Free Piranha to Scurfy by Ruth Rendell Page B

bushes all accurately positioned so that he could tell if they moved. He decided to make one. The evening was mild and sunny, though damp, and of course, at not long past midsummer, still broad daylight at eight. A deck chair was called for, a sheet of paper, and, better than a pen, a soft lead pencil. The deck chairs might be up in the loft or down here, he couldn’t remember, though he had been in the shed on Wednesday evening to find a spade. He looked through the window. In the far corner, curled up, was a small dark shape.
    Ribbon was too frightened to cry out. A pain seized him in the chest, ran up his left arm, held him in its grip before it slackened and released him.The black shape opened its eyes and looked at him, just as the demon in The Book looked at Charles Ambrose. Ribbon hunched his back and closed his eyes. When he opened them and looked again he saw Tinks Next-door get up, stretch, arch its back, and begin to walk in leisurely fashion toward the door. Ribbon flung it open.
    “Scat! Get out! Go home!” he screamed.
    Tinks fled. Had the wretched thing slunk in there when he’d opened the door to get the spade? Probably. He took out a deck chair and sat on it, but all heart had gone out of him for drawing a plan of the garden. In more ways than one, he thought, the pain receding and leaving only a dull ache. You could have mild heart attacks from which you recovered and were none the worse. Mummy said she had had several, some of them brought on—he sadly recalled—by his own defections from her standards. It could be hereditary. He must take things easy for the next few days, not
worry,
try to put stress behind him.
    Kingston Marle had signed all the books she sent him and returned them with a covering letter. Of course she had sent postage and packing as well and had put in a very polite little note, repeating how much she loved his work and what a great pleasure meeting him in Blackwell’s had been. But still she had hardly expected such a lovely long letter from him, nor one of quite that nature. Marle wrote how very different she was from the common run of fans, not only in intellect but in appearance too. He hoped she wouldn’t take it amiss when he told her he had been struck by her beauty and elegance among that dowdy crowd.
    It was a long time since any man had paid Susan such a compliment. She read and reread the letter, sighed a little, laughed, and showed it to Frank.
    “I don’t suppose he writes his own letters,” said Frank, put out. “Some secretary will do it for him.”
    “Well, hardly.”
    “If you say so. When are you seeing him again?”
    “Oh, don’t be silly,” said Susan.
    She covered each individual book Kingston Marle had signed for her with plastic wrap and put them all away in a glass-fronted bookcase, from which, to make room, she first removed Frank’s
Complete Works of
Shakespeare,
Tennyson’s
Poems, The Poems of Robert Browning,
and
Kobbe’s
Complete Opera Book.
Frank appeared not to notice. Admiring through the glass, indeed gloating over, her wonderful collection of Marle’s works with the secret inscriptions hidden from all eyes, Susan wondered if she should respond to the author. On the one hand a letter would keep her in the forefront of his mind, but on the other it would be in direct contravention of the playing-hard-to-get principle. Not that Susan had any intention of being “got,” of course not, but she was not averse to inspiring thoughts about her in Kingston Marle’s mind or even a measure of regret that he was unable to know her better.
    Several times in the next few days she surreptitiously took one of the books out and looked at the inscription. Each had something different in it. In
Wickedness in High Places
Marle had written, “To Susan, met on a fine morning in Oxford” and in
The Necromancer’s Bride,
“To Susan, with kindest of regards,” but on the title page of
Evil Incarnate
appeared the inscription Susan liked best: “She