Live Bait

9

‘Puff! Here kitty, kitty, kitty!’ There was a tremor in Rose’s voice, and for good reason. It was dreadfully late and that useless beast was still sauntering around the yard, pretending to be deaf.

She’d always hated the dark, even as a little girl, and the fear had only grown worse with age. Now, some seventy-odd years later, it had morphed into an irrational, debilitating phobia that made no sense at all. She wasn’t afraid of the mundane dangers that might befall an elderly woman living alone, things like burglars or murderers or rapists; or even of falling down and breaking her hip, all concerns her daughter voiced at every opportunity. It was the dark itself.

She took another tentative step out onto the back porch and caught a brief glimpse of white in the farthest corner of the tulip bed. Puff obviously assumed that all the hard work Rose had put into the gardens today were for his benefit – the world’s largest litter box.

‘Puff, come here!’

He responded with an irritated twitch of his tail, letting her know he’d come in when he was good and ready and not a minute before. His tiny kitty brain just didn’t understand that once darkness swallowed the backyard, it wouldn’t matter if he were being eaten alive by the neighborhood dogs before her very eyes – she still wouldn’t be able to go out to save him.

God, she hated being like this, hated the tears of frustration that prickled behind her eyes. Why couldn’t that damned cat just come in?…

‘PUFF, COME HERE!’

And at last, Puff did. He trotted up to his mistress as if he’d just noticed her presence for the first time, tail flagging in a cheerful greeting. Rose scooped him up into her arms, cooing admonishments as giddy tears of relief splashed onto his fur. Once she retreated into the safety of her bright, cozy kitchen, her silly tears dried and she poured a dish of cream for him, a glass of sherry for herself.

The phone rang as she was settling into a sofa almost as old and lumpy as she was. It was her son-in-law – not the brightest fellow on the planet, and a lousy dentist, she’d always thought – but he was a good husband to her Lorrel, and Rose supposed a mother couldn’t ask for much more.

‘Hello, Richard. Yes, I’m fine. I suppose Lorrel is working late again? Of course I remember tomorrow night, I haven’t lost my mind yet, Richard. Five o’clock. Kiss the girls for me and tell them I can’t wait to see them. I baked cookies.’

Rose smiled as she hung up the phone, and was still smiling as she clicked on the TV, coaxed Puff onto her lap, and started to doze. Her granddaughters were home from college, and tomorrow night they would all go out for dinner.

Rose woke up much later, disoriented and aching from her arduous day of gardening. Puff had deserted her lap, but she could feel his fur tickling the back of her neck. He’d retreated to his favorite perch on the back of the couch, where he liked to sit and look out the window. She reached behind to pat him, but her hand froze in midair.

Puff was growling.

She groped for the remote and eventually found the mute button. ‘What’s wrong, kitty?’ After a few moments of silence, she heard a faint rustling coming from behind her, outside in the bushes.

Juncos in the arborvitae, that’s all it is, she told herself. At night the little birds sheltered in the soft evergreen, making fluttery noises as they hopped from branch to branch.

But this wasn’t a fluttery noise, exactly. It sounded… bigger.

Someone is out there.

Rose felt it in those good senses people never pay attention to until it’s too late: the little hairs standing up on the back of her neck, the goose bumps rising on the loose, checkered skin of her old arms, and when the low rumble of Puff’s growl jumped in pitch, she knew…

… Someone is out there, on the other side of the glass, looking in at me.

She turned her head slowly, slowly, and then she saw a pair of eyes hanging there in the dark just outside the window, staring in at her.

There was a brief moment when her body reacted the way it was supposed to – when her heart leaped and started to hammer, when the blood rushed from her brain to her legs in an ancient preparation for flight, leaving her face cold and clammy. But it was over almost as soon as it began, and Rose simply turned her eyes back to the muted television screen and sat there quietly, waiting to wake up from this very bad dream.

It isn’t a dream.

The rustling stopped and a few minutes later, when she’d finally summoned the courage to turn around again, there was nobody at her window.

She didn’t breathe until her lungs screamed for air, and by then, she was feeling a little silly, because it probably had been just a dream. The mind always played tricks on you in that twilight netherworld between sleep and wakefulness; especially old minds.

And then the front door rattled in its frame and Rose started shaking so badly, she feared her old bones might shatter like glass.

Call the police.

She reached for the phone on the table beside her, but her hand wasn’t working the way it was supposed to, no, not at all, and there was nothing she could do but watch helplessly as the useless appendage spasmed and flailed and twitched and knocked the phone to the floor.

The noise at the front door finally stopped, but the silence was much worse, because she was terribly afraid that she might have forgotten to lock the back door, and even more afraid to get up and look.

She sat frozen on the sofa, a pathetic old woman deluding herself into believing that if she remained perfectly still, if she didn’t breathe, whatever was coming would simply pass her by. In the next instant, she heard the back screen door open, then close with a click, and still, she couldn’t move.

The heavy inside door closed, sucking a little air from the room.

Rose never turned to look at him, so he walked into her line of sight and waited for her eyes to rise to his. When they did, he pulled a large handgun from his jacket pocket and pointed it at her.

Oh, God. It wasn’t going to pass her by; this time it was going to kill her.

In that dreadful moment of realization, she became young and strong and fearless again, and she vaulted upward at the precise moment the bullet left the muzzle, ruining his killing shot. Fire tore into her stomach instead of her heart and Rose looked down to see a blossom of red spreading across the front of her little-old-lady dress.

‘Goddamnit,’ he said, and shot her again.