She thought about him wistfully as she climbed fell into her old, creaking bed. What would it be like to sleep next to a man like Joey? Before she turned out the light, she gazed doubtfully down at her ancient flannel nightie, so old and faded it was soft as silk. But nobody in the world could say that it was anything but old-maidish.
For that matter, would he take one look at her underwear, and run screaming into the night? Weren’t women supposed to wear lacy stuff in red or black? The most you could say for her undies were that they were clean and practical. But sexy, they were not. The words ‘sexy’ and ‘Doris Lebowitz’ had always seemed to orbit around entirely different planets. And sexy-planet was a place she’d known about, but had never had access to. She didn’t know the code words to get in. Would he share them, or be repelled at her ignorance?
Click. The light went out.
She lay in darkness, staring up at the knotty pine ceiling, which held no answers.
She slipped into sleep without being aware, only to jerk awake what felt like five minutes later. She blinked around the dark room, then glanced at the curtained window. A dim blue glow outlined the old window shades. She got up, her toes curling on the cold hardwood floor, and fingered the shade in order to peek out. She looked upon a peaceful scene. The trees were dark silhouettes except for the delicate lacework of snow on their branches. Moonlight reflected off the snow in the trees and the white carpet covering the ground. The storm had passed.
She was about to climb back into bed when she heard the creak of a stair, and a tiny noise, like a muffled cough. Doris opened her door and made out a small human-shaped blob. She grabbed her robe and pulled it on as she ventured out. Her eyes rapidly adjusted to the dark. There, sitting on the staircase, was Lon’s forlorn figure. He hiccoughed on a sob.
“Lon?” Doris whispered. “What’s wrong?”
“I heard a noise,” came a tiny, wavering voice.
Doris listened. “I don’t hear anything.”
“It’s in the spyhole.”
“Spyhole?” Doris repeated. Then she remembered the knothole in the attic that someone had hollowed out a couple generations before, probably because that face of the house had no windows at all. She and Sylvia had peered out the spyhole as kids, then forgot all about it. Doris remembered having pointed it out to Nicola, what, twenty years ago? Closer to thirty! And Nicola must have remembered all those years and showed it to Lon.
His head bobbed. “I waked up. I heard noises. So I looked.”
Doris wondered if she should blunder to the far end of the house to wake up Brad, then decided to try to deal with Lon’s problem first. Probably he’d had a nightmare, and if she sat with him, he’d settle down for the remainder of the night.
“Come on. Let’s go up together, and make sure things are okay now. Then you can go back to sleep. I’ll stay with you until you do. How does that sound?”
“Okay.” Lon sounded less forlorn. He turned and scrambled up the steep stairs to the attic.
Doris followed more carefully, feeling her way in the nearly complete darkness. If she turned on a light, she might wake up Pink. She held Lon’s chilled fingers as they moved to the knothole. She had to squat down.
“Do you play with this spyhole a lot?” Doris whispered.
Another bob of his head. “Pink and me, we saw the red horsie in it. And the woof with all the tails.” He sucked in a breath. “I heard a woof. So I looked. There were lots of woofs.”
“Dogs?” Doris asked.
“Woofs,” the boy corrected.
“Do you mean . . . wolves?”
Another more vigorous nod. “Woofs.”
Alarm shot through Doris before she remembered that there were no wolves in this area. Maybe he’d seen stray dogs. Or even coyotes, though they rarely ventured this close to houses.
“How many did you see?” she asked.
“Four.” He held up his hand, barely visible in the darkness. “Two made the other ones run away. Then one got up and beed a person. Wearing his skin.” Lon whispered. “I seed, saw, his bottom! You’re not posed to go outside wearing only your skin.”
“Oh, my, he must be very cold without any clothes.” Now Doris was sure that it had been a nightmare. “Lots of . . . woofs . . . does sound spooky. But let’s take a look and make sure they?
?re all gone. Okay? Then you can snuggle back into your tent, and I’ll wait right here and make sure nothing bad is in the spyhole. How does that sound?”
“Okay,” the boy said softly.
“Go ahead. You first. What do you see?”
Lon only had to bend slightly as he pressed his eye against the knothole. “All gone. No! There’s one woof.”