to my obligations, and fed her; she did her very best running when she heard me call her for food.
Then I had the pleasure of opening my package. It was heavy, and I wondered how Martin had managed to cope with it on the flight home. I slid off the ribbon and put it aside, and tore off the paper. The box was a plain brown one of thick cardboard, not one of the thin ones that clothes come in.
Not jewelry, not clothes ... hmmmm.
Books. Seven books by some of my favorite mystery writers. Bookmarks from a Chicago bookstore protruded from each one, and I opened the top book, a Sharyn McCrumb, at the marked page.
Each one was signed. Not only signed, but personalized.
I examined each book happily, looking forward to hours of reading, and tried to think of a special place to keep my gift.
While I was still smiling, the phone rang.
There was silence on the other end of the line after I answered. It wasn’t empty silence, like when the other person has realized he didn’t mean to call your number after all and has hung up—this was heavy silence, breathing silence. My smile slid off my face and I could feel my scalp crawl.
“Hello?” I said again, hoping against hope someone would speak.
Someone did.
“Are you alone?” asked a man’s voice. And the phone went dead.
I tried to slow my breathing, reminded myself that everyone gets prank or obscene calls from time to time (such is humankind’s determination to communicate, on whatever low plane) and I should not particularly be upset by this. But I felt so alone today; Martin wasn’t here, and the garage apartment was empty, too.
The phone rang again, and I jumped. I stared at it, wondering whether to answer it or not. As it kept ringing, I crossed the hall to the study and waited for the answering machine to come on. Martin had recorded the message, and hearing his voice made me feel better. When the recording ended and the signal beep came, the voice leaving the message was also reassuring.
“Sally!” I stopped the recording and picked up the phone. “What are you up to?”
“I wondered if you were free to take a little ride with me,” Sally said. “I didn’t know if that husband of yours was in town or not.”
“He’s in town, but not at home right now, so I’m footloose,” I said, relieved at having a reason to leave the house without calling it retreating in fear. “Where are you going to go?”
“I’m going to drive to that airport where Jack Burns was taking flying lessons, the one where he rented the plane before he took his final flying lesson, so to speak. I need an extra person—I have a plan—and since I haven’t gotten to talk to you in a coon’s age, I thought I’d combine the two goals.”
Put like that, how could I resist?
“Want me to drive in and meet you at the newspaper office?”
“That’s where I am now. That’d be great.”
“Okay. Give me a few minutes, I’ll be on my way.”
I called the hospital to ask Angel if she needed anything urgently, and she told me that Shelby was much better, but still didn’t remember anything about the attack. She sounded a lot better herself. She’d run home the night before to change clothes, and she told me she might come home to take a nap in the afternoon if he continued to improve.
Then I called Martin. If he was at the plant, he wasn’t answering his phone. I left a message at the Athletic Club with the intimidatingly streamlined girl who answered the phone, kept the sun-bed appointment schedule, and presided over the check-in book. She sounded quite pleased to have a reason to approach Martin.
I ran upstairs, looked myself over in the mirror, and decided that almost anything was good enough to run an errand with Sally. I brushed my hair quickly, securing it at the nape of my neck with a green band to match my T-shirt, and cleaned my Saturday glasses, huge ones with white-and-purple mottled frames.
Sally made a choking sound when she saw them. “God Almighty, Roe, where’d you get those? You look like a clown.” She was shoveling papers and fast-food bags out of the passenger’s seat of her car.
Talk about the honesty of friends.
“They’re my Saturday glasses,” I said with dignity, locking my car and walking over to Sally’s even older and more beat-up Toyota. The parking lot which served