study door, and saw Shearman Waxx pass by in the downstairs hall.
I do not recall rising from the armchair or letting the book of short stories fall from my hands. I seemed to have imagined myself onto my feet in a thousandth of a second.
Now erect, I couldn’t imagine myself moving. Shock paralyzed me.
My heart continued to beat at the pace of a man reading in an armchair. Disbelief forestalled a sense of jeopardy.
O’Connor’s story had cast over me a pall of apprehension. In that altered state, my mind must have played a trick on me, must have conjured an intruder where none existed.
This phantom Waxx had not even glanced at me, as certainly he would have if he had been real and had come here to confront me for whatever reason. Perhaps Penny passed by in the hall, and the limber imagination of a novelist remade her into the critic.
The possibility that I could mistake my luminous and slender Penny for the dour hulk of Shearman Waxx was so absurd that my disbelief dissolved. I broke my paralysis.
Suddenly my heart mimicked iron on turf, the frantic thud of racing horses’ heels. I hurried to the open door, hesitated at the threshold, but then crossed it. The hallway was deserted.
Waxx had been headed toward the back of the house. I followed the shorter length of the hall to the kitchen, half expecting to find him selecting a blade from the knife drawer beside the cooktop.
Even as that image crossed my mind, I was embarrassed by my near hysteria. Shearman Waxx would surely disdain such melodrama in real life as much as he scorned it in fiction.
He lurked neither in the kitchen nor in the adjacent family room that flowed from it. One of the French doors to the back patio stood open, suggesting that he had departed by that exit.
Standing in the doorway, I surveyed the patio, the swimming pool, and the backyard. No sign of Waxx.
That eerie stillness had befallen the world again. The water in the pool lay as smooth as a sheet of glass.
While I had been reading, gunmetal clouds had armored the sky. They did not billow, neither did they churn, but looked as flat and motionless as a coat of paint.
Because we lived in the safest neighborhood of a low-crime community, we were in the habit of leaving our most-used doors unlocked during the day. That would change.
Bewildered by Waxx’s intrusion, I closed the French door and engaged the deadbolt.
Abruptly, I realized that the critic might have done more than pass through the house. If he had left by the family room, he could have entered elsewhere—and could have done some kind of damage.
Engaged in strange science, Milo was upstairs in his bedroom with Lassie.
In her second-floor studio, Penny painted the wide-eyed, sharp-beaked owl that hunted the band of heroic mice in her current book.
Although the dog had not barked and though no one had cried out in pain or terror, my mind insisted on the most unlikely scenario, on bludgeoned heads and cut throats. Our modern world is, after all, full of flamboyant violence; as often as not, the evening news is as disturbing as any slasher film.
I climbed the back stairs two at a time.
Milo’s bedroom door stood open, and he sat at his desk, alive and beguiled by electronic gizmos that meant less to me than would ancient tablets of stone carved with runes.
On the desk, watching her master at work, sat Lassie. She looked up as I entered, but Milo did not.
“Did you see him?” I asked.
Milo, who can multitask better than a Cray supercomputer, stayed focused on the gizmos but said, “See who?”
“The man…a guy wearing a red bow tie. Did he come in here?”
“You mean the man with three eyes and four nostrils?” he asked, revealing that perhaps he had been more aware of my spy game at the restaurant than I had realized.
“Yes, him,” I confirmed. “Did he come in here?”
“Nope. We would have freaked if he did.”
“Shout if you see him. I’ll be right back.”
The door to Penny’s studio was closed. I flung it open, rushed inside, and found her at the easel.
So dimensional was the image of the villain owl that it seemed to be flying at me from out of the canvas, beak wide to rend and eyes hot for blood.
Certain that she knew the cause of my breathless entrance, Penny spoke before I could say a word: “Did the coffeemaker assault you or have you used the dishwasher again and flooded the kitchen?”
“Big problem,” I said. “Milo. Come quick.”
She put down her brush and hurried after me. When she saw Milo tinkering in peace and Lassie without hackles raised, Penny sighed with relief and said to me, “The punch line better be hilarious.”
“Stay here with him. Brace the door with that chair when I leave.”
“What? Why?”
“If someone asks you to open the door, even if it sounds like me, don’t open it.”
“Cubby—”
“Ask something only I would know—like where we went on our first date. He probably can’t imitate my voice—I mean, he’s not a comic-book supercriminal, for God’s sake—but you never know.”
“He who? What’s wrong with you?”
“There was an intruder. I think he’s gone, but I’m not sure.”
Her eyes widened as might those of a mouse in the sudden shadow of a swooping owl. “Call 911.”
“He’s not that kind of intruder.”
“There isn’t any other kind.”
“Besides, I might have imagined him.”
“Did you see him or not?”
“I saw something.”
“Then it’s 911.”
“I’m a public figure. The media will follow the cops, it’ll be a publicity circus.”
“Better than you dead.”
“I’ll be okay. Use the chair as a brace.”
“Cubby—”
Stepping into the shorter of the two upstairs hallways, I pulled the door shut. I waited until I heard the headrail of the straight-backed chair knock
