Misery

almost was the key word. She had slipped in Boulder and wriggled away mostly due to luck. Now she had slipped again. He had seen it. She had washed the blood off the mower but forgotten the blade underneath — the whole blade housing, for that matter. She might remember later, but Paul didn’t think so. Things had a way of dropping out of Annie’s mind once the immediate moment was past. It occurred to him that the mind and the mower had a lot in common — what you could see looked all right. But if you turned the thing over to take a look at the works, you saw a blood-slimed killing machine with a very sharp blade.
She returned to the kitchen door and let herself into the house again. She went upstairs and he heard her rummaging there for awhile. Then she came down again, more slowly, dragging something that sounded soft and heavy. After a moment’s consideration, Paul rolled the wheelchair across to his door and leaned his ear against the wood.
Dim, diminishing footfalls — slightly hollow. And still that soft flumping sound of something being dragged. Immediately his mind lit up with panicky floodlights and his skin flushed with his terror.
Shed! She’s gone to the shed to get the axe! It’s the axe again!
But this was only a momentary atavism, and he pushed it roughly away. She hadn’t gone into the shed; she was going down cellar. Dragging something down cellar.
He heard her come up again and he rolled back to the window. As her boot-heels approached his door, as the key slid into the lock again, he thought: She’s come to kill me. And the only emotion this thought engendered was tired relief.

The door opened and Annie stood there, looking at him contemplatively. She had changed into a fresh white tee-shirt and a pair of chinos. A small khaki bag, too big to be a purse and not quite big enough to be a knapsack, was slung over one shoulder.
As she came in, he was surprised to find himself able to say it, and say it with a certain amount of dignity: “Go ahead and kill me, Annie, if that’s what you mean to do, but at least have the decency to make it quick. Don’t cut anything more off me.”
“I’m not going to kill you, Paul.” She paused. “At least, not if I have just a little luck. I should kill you — I know that — but I’m crazy, right? And crazy people often don’t look after their best interests, do they?” She went behind him and propelled him across the room, out the door, and down the hall. He could hear her bag slapping solidly against her side, and it occurred to him that he had never seen her carrying a bag like that before. If she went to town in a dress, she carried a big, clunky purse — the sort of purse maiden aunts tote to church jumble sales. If she went in pants, she went with a wallet stuck in her hip pocket, like a man.
The sunlight slanting into the kitchen was strong bright gold. Shadows from the legs of the kitchen table lay across the linoleum in horizontal stripes like the shadows of prison bars. It was quarter past six according to the clock over the range, and while there was no reason to believe she was any less sloppy about her clocks than her calendars (the one out here had actually made it to May), that seemed about right. He could hear the first evening crickets tuning up in Annie’s field. He thought, I heard that same sound as a small, unhurt boy, and for a moment he nearly wept.
She pushed him into the pantry, where the door to the basement stood open. Yellow light staggered up the stairs and fell dead on the pantry floor. The smell of the late-winter rainstorm which had flooded it still lingered.
Spiders down there, he thought. Mice down there. Rats down there.
“Uh-uh,” he told her. “Count me out.” She looked at him with a level sort of impatience, and he realized that since killing the cop, she had seemed almost sane. Her face was the purposeful if slightly harried face of a woman making ready for a big dinner party.
“You’re going down there,” she said. “The only question is whether you’re going down piggyback or bum over teakettle. I’ll give you five seconds to decide.”
“Piggy-back.” he said at once.
“Very wise.” She turned around so he could put his arms around her neck. “Don’t do anything stupid like trying to choke me, Paul. I took a karate class in Harrisburg. I was good at it. I’ll flip you. The floor is dirt but very hard. You’ll break your back.” She hoisted him easily. His legs, now unsplinted but as crooked and ugly as something glimpsed through a rip in the canvas of a freak-show tent, hung down. The left, with the salt-dome where the knee had been, was fully four inches shorter than the right. He had tried standing on the right leg and had found he could, for short times,