guiltily, as if he was also aware of oversleeping. Anderson supposed he was - dogs seemed to have an acutely developed sense of time.
'We slept late, fella,' she said.
Peter got up and stretched first one hind leg and then the other. He looked around, almost comically perplexed, and then went to the door. Anderson opened it. Peter stood there for a moment, not liking the rain. Then he went out to do his business.
Anderson stood in the living room a moment longer, still marveling over her certainty that Peter had been dead. Just what in hell was wrong with her lately? Everything was doom and gloom. Then she headed for the kitchen to fix a meal ... whatever you called breakfast at three in the afternoon.
On the way she diverted into the bathroom to do her own business. Then she paused in front of her reflection in the toothpaste-spotted mirror. A woman pushing forty. Graying hair, otherwise not too bad - she didn't drink much, didn't smoke much, spent most of her time outside when she wasn't writing. Irish black hair - no romance-novel blaze of red for her - rather too long. Gray-blue eyes. Abruptly, she bared her teeth, expecting for just a moment to see only smooth pink gums.
But her teeth were there - all of them. Thank the fluoridated water in Utica, New York, for that. She touched them, let her fingers prove their bony reality to her brain.
But something wasn't right.
Wetness.
There was wetness on her upper thighs.
Oh no, oh shit, this is almost a week early, I just put clean sheets on the bed yesterday
But after she had showered, put a pad in a fresh pair of cotton panties and pulled the whole works snug, she checked the sheets and saw them unmarked. Her period was early, but it had at least had the consideration to wait until she was almost awake. And there was no cause for alarm; she was fairly regular, but she had been both early and late from time to time; maybe diet, maybe subconscious stress, maybe some internal clock slipping a cog or two. She had no urge to grow old fast, but she often thought that having the whole inconvenient business of menstruation behind her would be a relief.
The last of her nightmare slipped away. and Bobbi Anderson went in to fix herself a very late breakfast.
BOOK 1. THE SHIP IN THE EARTH Chapter 2. Anderson Digs
1
It rained steadily for the next three days. Anderson wandered restlessly around the house, made a trip with Peter into Augusta in the pickup for supplies she didn't really need, drank beer, and listened to old Beach Boys tunes while she made repairs around the house. Trouble was, there weren't really that many repairs that needed to be done. By the third day she was circling the typewriter, thinking maybe she would start the new book. She knew what it was supposed to be about: a young schoolmarm and a buffalo-hunter caught up in a range-war in Kansas during the early 1850s - a period when everyone in the midsection of the country seemed to be tuning up for the Civil War, whether they knew it or not. It would be a good book, she thought, but she didn't think it was quite 'ready' yet, whatever that meant (a sardonic mimic awoke in her mind, doing an Orson Welles voice: We will write no oater before its time). Still, her restlessness dug at her, and the signs were all there: an impatience with books, with the music, with herself. A tendency to drift off ... and then she would be looking at the typewriter, wanting to wake it into some dream.
Peter also seemed restless, scratching at the door to go out and then scratching at it to come back in five minutes later, wandering around the place, lying down, then getting up again.
Low barometer, Anderson thought. That's all it is. Makes us both restless, cranky.
And her damned period. Usually she flowed heavy and then just stopped. Like turning off a faucet. This time she just went on leaking. Bad washer, ha-ha, she thought with no humor at all. She found herself sitting in front of the typewriter just after dark on the second rainy day, a blank sheet rolled into the carriage. She started to type and what came out was a bunch of X's and O's, like a kid's tic-tac-toe game, and then something that looked like a mathematical equation ... which was