Dead Dancing Women by Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli

muttered under my breath, half hoping the machine caught it. “This is Emily returning your call.” Bang. Nothing else. No message. No encouragement. No “Call me, please, oh please, oh please, will ya, huh?”
    I had at least an hour before I’d be starving and, since I was deeply depressed, I didn’t want to let myself eat until it was safe. If I opened the refrigerator at that moment I’d gobble everything in sight then head back to Leetsville, to the nearest market, and buy more to gobble. It wasn’t that I put on weight after these binges, I usually didn’t. It was that I made myself sick. Instead, I planned a lovely omelet dinner and a jug of wine, a hunk of bread … though, blissfully, there was no “ thou, beside me. Singing in the wilderness. ”
    I went out to my studio to work awhile on the book, which loomed larger and larger in my consciousness. I’d decided to focus on writing, and not think about dead heads, and strange-acting neighbors, and certainly not odd little female deputies with gun belts.
    My studio was the size of a small garage. Plain. Undecorated. Wooden. A single open room with windows looking out on a small meadow where I could watch deer chase each other; and once I’d seen a coyote passing through; and once a mother fox with her kits. It was a good place to work and a good place to do nothing but stand at the window and look out—a thing I did a lot of, calling it “mental writing.”
    Elbows on the window sill was a terrific position, I’d found, for musing. My best stuff came from watching the meadow, and sometimes observing a spider weave a web in a corner of the window, and sometimes lying on my back on my ragged old futon, watching the ceiling, hoping inspiration would droppeth like “ the gentle rain from heaven .”
    During this hour, when it wasn’t dark yet, in the still time before the sun went down, when the world held its breath and noises were embarrassing and alien, I decided my New York writer needed a male detective to counter her. Maybe they’d even fall in love. Martin Gorman, his name would be, I told myself, while lying on my futon contemplating nothing. He would be a man with a checkered past. A man with one divorce and a few troubles in his work. I would get him in deep with the seductive writer he’d be investigating. I needed a bar scene. Maybe Martin was going to take up drinking again, or he would have a fight with somebody. I wanted him to appear more and more unstable so people thought he wasn’t to be trusted.
    I didn’t feel like putting myself into a smoky bar right then. Anyway, my troubles with the dead head and with my neighbors seemed a whole lot worse than Martin Gorman’s. I was in no mood to write. All I seemed capable of was listening to the trees make a buzzing sound like electricity running through wires. But maybe it was only my ears, and the quiet of being so alone.

NINE
    When the phone on my desk rang, I was grateful. Anybody—I didn’t care who was on the other end of the line. Somebody to bring me out of my dark funk. I got up from the futon where I’d been lying for over an hour and picked up the phone.
    â€œEmily?”
    Oh Lord, I’d forgotten about Jackson. I should have amended my wish: anybody but Jackson Rinaldi.
    â€œJackson here. Emily. This is you, right?”
    Jackson’s voice tended to rise when he got miffed, which, with me, had been most of the time, because I tended not to play along with his latest illusion of himself. Today he was sounding terribly, terribly British.
    â€œYes, Jackson,” I muttered. “It’s me.”
    â€œOh, yes, so good to hear your voice. How are you?”
    â€œFine. And you?” As if I gave a rat’s …
    â€œFine, too. I saw Sylvia King the other day, and she asked for you, and I was ashamed to say I hadn’t spoken to you in a while. I’ve been remiss