Free The Hangings by Bill Pronzini Page B

me to leave?
    You’re not a . . . you're not that kind of woman.
    The town thinks I am.
    Damn the town!
    I looked away from her, scraped my mind clear of carnal thoughts, and worked at lighting my pipe. But it was not lust. Ivy would have called it lust, the bluenoses in Tule Bend would have, but it was more than that, it was purer than that . . . damn the town. Goddamn the town!
    Neither of us spoke for a time. The silence was better now, easier. I drank the chicory-flavored coffee and smoked my pipe and watched the night. And glanced at Hannah every now and then, when it got to be too much of an effort to hold my eyes away.
    I was looking at her when she said, "Have you found out anything more about the man who was hanged?"
    "No," I said. "Not much."
    "You will."
    "So I keep telling myself and everyone else."
    "Don't you believe it?"
    "I'm worried, Hannah, I don't mind telling you that."
    "Why?"
    "Because I haven't found out more than I have—that's one thing. Another is Emmett Bodeen, the dead man's brother, he's a troublemaker, for sure. Then there was that prowler last night. Too much has happened too fast and it makes me edgy."
    "You think there'll be more trouble?"
    "Yes," I said, "I do. I can feel it."
    And I could, too, the way you can feel a storm building long before it breaks. More trouble was coming, all right. I was prepared for it.
    What I was not prepared for was how fast it arrived.

Chapter 9
    THERE WAS A BELL RINGING SOMEWHERE, A LONG WAY off.
    It got mixed up with the already muddled dream I was having, then brought me groggily awake. Pitch black in my bedroom—middle of the night? And that distant clamor kept on and on. . . .
    Fire bell.
    The realization woke me up good and proper. Our fire bell used to hang in the belfry of the old Methodist church on Tule Bend Road, before the congregation raised the money a few years back to build a new church. When the old one was torn down, the bell was donated to the town and mounted on the wall of the Volunteer Fire Brigade on Main. It had a crack in it, like the Liberty Bell, so there was no mistaking its sound. And when it pealed as it was pealing now, loud and steady with no pauses, it meant a big blaze somewhere within the town limits—a major alarm.
    I swung out of bed, managed to get to the window without falling over anything in the dark. The window faced north and when I raised the shade, there was nothing to see out that way except a faint reddish tinge. The fire was somewhere on the south side of town, then, or west or east. I turned back to the bed and groped for my clothes and got my trousers and boots on standing up. All the while that fire bell kept hammering out its urgent summons.
    I put my shirt and coat on over my nightshirt, not buttoning either one, and stumbled out into the hall. Ivy was coming from the direction of her room, carrying a lighted lamp; in her long white nightdress, her pale face backlit by the lamplight, she looked like a scrawny apparition—one of those female ghosts that are supposed to haunt manor houses over in England.
    "Mercy sakes, Lincoln, mercy sakes." Her voice was all a-quiver. But there was as much thrill in it as there was concern, like a tent show preacher's in the throes of a sermon about sins of the flesh. "What is it? What could have caught fire at three o'clock in the morning?"
    Foolish questions, so I didn't bother to answer. I ran down the stairs, onto the front porch. Outside the racket from the bell built echo after echo until the night itself seemed to have come alive. I could see lights flare up in the other houses along the block, people starting to spill out through open doorways; I could see the blaze, too, or rather the smoke and the weird pulsing glow lighting up the sky, and it dried my mouth, put a tightness in my chest. Whatever was burning was on this side of the creek, smack downtown.
    "Oh, my Lord!'' Ivy, behind me at the door. "It . . . why, half the town must be on fire!"
    I had no answer