Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 40, No. 6, June, 1995

Half an hour later, back in Billy’s Trans Am, on the way up the mountain to my cabin, the relaxed, warm feeling that had grown up between Dilly and me had evaporated.

The sky had gone to a dull gray-black, heavy with sudden clouds, and it was quite cold now, inside and out. It was a long, quiet drive, all the way.

When we arrived at my cabin, Dilly parked, sagged back in her seat, and said, “So — where were we?”

I looked at her. “Nowhere, I think.”

“What do you mean?”

I said, “That kid was really scared.”

“So?”

“So, you were pretty damn rough with him.”

Her eyes glittered with sudden anger. “Oh?”

I looked back at her, not with any anger of my own but with a genuine question.

“Look,” she said grimly. “I’m the law in this county. You know what that means?”

I shrugged.

She sighed. “We don’t have a lot of crime up here,” she told me. “But what we do have is usually violent, and that means I’ve got to be somebody that people look to as the damned cavalry. As somebody they can trust to keep them safe, and if that means being a little rough on a perpetrator now and then, that’s how it is.”

I said nothing, and the air seemed colder.

“I’ll tell you something,” she continued. “What I did back there at the station will be breakfast gossip around town tomorrow morning, and do you know what they’ll be saying?” She nodded with certainty. “They’ll be saying, ‘Whew. That Sheriff Dilly is one mean bitch, isn’t she? Don’t want to get on the wrong side of her, no sir. Barrel knew what he was doing when he hired her, I’ll say. She might make a good sheriff after all, she might.’ ”

“So,” I said. “When you bounced that little boy off the wall, you were making a political statement, is that it?”

“In more ways than one,” she said, in a take-it-or-leave-it way.

I nodded and decided to leave it. And she nodded back and said, “So — I guess we’re still nowhere.”

I opened the door of the car and stood outside saying, “I have my own problems, Loretta.”

“I’ll say you do,” she muttered angrily.

She gunned her car’s engine and spun quickly out of sight, down the road to the highway.

Leaving me standing and staring after her.

Sleep that night was a long time coming, and not as restful as it should have been. The cabin creaked under the strain of the wind, waking me up half a dozen times, leaving me awake to think about the things I’d wanted to avoid thinking about but now I couldn’t.

Something about Dilly reflected something about me, and suddenly a lot of what had mystified and confused me became clear — and I was very uncomfortable with myself.

The Winter of Virginiak’s Discontent continued.

In any case, sleep was a hard job that night, but as hard as it was, getting up the next day was even tougher, and when I got up finally, around nine o’clock, a blizzard was blowing its head off outside, so I passed on my morning run, started a blaze going in the fireplace, put myself in a big easy chair in the front room, and spent the day reading.

The Genealogy of Morals.

A book I’d skimmed in college but always intended to reread, and now found almost compelling.

Something about its contempt, its merciless appraisals, struck home again and again, and I couldn’t put it down.

And so I passed the day quietly — albeit thinking disparaging thoughts about my bourgeois neighbors. Around five P.M., with a feeling of self-mockery I couldn’t shake, I finally showered, shaved, and got dressed and hiked the two hundred yards or so through a heavy fall of wet snow to the motel restaurant where I had filet mignon, baked potato, broccoli in hollandaise, and a couple of Heinekens.

Which left me feeling, if not quite a “superman,” at least not the “sick animal” I’d been.

Dr. Nietzsche’s Midlife Crisis Remedy.

After dinner I considered getting mellow in the bar but decided enough was enough for one day — a prudent man takes Nietzsche in small doses, I thought — so I settled for espresso and a local newspaper in the lookout lounge.

Where I read articles about Billy’s arrest of Charley White Hand the night before — which characterized Dilly as “tough,” and White Hand as “desperate” and “violent” — and about the efforts of the local law to identify the body I’d found the previous morning — which were characterized as “ongoing” but “lacking results.”

Which, aside from a lot of talk about the weather — the promise of snow and the lengthening of the ski season occupying most of the front page — was all the news in Big Pine fit to print.

What else would there be?

Putting aside the paper, I people-watched for another half hour before I started getting bored, making up my mind that if I stayed on the full two weeks I would damn sure rent a car because this was not my kind of place and these were not my kind of people. Then I hiked back up to my cabin.

Where Dilly, dressed in her sheriff’s outfit, was waiting in her car.

“Hi,” she said tentatively, getting out as I walked up to her.