until I was in the woods and just dumped everything. You probably think I hid him, but I didn't. I knew the snow would cover him up, and I thought the spring melt would carry him away if I left him in the stream-bed. And that was what happened, except I had no idea he would go so far. Why, they found his body a whole year after… after he died, and almost twenty-seven miles away. Actually, it would have been better if he hadn't gone as far as he did, because there are always hikers and bird-watchers in the Grider Preserve. The woods around here are much less travelled.” She smiled.
“And that's where your car is now, Paul - somewhere between Route 9 and the Grider Wildlife Preserve, somewhere in the woods. It's far enough in so you can't see it from the road. I've got a spotlight on the side of Old Bessie, and it's plenty powerful, but the wash is empty all the way into the woods. I guess I'll go in on foot and check when the water goes down a little, but I'm almost positive it's safe. Some hunter will find it in two years or five years or seven years, all rusty and with chipmunks nesting in the seats, and by then you will have finished my book and will be back in New York or Los Angeles or wherever it is you decide to go, and I'll be living my quiet life out here. Maybe we will correspond sometimes.” She smiled mistily - the smile of a woman who sees a lovely castle in the sky - and then the smile disappeared and she was all business again.
“So I came back here and on the way I did some hard thinking. I had to, because your car being gone meant that you could really stay, you could really finish my book. I wasn't always sure you'd be able to, you know, although I never said because I didn't want to upset you. Partly I didn't want to upset you because I knew you wouldn't write as well if I did, but that sounds ever so much colder than I really felt, my dear. You see, I began by loving only the part of you that makes such wonderful stories, because that's the only part I had - the rest of you I didn't know anything about, and I thought that part might really be quite unpleasant. I'm not a dummy, you know. I've read about some so-called “famous authors”, and I know that often they are quite unpleasant. Why, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway and that redneck fellow from Mississippi - Faulkner or whatever it was - those fellows may have won National Pulitzer Book Awards and things, but they were nothing but cockadoodie drunken burns just the same. Other ones, too - when they weren't writing wonderful stories they were drinking and whoring and shooting dope and heaven knows what else.
“But you're not like that, and after awhile I came to know the rest of Paul Sheldon, and I hope you don't mind me saying it, but I have come to love the rest of him, too.”
“Thank you, Annie,” he said from atop his golden glistening wave, and he thought: Bu tyou may have read me wrong, you know - I mean, the situations that lead men into temptation have been severely curtailed up here. It's sort of hard to go bar-hopping when you've got a couple of broken legs, Annie. As for shooting dope, I've got the Bourka Bee-Goddess to do that for me.
“But would you want to stay?” she resumed. “That was the question I had to ask myself, and as much as I may have wanted to pull the wool over my eyes, I knew the answer to that - I knew even before I saw the marks on the door over there.” She pointed and Paul thought: I'll bet she did know almost from the very first. Wool-pulling? Not you, Annie. Never you. But I was doing enough of that for both of us.
“Do you remember the first time I went away? After we had that silly fight over the paper?”
“Yes, Annie.”
“That was when you went out the first time, wasn't it?”
“Yes.” There was no point in denying it.
“Of course. You wanted your pills. I should have known you'd do anything to get your pills, but when I get mad, I get… you know.” She giggled a little nervously. Paul did not join her, or even smile. The memory of that pain-racked, endless interlude with the phantom voice of the sportscaster doing the play-by-play was too strong still.
Yes, I know how you get, he thought. You get oogy.
“At first I wasn't completely sure. Oh, I saw that some of the figures on the little table in the parlor had been moved around, but I thought I might have done that myself - I have times when I'm really quite forgetful. It crossed my mind that you'd been out of your room, but then I thought, No, that's impossible. He's so badly hurt, and besides, I locked the door. I even checked to make sure the key was still in my skirt pocket, and it was. Then I remembered you were in your chair. So maybe…
“One of the things you learn when you've been an R.N. for ten years is that it's always wise to check your maybes. So I took a look at the things I keep in the downstairs bathroom - they're mostly samples I brought home off and on while I was working; you should see all the stuff that just goes roiling around in hospitals, Paul! And so every now and then I helped myself to a few… well… a few extras… and I wasn't the only one. But I knew enough not to take any of the morphine based drugs. They lock those up. They count. They keep records. And if they get an idea that a nurse is, you know, chipping - that's what they call it - they watch that nurse until they're sure. Then, bang!” Annie chopped her hand down hard. “Out they go, and most of them never put on the white cap again.
“I was smarter than that.
“Looking at those cartons was the Sam e as looking at the figures on the little parlor table. I thought the stuff in them had been sort of stirred around, and I was pretty sure that one of the cartons that was on the bottom before was on top of some of the other cartons now, but I couldn't be sure. And I could have done it myself when I was… well… when I was preoccupied.
“Then, two days later, after I had just about decided to let it go, I came in to give you your afternoon medication. You were still having your nap. I tried to turn the doorknob, but for a few seconds it wouldn't turn - it was like the door was locked. Then it did turn, and I heard something rattle inside the lock. Then you started to stir around so I just gave you your pills like always. Like I didn't suspect. I'm very good at that, Paul. Then I helped you into your chair so you could write. And when I helped you into it that afternoon, I felt like Saint Paul on the road to Damascus. My eyes were opened. I saw how much of your color had come back. I saw that you were moving your legs. They were giving you pain, and you could only move them a little, but you were moving them. And your arms were getting stronger again, as well.
“I saw you were almost healthy again.
“That was when I started to realize I could have a problem with you even if no one from the outside suspected a thing. I looked at you and saw that I might not be the only one good at keeping secrets.
“That night I changed your medication for something a little stronger, and when I was sure you weren't going to wake up even if someone exploded a grenade under your bed, I got my little tool- kit from the cellar shelf and I took the keyplate off that door. And look what I found!” She took something small and dark from one of the flap pockets of her mannish shirt. She put it in his numb hand. He brought it up close to his face and stared at it owlishly. It was a bent and twisted chunk of bobby-pin.
Paul began to giggle. He couldn't help it.
“What's so funny, Paul?”
“The day you went to pay your taxes. I needed to open the door again. The wheelchair - it was almost too big - it left black marks. I wanted to wipe them off if I could.”
“So I wouldn't see them.”
“Yes. But you already had, hadn't you?”
“After I found one of my bobby-pins in the lock?” She smiled herself “You bet your rooty-patooties I had.” Paul nodded and laughed even harder. He was laughing so hard tears were squirting from his eyes. All his work… all his worry… all for nothing. It seemed deliciously funny.
He said, “I was worried that piece of bobby-pin might mess me up… but it didn't. I never even heard it rattling around. And there was a good reason for that, wasn't there? It never rattled because you took it out. What a fooler you are, Annie.”
“Yes,” she said, and smiled thinly. “What a fooler I am.” She moved her feet. That muffled wooden thump from the foot of the bed came again.
22
“How many times were you out in all?” The knife. Oh Christ, the knife.
“Twice. No - wait. I went out again yesterday afternoon around five o'clock. To fill up my water pitcher.” This was true; he had filled the pitcher. But he had omitted the real reason for his third trip. The real reason was under his mattress. The Princess and the Pea. Paulie and the Pig Sticker. “Three times, counting the trip for the water.”
“Tell the truth, Paul.”
“Just three times, I swear. And never to get away. For Christ's sake I'm writing a book here, in case you didn't notice.”
“Don't use the Saviour's name in vain, Paul.”
“You quit using mine that way and maybe I will. The first time I was in so much pain that it felt like someone had put me into hell from the knees on down. And someone did. You did, Annie.”
“Shut up, Paul!”
“The second time I just wanted to get something to eat, and make sure I had some extra supplies in here in case you were gone a long time,” he went on, ignoring her. “Then I got thirsty. That's all there is. No big conspiracy.”
“You didn't try the telephone either time, I suppose, or took at the locks - because you are just such a good little boy.”
“Sure I tried the phone. Sure I looked at the locks… not that I would have gotten very far in the mudbath out there even if your doors had been wide open.” The dope was coming in heavier and heavier waves, and now he just wished she would shut up and go away. She had already doped him enough to tell the truth - he was afraid he would have to pay the consequences in time. But first he wanted to sleep.
“How many times did you go out?”
“I told you - “
“How many times?” Her voice was rising. “Tell the truth!”
“I am! Three times!”
“How many times, God damn it?” In spite of the cruiser-load of dope she'd shot into him, Paul began to be frightened.
At least if she does something to me it can't hurt too much… and she wants me to finish the book… she said so…
“You're treating me like a fool.” He noticed how shiny her skin was, like some sort of polymer plastic stretched tightly over stone. There seemed to be no pores at all in that face.
“Annie, I swear - “
“Oh, liars can swear! Liars love to swear! Well, go ahead and treat me like a fool, if that's what you want. That's fine. Goody-goody for you. Treat a woman who isn't a fool as if she were, and that woman always comes out ahead. Let me tell you, Paul - I've stretched thread and strands of hair from my own head all over this house and have found many of them snapped later on. Snapped or entirely gone… just disappeared… poof! Not just on my scrapbook but in this hallway and across my dresser drawers upstairs… in the shed… all over.” Annie, how could I possibly get out in the shed with all those locks on the kitchen door? he wanted to ask, but she gave him no time, only plunged on.
“Now you go right ahead and keep telling me it was only three times, Mister Smart Guy, and I'll tell you who the fool is.” He stared at her, groggy but appalled. He didn't know how to answer her. It was so paranoid… so crazy…
My God, he thought, suddenly forgetting the shed, upstairs? Did she say UPSTAIRS?
“Annie, how in God's name could I get upstairs?”
“Oh, RIGHT!” she cried, her voice cracking. “Oh, SURE! I came in here a few days ago and you'd managed to get into your wheelchair all by yourself! If you could do that, you could get upstairs! You could crawl!”
“Yes, on my broken legs and my shattered knee,” he said.
