Free The Kiss of Death by Victor J. Banis

The Kiss of Death
    By Victor J. Banis
    He would remain like that forever in her memory: his mouth agape, sky-blue eyes wide with shock and the first hot glint of pain.
    He was gone before she could speak, rushing out the door, the car’s tires shrieking accusations at her as they went down the driveway. She never saw him again. The sheriff advised against it.
    “You’d never know him,” he said. “He was beat up pretty awful.”
    There was no mystery to how he had gotten so “beat up.” He’d missed that bad curve on the old highway, hitting a tree at—according to the best estimates—something like ninety miles an hour. Even the car had barely been recognizable.
    The mystery was how a man who almost never touched liquor could have been so drunk. “Drunk as a skunk,” the sheriff said, though he put it a bit more delicately with the widow.
    “I only saw him one other time,” the bartender at The Lone Pine said. “He was in once with Doc Wister, had coffee that time. The other night, though, he must have put away a half-dozen shots, more than that, maybe, in fifteen, twenty minutes. He was drunk, all right.”
    “Too drunk for me to serve,” Linda said. Linda’s Joint was out on the old highway. It was coming back from there that he missed the turn. “Couldn’t hardly stand up. I told him I wasn’t about to serve him. I poured him some coffee and went to call the sheriff to have someone fetch him, but he lit out while I was on the phone.”
    “That’s how’s come I found him so quick,” the sheriff said, “I was already looking for him. The wheels hadn’t hardly stopped spinning when I came on the wreck.”
    Nobody was tactless enough to suggest it to Claire, but there was a sort of unspoken understanding that went around town about why a non-drinker would be so drunk: a fight with the wife, everyone assumed. One or two of them, back in the far recesses of their mind, wondered if he’d really “missed” the turn, but no one said that aloud, even to themselves.
    Claire saw the sliding-away looks they gave her, knew what they meant. The funny thing was, since the question wasn’t asked, she couldn’t answer it, but, no, they hadn’t had a fight. There hadn’t been time between the moment when he’d come in unexpectedly, and mere seconds later, when he’d dashed back out, leaving the door to swing in the wind behind him. Neither of them had spoken a word.
    What words she could have spoken, though, Claire had no idea. How could she ever have told him how sorry she felt, and how ashamed? Worse, she could not even explain to herself, let alone to him, how it had come about. In all her thirty four years she had never thought along those lines, never experienced any such desires, none at least that she had been conscious of. Nothing like that at all, until she and Jason had come here, to this desolate outpost of a town in Maine’s north woods, and Jason had thrown himself into his new job, and she had found herself so terribly alone—and Lisa Meredith had insinuated herself into Clair’s life.
    Claire sat in the dark in the little dining area of their house, letting her coffee grow cold, and stared morosely out the window at the falling snow. Almost from the day they’d arrived, she’d hated this house, this town, Jason’s job. She’d felt like a prisoner here. She’d lie at night beside her sleeping husband and hear dogs howling—she was sure they were wolves, but Jason laughed and said they were only dogs—and had felt like howling at the moon herself. She longed to be back in Oceanside, to kick off her shoes and walk barefoot along the beach, letting the gentle murmur of the surf coax every trace of gloom, every unhappy thought, from her.
    Well, she would be there soon enough, now, wouldn’t she, back in Oceanside, back on the beach? This wasn’t how she had dreamed it, though. She had dreamed of going back with Jason, with her husband, not with a handful of ashes in a brass urn.
    She