They had been married in a simple courthouse ceremony four years ago, the summer after Travis’s thirty-second birthday. He had loved her. Oh God, how he had loved her.

To Einstein, he said, “We didn’t know it then, but she had cancer on our wedding day. Ten months later, she was dead.”

The dog put its head down in his lap again.

For a while, Travis could not continue.

He drank some beer.

He stroked the dog’s head.

In time he said, “After that, I tried to go on as usual. Always prided myself in going on, facing up to anything, keeping my chin up, all that bullshit. Kept the real-estate office running another year. But none of it mattered any more. Sold it two years ago. Cashed in all my investments, too. Turned everything into cash and socked it in the bank. Rented this house. Spent the last two years… well, brooding. And I got squirrelly. Hardly a surprise, huh? Squirrelly as hell. Came full circle, you see, right back to what I believed when I was a kid. That I was a danger to anyone who gets close to me. But you changed me, Einstein. You turned me around in one day. I swear, it’s like you were sent to show me that life’s mysterious, strange, and full of wonders- and that only a fool withdraws from it willingly and lets it pass him by.”

The dog was peering up at him again.

He lifted his beer can, but it was empty.

Einstein went to the fridge and got another Coors.

Taking the can from the dog, Travis said, “Now, after hearing the whole sorry thing, what do you think? You think it’s wise for you to hang around with me? You think it’s safe?”

Einstein woofed.

“Was that a yes?”

Einstein rolled onto his back and put all four legs in the air, baring his belly as he had done earlier when he had permitted Travis to collar him.

Putting his beer aside, Travis got off his chair, settled on the floor, and stroked the dog’s belly. “All right,” he said. “All right. But don’t die on me, damn you. Don’t you dare die on me.”

6

Nora Devon’s telephone rang again at eleven o’clock.

It was Streck. “Are you in bed now, prettiness?”

She did not reply.

“Do you wish I was there with you?”

Since the previous call, she had thought about how to handle him and had come up with several threats she hoped might work. She said, “If you don’t leave me alone, I’ll go to the police.”

“Nora, do you sleep in the nude?”

She was sitting in bed. She sat up straighter, tense, rigid. “I’ll go to the police and say you tried to… to force yourself on me. I will, I swear! will.”

“I’d like to see you in the nude,” he said, ignoring her threat. “I’ll lie. I’ll say you r-raped me.”

“Wouldn’t you like me to put my hands on your breasts, Nora?”

Dull cramps in her stomach forced her to bend forward in bed. “I’ll have the telephone company put a tap on my line, record all the calls I get, so I’ll have proof.”

“Kiss you all over, Nora. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

The cramps were getting worse. She was shaking uncontrollably, too. Her voice cracked repeatedly as she employed her final threat: “I have a gun. I have a gun.”

“Tonight you’ll dream about me, Nora. I’m sure you will. You’ll dream about me kissing you everywhere, all over your pretty body-”

She slammed the phone down.

Rolling onto her side on the bed, she hunched her shoulders and drew up her knees and hugged herself. The cramps had no physical cause. They were strictly an emotional reaction, generated by fear and shame and rage and enormous frustration.

Gradually, the pain passed. Fear subsided, leaving only rage.

She was so wrenchingly innocent of the world and its ways, so unaccustomed to dealing with people, that she couldn’t function unless she restricted herself to the house, to a private world without human contact. She knew nothing about social interaction. She had not even been capable of holding a polite conversation with Garrison Dilworth, Aunt Violet’s attorney-Nora’s attorney now-during their meetings to settle the estate. She had answered his questions as succinctly as possible and had sat in his presence with her eyes downcast and her cold hands fidgeting in her lap, crushingly shy. Afraid of her own lawyer! If she couldn’t deal with a kind man like Garrison Dilworth, how could she ever handle a beast like Art Streck? In the future, she wouldn’t dare have a repairman in her home, no matter what broke down; she would just have to live in ever-worsening decay and ruin because the next man might be another Streck-or worse. In the tradition established by her aunt, Nora already had groceries delivered from a neighborhood market, so she did not have to go out to shop, but now she would be afraid to let the delivery boy into the house; he had never been the least aggressive, suggestive, or in any way insulting, but one day he might see the vulnerability that Streck had Seen.

She hated Aunt Violet.

On the other hand, Violet had been right: Nora was a mouse. Like all mice, her destiny was to run, to hide, and to cower in the dark.

Her fury abated just as her cramps had done.

Loneliness took the place of anger, and she wept quietly.

Later, sitting with her back against the headboard, blotting her reddened eyes with Kleenex and blowing her nose, she bravely vowed not to become a recluse. Somehow she would find the strength and courage to venture out Into the world more than she’d done before. She would meet people. She would get to know the neighbors that Violet had more or less shunned. She would make friends. By God, she would. And she wouldn’t let Streck intimidate her. She would learn how to handle other problems that came along as well, and in time she would be a different woman from the one she was now. A promise to herself. A sacred vow.

She considered unplugging the telephone, thus foiling Streck, but she was afraid she might need it. What if she woke, heard someone in the house, and was unable to plug in the phone fast enough?

Before turning out the lights and pulling up the covers, she closed the lockless bedroom door and braced it shut with the armchair, which she tilted under the knob. In bed, in the dark, she felt for the butcher’s knife, which she’d placed on the nightstand, and she was reassured when she put her hand directly upon it without fumbling.

Nora lay on her back, eyes open, wide awake. Pale amber light from the streetlamps found its way through the shuttered windows. The ceiling was banded with alternating strips of black and faded gold, as if a tiger of infinite length were leaping over the bed in a jump that would never end. She wondered if she would ever sleep easily again.

She also wondered if she would find anyone who could care about her- and for her-out there in the bigger world that she had vowed to enter. Was there no one who could love a mouse and treat it gently?

Far away, a train whistle played a one-note dirge in the night. It was a hollow, cold, and mournful sound.