“I could have made better pictures! He came in while I was looking and he got mad. He said I was snooping. I said I didn't call looking at things in my own house snooping. I said if he was an artist, I was Madame Curie. He started to laugh. He laughed at me. So I… I… “

“You killed him,” Paul said. His voice sounded dim and ancient.

She smiled uneasily at the wall. “Well, I guess it was something like that. I don't remember very well. Just when he was dead. I remember that. I remember giving him a bath.” He stared at her and felt a sick, soupy horror. The image came to him - Pomeroy's naked body floating in the downstairs tub like a piece of raw dough, head reclining aslant against the porcelain, open eyes staring up at the ceiling…

“I had to,” she said, lips drawing back a bit from her teeth. “You probably don't know what the police can do with just one piece of thread, or dirt under someone's fingernails or even dust in a corpse's hair! You don't know but I worked in hospitals all my life and I do know! I do know! I know about for-EN-sics!” She was working herself into one of her patented Annie Wilkes frenzies and he knew he should try and say something which would at least temporarily defuse her, but his mouth seemed numb and useless.

“They're out to get me, all of them! Do you think they would have listened if I tried to tell them how it was? Do you? Do you? Oh no! They'd probably say something crazy like I made a pass at him and he laughed at me and so I killed him! They'd probably say something like that!” And you know what, Annie? You know what? I think that just might be a little closer to the truth.

“The dirty birdies around here would say anything to get me in trouble or smear my name.” She paused, not quite panting but breathing hard, looking at him hard, as if inviting him to just dare and tell her different. Just you dare!

Then she seemed to get herself under some kind of control and she went on in a calmer voice.

“I washed… well… what was left of him… and his clothes. I knew what to do. It was snowing outside, the first real snow of the year, and they said we'd have a foot by the next morning. I put his clothes in a plastic bag and wrapped the body in sheets and took everything out to that dry wash on Route 9 after dark. I walked about a mile farther down from where your car ended up. I walked until I was in the woods and just dumped everything. You probably think I hid him, but I didn't. I knew the snow would cover him up, and I thought the spring melt would carry him away if I left him in the stream-bed. And that was what happened, except I had no idea he would go so far. Why, they found his body a whole year after… after he died, and almost twenty-seven miles away. Actually, it would have been better if he hadn't gone as far as he did, because there are always hikers and bird-watchers in the Grider Preserve. The woods around here are much less travelled.” She smiled.

“And that's where your car is now, Paul - somewhere between Route 9 and the Grider Wildlife Preserve, somewhere in the woods. It's far enough in so you can't see it from the road. I've got a spotlight on the side of Old Bessie, and it's plenty powerful, but the wash is empty all the way into the woods. I guess I'll go in on foot and check when the water goes down a little, but I'm almost positive it's safe. Some hunter will find it in two years or five years or seven years, all rusty and with chipmunks nesting in the seats, and by then you will have finished my book and will be back in New York or Los Angeles or wherever it is you decide to go, and I'll be living my quiet life out here. Maybe we will correspond sometimes.” She smiled mistily - the smile of a woman who sees a lovely castle in the sky - and then the smile disappeared and she was all business again.

“So I came back here and on the way I did some hard thinking. I had to, because your car being gone meant that you could really stay, you could really finish my book. I wasn't always sure you'd be able to, you know, although I never said because I didn't want to upset you. Partly I didn't want to upset you because I knew you wouldn't write as well if I did, but that sounds ever so much colder than I really felt, my dear. You see, I began by loving only the part of you that makes such wonderful stories, because that's the only part I had - the rest of you I didn't know anything about, and I thought that part might really be quite unpleasant. I'm not a dummy, you know. I've read about some so-called “famous authors”, and I know that often they are quite unpleasant. Why, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway and that redneck fellow from Mississippi - Faulkner or whatever it was - those fellows may have won National Pulitzer Book Awards and things, but they were nothing but cockadoodie drunken burns just the same. Other ones, too - when they weren't writing wonderful stories they were drinking and whoring and shooting dope and heaven knows what else.

“But you're not like that, and after awhile I came to know the rest of Paul Sheldon, and I hope you don't mind me saying it, but I have come to love the rest of him, too.”

“Thank you, Annie,” he said from atop his golden glistening wave, and he thought: Bu tyou may have read me wrong, you know - I mean, the situations that lead men into temptation have been severely curtailed up here. It's sort of hard to go bar-hopping when you've got a couple of broken legs, Annie. As for shooting dope, I've got the Bourka Bee-Goddess to do that for me.

“But would you want to stay?” she resumed. “That was the question I had to ask myself, and as much as I may have wanted to pull the wool over my eyes, I knew the answer to that - I knew even before I saw the marks on the door over there.” She pointed and Paul thought: I'll bet she did know almost from the very first. Wool-pulling? Not you, Annie. Never you. But I was doing enough of that for both of us.

“Do you remember the first time I went away? After we had that silly fight over the paper?”

“Yes, Annie.”

“That was when you went out the first time, wasn't it?”

“Yes.” There was no point in denying it.

“Of course. You wanted your pills. I should have known you'd do anything to get your pills, but when I get mad, I get… you know.” She giggled a little nervously. Paul did not join her, or even smile. The memory of that pain-racked, endless interlude with the phantom voice of the sportscaster doing the play-by-play was too strong still.

Yes, I know how you get, he thought. You get oogy.

“At first I wasn't completely sure. Oh, I saw that some of the figures on the little table in the parlor had been moved around, but I thought I might have done that myself - I have times when I'm really quite forgetful. It crossed my mind that you'd been out of your room, but then I thought, No, that's impossible. He's so badly hurt, and besides, I locked the door. I even checked to make sure the key was still in my skirt pocket, and it was. Then I remembered you were in your chair. So maybe…

“One of the things you learn when you've been an R.N. for ten years is that it's always wise to check your maybes. So I took a look at the things I keep in the downstairs bathroom - they're mostly samples I brought home off and on while I was working; you should see all the stuff that just goes roiling around in hospitals, Paul! And so every now and then I helped myself to a few… well… a few extras… and I wasn't the only one. But I knew enough not to take any of the morphine based drugs. They lock those up. They count. They keep records. And if they get an idea that a nurse is, you know, chipping - that's what they call it - they watch that nurse until they're sure. Then, bang!” Annie chopped her hand down hard. “Out they go, and most of them never put on the white cap again.

“I was smarter than that.

“Looking at those cartons was the Sam e as looking at the figures on the little parlor table. I thought the stuff in them had been sort of stirred around, and I was pretty sure that one of the cartons that was on the bottom before was on top of some of the other cartons now, but I couldn't be sure. And I could have done it myself when I was… well… when I was preoccupied.