It was night and well past the dinner hour when Karen pulled onto the long dirt and gravel driveway that led to her house, stopping at the beaten old mailbox by the side of the road. She lived in a rural part of the county, adjacent to conservation land and walking paths through dark woods, where modestly expensive homes were pushed back away from any roadway and many sported views of distant hills. In the fall this landscape was spectacular as the leaves changed, but that time had swept past, and now it was trapped in cold, muddy, and barren winter.
The lights were ablaze inside her home, but this wasn’t because there was someone to meet her; she’d had a timing system installed because she lived alone, and she didn’t like coming home to a dark house on sad nights like this one. It wasn’t the same as being greeted by a family, but it made the return home slightly more welcoming. She had a pair of cats-Martin and Lewis-who would be waiting for her with feline enthusiasm, which, she was sad to admit, wasn’t really very much. She was torn about her pets. She would have preferred a dog, some bounding, tail-wagging golden retriever who made up for lack of brains with unabashed eagerness, but because she worked such long hours away from her house, she hadn’t felt it fair to a dog, especially a breed that suffered without human companionship. The cats, with their lofty self-determination and haughty approach to life, were better suited for the isolation of Karen’s daily grind.
That she lived alone, away from city lights and energy, was something she had simply fallen into over the years. She had been married once. It hadn’t worked. She had a lover once. It hadn’t worked. She’d engaged in a relationship with another woman once. It hadn’t worked. She had given up on one-night-meet-you-in-the-bar stands and Internet service dating sites that promised real compatibility once you filled out the questionnaire and suggested that love was waiting right around the corner. None of these had worked, either. She had discovered that solitude didn’t bother her in the least. It gave her confidence.
What she had was her job and a hobby that she kept hidden from her physician coworkers: She was a dedicated if completely amateur stand-up comic. Once a month she would drive to any of the dozen or so comedy clubs throughout the state that had “open-mike” nights and would try out various routines. What she loved about performing comedy was its unpredictability. It was impossible to gauge whether any given audience would be howling with laughs, guffawing with hilarity, or sitting stony-faced, lips curling up, before the inevitable catcalls started to ring out and she would be forced to make a rapid retreat from the unrelenting spotlight. Karen loved making people laugh, and she even oddly appreciated the embarrassment of being hooted off the stage. Both reminded her of the frailties and eccentricity of life.
She kept a small Apple laptop with only a few applications on it to write her comedy routines and try out new jokes. Her regular computer was jammed with patient records, medical data, and the ordinary electronic life of a busy professional. The smaller one she kept locked away in the same way that she concealed her hobby from coworkers and her few friends and distant relatives. Comedy, like smoking, she told herself, was an addiction best kept secret.
Her mailbox door had been left slightly ajar-a habit the delivery person had that often resulted in her mail being soaked by the elements. She got out of her car, jogged around to the mailbox, and grabbed everything inside without looking at any of it. It had started to spit freezing rain, and a few drops hit her neck and chilled her. Then she hustled back behind the wheel and launched herself up the driveway, tires spinning against loose gravel and some ice that had already formed.
She found herself fixating on the old man who had died that day. This wasn’t uncommon for her, when she signed off on a death. It was as if some sort of vacuum had been created within her, and she felt a need to fill it with some bits of information. Bagpipes. Iowa. She had no idea how that connection was made. She began to speculate, trying to invent a story that would satisfy her curiosity. He first heard the pipes when he was a small child, after a new neighbor arrived from Glasgow or Edinburgh into the weather-beaten house next door. The neighbor would often drink a little too much, and he’d become melancholy and long for his native land. When this loneliness came over him, the neighbor would bring down his instrument from a shelf in the closet and decide to pipe in the evening dark, just as the sun would set over the flat Iowa horizon, all because he missed the rolling green hills of his home. Mister Wilson-only he wasn’t yet Mister Wilson-would be in his bedroom, and the rich, unusual music would float through his open window: “Scotland the Brave” or “Blue Bonnet.” That was where the fascination came from. Karen thought that as good a story possibility as any.
She wondered: Is there a routine in this? Her mind churned up So, I watched an old man who loved the bagpipes die… and could she make it seem like it was the unusual notes from the instrument that killed him and not old age?
The car crunched to a halt by the front door. She grabbed her briefcase, coat, and the pile of mail, and arms filled, she hustled through the gloomy darkness and damp chill toward her home.
The two cats sort of stirred to greet her as she came through the front door, but it seemed more an idle curiosity combined with dinner expectations that had forced them from slumber. She headed into the kitchen, intending to pour them a new bowl of dry food, fix herself a glass of white wine, and consider what leftover in the refrigerator wasn’t too close to homicidal spoilage to reheat for dinner. Food did not interest her much, which helped keep her build wiry even as she crept in age into her fifties. She dropped the coat on a bench and shoved her briefcase beside it. Then she went straight for the trash bin to sort through the mail. The letter without any identifying characteristics other than the New York City postmark was stuck between a telephone bill from Verizon, another from the local electric company, two promotional letters for credit cards she didn’t need or want, and several solicitation letters from the Democratic National Committee, Doctors Without Borders, and Greenpeace.
Karen set the bills on a counter, tossed all the others into a bin for paper recycling, and tore open the anonymous letter.
The message made her hands twitch, and she gasped out loud.
When she became Red Two, Sarah Locksley was naked.
She had stripped off first her pants and then her sweater, dropping them to the floor beside her. She was slightly drunk and slightly stoned from her usual afternoon combination of vodka and barbiturates when the postman pushed her daily mail delivery through the slot in her front door. She heard the sound of envelopes slapping against the hardwood floor of the vestibule. She knew most would be marked Overdue or Final Notice. These were the daily deluge of bills and demands that she had no intention of paying the slightest attention to. She stood up and caught a glimpse of herself in the reflection of the television screen and thought it made no sense to go halfway, so she tugged off her bra and stepped out of her underwear and tossed it all onto a nearby couch with a flourish. She pirouetted right and left in front of the screen, thinking how little of her seemed to be left. She felt scrawny, emaciated, too thin by a half, and not from obsessive exercise or marathon race training. She knew that she had been sexy once, but now her slenderness was caused solely by despair.