Woman in the Window Read Online Free PDF Page A

like a winding sheet. She popped out her contacts, creamed her face, wiped it off, and went to bed.
    The streetlamps shining, a siren going by, the rain still gently falling, soaking the city as the temperature slowly dropped … everything normal. She put on her reading glasses and tried sorting through the stack of books on her bedside table. She couldn’t face the work she’d brought home, nor any of the hot new novels: by and large she slogged through the hot and new as part of her job. The worst part. She took instead Wodehouse’s Leave It to Psmith, which, like Lucky Jim, always made her laugh.
    But she couldn’t forget the man with the gun, the way he had seemed almost to pose as he threw the gun over the fence … the slow chuckle on the other side of the office door. She shivered at the thought. She didn’t often feel the need to share things: she seemed to end up listening to other people’s lives rather than they to hers, but this was different, she wanted to tell someone. But it had to be the right person. Not Julie, who might use it to push her karate lessons; not Jay, who’d think she was dramatizing everything; none of her other friends … not even Lew, to whom she’d been running with her problems since college. No, there was only one person she could call. She dialed the Staten Island number and hoped. He answered on the fourth ring.
    “Tony,” she said, “it’s Nat. I wanted to thank you for the roses. Really, they meant a lot to me—”
    “And made Jay jealous,” he said. She couldn’t tell if he was smiling, what mood he might be in. “Two birds with one stone.” There was that edge of bitterness: he could never quite get it out of his mind that she was probably sleeping with Danmeier.
    “Well, thanks. They were beautiful.”
    As they talked he softened up, dropping his everlasting guard, stopped assuming the worst of her. He became himself again, at least the self she liked to remember, the self she once had loved. He was writing, working on a novel. She could hear a tape of Tosca playing in the background. She pictured him in the study of the old house, a fire going, wearing chinos and a sweatshirt, smoking a cigar, looking like an overage college senior.
    She told him about the man with the gun, told him all the details that she knew he’d enjoy. When she finished he was silent. “Well? Well?” she prompted.
    “I’m making notes,” he said. “It’s a little weird, Nat. There’s one big hole—”
    “Like what?”
    “Like how can you be sure it was a gun?”
    “Because it looked like a gun.”
    “Sure, and it was dark, it was raining, you’d had your share of champagne, and you were three floors up. Across the street.”
    “It was a gun—”
    “Not until somebody finds it.”
    “So why did the guy come into my building and stand outside the door laughing?” He was making her angry but she was fighting it. He was doing his devil’s-advocate thing and she couldn’t really blame him.
    “You don’t know who was outside the door,” he said, as if to prove her right. “Could have been a delivery boy, a messenger, a clean-up guy, laughing at the frightened lady locking the door just as he gets there—I mean, it could have been.” His patience always seemed so condescending.
    “I say it was a gun and I say he came to the door. And I say you’re full of it!”
    He laughed. “Well, the fact is, you’re probably right—”
    “You admit you’re full of it?”
    “No, I admit it probably was a gun and he probably did come to the door. But it’s also probably over. You went home and he’s hoping to God that’s all there is to it.” He paused. “It makes sort of a nice beginning for a plot—”
    “The author at work! It really happened … but yes, I guess it does. It’s so New Yorky, isn’t it?”
    “That’s what I mean. It’s real, it’s full of hints, and you can make up your own story to go with it. I mean, it’s my kind of pulpy crap, not like the