Sound of her footsteps crossing the kitchen again - she was going to the counter where she had set the pie down. He heard the board in the middle of the kitchen floor creak when she passed over it, as it had been doing for years.
What will it do to her? Made me thin. Turned Cary into something like an animal that after it was dead you'd make a pair of shoes out of it. Turned Hopley into a human pizza. What will it do to her?
The board in the middle of the floor creaked again as
she went back across the kitchen - he could see her, the plate held in her right hand, her cigarettes and matches in her left. He could see the wedge of pie. The strawberries, the pool of dark red juice.
He listened for the faint squeak of the hinges on the dining-room door, but it didn't come. That did not really surprise him. She was standing by the counter, looking out into the side yard and eating her pie in quick, economical Heidi-bites. An old habit. He could almost hear the fork scraping the plate.
He realized he was floating away.
Going to sleep? No - impossible. Impossible for anyone to fall asleep during the commission of murder.
But he was. He was listening for the floorboard in the middle of the kitchen floor again - he would hear it when she crossed to the sink. Running water as she rinsed her plate. The sound of her circling through all the rooms, setting thermostats and turning off lights and checking the burglar-alarm lights beside the doors - all the rituals of white folks from town.
He was lying in bed listening for the floorboard, and then he was sitting at his desk in his study in the town of Big Jubilee, Arizona, where he had been practicing law for the last six years. It was as simple as that. He was living there with his daughter, and practicing enough of the sort of law he called 'corporation shit' to keep food on the table, the rest of it was Legal Aid Society stuff. They lived simple lives. The old days - two-car garage, a groundsman three days a week, property taxes of twenty-five thousand dollars a year -were long gone. He didn't miss them, and he didn't believe Lin did either. He practiced what law he did practice in town., or sometimes in Yuma or Phoenix, but that was seldom enough and they lived far enough out of Jube to get a sense of the land around them. Linda would be going to college next year, and then he might move back in -but not, he had told her, unless the emptiness started getting to him, and he didn't think it would.
They had made a good life for themselves, and that was fine, that was just as fine as paint, because making a good life for you and yours was what it was all about.
There was a knock on his study door. He pushed back from his desk and turned around and Linda was standing there and Linda's nose was gone. No; not gone. It was in her right hand instead of on her face. Blood poured from the dark hole over her mouth.
'I don't understand, Daddy,' she said in a nasal, foghorning voice. 'It just fell off.'
He awoke with a start, beating at the air with his arms, trying to beat this vision away. Beside him, Heidi grunted in her sleep, turned over on her left side, and pulled the covers up over her head.
Little by little reality flowed back into him. He was back in Fairview. Bright early-morning sunshine fell through the windows. He looked across the room and saw by the digital clock on the dresser that it was 6:25. There were six red roses in a vase beside the clock.
He got out of bed, crossed the room, pulled his robe off its hook, and went down to the bathroom. He turned on the shower and hung his robe up on the back of the door, noticing that Heidi had gotten a new robe as well as a new blouse and haircut - a pretty blue one.
He stepped on the scales. He had gained another pound. He got into the shower and washed off with a thoroughness that was almost compulsive, soaping every part of his body, rinsing, and then soaping again. I'm going to watch my weight, he promised himself.