Panic! Read Free

entrance. Even though the black lettering on the front of the sign was not visible from there, she had taken her yellow Triumph TR-6 beneath it late the previous afternoon —after better than fifty miles of desert driving—and she remembered clearly what it said:
    Welcome to Cuenca Seco
Gateway to a Desert Wonderland
    As far as Jana was concerned, the wording was misrepre-sentational. The Wonderland it spoke of was little more than a dead sea sustaining grotesque cacti with spines like razor-edged daggers, a haven for vultures and scorpions and fat brown venom-filled snakes, an arid and polychromatic graveyard strewn with the very bones of time. And the Gateway—well, the Gateway was an anachronism in a world of steel-and-glass, of hurtling chrome-toothed machines, of great, rushing, ant-busy throngs of people; it was an elaborate set for an Old West movie, with too many false-fronted buildings and sun-bonneted women and Stetsoned men moving ponderously beneath a demoniacal sun, with dust-caked metal extras miscast in the roles of horses and carriages; it was make-believe that had magically become a reality, and been given an aura of antiquity that was somehow a little frightening.
    Jana expelled a long, soft breath. The trouble with me is, she thought, I’m a big-city girl. I can’t appreciate native Americana because I’ve never seen any of it face-to-face; I’ve never really been out of New York City until now. How much of the grass roots can you see in Brooklyn or Long Island or downtown Manhattan? It’s not so easy to adjust to a different way of life, it’s not so easy to surround yourself with nature instead of with people, with life-in-the-raw instead of life-insulated-by-luxury; it’s not so easy to break away, to change, to forget.
    To forget ...
    Abruptly, Jana turned from the window—tall and lithe in her mid-twenties, figure reminiscent of a lingerie model’s, sable hair worn long and straight, with stray wisps falling over her shoulders, almost to the gentle swell of her breasts. A pair of silver-rimmed reading glasses gave her narrow face a quality of introspective intelligence that was enhanced by the prominence of delicately boned cheeks, by the firm set of a small, naturally pink mouth. Her eyes, behind the lens of the glasses, were an intense brown that contained, like an alien presence, a small dull glow of pain.
    The room was small and hot, in spite of a portable air-conditioning unit mounted in the frame of the window; but since the Joshua Hotel was the only lodging in town—and since this was considered one of its finer accommodations—she had not had much choice in the matter. It contained a brass-framed double bed, two nightstands, a small private bathroom, and a child-sized writing desk; the walls were of a varnished blond wood, decorated with desert lithographs. The white bedspread depicted a stoic, war-painted Indian astride a pinto horse, a feathered lance in one hand.
    Jana crossed the room, stood behind the desk, and studied the typewritten sheets laid out beside the portable Royal, the first two pages of the outline she had begun earlier that morning. Then she looked at the half-filled third page rolled into the platen of the machine, at the x-ed out lines there. She turned again and went to the bed and sat down, staring at the telephone on the nightstand nearest the door.
    She had put off calling Harold Klein for a week now, and she knew that that had been a mistake. She hadn’t wanted to talk to him because of the book, the fact that she hadn’t even started it; and, more important, because he represented an integral part of the life in New York from which she had so completely severed herself. Time to think, uninterrupted, had been what she desperately needed during the two thousand five hundred miles she had driven this past week—time to sort things out in her mind so that she would be able to work again. And Harold would not have understood, would still not understand.