“There were lots.” She stood quite still, as if she were weighing a decision of vast import; then she weaved past a console radio removed from its housing, the metallic tubes and coils and tuners like the towers and domes of some miniature, futuristic city. She bent over the sewing table and slid a glitzy red box from a top drawer. Under the beam of the flashlight she handed it over.

In the candy box was a thick cluster of three-by-five index cards. The sickly sweet fragrance of chocolate was still on the first I pulled out.

We make war (I read) on all creation and in the process we kill ourselves.

The words were penned in an urgent, erratic hand. I plucked another random card from the pile.

The world will end soon with a bang. All of us, everywhere, are prisoners of our own destructiveness.

And:

There’s no way out for the human race. We’re running in reverse, back beyond Methuselah, back to the nothingness of the void.

It seemed to me, after a sampling of only three cards, that any moderately dispassionate observer would conclude that Mrs. Chatterton was paranoid, possibly to the point of madness. Which obviously didn’t disburden Chatterton; he couldn’t or wouldn’t let go.

I read on:

Phil dear, your gray suit is at the cleaner’s. Also two of my dresses. I’ve been wearing the same thing for a week. Maybe you noticed.

And:

I feel limp, hollow. I know I shouldn’t succumb to these thoughts.

And:

I don’t know what else to do. All I know, I won’t spend the rest of my life weeping.

So it ran on. Chaotic, repetitive, interlaced with domestic banalities, fearful admonitions.

I [a few words scratched out] and we need coffee, sugar. It is the end of the world. Tonight for me, anytime now for the rest of humanity. Goodness no longer exists in the world. Ingenious brutality, ceaseless bloodlust on one side, and corruption, greed, and arrogance on the other.

“She took more than a hundred Seconals,” Valerie said.

Why is it that nobody cares?

“The notes were pinned to her nightgown,” Valerie said. “More than a hundred. You could hardly see the nightgown for the notes.”

Phil, this is important. Get me out of the house before Valerie sees me.

I had read enough. “Who found her?” I asked.

“I did. Wouldn’t you know?” She tried to smile. The attempt was a shambles but she made no effort to wipe it off her face. “That’s how I met Derek,” she went on. “He was the son of the undertaker. He used to help out around the shop.”

“But you were thirteen, you said. That’s pretty young…”

“He called me a year later. Out of the blue.”

“It must have been tough for you. I mean without your mother.”