A Time of Predators

As he bent over her, Paula picked up and swung the decorative three-legged milking stool at his head. Rick blocked the clumsy blow with a forearm, so the stool went around him and was wrenched from her grasp by its own weight.

Aroused by the attack, Rick slashed a fist at the side of her jaw with a fierce exultation. She fell back away from him in a sort of slow motion. He went in after her. Mouthing obscenities, he tore at the frail material of her panties. Now she would find out what it meant to oppose Rick Dean.

Chapter 4

They were gone. Paula, huddled on her side on the couch, kept her eyes tight shut and listened. Her legs were drawn up in the fetal position; her ripped panties were lying on the floor by the couch and the straps of the one sandal she still wore were hanging loose. Her ears were like separate little animals, independent of her, which listened and probed and evaluated sounds while the voice of the one called Rick bragged in her memory.

“She still doesn’t know who we are. And even if she finds out, she won’t tell. She won’t dare, because she knows we’ll be back then.”

Which should have been silly, because if she told, the police would make sure they never would be back. But they were lucky. For reasons that the one called Rick was, she was sure, incapable of understanding, Paula would not tell.

She listened to her memory again. The casual retreat of swaggering footsteps — jackbooted Nazis leaving a looted Jewish shop on Kristallnacht — then, oddly, the phone being dialed, Rick’s voice using words which made no sense to someone named Debbie, the front door closing.

Her listening ears probed the old house for reassurance. Creak of ancient timbers. Sigh of old and faithful joists. Outside, the rustle of oak leaves. Nothing else.

Paula explored split lips with a careful tongue. Blood-clotted. Teeth loose. Was this how a hibernating animal felt when the snow had melted and it began checking how it had come through the winter?

Poorly, thank you. I came through it poorly.

She groaned and pushed herself into a sitting position. The pit of her stomach ached, her face and neck were gritty enough for an involuntary grimace of distaste. It was the body which betrayed you.

Paula ran automatic fingers through her hair, found that the plastic clasp which had held it back against her skull had broken, so it was a blond flood around her shoulders. She looked at the clock.

9:40. That would be P.M.

Curt would be finishing his seminar soon, folding his papers and ramming them sloppily into the briefcase, talking all the while and not getting the papers in until he finally thought to look at his hands.

Curt, big frowning bearlike man.

“Please come home,” she said to him solemnly in the empty house.

But she knew deep inside that Curt wouldn’t, not in time. She sighed and got carefully to her feet. Not really too bad, physically. Just the sort of stiffness she would expect if she had played some hard sets of tennis after a winter layoff. How had it happened to her, when after Rick, the first time, she still had felt only revulsion? She still had been Paula Halstead then, had gasped “No!” when he had swaggered to the door, zipping up his Levi slim-fits, and opened it to call out “Next?” in a parody of a barber with an unoccupied chair.

Maybe it had started then? Realizing, then, that they were all going to do it, and that Rick was going to stay and watch them?

“I’m sorry, Curt,” she said aloud.

The clock’s bland electric face murmured 9:47 to her eyes. Curt still would be in the seminar room, with its long wooden table and tube steel chairs with plywood backs. And talking. Curt was good at talking.

This is in your half of the court, kiddo, not Curt’s. A sizzler. Up on the toes, swing the racquet, send a hot flat drive over the net...

9:51. Eleven minutes to get up off a couch. Rome was not built in one day. Good old John Heywood. You could always count on John for a platitude or two. The fat is in the fire. She picked up the ripped panties, found her other sandal in a corner as if hurled there by an explosion. She went out carrying both items.

At the foot of the stairs she paused. Seeing, really seeing, the living room. To her left, the windows which in daylight looked out across the drive and the fringe of woods to the golf course. Below the windows, the couch. Nearer, its back to Paula, Curt’s reading chair. Please, Curt, come home. The coffee table, Paula’s snide bottle of wine, her disordered stack of paperbacks. Dark wine-colored rug. To her right, through double doors, the dull sheen of dining-room oak.

Nowhere any sign of their predatory passage. Oh, fingerprints, probably. On the doorknob. Perhaps on the phone. And, of course, on her soul. Grimy ones, there, that wouldn’t wash off.