A Farewell to Legs by JEFFREY COHEN Page A

and gaped into my
living room wondering what to do.
    Amid the broken glass, a splinter of wood from the
frame of what used to be our bow window and the usual clutter of
remote controls, discarded socks, and forgotten toys, was a rock
about the size of a softball, covered in a man’s handkerchief.
    I shook off my initial stupor and walked to the
rock, careful to avoid the shards of glass. Passing the side table,
I picked up a pair of gloves I’d left there the previous March
after the final snowfall of the season. No sense rushing these
things—we might have gotten one of those freak blizzards in July
you’re always hearing about.
    I pulled on the gloves and bent down to pick up the
rock. It was fairly heavy, and the handkerchief, it was now
obvious, had been lashed to it with thick rubber bands. I eyeballed
its trajectory from the street, and marveled at the thrower’s arm.
The Yankees could use a guy like that for middle relief.
    Written in permanent marker on the handkerchief were
the words, “YOU WERE WARNED.”

Chapter

Eighteen
    Y ou don’t often get a rock
with a threatening message thrown through your front window at two
in the morning, so I savored the moment. In other words, I stood
there a long time with a knot in my stomach and a definite shimmy
in my knees.
    The knot in my stomach leapt to my throat when the
light in the room suddenly came on. I spun, sending broken glass
sliding to various corners of the room.
    “Jesus!” said Abby, standing on the stairs and
looking down at me. “What happened?”
    To my eternal shame, I considered lying to her. Abby
was already on edge about the phone call, and this would be about
sixteen times worse than that. So what could I say—that I’d been
walking across the room on my way to the stairs when the window
inexplicably exploded?
    I held out the rock, like a little boy explaining to
his mother how he hadn’t meant to break his fire engine, but
displaying two, neatly snapped-apart pieces.
    “Somebody threw this through our window.”
    “Holy shit,” she said daintily. Abigail walked down
the stairs and surveyed the wreckage that is our living room,
layered with the wreckage that now was our front window. “Are you
okay?”
    “Yeah, I was on the stairs when it happened.” She
put on a pair of slippers that were on the stairs, came over and
gave me a hug anyway, which I would have appreciated more
thoroughly under different circumstances.
    “Why would somebody throw a rock through our
window?” she asked. Abby hadn’t seen the words on the handkerchief,
and I wasn’t rushing to show them to her.
    “I didn’t have time to ask.”
    Her eyes narrowed. She knows when I’m being evasive.
Apparently the only emotion she can’t detect on my face immediately
is lust, or all our conversations would begin with “okay,” or “not
now, for goodness sake!” “What aren’t you telling me?” she
asked.
    My lips pursed with a “you just don’t trust me”
look, but she wasn’t buying it. I showed her the note on the
handkerchief.
    Abby sat down on the bottom stair. She started to
rub her temples with both index fingers. “It’s starting again,
Aaron,” she said.
    “Put your head between your legs.”
    I got a sharp look for my trouble. “You know what I
mean. The threats. The worrying. The constant feeling that we’ll be
under attack at any moment. We swore we weren’t going to have this
again, didn’t we?”
    “I don’t know why we’re having it now. It doesn’t
make sense.”
    “Do rocks through a window usually make sense?”
    I started picking up the larger pieces of glass and
stacking them gingerly on the coffee table. “You like to think a
message is being sent,” I said. “But there’s no message here.”
    “I think the message is pretty clear. They don’t
want you looking into Louis Gibson’s murder.”
    “Who doesn’t? Every reporter in a three hundred mile
radius is looking into the murder. I don’t have anything the