In Self Defense

by Susan R. Sloan

  Richard was never far from her side. Except for what he could do by telephone, he all but abandoned his work while Clare remained in Port Angeles. Even after she was finally released from the hospital, and an ambulance had brought her home to the sprawling Tudor style mansion in the exclusive Seattle suburb of Laurelhurst, he went to the office for only a couple of hours each day. At all other times, he could be found at his wife’s side, feeding her, plumping her pillows, arranging her bedding, massaging her temples, reading to her, or just sitting quietly by the bed, loathe to leave her for so much as a moment.

  Seeing him, Doreen Mulcahy, the housekeeper, wagged her head back and forth.

  “That man is carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders,” she was heard to mutter. “Why, you’d almost think he was to blame for what happened.”

  “He does blame himself,” Richard’s sister, Elaine Haskell, told her. “You know him -- he prides himself on always being in control of everything. He thinks that somehow he should have been able to prevent what happened to Clare.”

  After a week, however, Clare had had enough. “Please, Richard, go back to work,” she begged. “You don’t have to hover. Really, I’m going to be all right.”

  “Are you sure?” he asked.

  “I’m sure,” she told him. Her legs were in casts, as was her arm, her shoulder was immobilized in a sling, her punctured lung and cracked ribs were slowly healing themselves -- as were the cuts and bruises all over her body, and the gash on her head was repairing itself beneath its sutures. She was physically exhausted and emotionally drained. What more could happen to her?

  “Well, if you’re sure,“ he said. He didn’t have to be told twice. He was gone in a matter of minutes, like a recalcitrant schoolboy released from detention.

  Clare breathed a big sigh of relief. Despite heavy medication, she was in constant pain and discomfort, and she was frightened -- more frightened than she had ever been in her life. She could put on a brave face for a few minutes at a time, for friends and family who insisted on coming to visit, but it was far too great an effort to do it twenty-four hours a day in front of her husband.

  It wasn’t long before Richard slipped back into his old habit of leaving early in the mornings and returning late in the evenings, sometimes as late as midnight. To make up for his absence, or perhaps to assuage his guilt, he sent his assistant to Laurelhurst as often as possible. Clare smiled to herself. She knew her husband so well. But she didn’t mind. She liked James Lilly. He was perhaps two or three years younger than she, actually much brighter than he let people know, and although somewhat shy, he had a devilish sense of humor. He sat by her bed and made her want to laugh instead of cry.

  It was James who finally got her out of bed. “You can’t hide in there forever,” he declared, six weeks after her release from the hospital. “The doctor says your elbow and your shoulder are healing nicely and they’re strong enough to use, so it’s time for you to get up and rejoin the world.”

  Were it anyone but James saying it, she might have said no, but he was so sweet and so caring and so funny, she didn’t have the heart to refuse. He made light of the crutches, showing her how to maneuver with them without looking too ungainly.

  “These things may seem awkward to you, but they have a multitude of uses,” he told her. “Among other things, they make great weapons.” And he showed her how to brandish them as though she were engaging a foe.

  “I have only one question,” she said. “How am I supposed to stay standing while I’m using these things to smite my enemy?”

  “Don’t bother me with minor points,” he said. “You’re here to learn from the master.”

  “The master, eh?” she said with a chuckle. “And how many broken legs have you survived?”

  “Well, at least one more than you, in my lifetime,” he declared. “So, back to walking. The first thing you do is you take your time. After all, how would it look for you to survive falling off a mountain only to trip over your crutches and break your neck?”

  She practiced by going up and down the second-floor hallway, swinging her cast-heavy legs, letting the crutches carry her along. By the third week of August, although her armpits were aching, she was able to negotiate the stairs, and surprised the children one evening by coming downstairs for dinner.

  “Gee, Mom,” Peter said his whole face lighting up. “Look at you go. When did you get so cool?”

  “While you weren’t looking, I guess,” Clare declared, quite pleased with herself.

  “I like Uncle James,” Julie said with a giggle. “He’s funny sometimes.”

  “I like him, too,” Clare told her.

  Unfortunately, Richard missed the big event. He called to say he was stuck in a late meeting.

  Soon enough, Clare began to think about going back to work. For the past four years, she had been an editor at Thornburgh House, a small but prestigious publishing firm, one of a handful that, some thirty-five years ago, had defied common wisdom about publishing houses needing to be located in New York City and set up shop in Seattle. Although Glenn Thornburgh, the head of the firm, had been more than solicitous, she knew things were piling up, and she also knew she was not indispensable.

  Not that Clare had to work. In fact, it was well known to everyone that she did not. She was just not the kind of person who was content to stay at home. She worked because she wanted to.

  Her leg and elbow casts were due to come off in another couple of weeks, and although it would be a while before she could get behind the wheel of a car, there were always car services that, for a fee, would be only too happy to take her from Laurelhurst to Pioneer Square and then return her to Laurelhurst each day.

  It would be good to get back to work, she decided. It would be good to get involved, to be productive again. It would give her something to think about other than herself.

  “I don’t like the way Julie’s acting,” Doreen declared a few days after Clare’s debut at dinner.

  “What do you mean?” Clare asked.

  “She put up a good front at supper the other night,” the housekeeper said, “but that’s all it was -- a front. If you look closely, you’ll see there’s something very wrong going on inside.”

  “Do you know what it is?”

  Doreen shrugged. “I don’t know as I can say,” she said. “I know it started right after your accident. And it’s been getting worse since you came home from the hospital.” She opened her mouth as if to say something else, and then changed her mind.

  Clare frowned. It was true that she had been pretty self-absorbed since the accident, but if there was something going on with her daughter, she needed to know about it.

  It took only a little bit of careful observation to see exactly what Doreen was talking about. Julie seemed to have retreated into herself. Her cheeks were pale and her eyes had a hollow, almost haunted look to them. She hardly laughed anymore, and rarely spoke unless spoken to. At meals, she did little more than push the food around her plate. Like a shadow, she hid in corners and behind doors, watching, waiting, seemingly unwilling to let her mother out of her sight, as though afraid, if she did, something awful would happen.

  Now that Clare was paying attention, it was obvious that Julie was well on her way to making herself sick.

  “I’m going to be all right,” she assured the twelve-year-old. “What happened on the mountain -- well, you know, things just happen sometimes, and there’s nothing we can do about it. But I’m home now. I’m safe. And I’m getting well. You don’t have to worry about me anymore.”

  “Yes, I do,” Julie said stubbornly.

  Clare put her arms around the girl and pulled her close, holding her as tight as her injuries, and her daughter, would allow.

  “I love you very much,” she said. “And you can believe me when I tell you not to worry. Everything is going to be all right. I’m not going to leave you. I promise.”

  ***

  August 29th was Clare’s thirty-eighth birthda
y. On that morning, her leg casts came off, and she had her first session with the physical therapist that was going to teach her how to walk all over again. That afternoon, Doreen baked a cake, a double chocolate fudge cake, Clare’s favorite, in preparation for a celebratory dinner. That evening, Richard came home from work early.

  “Come with me,” he said, tossing away her crutches, sweeping her up in his arms, and carrying her out the front door and down the stone steps. Parked in the curve of the circular driveway was a shiny new red BMW.

  “Happy birthday,” he said, setting her down beside it, and breaking into a huge smile.

  “Richard, how extravagant,” she exclaimed. Clare knew little about automobiles, but she knew enough to know there was over a hundred thousand dollars sitting in front of her.

  “So what?” he said. “You’re only thirty-eight once, you know.”

  She didn’t bother to remind him that, although the casts were indeed off now, and her legs technically healed, it was going to be weeks, if not months, before she would be able to drive again. Nor, at that moment, does she think it would be kind to tell him that she really loved the Toyota Camry she had been driving for less than a year, and wasn’t nearly ready to give it up.

  “Thank you, darling,” she murmured instead. “It’s beautiful.”

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s take it for a little spin. I’ll drive.” He started to help her into the car, but unaccountably, she stiffened against him. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “Does something hurt?” She shook her head. “Well then, come on. We have plenty of time before dinner.”

  “If we’re going, why don’t we take the children with us?” she suggested. “I think they’d enjoy it, too.”

  “There’ll be plenty of opportunities for that some other day,” he said, his arm tightening around her. “Right now, I think it would be nice for just the two of us to go.”

  “But it’s my birthday,” she insisted, holding him off and pressing her back against the car door for support. “I don’t want to just up and leave them.”

  He almost pouted. “I thought it would be fun, you know, just you and me for a change,” he said. “But if you’d rather not, then perhaps some other time.”

  “Oh, Richard,” she said, don’t be childish on the tip of her tongue to add.

  But he was already heading back toward the house, leaving her with no way to negotiate the distance by herself. She looked after him, so many emotions churning inside of her that she could barely sort them all out. He would realize her predicament after a moment or two, but he wouldn’t come back himself. He would send one of the children out with her crutches. Clare sighed and then smiled and then shook her head. She knew her husband so well.

  Two

  “Hello, Clare,” the voice at the other end of the telephone said -- the voice she had come to recognize, without actually recognizing it, for the past three weeks.

  With one hand holding the receiver to her ear, and the other holding a coffee mug halfway to her lips, she froze. It was nine-thirty in the morning on the first Monday in October, and Clare, not even a month back at work, had been in her office on the third floor of Thornburgh House for less than ten minutes.

  The office was much like the woman who occupied it -- warm and inviting, with exposed brick walls and soft lighting, a Persian rug that covered most of the polished wood floor, and sturdy, comfortable furniture, cluttered with books and manuscripts and potted plants, family photographs and memorabilia. And Clare, who preferred the personal approach, liked to answer her own phone whenever she could.

  “What do you want?” she asked, her usually soft and gentle voice gone so flat and cold that her secretary, bringing in the morning mail, was momentarily taken aback.

  “Did you have a nice weekend?” the voice asked.

  “Yes, I did,” she replied. “Now what do you want?”

  “You know what I want,” the voice taunted.

  “No,” she cried. “I don’t know. You just keep saying I know, but you never tell me.”

  Nina Jacobsen, a lanky, dark-eyed brunette in her early forties, stepped out of her office directly across the way.

  “Is that him again?” she mouthed to the secretary she shared with Clare. Anne-Marie Todd nodded and Nina rolled her eyes upward. “Why doesn’t she just hang up?”

  “I want you, of course,” the voice said.

  “But don’t you understand, I don’t want you,” Clare declared, and both women could see that she was close to tears. “So why can’t you just leave me alone?”

  “Because you’re just too beautiful,” the voice crooned.

  “How would you know that?” she demanded. “We’ve never met. We don’t know each other.”

  “Really?” the voice said. “Well then, it must be in my dreams that I see this exceedingly attractive woman with big brown eyes and blonde hair that feathers down to her shoulders. Oh yes, and by the way, you look quite lovely in that shade of blue.”

  With a little gasp, Clare dropped the receiver, and ran out of her office, her eyes peering up and down, as though frantically searching for someone who might be playing a joke on her, someone who knew what she looked like, someone who might have noticed, when she came in ten minutes ago, that she was wearing a blue dress.

  She was barely three weeks off her crutches, and still walked with an awkward little pitch to her gait that made her appear to be on the verge of falling.

  “Hasn’t this been going on long enough?” Nina inquired as she and Anne-Marie stood in the corridor and watched Clare’s antics.

  “I guess you could say that,” Clare agreed with a shaky breath. “But I don’t know how to get him to stop.”

  “Well, if he isn’t getting the message, why don’t you call the police?”

  “The police?” Clare repeated, genuinely startled. “Oh, I couldn’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “What would I tell them -- that some man I don’t know won’t stop calling me?”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what you tell them,” Nina declared. “It’s called harassment, and it’s against the law.”

  “Oh, but I’d feel so foolish,” Clare said. “I mean, he’s just a crank caller, after all. He hasn’t really done anything.”

  “You don’t think calling you half a dozen times a day, every day for weeks now, is doing something?”

  “It isn’t really that often,” Clare corrected her, “and you know what I mean.”

  Nina raised her eyebrows. “Do we know what she means, Anne-Marie?” she asked the secretary.

  The fresh-faced, red-headed secretary shook her head. “I don’t know what she means.”

  “Neither do I,” Nina said, and turned to Clare. “But what I do know is that you’re a nervous wreck, you jump a mile every time he calls, and lately, whenever we go out, you’re looking over your shoulder a whole lot more than you’re looking ahead. Now, this is serious. Obviously, this guy has misplaced some of his marbles. And he knows where you work. What if he also knows where you live? Have you thought about that? You have a family. You have a husband and two kids you care about. Do you really want to put them at risk from this lunatic?”

  “No,” Clare admitted, as tears began to press against the corners of her eyes.

  “Then stop being such a ninny and get some help.” Nina Jacobsen was nobody’s fool. She had been around the block a few times and had two ex-husbands to prove it. She had known Clare for four years, and now she leveled a probing glance at the frightened woman. “Unless, of course, you’re afraid of what will happen if Richard finds out?”

  Clare looked away. “You know he never wanted me to take this job,” she said. “I had to kick and scream and cry real tears to get him to let me go back to work after Peter started school. But he’s never been happy about it. He sees it as an affront to his manhood. Bless his mother’s heart, he’s hopelessly old-fashioned, and he thinks that any wife of his should be content just to grace his home and raise his chil
dren and do good works in the community. I know him. If he finds out about this, he’ll make a big fuss, and try to make me quit.”

  Nina sighed. “We’ve known each other for oure years now,” she said. “And in all that time, I’ve never once known you not to be able to get around Richard. Nor do I think you should have to give up a job you love just because some sicko out there wants to get his jollies at your expense.”

  The instant the word “sicko” came out of Nina’s mouth, the telephone on the desk in Clare’s office rang again.

  “You don’t want to hang up on me like that, you know,” the voice said.

  “Don’t I?” Nina replied, having beaten Clare to the receiver.

  The line went dead.

  ***

  From the time she was six years old, anyone who asked Erin Hall what she was going to be when she grew up would have gotten the same answer. “I’m going to be a woman policeman,” she always replied. “I’m going to catch bad people and make good people safe.”

  Of course it helped that both her father and her uncle were police officers in her hometown of Yakima, some hundred and forty miles over the mountains to the east of Seattle. But Erin had no intention of staying in Yakima, and beat a path out of there just as soon as she graduated from high school.

  Half Irish and half Native American, Erin had a tall, lean, athletic body, high cheekbones, angular features, and a freckled complexion that didn’t fare too well in the sun. Her brown eyes danced with flecks of gold, and her hair, which she liked to wear in a thick braid down her back, was the color of clay. At the age of thirty-four, she had risen higher and faster in the ranks than many of the men who had graduated from the police academy in the same class she had.

  Now entering her fourteenth year with the Seattle Police Department, she had the respect of both her peers and her superiors. She earned it by being smart, working hard, and oftener than not, carrying more than her share of the load without complaining and without allowing anyone to take advantage of her good nature. No man in the department had ever had cause to worry about his back when she was out there covering it. And none had ever attempted to take unwelcome liberties.