Joe, I need both hands to drive now. Sleep tight.”
“Good night. Love you.”
Catherine had started closing her cell phone before she heard it, and now she cursed herself for ending the call. Had he really said that? If he had, what could it possibly have meant? It had sounded automatic, like a formula. She thought about it as she drove up the curving road. She decided to ignore it. If he really had intended to tell her he loved her, then he would do it again.
She stopped in front of her parents’ house and went inside. “Mom?” she called.
Her mother appeared from the kitchen. “Hi, honey. Just coming home from work?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I hadn’t seen you guys in a couple of days, so I thought I’d come and brighten your empty lives.”
“You mean you don’t feel like making your own dinner?”
“That’s right. Where’s Dad?”
“He’s upstairs. He’ll probably be down in a minute. Want some leftover turkey?”
“Sure. Let me get my own.” She walked into the kitchen and got herself a plate, then took the Tupperware container with the neatly sliced turkey breast in it, added some broccoli, and put it into the microwave.
Her mother watched her. “How is your new boyfriend working out?”
She turned her head in mock surprise. “How’s your crystal ball?”
“It’s not that hard. I called your house the last five evenings and you’ve been out late. So how much are you going to tell me?”
“I’ll spill my guts. His name is Joe Pitt, and he was just here for a few days. I have absolutely no business going out with him. He’s too old and too rich and has a bad boy reputation that I think he probably earned. Naturally I’m getting more interested by the day. I’ll let you know when I need to come over and cry about how it ended.”
“Well, that’s nice,” said her mother. “I’ll set aside some time.”
There was the sound of her father’s heavy footsteps on the stairway, and then her father appeared. “Ah, the princess has returned.”
“Hi, Dad.”
He sat down in the chair beside hers, smiling. “Working late, eh?”
“Yeah,” she said.
“Anything interesting?”
“Nothing you haven’t seen a hundred times. Husband comes home early from a business trip. He trusts his wife, so he thinks the guy hiding in the closet is a burglar.”
“Bang bang,” said her father. “It’s a rotten job. I told you that from the time you were a child.”
“Practically from birth,” she agreed. “This is good,” she said to her mother. “It must have been nice to be one of the invited guests for its first appearance.”
“Then answer your damned phone,” said her father. “We tried.”
“Sorry,” she said. “I was busy trying to have a life.”
“Anybody we know?”
“No. He was a cop for a while, then an investigator for the Los Angeles D.A. He’s retired from that and working as a P.I. now.”
“Sounds too old for you.”
“He is.”
“Of course, you’re getting older by the day.”
“Thanks for noticing. I guess the bloom is off the rose.”
“The second bloom is more luxuriant than the first,” he said. “You seem kind of down. It was that case, wasn’t it?”
“You know how it is. Half the people you see are dead. The other half you’re seeing on the very worst day of their whole lives. It makes you tired.”
Her father stood up, kissed her on the forehead, and went out into the living room. In a moment, she heard the television.
She finished her dinner and rinsed the plate and silverware, then put them in the dishwasher with the ones from her parents’ dinner. She talked to her mother for a time about the things that had been going on in her parents’ lives. Then she and her mother both drifted into the living room and watched the meaningless activity on the screen with her father.
Suddenly she caught herself falling asleep. She stood up, kissed them both, and drove the rest of the way up the hill to her house. As she pulled into the garage, she thought she saw something move, just beyond the reach of the lights on the eaves of her house. But she knew that sometimes that happened when a person had not had enough sleep for a few days—the mind supplied the monster that it feared.
43
Judith Nathan filled the small backpack with the quart cans she had bought, and then lifted it. She had not expected it to be this heavy, or this hard and lumpy. She took everything out, wrapped the cans in a towel, put them in the backpack, and slipped another folded towel into the space between the cans and her back. She put the straps on her shoulders to repeat the test, and the pack felt more comfortable.
Judith dressed in her black pants and her running shoes, put on her black sweater and her raincoat. She inspected herself in the mirror, then looked at her watch. It was just after two A.M.
She opened the cylinder of Mary Tilson’s revolver and made sure all the chambers were loaded. She put it into the deep right-hand pocket of the raincoat and examined herself in the mirror once more to be sure it didn’t show. She took six extra bullets from the box and put them into her left pocket. Then she went outside and locked her door.
She had always been able to make herself feel better by going out into the night. When she was about six she had sometimes waited until her mother and the current boyfriend were back from their evening at the bars and had fallen asleep. Then she would slip on some clothes, quietly open the front door, and go out. The first time, she started by just stepping out on the front porch, looking and listening.
The night was not black, as it had always seemed from inside the lighted house. It was made of gray-blues, deep greens, and the white moonlight. She could see the familiar trees, sidewalks, and houses, but all of them were now silent, and everything was motionless. The people had not just gone. In the deep night they did not exist. The world was quiet.
At first she crouched on the porch with her back against the front of the house, far from the railing and near enough to the door so she had a fair chance of getting to safety ahead of whatever might leap out of the shadows to eat her. She stayed there for a long time that night and on several others before she was sure that no such thing would happen, and then stepped forward to the railing.
After that she moved to the porch steps, and it made an enormous difference. The porch roof had kept her in the shadows and hidden her, but it had also hidden the stars and the sky from her, and blocked her from the gentle current of slowly moving air. What she could hear once she was away from the house was a silence that had a range, that came to her from a great distance, from everywhere the dark could reach.
By the end of summer she had moved away from the house to the sidewalk, and on into the world. By the time she was eight she was in the habit of sneaking out every night and walking the streets. First she walked the streets of her neighborhood and looked at the houses she had always seen in daylight. Then she got into the habit of walking to school. The night walk became a tour of all of the places where she had been during the day. It was a chance to revisit scenes where things had happened. At night, the places were only hers.
She would look down at a spot on the concrete steps of the school and remember it was where Marlene Mastich had stood and said Charlene’s hair was dirty. She had stood right there to say it to the other girls, not an inch to either side. But now this spot, this step, this whole school, belonged to Charlene, and all other people were only memories, disturbances left in her brain from an ugly day. People weren’t even real now, only the ground where they had stood. There was only Charlene in the night world. The trees were real, the dark stores with iron grates across their windows were real, and Charlene was real. That was all.
Charlene was Judith Nathan tonight, and it was time to move. She stepped around the building to the row of
