Where Is Janice Gantry? Read Free Page A

could hardly escape. She is a big-boned brunette, full of life and bounce and sparkle, a truly warmhearted person. She has a wide hearty mouth, a strikingly good figure—firm, rounded and ample—and very dark blue eyes.
    Sis and I will never be at ease with each other. It started in the wrong way with us, and after a while it became obvious it should never have started at all. I met her nearly four years ago. They had whipped me and I had come back to my home town, knowing I should give a damn about what happened to the rest of my life, but finding it hard to care. I had been in town a month and I was doing rough carpentry work for one of the local builders when I met her. She was just getting over being whipped. She was twenty-five then, and I was a year older. She had made one of those impossible marriages, to a wild man—psychotic, alcoholic, vicious. A girl with less optimism and vitality than Sis would have gotten out of it in the first year. But she stuck it out for four childless, incredible years, until he shot her in the throat and himself in the roof of the mouth. She survived only because there was a very good man on the ambulance.
    We were a couple of prominent misfits in Florence City, and we joined forces and talked out our problems to each other. She had to have a project, because it helped her keep her mind off her own problems, and she elected me. It was due to her prodding that I began to look seriously for somekind of work that would suit me. Old Bert Shilder at the Central Bank and Trust, who had known my parents all their lives right up until they drowned in the Gulf in a storm fifteen years ago, put me onto this accident appraisal business and got me a job with a firm over in Miami. After four months I knew enough about the business to take the chance of starting up on my own in Florence City.
    It was Sis Gantry who applauded the decision, reviewed my precarious finances, decided I should own a place rather than rent, and found the old cottage on the bay shore on one acre of overgrown land four miles south of the city line. She was working for Tom Earle by then, and she knew it was a steal and, after she had bullied me into it, she felt she had earned the right to help me fix it up. And it was Sis who wangled the desk space in Tom Earle’s beach office for me.
    Up until about two weeks after I had moved into the cottage, sex had had no place in our relationship. We were friends and we’d both had a bad time, and we were able to relax with each other. Then one Sunday evening she brought over the kitchen curtains she had made. I put the fixtures up and she hung curtains. October thunder came banging down along the Keys, and then the rain came swamping down and the electricity went off. We made bad jokes about it. There were no candles back then, and no flashlight. We sat on the couch. I could see her in every blue-white flicker of lightning. I was reaching for the cigarettes when I happened to touch her hand. I closed my fingers around her waist. At the next flash of lightning I saw her face, inches from mine, eyes shadowy wide and lips apart. A few moments after the kiss began she was straining for a greater closeness, her mouth heated, her breath fast and shallow. She suffered herself to be led into the bedroom, docile as a child, and she turned this way and that way to aid me as, with hands made clumsy by a vast urgency, I undressed her there.
    I had had no one since Judy, and she had had no one sincethat madman who had put the dimpled scar in the side of her throat.
    For the many weeks after that, through the end of that year and into the next year, it was a lopsidedly sexual relationship, and all of it took place in that cottage, screened from the road and the neighbors by the wildness of the untended brush. It was a strong, obsessive and joyous thing. There was no coyness, no teasing, no parlor games. It never seemed to take more than thirty seconds from the doorway to the bed, in unvarying