She was in time to see the tailfins of Stanley Murdoch’s twenty-odd-year-old station wagon slither away past the hedge; then there was an angry flash of brake lights and another screech of tires, after which the car was gone around the bend.
Murdoch didn’t normally drive like that. He did it to frighten me.
Rattled and distressed, she fixed something to eat — later she couldn’t remember what it had been — and fed the cat and sat around in a housecoat, switching the TV on and off, picking up magazines and putting them down, thinking vaguely about getting dressed and walking the half mile down to the Mall to buy a pack of cigarettes. She’d given up smoking three years ago but at a time like this…
Don’t be absurd.
A drink. That was it — that would calm her down. She went into the cupboard and selected among the half-dozen bottles: a Margarita, that would do the job. A good tall stiff one. She tried to remember Richard’s Margarita rituaclass="underline" split the lime, rub it around the rim of the glass, pour salt into the palm of the hand, and twirl the glass in it until the entire rim was coated with salt that adhered to the limejuice-wet surface. Then shove the salt-encrusted glass into the freezer to harden. Then mix the drink itself: tequila, triple sec, lime juice, ice cubes. Stir it for quite a while, to get it thoroughly cold. Then bring the glass out of the freezer.
Lick a bit of salt off the rim and drink…
The ritual was good because it occupied her. She was beginning to find some sort of equilibrium, beginning to feel even a bit pleased with herself. Then the jangling phone nearly made her drop the drink.
It was Charles Berlin. “I just wondered if you were getting along all right.”
“I think so. It’s sweet of you to call.”
“I happened to be talking to another client of mine today and this is one of those wild coincidences but you remember we were talking about those condominiums out by the lake shore? Well, he’s got one of them, and he’s being transferred by his company down to Atlanta or Birmingham or someplace like that, and he asked me — the guy actually asked me this very afternoon — if I knew anybody who might be in the market to rent the place from him on a sort of sublet. He doesn’t want to put it up for sale right away until he sees how he likes it down south, but he’ll be gone at least a year. It’s a nice pad. I’ve been there for dinner a few times. You’d like it. Shall I give you his name and number?”
She thought of Stanley Murdoch standing on the porch staring at her, and the screech — filled with message — of Murdoch’s tires on the very patch of pavement where the little girl had died; and Carolyn said, “You bet.”
By the time she signed the lease that Charles had prepared for her, on the condominium, she had recovered enough self-confidence to drive there herself with the carload of fragile things she didn’t trust to the movers. She emptied the car, left the cartons in the apartment, and drove back to her house to pick up a few more things, and Fido. She’d have taken the cat on the first trip but of course he’d been nowhere in sight. She remembered one of Richard’s wry sayings: “Cats are just like cops. Never around when you want ’em.”
When she drove into the lane, Fido was there. Squashed flat on the same spot of pavement where Amy Murdoch had died.
“I know he did it on purpose.”
“Murdoch?”
She gave Charles a look. “Who else?”
“Well, you’ll never prove that, will you?”
“I know he did it. He wants revenge for his little girl. He won’t stop until —”
“Until what? Until you’ve been punished enough? God knows you’ve had enough punishment from this thing. I think I’d better have a talk with Murdoch.”
“If it’ll do any good.” She reached for the drink.
“I’ll make the appropriate threats,” Charles said drily. “Take it easy on that stuff — that’s your fourth one.”
“I didn’t ask you to count my drinks.”
“Yeah, I know. How about having dinner with me? I know a quiet place out past the lake.”
“I don’t go out with married men, Charles.”
“We’re separated.”
It took her a moment to absorb that. Then she squinted at him. “I’m in no shape to be made passes at.”
“Your shape is just fine, Carolyn, but right now I’m disinclined to take unfair advantage of you. I think you need company right now, that’s all.”
“I don’t want pity. I don’t think I could deal with that.”
“A friend’s concern isn’t pity.”
“Oh, hell,” she said, “take me to dinner. I hope it’s not Chinese. Richard used to make awful little jokes about how they run out of chickens in Chinese restaurants and they send the cooks out into the alleys to round up cats.”
“Your husband always had a macabre sense of humor, didn’t he?”
“I’m sorry. I don’t usually bring him into conversations like that.”
“I understand. It’s just that right now you haven’t got any anchor at all and you keep reaching for memories to prop you up.” Charles had very sincere warm eyes — brown eyes, nothing startling — and his hairline was starting to go, and there was too much flesh around too little chin, and he had a paunch and was only about five-eight and generally speaking he wasn’t the sort of man she had fantasies about, but —
She said, “Right now you’re a rope and I’m drowning, and I’m clutching at you like mad. Is that all right?”
“That’s just fine. You see the secret truth is, I’m kind of lone-some myself. I’ve only been separated a few months.”
“I always despised lawyers,” she said. “They feed on people’s misery. They stir up friction. It’s their job to treat everything as an adversary procedure — they’re in the business of creating enemies. I’ve hated lawyers ever since my father was defrauded of his dry-cleaning business by some clever loophole-bending gangster lawyer. So you will pardon me, I hope, if I sometimes seem a bit distant with you. I’m not used to thinking of a lawyer as anything but loathsome.”
It only made him smile. “Is that how you thought of me when I was handling your divorce? Loathsome?”
“I regarded you as a necessary evil, I guess.”
“Most people think of lawyers like that,”
“Do they?”
“We are the lowest form of life, with the possible exception of interior decorators.”
“Now you’re making fun of me.”
“Yeah, I am. You need it.”
“I do,” she said. “Thank you.”
“Do that again.”
“What?”
“Dimple up. Smile.”
But she didn’t. She suddenly remembered the cat again.
She made herself go out into the world and behave as if there were a tomorrow and it mattered. She had to pick up several bolts of fabric for one client and work with the upholsterer on angling the pattern of the fabric properly for the furniture it was to cover; she had a doctor’s waiting room to do in the new Medical Center court, and there were three messages left over from last week from the answering service. She returned all three calls, belatedly; two of the people had found other decorators. She made an appointment for Friday with the third.
But she kept thinking about Fido. It wasn’t that she’d been inordinately fond of the cat; she hadn’t — she wasn’t that crazy about cats, really — but the cat had been the nearest thing to a child she’d had, and Murdoch had killed it deliberately.
Deliberately.
That was what frightened her.
She tried to get used to living in an apartment. Actually, since she was alone, it was quite roomy — two bedrooms (she set up her office in one) and a spacious terrace. It was on the second floor. It didn’t exactly overlook the lake but if you leaned out over the railing of the terrace you could see a corner of the lake. The view mainly was of the country-club golf course, which was pleasant if over-groomed. Most of the golfers were overweight types who got their exercise in electric carts. She’d never had any interest in golf but being on the fifteenth hole was pleasant enough. She kept expecting a golf ball to come whizzing in through a windowpane, but nothing like that happened.