She spoke up in a clear strong voice. “I’ve had enough harassment from you. I’m sorry, very sorry, about what happened to Amy and I wish I could make it up to you. I know you don’t understand this, or believe it, but I feel nearly as bad about it as you do. But I’ve had enough. Harassing me won’t bring her back to you — you ought to know that. Now you’ve had your revenge and you’ve had your satisfaction and you’ve made me feel absolutely rotten all these weeks, and now I want you to stop it. Do you understand? Stop it!”
He hadn’t said a word; he still didn’t. His eyes narrowed down to slits and he merely watched her, unblinking. But she saw that one fist slowly clenched and unclenched. It kept doing that, with a terrible slow rhythm, closing and opening.
He didn’t respond to her words at all. She looked at the massive strength of him and felt appalled by her own temerity but, just the same, she stepped forward — five paces, six, seven — until she was nearly nose-to-nose with him, and she shouted in his face with blind thundering rage: “Leave me alone, Murdoch! Do you hear me? Leave me alone!” And she slapped him, as hard as she could, across the face.
He didn’t even move. He was like some sort of immutable granite rock.
She stood trembling, hyperventilating; she raised her arm again, to strike him, but he stirred then. It was as if he didn’t even see her threatening rising arm. He merely turned slowly on one heel and walked back up the steps to the porch.
She screamed at his back: “Did you hear me, Murdoch?”
He didn’t answer. He just disappeared inside; the screen door slapped shut behind him.
Lacking the courage to follow him into his house, she was forced to turn away and get in the car. She sat trembling for quite a while. She kept expecting to see his face at a window but he never appeared. Finally she drove off.
The phone: Charles. “Hi. I’m sorry I’ve been out of touch. I was out of town.”
“That’s what your secretary said.”
“I, uh, hell, this is awkward. Look, my wife and I — we’ve, uh, well, we’re going to give it another try. We’re trying for a reconciliation. For the sake of the kids, you know, and — well, we’ve been together a long time, nearly twenty years now. A lot of shared experience there. A lot of understanding. I think we may make it. I know it doesn’t usually work out, but we want to give it a try. I thought I’d better tell you…”
“I understand, Charles. Don’t worry about me.”
“Are you all right? No more trouble with Murdoch, I hope.”
“He made a little trouble. I had it out with him today. I don’t know if it will do any good, but at least it gave me the satisfaction of telling him off.”
“That was a gutsy thing to do. What did he say?”
“Nothing. Maybe he’s just chewing on what I said, thinking about it. Maybe something of what I said penetrated that little pea brain of his. I don’t know. It’s hard to tell. Anyhow he didn’t do or say anything nasty.”
“Well, maybe that’s a good sign.”
“Maybe. I hope so. Listen, Charles?”
“Yes?”
“I wish you good luck and every happiness. I mean that.”
“I know you do. You’re a damn good person, Carolyn.”
“Good-bye.”
She went to bed and hugged the pillow to her; she felt acutely alone tonight. I have got to get out in the world, she told herself with force, and start making friends again. This was ridiculous. She was a healthy thirty-six-year-old woman without any entangling attachments or encumbrances; she was no beauty but she was reasonably attractive in her chunky short-waisted way — after all, there were men who liked freckles and big chests on their women — and it was idiotic to confine herself in this kind of self-pitying isolation; there was no need for it.
Tomorrow, she resolved, she’d start making phone calls. Even if it made her look like some sort of shameless wanton.
She fell asleep filled with determination; she awoke filled with the harsh scent of smoke. She couldn’t place it at first but then she coughed and tried to breathe and coughed again, choking.
The apartment was on fire.
The red glow flickered through the living room doorway. She leaped out of the bed, flung the window open, and climbed out onto the narrow ledge. It was merely a decorative brick escarpment but it gave her purchase for her bare feet; she held onto the window sill and yelled for help.
It was only a one-story drop and finally, when the heat and smoke got too much for her, she jumped to the lawn below, managing to hit the grass without breaking anything. The fire engines were just arriving — she heard the sirens and saw the lights and then it was all a welter of men and machines and hoses and terrible smells.
By morning half of the building was gutted but the fire was out, and she was taken, along with a dozen other displaced tenants, to City Medical to make sure there were no serious injuries.
The fire apparently had started in the furnace room immediately below her apartment and had come up the air ducts, spreading through the building; the hottest part of it had attacked her apartment and it was there that the worst damage had been done, both by the fire and by the tons of water that had been used to extinguish it. The superintendent was a skinny little Italian man with sad compassionate eyes who kept shaking his head back and forth like a metronome. “I’m sorry but it’s a total loss. You’ll want to get in touch with the owner about the insurance, of course, but I doubt that will cover your own personal things. Were you insured?”
“No.”
“Too bad, Miss. I am very sorry. If there’s anything at all I can do —”
“You’ve been very kind. I think I want to sleep a while.” He went, and she thought vaguely, in song-like rhythm, Sorry-sorry-sorry-sorry…
She took a room in a residential hotel. Furnished. With daily linen and maid service. She bought a few clothes, enough to get by. She thought of moving to some other city.
Charles seemed very distant. He lent her money but not a shoulder to cry on; she could understand that but she needed a shoulder and resented his not providing one. All he said was, “Try not to persuade yourself that Murdoch set the fire. If he didn’t, you’d be making an unjust accusation. If he did, you’ll never prove it. Either way it’s no good torturing yourself.”
She was walking home from a solitary supper trip to the delicatessen when a car came up on the curb behind her at high speed. She heard it — she’d always had acute hearing — and dived flat against the display window of a furniture store, and the car swished past her, inches away. It was a shadowed place in the middle of the block and the car wasn’t running with any lights on, but she saw its silhouette vaguely in the darkness as it roared off and it looked like an old car. An old station wagon, with tailfins.
It had damned near killed her. She had that thought and then she crumpled and sat on the pavement for quite a while before she regained strength enough to walk.
Go to the police? And tell them what?
Call Charles? No, he’s got other things on his mind now.
Move away. Nothing to hold her here anymore. No real ties here. Go away. California maybe. Back to Illinois. New York. What difference did it make? Just get away from that madman.
That was it, then. Run. Run away.
And let him think he’s won?
She watched him get out of the old station wagon, lock it, put a cigarette in his mouth and light up. Then he turned and began to walk across the wide parking lot toward the low square stucco building that housed his realty office.
She let him get halfway across the parking lot. Right Out in the open. Then she put her car in gear.
“Sorry, Murdoch,” she muttered. “Sorry, sorry, sorry. It was an accident. I just couldn’t help it. I’m sorry.”