And, just to add to the fun, her pager had gone off three times in a space of forty-five minutes. Weeks went by when it sat mutely in her bag, but this afternoon, during a meeting where there were long periods of silence broken by people who seemed incapable of speaking above a tearful mutter, the gadget had gone crazy. After the third time she got tired of the swivelling heads and turned the Christing thing off. She hoped nobody had gone into labor at the picnic, that nobody’s kid had taken a thrown horseshoe in the head, and most of all she
hoped Rosie’s husband hadn’t shown up. She doubted that he had, though; he would know better. In any case, anyone who’d called her pager would have called D & S first, and she’d make the answering machine in her study stop number one. She could listen to the messages through the bathroom door while she peed. In most cases, that would be fitting.
She got out of the car, locked it (even in a good neigborhood like this you couldn’t be too careful), and went up the porch steps. She used her keycard and silenced the meep-meep-meep of the security system without even thinking of it; sweet shreds of her daydream (only woman of her time to be loved and respected by all factions of the increasingly divergent women’s movement)
still swirled in her head.
‘Hello, the house!’ she called, walking down the hall.
Silence replied, which was what she’d expected . . . and, let’s face it, hoped for. With any luck, she might have two or even three hours of blessed silence before the commencement of that night’s giggling, hissing showers, slamming doors, and cackling sitcoms.
She walked into the kitchen, wondering if maybe a long leisurely bath, Calgon and all, wouldn’t smooth off the worst of the day. Then she stopped, frowning across at her study door. It was standing ajar.
‘Goddammit,’ she muttered. ‘God damn it!’
If there was one thing she disliked above all others — except maybe for touchy-huggy-feely people — it was having her privacy invaded. She had no lock on her study door because she did not believe she should be reduced to that. This was her place, after all; the girls and women who came here came through her generosity and at her sufferance. She shouldn’t need a lock on that door. Her desire that they should stay out unless invited in ought to have been enough.
Mostly it was, but every now and then some woman would decide she really needed some piece of her documentation, that she really needed to use Anna’s photocopier (which warmed up faster than the one downstairs in the rec room), that she really needed a stamp, and so this disrespectful person would come in, she’d track through a place that wasn’t hers, maybe look at things that weren’t hers to look at, junk up the air with the smell of some cheap drugstore perfume . . .
Anna paused with one hand on the study doorknob, looking into the dark room which had been a pantry when she was a little girl. Her nostrils flared slightly and the frown on her face deepened. There was a smell, all right, but it wasn’t quite perfume. It was something that reminded her of the Mad Marxist. It was . . .
All my men wear English Leather or they wear nothing at all.
Jesus! Jesus Christ!
Her arms crawled with gooseflesh. She was a woman who prided herself on her practicality, but suddenly it was all too easy to imagine Peter Slowik’s ghost waiting for her inside her study, a shade as insubstantial as the stink of that ludicrous cologne he’d worn . . .
Her eyes fixed on a light in the darkness: the answering machine. The little red lamp was stuttering madly, as if everyone in the city had called today.
Something had happened. All at once she knew it. It explained the pager, too . . . and like a dummy she’d turned it off so people would stop staring at her. Something had happened, probably at Ettinger’s Pier. Someone hurt. Or, God forbid —
She stepped into the office, feeling for the light-switch beside the door, then stopped, puzzled by what her fingers had found. The switch was already up, which meant the overhead light should be on, but it wasn’t.
Anna flipped the switch up and down twice, started to do it a third time, and then a hand dropped on her right shoulder.
She screamed at that settling touch, the sound coming out of her throat as full and frantic as
any scream ever voiced by a horror-movie heroine, and as another hand clamped on her upper left arm and turned her around on her heels, as she saw the shape silhouetted against the flooding light from the kitchen, she screamed again.
The thing which had been standing behind the door and waiting for her wasn’t human.
Horns sprouted from the top of its head, horns which appeared to be swollen with strange, tumorous growths. It was —
‘Viva ze bool,’ a hollow voice said, and she realized it was a man, a man wearing a mask, but that didn’t make her feel any better because she had a very good idea of who the man was.
She tore out of his grip and backed toward the desk. She could still smell English Leather, but she could smell other things now, as well. Hot rubber. Sweat. And urine. Was it hers?
Had she wet herself? She didn’t know. She was numb from the waist down.
‘Don’t touch me,’ she said in a trembling voice utterly unlike her usual calm and authoritative tone. She reached behind her and felt for the button that summoned the police. It was there someplace, but buried under drifts of paper. ‘Don’t you dare touch me, I’m warning you.’
‘Anna-Anna-bo-Banna, banana-fanna-fo-Fanna,’ the creature in the horned mask said in a tone of deep meditation, and then swept the door shut behind it. Now they were in total darkness.
‘Stay away,’ she said, moving along the desk, sliding along the desk. If she could get into the bathroom, lock the door —
‘Fee-fi-mo-Manna . . .’
From her left. And close. She lunged to the right, but not soon enough. Strong arms enfolded her. She tried to scream again, but the arms tightened, and her breath came out in a silent rush.
If I were Misery Chastain, I’d — she thought, and then Norman’s teeth were on her throat, he was nuzzling her like a horny kid parked on Lovers’ Lane, and then his teeth were in her throat, and something was spraying warm all down the front of her, and she thought no more.
7
By the time the final questions were asked and the final statement was signed, it was long past dark. Rosie’s head spun, and she felt a little unreal to herself, as she had after those occasional all-day tests they threw at you in high school.
Gustafson went off to file his paperwork, bearing it before him as if it were the Holy Grail, and Rosie got to her feet. She began moving toward Bill, who was also getting up. Gert had gone in search of the ladies’ room.
‘Ms McClendon?’ Hale asked from her elbow.
Rosie’s weariness was supplanted by a sudden, horrid premonition. It was just the two of them; Bill was too far away to overhear anything Hale might say to her, and when he began to speak, he would do so in a low, confidential voice. He would tell her that she would stop all this foolishness about her husband right now, while there was still time, if she knew what was good for her. That she would keep her mouth shut around cops from here on out, unless one of them either (a) asked her a question, or (b) unzipped his fly. He would remind her that this was a family thing, that —
‘I am going to bust him,’ Hale said mildly. ‘I don’t know if I can completely convince you of that no matter what I say, but I need you to hear me say it, anyway. I am going to bust him.
It’s a promise.’
She looked at him with her mouth open.
‘I’m going to do it because he’s a murderer, and crazy, and dangerous. I’m also going to do
it because I don’t like the way you look around the squadroom and jump every time a door slams somewhere. Or the way you cringe a little every time I move one of my hands.’
‘I don’t . . .’
‘You do. You can’t help it and you do. That’s all right, though, because I understand why you do. If I was a woman and I’d been through what you’ve been through . . .’ He trailed off, looking at her quizzically. ‘Has it ever occurred to you how magic-goddam-lucky you are just to be alive?’