SWF Seeks Same

describe people. It sounds too much like soup, don’t you think?”

Allie held her silence.

Hedra said, “Okay, crabby appleton, I know you’re still on the line.” A little girl’s voice. Taunting. But still flat. “Listen, I didn’t mean to hurt you, Allie.”

“Then why did you?”

Instead of answering, Hedra said, “Are you lonely, Allie?”

“Yes,” Allie said, “I’m lonely.”

Hedra said, “I’m not.”

“You have Sam,” Allie said. “You deserve each other. You’re both contemptible.”

“He’s contemptible. Otherwise he wouldn’t have put his hands on both of us. He wouldn’t have done what he did to us.”

“He didn’t do it alone, Hedra.”

“He didn’t have to do it at all, did he? What if I promised he’d never do it again?”

“I don’t want your promises,” Allie said. “I don’t care anymore about either of you. Can’t you understand that? There’s no reason for us to have anything to do with each other.”

“I hope you’re right, Allie.”

“Don’t call me again, Hedra.”

“I won’t.”

The connection broke with a click, and the empty line sighed in Allie’s ear until the dial tone buzzed.

She hung up the phone and sat for a while thinking about the call, watching a large bluebottle fly, later along in life than it thought, drone and bounce off the window, trying to escape into the drab, cool evening. The sky was darkening quickly now; it was getting dark noticeably earlier each day. Seasons changing.

What was Hedra trying to do? Why had she virtually taken over Allie’s life, sapped Allie of herself and somehow become another Allie? She’d lived in Allie’s apartment. Wore duplicate clothes, jewelry, and perfume. Sometimes wore Allie’s clothes and jewelry. Used Allie’s identity. Even some of her gestures and speech habits. Slept with Sam.

Envied Allie.

Had no identity of her own.

“She’s ill,” Allie said to the bluebottle fly. Hedra had mentioned being hospitalized as a young girl. Possibly she’d been kept in a mental institution, and she was still very, very sick. So gradually had the situation made itself evident that the seriousness of Hedra’s problem had never registered on the unsuspecting Allie. Allie had misjudged the intensity of Hedra’s inner fire and envy. It was clear now why she’d wanted Sam so desperately, and why she flaunted the affair in front of Allie. It was as if she were letting Allie know that now she, Hedra, had finally supplanted Allie, and Allie no longer was quite real. Allie had become the inhabitant of an empty life, the shadowy subleasing roommate in her own existence.

The terrible part was that Allie felt that way. She’d bought it. She’d been so involved with other problems in her life that she hadn’t noticed danger creeping up from an unexpected quarter. And then it was too late.

It was Hedra, Allie realized, who must have stolen her credit cards and driver’s license, so she could be Hedra outside the apartment as well as inside. Hedra, the thief who stole so much more than property.

Why had Hedra called tonight? What had she meant about making Sam hers forever? And why the strange tone of her voice? There’d been an odd, deranged quality to the way she’d sounded. On the other hand, why shouldn’t there be? She’d certainly been behaving that way.

Allie remembered the blueberry cobbler recipe she’d found in the shoe box in Hedra’s closet, and the murder news item on its reverse side. There had been other newspaper clippings in the box, but she hadn’t looked at them, assuming they were other recipes or cooking columns. But maybe the grisly homicide story on the back of the recipe didn’t simply happen to be there. Maybe it was the recipe that happened to be on the back of the news item. Maybe the other clippings were about murders.

No, Allie told herself, don’t let your imagination make a fool of you again.

But the longer she sat there, the more a kind of pressure built in her. Things Hedra had said and done over the months seemed to click into a pattern and became meaningful. Ominous. Imagination? Maybe.

Only maybe.

Allie walked to her purse and dug in it until she found the card Sergeant Kennedy had given her. Then she untangled and stretched the phone cord so she could rest the phone in her lap while she sat in the wing chair.

Listening to her own harsh breathing, she punched out the number on the card. She waited while the phone on the other end of the line rang, unconsciously twirling a lock of her hair around her left forefinger. It was a nervous habit she’d had as a teenager, and she wondered why she was doing it now. God, was she regressing? She jerked her hand away so abruptly she pulled her hair. Then she hung up the phone.

She had to give this some careful consideration before talking to Kennedy. For all she knew, her call would result not in a quelling of her fears, but in a uniformed officer knocking on her door within minutes, then a ride to the precinct house, where events would be dictated by emotionless procedure. One phone call, and the blue genie of police power would be out of the bottle and out of control. The police would want something more substantial than the anger and dread of a spurned lover. And that was how they’d see Allie. Even Kennedy would see her that way.

Allie thought again of the news item on the back of the recipe clipped from the paper.