picture. I’ll say I hadn’t seen you. Then one of them will ask me, ‘This was last winter, Miss Wilkes, how could you be so positive?’ And I’ll say, ‘If Elvis Presley was still alive and you saw him last winter, would you remember seeing him?’ And he’ll say yes, probably so, but what does that have to do with the price-of coffee in Borneo, and I’ll say Paul Sheldon is my favorite writer and I’ve seen his picture lots of times. I have to say that, Paul. Do you know why?”
He knew. Her slyness continued to astound him. He supposed it shouldn’t, not anymore, but it did. He remembered the caption below the picture of Annie in her detainment cell, the picture taken in the caesura between the end of the trial and the return of the jury. He remembered it word for word. IN MISERY? NOT THE DRAGON LADY Annie reads calmly as she waits for the verdict.
“So then,” she continued, “I’ll say the policeman wrote it all down in his book and thanked me. I’ll say I asked him in for a cup of coffee even though I was in a hurry to be on my way and they’ll ask me why. I’ll say he probably knew about my trouble before, and I wanted to satisfy his mind that everything was on the up-and-up here. But he said no, he had to move along. So I asked if he’d like to take a cold Pepsi along with him because the day was so hot and he said yes, thanks, that was very kind.”
She drained her second Pepsi and held the empty plastic bottle between her and him. Seen through the plastic her eye was huge and wavering, the eye of a Cyclops. The side of her head took on a ripply, hydrocephalic bulge.
“I’m going to stop and put this bottle in the ditch about two miles up the road, she said. But first I’ll put his fingers on it, of course.”
She smiled at him—a dry, spitless smile.
“Fingerprints,” she said. “They’ll know he went past my house then. Or they’ll think they do, and that’s just as good, isn’t it, Paul?”
His dismay deepened.
“So they’ll go up the road and they won’t find him. He’ll just be gone. Like those swamis who toot their flutes until ropes come out of baskets and they climb the ropes and disappear. Poof!”
“Poof,” Paul said.
“It won’t take them long to come back. I know that. After all, if they can’t find any trace of him except that one bottle after here, they’ll decide they better think some more about me. After all, I’m crazy, aren’t I? All the papers said so. Nutty as a fruitcake!
“But they’ll believe me at first. I don’t think they’ll actually want to come in and search the house—not at first. They’ll look in other places and try to think of other things before they come back. We’ll have some time. Maybe as much as a week.”
She looked at him levelly.
“You’re going to have to write faster, Paul,” she said.
19
Dark fell and no police came. Annie did not spend the time before it did with Paul, however; she wanted to re-glaze his bedroom window, and pick up the paper-clips and broken glass scattered on the lawn. When the police come tomorrow looking for their missing lamb, she said, we don’t want them to see anything out of the ordinary, do we, Paul?
Just let them look under the lawnmower, kiddo. Just let them look under there and they’ll see plenty out of the ordinary.
But no matter how hard he tried to make his vivid imagination work, he could not make it come up with a scenario which would lead up to that.
“Do you wonder why I told you all of this, Paul?” she asked before going upstairs to see what she could do with the window. “Why I went into my plans for dealing with this in such great detail?”
“No,” he said wanly.
“Partly because I wanted you to know exactly what the stakes are, and exactly what you’ll have to do to stay alive. I also wanted you to know that I’d end it right now. Except for the book. I still care about the book.” She smiled. It was a smile which was both radiant and strangely wistful. “It really is the best Misery story of them all, and I do so much want to know how it all comes out.”