That she would break in and see her beautiful lampshade and shatter it to a thousand fragments on the floor.
Raider whined again.
“I know,” she said in a voice which was almost a groan. “I know.”
She had to leave. She had a responsibility, and she knew what it was and to whom she owed it. Polly Chalmers had been good to her. It had been Polly who wrote the recommendation that had gotten her out of juniper Hill for good, and it had been Polly who had co-signed for her home loan at the bank. If not for Polly, whose father had been her father’s best friend, she would still be living in a rented room on the other side of the Tin Bridge.
But what if she left and the crazy Polish woman came back?
Raider couldn’t protect her lampshade; he was brave, but he was just a little dog. The crazy Polish woman might hurt him if he tried to stop her. Nettle felt her mind, caught in the vise of this horrible dilemma, beginning to slip. She groaned again.
And suddenly, mercifully, an idea occurred to her.
She got up, still cradling the lampshade in her arms, and crossed the living room, which was very gloomy with the shades drawn.
She walked through the kitchen and opened the door in its far corner. There was a shed tacked onto this end of the house. The shadows of the woodpile and a great many stored objects bulked in the gloom.
A single lightbulb hung down from the ceiling on a cord.
There was no switch or chain; you turned it on by screwing it firmly into its socket. She reached for this… then hesitated.
If the crazy Polish woman was lurking in the back yard, she would see the light go on. And if she saw the light go on, she would know exactly where to look for Nettle’s carnival glass lampshade, wouldn’t she?
“Oh no, you don’t get me that easy,” she said under her breath, feeling her way past her mother’s armoire and her mother’s old Dutch bookcase to the woodpile. “Oh no you don’t, Wilma Jersyck.
I’m not stupid, you know. I’m warning you of that.”
Holding the lampshade against her belly with her left hand, Nettle used her right to pull down the tangle of old, dirty cobwebs in front of the shed’s single window. Then she peered out into the back yard, her eyes jerking brightly from one spot to another. She remained so for almost a minute. Nothing in the back yard moved.
Once she thought she saw the crazy Polish woman crouching in the far left corner of the yard, but closer study convinced her it was only the shade of the oak at the back of the Fearons’ yard. The tree’s lower branches overhung her own yard. They were moving a little in the wind, and that was why the patch of shade back there had looked like a crazy woman (a crazy Polish woman, to be exact) for a second.
Raider whined from behind her. She looked around and saw him standing in the shed door, a black silhouette with his head cocked.
“I know,” she said. “I know, boy-but we’re going to fool her. She thinks I’m stupid. Well, I can teach her better news than that.”
She felt her way back. Her eyes were adjusting to the gloom and she decided she would not need to screw in the lightbulb after all.
She stood on tiptoe and felt along the top of the armoire until her fingers encountered the key which locked and unlocked the long cupboard on the left-hand side. The key which worked on the drawers had been missing for years, but that was all right-Nettle had the one she needed.
She opened the long cupboard and deposited the carnival glass lampshade inside, amid the dust bunnies and mouse-turds.
“It deserves to be in a better place and I know it,” she said softly to Raider. “But it’s safe, and that’s the important thing.”
She put the key back in the lock, turned it, then tried the cupboard door. It was tight, tight as a tick, and she felt suddenly as if a huge boulder had rolled off her heart. She tried the cupboard door again, nodded briskly, and slipped the key into the pocket of her ho ’ usedress. When she got to Polly’s house, she would put it on a piece of string and hang it around her neck. She would do it first thing.
“There!” she told Raider, who had begun wagging his tail. Per 7
haps he sensed that the crisis was past.
“That’s taken care of, big boy, and I must get to work! I’m late!”
As she was slipping into her coat, the telephone began to ring.
Nettle took two steps toward it and then stopped.
Raider uttered his single, severe bark and looked at her. Don’t you know what you’re supposed to do when the telephone rings?
his eyes asked her. Even I know that, and I’m only the dog.
“I won’t,” Nettle said.
I know what you did, you crazy bitch, I know what you did, I know what you did, and I… am going to… get you!
“I won’t answer it. I’m going to work. She’s the one who’s crazy, not me. I never did a thing to her! Not one solitary thing!”
Raider barked agreement.
The telephone stopped ringing.
Nettle relaxed a little… but her heart was still pounding hard.
“You be a good boy,” she told Raider, stroking him. “I’ll be back late, because I’m going in late. But I love you, and if you remember that, you will be a good doggy all day long.”
This was a going-to-work incantation which Raider knew well, and he wagged his tail. Nettle opened the front door and peered both ways before stepping out. She had a bad moment when she saw a bright flash of yellow, but it wasn’t the crazy Polish woman’s car; the Pollard boy had left his Fisher-Price tricycle out on the sidewalk, that was all.
Nettle used her housekey to lock the door behind her, then walked around to the rear of the house to make sure the shed door was locked.
It was. She set off for Polly’s house, her purse over her arm and her eyes searching for the crazy Polish woman’s car (she was trying to decide if she should hide behind a hedge or simply stand her ground if she saw it). She was almost to the end of the block when it came to her that she had not checked the front door as carefully as she should have done. She glanced anxiously at her watch and then retraced her steps. She checked the front door. It was locked tight. Nettle sighed with relief, and then decided she ought to check the lock on the woodshed door, too, just to be safe.
“Better safe than sorry,” she muttered under her breath, and went around to the back of the house.
Her hand froze in the act of pulling on the handle of the woodshed door.
Inside, the telephone was ringing again.
“She’s crazy,” Nettle moaned. “I didn’t do anything!”
The shed door was locked, but she stood there until the telephone fell silent. Then she set sail for work again with her purse hanging over her arm.
4
This time she had gone almost two blocks before the conviction that she still might not have locked the front door recurred, gnawing at her. She knew she had, but she was afraid she hadn’t.
She stood by the blue U.S. mailbox at the corner of Ford and Deaconess Way, indecisive. She had almost made up her mind to push on when she saw a yellow car drift through the intersection a block down.
It wasn’t the crazy Polish woman’s car, it was a Ford, but she thought it might be an omen. She walked rapidly back to her house and checked both doors again. Locked. She got to the end of her walk before it occurred to her that she ought to doublecheck the cupboard door of the armoire as well, and make sure it was also locked.
She knew that it was, but she was afraid that it wasn’t.
She unlocked the front door and went inside. Raider jumped up on her, tail wagging wildly, and she petted him for a moment-but only a moment. She had to close the front door, because the crazy Polish woman might come by anytime. Anytime at all.