Time Out of Mind by John R. Maxim

tried to tell you before. I was in a big elaborate bar. It might have been a men's club because there weren't any women, but I think the place was a hotel. There was a fight. I went there to beat up a man I know, who I think I've always known, but I just can't seem to place him. After I belted him a few times, he told me he was going to get me and my whore. He was talking about cutting up her face. I knew that he was talking about Margaret.”
    “ The fight was over Margaret?”
    “ No.” Corbin took a long sip of coffee. “My impression is no. She didn't enter into it until the man threatened her. I don't think I know why I hit him. But I hated the son of a bitch and could happily have blown his head off except that I wanted other people to see what a coward he was.”
    “ Jonathan”—Gwen Leamas kept her eyes on the scram bled eggs she held—“are you in love with Margaret?”
    “ No.” Not the way you think.
    “ You say that as if you're certain.”
    ” I think the ghost is in love with her,” Corbin said slowly. “The man I become when it snows, the man I was in that fight, I think he's in love with her. I know that they've had sex between them. A lot of it. But as for the kind of sex, I think what you said before was right. I think it's very basic. I also think it's all he knows. Maybe it isn't all Margaret knows, but I think he would have been shocked if she tried anything fancy with him.”
    “ Which, it seems, is what happened.” Gwen made a face. “You're telling me that I was about to give a blow job to a ghost.”
    Corbin winced.
    “ Well?”
    “ Not exactly.”
    “ Then what, exactly?”
    “ It's true that...” Corbin paused, again sipping from his mug, once more searching for the words. “It's true that when I came out of the dream, I thought for an instant that you were Margaret, and I was a little shocked to see blond hair. But that was all me. It wasn't the ghost. I, Jonathan Corbin, was lying there naked with this person named Mar garet and we were going to have sex. I was horrified. It's true that at first I thought it was the kind of sex that both ered me. But it wasn't. It was any kind of sex. Missionary, S and M, or hanging from a chandelier, it wouldn't have mattered. Sex between me and Margaret just seemed so terribly, awfully wrong.”
    Gwen leaned toward him and took his hand. “Have you any idea why?”
    “ None.” He touched her fingers to his lips. “It's about the way I'd feel if I woke up tomorrow morning and found myself in the buff with your sister.”
    “ You're saying that lovemaking with Margaret is inap propriate. Even though she seems to be a prostitute.”
    “ Yes.”
    “ That's an interesting puzzle all by itself. And you're certain, by the way, that Margaret was not the same woman you left frozen in the snow?”
    “ I'm sure. They weren't anything alike.”
    “ But you said the murdered one was young and attrac tive. And dark-haired.”
    Corbin nodded.
    “ What if you woke up in the buff with that one? How would you feel?” .
    A very good question, Corbin thought. Also an unpleasant question for some reason, though not an upsetting one. His mind wanted to fly from it. It wanted instead to replay the scene in the hotel bar where he pummeled the tall, thin man he hated so. Could the tight have been over that woman? He wasn't sure.
    “ Just plain disgust,” he answered. ”I don't like her.”
    ” I daresay.”
    Corbin couldn't help but smile at the dimension of his own understatement. I don't like her. I chased her through a blizzard in the black of night and pinned her down in the driving sleet until it covered her and she was dead. I didn't like her.
    “ It's good,” Gwen told him, “to see you getting a bit more relaxed about this.”
    ” I guess it's a relief to be able to talk about it.”
    “ Are you ready to talk to a professional?” She expected Corbin's hand to stiffen and pull away, but it didn't.
    “ You're kidding, aren't you?” he