In Over Her Head by Elsie Russell - Parnasse.com

her bathroom as fast as she could, and all the scallopine and the peas
and the gnocchi tumbled into the toilet.
The rooster woke her this time but the sun was still asleep
behind its gray flannel blanket. Still, it was pretty late, and she just lay
there like mud, like the sky. She forced herself up to run a bath in the
tin tub. The battery was still at the edge of the marble sink. Maybe it
was still good, better not get it wet. Probably from one of those fancy
Swiss watches, like the one around his wrist with all those useless dials.
No, they were perpetual, the motion of your arm kept them ticking. An
electric razor? She looked at it more closely. Not like any battery she'd
ever seen. No seams, no numbers, no nothing, just a dull heavy
cylinder. Someone must have stuck it under all the tissues in the
bottom of the box. Her skin crawled. A bug! Someone had bugged the
room. But, who, when, why? Whoever was spying on her in New York,
but that was Ng and he had never come anywhere near here. And the
weird stuff going on with her computer. Was it all related?
She turned the water off. She took the thing to the bedroom
and placed it by her keyboard and checked that the door was locked.
Back in the bubbly hot water the shivering stopped. She shampooed
her hair and scrubbed herself pink with the loofah.
Wrapped in one of the warm fluffy towels, she pondered the
steel dot by the computer and mentally scrolled through her options as
she got dressed. She picked up the phone. Over the dial tone was a
funny click, intercepted every couple seconds on the other end, and she
heard faint crackling voices, when there should just be a dial tone. But
the phones were old with rotary dials, with wires that were stuck
directly into the wall, disappearing in a hole drilled in the ancient
baseboard, so maybe it was just the obsolete state of the house wiring.
And maybe phones behaved differently here. They looked a lot
different. The light switches were big chrome things out of the last
century with the wires discretely stapled to grooves in the paneling and
above to the plaster and stone. Pretty obvious if someone had messed
with any of that.
Paranoia was just getting the better of her. Better wait and ask
him what he thought about all this. He would just say she was being
paranoid, or paranoiac as he called it.
But maybe she should just check his empty bedroom.
Cautiously she opened each door and then tiptoed to the bed. On his
night table was a notebook, next to his assortment of homeopathic
painkiller phials.
136