She pushed the door shut and locked it. Then she sagged against it, both palms hard against her temples, trying to keep from screaming.
...Back in the worst Medusan entanglements of the divorce (and admittedly it hadn’t been terribly messy but there was no such thing as a non-traumatic divorce), she had discovered the wonderful therapeutic value of showers: a scalding hot one followed by a needle-sharp cold one. In some way that she understood but couldn’t explain, the hard and meticulous scrubbing was a process that cleansed more than just the epidermic surface. It seemed to work this time too.
She emerged from the steamy bathroom with her wet hair wrapped in a turban of towel and stood before the dressing-room’s full-length mirror squinting at her flushed body, skin still taut from the shower. “Not bad for an old broad,” she said aloud — she was thirty-six. She thrust out one hip and tried a lewd grin but it broke up in the mirror and she turned away.
Fido came in while she was sitting naked in the dressing room moving the hair dryer around her head. He miaowed and rubbed against her calf and tickled her knee with his upthrust tail. She reached down to pet him and she could feel, through the fur, that he was not purring. Fido always purred, but not today. So the edge of her own vibrations must be reaching out that far.
Fido, she thought. What an absurd suburbanite’s name for a cat. At the time — when Richard had brought the kitten home and suggested the name — she’d thought it was cute. Fido was fuzzy, black and white, with a sort of negative Chaplin face — all black except for a white smudge of mustache. He was affectionate, lazy, reasonably bright — a thoroughly ordinary cat but since the divorce he was all the family she had.
A screeching squeal of tires on pavement almost lifted the top of her head off. She raced through the bedroom to the window.
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.”