Logic seems to be slipping out of my grasp. What possible threat could Jane pose? She’s such a nice kid. An exceptionally nice kid.
He sighed, rolled over, and thought about the plot of his first novel (the failed one), and that quickly put him to sleep.
At one o’clock in the morning, Grace Mitowski was sitting up in bed, watching a late movie on the Sony portable. She was vaguely aware that Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall were engaged in witty repartee, but she didn’t really hear anything they said. She had lost track of the film’s plot only minutes after she had turned it on.
She was thinking about Leonard, the husband she had lost to cancer eighteen years ago. He had been a good man, hard-working, generous, loving, a grand conversationalist. She had loved him very much.
But not everyone had loved Leonard. He had had his faults, of course. The worst thing about him had been his impatience—and the sharp tongue that his impatience had encouraged. He couldn’t tolerate people who were lazy or apathetic or ignorant or foolish. “Which includes two-thirds of the human race,” he had often said when he was feeling especially curmudgeonly. Because he was an honest man with precious little diplomacy in his bones, he had told people exactly what he thought of them. As a result, he had led a life remarkably free of deception but rich in enemies.
She wondered if it had been one of those enemies who had called her, pretending to be Leonard. A sick man might get as much pleasure from tormenting Leonard’s widow as he would have gotten from tormenting Leonard himself. He might get a thrill from poisoning her cat and from harassing her with weird phone calls.
But after eighteen years? Who would have remembered Leonard’s voice so well as to be able to imitate it perfectly such a long time later? Surely she was the only person in the world who could still recognize that voice upon hearing it speak only a word or two. And why bring Carol into it? Leonard had died three years before Carol had entered Grace’s life; he had never known the girl. His enemies couldn’t possibly have anything against Carol. What had the caller meant when he’d referred to Carol as “Willa”? And, most disturbing of all, how did the caller know she had just made apple dumplings?
There was another explanation, though she was loath to consider it. Perhaps the caller hadn’t been an old enemy of Leonard’s. Maybe the call actually had come from Leonard himself. From a dead man.
—No. Impossible.
—A lot of people believe in ghosts.
—Not me.
She thought about the strange dreams she’d had last week. She hadn’t believed in dream prophecies then. Now she did. So why not ghosts, too?
No. She was a level-headed woman who had lived a stable, rational life, who had been trained in the sciences, who had always believed that science held all the answers. Now, at seventy years of age, if she made room for the existence of ghosts within her otherwise rational philosophy, she might be opening the floodgates on madness. If you truly believed in ghosts, what came next? Vampires? Did you have to start carrying a sharp wooden stake and a crucifix everywhere you went? Werewolves? Better buy a box of silver bullets! Evil elves who lived in the center of the earth and caused quakes and volcanoes? Sure! Why not?
Grace laughed bitterly.
She couldn’t suddenly become a believer in ghosts, because acceptance of that superstition might require the acceptance of countless others. She was too old, too comfortable with herself, too accustomed to her familiar ways to reconsider her entire view of life. And she certainly wasn’t going to contemplate such a sweeping reevaluation merely because she had received two bizarre phone calls.
That left only one thing to be decided: whether or not she should tell Carol that someone was harassing her and had used Carol’s name. She tried to hear how she would sound when she explained the telephone calls and when she outlined her theory about Aristophanes being drugged or poisoned. She couldn’t hope to sound like the Grace Mitowski that everyone knew. She’d come off like an hysterical old woman who was seeing nonexistent conspirators behind every door and under every bed.