Atropos - William L. DeAndrea Page 0,1

if she wouldn’t have burned more thoroughly with cloth around her. He shrugged it off. Too late to worry about it.

Hank watched. He watched Pina’s long, black hair first crisp, then turn gray-white, then disappear. He watched the fire attack her pretty face, distort it, corrupt it, until it looked just like Gramps’s face when the men had pulled him out of the fire.

And suddenly, overwhelmingly, it was horrible, and the spell was broken. Hank Van Horn turned and ran for his life.

He had never meant to kill her. Why in the name of God should he kill her? He liked her. She was a lot of fun. Smart, too. Dedicated. A hard worker. Pina had organized Hank’s out-of-state fund-raising phone calls more efficiently than in any of his previous campaigns.

She was even nice to Ella. That was the really amazing thing. Hank Van Horn had dallied with a lot of girls, and all of them but Pina had shown it when they came in contact with his wife. There was always some kind of smirk on their faces, or some icicle-sharpness to their voices when they talked to Ella, as though they were scoring some big points off her.

It wasn’t as if Ella cared or anything. She had her charities and her tennis and a more than generous allowance from the family coffers; she was happy enough. And she had Mark, their son. Since he’d been born twelve years ago, he seemed to be all the man she needed in her life. Mark looked more like his mother all the time, as though proximity reinforced heredity.

And he was sharp, too. He had already learned, with a lot less pain than Hank had, what it meant to be a Van Horn. Hank was proud of him, when he thought about it. He made it a point to tell the boy whenever their schedules coincided.

This tended to happen less and less frequently these days. Ella seemed to want it that way. They’d be together in the fall, when the campaign heated up. Ella always dropped what she was doing to campaign with him. She was a fair campaigner—she could nod sympathetically when a factory worker held her hand and talked about his problems, even though she’d never seen the inside of a factory before her first campaign stop at one. Her real value, though, was in campaign photographs. Ella always photographed beautifully, and she had a way of looking at Hank that always came across as worshipful respect, whatever emotion it really reflected. The message to all who saw the picture was, “If this classy broad feels this way about him, he must really have something.”

It was a big help, and it wasn’t something Hank wanted to lose, so he made it a point to change girlfriends whenever they started to try to lord it over his wife.

Pina never did that, so Pina lasted much longer than any of the others, well into her second year, now. She was his Collierville girl, now, the one who got to live in the modest bungalow in the not-too-great section of town. The house had belonged to the family for years, always as a rent-free home for poorly paid campaign workers far from their own apartments. One time, a columnist in a New York paper had suggested it might be a—a “love nest” was the phrase he used—but Gramps had persuaded the paper to discourage the fellow from pursuing the point.

So when Hank was in town, he’d frequently drive Pina home from campaign headquarters when they’d work late. And he’d frequently go inside, where he and Pina would discuss campaign strategy, the way Nelson Rockefeller used to work late on a book about modern art.

That’s what they’d done tonight. Hank and Pina had discussed campaign strategy in the shower, and again in the bed. He was just catching his breath after the second discussion when Pina told him she was pregnant.

Hank looked at her. “I thought you were taking care of that.”

“Hank, darling,” she said. “Nothing works all the time. I’m sorry.”

She didn’t seem sorry.

Then Hank told her she’d have to go somewhere far away, have the abortion under another name. He didn’t need the anti-abortion nuts sniping at him because someone on his staff needed to get herself destorked. He told her he’d get Ainley Masters to handle all the details.

Pina went all Catholic on him. No abortion. Under no circumstances. She was going to have their baby.

That pissed Hank off. She hadn’t