Chapter Three
At two forty-five in the middle of the dark storm, a terrific lightning bolt rammed the earth behind my bungalow. Thunder erupted. Mice died in the walls.
Rattigan leaped upright in bed.
“Save me!” she yelled.
“Constance.” I stared through the dark. “You talking to yourself, God, or me?”
“Whoever’s listening!”
“We all are.”
She lay in my arms.
The telephone rang at three A.M., the hour when all souls die if they need to die.
I lifted the receiver.
“Who’s in bed with you?” Maggie asked from some country with no rains and no storms.
I searched Constance’s suntanned face, with the white skull lost under her summer flesh.
“No one,” I said.
And it was almost true.