Thomas Perry: Dead Aim

He unlocked the door and let her in first. She moved slowly around the living room while he slipped off his backpack and carried it to the laundry room off the kitchen. He knew she was examining his things and drawing conclusions about him. “Would you like tea or coffee or a soft drink, or… whatever?”

“I’d like a glass of water, and then I would like to sleep for an hour.”

He opened the refrigerator and took out one of the cold bottles of water he kept there for his walks. Then he climbed the stairs and showed her to the spare bedroom. “This is it. Make yourself comfortable. There’s a bathroom attached, with clean towels and everything, so you can take a hot shower. There’s a robe hanging on a hook behind the door. In the dresser there are T-shirts, sweatshirts, some shorts. None of them will fit you, but you can tighten a belt around the shorts to keep them up until yours dry. Anything else you need, holler.”

She stepped into the room and closed the door. As he reached the stairway, he heard the lock click into place. He didn’t blame her. Who the hell was he, anyway? And he supposed his behavior had struck her as at least mildly peculiar. She could not know why he wasn’t able to give up and leave her alone. She didn’t know that this was not his first try. He had been the last one in the family to talk to Nancy. It had been more than thirty years ago, but today the desperate, panicky feeling of regret that always came when he thought about Nancy had come back, almost as though he were getting a second chance but still didn’t know what to do.

Mallon sat in the living room, waiting. He stared at the empty staircase for minutes at a stretch, listening for the young woman to do something unexpected that he would need to oppose very quickly and flawlessly. When his eyes had stayed there for a very long time without anything happening, he turned and stared out the front window, still listening for sounds from above. He was not sure what he expected to see out there, but he knew what he wished he could see. He longed for the nonexistent, the impossible: an ambulance would pull up that was unmarked, and out would come a municipal team of specially trained psychiatrists-female psychiatrists at that, strong-minded but soft-voiced-who had been dispatched because somebody on the bluff above the beach had seen what had happened and reported it. They would gently bundle the girl in a blanket and rush her off to some discreet, ultramodern clinic for the suicidal. By bedtime there would be so many antidepressants in her bloodstream that she would be incapable of imagining herself dead.

He heard the faint sound of water running in the pipes below the room, then a distant hiss of spray from above. She was in the shower. He glanced at his watch and half-smiled, then realized that the knotted muscles between his shoulders had just relaxed a bit. She had slept for two hours, and now she was in the shower, feeling the hot water pelting her skin, warming her and soothing her. She was recovering.

The thought slowly curdled. He always left supplies in the guest bathroom, still in their packages from the store: soap, shampoo, toothbrushes, combs and hairbrushes, shaving cream, razors. Could she hurt herself with a disposable razor? If she broke off the plastic and sawed away at an artery, she could probably cut her way through. Maybe the hot water was to keep the blood flowing.

He told himself that it was foolish to think of such a thing, and retorted that it was foolish to think of anything else after seeing her try to kill herself. Bright blood could be spurting rhythmically from her neck and washing down his drain right now. How could he leave her alone up there to do it? But he could hardly burst into the shower.

The sound of the water stopped. He took a couple of deep breaths to calm himself while he tried to interpret it. A few minutes went by, but he still had no conclusion. Then the sound of running water began again. It sounded slightly different to him, but he was not sure why, until it occurred to him that this time it was the bath. The sound suddenly grew louder. The door up there must have opened. He revised the impression: it must have been both doors, not just the one to the hallway, but the bathroom door too. He stood and looked in the direction of the stairs.

The girl appeared on the upstairs landing, his bathrobe cinched tightly at the waist and coming to her ankles. She said, “I’m running your bath for you. Come on up.” Then she disappeared into the upstairs hallway.

Mallon hesitated for a moment. Running a bath for him wasn’t a normal thing for a suicidal girl to do, or even a thing that he could have anticipated as possible under the circumstances. But it had the curious effect of imposing normalcy on the proceedings in the house. They had both been in the ocean and walked home in wet clothes. She’d had her chance to wash the sand and salt off, and now in the natural order of events, he could have his turn. He sensed that to reject her restoration of simple civility, to insist on treating her as a mental patient, someone whose acts needed to be scrutinized and mistrusted, would be a bad tactic. As long as she had a desire to behave well, he must let her. As he walked to the staircase, it occurred to him that a strange reversal had taken place. Now he was the one who was behaving irrationally, acting as though nothing had happened.

He climbed the stairs. The door to the guest room was closed. He could tell that the bath he heard running now was the one down the hall, in his master suite. It was a little presumptuous of her to go into rooms he had not invited her to enter, but he chided himself for that thought. Was she supposed to have him use the smaller guest bathroom that he had set aside to be hers? That would have felt even more awkward, because it would imply a kind of forced proximity, even intimacy. He was going to accept her gesture exactly as it had been made. What other sign of sanity could he demand of her, than her acting sane?

He entered his bedroom and stepped through it into his bathroom. The water was high in the oversized bath, and the air jets had been turned on and left bubbling. He tested the temperature of the bath water, turned it off, then closed the bathroom door. He took off his walking shoes and his shorts, pulled the T-shirt off, then stepped into the tiled shower stall. He had decided that the bath would feel better after he washed off the sand and salt, as she had done. He washed his hair, soaped himself and rinsed, then turned the shower off. He opened the glass door, stepped onto the mat, and caught a shape at the edge of his vision. He had not heard the door open, and the impression of an intruder made his muscles stiffen and his chest draw in air in preparation for a struggle. His head whirled to see.

She smiled at him pleasantly and said, “I hope I didn’t startle you. Didn’t the shower feel great?” She ran a hand through her long, wet hair.

Mallon took a step backward to place his body back out of her line of vision in the shower stall. “Yes, it did,” he said calmly.

“You don’t need to hide in there now,” she said. “I already got an eyeful.” She stepped close to the big bathtub, then turned away from him and let the bathrobe fall to the floor. She bent at the hips to place her hand on the rim of the tub to steady herself, then put a foot in the water. His eyes were drawn down her smooth back to her buttocks and the glimpse between her thighs.

She laughed, a sudden giggle, and his eyes shot to the mirrored wall and met hers. She had been watching his reaction. She straightened and slowly turned to face him, stood still for a moment with her arms held out from her sides. “It’s just me.” She sat down, and the water rose nearly to her breasts. “Come on in. I left you plenty of room.”