Tell Me No Secrets by Joy Fielding Page B

she thought, reminding herself that she wasn’t even sure that the car that had almost collided with her own in Evanston had been a Chrysler.
    Jess edged back toward the window, peering out from behind the lace curtains. The white Chrysler was still there, a man sitting motionless behind the wheel, shadows from the streetlights falling across his face. He was staring straight ahead, not looking in her direction. The darkness, the weather, and the distance combined to throw a scrim across his features. “Rick Ferguson?” she asked out loud.
    The sound of his name on her lips sent Jess scurrying out of the living room, down the hall, and into her bedroom. She threw open her closet door, falling to her hands and knees, and rifling through her seemingly endless supply of shoes, many still in their original boxes. “Where the helldid I put it?” she demanded, getting off the floor, stretching for the top shelf where she kept still more shoes, old favorites not currently in fashion but too precious to throw away. “Where did I hide that damn gun?”
    She ejected the boxes from the high shelf with one grand sweep of her hand, protecting her head as it rained shoes around her. “Where is it?” she cried, spying something shiny and black beneath some crumpled white tissue paper.
    A pair of black patent high-heeled shoes, she discovered, wondering what had ever possessed her to purchase shoes with four-inch heels. She’d worn them exactly once.
    Jess finally discovered the small snub-nose revolver hidden behind the enormous cloth flowers that adorned a pair of pewter pumps, the bullets painstakingly lodged inside the shoes toes. Her hands shaking, Jess loaded six bullets into the barrel of the .38 caliber Smith & Wesson that Don had insisted she take with her when she moved out on her own. “Call it my divorce present,” he’d told her, brooking no further discussion.
    It had sat in the shoe box for four years. Would it still work? Jess thought, wondering if guns carried the same sort of “Best if used before” warning that came with dairy products and other perishable items. She let the gun lead her back into the living room, tapping its short barrel against the light switch and throwing the room into darkness. The canary abruptly stopped singing.
    Jess approached the window, the gun at her side. “Just don’t shoot yourself in the foot,” she cautioned, feeling as foolish as she did frightened, parting the lace curtains with trembling hands.
    There was nothing there. No white Chrysler. No white car of any kind. Nothing white except the snow that was gradually peppering the grass and pavement. Nothing but a quiet residential street. Had there been a white car at all?
    “Your mistress is definitely going crazy,” Jess told her canary, leaving the room in darkness. She covered the bird’s cage with a dark green cloth and turned off the radio, carrying the gun back to her bedroom, freshly carpeted with shoes. Why couldn’t she collect stamps? she wondered, surveying the mess. Stamps definitely took up less space, were less messy, less subject to the frivolous dictates of fashion. Certainly, nobody would have criticized Imelda Marcos for collecting three thousand pairs of stamps.
    She was getting giddy, she realized, squatting on the floor and starting to tidy up. There was no way she’d be able to sleep when the floor of her bedroom looked like it could be declared a national disaster area. Assuming she could sleep at all.
    “What a night!” she said, staring at the gun in her hand. Would she have actually been able to use it? She shrugged, grateful not to have been put to the test, and returned it to the shoe box behind the large cloth flowers of her old pewter pumps. Guns ‘n Roses, she thought, immediately lifting the gun back out.
    Maybe it would be a better idea to hide it somewhere a little more accessible. Even if she wasn’t ever going to use it. Just to make her feel better.
    Opening the top drawer of