Night Shift(92)

'Sure. They're menthol, though. Sorry.'

She took one. 'How did you know I didn't like menthol cigarettes?'

He shrugged. 'You just don't look like one of those, I guess.'

She smiled. 'You're funny, do you know that?'

He smiled neutrally.

'No, really. For you of all people to turn up. . .I thought I didn't want to see anyone. But I'm really glad it was you, Ed.'

'Sometimes it's nice to be with someone you're not involved with.'

'That's it, I guess.' She paused. 'Who are you, Ed, besides my fairy godfather? Who are you really?' It was suddenly important to her that she know.

He shrugged. 'Nobody much. Just one of the sort of funny-looking guys you see creeping around campus with a load of books under one arm -'Ed, you're not funny-looking.' 'Sure I am,' he said, and smiled. 'Never grew all the way out of my high-school acne, never got rushed by a big frat, never made any kind of splash in the social whirl. Just a dorm rat making grades, that's all. When the big corporations interview on campus next spring, I'll probably sign on with one of them and Ed Hamner will disappear for ever.'

'That would be a great shame,' she said softly. He smiled, and it was a very peculiar smile. Almost bitter.

'What about your folks?' she asked. 'Where you live, what you like to do -'

'Another time,' he said. 'I want to get you back. You've got a long plane ride tomorrow, and a lot of hassles.'

The evening left her relaxed for the first time since Tony's death, without that feeling that somewhere inside a mainspring was being wound and wound to the breaking point. She thought sleep would come easily, but it did not.

Little questions nagged.

Alice told me. . . poor Beth.

But Alice was summering in Kittery, eighty miles from Skowhegan. She must have been at Lakewood for a play.

The Corvette, this year's model. Expensive. A backstage job at Lakewood hadn't paid for that. Were his parents rich?

He had ordered just what she would have ordered her-self. Maybe the only thing on the menu she would have eaten enough of to discover that she was hungry.

The menthol cigarettes, the way he had kissed her good night, exactly as she had wanted to be kissed. And -You've gota long plane ride tomorrow.

He knew she was going home because she had told him. But how had he known she was going by plane? Or that it was a long ride?

It bothered her. It bothered her because she was halfway to being in love with Ed Hamner.

I know what you need.

Like the voice of a submarine captain tolling off fathoms, the words he had greeted her with followed her down to sleep.

He didn't come to the tiny Augusta airport to see her off, and waiting for the plane, she was surprised by her own disappointment. She was thinking about how quietly you could grow to depend on a person, almost like a junkie with a habit. The hype fools himself that he can take this stuff or leave it, when really -'Elizabeth Rogan,' the PA blared. 'Please pick up the white courtesy phone.'

She hurried to it. And Ed's voice said, 'Beth?'

'Ed! It's good to hear you. I thought maybe .

'That I'd meet you?' He laughed. 'You don't need me for that. You're a big strong girl. Beautiful, too. You can handle this. Will I see you at school?'

'I... yes, I think so.'

'Good.' There was a moment of silence. Then he said, 'Because I love you. I have from the first time I saw you.'

Her tongue was locked. She couldn't speak. A thousand thoughts whirled through her mind.

He laughed again, gently. 'No, don't say anything. Not now. I'll see you. There'll be time then. All the time in the world. Good trip, Beth. Goodbye.'

And he was gone, leaving her with a white phone in her hand and her own chaotic thoughts and questions.

September.

Elizabeth picked up the old pattern of school and classes like a woman who has been interrupted at knitting. She was rooming with Alice again, of course; they had been roomies since freshman year, when they had been thrown together by the housing-department computer. They had always got along well, despite differing interests and personalities. Alice was the studious one, a chemistry major with a 3.6 average. Elizabeth was more social, less bookish, with a split major in education and math.

They still got on well, but a faint coolness seemed to have grown up between them over the summer. Elizabeth chalked it up to the difference of opinion over the sociology final, and didn't mention it.

The events of the summer began to seem dreamlike. In a funny way it sometimes seemed that Tony might have been a boy she had known in high school. It still hurt to think about him, and she avoided the subject with Alice, but the hurt was an old-bruise throb and not the bright pain of an open wound.

What hurt more was Ed Hamner's failure to call.

A week passed, then two, then it was October. She got a student directory from the Union and looked up his name. It was no help; after his name were only the words 'Mill St'. And Mill was a very long street indeed. And so she waited, and when she was called for dates - which was often - she turned them down. Alice raised her eyebrows but said nothing; she was buried alive in a six-week biochem project and spent most of her evenings at the library. Elizabeth noticed the long white envelopes that her room-mate was receiving once or twice a week in the mail - since she was usually back from class first but thought nothing of them. The private detective agency was discreet; it did not print its return address on its envelopes.