OCR Text |
Show 10 Phyllis made no answer. Tired of the conversation she gazed aside. And Louise, anxious to mend the rift, returned to the earlier topic. "Phyllis," she murmured to Evelyn, "has a new bit of gossip. The Sergeant's found a girl." "Oh?" Evelyn's eyes widened. She was the daughter of a restaurant owner in Santa Cruz, Episcopalian rather than Buddhist, but of such implacable innocence that, it was presumed, she had never really understood what her husband was doing, and had grown pregnant, so to speak, through inadvertence. She bent forward. "Who is it?" Phyllis chortled again. "Are you ready for this?" Turning, she looked Louise in the eye. "Kimiko." Sensation. Phyllis had had no such triumph since 3ingo. "Can't be," said Louise "Hal's seen them. Koontz takes her home." "He doesn't. She leaves by herself. Says goodbye at the door." "Closes the door, walks around the corner, and gets into Koontz's jeep. Nor is that all. There's an inn at Nishi where they spend the weekend." "What for?" asked Evelyn, and Phyllis gazed at her poleaxad. "He doesn't," said Louise, "look that kind." "They're all that kind," said Phyllis, her voice like a barker's, and as if to give point, her eye fell on the figure of her husband, who in one of the coincidences that spangle life chose that moment to scratch his groin. |