by Elaine Ford
When she’d stowed her coat, Anne’s eye was caught by something on the otherwise-bare, glass-topped coffee table: a tangle of black cotton thread. She set down her book bag and took a look. Close up, the tangle seemed almost to have a pattern to it, as though the thread had been loosely woven into a circle.
This was getting too weird. Since the landlord’s office closed at five, she left a message on his home answering machine and went to the kitchen to see about her dinner.
Mr. Peyzer returned her call as she was finishing up the dishes. “What’s the problem?” he asked briskly.
“I guess it’s not really an emergency. I just . . . I have the suspicion that someone’s been in my apartment.”
“What makes you think so?” She could hear the exaggerated patience in Mr. Peyzer’s voice, the tone with which men deal with hysterical females to whom they are required to be polite.
“I keep finding things, like a button on the living room floor—not my button. A needle in the sofa arm.” She knew how ridiculous this sounded. He was going to conclude that she was becoming one of those nuisance tenants who drive landlords insane. “I was wondering,” she went on, “if you happened to let anybody into my place today.”
In the background a dog barked, a television set shrilly yammered. Finally Mr. Peyzer said, “I think the fire inspector was by your building this week. I remember the girl mentioning something about giving him the keys.”
When Anne hung up she felt better. She couldn’t see what a snarl of thread had to do with investigating smoke detectors and fire escapes, but at least there was a halfway plausible explanation for the presence of an unknown person in her apartment. Anne threw the thread in the wastebasket next to her desk and decided to forget about it. She settled down on the sofa with the current issue of The Atlantic.
However, her mind kept straying from the words on the page. She went into her bedroom at the far end of the apartment and opened the wicker basket in which she kept her sewing things. Nothing seemed out of place or tampered with. But how, she asked herself, would she be able to tell if it had been?
A month went by, during which no further alien objects appeared in the apartment. When she came home to find the kitchen tap dripping, however, she could not be sure whether she’d turned the faucet handle tightly before leaving. Had she left the curtains in the living room drawn? Her closet door half open? Had the crumbs of dried mud on the mat fallen off her own boot or someone else’s? Anne felt unsettled, unable to focus on her work, troubled by the idea that her apartment might not be the safe nest she’d always assumed.
On a Sunday morning in November she telephoned Myra, hoping they could have lunch together, but reached only her answering machine. Another friend’s phone rang and rang. A third was on her way out the door, late to church.
By afternoon Anne badly needed to get out of the apartment. She put on her boots and coat. The weather outside was gray and cheerless, and downtown Bangor would be dead. However, the Blue Moon Café, the little coffee shop–cum–bookstore, might be open. Maybe she’d treat herself to the new novel one of her colleagues was excited about.
On Main Street, ahead of her, she noticed Terry’s bulky figure. His thin hair wafted in the breeze as he peered into the window of the Surplus Store. From a distance he looked good to her, familiar and comforting as shepherd’s pie. Anne found herself hurrying to catch up with him.
He turned away from the window and spotted her. “Anne,” he said.
For a moment they took each other in. “What are you doing downtown on a Sunday?” she asked.
“Delivering a bike,” he said. “To a guy around the corner, on Cross Street. Mongoose. Lovely machine.”
The bike shop had been one of the things she and Terry fought over. The patchwork hours—never being able to plan this week what he’d be doing next week—the insulting pay and zero benefits. How, she’d demand, in the heat of argument, could somebody as smart and well educated as Terry be content, year after year, with such a go-nowhere job? Why didn’t he take control of his life, do something? Now Anne regretted that she’d harangued him. People don’t change simply because you want them to.
Awkwardly they stood gazing at heaps of Day-Glo orange knit caps and nylon hunting vests in the window of the Surplus Store. In spite of her innate reticence, she felt a strong need to talk to somebody about the odd things that had been happening in her apartment. Terry was a good listener. She’d always given him credit for that, at least. “How about a cup of coffee?” she suggested.
“Why not?”
She felt a twinge of guilt for taking advantage of him. Still, he went along willingly enough.
In the Blue Moon, most of the tables were unoccupied. They chose one near a window, and after the waitress brought their cups of espresso, Terry said, “I wasn’t expecting this. To run into you, on the street.”
“It’s not as though I live very far away.”
He shed his down parka and she saw that his shirt was wrinkled, his tweed jacket in need of pressing and starting to fray in one elbow. Still, he seemed his usual cheerful self. Surprisingly cheerful, considering. He rubbed his plump hands together and said, “Cold out.”
“True.”
“Going to be a hard winter.”
“How can you tell?”
“Caterpillars,” he said, launching into an explanation of what it meant that a particular kind of striped brown caterpillar, which his grandmother had called woolly-bears, was fuzzier than usual this year.
Just like Terry, to depend on the wisdom of caterpillars for information about the future. Terry hated winter. He’d moan about the relentless cold, the miserly short days. Anne didn’t mind winter the way he did, and her indifference to it had perplexed and even aggrieved him. “You could live somewhere else,” she’d say. “California, Florida. There are bike shops everywhere.” “Come with me,” he’d plead. But how could she? Not many job options for lecturers in English these days.
“Are you going to eat something?” he asked.
“I don’t think so. But don’t let me stop you.”
He picked up the menu and read out the list of lunch offerings. “Veggie pita with sprouts. Barley-and-carrot soup. Zucchini quiche.” He made a face. “Do you have to be a vegetarian to read books?”
“Here I guess you do.”
Folding the menu he said, “So Anne. How are you?”
She stirred her coffee. “Actually, I haven’t been sleeping too well.”
“Oh?”
She thought she detected a note of hope in his voice. “I have the feeling someone’s been getting into my apartment.”
“What do you mean? Breaking in?”
“No, no sign of that.”
She told him about the button, the needle in the arm of the sofa, the web of black thread. Terry didn’t look alarmed, but wasn’t dismissive, either. “Who has a key to the place?” he asked.
“The landlord, of course. My sister. Remember when she visited me? She never gave the key back—typical. You, I suppose, come to think of it.”
Terry took his bike-shop-logo keychain out of his pocket and, smiling, removed a Kwikset key. “Time to get on with our lives,” he said. He placed it on the table between them. “I believe those are the words you used.”
Yes, she had, on that August day when they’d sat in her Volvo at Schoodic Point, looking out to sea, and she’d told him it was over. Embarrassing to have let such a hackneyed expression escape her lips, even in that stressful situation. She picked up the key and dropped it into her handbag.
“Who else has one?” he asked.
She pondered a few moments. “I can’t think of a soul.”
“Does your sister have some score to settle?”
“She may well, but she’s out in Santa Cruz, three thousand miles away.”
A couple at another table got up and left, and Anne
watched the waitress load dirty dishes onto a tray. “Actually,” she said, “there was a student I lent the key to two or three times. But that was last spring.”
“A student? Why’d you do a thing like that?”
Anne finished her espresso, although the caffeine, on an empty stomach, was beginning to work on her nerves. “He needed a quiet place to write. He was having problems.”
“What sort of problems?”
“Family stuff.”
“You let those kids take advantage of you.”
“Nonsense,” she said, though maybe there was some truth in his accusation. “Anyway, Derek would always be gone by the time I got home. I’d find the key on the coffee table.”
“You never heard of copying a key? He could’ve strolled down to that hardware store next to Dunnett’s and had a new key made for the price of a cup of coffee. Less. Take him twenty minutes, max.”
“But why would he?”
Terry shrugged. “You tell me.”
She remained silent, examining the grit in her cup. She wondered if it could be Terry himself, playing these tricks. The key-copying scenario rolled off his tongue with suspicious ease. Maybe he hadn’t been delivering a bike at all, but instead loitering in the vicinity of her apartment. When it came down to it, however, she couldn’t picture him stalking her. Terry was too bumbling, too let-it-all-hang-out to be that devious.
“Out of curiosity,” Terry said, “what became of this student?”
“He was a senior. I assume he graduated.” Derek had not, however, turned in his final portfolio, had not bothered to do the required revision. He’d simply disappeared at the end of the course, and she’d been forced to give him a far lower grade than she would have otherwise. Anne didn’t mention that to Terry.
“Living alone,” he said, “you’re vulnerable.”
Translation: “Let me take care of you, Anne.” But if he couldn’t take care of himself, she thought, how in heaven’s name could he take care of her? What he really wanted was for her to nurture him. Rescue him from the dumpy apartment, cook his meals, patch his elbows, iron his shirts. She wasn’t going to cave in to his neediness, she just wasn’t.
At first it seemed beyond credibility, the idea of Derek Millet harboring a copy of her key for half a year, then secretly re-entering her apartment to plant a button, unwind a spool of thread.
But Derek’s major work of the semester had been a long, intense story about a private detective hired to tail a client’s wife. Carefully, lovingly, the story had explored the detective’s growing obsession with his prey, ending after a hundred pages in the wife’s ambiguous death in a blood-soaked motel room. Derek’s particular skill was in verisimilitude—meticulous accuracy of detail—which had made what amounted to genre melodrama believable, and even moving. She recalled the banal settings in coffee shops and bus stations and strip malls that Derek had rendered with precision. The taut, slangy dialogue. The sly use of metaphor—so much hidden, or half-hidden, beneath the surface.
Anne reflected on the detective’s subtlety and inventiveness. His determination.
Now that Terry had put the idea in her head, she couldn’t entirely dismiss it. What if a clever writer were to confuse the line between fiction and reality?
In her apartment Derek would have been surrounded by her possessions: the framed snapshots of her parents and sister; her collection of glass, stone, and ceramic eggs; the Undset first English editions among her books; the prescription container of Atenolol in the bathroom cabinet; the old beaver coat deep in the back of her closet. He might have begun to ruminate about her, using the details of her life to turn her into a character of his own contriving. A character that he, in the guise of detective, eventually felt driven to hunt down.
No. Not possible. What was she thinking? Derek was an ordinary kid—from Lewiston, she remembered his telling her. Straight out of working-class stock, but touched by random luck with a talent for fictive invention.
Yet there had been something a little strange, a little exotic about Derek Millet. Older than the typical senior, but hard to say how much older. Thick dark hair that looked as though it had been chopped off with a hatchet. Sallow complexion, lips bleached of color, sharply bony facial structure that suggested the steppes by way of a dirty mill town. Knowing, faraway smile. In her office, bent with her over his manuscript, his chair pulled close to hers, he’d given off a pungent odor of wood smoke and cigarettes.
When she first started teaching, an ancient professor of medieval literature had cornered her and, with no clear provocation, begun to lecture her about the number of certifiables wandering the halls of the English Department. “Freaks who can’t even tie their own shoelaces fit right in here,” he’d muttered. “Place should have bars on the windows and a high brick wall around it. Take my advice. Keep your distance from the crazy bastards.” Of course she’d paid no attention to him, but maybe what the old goat said wasn’t just blather.
Pound, Woolf, Lowell, Styron, Plath, Berryman . . . The line between brilliance and lunacy could be thin.
All right, admit it. She’d lent the key to Derek, an unprofessional act she hadn’t committed before or since, because she’d felt some special attachment to his creative gifts. To him. Admit also that she’d been bitterly disappointed over his casual failure to turn in his portfolio. She’d given him the C-minus not because she couldn’t in conscience do otherwise, which is what she told herself at the time, but in revenge for her hurt. Anne’s sleep that night was ragged, invaded by disturbing dreams.
The next morning, having dropped off a bundle of clothes at the laundromat on State Street, Anne took the back route to the university. As she drove along the river in Veazie, not far from Terry’s apartment, she considered again whether he might be the one playing these mind games with her. The rejected suitor, she’d heard, is always the first suspect in situations like this.
Anne shook her head at the thought. She and Terry had been lovers for more than two years and had talked seriously of marriage. He still cared about her. She felt sure he would never hurt her if he could help it. In any case, she couldn’t imagine him organizing himself sufficiently to plan and execute a scheme of harassment—or whatever this was.
When she reached her office, she phoned down to the department secretary. Yes, Rose confirmed, Derek Millet had indeed graduated the previous May. The address in his file was a post office box in Old Town. “Probably gone by now, though,” Rose said. “Most of them vanish in a nanosecond once they’ve got that diploma.”
“What about a home or family address?” Anne asked. “Lewiston?”
“None listed here on the form.”
“Isn’t that kind of unusual?”
“If you pay your own bills, you don’t have to tell the university who your people are—not if you don’t want to.”
“Is there a telephone number?”
Rose read it off, an Old Town exchange.
Before she could think better of the idea, or decide what she’d say to Derek if he answered, Anne called the number. A recorded voice announced that it had been disconnected, “no further information available.” Almost certainly Rose was right, and the post office box would be defunct, too.
Next she called the Careers Center. He might have left a résumé with a current address on file there. Apparently, however, Derek had not been eager to let the university in on his future plans.
Nor did the Alumni Association have any idea where Derek Millet had landed after graduation, or demonstrate much interest. Perhaps they sensed, in their practiced bureaucratic intuition, that this alumnus was not among those likely to make millions and gratefully donate hockey arenas.
She tried the Bangor phonebook. No Derek Millets, or even D. Millets. She turned on her computer, logged onto the internet, and searched three different telephone directories. No matches in any of them. In the city of Le
wiston no Millets at all, not a single one. Had Derek Millet and his kin disappeared off the face of the earth?
He wouldn’t necessarily have a landline, she reminded herself. Or if he did, he wouldn’t necessarily have a listed number.
Anne pictured Derek returning to the seedy, shadowy life from which he’d emerged. He might be working as a night clerk in a rundown motel, a security guard in a warehouse, a truck driver, a bartender. He could be anywhere. He could be right around the corner.
She met her freshman lit course, only part of her mind focused on the material; absently graded some late papers from the lit course; stumbled through her creative writing class; attended a department meeting without making a single contribution to the discussion.
At the end of the afternoon she sat in her office with the door closed, considering what metaphorical meaning objects from a sewing basket might have for Derek Millet.
A tangle of thread: web, fairly obviously. Needle: sting perhaps, or bite. Button? Anne thought about the button’s smooth, pearly surface, its fragility. In memory she saw the two tiny holes drilled into its center. She recalled reading somewhere that the bite of a spider is differentiated from the bite of insects by a double, two-fanged puncture wound. The button could represent the victim.
Anne wheeled her desk chair around and took from a shelf Biedermann’s Dictionary of Symbolism. Spider: “a creature capable of spinning a web and lying in wait to paralyze flies and gnats and suck them dry”; “the sinful urges that suck the blood from humanity.”
A few minutes past five she left the building and headed for the faculty parking lot where she’d left her car. Dark already. Overcast. A wind had picked up and a few flakes of snow skipped on frozen ground. Unaccountably, she felt a shivery rush of something akin to joy.
Anne poured herself a glass of Chablis. As she was heating a portion of braised chicken she listened to the forecast on the radio. Arctic front approaching, accompanied by high winds. Gale warning along the coast with seas of fifty to sixty knots. Temperatures statewide expected to drop below zero or into the single numbers by morning. “Keep your pets inside tonight,” the weatherman advised. “Bundle up if you have to go out.”