Ride the Nightmare (5 page)

All along the first five miles of the canyon, Chris had kept slowing down as if he meant to stop. Then his teeth had set on edge and he’d picked up speed again as he saw that the spot was unsuitable. Now he had turned onto the old Topanga Road.

Helen looked at the dashboard clock. It was twenty minutes after twelve. She drew in a long breath and let it seep out between her lips as she stared at the road ahead, glancing at the occasional houses they passed. Once they had discussed the possibility of buying a house in this area. She’d never want to live here now.

Finally they stopped and the rasping click of the hand brake made her twitch. Chris pushed in the light knob and darkness blotted away everything around them. He sat motionless for a moment, his eyes staring ahead. Then, with a brusque motion, he pulled up the door handle and slid out of the car.

“Could I have the flashlight, please?” he asked.

Reaching forward, Helen pushed in the button on the glove compartment door. After a few seconds of fumbling, she found the flashlight and held it out. Chris took it from her and pushed forward the seat back on his side. It fell on the steering wheel and they both gasped as the horn sounded once in the heavy silence. Chris grabbed the seat back and held it.

Then, abruptly, he shoved it back into place. Helen looked over at him as he sat down, his back to her.

“Oh, what’s the use?” he said. He sat there turning the flashlight restlessly in his hands.

Helen swallowed.

“Chris, if you’re expecting me to encourage you,” she said, “I can’t.”

“I don’t want encouragement,” he answered. “I want—to
end
this, to get you out of it.” Abruptly, he drew his legs in and closed the door.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Going to the police.”

“Chris,
please
.” Helen closed her hands into rigid fists. “I love you. I don’t want you to go to prison. If you think you can put him here without him being found, then do it.
Do
it! But, for God’s sake, get it over with!”

“All right, Helen,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

Hastily, he slid out of the car and unlocked the back trunk to get the shovel he always kept inside. Helen wondered why he hadn’t put the man in the trunk too, then remembered that the trunk door wouldn’t open when the garage door was down. Chris would have had to open the garage, but then someone might have seen. He had done the only thing possible.

The only thing possible
. That was what made it all a nightmare. Everything seemed so inevitable. The phone call, the locking of the house, the man’s violent entrance and death, the placing of his body in the car, the drive along the ocean, the policemen stopping them, the burial now. Nothing could have happened in any other way. It
was as if they were trapped in some inexorable plan which had determined their past and their present and would also determine their future.

Still it seemed impossible to accept. Such things did not happen really. Melodrama was confined to bad motion pictures. And now, melodrama had engulfed her so quickly and violently that it seemed beyond belief. If there had been something in the past to signal its coming she might be able to accept. But there had been nothing. She thought about it as carefully as she could. There had been nothing.

She’d met Chris at a concert—that was the start. The Santa Monica Music Guild sponsored a series of concerts every year to which she and her mother subscribed. That particular night, Helen remembered, Wallenstein had been conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

During intermission, she walked downstairs with her mother to get a drink of water and stretch her legs. Her mother had gone into the ladies’ room and Helen out onto the porch for some air. Only later did she realize that Chris was out there at the same time. If either of them had stayed outside until the intermission was over, they might never have met. The ironies of coincidence, however, were far from her mind that night and for years of nights to come.

When she decided that her mother had probably left the ladies’ room and was wondering where she was, Helen went back inside. She didn’t see her mother at first. Then, after several moments, she caught sight of her standing near the center aisle entrance, talking with Mrs. Saxton who owned the Melody Music Shop. She went over and they chatted a few minutes about how wonderfully the orchestra had played the Brahms Third, how marvelously adept Wallenstein was in drawing such a performance from them.

Then a figure stepped up beside Helen and Chris was in her life.

“Marjorie, Helen,” said Mrs. Saxton, “I’d like you to meet Mr. Martin.”

There were the usual amenities, the usual small talk about the concert, about Mrs. Saxton’s shop. Mrs. Saxton told them that Chris was working for her and that the way he was going at it, she’d be working for him before long. The laughter was polite, casual. Then the buzzer sounded and they were all returning to their seats.

“He seems like a nice young man,” her mother commented as they went up the stairs.

“Yes, Mrs. Cupid,” Helen answered.

The concert ended, they left the auditorium and, in walking to their car, were briefly joined by Chris and Mrs. Saxton. Again, the conversation was vague. There was no impression on either side, Helen felt. She experienced none in particular and, later on, Chris told her that he repressed what interest he had felt because he didn’t feel he had a right to become involved. He’d said it was because he didn’t have the time to spare from his work. Now, Helen knew why he had repressed it.

So the matter might have ended. Helen thought of that as she sat, her cheek pressed to Connie’s head, listening to the shovel strokes outside in the darkness. It might have ended, they might not have married, Connie might never have been born. And how did one decide if their life would have been better if things had happened differently?

They happened as they did—without intention, in the normal pattern of events. Her mother’s birthday was coming in a few weeks, her mother loved the Beethoven piano sonatas. Helen went to Mrs. Saxton’s shop to order the record.

There were, of course, larger, more complete music stores in Santa Monica. Still, Mrs. Saxton was a friend of mother’s and she could, certainly, order a record as well as anyone else. Helen was positive that a record with such a limited audience appeal would not be in stock in any of the local stores.

She was wrong—and amazed. Amazed at the change that had taken place in Mrs. Saxton’s shop. As she entered, she saw how the decor had been brightened, the arrangement of counter and shelving changed to lend an air of pleasant informality to the shop rather than its previous one of rather unimaginative drabness.

And there, in the center of this impressive alteration, was Chris—a smiling, affable Chris; a well-informed and literate Chris; a charming and amusing Chris. Helen had been completely won over by him. He was far more than the man she’d shaken hands with at the concert. He seemed larger here, more imposing. It was as if, at the concert, he had been some sort of deposed monarch—polite as reared, dignified as bred but, deprived of his kingdom, without the stature of ego. The shop was his kingdom then. Within its boundaries, he ruled benevolently, imparting interest, bestowing humor and cordiality, making the experience of visiting the shop a uniquely nice one.

Not only had the sonata record been in stock, there had been three different ones to choose from. Moreover, Chris had initiated a practice which, only later, other record stores began to utilize—that of offering unplayed records to customers. Until that time, Helen had always found what she was looking for on the shelves—the records, unsheathed, inserted directly into their cardboard jackets. Chris had taken the records out of the jackets and placed them alphabetically behind the counter in plastic envelopes. He had, in addition, moved the turntable behind the counter and connected it to the one booth so that the record might be heard without the danger of a customer injuring it.

Had it been a coincidence that no customers were in the store that afternoon? Sometimes, Helen thought so. Sometimes, contrariwise, she had the feeling that, in any case, they would have seen each other again. As it was, the absence of customers enabled him to ask her if she’d like to have a cup of coffee and she’d accepted.

Only now did she wonder if he had realized what she was beginning to feel, if he knew as clearly as she did, what was starting between them. Had he fought the desire to ask her out for that cup of coffee? Or had it seemed the thing to do; had he been lulled into ignoring or forgetting his past?

There seemed no answer to that. It had been done and everything had commenced which, now, had ended in a dead man being buried in the night.

The cup of coffee had led to an invitation to dinner by Helen; ostensibly to listen to some records Chris had mentioned, actually as an excuse to see him again. Chris had been hesitant about accepting—she remembered that now. (It seemed as if, now, a hundred different incidents were clarified.) He had only accepted when he’d seen that his apparent attempt to back out was embarrassing her.

Again, who was to blame? Would it have been better if he had ignored that embarrassment and not accepted anyway? At least, then, this horror might not have occurred. Had he been kind to accept that invitation—or weak, thinking more of her opinion of him than of the pain to which he might be exposing her?

None of which she was aware of at the time, of course. There was, at the time, only that sweetly uncomfortable sensation of allowing an attraction to become fatal. That burgeoning struggle between the impulse to love and the desire to remain unharmed. Not that she bore the scars of any past romantic wounds. Far from
it. Men had not existed in her life to any degree. Her mother had tried, often enough, to change this. But men seemed to Helen, if not frightening, somehow uninviting. The only man she had ever given her heart to had left her mother for another woman. This had not enhanced, for Helen, the attractions of men.

This plus an undefined fear of sex through her teen years had always kept her to herself or with a group of girls. Occasionally, there had been dates, some of them enjoyable. Still, at those moments when conversation ended and dates expected physical affection, Helen was half-frightened, half repelled by the artificiality of the moment. Love, when she thought of it, seemed to her an emotion that needed size and scope, one which should envelop and beautifully so—not a feeling which one could forcibly arouse on the back seat of a car, a beer-can cluttered blanket on the sands.

Maybe it was Chris’s love and knowledge of music, Helen thought. His quiet refinement. Maybe it was his reticence bringing out what aggressiveness Helen had not completely repressed in herself. Something had to explain her asking him to dinner. More amazingly, something had to explain her anxiety for him to like her, for something more than friendship to develop between them.

Sometimes, she convinced herself that she was one of those females who never loved until the right man came along. At other times, with more logic, she decided it was probably closer to the truth that she was getting older and the desire for companionship was outdistancing timidity. It was not, she admitted to herself on those occasions, a union consummated in heaven. It was, under the circumstances of her life, simply a desirable and sensible relationship.

Whatever the explanation, her falling in love with Chris had been continuous and certain—to her, remarkably devoid of complications. Chris’s holding back she accepted as faint heart; she overlooked it. She loved him and was, soon, convinced that he loved her in return. It seemed a very positive enterprise.

Still, there had been little things—things she’d chosen to ignore or, worse, to rationalize. Things like Chris’s unwillingness to discuss his background. She tried, occasionally, to find out about his family but, outside of an infrequent comment about his mother, he was unwilling to talk about it.

One day, in talking with her mother about Chris, she had to admit that, not only did she not know where his relatives were, she didn’t
even know who they were or if they existed at all. A few nights later, at dinner, her mother tried to get Chris to answer specific questions about this. He was uncomfortably reluctant about it and said little. Strangely (it seemed now), Helen didn’t question his reluctance but only felt a startled irritation with her mother. Later that night, she told her mother so. Her mother only shrugged and smiled.

“Well, if it’s a mystery man you want,” was all she said.

How fantastic that, until this moment, she had completely forgotten that incident. Forgotten that Chris always questioned, never answered. His past had all been unknown to her. She had accepted this lack of knowledge, feeling, in the security of her love, that she knew him just as well as if she were apprised of the statistical data of his past. These formed the surface of a man, she decided, not the core. The core, she felt, she understood. Had she been right? Did she really understand Chris? Was this revelation, for all its hideousness, only a belated filling in of really unimportant details? Was he still the man she’d believed she knew? Or had the filling in of his background revealed basic differences in him? In short, must she allow that she had been living with a stranger for all these years? This was the thought that tortured her in the dark silence of—

Silence.

She was chilled with the sudden awareness. That meant that Chris had finished digging the grave. Now he was lowering the body into it. In a moment or two, he would be…

She shuddered as the first shovelful of dirt was thrown. She sat there rigidly, listening, all the past swallowed in the black pain of the present. All she could think of now was that Helen Martin was lying in that grave too. She tried to think of something else but she couldn’t. There was only the one thought.

Helen Martin was dead.

Chris opened his eyes.

Overhead, a DC-7 was circling for International Airport. He listened to the burring stridency of its engines until the noise had faded. It was a dream, he told himself, but the thought did not deceive him.