thing, what do you think? You think it’s wise for you to hang around with me?
You think it’s safe?”
Einstein woofed.
“Was that a yes?”
Einstein rolled onto his back and put all four legs in the air, baring his belly
as he had done earlier when he had permitted Travis to collar him.
Putting his beer aside, Travis got off his chair, settled on the floor, and
stroked the dog’s belly. “All right,” he said. “All right. But don’t die on me,
damn you. Don’t you dare die on me.”
6
Nora Devon’s telephone rang again at eleven o’clock.
It was Streck. “Are you in bed now, prettiness?”
She did not reply.
“Do you wish I was there with you?”
Since the previous call, she had thought about how to handle him and had come up
with several threats she hoped might work. She said, “If you don’t leave me
alone, I’ll go to the police.”
“Nora, do you sleep in the nude?”
She was sitting in bed. She sat up straighter, tense, rigid. “I’ll go to the
police and say you tried to . . . to force yourself on me. I will, I swear!
will.”
“I’d like to see you in the nude,” he said, ignoring her threat. “I’ll lie. I’ll
say you r-raped me.”
“Wouldn’t you like me to put my hands on your breasts, Nora?”
Dull cramps in her stomach forced her to bend forward in bed. “I’ll have the
telephone company put a tap on my line, record all the calls I get, so I’ll have
proof.”
“Kiss you all over, Nora. Wouldn’t that be nice?”
The cramps were getting worse. She was shaking uncontrollably, too. Her voice
cracked repeatedly as she employed her final threat: “I have a gun. I have a
gun.”
“Tonight you’ll dream about me, Nora. I’m sure you will. You’ll dream about me
kissing you everywhere, all over your pretty body—”
She slammed the phone down.
Rolling onto her side on the bed, she hunched her shoulders and drew up her
knees and hugged herself. The cramps had no physical cause. They were strictly
an emotional reaction, generated by fear and shame and rage and enormous
frustration.
Gradually, the pain passed. Fear subsided, leaving only rage.
She was so wrenchingly innocent of the world and its ways, so unaccustomed to
dealing with people, that she couldn’t function unless she restricted herself to
the house, to a private world without human contact. She knew nothing about
social interaction. She had not even been capable of holding a polite
conversation with Garrison Dilworth, Aunt Violet’s attorney—Nora’s attorney
now—during their meetings to settle the estate. She had answered his questions
as succinctly as possible and had sat in his presence with her eyes downcast and
her cold hands fidgeting in her lap, crushingly shy. Afraid of her own lawyer!
If she couldn’t deal with a kind man like Garrison Dilworth, how could she ever
handle a beast like Art Streck? In the future, she wouldn’t dare have a
repairman in her home, no matter what broke down; she would just have to live in
ever-worsening decay and ruin because the next man might be another Streck—or
worse. In the tradition established by her aunt, Nora already had groceries
delivered from a neighborhood market, so she did not have to go out to shop, but
now she would be afraid to let the delivery boy into the house; he had never
been the least aggressive, suggestive, or in any way insulting, but one day he
might see the vulnerability that Streck had Seen .
She hated Aunt Violet.
On the other hand, Violet had been right: Nora was a mouse. Like all mice, her
destiny was to run, to hide, and to cower in the dark.
Her fury abated just as her cramps had done.
Loneliness took the place of anger, and she wept quietly.
Later, sitting with her back against the headboard, blotting her reddened eyes
with Kleenex and blowing her nose, she bravely vowed not to become a recluse.
Somehow she would find the strength and courage to venture out Into the world
more than she’d done before. She would meet people. She