Rain by Michael Mcdowel

her to go elsewhere, or at least into a few minutes' conversation.
    Her movements around the house were very circumscribed; she used only her bedroom, the bathroom attached to it, and the front porch. She had established narrow, unvarying routes through the other rooms—it was necessary to go through them to get out the front door, or out the back door—and they were like familiar paths through a forest. One could walk those paths three or four times a day, calm and confident of safety, and never venture off into the dark and dangerous groves that loomed on either side of the needle-strewn track. The kitchen was empty; Queenie had cleared it of all food because she detested roaches. James's rooms, filled with the furniture of James's mother, and all James's things, remained as they were on the night that James died. Queenie had never moved a thing. The extra bedrooms were filling up with boxes of the Caskeys' cast-off clothing, now that the closets at Elinor's and at Miriam's had been filled up. Queenie never had guests; when she occasionally did entertain, she did so at Elinor's, receiving her friends there. Queenie never realized that her patterns were becoming as entrenched as Sister's had been. Because Queenie could get around—though she never went far—those patterns were not so apparent to the casual observer—or to her.
    At night, Queenie was frightened. She had never slept in a house alone before, and James's house seemed particularly lonely. The rooms were shadowy, filled with curious shapes and noises. Some small animal had got into the attic and there it scrabbled about all night long. Boards creaked beneath the weight of stacked boxes, and every now and then James's delicate china would rattle in the cupboards as if being moved by an unseen hand. When Queenie had undressed she would look out of her window; she saw nothing but the levee quivering in a shroud of black kudzu, and a corner of the DeBordenave house next door, still boarded over. The wind sometimes picked up sand from the yard and flung it against the house, so that she was awakened with what sounded like infinitesimal raindrops.
    Sister had once told her, "Old women don't sleep well." Not having experienced this, Queenie had not then believed it, but now she found that Sister's insomnia had come to her. She would lay long hours awake, seeming never to fall asleep at all. That she did so was proved only by the fact that she awoke in the morning. But how long she had slept, Queenie could never say.
    She would lie rigid in her bed, catching every noise in the house and noting it down on a little mental pad, the dimensions of which grew with each succeeding night. Some nights she was troubled with the blowing sand, other nights by the creaking boards, other nights by the rattling crockery. Queenie lay awake and trembling.
    Occasionally, new noises came. Something in the house would seem to shake that she had never heard disturbed before. The crystal drops on the candelabra on the dining room table would now and then chime together, as if someone were in that closed-off room, moving restlessly but quietly around and around the table, gently agitating the table and the candelabra with his tread. Or one of the windows opening onto the front porch would shake in its sash as if someone were surreptitiously pacing the porch. Sometimes Queenie thought she could hear the doorknob rattle.
    One night she heard the window in its sash, and thought, it's the wind. A few minutes later, she heard the rattle of the doorknob, and thought, It must be a change in the temperature.
    Then she was certain she heard footsteps, light and secretive at first, up and down the length of the porch, then heavier, as if in mockery, as if to say, And what is the explanation for this, Queenie Strickland?
    She quickly picked up the telephone, but just as she lifted the receiver, the sound of the footsteps stopped.
    But the footsteps returned the following night, and again when Queenie