clothes on the floor that mingled with the towels she’d spilled everywhere the night before. Naked in a brightly lit pink and chromed bathroom, she spun the taps, sat on the edge of the bathtub, and tried to think her way past the haze of depression and pain.
“You’re a big girl,” she told the scalding hot waterfall as it gushed into the tub. “Big girls don’t get bent out of shape by little things,” she told herself. Like losing her job. “Big girls deal with divorces. Big girls deal with getting pregnant while they’re at school, putting the baby up for adoption, finishing med school, and retraining for another career when they don’t like the shitty options they get dealt. Big girls cope with marrying their boyfriends, then finding he’s been sleeping with their best friends. Big girls make CEOs shit themselves when they come calling with a list of questions. They don’t go crazy and think they’re wandering around a rainy forest being shot at by armoured knights with assault rifles.” She sniffed, on the edge of tears.
A first rational thought intruded: I’m getting depressed and that’s no good. Followed rapidly by a second one: Where’s the bubble bath? Bubble bath was fun. Bubble bath was a good thought. Miriam didn’t like wallowing in self-pity, although right now it was almost as tempting as a nice warm shower. She went and searched for the bubble bath, finally found the bottle in the trashcan-almost, but not entirely, empty. She held it under the tap and let the water rinse the last of the gel out, foaming and swirling around her feet.
Depression would be a perfectly reasonable response to losing my job, she told herself, if it was actually my fault. Which it wasn’t. Lying back in the scented water and inhaling steam. But going nuts? I don’t think so. She’d been through bad times. First the unplanned pregnancy by Ben, in her third year at college, too young and too early. She still couldn’t fully articulate her reasons for not having an abortion; maybe if that bitch from the student counselling service hadn’t simply assumed… but she’d never been one for doing what everyone expected her to do, and she’d been confident-maybe too confident-in her relationship with Ben. Hence the adoption. And then, a couple of years later when they got married, that hadn’t been the smartest thing she’d ever done either. With twenty- twenty hindsight it had been a response to a relationship already on the rocks, the kind that could only end in tears. But she’d weathered it all without going crazy or even having a small breakdown. Iron control, that’s me. But this new thing, the stumbling around the woods being shot at, seeing a knight, a guy in armour, with an M-16 or something-that was scary. Time to face the music. “Am I sane?” she asked the toilet duck.
Well, whatever this is, it ain’t in DSM-FV. Miriam racked her memory for decade-old clinical lectures. No way was this schizophrenia. The symptoms were all wrong, and she wasn’t hearing voices or feeling weird about people. It was just a single sharp incident, very vivid, realistic as-
She stared at her stained pants and turtleneck. “The chair,” she muttered. “If the chair’s missing, it was real. Or at least something happened.”
Paradoxically, the thought of the missing chair gave her something concrete to hang on to. Dripping wet, she stumbled downstairs. Her den was as she’d left it, except that the chair was missing and there were muddy footprints by the french doors. She knelt to examine the floor behind her desk. She found a couple of books, dislodged from the shelf behind her chair when she fell, but otherwise no sign of anything unexpected. “So it was real!”
A sudden thought struck her and she whirled then ran upstairs to the bathroom, wincing. The locket!-
It was in the pocket of her pants. Pulling a face, she carefully placed it on the shelf above the sink where she could see it, then got into the bathtub. I’m not going nuts, she thought, relaxing in the hot water. It’s real.
An hour later she emerged, feeling much improved. Hair washed and conditioned, nails carefully trimmed and stripped of the residue of yesterday’s polish, legs itching with mild razor-burn, and skin rosy from an exfoliating scrub, she felt clean, as if she’d succeeded in stripping away all the layers of dirt and paranoia that had stuck to her the day before. It was still only lunchtime, so she dressed again: an old T-shirt, jeans that had seen better days, and an old pair of sneakers.
The headache and chills subsided slowly, as did the lethargy. She headed downstairs slowly and dumped her dirty clothing in the washing machine. Then she poured herself a glass of orange juice and managed to force down one of the granola bars she kept for emergencies. This brought more thoughts to mind, and as soon as she’d finished eating she headed downstairs to poke around in the gloom of the basement.
The basement was a great big rectangular space under the floor of the house. The furnace, bolted to one wall, roared eerily at her; Ben had left lots of stuff with her, her parents had passed on a lot of their stuff too, and now one wall was faced in industrial shelving units.
Here was a box stuffed with old clothing that she kept meaning to schlep to a charity shop: not her wedding dress-which had gone during the angry month she filed for divorce-but ordinary stuff, too unimportant to repudiate. There was an old bag full of golf clubs, their chromed heads dull and speckled with rust. Ben had toyed with the idea of doing golf, thinking of it as a way up the corporate ladder. There was a dead lawn mower, an ancient computer of Ben’s-probably a museum piece by now-and a workbench with vice, saws, drill, and other woodworking equipment, and maybe the odd bloodstain from his failed attempts to be the man about the house. There on that high shelf was a shotgun and a box of shells. It had belonged to Morris, her father. She eyed it dubiously. Probably nobody had used it since Dad bought it decades ago, when he’d lived out west for a few years, and what she knew about shotguns could be written on one side of a postage stamp in very large letters, even though Morris had insisted on teaching her to use a handgun. Some wise words from the heavyweight course on industrial espionage techniques the Weatherman HR folks had paid for her to take two years ago came back: You’re a journalist, and these other folks are investigators. You’re none of you cops, none of you are doing anything worth risking your lives over, so you should avoid escalating confrontations. Guns turn any confrontation into a potentially lethal one. So keep them the hell out of your professional life! “Shotgun, no,” she mused. “But. Hmm. Handgun.” Must stop talking to myself, she resolved.
“Do I really expect them to follow me here?” she asked the broken chest freezer, which gaped uncomprehendingly at her. “Did I just dream it all?”
Back upstairs, she swiped her leather-bound planner from the desk and poured another glass of orange juice. Time to worry about the real world, she told herself. She went back to the hall and hit the “play” button on the answering machine. It was backed up with messages from the day before.
“Miriam? Andy here. Listen, a little bird told me about what happened yesterday and I think it sucks. They didn’t have any details, but I want you to know if you need some freelance commissions you should give me a call. Talk later? Bye.”
Andy was a junior editor on a rival tech-trade sheet. He sounded stiff and stilted when he talked to the telephone robot, not like a real person at all. But it still gave her a shiver of happiness, almost a feeling of pure joy, to hear from him. Someone cared, someone who didn’t buy the vicious lie Joe Dixon had put out. That bastard really got to me, Miriam wondered, relief replaced by a flash of anger at the way she’d been treated.
Another message, from Paulette. Miriam tensed. “Miriam, honey, let’s talk. I don’t want to rake over dead shit, but there’s some stuff I need to get straight in my head. Can I come around?”
She hit the “pause” button. Paulette sounded severely messed up. It was like a bucket of ice water down her spine. I did this. I got us both fired, she began thinking, and her knees tried to turn to jelly. Then she thought, Hold on. I didn’t fire anybody! That switched on the anger again, but left her feeling distinctly shaky. Sooner or later she’d have to talk to Paulie. Sooner or-
She hit the “next message” button again.
Heavy breathing, then: “Bitch. We know where you live. Heard about you from our mutual friend Joe. Keep your nose out of our business or you’ll be fucking sorry”-click.
Wide-eyed, she turned and looked over her shoulder. But the yard was empty and the front door was locked. “Bastards,” she spat. But there was no caller-ID on the message and probably not enough to get the police interested in it. Especially not if Joe’s minions at The Weatherman started mud slinging with forged fire-wall logs: They could make her look like the next Unabomber if they wanted to. For a moment, outrage blurred her vision. She forced herself to stop panting and sit down again, next to the treacherous, venomous answering machine. “Threaten me in my own home, will you? Fuck.”
The gravity of her situation was only just sinking in. “Better keep a gun under my pillow,” she muttered under her breath. “Bastards.” The opposite wall seemed to be pulsing slightly, a reaction to her fury. She felt her fingers clenching involuntarily. “Bastards.” Kicking her out of her job and smearing her reputation wasn’t enough for them, was it? She’d show them-
– Something.
After a minute she calmed down enough to face the remaining message on the answering machine. She had
