On the Other Hand, Death

3

I turned onto Fuller Road and headed to ward Central. Bright heat undulated across the concrete pavement and traffic swam through it like schools of blue-fish. I stopped at a gas station phone booth, took a deep breath, and went inside. I phoned Timmy and told him it might be nine o'clock before I'd be able to meet him.

"Let me guess. You're having a drink with… Buster Crabbe."

"No, that's you, as I recall. I'm on my way out to Dot Fisher's." I described my meeting with Crane Trefusis.

"Dot's a real sweet lady," he said, "and I hope you catch the dementos who did it, even if Millpond shares the credit. Dot's a friend of Fenton McWhirter, did you know that? In fact, I think he's staying with her while he's in Albany."

"Dot gets around for such a late bloomer."

"You've met her, haven't you?"

"Once, briefly, at the demonstration after the baths were raided."

"She caused quite a sensation that day. The cops and the TV people thought she was somebody's grandmother. Of course, she is. So, where do you begin? If, by some crazy chance, Millpond is 8 not behind what's happening out there, who might be?"

"Trefusis thoughtfully provided me with a list of suspects," I said, moving the door of the airless phone booth back and forth like a fan. "There are two other families on Moon Road with a strong interest in seeing Dot deal. It turns out Millpond has optioned their properties but won't buy outright until Dot's been lined up too. Both parties are hot to sell and don't like it at all that Dot is standing in the way of their windfall. They're very mad, maybe mad enough to provide Dot with some rude encouragement. That's where I begin."

"Millpond has set it all up with their characteristic finesse," Timmy said. "This way they let someone else do their dirty work without lifting a finger."

"I think I'll keep an open mind for a day or two on who lifted which finger for what purpose.

Like you said, Citizen Crane is a fairly complicated guy. He tries to come across as Mister Hardnosed-but-Open-and-Direct, yet the whole time I was with him I felt as though I was in the presence of a rather extensive rain forest. I don't envy anyone who has to navigate his mind regularly."

"Better take along a machete on this one."

"My Swiss Army knife will have to do. And my heat-addled brain. See you around nine, then?"

"Oh… yeah. Around nine. For sure."

"Swell. See you."

For sure? In the six years I'd known him I'd never heard him use that phrase. Only twenty-year-olds said that. Where had he picked it up? From a twenty-year-old? Or from someone who spent a lot of time hanging around twenty-year-olds? The hell with it, I thought. Timmy and I were solid, a twosome. The heat was cooking my few million remaining brain cells, that's all it was.

Marrakech-on-the-Mohawk. Ouagadougou-on-the-Hudson. For sure.

The two other homes on Moon Road were of more modest proportions, so Dot Fisher's farmhouse was not hard to pick out.

The first place I passed was an old two-story frame box with flaking tarpaper shingles. The place listed crazily to the southwest, and a newer freshly painted side porch sat partially detached from the sinking house, like a dinghy by a shipwreck. It was easy to see why the owners of this one wanted badly to take Millpond's money and run with it.

The second house, another fifty yards down the narrow rutted road, was a two-tone beige and electric blue 1950s ranch. It had a big picture window with a lamp in the middle, a double garage, and a long, fat Plymouth Fury wagon with a smashed taillight parked in the driveway.

There was a green plastic worm with wheels and a seat lying on its side on the recently mowed lawn, and off to the left of the property, in an area where the underbrush had been cut away, a '68

T-bird was up on cinder blocks. As at the first house, I saw no sign of life.

Banging on ahead over the potholes, I passed a Channel 12 TV van lurching and swaying back toward Central Avenue. I guessed I had just missed a media event and had mixed feelings about what the report, once broadcast, was going to mean.

Moon Road dead-ended just beyond the Fisher house, so I bypassed Dot's driveway with two cars already in it and parked by a scraggly stand of sun-scorched sumac trees where the pavement ended. A newly bulldozed dirt track ran off to the left. The foliage along it was wilting under fine brown dust. I could hear the roar of the traffic on the interstate a hundred yards or so beyond the trees, though not the heavy equipment building the new inter-change-more canny planning by Millpond. It was after four on a Friday now and work had stopped for the weekend. I walked back toward the house.

As I moved up the fieldstone walkway past long, tall clumps of purple-pink phlox, a young man 9 emerged from behind the house carrying an aluminum ladder. I recognized his face from news photos in The Native and Gay Community News, and I cut across the lawn under a big spreading oak tree to meet him. He was moving purposefully toward the carriage house, which still had the ugly slogans sprayed all over its side, like a Manhattan subway car lost upstate.

I called, "Hello… Fenton McWhirter?"

He turned abruptly and looked at me uncertainly for a few seconds, then set the ladder down and extended his hand. "Yes, how do you do? Are you a reporter?"

"No. Don Strachey. I'm a private investigator. That looks like a real job in this heat. Will the graffiti wash off, or will you have to paint over it?"

Looking harried and put out, he spoke to me impatiently in a raspy baritone. "Mrs. Fisher isn't sure whether or not she wants to talk to you, you know? You're the guy Crane Trefusis said he was sending out here?"

"I'm the guy, but I'd probably have come anyway. Try not to think of me as Trefusis's agent. It's true he's paying me, but what the hell."

He peered at me as if I might not be the most mentally stable person he'd met that day. In ragged cutoffs and a sweat-stained T-shirt, he was in his early thirties, slender but solid, with the sort of lean, exaggeratedly defined musculature and bone structure I'd always associated more with Renaissance anatomical studies than with real people. The lips of his wide mouth were severely ridged rather than rounded, a feature I'd always found erotic, but the mess of teeth beyond them was badly in need of tidying up. His strong face was all angles and planes, with a thick stubble of dirty blond hair that might have been meant as a beard, or could have been the result of his not having had the time, or the interest, to shave for a few days, or could as well have been the way movement people on the West Coast were wearing their faces these days and the fad would reach Albany in 1990. His deep-set gray eyes were smallish and bloodshot, and they looked at me with no pleasure.

"This Trefusis asshole sent a crew over earlier to repaint the barn," McWhirter said sourly. "Dot told them to fuck off. But she says she knows you, or heard of you or something, and she's surprised you're working for Millpond."

"That makes two of us," I said. "Life gets complicated sometimes. On the one hand this, on the other hand that."

He peered at me stonily. "You sound to me like a rather indecisive person to be doing the kind of work you claim you do. I can't actually see how you're going to be any help around here. Dot and Edith need protection, not a lot of bullshit existential angst."

"Maybe I won't be much help," I said, seized by a fit of free-floating perversity. "Or maybe I will." I wished somebody would offer me a cold Molson's.

McWhirter was supposed to burst into laughter at this point, and I'd laugh too, and we'd immediately become great pals. But he didn't laugh. He just shook his head incredulously and made a little astonished sound with his breath, like "eeesh." Revolution was a serious business. I hadn't made a hit.

"What do you mean, 'protection'?" I said, trying to meet him on his own terms, of which I'd run into worse. "Has something else happened since last night? Have there been more threats?"

His look hardened and he was about to reply, when another figure appeared from around the back corner of the house carrying a gallon can of paint and two brushes.

"Peter, come over here and meet the gay James Bond," McWhirter said loudly. "He says he's going to catch the assholes who are after Dot-except he's also on their payroll. He's a little confused, but he says not to worry."

I recognized Peter Greco, McWhirter's lover, an Albany native who'd been in California or on the road with McWhirter since I'd come to Albany eight years earlier, so we hadn't met. He was short and fragile-looking in jeans and no shirt, with shiny olive skin and a frail boy's thin arms. He had an open, quietly cheerful face, curly black hair on his head and chest, and placid dark eyes. I'd always thought poets were supposed to be pimpled and funny-looking, but I'd read some of Greco's verses and he, unhappily, was no Auden, so maybe that explained it.

"Hi," he said, smiling easily despite McWhirter's sarcastic, and possibly accurate, introduction.

"You're a gay detective? I don't think I've ever met one before."

"Of course you have," McWhirter put in emphatically. "You just didn't know they were gay.

That's the whole point."

"I'm Don Strachey," I said, offering my hand. There was a brief tussle of fingers and thumbs while we found the old movement handclasp of the '60s. "I am a private investigator, yes, and more or less coincidentally gay, and it's also true that I'm being paid by Millpond. But I'll be working for Dot, if she's agreeable. I'd have done that anyway."

"Why don't you come in and talk to her?" Greco said, cheerfully accepting me at my word. Was he an instant judge of good character, or a dangerously vulnerable naif? "Dot won't admit it," he said, "but she's really pretty upset, and she can use all the help and support she can get right now. And Edith's not making things any easier."

I thought at first that "Edith" might be a pet name for McWhirter, but then I remembered.

I said, "Fine, I'd like to talk with Dot. When did you two arrive? Were you here last night when it happened?"

"No, we just got into town this morning, but we were here when the letter arrived. It really shook poor old Edith up. At first Dot wasn't even going to show it to her."

"What letter was that? Trefusis didn't mention a letter."

McWhirter snapped, "Why should he? He wrote it, didn't he? Or his Mafia goons did. Or maybe you wrote it yourself, Strachey. I've heard all about this Trefusis gangster, and I wouldn't trust anybody who had anything to do with him."

Greco and I went on with our exchange of information while McWhirter stood there adding to the humidity. "It was in the mailbox when Dot went out around three this afternoon," Greco said.

"Dot called the police right away, and they said they'd send a detective out, but he hasn't shown up yet. It's just a plain piece of notebook paper with printing that says, 'You're next. You got three days. Saturday you die.' It was addressed to both Edith and Dot."

I said, "Today's Friday. The letter arrived in the regular mail?"

Greco nodded. "It was postmarked Wednesday in Albany. Whoever sent it must have thought it would be delivered the next day."

"Could be," I said. "Somebody who doesn't patronize the Postal Service regularly and doesn't know how slow it can be. Or someone who can't add, or use a calendar."

"I am going to demand," McWhirter said, eyes flashing, "that the police provide round-the-clock protection for Dot and Edith. And if those assholes aren't out here within half an hour, I am notifying the media and driving straight in to city hall and the mayor's office. It's been two fucking hours since Dot called them!"

"Ask nicely and the Albany cops might be helpful," I said. "Demand anything of them and they'll vanish without a trace. Or worse. They're a sensitive lot." McWhirter glowered. "As for the mayor," I went on, enjoying myself a little, "I'm fairly certain it's already past his bedtime. Not that he's all that alert and responsive during his waking hours. I'm not saying, Fenton, that 11 municipal government in Albany functions exactly the same way it does in, say, Buenos Aires.

It's more benign here-slower and sleepier than in the tropics. But don't get your hopes up. To a very large extent, if you're gay in Albany you're on your own. I'm a little surprised at your expectations. Surely you must have run onto similar situations elsewhere."

McWhirter scowled at me with disgust, as if I were a prince of the local machine instead of one of its taxpaying reluctant benefactors. "And people like you just sit around and take it," he said acidly, then abruptly picked up his ladder and stalked off muttering.

Greco frowned after him for a moment, then shrugged and smiled, his most natural expression. I thought it would be nice to go lie down with him in some shady spot. He said, "Poor Fenton.

He's having a hard enough time getting the campaign off the ground, and then when he comes here he runs into this awful mess. It's been a rough year for him, believe me."

He set down the paint cans and brushes and we walked toward the back of the house past a bed of nasturtiums that looked like cool, soft fire. I said, "There's been no mass of recruits signing on for the gay national strike?"

A weary laugh. "No, no masses. If the GNS is going to work there'll have to be millions, of course. But so far the people who've pledged to come out of the closet and join the strike can only be numbered in the hundreds. Or maybe tens," he added, shaking his head dolefully. "We've only been to nine cities so far, and we've got almost another year-ten and a half months-to get people committed. But so far it's been pretty discouraging. A joke, really. I mean, it's partly because it's summer, don't you think? People are more interested now in cultivating their tans than they are in social justice. Maybe in the fall…" He turned to me with a tentative smile. "So, how do you think we'll do at the center in Albany tonight?"

"Hard to say," I lied, having a good idea of what was going to happen. Which was too bad, because McWhirter's notion of a national coming-out day as the first event of a week-long gay national strike seemed to me a wonderful piece of whimsy-which, if it ever somehow actually happened, could make a real difference in the way American homosexuals were thought of and treated.

McWhirter, I'd read in the gay papers, envisioned gay air traffic controllers, executives, busboys, priests, construction workers, doctors, data analysts, White House staffers, Congressmen, newsboys, waitresses, housewives, firemen, FBI agents-the whole lot of us suddenly declaring ourselves and walking off our jobs and letting the straight majority try to keep the country running on their own for a week. It was a bold, wacky, irresistible idea.

But a lot of people were resisting the GNS anyway. The big national gay organizations estimated

— correctly, I guessed-that too few people would participate and the thing would end up an embarrassment to the movement. This was also a self-fulfilling prophecy: McWhirter was receiving no financial support from the big outfits. His waspish personality was said to be putting off a number of would-be supporters too. Another good idea done in by its originator's poor social skills.

The gay press was covering McWhirter's campaign sporadically and offering wistful and qualifiedly encouraging editorials. Notice by the straight press had been even more fitful, and the tone of the few stories printed or broadcast had ranged from the tittering to the maliciously bug-eyed.

Albany would not, I thought, be the place where the GNS campaign took off. Of the sixteen people likely to show up at the Gay Community Center that night to hear McWhirter's plea for support, three would tiptoe upstairs midway in the presentation and play Monopoly. Of the six who would sign on at the end of McWhirter's description of how we would shut the country 12 down for a week, three would be full-time recipients of public assistance. The outlook in Albany was not promising.

"Well," Greco said, putting the best face on it, "even if we don't do terribly well at the center tonight, we'll be leafleting the bars afterwards. I remember when I lived here that on Friday nights the bars are full of state workers. Imagine what it would be like if all the gay people in the South Mall walked out for a week. What a glorious mess that would be!"

"Right. The state bureaucracy would become sluggish and disorganized."

He stopped by the back door of the house and looked at me uncertainly, examined my face, then suddenly shook with bright laughter. "Well," he said, "you know what I mean." He laughed again, and his hand came up and gently brushed my cheek, a gesture as natural and uncomplicated for Greco as a happy child's reaching out spontaneously to touch a sibling. Greco, waiflike and vulnerable, was not a type I usually went for. But on the other hand… Maybe it was the heat.

Inside the big pine-paneled kitchen of the farmhouse, Dot Fisher was slumped against a doorjamb and speaking wearily into a wall phone. One hand pressed the receiver hard against her ear under a short, damp thicket of frizzy gray-black hair, and the other arm rested on the little crockpot of a belly that protruded from her otherwise wiry frame. Wet half-moons stained the sides of the white cotton sleeveless shift she wore, and her long, sun-reddened face, deeply etched with age and the things she knew, was screwed up now in a grimace of barely controlled frustration, and gleamed with sweat. She forced a distracted smile in our direction and waggled a finger urgently at the refrigerator.

Greco and I helped ourselves to the iced mint tea and sat at a cherrywood table by the window overlooking the farm pond while Dot finished up her conversation. "Well, not at all. Thank you for your time," she told whoever was at the other end of the line-a reporter, it sounded like and then collapsed in a chair across from us, where she began to fan her face with a Burpee seed catalog.

"Oh, what a day this has been!" she croaked. "And this heat! Good heavens, the least these awful people could have done was wait until October to… to do whatever they're trying to do to us.

Speaking of which- I suppose you're Donald Strachey, aren't you? Mr. Johnny-on-the-spot from Millpond." Her look was not friendly.

"Yes, ma'am. We met last year around this time. Under similarly depressing circumstances."

"Mm-hmm." She examined me coolly. "Depressing is certainly the word for it. And confusing," she added pointedly.

"I really think Don is going to be helpful," Greco put in, grinning a little zanily. "He cares a lot about you, Dot, and he can work twenty-four hours a day to find out what's going on and put a stop to it. I mean, you know, the police will go through the motions and all, but to have an experienced private investigator on your side, even if he's employed by- Well, it can't hurt, can it? If you're going to stay here and not give in-"

"What do you mean, if I'm going to stay and not give in?"

Greco shrugged, grinned tentatively. "Naturally I meant since you're not going to give in."

"You'd better mean it."

I said, "I'm glad to see how determined you are, Mrs. Fisher. Most people in your position would have locked up the house and booked passage on a three-month cruise through the Norwegian fjords. Or sold out to Millpond and headed for Fort Lauderdale. And I know you know how formidable an outfit Millpond can be. Treacherous even. You've got lot of guts."

"You really needn't explain the obvious to me, young man," she said evenly. "And don't waste 13 your breath trying to flatter me either." Her brown eyes had softened, though, and she looked as if something had suddenly struck her funny and she was trying hard not to smile. "And I might add, you'd better not let Edith hear you say that word, Mr. Strachey-"

"Don."

"Well, Don," she said, "however brief your visit on Moon Road might turn out to be, you're going to have to remember that Edith cannot stand that word."

"Which word? Fjords? Fort Lauderdale?"

"Oh, no!" She found a way to laugh now, shakily, despite herself. "No, no. Peter, you say it."

"Guts," Greco whispered. "Edith hates the word 'guts.' She also, unfortunately, can't stand the word 'rot.'"

"One time a whole lot of years ago," Dot said, looking relieved to be distracted for the moment,

"Edie and I were at a teachers' convention in Buffalo, and I mentioned during dinner that I thought the wine tasted like rotgut. Well, Edie just stood right up and marched out of the room!

Oh what a brouhaha that was between us. I haven't said either word in front of her since that evening, and that's been twenty years ago if it's a day."

Greco and I laughed, but Dot's mood had shifted abruptly back, and she was watching me levelly again, somberly. "Now then," she said. "Let's do get to the point of all this, Mr. Strachey-Don.

You're not exactly in my home on a social call, are you? Crane Trefusis phoned earlier and told Peter that he was sending you over to help us out. That struck me as extremely peculiar. Is that correct? That you are working for Millpond?"

"It is. On this case, yes."

"Mm-hmm. Well. You know, I'll bet, just what my opinion of Crane Trefusis is, don't you? That he's a… a crock of rotgut." She shot a quick look down the hallway again.

"He mentioned it. Or words to that effect."

"However," she went on, watching me even more closely now, "I called up a mutual friend of yours and mine this afternoon, Lew Morton, and Lew told me emphatically that I could trust you.

He said even if you were being paid by Millpond you'd be a good man to have helping us out, and that you would know what you were doing. I didn't like the sound of that, but I trust Lew's judgment about people. So, Mister-Private-Eye-with-the Morals-of-Rhett-Butler-and the mustache-tell me then. Do you know what you're doing?"

I said, "No."

Greco laughed and Dot looked startled.

"All right then," she said, reassured slightly by Greco's good humor. "Let me put it this way. Do you plan to figure out what you're doing?"

"That's the plan," I said.

"And you're on our side in this great war with Millpond?"

"Absolutely. Trefusis is paying me to catch the vandals. We can both imagine what his motives are in hiring me instead of someone else, but forget that. I'll just do the job, and after that I bow out."

She considered this carefully for a long moment, then said, "And you understand that I am not selling this house under any circumstances?" Her face was set now, her dark eyes bright with emotion.

I said, "That's clear by now."

"Oh, all right then." She sighed, the apprehension about me fading but the fear still in her eyes.

"In fact, thank you. Yes, thank you very much. I'm a tough old bird, any of my former students will tell you quick enough. Yes, I've always been a very strong person. But I'm frightened. Today 14

I'm just scared to death. And I just want you to… I just hope you can help get us out of this… this phantasmagoria!"

"That's what I want to do."

"It has not been pleasant. Oh, no, not pleasant. First today it was those asinine words on the barn.

And then this infernal nonsense arrived."

She picked up the Burpee seed catalog she'd used as a fan, slid an envelope from between the pages, and handed it to me. I opened it, lifted out the single sheet of paper by a corner, flipped it open, and read: "You're next. You got three days. Saturday you die!"

It was hard to tell whether the printing had been done by the same hand responsible for the carriage house graffiti, which had been hurriedly and sloppily spray-painted. There were similarities in the way the Y's and G's slanted, but an expert would come up with a more reliable opinion than mine. Maybe the police would provide a graphologist and fingerprint person. I knew they did that sometimes.

I asked Dot to describe one more time the events of the past eighteen hours. She groaned, decided she'd better have a Schlitz, brought me and Greco each a can too, then sped through it.

Dot and Edith had gone to bed at eleven-thirty the night before, watched Nightline, then slept soundly with the air conditioner running. They were not awakened by any sounds during the night. At seven in the morning Dot went out to pick up the Times Union from the roadside box and saw the graffiti. She informed Edith, who promptly went back to bed with a headache. Dot phoned the police, who arrived around eight-thirty.

At eight-fifty the two patrolmen departed, having expressed sympathy and stated that a police detective would arrive later in the morning. None had. At nine-forty-five, Dot, frustrated and

"hopping mad," phoned Crane Trefusis and told him what she thought of "his cruel prank."

Trefusis denied all. He sent a PR lackey out to the house to recoil in horror and further plead Millpond's innocence, and a photographer to record the crime on film. These were the pictures I'd seen.

McWhirter and Greco arrived from New York City around eleven in their car, the old green Fiat I'd seen in the driveway alongside Dot's Ford Fiesta. McWhirter went straight for the phone book and began calling newspapers and radio and TV stations. A Millpond paint crew showed up at noon. Dot would have let them do the job, but McWhirter explained that none of the television people had arrived yet-"You get more air time with a good visual," he correctly pointed out-so the Millpond crew was sent away.

Trefusis called back in the early afternoon-probably just after he'd phoned me-and told Peter I might be showing up to help out. Dot refused to speak with Trefusis. At three, the threatening letter was discovered in the mailbox. Dot phoned the Albany Police Department once again and was promised assistance. As yet, none was forthcoming. A television news crew showed up an hour or so later, and soon after that I arrived.

"Fenton wasn't too happy to see Don," Peter told Dot. "He's convinced Don must be a spy or something for Millpond. Part of the pressure they're putting on you."

"That's understandable," I said. "Trefusis is one of Albany's most accomplished sneaks. I would have been just as suspicious of me myself."

"Fenton heard all about that Crane Trefusis from me," Dot said, getting the same nauseated look on her face that Trefusis's name tended to inspire in a lot of people, as if a dog under the table had silently farted. "Someday I'll tell you stories about that man that will just curl your hair!"

I looked over at Greco's curly hair and wondered if he'd already heard them. For the second time in an hour I wanted to reach over and take his head very carefully in my hands.

A door opened somewhere in the front reaches of the house, and a warbly nasal voice, like a flute with a piece of straw stuck in it, wafted down the hallway. "Dor-o-thy? Are you back there, Doro-thy?"

"Yes, we're back here, hon. In the kitchen."

A short plump woman in a floral print dress ambled into the room. She had an abstracted, vaguely wounded look, as if preoccupied with a deep pain that had begun a long time ago, or maybe her feet hurt. Her prominent jaw was set like a pink Maginot Line, and she had snow white hair done in a beauty parlor wave. She smelled of lilac water, face powder, and old bureau drawers. Through white plastic-framed glasses, her cool blue eyes gave me a weary baleful look. I was another sign of the trouble.

"Edith, this is Mr. Strachey," Dot said loudly. "He's a detective."

Edith squinted at me, looking lost, as I stood up.

"He's a detective, Edie. A detective-Donald Strachey."

"H. P. Lovecraft? Why, I thought he was dead!"

"Strachey. Donald Strachey, Edie. A detective who's going to catch the people who wrote on the barn!"

"Yes, yes, someone wrote on the barn, you already told me about that, Dorothy. I know all about that. Has anyone watered the peonies, Dorothy? This weather… my word!"

"Fenton and Peter watered them a little while ago, hon."

"The petunias in the window box look about ready to expire. And, my stars, I know just how they feel. Are you a gardener, Archie?"

She seemed to be addressing me. I said, "No, I'm not, Mrs. Stout. When I was a boy in New Jersey I once caused a single onion to sprout for my Cub Scout agrarian badge, but that's about the extent of it."

"We tried brussels sprouts too one year," Edith said sadly. "But the coons filched them."

"Oh. Sorry."

Something crossed her mind and, suddenly alert, she gave me the fish-eye. "I suppose you're one of Dorothy's gay-lib friends. Is that it? March up and down the street, make a commotion, get us all into this trouble?"

"I guess I am," I said. "But I don't think I'll march today, Mrs. Stout. Not in this weather."

"That is not what I meant," she said, glaring, "and you know it." She sniffed and gave Dot a why-do-you-do-this-to-me look. "I guess I'll just wander out and rest my feet by the pond for a spell. You young people enjoy yourselves. Are you coming out, Dorothy?"

"After a bit, hon. When it cools down a bit we can go for a stroll. And I think I'll take a quick dip in the pond later."

"Oh, that would be lovely," Edith said, forgetting the trouble again. "I'll fix some cucumber sandwiches and lemonade. This weather! My land, when will we get some relief!"

When Edith had gone, Dot smiled weakly. "Edie's hearing isn't what it once was. I guess you could tell. And, yes, she's fretful too, and forgetful and… every once in a while, thank the Lord, Edith is cheery and sweet and sharp as a tack. Just the way she used to be. But, oh dear, the years certainly are taking their toll. Not that that isn't to be expected. Edith's seven years older than I am, Don, did you know that? Edie will be seventy-six next month."

I wanted to say she didn't seem it, but she did. Older, in fact. Edith appeared sturdy enough, her health generally sound. But her mind was on its way out, well ahead of the rest of her. I wondered who this would happen to first-Timmy or me?

The telephone rang, and Dot sprang up to answer it. She was as light on her feet as Edith was heavy, as alert as Edith was vague and uncertain.

As Dot listened to the caller, I watched the color drain from her face. Abruptly, she slammed the receiver down. The blood returned to her cheeks and neck in a rush as she looked at me, stricken, and said, "Now they're phoning us with their horrible threats! Now this is the absolute limit!" end user