Programmed for Peril

than she deserves!” Lois said angrily. “I was foolish to allow you to do this. A brief phone call would have served the same purpose.”
    “Would you do me a big favor, Lois?” Trish said. “Shut up! Let him talk. And what’s this stuff about you ‘allowing’ him to do anything?”
    “Just listen, Trish. You’ll understand.” No emotion in Foster’s voice. No, he wasn’t at all what he had been.
    He told her what Carson had done to him on the grimy floor of the squalid room—what had taken hours that, in their loathsomeness, stretched seemingly to weeks. She closed her eyes, turning away to hide welling tears. Lois was yapping about it all being Trish’s fault. Her whining words in the teeth of Trish’s growing distress sounded as faint as the bird calls in distant trees. The last sentences of Foster’s tale emerged in a whisper. Trish pawed at her eyes, used the apron on smeared cheeks.
    She went to him, arms out to comfort. Oh, God, he leaned away from her!
    “Don’t bother!” Lois barked. She seized Foster’s short sleeve and shook it. “Now! You have to tell her now.”
    He raised his face, disclosing an unfamiliar weak, watery gaze. “Trish...” He raised a hand toward her, let it fall back. “There won’t be a wedding. Our engagement is off— permanently. ”
    After they left Trish flew upstairs and flung herself on the bed. Thank goodness Melody wasn’t there to see and hear her frenzy of weeping. What weighed more crushingly than a dead dream?
    She drew her knees up, clutched them, and let go. Her choking gasps were at first heavy with hysteria. In time they subsided to steady blubbering. She rubbed her streaming face against a pillow sham. Rising for a tissue seemed as impossible as scaling Everest.
    She wept on in bitter disappointment. Not only over the turning of the road of her life away from Foster, but for the man himself. He had rebuffed Trish’s tenderness in favor of Lois Smith-Patton’s martial rule. From a potential life of sharing to one of being dominated. Poor Foster!
    And yes, poor Trish. Or at least so she thought early in her long siege of tears. In time she came to ask herself about her shattered dream of a safe, moneyed life beside what she only now admitted was a merely adequate man. Whose hopes had she tried to make reality? Hers? Or her mother’s? In a moment of painful honesty she recalled the shaky soul she had been when she began the relationship—a storm-tossed ship seeking nothing more than a safe harbor. Oh, how hard it was to admit the commonplace! She had colored and filigreed her motivations to fit the pattern of an outstanding love.
    Ended now, it didn’t seem so grand.
    Looming behind that painful insight stood Carson, tall as a colossus in his total comprehension of how she thought and what she imagined she wanted. He had dismantled her future just as she had learned to dismantle the pistol Jerry had given her. Now her devil had gotten his way. The wedding was off. She guessed he thought that now things between them were as they had been. Not quite.
    The distant, submissive Trish Morley was gone. She understood now that the woman who stood in her place was a tougher type altogether. In destroying her hopes for a traditional married life he had annealed her in a fire of emotions and events that forever drove off the impurities that had made her a helpless creature.
    Just precisely what kind of person she had become she couldn’t yet determine. One thing was certain: She would be a great deal harder for him to deal with than he dreamed. Oh, yes, Carson was wise in that way. But unwise in at least one other: He thought she now belonged to him.
    Conceivably he could imagine that he had long ago bargained successfully for her soul. In a sense he, her devil, had possessed it for a while. Weil, he didn’t own it anymore!
    Or so she told herself.
    Now what? Carson had finally gotten his way. She wouldn’t be marrying Foster. Briefly she hoped that her devil would simply... go away. Face pressed to damp sham, her memory spoke: Trish, Carson, and Melody - together forever! Oh, no, he wouldn’t disappear. Somehow he would edge in closer till he stood by her side, arm outstretched to draw her into his hell of madness....
    She dreaded the next days.
    She rolled over and sat up. She wouldn’t just wait for him! She had to try to defend herself and her child. Yet she couldn’t guess from which direction he would approach her. She was so