Deep Water by Patricia Highsmith (best books to read now .TXT) 📕

suits. One of the people was Horace, and seeing Vic, Horace detached himself and came over.

       "Is Tiberius in retirement already?" Horace asked.

       Tongue-tied, Vic watched Melinda in her green bathing suit waving good-bye to two couples who were leaving and crossing the lawn toward the cars in front of the house.

       "Aren't you having a dip?" Horace asked.

       "No, I don't think so," Vic said. "But I'll come down to the pool," he added, for no reason that he knew of, because he didn't want to go down to the pool.

       He and Horace walked down together in silence. Finally Horace said, "Looks like the party's thinning out a little."

       Vic hung back out of the glow of the lanterns. De Lisle was standing on the edge of the pool with a can of beer in each hand, watching Melinda, who was swimming in a fast overhand stroke down one arm of the L toward the end of the pool. De Lisle came around the edge of the pool to meet her. He had not been in yet, Vic saw from his dry blue shorts. De Lisle's body looked scrawny and pale, and here and there patches of black hair grew, not only on his sunken-in chest but high on his left shoulder blade. He stooped and handed a beer to Melinda as she hauled herself out, and she said in her loud, distinct voice, "I've got a 'foul' headache! This'll kill or cure!" She caught sight of Vic.

       Vic turned away, strolled toward a gardenia bush with the intention of examining a blossom, though it was so dark he could hardly see the white flowers.

       "Hi, there!" Melinda's voice called behind him. She tossed his rolled-up trunks at him, and Vic caught them. "Aren't you coming in?"

       From across the pool De Lisle was grinning in their direction. The lantern glow made his face cadaverous.

       Melinda hit the water with a belly-whopping 'splat', which didn't seem to bother her, because she took a couple of easy strokes, then rolled over on her back. "Oh, it's divine!" she shouted lust as Vic had known she would, and he knew also that she had by now had so much to drink that she didn't know or care what she was saying. She was just as likely to come out with, "Charley, I adore you!" as she had one night, when Jo-Jo was around, said "Jo-Jo, I adore you!" and their friends who had heard it—the Cowans, Vic remembered—had discreetly ignored it.

       There was the distant slam of a car door from the road.

       Now De Lisle was gingerly descending the metal ladder at the far end of the pool. Vic took his trunks toward the remotest gardenia bush to change, because he was expected to go in, but he felt a revulsion about getting into the pool while Melinda and I )e Lisle were there, about even getting near the pool, because De Lisle had been in its water. The gardenia bush was thirty yards from the pool, in the darkest corner of the lawn. Vic was as careful to get the bush exactly between himself and the pool as he would have been if it had been broad daylight. He left his toga, his walking shorts and underwear and T-shirt behind the bush, and stepped forth barefoot in his brown swimming trunks.

       Horace had left, Vic saw, evidently gone back into the house. Melinda was just climbing up the ladder as Vic got to the pool. "Cold?" Vic asked.

       "No, it's not cold," Melinda said. "I've got a headache." She whipped off her white rubber cap and shook her damp hair out.

       De Lisle was hanging on to the gutter of the pool, not cutting a very athletic figure. "Feels pretty cool to me," he said.

       "Have you got an aspirin, Evelyn?" Melinda asked.

       "Oh, of course!" Evelyn was standing nearby on the grass. "But they're not in the bathroom—I don't think. I think they're in the bedroom. Come on with me. I'll just make a small detour to look at the coffee."

       "I smell that coffee way out here," Phil said, getting up from the edge of the pool. "Anybody want coffee?"

       "Not just now, thanks," Vic said. He was the only one who answered. Vic suddenly realized he was alone with Charley De Lisle.

       "You're not coming in?" Charley said to Vic, pushing off from the edge of the pool, swimming in a vague side-stroke toward the shallow end.

       The water looked black and uninviting. Not cold, just uninviting. He wanted to walk away, to leave De Lisle there alone, but he felt it would look like some kind of retreat, like a silly change of mind after he had gone to the trouble of putting on his swimming trunks. "Oh, I suppose so," Vic said, sliding immediately off the edge of the pool into deep water. He was a buoyant swimmer, a strong swimmer, but he was not in the mood for swimming now, and the sudden coldness of the water, the messy wetness of his hair, shocked him unpleasantly, and started up a little dynamo of anger within him.

       "Nice pool," De Lisle said.

       "Yes," Vic replied as coolly as a snobbish club member might use to a nonmember. Vic, treading water, looked at the terrace where two lanterns still burned. There was nobody on the terrace, Vic thought.

       De Lisle was on his back, floating. One of his white arms came up and lashed the water awkwardly and a little frantically, though where he was would be barely over his head, Vic knew Vic would have loved to grab him by the shoulders and hold him under, and even as he thought of it, Vic swam toward him. De Lisle was now making an overhead stroke to bring him to the edge of the pool, but Vic reached him in a second, grabbed his throat and pulled him backward. There was not even a