Shakespeares Trollop Page 0,68

was not flexible. She'd be the only problem, I figured as I quickly ran down my Thursday list in my head. "What kind of pay are we talking about?" Before I put myself out, it was best to know.

Calla was ready for the question. The figure was enough to compensate me for the amount of trouble I'd have to go to. And I needed the money. But I had one last question.

"The Winthrops are okay with this?" I asked, my voice carefully neutral. I hadn't set foot in the Winthrop house for five months, maybe longer.

"You working there? Honey, it was Beanie who suggested it."

I'd been the means of sending Beanie's father-in-law to jail, and she'd taken it harder than her husband, Howell Winthrop's only son. Now, it seemed, Beanie was going to sweep the whole incident under her mental rug.

For a dazzling moment, I visualized Beanie hiring me again, her friends picking me back up, the much easier financial state I'd enjoyed when she'd been my best client.

I hated needing anything that much, anything I had to depend on another person to supply.

Ruthlessly, I clamped the cord of that happiness off and told Calla that I'd call her back when I'd seen if I could arrange my Thursday schedule.

I'd be needed from around eight o'clock (receive the food, arrange the trays, wash the breakfast dishes, maybe set up the table in the Winthrop dining room) to at least three in the afternoon, I estimated. Service at eleven, out to the cemetery, back to town... the mourners should arrive at the Winthrop house around twelve-fifteen. They'd finish eating about - oh, one-thirty. Then I'd have dishes to do, sweeping and vacuuming...

When Helen Drinkwater found that by releasing me from Thursday morning, she'd be obliging the Winthrops, she agreed to my doing her house on Wednesday morning instead of Thursday. "Just this once," she reminded me sharply. The travel agent I usually got to late on Thursday I should be able to do with no change, and the widower for whom I did the deep work - kitchen and bathroom, dusting and vacuuming - said Wednesday would be fine with him, maybe even better than Thursday.

I called Calla back and told her I accepted.

The prospect of money coming in made me feel so much more optimistic that I didn't think again about my problem with Jump Farraclough. When Jack called, just as I was getting ready for bed, I was able to sound positive, and he picked up some of that glow from me. He told me he was looking into getting a smaller apartment, maybe just a room in someone's house, in Little Rock, giving up his two-bedroom apartment. "If you're still sure," he said carefully.

"Yes." I thought that might not be enough, so I tried again. "It's what I really want," I told him.

As I was falling asleep that night I had the odd thought that Joe C had already given me more happy moments in his death than he had ever given me in his life.

As if in punishment for that pleasure, that night I dreamed.

I didn't have my usual bad dreams, which are about the knife drawing designs in my flesh, about the sound of men grunting like pigs.

I dreamed about Deedra Dean.

In my dream, I was next door, in the apartment building. It was dark. I was standing in the hall downstairs, looking up. There was a glow on the landing, and I knew somehow that it came from the open door of Deedra's apartment.

I didn't want to go up those stairs, but I knew I must. In my dream, I was light on my feet, moving soundlessly and without effort. I was up those stairs almost before I knew I was moving. There was no one in the building except whatever lay before me.

I was standing in the doorway of Deedra's apartment, looking in. She was sitting on the couch, and she was lit up with blue light from the flickering television screen. She was dressed, she was intact, she could move and talk. But she was not alive.

She made sure I was meeting her eyes. Then she held out the remote control, the one I'd seen her hold many, many times, a big one that operated both television and VCR. While I looked at her fingers on the remote control, she pressed the play button. I turned my head to the screen, but from where I stood I could only see an indistinct moving