What did happen was that someone drew a chalk outline of a sprawled little girl’s body on the floor of the hallway just outside her door.
It looked exactly like the outline of Amy Murdoch that the police had chalked on the asphalt lane.
“I talked to him again,” Charles told her over the phone. “Of course he says he doesn’t know anything about it. He’d say that whether it was true or not, but it makes it hard to pin anything down. You know it could just be some awful brat who read about the case in the newspaper.” The photograph of the chalked outline on the lane had appeared on an inside page of the paper. Carolyn remembered it and made a face.
She said into the phone, “I don’t think it was just some little kid.”
“Well, we can’t prove it was Murdoch. I can’t go around threatening him with legal action when we haven’t got any evidence against him. We’d look pretty silly in court asking for a restraining order and watching his lawyer get up and say, ‘Restrain from what?’”
“I know,” she said wearily. “It’s not your fault.” But at least his voice had calmed her down enough so that she was able to go out into the hall with the mop and clean the chalk drawing off the floor.
Next day she received in the mail a copy of a children’s magazine. It was the kind that was aimed at little girls the age Amy Murdoch had been — six, seven, eight. Full of cheery cartoons of fuzzy smiling animals. It had one of those addressograph-printed labels, with her name on it and the new address. Obviously a subscription had been taken out in her name.
In the next few days her mailbox began to fill up to the point of engorgement with magazines, newspapers, comic books, even cheap pornographic material — the kind that actually did come, she saw, in plain brown-paper wrappers.
Then the bills for all the subscriptions began to come in.
“Just write ‘Please cancel subscription’ on the forms and send them back,” Charles told her. “Don’t get rattled. He wants you to get rattled. Don’t give him the satisfaction”
“For God’s sake, Charles, I don’t need avuncular advice. I need to have him stopped.”
“I can’t prove he’s the one who’s doing it. Neither can you.”
“Talk to him anyway. Threaten him. Please?”
Finally a golf ball did come through the window. It was the bedroom window — which overlooked the parking lot, not the golf course — and it was the middle of the night, when nobody could possibly have been playing golf. It made a hell of a noise; she thought she’d have a heart attack.
Wrapped around the golf ball and tied with a rubber band was a crumbled copy of that newspaper photo of the chalk outline on the pavement.
Trembling, she went into the kitchen, lit a gas ring on the stove, and set fire to the bit of newsprint. She watched it curl up and turn black, and wished it were Murdoch.
In the morning she called Charles at his office but the secretary told her Charles was out of town until Monday.
She went around the apartment half of the morning, pacing aimlessly, the hard leather heels of her shoes clicking angrily on the floor like dice. By noon she was distraught enough to think about having a drink, but she didn’t. Instead she went down to the machine in the lobby and for the first time in three years bought a pack of cigarettes. A folder of matches came with it. The elevator had a big “No Smoking” sign, but she lit up anyway before she’d even got out of it.
She drew a deep chestful of smoke and it nauseated her and made her instantly, terrifyingly dizzy; she nearly fell to the floor, and had to lean with both hands on her doorknob until the wave of sick dizziness passed. She went inside, stumbled to the bathroom, threw the burning cigarette in the toilet, threw the pack of cigarettes in the wastebasket, leaned both arms against the sink, and stood there, head down, until she was sure she wasn’t going to throw up. Then she looked up into the medicine-cabinet mirror.
Go ahead. Go to pieces. Fall apart.
“The hell,” she said aloud. “It’s just what he wants me to do. I’ll be damned if I’ll give him the satisfaction.”
She found the golf ball where she’d thrown it into the bedroom wastebasket. Feeling cold and angry and determinedly calm now, she put the golf ball in her handbag and went downstairs to the parking lot. It was nearly one o’clock. Murdoch would be home for lunch, probably. He sold real estate in a crummy office out west of town but he usually came home for lunch every day. The housekeeper prepared it for him and always had it ready for him when he arrived, which usually was at about 1:15.
Murdoch was a widower, a very close-mouthed man although not normally a surly one — he had a salesman’s hearty but insincere graces, although his gift of gab was one he saved up for customers and rarely displayed in his home neighborhood. Richard had invited him over once or twice in the old days but he’d been a singularly boring dinner guest and after a while their only contact with Murdoch was an occasional wave from the car as one or another of them went in or out — or a shared beer now and then on Sundays when both Richard and Murdoch would be out mowing the lawns. Murdoch’s life had mostly been wrapped up in his little girl; his wife had died of leukemia quite young, when Amy was only two or so — several months before Richard and Carolyn had moved in.
Basically her relationship with Murdoch had always been distant — cordial enough, but indifferent. About three months after the divorce Murdoch had made a sort of half-hearted and apparently dutiful gesture of inviting her out to dinner, explaining in a toe-in-the-dust aw-shucks way that since the two of them were the only singles in the whole neighborhood it was almost incumbent on them to go out together. But she’d found some excuse to decline the invitation and he hadn’t asked a second time.
He was physically unpleasant; she found him nearly repulsive, although she knew women who liked his type — he was muscular enough, a macho character with huge arms and a big chest and military sort of crew-cut, flat on top. He had a beer-drinker’s gut and the hands of a mountain gorilla; he looked more like a heavy-equipment mechanic than a realtor.
Mainly he sold small pre-war houses, in rundown areas, to blue-collar workers and their families. Presumably he looked to them like the kind of man they could trust. The word around the neighborhood was that his realty operation was a bit on the shady side — something to do with kickbacks to building inspectors and bribes to government mortgage people, Nobody had ever proved anything against Murdoch but he had just a slightly unsavory aura. In any case, she had always thought him unattractive, to say the least. But up to the time of Amy’s death she had not thought of him as menacing.
Now, however, there was clearly no question but that he was executing a deliberate and careful scheme of harassment against her. Revenge for Amy’s death.
When she turned the car into the lane Murdoch’s semi-antique Chevy station wagon was in the driveway. Good; it meant he’d come home for lunch. Carolyn got out of the car and walked halfway up the walk toward the Murdoch porch. It was one of those old clapboard places with the porch running around three sides of the house. Part of it, on the left side, was screened in as a sleeping porch. The rest had a little picket-fence type railing which was turning gray in patches and needed paint.
She fumbled in her handbag a moment and then looked up. Nobody was in sight. She gave the golf ball a good strong throw. It made a satisfying noise when it crashed through Murdoch’s front window.
And it brought him boiling out of the place, as she’d thought it would. “Damn irresponsible kids —” he was roaring; then he recognized her and his face froze and he went absolutely still.