The Lighthouse: A Novel of Terror by Marcia Muller Bill Pronzini Page A

Give Jan the opportunity to tell her what had happened. “Last night,” she said, “you told me you were going out for tobacco.”
    “Yes?”
    “But you’re not out of tobacco. There’s a half-full pouch on your desk. Why did you lie to me?”
    He let out his breath in a tired sigh. “Alix, I’m sorry. I had one of my headaches and I thought a drive would relax me. But I wanted to be alone, and I didn’t feel like explaining. I didn’t want to upset you while you were working.”
    She felt her anger rising; forced it down. She was determined to handle this in a way that would damage them the least. “Jan, why didn’t you tell me about the dog?”
    “What dog?”
    “Mitch Novotny’s dog—Red. Everyone in the village is talking about it.”
    “Still? My God, that was over a week ago.”
    “They’re not talking about last week, they’re talking about what happened last night!”
    For a moment Jan seemed honestly bewildered; then an uneasiness—and something that might have been fear—crawled into his eyes. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said.
    Alix sat heavily on the extra chair, a mate to the lumpy ones in the living room. “Someone ran down and killed Mitch Novotny’s dog last night. He claims it was you. And that you did it deliberately because you didn’t stop, didn’t even slow down.”
    “Oh, God. ”
    Now Jan looked ill. He shook his head, winced, pressed thumb and forefinger against his eye sockets.
    “You did run down that dog, didn’t you?”
    “I . . . don’t know.”
    “What?”
    “I don’t know!”
    “My God, how can you not know? Even if you didn’t see it, you’d have to have felt the impact. Or heard it. The front bumper is dented, there’s blood on it. . . . ”
    He got convulsively to his feet, went to the window, stood staring out. “The headache wasn’t so bad when I left here,” he said in a low, pained voice. “But it’d worsened by the time I got to the village, got so bad I could barely see. I turned around, drove back a ways, and then I couldn’t see at all and I stopped—somewhere out on the cape—and just sat there, a long time, until it eased enough so that I could make it back here. I was afraid of hitting something or somebody, that’s why I stopped. I . . . I didn’t know I’d already hit the dog.”
    Conflicting emotions moved through her: relief, concern, fear, even a small doubt. She stood and went to him, caught one of his arms and turned him gently until he was facing her. The deep pain etched in his face was frightening.
    She said, “Jan, those headaches of yours seem to be getting worse, more intense. They worry me. You’ve got to do something about them. Call Dave Sanderson or something. . . . ”
    “I’ve already called him. He gave me a referral to a doctor in Portland. I’ll be seeing him on Tuesday.”
    “I’ll go to Portland with you—”
    “No, somebody has to stay here and take care of things.”
    “I don’t like the idea of you driving all that way alone, not after last night.”
    “I won’t drive if a headache starts.”
    “Promise me that? Never again?”
    “I promise. God, do you think I want to hit anything else with the car? Just the thought of that poor dog . . . ” He shuddered. “Novotny must be pretty upset, must think I’m some kind of criminal. Everyone else in Hilliard, too.”
    “They’ll get over it when they hear the truth.”
    “Will they?”
    “Maybe if you call Novotny and apologize, explain what happened . . . maybe he’ll listen.”
    “It’s worth a try. But I remember when Thud was killed—the driver of the car that hit him apologized and we still suffered for weeks.”
    Alix remembered too—all too well. Thud had been their big, solid yellow cat, named for the noise he made when lesser cats would have jumped off the furniture soundlessly. Years later she still felt his loss, still expected at odd moments to find him lurking in the kitchen next to his food bowl, or to hear him