“Yes.”
“Go on.”
I turned back to the window.
When I entered the God office, Wrigley was smiling and holding an unlit cigar. (California’s anti-smoking laws were second only to sexual harassment suits in making his life miserable.) I grew more wary; Wrigley’s halo is always perched on his horns. He introduced the two couples with him as friends of the family who were visiting the area, who had stopped by the office today especially to meet me.
“To meet me?” I asked. “I don’t understand.”
“You’re the one who escaped from Nick Parrish, right?” one of the men asked.
I looked at Wrigley. He’s known me for many years, which is why he stopped smiling. His guests didn’t seem to notice.
“Oh! It must have been so horrible!” one woman said, but she made the word “horrible” sound a lot like the word “thrilling.”
“What is he really like?” she went on. “They say he’s probably killed more women than Ted Bundy did. They say he’s just as handsome as Bundy.”
“He’s not handsome,” I managed to say. “Excuse me, I have to get back to work.”
“Not especially handsome,” the other woman corrected, “but charming. They say that’s how he lures women.”
“Don’t run off,” one of the men said, seeing me edge toward the door. “After all, you’re here with the boss, right, Win?”
Win? I had never heard anyone call him that before.
“Right,” Wrigley said. “Irene wasn’t taken in by his charms,” he added, trying to recover. “She’s a professional, through and through. Why, she nearly killed him!”
This elicited gasps from the female members of his audience.
“And she was the only one up there who had the sense not to get herself killed or wounded!” he said, warming to his subject. “She saved the life of this one idiot who ran into the field after the shooting started — can you imagine anyone doing anything so stupid?”
“Mr. Wrigley—” I began angrily, but he must not have heard me over the combination of exclamations of disbelief and laughter.
“He’s crippled now, but really, it’s his own damned fault. Irene has been taking care of him. In fact—”
“Yo, Win!” I shouted at the top of my lungs.
All laughter and conversation ceased.
“Yo, Win,” I said quietly. “Go fuck yourself.”
I walked out. But as I did, I heard them start to laugh again — nervously, at first, and then one of the men made some crack I couldn’t hear, and they all laughed loudly.
“What happened then?” Jo Robinson prompted.
But I was frozen, watching a man walk across the parking lot.
Panic replaced the blood in my veins, pumped through me, tensed every muscle in my body.
In the next moment, I saw it wasn’t him.
Just like every other time, it wasn’t him.
“Irene?” Jo Robinson’s voice, breaking through to me. Had she noticed?
“I was near Stuart Angert’s desk,” I said, forcing my mind back to the events of that day. “I seemed to go into this — this altered state. I heard this rushing in my ears, and then, after that, nothing. It was almost like being underwater, without the water — no sound, not even the sound of my own thoughts. I didn’t see anyone, feel anything.
“But I saw Stuart’s computer monitor, and I pulled the connections out of the back of it. Lydia tells me Stuart asked me what I was doing, but I didn’t hear, didn’t notice him. I pulled it off his desk with both hands — it’s a big monitor, but I didn’t notice its weight, either. I hurled it through one of the glass windows of the God office. I heard the glass breaking — that was the first thing I heard.”
“And after that?”
“They stopped laughing.”
She waited, and when I turned back to the window, she said, “Do you remember what happened after they stopped laughing?”
“I was forced to take a leave of absence and told I couldn’t come back until I had sought counseling.”
“I meant, immediately after you broke the glass panel.”
I frowned, then said, “Not really. There was a lot of shouting and — I’m embarrassed to admit this, because I should have been making a speech or something at that point, you know, a grand exit — but instead, I sort of fainted.”
“Sort of fainted?”
