Third chapter: Rope Dancers

Here's chapter three, a short piece that characterize a witness and moves us closer to the first murder.

Chapter Three -- 

Veronica Wyeth wasn't much interested in the game.  It was a blowout.  Los Angeles was beating the Braves fourteen to two in the fifth inning and it seemed as though they’d been playing for three or four days already, so how could it possibly keep her attention?

Why would she want to stay involved with the game, anyway?  Ball games didn't make any difference to anybody.  Never did, although back when she was a girl, for most of her life, in fact, she lived and died baseball.  If the Braves were in the tank, so was she.  When they were winning, she was a fun lady to be around; back when the team had first moved to Atlanta, she’d gone to bed with a man she didn’t even know just because the Braves won a playoff game.  Her fortunes reflected the team’s.  

The bat Chipper Jones had signed for her still hung over her mantle but she didn't bother to look at it anymore.  The game just didn’t really do anything for anybody.  Just took up time and she didn’t have a whole lot of that left.

Wasn’t but one thing important now:  the fact that she was dying.  Virginia Wyeth only had a matter of months.  She was having a hard time getting used to the fact that this old world was going to have to keep on rolling along without her.  Most of her life, she’d been unable to imagine this planet without her on it.  She’d been, in her own mind, the absolute center of the universe.  Now, in a matter of minutes, her whole attitude had changed.  She’d learned that she was no more important than a hunk of dirt.  Not only had she learned it, she was right close to accepting it.

When you got right down to it, she’d had time enough to get used to the idea of a universe without her smack dab in the middle of it.  Even though that damn young fool, Doctor Draco, hadn’t been able to get around to telling her till Wednesday, she'd known it for months.  When the people in the doctor's office won't even look you in the eye, it's a plain fact that what they aren't saying is much more important than the words they’re using.  When the women on the receptionist’s desk begins treating you like an old friend, smiling and fawning over you and laughing at every little thing you say, it’s a sure sign you’re not meant to be around much longer.

Well, that was all right.  Only a damn fool thinks this life is going to last forever.  Only a fool wants it to last forever.  She had been telling herself for years that she was ready, but ever since she found out it was going to happen and it was a definite true fact that she was going to be taking her leave, she wondered if, deep down in her soul, she really was ready.

She thought she was.  Hopes she was.  The fact was she'd be finding out before much longer.  The room was cold.  She pulled a shawl over her bony shoulders.

She hauled herself over to the window.  The little foreign car was still there.  Somebody in it was smoking a cigarette.  She could see the flame in the dark and she wondered absently if the guy in the car was ready to meet his maker.  People  so rarely were.  Everybody thought they were going to live forever, the way she once had.

The poor mistaken bastards.