Small Town

Well, it hadn’t gotten there by itself. If the cops had found it, he could have tried telling himself that they’d planted it themselves. But that would have seemed unlikely, a real Dream Team stretch, and the obvious conclusion, the only plausible conclusion, was that he’d taken the creature from her apartment, stashed it with his socks when he got undressed, and forgot the whole thing by the time he awoke the next day.

It wasn’t like him to steal something. He weighed the rabbit in his palm, trying to imagine why he would have taken it. Out of spite? Out of sheer cussed alcoholic meanness?

Maybe he’d meant to ask her about it, where she got it or who’d carved it, some damn thing, and took it into the bedroom to show it to her. And then forgot about it until he got home, and figured he’d find some way to return it to her in the morning, and...

It seemed more likely that he would have picked it up on his way out the door. Hadn’t they argued? They’d had some kind of drunken sex, and followed it with some kind of drunken argument. But he couldn’t remember the details, and didn’t know what he could trust of what he did seem to remember.

Suppose the worst.

Suppose the argument got out of hand. Suppose she slapped him, or said something that got to him. Suppose he got his hands on her throat, just to shut her up, just to let her know she’d crossed a line, and suppose she taunted him, said he wouldn’t dare, called him an impotent cripple, and suppose his hands tightened.

He’d have been drunker than he realized. Drunk enough to do it, too drunk to remember it. Drunk enough, certainly, to take something with him as he left, for a souvenir of the occasion, say, or just because it caught his eye. Most pet shop sales, he’d read somewhere, were to men who got drunk and suddenly decided that they had to bring home a puppy. Could he have felt a similar need for a bunny rabbit?

He looked at the thing again. Much as he wished he’d never seen it, he had to concede it was not without appeal. And he’d admired Zuni carvings in the window of Common Ground and other local shops. He’d never felt the need to own one, but they were the sort of thing that, seized suddenly by a fit of drunken kleptomania, he might have reached for.

And, God help him, he’d have been capable of killing. How close had he come, really, to killing Penny all those years ago? He’d never laid a hand on her, but in the story that sprang from the nonincident, and in the book he was writing now, the wife had died; the young husband had changed his mind, but too late.

In the novel, the man got away with murder. But he hadn’t really gotten away with anything, for all his life from that day on was shaped and colored by that simple act of murder. And, as the story unfolded on the page (or unscrolled upon the screen), it was becoming evident that the protagonist was still a murderer, that he still sought solutions to problems without regard to their moral implications, and that, before the book was done, he would kill again.

But that was just a book, wasn’t it? It was his attempt to construct out of his imagination a logical series of consequences to an event that had never taken place. It didn’t prove anything, did it?

Christ, suppose he killed her.

There was really nothing like denial. It was a powerful tool; used wisely, it could get you through a lot of bad days.

He spent the weekend cloaked in it, acting as if nothing had changed since he’d seen an unwelcome bit of brightness in his sock drawer. It meant nothing, he told himself, and acted accordingly. He made some phone calls, answered his e-mail, and worked on his book. He’d thought it might be hard to slip back into the alternate universe of the novel, thought the blue rabbit might have understandably thrown him off stride, but all he had to do was sit down at the keyboard, and a few mouse clicks took him out of his world and into the far more comfortable world of Harry Brubaker. Comfortable for him, because he was there as an observer and reporter. It wasn’t all that comfortable for Harry, and it was going to get a lot worse.

While he worked, the rabbit sat on a shelf, next to the thesaurus, which he never used, and the dictionary, which he used less now that his word-processing program had a good spell-check feature. (Beside them stood Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, which he used far too frequently; he would grab it to check something, and the next thing he knew an hour had gone by.) Now and then he would glance over at the rabbit. It was ridiculous, even dangerous, to keep it — but he sort of liked having it there.