Five-foot-two-inches and 110 pounds of living, breathing ghost. The physical form and being, the one soul on this entire planet that has haunted me more than all others combined. The brightness and proximity of the porch light was making her squint almost to the point where her eyes were closed. There was no mistaking her, though, and besides, I had seen her plenty of times with her eyes closed.

I unlocked the door and threw back the deadbolt with its resulting click. I deliberately inched the door open slowly just a few inches and then more widely. The interior threshold was two-and-a-half inches or so higher than the porch, so I had to look down sharply at her and she had to crane her neck to look up at me. Our gazes locked upon each other.

“Thank God!” she said in that same almost breathless way she always had as soon as she recognized me.

I did not say anything, but stood with one hand near the jamb and the other on the side of the door, drinking in her image, which nearly overwhelmed me, with four years’ worth of emotion welling up inside me. At that second I was seized by a prompting to simply slam the door shut and walk back through the living room and up the stairs and jump back into bed and go to sleep, preferably forever. I did not do that, though. Instead, I opened the door a little wider and pulled my left hand away from the jamb and with a sidelong motion with my palm tilted slightly up, beckoned her in.

She lightly brushed against me coming through the doorway and into the still unlighted entranceway. This was not without its affect upon me, but I did my best to ignore it. I swept the door closed as I turned on the entranceway light. I moved around her and walked into the living room, where I ignited the closest of the floor lamps. I walked over to the divan.

“Well, if it’s not the still beautiful but ever unreliable Emli Townsend,” I said with just the right touch of bitterness in my voice, “at –what time is it?” I looked at the clock on the mantle. “One-twenty a.m. in my living room.” I sat back into the divan. “Have a seat,” I said.

My words and the latent venom that draped over them seemed to have no impact on her, but then she walked over to a chair.

“I’m in a jam, Steve,” she said, “bad. I didn’t want to bother you, really. But you’re the only one that can help me. I got your address out of the phone book. It took me a while to find this place and then it seemed like no one was home. I’m really sorry I woke you up this late.” She rubbed the side of her right hand and sat down.

I rubbed the back of my neck. “There was a time,” I said, “when I would have liked nothing better than for you to wake me up at this hour. You’ve caught me a little off-guard. I’ve done my best not to think about you for a quite a while. At first, I couldn’t get you out of my mind. The last year or so, I almost forgot you ever existed.” I meant it even more meanly than it sounded.

She looked down and then lightly touched her fingertips together. She hesitated, as if she were choosing her words very carefully. “I don’t know if you remember,” she said. “You said once that if I ever needed help, you would come through for me.” There was almost a pleading in her voice. She looked very vulnerable, and very beautiful.

“I might have said something like that,” I said, suggesting I did not really remember. I remembered though. “Well, what is it? How can I help you?”

She looked down at her feet and then looked up at me. She licked her lips

“There’s a dead man… in the place where I used to live,” she said.

It did not scan at all, for a few seconds.

“Dead?” I finally said. “In your apartment?”

“No, where I was staying for a while.”

“Dead how?”

“I killed him.”

“You killed him? How?”

“With a gun. His gun. It was self-defense.”

“Then we’ll call the police.”

“But it’s more complicated than that.”

“Complicated how?”

“He was… We were… We were practically man and wife, for a time.”

“And he was threatening you?”

She did not respond but looked as if she was staring vacantly out into space.

A little louder I said, “Was he hurting you?”

“Yes. No. Not tonight. A few times. He’d twist my arm. He hit me once and loosened up my teeth.”

“So why did you shoot him tonight? You thought he might hit you again?”

“It was a stupid accident, just a stupid thing. I really didn’t mean to use the gun. Not that way. We had broken up two months ago. I couldn’t keep him away. He wouldn’t leave me alone. He kept saying he would commit suicide. Then it was he would break my nose and scar up my face so no other man would ever look at me again. He would call me up all the time early in the evening or late at night and not say anything, just a phantom call where I could hear somebody breathing on the other end and then there would be a click. I knew it was him. It couldn’t have been anyone else. He was following me around all the time. He saw me with this other guy once when we went out for dinner. It was really innocent… just dinner. But he came by my apartment the next day and told me he’d put the guy I went to dinner with in the hospital if he ever saw us together again. He had his car license number and said he knew where he lived.”

She took a long pause as if she were composing herself. She breathed deeply and then continued.

“I just told him to stop. He wouldn’t stop. He called again tonight. Another phantom call. I don’t know, I guess, I just wanted it to end. That’s when I got the idea. I drove over there, to his house. He let me in and we started to talk and I got him to admit he had been making all those calls. When I had the chance I went over to the cabinet on his entertainment center where I knew he kept his gun. I got it and pointed it at him. I told him it had all gone on long enough and that this was really the end. I was trying to impress him with how serious I was. I told him I was taking the gun with me so he wouldn’t hurt himself, or me or anyone else. I told him I meant it and if he tried to stop me, I’d use it on him. I told him tonight was the last time I ever wanted to see or hear from him again, that it was really over and nothing he could say or do was going to change that.”

She shuddered. “I didn’t mean to shoot him, Steve, I swear to God, I didn’t. I just meant to scare him. To show him how tough I could be.” The next sound she made is pretty hard to describe. It started as an anguished moan but changed to a wail and then ended as a sob. There were tears streaming down her face. I started to get up. Her voice, low and calm, but muttered as if through clenched teeth, stopped me.

“He just got angry. He belittled me and walked right to me as if I didn’t have the gun at all. I thought for a second it might not be loaded. He was going to take it away from me. I just… He…”

“Okay,” I said. “How many times did you shoot him?”

“Just once.”

“And you’re sure he’s dead?”

“He wasn’t breathing, Steve.”

“What time was this?”

“Oh, between nine and ten. Just after nine, I guess.”

“And where’s the gun?”

“I think I left it on the desk in the den.”

“Where’s this house?”

“Out in the valley.”

My mind was racing.

“Okay,” I said. “Let me get dressed.” I got up and headed up the stairs. In my room I switched on the lights and deliberately set about finding the darkest set of clothes I possessed – a black turtleneck long-sleeved shirt, a dark blue pair of socks, an unfaded pair of black denim jeans. I pulled off the bathrobe and flung it onto the bed. I pulled the dark clothes on and then searched along the floor of the back of the closet for an old pair of black tennis shoes I almost never wore. Having clothed and shod myself, I retrieved my black leather jacket and put that on. I went into the top drawer of my dresser and found my black wool watch cap, which I tucked into the jacket pocket. I went down the stairs and through the living room into the kitchen. I went past the stove to the far left drawer under the sink counter and dug through the hodgepodge of disparate items I kept there, retrieving two sets of gloves, one well worn protective thick leather pair and the other a soft cloth set I used for gardening. I put those into the jacket pocket opposite the one holding the watch cap.

In retrospect, it seems very remarkable to me how outwardly calm I was as I was taking all these deliberate steps which I knew were likely to have a profound effect on the rest of my life.

I went past the pantry and then unlocked the back door and walked out into the night across the strip of lawn over to the side door into the detached garage. In there, I went to the miscellaneous tools stacked against the wall and stepped over the lawnmower to gather a pick and a shovel. From the top of the workbench I grabbed a flashlight. I turned off the garage light, set the shovel and pick down on the grass momentarily, pressed in the locking pin on the side garage door before shutting the door behind me, picked up the shovel and pick and went back into the kitchen.

When I got out into the living room again Emli was standing near the south wall, gazing at one of the framed pictures.

“You got this one since we were together,” she said.

“It’s not mine,” I said. “It came with the house.”

I walked toward the front door, carrying the tools. “Let’s go,” I called over my shoulder.

As we were standing at the door and I was fishing around for the key to lock up behind us, I gave Emli a sidelong look. She wrinkled her nose. “Did you have fish for dinner?” she asked.

“Scallops,” I said.

As we were walking down the darkened stepway I asked, “You still have the same apartment?”

“Yes,” she said.

“How far is his house from your apartment?”

“Less than fifteen minutes on the freeway and into the valley at this hour.”

At the street, I opened my car’s trunk and dropped the shovel, pick and flashlight into it and shut the lid.

“Okay, now listen to me,” I said. I bent down to put my mouth close to her ear so I could lower my voice and still have her hear me. “I’ll meet you in front of your apartment and then we’ll drive to his house together in my car. It’s probably going to be important that no one sees you or your car over there again.”

I went around my car to the driver’s side, unlocked and opened the door and stepped in to slide behind the steering wheel. I thought I saw Emily walking toward her car parked down about a hundred feet behind mine. After I started the engine and let it idle to warm up, I looked up to see that she was standing out in the street right next to my car. I rolled down the window. Her hand touched my jacketed left forearm very lightly just above the wrist.

“I really appreciate this, Steve,” she said.

“We have to get moving,” I said. “We don’t have much time.”