Secret Prey

.’’
    ‘‘Okay. If you’re sure you’ll be all right.’’
    ‘‘Do you, uh . . . You used to take Prozac,’’ Audrey said. ‘‘Do you still use that?’’
    ‘‘Well, sure. Could hardly get along without it,’’ Helen said.
    ‘‘Do you think it would help? In the next few days?’’ Helen shook her head. ‘‘I don’t think it’s for your kind of problem, honestly. I could give you a few and you could try them, but I think a doctor could give you something better.’’
    ‘‘Maybe if I could just try a couple. If I don’t sleep tonight . . .’’
    ‘‘Sure. We’ll talk tomorrow.’’
    When Helen was gone, Audrey prowled through the house, already planning: she’d bundle up his suits, dump them at Goodwill and get a tax deduction. She got a notepad and wrote: ‘‘ACCOUNTANT/Taxes and Deductions,’’ and under that, ‘‘Suits.’’ Wilson had all kinds of crap she’d want to get rid of, starting with that XK-E. She wrote ‘‘Jag’’ under ‘‘Suits.’’ And he had a whole wall full of bullshit awards and plaques—chairman of this charity in 1994, director of that community effort in 1997. All worthless: straight into the garbage can, she thought.
    So much to do.
    Audrey really did hurt from Wilson’s beating, and from her own enhancements to the damage. The scalp wound, in particular, felt tight, like a banjo head, its edges seeming to pull against the stitches. After half an hour of cruising through the house, she went up to the bedroom, set the alarm clock for nine P.M., and tried to sleep.
    But sleep, she found, wouldn’t come easily. Too many images in her head, a mix of plans and memories. If Wilson had only landed the chairmanship, none of this would have happened. She’d believed in him from the start, and the belief had only begun to falter after Kresge got the top job six years earlier. Kresge was a technocrat, and brought in other technocrats like Bone and Robles. They had no respect for family name, for fortune, for breeding or society. All they knew was how to make money. Wilson, running the mortgage division, which had always been one of the pillars of the bank, was suddenly out on a limb.
    She didn’t know that sleep had come, but it must have. The clock went off: she sat up, a bit groggy, realized that the room was dark. She groped around the bedstand, found the clock, and silenced the alarm. Then she touched the light and swung out of bed.
    A little tension now. She went straight to the shower and stood under it, breathing deeply, flexing the muscles in her back and shoulders. Stiff. When she got out of the shower, she downed four ibuprofen tablets, then dressed: black slacks, a deep red sweater, and a dark blue jacket over the sweater. She found a pair of brown cotton gardening gloves, and pulled them on. The best she could do for nighttime camouflage. Now for a weapon.
    The police had been all through the house, but she remembered that when the closet rod broke in the front closet a year or so earlier, Wilson had tossed the broken dowel rod up in the rafters of the yard shed, where it lay with other scrap wood. She found a flashlight in the kitchen, let herself out the back, and walked in the dark to the shed. Inside, she turned the flash on. She could see the scrap wood overhead, but couldn’t reach it. The lawn tractor was there, and she stood on the seat, stretched to push the wood around, and saw the two pieces of the dowel rolling to one side. She got both of them down. One was a little more than six feet long, including the split; the other a little more than two feet long, including the sharp split end.
    She carried them both back to the house in the dark, and inside the porch gave the shorter of the two pieces a test swing. A little lighter than a baseball bat, but it swung just as well. Wearing the gloves, she rubbed both of them down with WD-40, eliminating any fingerprints.
    In the garage, she put both pieces in Wilson’s Buick, then climbed on top of the car hood, pulled the cover off the light on the garage door opener, and unscrewed the lightbulb. She climbed down from the car and put the bulb on the passenger seat.
    Ready. She took a deep breath, started the car, pushed the garage door opener. The door came up, but no light came on. She backed out of the garage, lights out, then rolled down the long driveway to the street. The houses were far enough apart, and the street dark enough, that she should be able to get out without being