Chapter 6
In the morning, Lynn woke up filled with remorse. It was if her conscience had returned and crawled back inside her while she was asleep. Whatever had possessed her, she wondered, after all her resolutions to play the role of the sexless librarian, to indulge in a gang fuck with a bunch of middle-aged poker players? High school teachers, at that?
It had to have been more than the Scotch she'd been feeding herself so liberally on her trips to the kitchen. She had to be out of her mind. She certainly had been out of her mind last night.
But she should have been on her guard against letting anything crazy like that happen. In this sleepy little town, of all places, where she was the new librarian and the natives were watching and waiting for anything to trigger their tongues, set them to wagging. Well, the tongues had plenty to wag about, now, if one word got out about last night. They looked like a pretty discreet bunch. But they drank. Oh God.
How'd she ever face any of them if she chanced to meet them in the street, or in the library, in the supermarket, on their way to church or wherever they went where people might be watching them? She closed her eyes, and scenes from the night before flashed across her mind, like scenes from an old X-rated movie running through a faulty projector. Their faces, their hands, even their cocks, were much too distinct. Mr. Bellows. Mr. Montagna. Jeff McNally, Don Winthrop, Mr. Denthos ( the projector stuck for a long moment on a scene of a smiling Mr. Denthos with his long white broomstick of a cock up her ass). God, in a town this size, she had to run into them, again and again--in the drug store, the car wash, the parking lot by the library. How would she ever face them, even if none of them talked, ever?
In the shower, she had her answer: she wouldn't face them.
Lynn could move very fast and with firm decision, once her mind was made up.
Her first stop, when the doors opened at nine that morning, was the Delmont Savings Bank. In it was the whole nest egg her stepfather had left in trust for her when she reached the age of twenty-one. She'd had her twenty-first birtliday the week she'd graduated from State, and she'd put her whole nest egg in the Delmont Savings Bank, never to be touched unless she really needed it. Well, she needed it now. Half of it. From what she'd heard, she could live for quite a while in Spain on the half of her nest egg she took from the bank.
Spain, she asked herself in wonder as she left the bank, why Spain? Well, she'd never been there. That was reason enough.
The head librarian took the news of her instant resignation in a state of numbed shock and mystification.
"Something's come up," was all Lynn told her. "An emergency. A serious personal emergency. I'll write you about it when I get the chance."
She wouldn't, of course, but what difference did it make? She had to tell the poor confused woman something.
She was packed in less than an hour. Fortunately, she had nothing in her efficiency apartment except her clothes, and her summer clothes should be just fine for Spain.
When she called the airport eighty miles away, she learned that there was a flight for New York at three that afternoon. She'd make it, with time to spare. She'd call someone to come and get her car to take care of it for her, while she was waiting for her plane.
And the rest of her thinking and planning she'd do after she got to New York.
Right now, she didn't want to think at all. She just wanted to keep moving.
There'd be plenty of time for thinking later.