So she let him go and did not think of him again until the credit-crawl, when she looked up and saw his empty chair. She had heard the water running into the tub upstairs and had heard it stop five or ten minutes later . . . but now she realized she had never heard the fridge door open and close, and that meant he was up there without a can of beer. Someone had called him up and dropped a big fat problem in his lap, and had she offered him a single word of commiseration? No. Tried to draw him out a little about it? No. Even noticed that something was wrong? For the third time, no. All because of that stupid TV show — she couldn't even really blame the buttons; they were only an excuse.
Okay — she'd take him up a can of Dixie, and sit beside him on the edge of the tub, scrub his back, play Geisha and wash his hair if he wanted her to, and find out just what the problem was . . . or who it was.
She got a can of beer out of the fridge and went upstairs with it. Th e first real disquiet stirred in her when she saw that the bathroom door was shut. Not just part-way closed but shut tight. Stanley never closed the door when he was taking a bath. It was something of a joke between them — the closed door meant he was doing something his mother had taught him, the open door meant he would not be averse to doing something the teaching of which his mother had quite properly left to others.
Patty tapped on the door with her nails, suddenly aware, too aware, of the reptilian clicking sound they made on the wood. And surely tapping on the bathroom door, knocking like a guest, was something she had never done before in her married life — not here, not on any other door in the house.
The disquiet suddenly grew strong in her, and she thought of Carson Lake, where she had gone swimming often as a girl. By the first of August the lake was as warm as a tub . . . but then you'd hit a cold pocket that would shiver you with surprise and delight. One minute you were warm; the next moment it felt as if the temperature had plummeted twenty degrees below your hips. Minus the delight, that was how she felt now — as if she had just struck a cold pocket. Only this cold pocket was not below her hips, chilling her long teenager's legs in the black depths of Carson Lake.
This one was around her heart.
'Stanley? Stan?'
This time she did more than tap with her nails. She rapped on the door. When there was still no answer, she hammered on it.
'Stanley?'
Her heart. Her heart wasn't in her chest anymore. It was beating in her throat, making it hard to breathe.
'Stanley!'
In the silence following her shout (and just the sound of herself shouting up here, less than thirty feet from the place where she laid her head down a nd went to sleep each night, frightened her even more), she heard a sound which brought panic up from the belowstairs part of her mind like an unwelcome guest. Such a small sound, really. It was only the sound of dripping water. Plink . . . pause. Plink . . . pause. Plink . . . pause. Plink . . .
She could see the drops forming on the snout of the faucet, growing heavy and fat there, growing pregnant there, and then falling off: plink.
Just that sound. No other. And she was suddenly, terribly sure that it had been Stanley, not her father, who had been stricken with a heart attack tonight.
With a moan, she gripped the cut-glass doorknob and turned it. Yet still the door would not move: it was locked. And suddenly three nevers occurred to Patty Uris in rapid succession: Stanley never took a bath in the early evening, Stanley never closed the door unless he was using the toilet, and Stanley had never locked the door against her at all.
Was it possible, she wondered crazily, to prepare for a heart attack?
Patty ran her tongue over her lips — it produced a sound in her head like fine sandpaper sliding along a board — and called his name again. There was still no answer except the steady, deliberate drip of the faucet. She looked down and saw she still held the can of Dixie beer in one hand. She gazed at it stupidly, her heart running like a rabbit in her throat; she gazed at it as if she had never seen a can of beer in her whole life before this minute. And indeed it seemed she never had, or at least never one like this, because when she blinked her eyes it turned into a telephone handset, as black and as threatening as a snake.
'May I help you, ma'am? Do you have a problem?' the snake spat at her. Patty slammed it down in its cradle and stepped away, rubbing the hand which had held it. She looked around and saw she was back in the TV room and understood that the panic which had come into the front of her mind like a prowler walking quietly up a flight of stairs had had its way with her. Now s he could remember dropping the beer can outside the bathroom door and pelting headlong back down the stairs, thinking vaguely: This is all a mistake of some kind and we'lllaugh about it later. He filled up the tub and then remembered he didn't have cigarettes and went out to get them before he took his clothes off —
Yes. Only he had already locked the bathroom door from the inside and because it was too much of a bother to unlock it again he had simply opened the window over the tub and gone down the side of the house like a fly crawling down a wall. Sure, of course, sure —
Panic was rising in her mind again — it was like bitter black coffee threatening to overflow the rim of a cup. She closed her eyes and fought against it. She stood there, perfectly still, a pale statue with a pulse beating in its throat.
Now she could remember running back down here, feet stuttering on the stair –levels, running for the phone, oh yes, oh sure, but who had she meant to call?
Crazily, she thought: I would call the turtle, but the turtle couldn't help us.
It didn't matter anyway. She had gotten as far as zero and she must have said something not quite standard, because the operator had asked if she had a problem. She had one, all right, but how did you tell that faceless voice that Stanley had locked himself in the bathroom and didn't answer her, that the steady sound of the water dripping into the tub was killing her heart? Someone had to help her. Someone —
She put the back of her hand into her mouth and deliberately bit down on it. She tried to think, tried to force herself to think.
The spare keys. The spare keys in the kitchen cupboard.
She got going, and one slippered foot kicked the bag of buttons resting beside her chair. Some of the buttons spilled out, glittering like glazed eyes in the lamplight. She saw at least half a dozen black ones.
Mounted inside the door of the cupboard over the double-basin sink was a large varnished board in the shape of a key — one of Stan's clients had made it in his workshop and given it to him two Christmases ago. The key– board was studded with small hooks, and swinging on these were all the keys the house took, two duplicates of each to a hook. Beneath each hook was a strip of Mystik tape, each strip lettered in Stan's small, neat printing: GARAGE, ATTIC, D'STAIRS BATH, UPSTAIRS BATH, FRONT DOOR, BACK DOOR. Off to one side were ignition-key dupes labelled M-B and VOLVO .
Patty snatched the key marked UPSTAIRS BATH, began to run for the stairs, and then made herself walk. Running made the panic want to come back, and the panic was too close to the surface as it was. Also, if she just walked, maybe nothing would be wrong. Or, if there was something wrong, God could look down, see she was just walking, and think: Oh, good — Ipulled a hell of a boner, but I've got time to take it all back.