As she listened to the back door open and heard him cross the kitchen, she wondered what would happen if he found a cat in the house.
What would he do if he found himself alone in the house with a cat? If he were stalked through his own house by a snarling, predatory cat? She licked a whisker, playing over a variety of scenes.
But she had seen him throw rocks at dogs in the yard and smile when he hurt them. And once he had hit a cat on the highway but hadn’t stopped-she had been unable to make him stop. She had come home weeping, had driven back there alone; she had searched for hours, until it grew dark, but she couldn’t find it.
He was coming down the hall. His approaching footsteps sent a sudden terror through her. Chilled, she leaped off the dresser and dived under the bed.
Crouching deep under, in the faintly dusty dark, she watched his black oxfords move past the bed, heard him drop his keys on the dresser. In a moment he would dump his clothes on the chair, then get into the shower. She startled when he called her name.“Kate? Kate, are you here?”
Shocked, alarmed, she backed deeper under. Her backside hit the wall with a thump. Oh, God, had he heard her?
But it was only a soft thud. She stiffened when again he shouted.
“Kate! Are you home?”
But he was only calling the Kate he knew, as he called her every night. When he received no answer, he grunted with annoyance.
He hadn’t taken off his clothes, hadn’t gone into the shower. He sat down on the bed, creaking the springs, and she heard him pick up the phone. She listened with interest as he called the Blakes to see if they had any news of her. His effort made her feel better, as if maybe he did care.
He called the Harmons, the Owens, the Hanovers asking if they’d seen her yet. She didn’t know whether to feel ashamed at the concern she was causing him, or to enjoy his distress. She listened with interest as he called Clyde.
He told Clyde she still hadn’t come home, and then he sympathized thinly with Clyde’s own plight, which seemed to be that Clyde’s cat was missing. Jimmie said that after all it was a tomcat, what did Clyde expect? The cat would come home when it couldn’t screw anymore. He reminded Clyde that he, Jimmie, was missing hiswife,not a cat. Clyde must have said something rude, because Jimmie snapped, “Maybe, but I doubt that!” and he hung up, banging the phone.
He made one more call.
Why would he call Sheril Beckwhite? She sat up straighter, hitting her head on the bedsprings.
But of course he would call Sheril, she was so recently widowed, she needed all the friends she could get. When Samuel was killed, everyone at the shop had rallied around to help her. Jimmie would be calling to help out in some way, do one of the little kindnesses. The fact that he was being extraordinarily thoughtful regarding Sheril did strike her. Jimmie didn’t ordinarily go to any particular trouble over people.
But after all, Sheril had been his boss’s wife.
When Sheril answered, Jimmie’s voice was not that of a helpful friend. It was soft and intimate. Kate felt her claws reaching and retracting, felt her tail whipping against the carpet.
He told Sheril he would just get some fresh clothes and drop off his laundry, then he’d be over, that he’d pick up a couple of steaks and a bottle of brut.
Steaks? Brut? She didn’t know whether to leap out and claw him, or to fall over laughing. Cheap Sheril Beckwhite and dull, unimaginative Jimmie. That should be an exciting evening.
But how degrading that he had betrayed her with Sheril, of all the women they knew. Why Sheril? How perfectly ego-destroying.
Though in truth, she realized, she didn’t give a damn. She wondered how long he’d been seeing Sheril. She was embarrassed that she hadn’t guessed. Not a clue. How many people knew? How many people were laughing because she didn’t know?
She wondered what Sheril was like in bed.
Maybe Sheril did things she didn’t do, things that would shock Jimmie if she did them. The bitch syndrome. The good girl, bad girl syndrome. She had to stop her tail from lashing and thumping against the carpet; he was going to hear her.
She waited quietly until Jimmie had left the house-with his clean clothes and his laundry in two paper bags. Really classy. Then, frightened but resolute, she stood in the middle of the bedroom repeating the words Wark had whispered. She hardly thought it strange that she remembered them so clearly, they seemed seared in her head, as natural as, it seemed, was her ability to speak them. She didn’t think, she just did it.
A sick feeling exploded inside her, a sick dizziness. But then a feeling of elation swept her, reeling and giddy; and she was tall again. Her hands shook. For a moment it was hard to walk, hard to remember how to move on two feet. It was very hard to turn and look into the mirror.
When she did look, Kate was there looking back at her, tall and blond, the Kate she knew. How strange that she was cleaner; though her clothes were still a mess. She stood looking for some time, glad to see herself again.
It did occur to her to wonder which being she liked best. But what matter? She evidently had control of both. Talk about liberating.
She turned away from the mirror, and assembled her toothbrush and some makeup and toiletries. She packed panties and bras, a couple of blouses, a robe, stuffing everything into her overnighter. She tucked in an extra checkbook from her own account, then opened Jimmie’s dresser and removed the stack of twenties and hundreds he kept for emergencies. She put the bills in her purse on the dresser.
She showered and washed her hair, gave it a few quick swipes with the blower and shook it into place. She put on fresh jeans and a clean shirt, and a decent pair of sandals. In the study she retrieved their savings book.
The balance was forty thousand and some change. She would stop at the bank and clean out the account before he found the book missing, open an account in her name alone. More than half of it was money her mother had left her. She figured she deserved the other half. She was straightening the pile of bank statements she had disturbed, when she uncovered, behind them, several small folders held together with a rubber band.
She removed them, frowning, and slipped off the rubber band. They looked like bankbooks, but she and Jimmie had no other accounts, just the one.
They were bankbooks. She opened one, then the next. All were on foreign accounts, two in the Bahamas, one in Curacao, two in Panama. None was in Jimmie’s name, but in the names of companies unfamiliar to her. The balances were all in the six figures, the largest for eight hundred thousand, none for less than three hundred thousand.
These had to belong to someone else. Why would Jimmie have them? Who would he be keeping bankbooks for? Her hands shook so hard she dropped the books. She knelt to pick them up, knelt on the rug staring dumbly at the evidence of accounts worth over two million dollars.
Maybe they were Beckwhite’s. But why would Jimmie have Beckwhite’s bankbooks, and after he was dead?
She thought of taking them with her, showing them to an attorney, or at least to Clyde. She started to put them in her pocket, but a coldness filled her.
If these were Beckwhite’s bankbooks, what did that mean? And even if they were not Beckwhite’s, if they were Jimmie’s accounts, still, he was into something frightening.
She put them back in the drawer, and straightened the drawer, making sure everything was as she had found it. The bank statements had been facing with the cut edges of the envelopes to the back. The bankbooks had been facedown. Spines to the right? Or the left?
She was growing more shaken as the possibilities behind those huge accounts presented themselves.
She put their savings book back, too, just as she had found it. She didn’t want him to know she’d been in this drawer; she’d rather do without the forty thousand.