She crossed to the window, opening the curtains as if about to step onto a stage.
“No light on the horizon just yet,” she said.
“We’ll find some,” he replied.
“Do you think he’s on his own?”
Malcolm didn’t have to ask who she meant. He had already checked every window, peering around as far as he could crane his neck to make sure the raven remained the only man out there spying on the house. He wondered if she’d come to the same conclusion he had—that her husband’s gambling had gotten him, and them, into trouble at last.
“I think he’s waiting, just like us,” he said.
Violet turned to him, long and elegant in her dressing gown. “Not like us. He’s no more than a vulture, waiting for some lost soul to collapse out in the desert.”
“Agreed. But we’re all waiting, aren’t we? The three of us. The four of us, if we include Maggie.”
“I don’t know how you can stay so calm. Maggie behaves as if she’s sure trouble will follow her passing, and that fellow out there looks like trouble to me.”
“I don’t think that spooky bastard’s got anything to do with Maggie’s delusions.”
Violet cocked her head. “What, then?”
He didn’t want to go down that road. “It doesn’t matter. Whatever the guy wants, we won’t be here to give it to him. If it’s something in the house, I don’t suppose we can stop him from just taking it after we’re gone.”
“And if he tries to stop us going?”
Malcolm knelt on the edge of the bed and reached behind his traveling case. He’d laid out the sidearm he’d brought home from Korea—a Browning Hi-Power 35—and now he revealed it to Violet, barrel pointed at the mattress.
“Okay, then,” she said.
“It doesn’t make you nervous?”
Violet crossed her arms and leaned against the doorframe. “I’ve seen men with guns before, Malcolm. As long as they know how to use them and don’t point them at me, I’m not bothered.”
Early in the war, he’d been stuck with the same Colt revolver the army issued to its troops. The same revolver they’d used in the Second World War. But once he’d seen what the Browning could do—once he knew the magazine could hold thirteen bullets, with one more in the chamber—Malcolm had been determined to get his hands on one. His friend Ron Bellamy had taken a bullet in the gut because his Colt had clicked on an empty chamber. The surgeons at the field hospital had kept Bellamy alive, but he’d never be the same man—never be whole again. Malcolm had decided then and there that if he died, it wouldn’t be because he’d run out of bullets.
Even now.
He moved the shirts he’d just put into the traveling case to show Violet the boxes of ammunition he’d already packed.
“When I go out the front door, it’ll be in my hand, not in my case,” he said. “I don’t know who’s behind that mask, but the way he’s lurking out there isn’t just strange, it’s repugnant. Grief isn’t meant to be on display. I’m not gonna shoot him for bad manners, mind you. We can draw the curtains and do our best to forget he’s out there. But if he tries to interfere with what we need to do, or tries to follow us… I’ll make him think twice.”
Violet gave a small nod. “Okay.” She started for the door. “You should go in and sit with her, if you’re all packed. I’ve got to pull some things together.”
“You all right?” he asked.
She paused with her hand on the doorframe. “Sometimes I forget the war taught you to be dangerous.”
Malcolm turned away. He set the gun back on the bed and arranged his shirts over the ammunition boxes again. “The war taught me to survive.”
The room had fallen silent, and when he glanced at the doorway, he found it empty.
On his bedside table was a battered paperback copy ofIn a Lonely Placeby Dorothy B. Hughes. Malcolm had only read fifty pages or so and he wanted to know what would happen next, so he tucked the book into his traveling case, closed and locked it, and took one last look around the room.
Music still drifted from Maggie’s bedroom. He knew he ought to go and check on her, but nursed the suspicion that somehow, as long as he didn’t look into her room, she would keep living. A foolish thought, and he grew angry with himself. The clock of her life had nearly stopped, and there would be no rewinding it.
Go, he thought.Be with her, even if she tries to send you away again.
Malcolm went into the hall, heading for his mother’s room. The door to Violet’s bedroom stood open several inches. Heheard her opening and closing drawers, packing, the floor creaking as she moved back and forth.
