[Oxrun Station] The Bloodwind Read Free Page B

shoes anymore."
    She laughed again, gratefully and loudly. She knew it wasn't all that funny, knew that poor Danvers wasn't really as bad as they liked to pretend. But apprehension spurred her (and a cold finger of the wind that had pursued her last night), and it was some time before she was able to control herself long enough to thank her colleague for the release and ring off, still chuckling and just as aware as he that she hadn't answered his invitation. He tried too hard sometimes, Gregory Bill ings did, but somehow he always managed to sense when she needed being silly, needed a willing target for her occasional undirected bitterness, needed to be alone. And it bothered her quite a lot lately that she was often incapable of reciprocating in kind.
    Immediately the receiver left her hand, however, she patted Homer's head and walked to the front door, where her fawn overcoat was waiting in the cane rack against the wall. Though her first studio class did not begin until ten , Greg's call had served to magnify the apartment's silence, and her suddenly unpleasant soli tude. She was giving herself too much time to think, to worry, and she had no intention of assuming the role of the instrument of her own defeat. She had worked too l ong and too hard for this day, had yielded the feast possible number of compromises for it all to be wasted just because she didn't have the nerve to leave her own home.
    "Darling," her mother had asked just three weeks ago, at the end of her last visit, "I don't understand what you're trying to prove. Don't you realize you're jeopardizing your position at the college with what you're doing?"
    Pat hadn't answered. Mother and Father entrenched in their penthouse museum hadn't even understood why she had chosen to come to the Station; how could she expect them to understand her now?
    Once the coat was on and buttoned, she grabbed a tasseled white woolen cap and pulled it down over her ears, down to her eyebrows, flung a six-foot white muffler cavalierly around her neck, and drew leather-palmed gloves over her long fingers. The door closed behind her, and she tested the lock —more often than not she didn't bother to use it. A bad habit, perhaps, but she had never felt other than safe in the Station.
    It was done. She was out. There was no turning back.
    She stood on the front porch and allowed the damp cold to attack her, pulling stiffly at her cheeks and nose, stinging her chin, slipping beneath her skirt to tighten her calves and thighs.
    Her blouse turned to ice.
    She tucked her purse under one arm and shoved her hands into her pockets.
    Like most of Oxrun Station this side of the huge park, Northland Avenue was lined with homes ranging from gingerbread Victorians to stately Dutch Colonials, all of them considerably bulky, all of them maintained in scrupulous repair. The lawns were broad, the trees ancient and massive, the inhabitants with few exceptions well enough off not to worry about the direction the rest of the country was taking. A self-contained street in a self-contained community that carried its wealth like a topcoat well worn.
    She inhaled slowly, deeply, the last of the evening's punishment driven to hiding by the chill, the last rem nant of her scare made ludicrous by daylight. Behind her the house loomed quietly, the bay windows on either side primly white-curtained and reflecting the pale new sun in each of the square panes. Two blocks to her right the street dead-ended at the fencing of the town's cemetery; two blocks west the traffic on Main land Road was easing as commuters gave way to those just passing by. Directly across Northland, old man Stillworth was sweeping snow from his walk, puffing whitebreath like smoke and grumbling loudly at his broom about New England's insane weather. The block's children were already in school, but their spirits re mained hovering around abandoned sleds on porch steps, in snowmen guardians behind hedges, in a stray red mitten propped atop an