The death was reported in four lines in the paper she usually read. She had stopped delivery and had to go to a newsstand the next morning to buy it. After she read the paper, she had a second cup of coffee. She felt displaced, and she did not know why. Finally, she realized that for fourteen years there had been a plan for each day, for nearly every hour of every day. Every Sunday had its ritualistic schedule. And now she was adrift. She tried reading, tried music, took a short walk. It made her think of the long, rainy Saturdays of her childhood. “What will I do, Mother?”
The inquest was on the third day. A droning affair, with voices like tired houseflies against dusty windows. A stilted, barely audible report by Moyer, another by a young medical examiner, some bored questions and her own soft-voiced answers, and an official verdict, so that now the pretty face was officially and legally at rest. When she looked for Moyer, he had left, and so she walked out of the dust and varnish smell while behind her the buzzing voices began on another case.
When she got back to the apartment, she knew she should plan to leave in the morning. But it seemed too vast an effort. Tomorrow she would pack again and leave on Saturday.
The shrill phone awakened her, and she clicked on her bed lamp and went to the phone, feeling puffed and blinded by sleep, her fingers clumsy on the phone. “Yes?”
There was no answer. There was no dial tone. There was a presence on the other end of the line, someone who had listened to her voice and now waited in silence. She listened hard, and she heard the soft, slow breathing.
“Hello! This is Miss Renken.” Some of the sleep was dispelled, and she said this in the tart classroom voice, with the acid of authority.
A breathing silence. Someone was there.
And then a husky, whispering voice said a single word. “Killer,” it said, and there was a muted click.
“Hello!” she said again, but she knew the person had hung up. She pressed the button on the top of the cradle, and the dial tone began. She hung up and sat in the darkness in her nightgown, knees pressed tight together. Light from her bedroom patterned the living-room floor. One drop of perspiration traced a slow, cold line from her armpit to her narrow waist.
“How ridiculous!” she said aloud, and her own voice startled her. She went back to bed. She lay in the darkness with her thin fists shut tightly, pressing against her thighs. She smiled into the darkness and thought: How ridiculously theatrical. For a long time she did not sleep.
When she awakened in the morning, she did not feel rested. She mixed the frozen orange juice, put the coffee on, plugged in the toaster, and then, out of habit, started toward the door to get the paper. A triangle of white showed under the door. She pulled it through and picked it up. It was cheap white typing paper. The single whispered word she had heard over the phone was lettered in pencil on the paper. In the morning sunlight, the midnight voice had seemed dreamlike. But the paper was real. And it changed the look of the apartment. Someone had been out there in the hall during the night. Someone had stood there with that same soft breathing and had slid the bit of paper under the door while she slept.
She did not move again until she heard the angry boiling of the abandoned coffee. I will not allow myself to be frightened by this nonsense, she told herself firmly. I am not one of those sniveling and helpless women. She made fresh coffee. She ate an extra slice of toast to prove to herself that she was in good health and unconcerned. She cleaned up and dressed for her trip and walked to the neighborhood garage and brought her car around and parked it in front. She packed, took a last look around, and told herself firmly that she had merely changed her mind in eagerness to get to the mountains sooner. It had nothing to do with not wanting to spend another night in the apartment. She carried her things down, stowed them in the car, got behind the wheel, put her map beside her. She turned the key and pressed the starter button. There was no response. She tried again and again and realized that she was breathing too quickly. She went back upstairs and phoned.
The man who came opened the hood and looked in. He whistled softly.
“What’s the matter with it?”
“Somebody fixed you good, lady. Kids, maybe. See here? They ripped the whole ignition system out of her.”
“Can you fix it quickly?”
“There’s a lot of work there, lady. I’ll call a tow truck. I’d figure you can pick it up Tuesday. No sooner.”
She watched when the tow truck hooked on and lifted the front wheels off the street. As it started away, she saw the word written with a finger in the dust of the car door. Killer. She looked up and down the street. It looked as it always did. She hurried upstairs and when she was inside, she chained the door. Her bags were in the middle of the living-room floor. She carried them into the bedroom and unpacked.
Friday night she got two calls. She did not sleep that night. She found another note in the morning. Always that one word. She slept that afternoon and woke up feeling stale and sick, her head aching in a dull way, her mouth furred. Saturday night she placed a straight chair close to the door. The chain was on. She would wait, and when he came with the note, she would open the door as far as the chain would allow and look at him and tell him to leave her alone.
There was a call at eleven, and another at three. It was a little after four when she heard the heavy, slow steps coming down the hall. They stopped in front of her door. She reached out to touch the knob and pulled her hand back. There was no sound. There was a faint light in the room, the night light of the city sky, hued by neon. She backed away from the door, moving with great stealth. She heard the whisper of the paper, saw the pale triangle. Long minutes passed. And then the footsteps moved away, with no pretense at stealthiness. A long time after she could no longer hear the footsteps, she took the paper and took it to the window and read it in the pale light. You killed her. Three words this time.
It was true, of course. She saw clearly how she could have swerved the car, using brakes and horn simultaneously. She saw how the startled girl would have jumped back, made angry by fear, yelling something as the car passed her. I killed her. It was unnecessary.
When Tuesday came, she did not get the car. Her fear had become obsessive, and she knew that, and yet it seemed in some strange way to be necessary, this night ritual of fear and approach, and the silences on the phone and the silence beyond the door. Some nights he did not come, did not phone. And those were the worst nights of all. She slept poorly by day. When she had to leave the apartment for food, she walked in a wild, quick way and sensed that people had begun to look at her and that clerks had begun to treat her strangely. She avoided looking at her gaunted face in the single mirror in the apartment over the bathroom sink. When she ran her fingers through her hair, it felt matted and coarse, and she remembered she had forgotten to brush it.
When she hurried along the street, she would look at men and wonder whether she looked at any time into the eyes of the one who was doing this. He was right. She had killed the girl. The wire from the owner of the cottage went unanswered. The letter from him told her the deposit was forfeited. It seemed a faraway and unimportant thing. The city grew hotter in July. There was dust on the record albums, on the books, on the dials of the FM radio, and the dishes were crusted in the sink. She felt that her soul and her body had soured with the clear knowledge of her guilt.
For two nights he did not come. He had never stayed away so long before. She felt abandoned in her fear. The next night he did not phone. And it was nearly dawn when he came. She stood flattened against the varnished panel of the door, pressing against it, knowing he stood out there, as silent as she. The bit of paper whispered its way under the door. They stood inches apart in the four-o’clock city, and at last he went away. The moment she could no longer hear his footsteps, she snatched the paper and hurried to the window. In the faint light she read the single word — Jump.