The Mask

kook I’ve got to deal with, then it really must’ve been Leonard on the phone. And that’s even more bizarre, don’t you think?”
    The cat turned his head from one side to the other, as if he really were trying to make sense of what she was saying.
    Grace stopped, held out her hand, and rubbed her thumb and forefinger together. “Here, kitty. Here, kitty-kitty-kitty.”
    Aristophanes hissed, spat, turned, and ran.
     
    For a change, they made love with the lights off.
    Carol’s breath was hot against his neck. She pressed close, rocked and tensed and twisted and flexed in perfect harmony with him; her exquisite, pneumatic movements were as fluid as currents in a warm river. She arched her elegant back, lifted and subsided in tempo with his measured strokes. She was as pliant, as silken, and eventually as all-encompassing as the darkness.
    Afterwards, they held hands and talked about inconsequential things, steadily growing drowsy. Carol fell asleep while Paul was talking. When she failed to respond to one of his questions, he gently disentangled his hand from hers.
    He was tired, but he couldn’t find sleep as quickly as she had found it. He kept thinking about the girl. He was certain he had seen her prior to their meeting outside the courtroom this morning. During dinner, her face had grown more and more familiar. It continued to haunt him. But no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t recall where else he had seen her.
    As he lay in the dark bedroom, paging through his memory, he gradually became uneasy. He began to feel—utterly without reason—that his previous encounter with Jane had been strange, perhaps even unpleasant. Then he wondered if the girl might actually pose some sort of threat to Carol and himself.
    But that’s absurd, he thought. Doesn’t make any sense at all. I must be even more tired than I thought.
    Logic seems to be slipping out of my grasp. What possible threat could Jane pose? She’s such a nice kid. An exceptionally nice kid.
    He sighed, rolled over, and thought about the plot of his first novel (the failed one), and that quickly put him to sleep.
     
    At one o’clock in the morning, Grace Mitowski was sitting up in bed, watching a late movie on the Sony portable. She was vaguely aware that Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall were engaged in witty repartee, but she didn’t really hear anything they said. She had lost track of the film’s plot only minutes after she had turned it on.
    She was thinking about Leonard, the husband she had lost to cancer eighteen years ago. He had been a good man, hard-working, generous, loving, a grand conversationalist. She had loved him very much.
    But not everyone had loved Leonard. He had had his faults, of course. The worst thing about him had been his impatience—and the sharp tongue that his impatience had encouraged. He couldn’t tolerate people who were lazy or apathetic or ignorant or foolish. “Which includes two-thirds of the human race,” he had often said when he was feeling especially curmudgeonly. Because he was an honest man with precious little diplomacy in his bones, he had told people exactly what he thought of them. As a result, he had led a life remarkably free of deception but rich in enemies.
    She wondered if it had been one of those enemies who had called her, pretending to be Leonard. A sick man might get as much pleasure from tormenting Leonard’s widow as he would have gotten from tormenting Leonard himself. He might get a thrill from poisoning her cat and from harassing her with weird phone calls.
    But after eighteen years? Who would have remembered Leonard’s voice so well as to be able to imitate it perfectly such a long time later? Surely she was the only person in the world who could still recognize that voice upon hearing it speak only a word or two. And why bring Carol into it? Leonard had died three years before Carol had entered Grace’s life; he had never known the girl. His enemies couldn’t possibly have anything against Carol. What had the caller meant when he’d referred to Carol as “Willa”? And, most disturbing of all, how did the caller know she had just made apple dumplings?
    There was another explanation, though she was loath to consider it. Perhaps the caller hadn’t been an old enemy of Leonard’s. Maybe the call actually had come from Leonard himself. From a dead man.
    —No. Impossible.
    —A lot of people believe in ghosts.
    —Not me.
    She thought about the strange dreams she’d had last week. She hadn’t