A click, not much of a sound but loud in the silence. This was followed by another sound: meep-meep-meep-meep. The burglar alarm. Norman had company.

Anna never noticed the green Tempo parked by the curb a block and a half down from Daughters and Sisters. She was deep in a private fantasy, one she had never told anyone, not even her therapist, the necessary fantasy she saved for horrible days like today. In it she was on the cover of Time magazine. It wasn’t a photo but a vibrant oil painting which showed her in a dark blue shift (blue was her best color, and a shift would obscure the depressing way she had been thickening around the middle these last two or three years). She was looking over her left shoulder, giving the artist her good side to work with, and her hair spilled over her right shoulder in a snowdrift. A sexy snowdrift. The caption beneath the picture read simply: AMERICAN WOMAN, She turned into the driveway, reluctantly putting the fantasy away (she had just reached the point where the writer was saying, “Although she has reclaimed the lives of over fifteen hundred battered women, Anna Stevenson remains surprisingly, even touchingly, modest…'). She turned off the engine of her Infiniti and just sat there for a moment, delicately rubbing at the skin beneath her eyes. Peter Slowik, whom she had usually referred to at the time of their divorce as either Peter the Great or Rasputin the Mad Marxist, had been a promiscuous babbler when alive, and his friends had seemed determined to remember him in that same spirit. The talk had gone on and on, each “remembrance bouquet” (she thought that she could cheerfully machine-gun the politically correct buttholes who spent their days thinking such smarmy phrases up) seemingly longer than the last, and by four o’clock, when they’d finally gotten up to eat the food and drink the wine-domestic and dreadful, just what Peter would have picked if he’d been the one doing the shopping-she was sure the shape of the folding chair on which she’d been sitting must have been tattooed into her ass. The idea of leaving early-perhaps slipping out after one finger-sandwich and a token sip of wine-had never crossed her mind, however. People would be watching, evaluating her behavior. She was Anna Stevenson, after all, an important woman in the political structure of this town, and there were certain people she had to speak to after the formal ceremonies were over. People she wanted other people to see her talking to, because that was how the carousel turned. And, just to add to the fun, her pager had gone off three times in a space of forty-five minutes. Weeks went by when it sat mutely in her bag, but this afternoon, during a meeting where there were long periods of silence broken by people who seemed incapable of speaking above a tearful mutter, the gadget had gone crazy. After the third time she got tired of the swivelling heads and turned the Christing thing off. She hoped nobody had gone into labor at the picnic, that nobody’s kid had taken a thrown horseshoe in the head, and most of all she hoped Rosie’s husband hadn’t shown up. She doubted that he had, though; he would know better. In any case, anyone who’d called her pager would have called D amp; S first, and she’d make the answering machine in her study stop number one. She could listen to the messages through the bathroom door while she peed. In most cases, that would be fitting. She got out of the car, locked it (even in a good neigborhood like this you couldn’t be too careful), and went up the porch steps. She used her keycard and silenced the meep-meep-meep of the security system without even thinking of it; sweet shreds of her daydream (only woman of her time to be loved and respected by all factions of the increasingly divergent women’s movement) still swirled in her head.

“Hello, the house!” she called, walking down the hall. Silence replied, which was what she’d expected… and, let’s face it, hoped for. With any luck, she might have two or even three hours of blessed silence before the commencement of that night’s giggling, hissing showers, slamming doors, and cackling sitcoms. She walked into the kitchen, wondering if maybe a long leisurely bath, Calgon and all, wouldn’t smooth off the worst of the day. Then she stopped, frowning across at her study door. It was standing ajar.

“Goddammit,” she muttered.

“God damn it!” If there was one thing she disliked above all others-except maybe for touchy-huggy-feely people-it was having her privacy invaded. She had no lock on her study door because she did not believe she should be reduced to that. This was her place, after all; the girls and women who came here came through her generosity and at her sufferance. She shouldn’t need a lock on that door. Her desire that they should stay out unless invited in ought to have been enough. Mostly it was, but every now and then some woman would decide she really needed some piece of her documentation, that she really needed to use Anna’s photocopier (which warmed up faster than the one downstairs in the rec room), that she really needed a stamp, and so this disrespectful person would come in, she’d track through a place that wasn’t hers, maybe look at things that weren’t hers to look at, junk up the air with the smell of some cheap drugstore perfume… Anna paused with one hand on the study doorknob, looking into the dark room which had been a pantry when she was a little girl. Her nostrils flared slightly and the frown on her face deepened. There was a smell, all right, but it wasn’t quite perfume. It was something that reminded her of the Mad Marxist. It was… All my men wear English Leather or they wear nothing at all. Jesus! Jesus Christ! Her arms crawled with gooseflesh. She was a woman who prided herself on her practicality, but suddenly it was all too easy to imagine Peter Slowik’s ghost waiting for her inside her study, a shade as insubstantial as the stink of that ludicrous cologne he’d worn… Her eyes fixed on a light in the darkness: the answering machine. The little red lamp was stuttering madly, as if everyone in the city had called today. Something had happened. All at once she knew it. It explained the pager, too… and like a dummy she’d turned it off so people would stop staring at her. Something had happened, probably at Ettinger’s Pier. Someone hurt. Or, God forbid-She stepped into the office, feeling for the light-switch beside the door, then stopped, puzzled by what her fingers had found. The switch was already up, which meant the overhead light should be on, but it wasn’t. Anna flipped the switch up and down twice, started to do it a third time, and then a hand dropped on her right shoulder. She screamed at that settling touch, the sound coming out of her throat as full and frantic as any scream ever voiced by a horror-movie heroine, and as another hand clamped on her upper left arm and turned her around on her heels, as she saw the shape silhouetted against the flooding light from the kitchen, she screamed again. The thing which had been standing behind the door and waiting for her wasn’t human. Horns sprouted from the top of its head, horns which appeared to be swollen with strange, tumorous growths. It was-“Viva ze bool,” a hollow voice said, and she realized it was a man, a man wearing a mask, but that didn’t make her feel any better because she had a very good idea of who the man was. She tore out of his grip and backed toward the desk. She could still smell English Leather, but she could smell other things now, as well. Hot rubber. Sweat. And urine. Was it hers? Had she wet herself? She didn’t know. She was numb from the waist down. “don’t touch me,” she said in a trembling voice utterly unlike her usual calm and authoritative tone. She reached behind her and felt for the button that summoned the police. It was there someplace, but buried under drifts of paper. “don’t you dare touch me, I’m warning you.”