals to me,” she said. “At least I think it does.”
“You'll have a great opportunity to learn whether or not it does if you live long in Roxburgh!”
“And the job sounds interesting,” she said. “Everyone seems to like Lydia Boland.”
Again, she saw a subtle reaction pass through his features: a tightening of the jawline, a squinting about the eyes. She wished she knew him well enough to solicit his obviously different opinion of the Bolands.
“Everyone does,” he said. “Everyone likes them.” But she was still certain that he did not like them very much at all.
“Your car?” he asked a moment later as they came within sight of the roadside picnic area where she had parked the Ford.
“Yes,” she said.
He pulled the Land Rover up next to it. “If you'll give me your keys and tell me where the suitcases are, you won't have to get out of the Rover again.”
“I'm putting you to a lot of trouble,” she said.
“Nonsense.”
“But I am.”
He grinned. “Then I'll get even when we go up the mountain.” He pointed ahead at the narrow, snow-laden roadway which looked, suddenly, twice as steep and harrowing as it had earlier when she'd attempted to climb it in the Ford.
He took her keys and got out, closed the door and clomped over to the Ford, opened the trunk and lifted out two cases which he brought back. A rear door of the Rover opened to admit the cases and, in a moment, the last two as well. He slammed it shut, locked it, got in behind the wheel again and gave her the keys.
He said, “It's a good thing you decided not to force your way up in that car of yours. Even if you'd been lucky and made it most of the way to the top, you'd have gone over the edge on the last turn. It's a menace for the Rover, let alone for something with worn winter tires and a high speed rear end, like the Ford.”
Swallowing hard at the prospect of having pitched over the brink in the old car, she said, “How long will it take to get up there, in this?”
He looked ahead. “It's a mile and a quarter, but all steep and all icy. I'd say there's six to eight inches of snow…”
She waited while he thought it out.
“If I heed Bertha's warning and take it easy, we ought to be up there in fifteen or twenty minutes. All right?”
“Fine,” she said.
He looked at Owlsden, what they could see of it from this angle. “I don't think I'll ever understand why anyone would want to build a house in such an unapproachable place — or, for that matter, found an entire town in the middle of nowhere.”
He slammed the Rover into gear.
They jerked as the engine groaned and caught hold.
They moved forward toward the road and the ascent to the Roxburgh estate at the top of the valley wall.
Even the Rover wallowed a bit in the treacherous climb, though Mike Harrison did not seem to think the ascent was all that spectacular. While Katherine tried not to look out her window at the yawning pit that opened on her side of the road but found herself looking in fascination anyway, he talked amiably, as if they were out for a Sunday afternoon drive to admire the local scenery.
At last, because talking about anything would be better than staring into the ever-growing chasm beside them, Katherine joined in the conversation and brought up the dead cat she had found in the barn.
“Where was this barn?” he asked immediately, taking his eyes away from the road for a second.
She told him. “It was absolutely terrible,” she said.
“I can imagine.”
“It was all that I could do to touch the poor thing, let alone to dig its grave. But, I guess, someone had to do it.”
“You buried the cat?” he asked incredulously.
Again, he took his eyes away from the road and looked at her. She wished he wouldn't do that.
“Yes,” she said.
“You shouldn't have.”
The Land Rover slipped sideways with a ratcheting noise, toward the brink, corrected smoothly as Harrison touched the gas and shifted down a gear.
“Whyever not?” she asked.
She tried not to think about how close they had been to loosing a wheel over the abrupt lip of the berm. This
