the hoses to fill five of the six buckets with water when Stillman called to ask how the case was coming along. I told him it was coming along like a house afire and hung up on him. I was putting eighteen of the twenty-four towels into the buckets full of water when Annabelle Winston called.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“Well,” I said, “I’ve lost a little weight, but I’ve acquired a guard dog.”
“I haven’t wanted to bother you. I just wondered if you have anything to tell me. I want to go to Chicago for the weekend, but not if you think anything is likely to happen.”
“I think that exactly anything is likely to happen.”
“Should I stay?”
“Look, Miss Winston, I appreciate how patient you’ve-”
“I saw how stressed you were last time,” she said, pouring it on just a bit. “I wouldn’t add to the strain for the world, it’s just that I’m not sure whether to leave or not. When you say you think anything might happen-”
“I mean that he might burn me, he might burn you, or he might burn half of southern California. I think he’s on the move and that he’s got something very big in mind. And I think it’s going to happen soon.”
“I’ll stay,” she said.
“Suit yourself,” I said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to finish filling my moat.”
I put each of the buckets, full of water and towels, dead center in a room. I fastened the garden nozzles onto the hoses and hauled them through the house to make sure there was no spot I couldn’t hit. I filled the sixth bucket with water, dropped the remaining six towels into it, and toted it down to Alice. Bravo roused himself loyally and trotted down after me. When I got back to the top of the hill, I gave him a bowl of water and a full box of low-salt Triscuits, over which I poured bacon grease from some forgotten breakfast. He knocked it back as though it had been Chateaubriand.
Having purchased his territorial loyalty for one more night, I sat at the plywood breakfast counter and used a pair of needlenose pliers to work the bells out of the wind chimes. I only pinched myself twice. The pliers doubled as wire cutters, so I took them outside as I strung the piano wire back and forth across the driveway and through the brush on the hillsides surrounding the house. Each wire or pair of wires ultimately passed through one of the many holes in the screen over my bedroom window, where I passed it under a bent nail driven into the wall and then tied it off through one of the metal rings that had held the bells in place in the wind chimes. The entire bouquet of bells dangled about twelve inches above where my nose would be when I was asleep. I was outside, tugging wires and listening to bells, when the phone rang again.
“Yeah?”
“Hello, Simeon,” Eleanor said.
“Oh, Lord,” I said, feeling as though I’d broken into a blush. “Let me get a beer.”
I grabbed a bottle of Singha from the refrigerator and plopped down on the floor. “So hi,” I said.
“How are you?”
“Everybody’s asking. I’m not well done yet, and that’s something.”
“Have you got any protection?”
“Bravo Corrigan’s here. I’ve put in an alarm system.” I could hear a television in the background. “And you?”
“Getting tired of hotels.”
“Call room service.”
“I do,” she said. “Continuously.”
“How’s good old Burt?”
“In New York.”
“He’s a New York type of guy. He should really move to New York. I bet he’d be happy as hell in New York.”
“Well,” Eleanor said. It was beginning to get dark.
I didn’t want her to hang up. “Have you seen Hammond?”
“He’s with me four hours a day. He’s in terrible shape, Simeon. I think he’s drunk all night long. He’s got so much fluid under his eyes I’m surprised he can blink.”
“Tough,” I said. “He’s a big boy. Time for him to stop feeling sorry for himself.”
“She’s going to take everything. She’s got proof that he committed adultery.”
“ Al? ” I asked in mock disbelief.
“Oh, stop it. He’s your friend.”
“I am now the One Musketeer,” I said.
“Well,” she said again. “He misses you.”
I drank again. “He does?”
“I miss you, too.”
“Eleanor,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Me, too,” she said after a moment. “How did things get so complicated?”
“Maybe I’m not the best guy in the world. But I could get better.” I felt like I was talking Tourist’s English.
The television on her end of the line went bang-bang. “It would be good for you if you did,” she said. “You can’t run away from love forever.”
“It’s how I keep in shape,” I said. “Stupid. Sorry, that was stupid.”
“Well, it was certainly Simeon. Do you want me to come over?”
“No,” I said quickly. “We’re in Wilton’s time zone here.”
“Do you want to come here, then?”
There was nothing in the world I wanted more. “I’m afraid to leave.”
“I’d think you’d be afraid to stay.”
“That, too.”
“And you think you can change,” she said. “Well. When it’s over, then. Promise?”
“I promise.” I searched my brain for words that would prove I meant it.
“Please take care of yourself. For me, if not for you.”
“I will.” I drank half the bottle in a series of long, heart-clutchingly cold swallows.
“See you, then.”
“See you.” She hung up, and I finished the bottle and thought about the conversation we hadn’t had.
When in doubt, Dreiser. Since I’d totaled An American Tragedy, I took a shovel to The Titan for an hour or two, then gave up once again and reread the first part of Trollope’s richly venal The Way We Live Now. At about eleven I turned off the light and got into bed. Two minutes later, the phone rang. I pushed Bravo Corrigan off my feet, where he was already twitching his feet, chasing some dream cat, and went to answer it.
“Hello?” I said, hoping it was Eleanor again.
Silence.
“Oh, fuck you, Wilton,” I said, slamming the phone down. I went back to bed. Ten minutes later, Bravo raised his head and growled. I picked up the flashlight I’d put on the table by the bed and pointed it out the bedroom window. I lay down again.
All the bells went off.
19
All told, the bells went off three times that night. The third time, I went all the way to the kitchen, clutching Billy’s rabbi, and old Bravo barreled out the door, and two seconds later a bunch of coyotes exploded past me and down the hill in a mad scrabble of claws on granite. There was no way to know about the first two times, so I went to bed and spent a couple of hours watching a big reddish fire moon sink itself below the hills, waiting for peal number four.
