and worry involved. Living off the pines was like having the key to a supermarket, provided you knew what you were doing. It never ceased to amaze him how little most people knew.
“Oh, Christ,” he groaned aloud. “You’re back, are you?”
He heard an obscenely eager snuffling. It reminded him of a dog after a groundhog, magnified a hundred times. But he was the groundhog, and this flimsy house wasn’t nearly so secure as a deep burrow.
He extinguished the lamp and took his loaded shotgun from its place beside the door. Heavy though it was, it felt inadequate. Anything capable of making such a noise had the bulk of an elephant.
He went on tiptoe to the window, but low clouds made it very dark outside. Something scraped clumsily against the side of the house.
He wasn’t terribly afraid. He had lived for a long time with the foreknowledge of a lonely death, and he had pictured it in all of its forms. Worst of all would be a wasting illness, his body stuck full of tubes and needles in some charity ward while bright young nurses cheerily treated him like a retarded child. Best of all would be a fall on a slippery rock, a bite from a particularly venomous rattler, a misstep in a forest fire. If those accidents proved less than fatal, or if he noted the first signs of a wasting illness, he had made up his mind to turn the shotgun on himself. He had already lived four times longer than either of his children.
He thought of turning the gun on himself now. But what a fool he would be if he were misinterpreting what he heard! Perhaps these noises were being caused somehow by malicious youngsters. He had seen many strange-looking kids lately, and—
The house trembled under the impact of a heavy body.
This was intolerable. He had worked hard at making up the rules for his life, and he had stuck to them. Now, suddenly and unjustly, a wild card had been put into play, a force that was inaccessible to his experience or his intelligence or even his senses. He howled with rage.
“Stop it! Stop it, you bastard! Come in here and get me if you want, but show yourself! Let me see what you are!”
Driven nearly mad by the injustice, frustrated by an enemy he couldn’t cut or shoot or even see, the old man threw aside his gun and struggled to open the window. He had time for only one scream as the frame and the glass burst inward around him.
CHAPTER TWO
If you didn’t mind disorder, the city room of the Riveredge Banner normally looked like a good place to take a nap. On a typical workday, a few reporters lounged around the untidy office, but they seldom found the energy to attack their typewriters unless Jack Higgins, the managing editor, was present to goad them.
On Wednesday nights, that changed. The paper went to bed on Thursday mornings. Late-breaking stories were covered energetically for the pages that hadn’t been locked up in order to give the weekly a look of up-to-the-minute timeliness.
And whenever she had to work on that night, Marcia Creighton found it easy to pretend that she was working for a real newspaper, one that thrived on life-or-death deadline pressures.
It was Wednesday night, but it was still early for the kind of pandemonium that often developed. The real activity wouldn’t start until eleven, when the staff would begin drifting in from scattered meetings of municipal governments. By that time, Marcia hoped, she would have completed her story about the township Planning Board and be on her way home.
She might not make it, though. Her efforts to finish her story had been interrupted five or six times by telephone calls: obituaries she had to transcribe, circulation problems she couldn’t solve, belated ads she couldn’t take. Her conscience wouldn’t permit her to ignore a ringing telephone; and Ron Green, the only other person in the city room, was busy with his own calls.
Ron was another one who liked to pretend that he was a real newspaperman; although with Ron, it was less a game to make work more interesting than it was an obsessive delusion. He habitually talked and acted like something out of an amateur production of Front Page. She had never actually heard him say “Stop the presses!” but she believed he could have said it with a straight face.
She knew it was unkind to laugh at Ron Green. She could take her job lightly, as a kind of footnote to her existence as a suburban housewife, but Ron’s job was his whole life. Now in his mid-thirties, he had worked on a dozen progressively less prestigious newspapers across the country. He had nothing to go home to but a furnished room, a six-pack, and a police radio.
He was always talking about “getting a break” or “making the right connections” to land a job on the New York Daily News, but Marcia knew that he didn’t stand a chance. With his loud checked jackets and string neckties, they wouldn’t have let him through the front door. Even if they did, he would have soon revealed himself as a lousy reporter. He couldn’t spell; he couldn’t put a sentence together. These faults might have been overlooked if he’d had a flair for gathering news, but he didn’t. Even when he got a good story, he managed to screw up the facts. Add to that his brash demeanor, his beer-belly, his late-blooming acne, and it was difficult for Marcia to imagine how he’d even managed to get a job on the Banner.
The phone rang. Marcia glanced at Ron’s back, emblazoned with big blue and yellow checks. He made no move to answer it. She sighed. The call would probably prove to be a funeral director with an obituary, in which case Ron if he did answer it, would ask her to take it from the eminence of his seniority.
“Banner, Mrs. Creighton.”
“This is Joe Reilly,” the voice on the telephone said. “I have an obit.”
“Just a minute, Mr. Reilly.” Marcia took her Planning Board story out of her typewriter and rolled in a fresh sheet of copy paper.
Unexpectedly, Ron Green heaved his bulk around in his chair. “Hey, is that Joe Reilly?” he demanded. “I been trying to get that son of a bitch all day.”
Before Marcia could react, he picked up the phone and started talking. She hung up her extension and waited, not patiently. He could have let her take the obit before crashing in like that; but good manners didn’t go with his Front Page act.
“Yeah, I been trying to reach you, Reilly, Yeah, Ron Green. Listen…I know…I know…of course. No, of course not. Yeah, well, news, what news is, it’s sometimes embarrassing, that’s the name of the game, you know? No…no…now, wait a minute…wait just one minute. Look, Reilly, if a stiff gets up and walks around in your joint, that’s news, I don’t give a shit whose stiff it is…What’s that supposed to mean? Hey, wait a minute!”
“My God,” Marcia said into the silence that followed. “What was that all about?”
“The son of a bitch hung up on me,” Ron said. He seemed amazed and aggrieved, even though people were always hanging up on him. “Listen, if he calls back, give him to me, will you?”
“All right, but what’s it all about?”
“What it’s all about is a lot of crap, if you ask me,” Ron said, turning his plaid back to her once more and dialing the phone with the receiver cradled between his cheek and his shoulder. “But you never can tell.”
Marcia seethed with a mixture of annoyance and curiosity, but she knew Ron well enough not to show either. If she criticized his bad manners, they would get worse. If she accused him of teasing her with mysterious hints, he would positively torture her with them. He refused to take her seriously as a person,
