In all, she used thirty rounds, twenty-eight of them at the paper plates, nineteen of them hitting the plates, the last ten in a row all hitting home. The sun was going down behind the mountains across the lake when she took the plates and thumbtacks down from the wall and carried them with the rifle and the ammunition carton back into the house. She locked the door behind herself, leaned the rifle against the wall near the fireplace, started a fire, and went out to the kitchen to make dinner. She turned on the kitchen radio and sang with the music.
When the phone rang, shortly after two in the morning, she was just getting into bed. There were two extensions, one in the living room and one here, on the nightstand on her side of the bed. She picked it up after one ring, and said, “Hello?”
Parker’s voice: “It’s me. How are things?”
“Fine.” She used her free hand to lean a pillow-up against the headboard, then rested her back against it. She was wearing a yellow nightgown he’d never seen; when they were together, she slept nude. She said, “How are you?”
“No visitors?”
“Nobody at all,” she said. Out in the living room, the dying fire made a dry settling sound. “Will you be back soon?”
“My friend died of a lingering illness,” he said. His voice was as flat and emotionless as ever. “Very painful illness.”
It took her a second to understand his meaning, and when she did she didn’t like it. “Oh,” she said. She knew what he was going to say next, and was already rejecting it.
She was right. He said, “You ought to take a day or two off. Go to New York, do some shopping.”
The mulish feeling came over her again; she could feel it even in the set of her jaw. “I don’t want to leave my house,” she said.
“This is serious!” His voice wasn’t more emotional, exactly, merely more intense, pushing each word harder into her ear.
“So am I,” she said. And then, casting around to find something reassuring to say to him, heard herself add, “Tomorrow I’ll buy a dog.” Which she’d had no intention of doing, till now. But a dog might be nice, a companion during the times when Parker was away.
He was saying, “I’m talking about tonight.”
“I’ll be all right. I went out and got a rifle.”
She hadn’t intended to tell him that, not until afterward, when he was here again and this situation was finished. It sounded foolish, really, to say she’d bought a rifle; she wouldn’t tell him about the time this afternoon spent shooting at paper plates out by the lake.
There was a little silence from his end of the wire now, and she read it to mean that the rifle hadn’t reassured him any more than the dog had, and that he was trying to find some way to change her mind. But in the end all he did was repeat himself: “I think you ought to go away.”
She didn’t want him to say that any more. “I know what you think,” she said, more sharply than she’d intended, and tried at once to soften it, saying, “I know you’re worried about me. But you just don’t know what this house means to me. I can V go away from it, not after I just got into it. I won’t be driven away from it.”
She felt she had told him a great deal about herself then, much more than was usual to her nature. She felt almost frightened, wondering what he would do with what she’d said, and the silence from the phone extended this time, and he did nothing with it, and finally she said, hesitantly, “Hello? Are you there?”
“I’m here.” He said it distractedly, and then there was silence again, and when next he spoke, his voice was matter of fact, seamless again, without the increase in pressure. “What you do right now,” he said, “you pack everything there that’s mine and get it out. Stow it all in one of the empty houses around there. But do it now, don’t wait till morning.”
“You don’t have that much here,” she said. Looking around the dimlit bedroom, all she saw of his was one pair of shoes on the floor near the closet.
“So it won’t take long,” he said. “If anybody comes looking for me, you don’t fight them. Understand me? You don’t fight them.”
She felt herself getting mulish again, thinking of the practice time with the rifle, but she fought the mulish feeling down and said, “What do I do instead?”
“Tell them you just run a message service, you only see me two or three times a year, when I give you some money for taking care of my messages. What you tell them, any time a message comes for me you call the Wilmington Hotel in New York and leave it for me in the name of Edward Latham. You got that?”
“Yes. But what—”
“Give me the names back.”
She hadn’t been paying particular attention to the names, not knowing they meant anything. She said, “Is it important?”
“Yes. Those are the names to use.”
“Wilmington Hotel,” she said, trying to remember. “Edward— I’m sorry.”
“Latham. Edward Latham.”
“Edward Latham. Is that all?”
“Don’t antagonize them. They’re very mean people.”
The very flatness of the statement made her believe him. “I know how to be a little mouse,” she said, remembering times when she’d fought male strength with female cunning, feeling strong in the memories.
“That’s good,” he said. “I’ll get back there as soon as I can.”
It was rare that he let her feel tender toward him. “I know you will,” she said.
“Clean my stuff out of there right away.”
“I will.”
She heard the click as he hung up, but held the phone to her ear a second or so longer, then reluctantly put it back in its cradle.
Get his things out of here. It was after two in the morning, she was ready for bed, the temptation was strong to let it go until morning. But she believed him about the people he was involved with, and she believed he knew best how to prepare for them. Reluctant, but dogged, she got out of bed again, turned on the overhead light, and got his suitcase from the closet.
One suitcase was all it took; that, and fifteen minutes. Then she dressed, putting clothes on over the nightgown, and lugged the suitcase through the kitchen and out of the house.
It was very dark out, patches of cloud in the sky, no moon. She stood on the gravel a minute, then put the suitcase down, went back into the house, and got the flashlight from its kitchen drawer.
Stow his things in an empty house, he’d said. The houses were empty on both sides, why not pick one of them? She shone the flashlight right and left, and chose the house to her left because there seemed to be fewer trees and bushes in the way.
She left the suitcase outside the lake-side door, and went around the house trying doors and windows, all of which were locked. Finally she broke a window on the side opposite her own house, unlocked it, raised it, and climbed in. The electricity was turned off, so she found her way through to the rear door by flashlight, unlocked it, opened it, and brought the suitcase inside. The bedroom closet seemed a perfectly adequate place to leave it. She went out by the door, leaving it unlocked, and went back across to her own place and inside, carefully locking the door behind her.
In bed again, in the darkness, the rifle on the floor under the bed, she lay gazing at the paler rectangle of the window and thought about Parker, and began to think sexually about Parker. She was lying on her back, but the sexual images involving Parker grew so insistent she rolled over on her side, trying to find a position without sexual connotations.
It was strange, this feeling. When she was involved with a man, and he was with her, she had very strong and healthy sex urges, but when she was alone she never thought very much about sex at all. She had always been glad to welcome Parker back after one of his jobs, because his own sexual appetites were always at their strongest then, but the time spent waiting was usually empty of sexual frustration. Yet tonight her mind was crowded with remembered incidents, moments, expressions, and she couldn’t get rid of them, couldn’t get to sleep.