“I think it’s about me,” she said, flipping the paper back and reviewing the words. “It’s embarrassing. Frances and I shared cleaning duties, but sometimes when I was with a client I asked her to touch the mirror up a little. Do you think she was angry with me?”
“I don’t think she could write that.”
“One of the girls saw her writing it. I found it in my coffee cup months ago and asked around, and one of the girls saw Frances do it. That area is employees only. We don’t let anyone else in there. She wrote it.”
It was very quiet in the house, and David realized that he had grown accustomed to the rocking chair’s constant noise. “May I have it?” he asked.
She held the page closer to her body, against her stomach. “I feel like she would be angry if I showed it to you,” she said. “Can you imagine? Maybe it’s a bad joke. I would hate it if she wrote this about me. I mean, she wrote it out and everything. One of the girls saw her.”
“If she wrote it, I can give it to the police.”
“Maybe you could avoid telling them that it might be about me. I’m so embarrassed.”
“I’m sure it’s not about you.”
Aileen turned the paper over, examining each side. She folded it in half and unfolded it. She placed her palm on the words and closed her eyes. It looked as if she was trying to absorb the words into her skin. “I can’t keep it. The police should see it. If you really think it will help.”
David thought about the threats on the countertop. “I’ll show it to the police.”
“Thing is”—Aileen looked at the page in her hands—“the thing is that we never called it anything. We would never call it the bathroom scrub challenge. It’s so unlike her to be cruel in that way.” She folded the page again, rolled it and unrolled it. “Maybe I could keep it. You took everything else of hers.”
“You’re right when you say the police should see it.”
“I saw you had taken everything of hers from the salon. It’s fine. You were within your rights. But when I saw, I sat behind the front desk and cried about it. I’m not the kind of woman who cries. This was after closing. I saw everything was gone. Of course, you were well within your rights. The next girl in that room would have put on the apron and put the oils on her fingers without even knowing about them. Really, it’s better you took them. But this is all that’s left.”
He thought of Aileen crying, the LED display of the cash register illuminating her face with a machine-green light.
“I think about everyone who has died where we are.” She leaned forward to speak, then leaned back and held her hands over her stomach, clenching the rolled-up threat in her fist. “We make such a fuss when someone dies in a house now, because the proper place to die is in a hospital or a nursing home, or maybe on the street, but never in a house where we spray antibacterial solution on the counter and scrub the floors and vacuum two or three times a week. Two times a week. What a rude thing, to die in a clean house. Better to go to a place where there is a professional level of clean, we think. We’ve got it figured out. Yet think of the age of the earth and the age of humans on the earth. Think of the number of people in the thousands of years who have died on this very spot. Actually bled out over the ground on which we sit and think about how impolite it is to die in a house. How narrow-minded of us, how selfish.” She unrolled the scrolled threat and held it. For a moment it seemed as if she was going to rip it apart.
When she looked at him, he could just barely see the inner ear parting within the sheen of her lips. She handed the page to David, and he felt the warmth from her hand. After she left, David walked into his kitchen. He cleared some of the broth cans from the countertop, where the threats were still laid out like a treasure map. The pages were all different shapes and colors. Some looked as if they had been around for years, while others were crisp and new. The new threat was stained across one edge with coffee.
63
THE SECURITY MAP over the dresser featured points of potential entry and methods of resistance. There was a triple-lock system for the door in the den and a series of traps that could be set around the door if the intruder managed to bypass the locks. Franny had wanted to board up the workroom door in the basement, because they never went in there and it seemed possible for an intruder to enter the house through the room’s small storm windows. The plan included some trenches dug in the backyard. A speculative mark on the side of the page suggested that there was room in the family budget for dogs.
Before he got into bed, David brushed aside a line of ants walking over the pillow. He lay down and felt a piece of the mass more obtrusive than usual against the back of his neck. He reached and pulled out the envelope he had left on Franny’s side of the bed days or weeks ago. He took the paper out of the envelope and read:
IF YOU’RE HERE, DON’T LEAVE. I’M HERE IN THE HOUSE. IF YOU’RE HERE, I WILL FIND YOU.
He held the page to his chest and sensed his body alive under it. He felt a great sadness, which caused him to tear off a sliver of the page and put it in his mouth. He packed the sliver into his right anterior molar and tore off another, a thin strip, which he rolled into a ball and pressed into his left anterior molar. He packed the paper into his teeth again and again until each molar was stuffed full, plus the spaces within the single divots of his premolars and behind the deep divots in his maxillary central incisor. David ran his tongue across the newly smooth teeth. It tasted like he was holding a small book in his mouth. He longed to read his words to Franny again but had eaten them. He went downstairs.
Marie was sitting at the kitchen table. “I wanted to try some coffee,” she said. Her hands were stung and swollen to the point where she had to hold the cup by pressing it between the tips of all ten fingers. She brought the trembling mug to her lips.
“Do you need some diphenhydramine?” he asked. It was hard to talk. He clenched his teeth to compact the paper further.
“I’m fine, thank you.”
David poured a cup of coffee. The liquid was viscous. “You put too much in,” he said. He took a sip and felt the coffee soaking deep into the packed paper.
“I have your best interests in mind. You can’t say that much for most therapists. Most everyone else is in it for their perception of a paycheck. I haven’t even asked you for any money. Analysis is a passion of mine.”
The coffee in his cup was like an oil spill. “We should get you an adrenaline syringe,” he said.
“You should come see me again. I’m very helpful, you know. If you release yourself to the potential of help, anyone can be helpful.”
Some of the paper had disintegrated into the hot liquid, thickening it further. “This coffee.”
“I’m good,” Marie said. “I don’t even have to ask you a question. Eventually you’ll give me everything I want, which is, in turn, everything you need.”
David put the mug down and picked up his jacket. “I need to go into town. Could you lock up?”
“Consider it done,” she said, jingling a set of keys. David was halfway to the bus stop before he wondered who had given them to her.
64
CHICO WAS IN THE MIDDLE of his after-lunch practice of relocating for twenty minutes to a bench outside the police station. He had a spiral notebook on his lap, which he paged through with one hand, reaching into a bag with the other to throw bread crumbs to the birds.
He was surprised to see David, surprised in that way when someone is being discussed and they appear, as if it were a dream. It was a special subvariety of a wider variety of surprise.
“David,” he said. “Good morning.”