Gerald's Game(106)

All that's off the subject, though-I was telling you about the conversation I had with Brandon after I'd told him there might have been a stranger in the house, He agreed, and most emphatically, that it would be better to let sleeping dogs lie. I guessed I could live with that-it was a great relief just to have told one person-but I still wasn't quite ready to let it go.

"The convincer was the phone," I told him. "When I got out of the handcuffs and tried it, it was as dead as Abe Lincoln. As soon as I realized that, I became sure I was right-there had been a guy, and at some point he'd cut the telephone line coming in from the road. That's what really got my ass out the door and into the Mercedes. You don't know what scared is, Brandon, until you suddenly realize you might be out in the middle of the woods with an uninvited houseguest."

He was smiling, but it was a less winning smile that time, I'm afraid. It was the kind of smile men always seem to get on their faces when they're thinking about how silly women are, and how it should really be against the law to let them out without keepers. "You came to the conclusion that the line was cut after checking one phone-the one in the bedroom-and finding it dead. Right?"

That wasn't exactly what happened and it wasn't exactly what I'd thought, but I nodded-partly because it seemed easier, but mostly because it doesn't do much good to talk to a man when he gets that particular expression on his face. It's the one that says, "Women! Can't live with "em, can't shoot "em!" Unless you've changed completely, Ruth, I'm sure you know the one I'm talking about, and I'm sure you'll understand when I say that all I really wanted at that point was for the entire conversation to be over.

"It was unplugged, that's all," Brandon said. By then he was sounding like Mister Rogers, explaining that sometimes it surely does seem like there's a monster under the bed, by golly, but there's really not. "Gerald pulled the t-connector out of the wall. He probably didn't want his afternoon off-not to mention his little bondage fantasy-interrupted by calls from the office. He'd also pulled the plug on the one in the front hall, but the one in the kitchen was plugged in and working just fine. I have all this from the police reports."

The light dawned, then, Ruth. I suddenly understood that all of them, all the men investigating what had happened out at the lake-had made certain assumptions about how I'd handled the situation and why I'd done the things I'd done. Most of them worked in my favor, and that certainly simplified things, but there was still something both infuriating and a little spooky in the realization that they drew most of their conclusions not from what I'd said or from any evidence they'd found in the house, but only from the fact that I'm a woman, and women can be expected to behave in certain predictable ways.

When you look at it that way, there's no difference at all between Brandon Milheron in his natty three-piece suits and old Constable Teagarden in his satchel-seat bluejeans and red firehouse suspenders. Men still think the same things about us they have always thought, Ruth-I'm sure of it. A lot of them have learned to say the right things at the right times, but as my mother used to say, "Even a cannibal can learn to recite the Apostles" Creed."

And do you know what? Brandon Milheron admires me, and he admires the Way I handled myself after Gerald dropped dead. Yes he does. I have seen it on his face time after time, and if he drops by this evening, as he usually does, I am confident I will see it there again. Brandon thinks I did a damned good job, a damned brave job... for a woman. In fact, I think that by the time we had our first conversation about my hypothetical visitor, he had sort of decided I'd behaved the way he would have in a similar situation... if, that is, he'd had to deal with a high fever at the same time he was trying to deal with everything else. I have an idea that's how most men believe most women think: like lawyers with malaria. It would certainly explain a lot of their behaviour, wouldn't it?

I'm talking about condescension-a man-versus-woman thing-but I'm also talking about something a hell of a lot bigger and a hell of a lot more frightening, as well. He didn't understand, you see, and that has nothing to do with any differences between the sexes; that's the curse of being human, and the surest proof that all of us are really alone. Terrible things happened in that house, Ruth, I didn't know just how terrible until later, and he didn't understand that. I told him the things I did in order to keep that terror from eating me alive, and he nodded and he smiled and he sympathized, and I think it ended up doing me some good but he was the best of them, and he never got within shouting distance of the truth... of how the terror just seemed to keep on growing until it became this big black haunted house inside my head. It's still there, too, standing with its door open, inviting me to come back inside any time I want, and I never do want to go back, but sometimes I find myself going back, anyway, and the minute I step inside, the door slams shut behind me and locks itself.

Well, never mind. I suppose it should have relieved me to know my intuition about the telephone lines was wrong, but it didn't. Because there was a part of my mind which believed-and believes still-that the bedroom telephone wouldn't have worked even if I had crawled behind that chair and plugged it in again, that maybe the one in the kitchen was working later but it sure as hell wasn't working then, that it was get the hell away from the house in the Mercedes or die at the hands of that creature.