finish the job of furnishing the place.
Still leery of a pit bull springing on her from nowhere, she set about searching the house. Once, just as she was standing in the centre of the living room, headlights splashed through the curtains and across the wall. She stopped, frozen, heart pounding, a glaze of sweat covering most of her body.
The man was home.
What was she going to do?
But then, miraculously, the headlights withdrew, a transmission whined in reverse, and the car was going back down the street.
Just turning around. Nothing more.
Her next stop was the basement. She'd found a flashlight sitting on a kitchen counter, and she used it then, easing her way down the basement stairs. A furnace blasted on when she got about halfway down, startling her. The flashlight picked out a large family room that, like the upstairs, gave the impression of crying out for furniture. Instead of curtains, for instance, the windows were covered with sheets and pillow cases.
In other parts of the basement she found a bathroom complete with shower, a formidable workshop area, and a large freezer.
For some reason she was curious about the freezer and was ready to open it when the phone started ringing upstairs. Suddenly she heard a male voice filling the darkness above her. An answering machine telling people that he wasn't home. She let her hands slide from the lid of the freezer. She decided to go back upstairs, to the bedrooms. Most people kept cash on hand somewhere in the house. Thus far she hadn't found any, true, but the bedrooms were probably a more likely place to hide cash anyway.
On her way through the living room to the staircase, she thought again of sitcom families. Just a little more furniture, and this place would be a palace. How nice it would be to live there instead of a cramped, five-room farmhouse, where every night she'd had to listen to… She thought of her older sister Janice. How Janice had looked that last time in the hospital.
But there was no time for that. She wanted to find some cash… She went up the stairs.
There were three bedrooms on the upper floor. In the beam of the flashlight, the upstairs looked even more desolate than the rooms downstairs. In one she found clothes that still were packed in boxes, along with odds and ends such as hairbrushes and cuff links and shoe trees. In another, she found boxes of books. Here was a man who obviously liked to read. She pulled up one of the books and looked at it, an expensive hardcover entitled The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. She had seen the movie version of this with Robert Redford and hadn't liked it.
In the third bedroom she found a double bed askew with twisted sheets and covers. The electric blanket was still on, its controls still glowing orange in the darkness. The windows were rimmed with frost; she wanted to climb into the bed and get under the covers and luxuriate in long hours of uninterrupted sleep.
In a four-drawer dresser in the west corner of the bedroom she found a small red box that had once contained chequebooks. It now contained cash. More than two hundred dollars. She put the money in her coat pocket and started downstairs.
When she got halfway down, the phone rang again. The sounds were loud, almost eerie, in the big, dark, empty house.
She heard the man's voice say he wasn't home but would call back as soon as possible, and then she heard another voice, the live one, describe how badly he wanted to talk to the man who lived there. The caller said that he knew the man could take his messages off this machine from a long ways away, so would the man please come over to the caller's house ASAP. Then the caller hung up.
Standing in the pooled shadows at the bottom of the stairs, streetlight and frost turning the white curtains to silver, Denise searched her mind for what ASAP meant. Then she remembered; it was an expression her mother had used frequently when Denise was younger. You clean that room up ASAP, young lady; you get your bike into the bam where it won't be rained on, and I mean ASAP.
As soon as possible.
In the echoes of the caller's voice, she could hear desperation and trouble. The caller wanted the man to come to his place right away. Which is probably what the man would do instead of coming back home, especially if he had one of those deals where you could snag your phone messages with one of those little black jobbies.
Which meant that if Denise wanted to confront the man, and tell him how much money she wanted to keep quiet, she was going to have to do it at the caller's address. If, that is, she could find the caller's name and address in the phone book.
At first she thought of the incredible hassle it would be to get back on a bus and be taken to God knew where. It could literally be another three hours. But then she remembered the cash in her coat. She didn't have to rely on a bus. She could call a cab. She had plenty of money.
Keeping the caller's name fresh in her mind by repeating it over and over to herself, she took the flashlight and started looking for a phone directory. After a ten-minute search, she spotted one in a kitchen drawer. By then she'd repeated the caller's name so many times, it was gibberish, the way you could say the word spoon or clock so many times, it ceased to have all meaning.
She found the caller's name and address with no problem, writing them down on a paper napkin she found in the same drawer.
Putting the flashlight back where she'd found it, she drifted toward the back door. In the moonlight the shards of broken glass looked terrible, spoiling the nice, if empty, look of the place.
Shrugging, feeling guilty about making such a mess, she rummaged around in the kitchen closet till she found a broom. Having no luck finding a dustpan, she went over to the green plastic garbage receptacle and fished out a TV dinner cover. She folded the cover in half and went over and swept all the glass up into the fold. It made a fine dustpan.
In ten minutes she had all the glass swept up. All that bothered her then were the holes in the window; bone-chilling night air flowed through them. Ultimately the wind would make the whole house cold.
She realized how weird it was, of course, feeling driven to patch up the same place she'd broken into, but she couldn't help it. Her mother had always taught her to lend a hand when a hand was needed, and one was certainly needed there.
She found some heavy tape in a drawer and then dug out a carton container from the garbage, fashioning two pieces of material that would cover both holes. When she was finished, she stood back and assessed her handiwork. All in all the patches didn't look so bad. The trouble was, they wouldn't last too long. Cold air would freeze the adhesive surface of the tape, and soon enough the patches would fall off.
But at least she had tried.
Going to the back door, she took the receiver from the wall phone and dialled a cab number. She was pretty familiar with cabs. Sometimes johns would pay the cab fare to bring you to different places to meet them. And she liked cabs. You felt kind of regal or special-or at least a country girl did-riding around in the backseat of what was really a chauffeur-driven vehicle. Or at least that was how she imagined it.
The guy at the cab company sounded kind of grouchy. He said that with this weather, all kinds of cars weren't starting, and so it would be a while. She said okay.
While she waited, she looked in the refrigerator for something to eat. It was a huge new fridge, and all the guy had in it was a dried-out apple, some cottage cheese that was already three weeks beyond the fresh date and smelled like it, and one lone egg that sat pathetically in the back, like a deserted child.
Disappointed, she closed the door and started searching the cupboards. Unless she planned to dine on salt and sugar, she was out of luck.
Then she remembered the freezer in the basement, the long white chest model, like the one her father had always been promising to buy her mother.
Maybe in the freezer she'd find something she could pop into the microwave oven. Something that would fortify her for what would probably be a long night ahead.
She went over to the door leading to the lower level and started descending the stairs, the flashlight chasing away shadows the way a cat would chase away mice caught in a bam.
All she could think about was the freezer and the great stuff that might be inside. Maybe he'd have a few of those burger-and-fries deals that took just four minutes (the way they were advertised on TV) before they sat, steamy and succulent, before you on the table.
She headed straight for the freezer, ready to throw back the lid.
