A Time of Predators

She met his brown eyes steadily. “Because I want you to understand my position. I’m going to keep looking until I find that boy. Stopping to grind Harold Rockwell’s face into the gravel was the most vicious thing I’ve ever seen anyone do to another human being.”

“Why do you insist on words like ‘vicious’? Sick, maybe, but—”

“I saw his face when he did it,” she flared. “You didn’t. Evil: naked, willful evil. I want that boy caught, and I want him punished.”

“The lady doth protest too much, methinks,” grunted Curt. He got his briefcase from the spare bedroom he had converted years before into a study, and was followed by Paula to the head of the stairs.

“What time can I expect you home, Curt?”

He grimaced; he had more than the beginnings of a double chin. “I might be a little late,” he said judiciously. “Young Chuck Belmont is reading his paper on ‘The Relation of Culture to Human Evolution’ — a damned brilliant piece of work, actually — and I imagine there’ll be some discussion afterwards.”

Paula said drily, “I’ll set out a bottle of wine before I retire.”

“Always have to get your little dig in, don’t you? Because I enjoy a glass or two of wine...” He cut off the rest of it, shook his head, and went down the stairs. Paula watched him cross the living room to the front door, almost hungrily, but he didn’t look back. She sighed, went down the stairs herself, and turned right through the double doors leading to the dining room and the lighted kitchen beyond.

Could Curt be right? About her protesting too much? Ever since the attack on Rockwell, she had lived with a strange... what? Excitement was too strong a word: anticipation, perhaps. Expectancy. Involving herself completely in the search for the attackers, pushing the police in their investigation. Could Curt be right?

Over the years they had modernized the kitchen with bright new stainless-steel fixtures, metal storage cabinets, and maroon vinyl tops on the flat surfaces to give her plenty of work area. She began the supper dishes automatically, getting out the dishpan and draining rack, shaking out soap powder, sousing glassware in steaming suds.

Perhaps she was being unnecessarily alarmed over teen-age horseplay, as Curt put it, which had gotten out of hand and had ended in tragedy. Perhaps she was merely a frustrated woman seeking some outlet for a mild discontent with her life, her marriage, even herself.

Paula paused, holding a plate under the hot-water tap and barely feeling the smart of the steaming water running over her hand.

No. She had seen it in that boy’s face, along with the fear. Pleasure. Excitement. The sort of excitement that the big lie propounded by mothers to their daughters and women’s magazines to their readers claimed was to be gained from sex.

Paula dried the dishes, put them away, and carefully set out the accusing bottle of wine on the coffee table by Curt’s reading chair. Then she went out onto the narrow front porch, nearly buried in the thick overhang of live oaks, and listened to the frogs chorusing in the ditch between the drive and the golf course.

It seemed important, suddenly, to know whether she actually was using the attack on poor Harold Rockwell for some obscure inner satisfaction. Know thyself, as... who had said? She smiled in genuine pleasure. Plato, or Socrates, or Pythagoras, or Chilo, or Thales. It had always amused her that no one knew whose sage advice on knowing it was.

What was the answer, then? Another affair? The first had been five years before, with a visiting English professor whose courting had been the direct antithesis of Curt’s bearish love-making. Candlelit suppers at remote rendezvous; flowers; passionate poems cribbed so shamelessly from the classics that she had found it unflattering. And the denouement in unfamiliar motel room beds? Distressingly familiar: counterfeiting orgasm as she did with Curt, to heighten her lover’s pleasure while experiencing none herself. No, an affair was no answer at all.

Through the screening bushes she could see the flicker of approaching auto lights on the blacktop below. They caught the bright yellow sweater of a girl coming up the road from the university. Strange to see a girl walking along this isolated road at night, alone. A girl who looked pretty, with toffee-colored hair, worn long, visible only in flashes through the foliage. The car passed, dropping her back into darkness. Then Paula heard the aluminum folding door of the phone booth across the road creak shut. That explained it. An insistent date, a slapped face, a phone call to the folks. But the light in the booth went on only momentarily, showing the girl, then the door reopened.

It was like watching a home movie, where the flickering figures were familiar yet remote, without real relation to one’s own life.