5

He came pounding out of the edge of the woods and out of breath, stopped running. Sand moved under his feet. For a moment he wanted to remove his shoes. Far up the cliff, the house shone from a dozen windows. He could see Rose nowhere on the beach, which was a silvery mushroom gray beside the black smooth water. He checked his watch again and saw that it was now ten-fifty. She had gone.

Tom trudged forward through the sand. Here was a surprise: a substantial part of him was relieved that Rose had given up and gone back across the lake. Now he could return to Del.

But maybe just ahead, on the other side of the boathouse? He saw the slavering wolf pouncing toward her. If Collins had seen her waiting on the beach…

Now his mood had swung, and he desperately wanted to know if Rose Armstrong were safe. His mind was a jumble of images: the' wolf, held up with unbelievable strength, impaled on a sword; the badger being swung in a great arc toward the pit; Dave Brick sitting on a metal chair, waiting to be roasted. He banged open the door of the boathouse. He walked in, and nearly fell twenty feet into black shallow water.

Tom jerked himself back just in time. Inside the dilapidated shell, the boathouse was chiefly water and open space. A three-foot apron of concrete ran around a wide hole open at the lake end. Most of this entire side of the boathouse was open. Only six or seven feet down from the top had been boarded across.

The door slammed shut behind him, and his heart too slammed in his chest. Tom heard a metal bar sliding into a brace. He hit the door with his shoulder. It rattled, but would not open. He banged it again, beginning to settle down from his original terror into ordinary fright. Who was it? Collins? The Collector turned loose to get him? One of the Wandering Boys? He would have to jump into the water. He looked down, saw greasy-looking blackness, and then saw something else.

Then he heard giggles from behind the door: Rose.

'Let me out!'

'You stood me up three nights straight. Why should I?'

'Three nights?' Tom's stomach fell away.

'I got your note this morning.'

'No, you didn't, boyo. That was three days ago.'

'Oh, God.' He leaned against the creaky doors of the boathouse wall.

'You didn't know?'

'I thought it was this morning.'

'Likely story, but I'll let you out.'

The bolt slid across. The door opened, and Rose stood before him in a green 1920's dress. She was smiling teasingly, and on her face it looked brave. She was the best thing he had ever seen. The green dress made her look more sophisticated than any girl he had ever known.

'I almost had heart failure in there,' he said, 'but I'm so happy to see you, I guess I wouldn't mind dying.'

She pouted, took a step back. 'You almost had more than heart failure. You know what I almost did to you? I was so mad.'

'Did to me?'

'Take a look at this and tell me about three days.'

Rose stepped gracefully around him, and he saw that she was wealing high heels. 'You were standing on the other side of the door, right? Okay.' She bent down and tugged at a bar set in the sand beside the door. Bang! Iron rang against concrete. The apron he had been standing on had fallen in on a hinge. 'It's like a kind of trapdoor. A long time ago, there was a boat, and a sort of winch fit in here… anyhow, I almost dropped you in the drink. The water's deep enough. You'd just have to swim out. I could have strangled you, boyo-three nights? I'm getting muscles from swimming across that lake!'

'You didn't swim tonight,' Tom pointed out.

She turned away. 'Of course not. I ruined my stockings. And this dress is full of gunk.' She lifted the hem and brushed at dust and twigs. 'I came all the way through the woods. Then I sat out on the pier. You walked by without even looking at me.'

'I'll look at you now,' he said, and made to embrace her. She looked as if she were going to back away, but stiffly submitted. 'What's wrong?'

'This.'

'Oh. I'm sorry.' Chagrined, he dropped his arms. He could not read her face - she looked grown up in the green dress, far beyond his reach. 'Really. The note came this morning. At least I thought it was this morning. That scene in the woods, that was just now, wasn't it? About half an hour ago?'

'Sure. Look, what day —?'

'I want to show you something. Something I want to look at again too.'

'Oh?'

'In here.' He pulled open the boathouse door and knelt. 'Push that lever again.' Rose stepped aside and tugged the rod back. The iron plate swung up on its hinge, clicked into place. Tom crawled out on it and peered down at the water.

'I was going to ask you what day you thought it was.'

'I don't see it now. What day? I'm not sure anymore. Tuesday or Wednesday.'

'It's Saturday,'

'Saturday?' He looked up at her, standing just outside the boathouse on the sand. She looked very tall, very feminine. Though slim, her body curved.

'What month do you think this is? What week?'

'I'm trying to find something,' he said. 'Something I saw before.' He looked down at the murky water. 'Oh.'

'Did you find it?'

'No.' He scuttled backward.

'You did.'

'What week is it, anyhow?' He stood up. 'What month is it?'

'What do you think it is?'

'Early June. About the sixth or the seventh. Maybe as late as the tenth.'

She rubbed her nose. 'So you think it's the tenth of June. Poor Tom.' Rose touched his cheek with the tips of her fingers. Tom felt as though new nerves had grown where her fingers had rested. 'What did you see down there?'

'Tell me what day it is, Rose.'

Her brave smile flickered in the moonlight. 'I'm not sure, but it's at least the first of July. Or the second.'

'It's July? We've been here a month?'

Rose nodded; her face searched his, sent out such sympathy that he wanted again to embrace her. 'How can he do that?'

'He just can. One summer he made Del think that six or seven weeks went by in a day. It was the time Del broke his leg.'

'And Bud Copeland came.'

Her eyebrows lifted. 'You know about that? Oh… Del told you. Yes, that summer. He didn't want Del to… I can't say.'

'What happened?'

'The iron staircase. It broke away from the cliff.'

'What can't you say?'

Now the smile was firmer. 'Ask Del. Maybe he'll be able to remember by now. I can't, Tom.'

She walked a little way up the beach and turned to him. again. He saw that it was impossible: this was a secret that she would not give up. 'I can't stay much longer, Tom,' she said softly.

'I want to kiss you,' he said. That she would keep her secret had made her even more desirable. 'I want to hold you.'

'I told you. It's wrong now. I have something to tell you and I don't want to get all confused, and I don't have much time. He'll want to see me again.'

'Tonight?' He walked toward her over the gray sand.

She nodded. At least she did hot walk away.

'What for?'

'To talk. He likes to talk to me. He says I help him think out loud.'

'But that's great. Then you can tell me and Del… '

'Right. That's why I gave you that note. I found out something. But now, after tonight, you probably know it anyhow.'

'I don't know anything,' Tom complained. And she reached out and took his hand.

'He wants to give his farewell performance over again. With you and Del in it. If we're going to get out, I think it has to be right before, when all they'll be thinking about is what they have to do.'

Pleasurable impulses and sensations had been going all the way up his arm, and now she gripped him harder. 'The important thing is that he's planning something big for this performance. Something dangerous. He said you'd have to choose between your wings and your song. Do you know what that means?'

Tom shook his head. 'He said it to me once before. I don't know what it means.'

'He said Speckle John chose his song, and he took his song away from him. So he didn't have anything left. I think we have to make sure we're out of here before… '

'Before I find out what it means,' Tom said a little fearfully.

'That's what I think.' Rose dropped his hand. Tom leaned forward and took hers and raised it to his mouth. He was trembling. He saw a girl in a red cloak carrying a wicker basket up a wooded path.

Rose said, 'Tom, I feel so terrible-like I'm drawing you in deeper. But I have to do what he says, or he'll know something's wrong. Just trust me.'

'God, I don't just trust you,' Tom said. 'I - '

Rose was suddenly upon him. Her face came down over his, blotting out the sky and the brilliant stars. Her mouth swam over his, and her teeth took his lips. Rose's legs nestled his, her breasts plumped against his chest. Tom put his hand in her hair and gave himself over to the kiss. His surprised erection grew straight into the softness of her belly; he groaned into her mouth, smelling a faint perfume and the fragrance of clean hair, tasting what she was. She was the girl in the window: it was knowledge he had not permitted himself before, but now he held two Rose Armstrongs, the girl in the green dress and the unattainable staggering girl who had raised her arms and shown herself to a frightened boy freezing in a wintry sleigh.

'You're going to break my back,' Rose said into his mouth.

He put his hands again in her hair.

'We can't.'

'We can't what?' Tom mumbled.

'We can't make love. Not here.'

That nearly made him explode. Not here! He groaned again, jerked in an instant from a world in which he had feared he might be frightening or disgusting her with the evidence of his desire into one in which she could casually allude to its fulfillment. 'Where?' he said, his voice out of control.

'Don't growl, I'm just barely… If you knew… '

'Oh, Jesus, I know,' he said, and found her mouth again.

'It's not fair, is it?' She pulled her face away from his: in compensation, her hips tipped toward him. 'Oh, you're so beautiful.'

'Where?' he repeated.

'Nowhere. Not now. I have to go back and see him, Tom. And besides, I… '

She was a virgin. 'I am too,' he said. 'Oh, my God.' He pulled her tighter into him. 'I want you so much.'

'Pretty Tom.' She'grazed over his cheek, but she already felt distant. So much had happened to Tom, so many milestones had gone by in a blur, that he had no idea of what to do next. Despite what he had hinted to Del, Jenny Oliver and Diane Darling had stopped short even of French kissing. Rose's belly was somehow miraculously accommodating and accepting his erection.

'Pretty Tom,' she repeated. 'I don't want to be unfair to you. I want you, too.' Her arms went around his neck, and he thought heaven had opened and taken him in. 'I'm just afraid… '

'It's okay,' Tom said. 'Oh, Rose.'

'The shadow of the boathouse,' Rose said, and pushed him back with her body. They stumbled awkwardly back a few steps.

'There aren't any shadows, it's night,' Tom said, and it seemed so funny to him that he laughed out loud.

'Dummy.' She pinned him against the coarse wood and opened him up with her mouth again. She muttered, 'Too bad I didn't drop you in the water, then you'd have to take off your clothes.'

She was a cloud blessedly made of flesh, softly pillowing every part of him. Sexual urgency blasted him.

'It's okay, Tom,' she whispered right against his ear. 'I know. It's okav. Go on.'

One of her hands left his head and lighted on his trousers. 'Oh, no,' he said. And she slipped her hand a layer closer to him. His whole body shook. Rose's fingers twined in, cupped and held - he felt a yard long. She said, 'Oh, Tom,' and he hugged her as close as he could and felt everything in him jump, an explosion seeming to happen in his spine and his head as well as where Rose was, and she pulled, and he thought he was turning inside-out. 'Dear Tom,' she said, and nuzzled his cheek, and he turned inside-out again. 'We really shouldn't have done this,' she said into his cheek, and he laughed until her hand left him. 'Now you're a real mess.'

'Thank God.'

'You must think I'm terrible. I just could feel you… and you were moaning like that… I don't want you to think I'm… '

'I think you're amazing. Beautiful. Astonishing. Incredible. Fantastic.' His heart was still thrumming. 'You're even generous. I hardly know what happened to me.'

'Well,' she said, and her expression made him laugh again.

'How are you?'

'Fine. I don't know. Fine.'

'Sometime… '

'Sometime. Yes. But don't start again.' She stepped back on the sand.

'I love you,' he said. 'I'm just absolutely in love with you.'

'Beautiful Tom.'

'Not grumpy Tom.'

'I hope not.' Rose lifted her hands, bobbed her head self-deprecatingly. 'I have to go. Really. I'm sorry.'

'So am I. I love you, Rose.' Tom was just beginning to return to earth. She blew him a kiss. Walked away down the beach, stopped to take off the high-heeled shoes, and blew him another kiss before she slipped into the woods bordering the lake.

'Hey!' he called out. 'We could go back together! I have to… ' But she was gone. Tom, still dazed, looked back at the boathouse and then followed her footprints toward the end of the beach. He remembered that he had to sleep in the woods that night, and wondered if he would ever find his way back to Del.

What could he say to Del? What Rose had done for him seemed an act of almost godlike charity.

When he reached the end of the beach, he took off his clothes and stepped into the cool water. 'I love Rose Armstrong,' he said to himself, and went in up to his neck. The moonlight made a path straight toward him, rippling when he moved. When he put his face in the water, he remembered what he had seen at the bottom of the boathouse, the severed head of a horse, tipping over slowly in murk.

Tom got out of the lake and dried himself hurriedly on his shirt. Then he brushed sand from his feet, got back into his trousers, pushed his feet into his loafers, and walked back into the woods, carrying his damp shirt under his arm.