They devise a phone tree: Charis will get two calls a day, one from each of them, to monitor the situation. But Charis stops answering the phone.
Three days pass. Then Tony receives a text message: Need to talk. Please come. Sorry. It’s from Charis.
Tony collects Roz, or rather Roz collects Tony, in her Prius. When they arrive at the duplex, Charis is sitting at the kitchen table. She’s been crying. But at least she’s still alive.
“What happened, sweetie?” says Roz. There are no marks of violence; maybe that schmuck Billy has pocketed Charis’s life savings.
Tony looks at Ouida. She’s sitting beside Charis, ears pricked, tongue out. There’s something on her chest fur. Pizza sauce?
“Billy’s in the hospital,” says Charis. “Ouida bit him.” She starts to sniffle. Good dog, Ouida, thinks Tony.
“I’ll make us some mint tea,” says Roz. “Why did Ouida …?”
“Well, we were going to, you know … in the bedroom. And Ouida was barking, so I had to shut her in the upstairs hall closet. And then, just before … I simply had to know. So I said, ‘Billy, who murdered my chickens?’ Because back then, Zenia told me it was Billy who did it, but I never knew what to believe, because Zenia was such a liar, and I just couldn’t … with someone who’d done that. And Billy said, ‘It was Zenia, she slit their throats, I tried to stop her.’ And then Ouida started to bark really loud, as if something was hurting her, and I had to go see what was wrong, and when I opened the closet door she rushed out and jumped up on the bed and bit Billy. He screamed a lot, there was blood on the sheets, it was …”
“You can get it out with cold water,” says Roz.
“On the leg?” asks Tony.
“Not exactly,” says Charis. “He wasn’t wearing any clothes, otherwise I’m sure she wouldn’t have … but they’re doing surgery. I feel bad about that. I told them at the hospital, after they’d wheeled him to emerg – I said it was me who bit him, it was a sex thing Billy liked and it went too far, and they were very nice, they said these things happen. I hated to lie, but they might have, you know, put Ouida away. It was very stressful! But at least now I know the answer.”
“What answer?” asks Roz. “The answer to what?”
Charis says it’s all very clear: Zenia has been coming back in dreams to warn her about Billy, who was the chicken-murderer all along. But Charis was too stupid to figure it out – she wanted to believe the best of Billy, and it was so nice at first that he was back in her life, it was like a completion of the circle or something, so Zenia had to take the next step and reincarnate herself in the body of Ouida – that’s why she was wearing fur in the second dream – and she was naturally annoyed when she heard Billy sticking the blame onto her for something she hadn’t done.
In fact, says Charis, maybe Zenia’s intentions were benevolent all along. Maybe she stole Billy to protect Charis from such a bad apple as him. Maybe she stole West to teach Tony a life lesson about, well, music appreciation or something, and maybe she stole Mitch to clear the way for Roz’s much better husband, Sam. Maybe Zenia was, like, the secret alter ego of each of them, acting out stuff for them they didn’t have the strength to act out by themselves. When you looked at it that way …
So that is how Tony and Roz have agreed to look at it, at least when they are with Charis, because it makes Charis happier. It takes some doing to pretend that a medium-sized black-and-white dog who wipes her paws on your coat and poops behind logs is in fact Zenia, but they don’t have to pretend all the time: Zenia comes and goes, unpredictable as she has always been, and only Charis can tell when Zenia is present inside Ouida and when she is not.
Billy made threatening noises about suing Charis for his injuries, but Roz squashed that: she can out-lawyer him any day of the week, she told him. Thanks to the extensive search done by her hired detective, she has chapter and verse on his career in matron-fleecing, Ponzi schemes, and identity theft, and if he thinks he can use Ouida as his blackmail weapon he should think again, because it’s his word against Charis’s, and who does he think a jury will believe?
So Billy has gone elsewhere, never to be seen again, and now a jovial retired plumber lives in the other half of Charis’s duplex. He’s a widower, and Roz and Tony have hopes for him. He’s redoing the bathroom, which is a start. Ouida approves of him, and tries to cram herself under the sink when he’s down there with his wrench, and licks him wherever possible, and flirts with him shamelessly.