It was after midnight when she woke and sat up in bed. She was suddenly wide awake and quite clearly she heard the front door of the apartment being unlocked, heard the two tumblers turn. She jumped from the bed and rushed to the bedroom door. Tom was up and off the sofa. He had grabbed his pistol from his briefcase, and when he spotted her, he put his finger to his lips, motioned for her to be silent.
She watched as he carefully stepped around the sofa, moving silently in his bare feet. Then she heard the dog, heard his paws on the bare hardwood floors of the front entrance.
She started to move out of the bedroom, and frantically Tom signaled, waved her back into the room, motioning that she should close the door.
“What is it?” she whispered, and then she caught a glimpse of the dog in the dim light of the living room. It had run in from the front hall, and spotting Tom, it immediately growled and bared its teeth. It was a pit bull, Jennifer saw, watching the small blunt-faced beast.
“Get away, Jenny!” Tom ordered, raising his pistol. He fired as the dog leaped at him. The bullet missed the animal and shattered the glass in her breakfront beside the bedroom door.
Jennifer screamed.
The pit bull landed on the back of the sofa and then jumped at Tom. Backing off, Tom tripped over the coffee table and shot again. This time the bullet dug into the high ceiling.
The dog was on top of him now, had seized his forearm in his teeth. Tom swung the pistol around and shoved it against the pit bull’s face and pulled the trigger. The automatic pistol jammed, and before he could get off the next shot, the dog ripped the flesh off his forearm. Now Tom screamed.
Jennifer went for the beast. She dove at the animal, grabbed his white slavering muzzle with her own bare hands and wrenched open his jaw with one smooth strong motion, as if she had been killing animals in the wild all of her life.
Then with her arms outstretched, she let the heavy beast twist and turn under her strong grip, let him struggle to get loose. She saw the anguish in the dog’s yellow eyes as he gasped for breath, and then with a sudden jerk, she ripped open the beast’s mouth and broke his jaw. The fresh blood from the soft white insides of his mouth sprayed her face and splattered the pale yellow rug of her living room. She dropped the prey.
Tom crawled away from the pit bull. Crawled away in pain. His arm was bleeding and his flesh hung loose from the muscle.
“Jenny!” he gasped, seeing what she had done to the dog.
He was frightened, she saw. Frightened now of her. But Tom wasn’t her enemy. He did not want to harm her.
Jennifer smiled at her lover, and slowly, carefully, as any animal would, she wiped her lips clean with the tip of her tongue.
Book Three
If we open to these sources of inspiration and creativity, we open a window to a universe that is going to be becoming better. Someone once asked me about which mode! of the universe I favored. I said, “To hell with the model, let’s just channel the universe. Let’s become one with it. That way we don’t have to play little games.”
He [my guru] asked me to pray, but I could not pray. He replied that it did not matter, he and some others would pray and I had simply to go to the meeting
and wit and speech would come to me from some other source than the mind. [I did as I was told.]
The speech came as though it was dictated, and ever since, all speech, writing, thought and outward activity have so come to me from the same source.
CHAPTER TWENTY
JENNIFER SLEPT AS THE car swept across New Jersey. When she woke, stretched out in a sleeping bag in the back of Eileen’s station wagon, she saw they were on an interstate, passing through bleak farmland. The trees were bare, and icy snow covered the low, rolling hills. The sun, reflecting off the snow, blinded her for a moment, and she thought at once of how she had killed the pit bull, and to keep her mind off the frightening memory, she asked, “Where are we, Eileen?”
“Well, good morning, sleepyhead. According to the last signpost, we’re just beyond Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, heading west on 80. Do you want coffee?”
“Oh, no, just keep driving.” Jennifer did not want to stop. She liked feeling that she was escaping from New York, driving away from danger.
“I have some with me. Here.” Without taking her eyes off the road, Eileen handed back a thermos. “There are sandwiches packed, too, and sodas. Would you like to drive?”
Jennifer shook her head. “Not unless you want me to,” she said. “I’m exhausted.” When Eileen had picked her up that morning at the apartment, she was still trembling from the dog’s attack. She was afraid that Tom wouldn’t let her go, but he had wanted her to go then, thinking that she would be safer in Minnesota, far away from the drug dealers. But it wasn’t drug dealers, Jennifer knew, who had sent the pit bull into her apartment.
“Well, you’re okay now,” Eileen told her, smiling into the rearview mirror.
“I don’t know. I don’t think I’ll ever be all right again.”
“Yes, you will. Kathy’s going to help you.”
Jennifer smiled, then reached over and tenderly squeezed Eileen’s shoulder. She closed her eyes again but immediately conjured up the nightmare vision of the dog attacking. She saw the animal’s slobbering mouth, its bare white teeth. Jennifer opened her eyes and blinked again at the brilliant winter sun.
“Tom thinks the dog was sent after him,” she said. “By drug dealers he’s prosecuting.”
“You don’t believe that.” It was a statement, not a question. Eileen’s eyes found Jennifer in the mirror.
“The dog was after me, Eileen,” she said. “I just have this feeling that whoever attacked me outside of my apartment is still after me.” Her own words frightened her. “I guess I’m trying to warn you, Eileen, even if it’s too late. I mean, here we are all alone on the interstate in the middle of nowhere.”
“We’ll be careful,” Eileen said reassuringly.
“I’m just sorry that you have to be involved.”
“I want to be involved. Kathy Dart practically told me to hand-deliver you to Minnesota.”
“Oh?” Jennifer looked over at Eileen. From where she was sitting, she could see her right profile.
“You know Kathy is concerned about you,” Eileen said.
“Yes, I know. Is she this concerned about your well-being, too?” Jennifer shifted around and rested her chin on the back of the driver’s seat.
“Yes, I think so. Habasha says that I was once in King Louis the Fourteenth’s cavalry. That must explain my love for horses. Anyway, Kathy was my commanding officer and I saved her life. That explains why she is linked to me. And look at us, you and I. Why were we so close in high school? Why did we just—you know—pick up afterwards? There’s a reason. It’s not coincidence. We’re totally different people. My parents weren’t wealthy; yours were. I was raised a Unitarian. You were what, nothing?”
“I wasn’t nothing!” Jennifer answered back, laughing. “I was raised a Lutheran. And Lutherans believe in God. I do!” she added defensively. “So there!”
“So there yourself!” Eileen answered back.
They rode in silence for a moment, watching the highway ahead of them. There was very little traffic, and Eileen was speeding in the left lane, passing an occasional car. At that moment, Jennifer felt happy and secure. She had turned her life over to Eileen and Kathy Dart. They had answers about what was happening to her, and that was more than she had herself.