Drying off took some time and a couple of grunts, and by the time I was done, I was exhausted. There was great temptation not to get dressed, but I plowed ahead. Then I resisted another temptation to put some dry towels on the floor and stretch out and sleep there.
I got ahold of my borrowed cane, went out to the bedroom, took a gander at my sloppily made bed, and knew at some point I’d have to strip it and put fresh sheets down—but not tonight, maybe tomorrow.
Maybe tomorrow.
The slogan of all recovering patients everywhere, I guessed.
I slipped into bed and switched off the lights and rested.
And rested.
Okay, why aren’t we sleeping?
I thought about the oddest things, bouncing from one to another. Maggie’s murder. Paula and her sweetness and her being by my side. Diane Woods, being shoved aside by the state police, and also considering applying for the deputy chief’s job. My memories of my dear Cissy, bustling in at the oddest time … and that dream. Oh, that dream. Heroin, here, there, and everywhere. The little planned power outage. Dave Hudson and his poor wife, Marge, trying to gain entry to my house for genealogical purposes, and me … well, maybe me being a jerk about it.
Then there was the whole writing business. Unlike for some, to whom it came easily, writing had always been a struggle for me, especially when it came to nonfiction, for—unless you worked for some websites or newspapers of notoriety—you had to write the truth, and keep the facts straight.
I positioned myself in bed, and winced, just as there was a creak or a groan as the new wood continued to settle, still getting used to being part of the landscape.
My old house, still not there yet.
My somewhat old body, still not there yet either.
Let the healing resume, and eventually, sleep did come.
To be disturbed about two hours later.
I woke from a dream I couldn’t remember, but I was hearing rain coming down, rattling on my new roof and my small, second-floor deck, and there was another noise as well, of someone closing the door downstairs.
I called out. “Paula? Is that you?”
No answer.
Had I been dreaming?
I switched on a small bedroom lamp, checked the time: 1:05 A.M.
Maybe I had been dreaming.
Then came the sound of a floorboard creaking.
“Paula, if that’s you, I’d really appreciate you letting me know.”
Still nothing.
I thought of something else, and called out, “Dave Hudson, if that’s you or your wife, Marjorie, you better leave now. Right now. Or I’m calling the Tyler police.”
More rain falling. A gust of wind rattled the door leading out to the deck on this floor.
“Last chance.”
Another creak of a floorboard.
I reached for my phone, thought better of it. One more call to the Tyler cops, finally arriving once more to an empty house? Nothing like helping along the growing story of the nutty magazine writer living alone on Tyler Beach.
Felix?
No. At this hour, he would come, no matter where he was, but I wasn’t going to put him through that. Besides, he was still recovering from a gunshot wound, and he didn’t need to come out here for one more empty reason.
Nope.
I called out one more time. “I don’t know who you are or what you’re up to, but if you come up the stairs, I’ll blow off your goddamn head.”
Then I thought some more and said, “And whatever you do, don’t steal my books. Anything else down there is fair game. But not my books.”
A pause, and I said, “Good night.”
Still no reply, but it didn’t take long for me to get back asleep.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
My unplanned and unanticipated wake-up call came at just past eight A.M., and it was Paula, checking in.
“You sleep okay last night?” she asked.
I wasn’t about to get into my mystery visitor, so I said, “Pretty fair. How about you?”
An intake of breath. “Hardly got a wink. Last night … a bloody mess it was. Two dead, both from the SUV. Neither one was wearing a seat belt, and when their car got hit by the tractor-trailer truck, they were both ejected between roll number two and roll number three.”
“Damn,” I said.
“Oh, yeah, it gets better. So you have the SUV in one tangle of birch trees, and what’s left of the driver and passenger in another. Plus a big-ass tractor-trailer hauling fuel oil on its side, leaking, with the local fire guys freaking out that it was gonna blow.”
“Rough night.”
“Oh, it was long … but you know what? I owned that story. Nobody else did. I even caught some video and sold it to the nice TV folks in Manchester, and today, it’s going to be follow-up city.”
“Which means no sensuous back rub with scented candles later on?”
She didn’t laugh. Maybe she hadn’t heard me or didn’t like what she had heard, but she pressed on. “I’ll drop by if I can,” she said. “Rollie Grandmaison is out sick again. Poor guy’s been editor since I’ve been there and I think he’d rather die in his editor’s chair than a hospital room.”
“Who wouldn’t?”
“Not me,” she said. “I want to die when I’m over a hundred, looking out a window and seeing the Eiffel Tower. But that’s for another day. You take care.”
“You, too.”
I hung up the phone and wondered if I had enough energy to get up and check my drainage tubes and have breakfast.
I fell back asleep while in the middle of contemplating just that.
Breakfast was breakfast and I got the usual tube-drainage task done without spraying blood everywhere or falling on my increasingly flabby ass. At about eleven in the morning, a force of
