Free A Chill Rain in January by LR Wright

him up.
    She couldn’t see blowing him up. She didn’t know enough about explosives. And although she could learn, death by explosion was certain to alarm the authorities.
    She could poison him, she thought, and considered this for a while, as she ran.
    But she didn’t know anything about poisons, either, and unless she could manage to get hold of some that was absolutely undetectable, she oughtn’t to consider it. Death by poison, too, would cause a lot of consternation.
    At least he didn’t have a wife or a family to ask questions afterward.
    She swiped at her forehead with her sleeve. Too bad he doesn’t jog, she thought, panting. She could have challenged him to a race and tried to induce a heart attack.
    It will have to be an accident, she decided, turning off the highway. She slowed to a trot, then a walk, for the last quarter mile across the promontory to her house.
    If not a car accident, then something else.
    It would come to her.
    When she had showered and changed, she stood by the living room window, looking out at the rain. Killing Benjamin, it occurred to her, might be considerably more complicated and difficult than the only alternative, which was to kill herself.
    What if she killed him but got caught, and ended up going to jail for the rest of her life? Dying would be far preferable to that.
    She wasn’t fond of pain. But she knew she could find a way to do it without causing herself physical suffering.
    She would have to decide how to dispose of her money, though. She certainly wouldn’t want Benjamin, or the government, getting any of it. Perhaps she ought to convert everything she had to cash, transfer it to her checking account, and divide it among the listings in the Sechelt phone book.
    She roamed uneasily through her house, stroking her favorite pieces of furniture, turning television sets on and off. There were all these possessions, too. What would become of them? How on earth could she dispose of all her belongings—her car, her house, for heaven’s sake? Could she get rid of all these things without calling attention to herself?
    Her house. Her fortress.
    She had chosen the Sunshine Coast as her home because it was made remote from metropolitan Vancouver by the need to get there by ferry.
    She chose Sechelt because it was in the middle of the Coast, halfway between the ferry at Langdale, which crossed Howe Sound to Horseshoe Bay, and the one at Powell River, which crossed Georgia Strait to Vancouver Island.
    She had looked for a long time, and then bought the waterfront property, and then she bought the lots on either side of it, and the lots on either side of them, too; she bought the whole promontory. It wasn’t a huge area—less than two acres. Manageable in size. The highway formed its eastern border, so she never had to worry about acquiring neighbors.
    She’d had a plain house built, with exactly the amount of room in it that she needed. And a garage.
    And halfway up the driveway, a small guest cottage. It wasn’t used often. Just once or twice a year.
    One of the things she’d had to check out before deciding to move here was whether there were enough bars. She found four up and down the Coast that would do, not counting whatever there might be in Sechelt; that would have been too close to home.
    Sex, to Zoe, was a hunger, the satisfaction of which depended not on appetite but on need. She felt it first when she was fourteen and a boy three years ahead of her in school began following her home. One day he caught up with her and took her into a park. What followed was not a particularly pleasant experience for Zoe, but it proved in the end an adequate introduction to the gratification of sexual desire.
    Every few months she dressed up in one of her costumes and went to a bar. She found someone, took him to her guest cottage, and they had sex. Zoe did it thoroughly, and with energy, the way she did everything. Afterward, she sent the