Paul Murphy was a cop in a town of 5,000 people. The town had a center with a grocery store, a doctor’s office, a lawyer’s office and a hardware store that serviced the farmers that lived outside the town.
Paul with his wife Andrea lived on the edge of the town in a Cape Cod style house. Andrea had been a city girl that was not sure how she ended up as a small-town cop’s wife. She’d met him at her cousin’s wedding and was drawn to his blue eyes and blond hair. If he had not been an addicted reader like she was, they probably would never have ended up married.
There were many things that intrigued her about her new life. Used to traffic, congestion, garbage on the streets and her crowded studio, which was all she could afford in the big city on her salary as a college lecturer with little hope of promotion, the quiet of Paul’s town, a village really like one out of a TV serial, and especially Paul’s vegetable and flower garden seemed exotic.
Thus, she married Paul, without really thinking it through, what it would mean to give up her work, friends, the chance to pop into a music or choose between all kinds of movies.
After their honeymoon, Paul had been on the day shift for a month. Then it was his turn to switch to the midnight to 8 a.m. shift. She had stayed up to kiss him goodbye, hand him a sandwich which she made in case he was hungry later, adding some cookies, she’d made as part of her new job as wife, and crawled into bed.
At 2:27 according to the clock on her bed, she’d heard a scratching downstairs. It was the first time - or so she thought. She might have slept through an earlier noise when she was curled up in Paul’s arms.
It could have been a branch against the back door, but the sound moved to the bottom of the stairs. Should she be a coward and call Paul. Her head said no, but the scratching grew louder. She called.
Paul drove up in the cruiser. He looked throughout the house but saw nothing that should concern Andea.
Two night later it happened again. Then almost every night for a week.
Paul became annoyed at the middle-night calls. “You’re a cop’s wife. You need to be braver.” His solution was to buy her a gun and show her how to shoot.
A neighbor, who had befriended her, said, “Maybe it was a ghost. Andrea didn’t believe in ghosts and even if she had, a gun would be useless against ghosts. She stopped calling Paul, but lay in bed, the quilt pulled up to her neck with the gun in her hand.
The next day, she called her best friend back in the city, who offered to come and spend the night. Together they could track down the noise.
Paul welcomed Shelley before leaving for work. Shelley crawled into bed with Andrea.
“Maybe it won’t come tonight,” Andrea said. The two women fell asleep but at 4:22 the scratching woke them up.
They crept out of bed and down the stairs toward the kitchen where the scratching was coming from.
“Murderers and burglars don’t scratch,” Shelley said. “But rats do. Look at the size of the sucker.”
The rat was larger than the Jack Russell Andrea had had growing up.
“Shoot it.” Shelley said.
Andrea raised the gun, but the rat decided to leave before she could aim and fire.
The next day Paul sealed the hole that he guessed the rat had used to visit their kitchen. He chided Andrea for not noticing some of the bread she’d left out was missing.”
“I thought you ate it,” Andrea defended herself. Maybe garbage and city congestion wasn’t so bad after all.
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