and almost twenty-seven miles away. Actually, it would have been better if he hadn’t gone as far as he did, because there are always hikers and bird-watchers in the Grider Preserve. The woods around here are much less travelled.”
She smiled.
“And that’s where your car is now, Paul—somewhere between Route 9 and the Grider Wildlife Preserve, somewhere in the woods. It’s far enough in so you can’t see it from the road. I’ve got a spotlight on the side of Old Bessie, and it’s plenty powerful, but the wash is empty all the way into the woods. I guess I’ll go in on foot and check when the water goes down a little, but I’m almost positive it’s safe. Some hunter will find it in two years or five years or seven years, all rusty and with chipmunks nesting in the seats, and by then you will have finished my book and will be back in New York or Los Angeles or wherever it is you decide to go, and I’ll be living my quiet life out here. Maybe we will correspond sometimes.”
She smiled mistily—the smile of a woman who sees a lovely castle in the sky—and then the smile disappeared and she was all business again.
“So I came back here and on the way I did some hard thinking. I had to, because your car being gone meant that you could really stay, you could really finish my book. I wasn’t always sure you’d be able to, you know, although I never said because I didn’t want to upset you. Partly I didn’t want to upset you because I knew you wouldn’t write as well if I did, but that sounds ever so much colder than I really felt, my dear. You see, I began by loving only the part of you that makes such wonderful stories, because that’s the only part I had—the rest of you I didn’t know anything about, and I thought that part might really be quite unpleasant. I’m not a dummy, you know. I’ve read about some so-called ‘famous authors,’ and I know that often they are quite unpleasant. Why, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway and that redneck fellow from Mississippi—Faulkner or whatever it was—those fellows may have won National Pulitzer Book Awards and things, but they were nothing but cockadoodie drunken bums just the same. Other ones, too—when they weren’t writing wonderful stories they were drinking and whoring and shooting dope and heaven knows what else.
“But you’re not like that, and after awhile I came to know the rest of Paul Sheldon, and I hope you don’t mind me saying it, but I have come to love the rest of him, too.”
“Thank you, Annie,” he said from atop his golden glistening wave, and he thought: But you may have read me wrong, you know—I mean, the situations that lead men into temptation have been severely curtailed up here. It’s sort of hard to go bar-hopping when you’ve got a couple of broken legs, Annie. As for shooting dope, I’ve got the Bourka Bee-Goddess to do that for me.
“But would you want to stay?” she resumed. “That was the question I had to ask myself, and as much as I may have wanted to pull the wool over my eyes, I knew the answer to that—I knew even before I saw the marks on the door over there.”
She pointed and Paul thought: I’ll bet she did know almost from the very first. Wool-pulling? Not you, Annie. Never you. But I was doing enough of that for both of us.
“Do you remember the first time I went away? After we had that silly fight over the paper?”
“Yes, Annie.”
“That was when you went out the first time, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.” There was no point in denying it.
“Of course. You wanted your pills. I should have known you’d do anything to get your pills, but when I get mad, I get ... you know.” She giggled a little nervously. Paul did not join her, or even smile. The memory of that pain-wracked, endless interlude with the phantom voice of the sportscaster doing the play-by-play was still too strong.
Yes, I know how you get, he thought. You get oogy.
“At first I wasn’t completely sure. Oh, I saw that some of the figures on the little table in the parlor had been moved around, but I thought I might have done that myself—I have times when I’m really quite forgetful. It crossed my mind that you’d been out of your