Free The Deceivers by John D. MacDonald

frame of mind as a farmer might have while purchasing a lightning rod for his barn. You didn’t expect lightning to strike. But if it did … Surely, working in an insurance office, she could understand that. And when she was comforted, he indulged in a little self-analysis, wondering if perhaps there wasn’t some Freudian implication in the analogy he had invented. He stopped wondering aloud when he realized his flight of fancy was making her uncomfortable. He had begun to learn that when he voiced some of the oblique flights of fancy that went on in his mind, she would become restless and slightly resentful of him. But this was a most minor flaw, if indeed it could be considered a flaw, in the fair Joan Browning. She was staunch and honest and almost invariably gay. She was affectionate and neat and as personally tidy as a cat. And, bestof all, best of everything, her physical hunger for him was as great as his for her.
    So the wedding finally came, and they were married in her home in Watertown, and the most obvious cases of snuffles were on the part of his sister, Marian, and Joan’s father, and two stone-faced maiden aunts of Joan that she claimed to have seen only twice in her life before. Bill Garrett had unloaded his speculative houses and came in a new suit and an almost new Cadillac, and Carl wondered what badly needed piece of equipment the company had been forced to forgo because Bill Garrett felt he needed a Cadillac.
    Dr. Browning’s wedding present was five hundred dollars, and the present from Carl’s parents was initialed luggage for both of them.
    They got away after the wedding lunch and drove up to Cape Vincent and took the ferry to Kingston and stayed the night there, and then drove the next day to Ottawa and there found a big room in a pension, with a great feather bed and a long view through big windows. And decided to stay two nights rather than one. And ended up staying twelve nights in all, while the marked road maps lay in the bureau drawer, forgotten.
    During those twelve days and nights he began to learn her the way a soldier might learn a strange terrain. He learned her tempos in love and discovered which things most pleased her. She liked great hot steamy baths, and to have her smooth back scrubbed, and to come to bed all pink and humid from her bath and be made love to. After the first few days, when she was more at ease with him, she reverted to her private custom of padding around nude, and teased him when she found he had a funny streak of modesty which prevented his doing so. Whenever she brushed her hair, she had her underlip caught behind her teeth. Sometimes she was as boisterously playful as a puppy, cuffing and pummeling him, then fleeing in mock fright, wanting to be caught, wanting, after being caught, for the playful violence to turn into something else.
    All during the drive back to Syracuse she sat close beside him, her shoulder and hip touching him, her hand resting on his thigh. She was content, and she hummed small songs, and her eyes had a look of sleep and love. And, as an index to the efficacy of honeymoon, it was very fine indeed.
    He thought of the honeymoon girl, and he thought of the woman in the hospital tonight, seventeen years older, twenty pounds heavier—but the same person. Incredibly the very same person, a girl who thought of herself and reacted to others in the same way as the honeymoon girl. If she was awake she would be looking into the darkness and being afraid. But it was a fear she would not show. Because of that staunchness.
    So many things had changed. He wondered how he would have felt on that wedding day if he could have looked ahead and seen how the future would be for those of the wedding party.
    His sister, Marian, who had wept, seemed now quite beyond tears. There was no more softness in her. She was in New York now, a crisp and cynical and too aggressive divorcee, a highly paid television consultant in one of the major advertising