Текст книги "Full dark, no stars"

Автор книги: Stephen Edwin King

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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

The street ended in a turnaround. Tess took it, came back, and turned into Norville’s driveway without giving herself a chance to hesitate. She killed the lights and the motor, then took a long, deep breath.

“Come back safe, Tess,” Tom said from his place on the dashboard. “Come back safe and I’ll take you to your next stop.”

“I’ll do my best.” She grabbed her yellow legal pad (there was now nothing written on it) and got out of her car. She held the pad to the front of her jacket as she walked to Ramona Norville’s door. Her moonshadow-perhaps all that was left of the Old Tess-walked beside her. – 34 -

Norville’s front door had beveled glass strips on either side. They were thick and warped the view, but Tess could make out nice wallpaper and a hallway floored with polished wood. There was an end table with a couple of magazines on it. Or maybe they were catalogues. There was a big room at the end of the hall. The sound of a TV came from there. She heard singing, so Ramona probably wasn’t watching Saw. In fact-if Tess was right and the song was “Climb Ev’ry Mountain”-Ramona was watching The Sound of Music.

Tess rang the doorbell. From inside came a run of chimes that sounded like the opening notes of “Dixie”-a strange choice for New England, but then, if Tess was right about her, Ramona Norville was a strange woman.

Tess heard the clump of big feet and made a half-turn, so the light from the beveled glass would catch only a bit of her face. She lowered her blank pad from her chest and made writing motions with one gloved hand. She let her shoulders slump a little. She was a woman taking some kind of survey. It was Sunday evening, she was tired, all she wanted was to discover the name of this woman’s favorite toothpaste (or maybe if she had Prince Albert in a can) and then go home.

Don’t worry, Ramona, you can open the door, anybody can see that I’m harmless, the kind of woman who wouldn’t say boo to a goose.

From the corner of her eye she glimpsed a distorted fish-face swim into view behind the beveled glass. There was a pause that seemed to last a very long time, then Ramona Norville opened the door. “Yes? Can I help y-”

Tess turned back. The light from the open door fell on her face. And the shock she saw on Norville’s face, the utter drop-jaw shock, told her everything she needed to know.

“You? What are you doing h-”

Tess pulled the Lemon Squeezer.38 from her right front pocket. On the drive from Stoke Village she had imagined it getting stuck in there-had imagined it with nightmarish clarity-but it came out smoothly.

“Move back from the door. If you try to shut it, I’ll shoot you.”

“You won’t,” Norville said. She didn’t move back, but she didn’t shut the door, either. “Are you crazy?”

“Get inside.”

Norville was wearing a big blue housecoat, and when Tess saw the front of it rise precipitously, she raised the gun. “If you even start to yell, I’ll shoot. You better believe me, bitch, because I’m not even close to kidding.”

Norville’s large bosom deflated. Her lips were drawn back from her teeth and her eyes were shifting from side to side in their sockets. She didn’t look like a librarian now, and she didn’t look jovial and welcoming. To Tess she looked like a rat caught outside its hole.

“If you fire that gun, the whole neighborhood will hear.”

Tess doubted that, but didn’t argue. “It won’t matter to you, because you’ll be dead. Get inside. If you behave yourself and answer my questions, you might still be alive tomorrow morning.”

Norville backed up, and Tess came in through the open door with the gun held stiffly out in front of her. As soon as she closed the door-she did it with her foot-Norville stopped moving. She was standing by the little table with the catalogues on it.

“No grabbing, no throwing,” Tess said, and saw by the twitch of the other woman’s mouth that grabbing and throwing had indeed been in Ramona’s mind. “I can read you like a book. Why else would I be here? Keep backing up. All the way down to the living room. I just love the Trapp Family when they’re really rocking.”

“You’re crazy,” Ramona said, but she began to back up again. She was wearing shoes. Even in her housecoat she was wearing big ugly shoes. Men’s laceups. “I have no idea what you’re doing here, but-”

“Don’t bullshit me, Mommy. Don’t you dare. It was all on your face when you opened the door. Every bit of it. You thought I was dead, didn’t you?”

“I don’t know what you’re-”

“It’s just us girls, so why not fess up?”

They were in the living room now. There were sentimental paintings on the walls-clowns, waifs with big eyes-and lots of shelves and tables cluttered with knickknacks: snowglobes, troll babies, Hummel figures, Care Bears, a ceramic candy house? la Hansel and Gretel. Although Norville was a librarian, there were no books in evidence. Facing the TV was a La-Z-Boy with a hassock in front of it. There was a TV tray beside the chair. On it was a bag of Cheez Doodles, a large bottle of Diet Coke, the remote control, and a TV Guide. On top of the television was a framed photograph of Ramona and another woman with their arms around each other and their cheeks pressed together. It looked as if it had been taken at an amusement park or a county fair. In front of the photo was a glass candy dish that gleamed with sparkle-points of light beneath the overhead fixture.

“How long have you been doing it?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“How long have you been pimping for your homicidal rapist of a son?”

Norville’s eyes flickered, but again she denied it… which presented Tess with a problem. When she had come here, killing Ramona Norville had seemed not just an option but the most likely outcome. Tess had been almost positive she could do it, and that the boat-rope in the left front pocket of her cargo pants would go unused. Now, however, she discovered she couldn’t go ahead unless the woman admitted her complicity. Because what had been written on her face when she’d seen Tess standing at her door, bruised but otherwise very much alive, wasn’t enough.

Not quite enough.

“When did it start? How old was he? Fifteen? Did he claim he was ‘just foolin around’? That’s what a lot of them claim when they first start.”

“I have no idea what you mean. You come to the library and put on a perfectly acceptable presentation-lackluster, obviously you were only there for the money, but at least it filled the open date on our calendar-and the next thing I know you’re on my doorstep, pointing a gun and making all sorts of wild-”

“It’s no good, Ramona. I saw his picture on the Red Hawk website. Ring and all. He raped me and tried to kill me. He thought he did kill me. And you sent me to him.”

Norville’s mouth dropped open in a gruesome combination of shock, dismay, and guilt. “That’s not true! You stupid cunt, you don’t know what you’re talking about!” She started forward.

Tess raised the gun. “Nuh-uh, don’t do that. No.”

Norville stopped, but Tess didn’t think she would stay stopped for long. She was nerving herself up for either fight or flight. And because she had to know Tess would follow her if she tried to run deeper into the house, it would probably be fight.

The Trapp Family was singing again. Given the situation Tess was in-that she had put herself in-all that happy choral crap was maddening. Keeping the Lemon Squeezer trained on Norville with her right hand, Tess picked up the remote with her left and muted the TV. She started to put the remote down again, then froze. There were two things on top of the TV, but at first she had only registered the picture of Ramona and her girlfriend; the candy dish had just earned a glance.

Now she saw that the sparkles she had assumed were coming from the cut-glass sides of the dish weren’t coming from the sides at all. They were coming from something inside. Her earrings were in the dish. Her diamond earrings.

Norville grabbed the Hansel and Gretel candy house from its shelf and threw it. She threw it hard. Tess ducked and the candy house went an inch over her head, shattering on the wall behind her. She stepped backward, tripped over the hassock, and went sprawling. The gun flew from her hand.

They both went for it, Norville dropping to her knees and slamming her shoulder against Tess’s arm and shoulder like a football tackle intent on sacking the quarterback. She grabbed the gun, at first juggling it and then securing her grip. Tess reached inside her jacket and closed her hand around the handle of the butcher knife that was her backup, aware that she was going to be too late. Norville was too big… and too maternal. Yes, that was it. She had protected that rogue son of hers for years, and was intent on protecting him now. Tess should have shot her in the hall, the moment the door was shut behind her.

But I couldn’t, she thought, and even at this moment, knowing it was the truth brought some comfort. She got up on her knees, hand still inside the jacket, facing Ramona Norville.

“You’re a shitty writer and you were a shitty guest speaker,” Norville said. She was smiling, speaking faster and faster. Her voice had a nasal auctioneer’s lilt. “You phoned in your talk the same way you phone in your stupid books. You were perfect for him and he was going to do someone, I know the signs. I sent you that way and it worked out right and I’m glad he fucked you. I don’t know what you thought you were going to do, coming here, but this is what you get.”

She pulled the trigger and there was nothing but a dry click. Tess had taken lessons when she bought the gun, and the most important had been not to put a bullet in the chamber that would first fall under the hammer. Just in case the trigger was pulled by accident.

An expression of almost comical surprise came over Norville’s face. It made her young again. She looked down at the gun, and when she did, Tess drew the knife from the inside pocket of the jacket, stumbled forward, and jammed it up to the hilt in Norville’s belly.

The woman made a glassy “OOO– OOOO” sound that tried to be a scream and failed. Tess’s pistol dropped and Ramona staggered back against the wall, looking down at the handle of the knife. One flailing arm struck a rank of Hummel figures. They tumbled from the shelf and shattered on the floor. She made that “OOO– OOOO” sound again. The front of the housecoat was still unstained, but blood began to patter from beneath its hem, onto Ramona Norville’s manshoes. She put her hands on the haft of the knife, tried to tug it free, and made the “OOO– OOOO” for the third time.

She looked up at Tess, unbelieving. Tess looked back. She was remembering something that had happened on her tenth birthday. Her father had given her a slingshot, and she had gone out looking for things to shoot with it. At some point, five or six blocks from her house, she had seen a raggedy-eared stray dog rooting in a garbage can. She had put a small rock in her slingshot and fired at it, only meaning to scare the dog away (or so she told herself), but hitting it in the rump instead. The dog had made a miserable ike-ike-ike sound and run away, but before it did, it gave Tess a look of reproach she had never forgotten. She would have given anything to take that casual shot back, and she had never fired her slingshot at another living thing. She understood that killing was a part of life-she felt no compunction about swatting mosquitoes, put down traps when she saw mouse-droppings in the cellar, and had eaten her fair share of Mickey D’s Quarter Pounders-but then she had believed she would never again be able to hurt something that way without feeling remorse or regret. She suffered neither in the living room of the house on Lacemaker Lane. Perhaps because, in the end, it had been self-defense. Or perhaps that wasn’t it at all.

“Ramona,” she said, “I’m feeling a certain kinship to Richard Widmark right now. This is what we do to squealers, honey.”

Norville was standing in a puddle of her own blood and her housecoat was at last blooming with blood-poppies. Her face was pale. Her dark eyes were huge and glittery with shock. Her tongue came out and swiped slowly across her lower lip.

“Now you can roll around for a long time, thinkin’ it over-how would that be?”

Norville began to slide. Her manshoes made squittering sounds in the blood. She groped for one of the other shelves and pulled it off the wall. A platoon of Care Bears tilted forward and committed suicide.

Although she still felt no regret or remorse, Tess found that, in spite of her big talk, she had very little inner Tommy Udo; she had no urge to watch or prolong Norville’s suffering. She bent and picked up the.38. From the right front pocket of her cargo pants she removed the item she had taken from the kitchen drawer beside her stove. It was a quilted oven glove. It would silence a single pistol shot quite effectively, as long as the caliber wasn’t too big. She had learned this while writing The Willow Grove Knitting Society Goes on a Mystery Cruise.

“You don’t understand.” Norville’s voice was a harsh whisper. “You can’t do this. It’s a mistake. Take me… hospital.”

“The mistake was yours.” Tess pulled the oven glove over the pistol, which was in her right hand. “It was not having your son castrated as soon as you found out what he was.” She put the oven glove against Ramona Norville’s temple, turned her head slightly to one side, and pulled the trigger. There was a low, emphatic pluh sound, like a big man clearing his throat.

That was all. – 35 -

She hadn’t googled Al Strehlke’s home address; she had been expecting to get that from Norville. But, as she had already reminded herself, things like this never went according to plan. What she had to do now was keep her wits about her and carry the job through to the end.

Norville’s home office was upstairs, in what had probably been meant as a spare bedroom. There were more Care Bears and Hummels here. There were also half a dozen framed pictures, but none of her sons, her main squeeze, or the late great Roscoe Strehlke; these were autographed photos of writers who had spoken to the Brown Baggers. The room reminded Tess of the Stagger Inn’s foyer, with its band photos.

She didn’t ask for an autograph on my photo, Tess thought. Of course not, why would she want to be reminded of a shitty writer like me? I was basically just a talking head to fill a hole in her schedule. Not to mention meat for her son’s meatgrinder. How lucky for them that I came along at the right time.

On Norville’s desk, below a bulletin board buried in circulars and library correspondence, was a desktop Mac very much like Tess’s. The screen was dark, but the glowing light on the CPU told her it was only sleeping. She pushed one of the keys with a gloved fingertip. The screen refreshed and she was looking at Norville’s electronic desktop. No need for those pesky passwords, how nice.

Tess clicked the address book icon, scrolled down to the R’s, and found Red Hawk Trucking. The address was 7 Transport Plaza, Township Road, Colewich. She scrolled further, to the S’s, and found both her overgrown acquaintance from Friday night and her acquaintance’s brother, Lester. Big Driver and Little Driver. They both lived on Township Road, near the company they must have inherited from their father: Alvin at number 23, Lester at number 101.

If there was a third brother, she thought, they’d be The Three Little Truckers. One in a house of straw, one in a house of sticks, one in a house of bricks. Alas, there are only two.

Downstairs again, she plucked her earrings from the glass dish and put them in her coat pocket. She looked at the dead woman sitting against the wall as she did it. There was no pity in the glance, only the sort of parting acknowledgment anyone may give to a piece of hard work that has now been finished. There was no need to worry about trace evidence; Tess was confident she had left none, not so much as a single strand of hair. The oven-glove-now with a hole blown in it-was back in her pocket. The knife was a common item sold in department stores all over America. For all she knew (or cared), it matched Ramona’s own set. So far she was clean, but the hard part might still be ahead. She left the house, got in her car, and drove away. Fifteen minutes later she pulled into the lot of a deserted strip mall long enough to program 23 Township Road, Colewich, into her GPS. – 36 -

With Tom’s guidance, Tess found herself near her destination not long after nine o’clock. The three-quarter moon was still low in the sky. The wind was blowing harder than ever.

Township Road branched off US 47, but at least seven miles from The Stagger Inn and even farther from Colewich’s downtown. Transport Plaza was at the intersection of the two roads. According to the signage, three trucking firms and a moving company were based here. The buildings that housed them had an ugly prefab look. The smallest belonged to Red Hawk Trucking. All were dark on this Sunday night. Beyond them were acres of parking lot surrounded by Cyclone fence and lit with high-intensity arc lights. The depot lot was full of parked cabs and freight haulers. At least one of the cab-overs had RED HAWK TRUCKING on the side, but Tess didn’t think it was the one pictured on the website, the one with the Proud Papa behind the wheel.

There was a truck stop adjacent to the depot area. The pumps-over a dozen-were lit by the same high-intensity arcs. Bright white fluorescents spilled out from the right side of the main building; the left side was dark. There was another building, this one U-shaped, to the rear. A scattering of cars and trucks was parked there. The sign out by the road was a huge digital job, loaded with bright red information.

RICHIE’S TOWNSHIP ROAD TRUCK STOP

“YOU DRIVE ’EM, WE FILL ’EM”

REG $2.99 GAL

DIESEL $2.69 GAL

NEWEST LOTTERY TIX ALWAYS AVAILABLE

RESTAURANT CLOSED SUN. NITE

SORRY NO SHOWERS SUN. NITE

STORE amp; MOTEL “ALWAYS OPEN”

RVS “ALWAYS WELCOME”

And at the bottom, badly spelled but fervent:

SUPPORT OUR TROOPS! WIN IN AFGANDISTAN!

With truckers coming and going, fueling up both their rigs and themselves (even with its lights off, Tess could tell that, when open, the restaurant was of the sort where chicken-fried steak, meatloaf, and Mom’s Bread Pudding would always be on the menu), the place would probably be a beehive of activity during the week, but on Sunday night it was a graveyard because there was nothing out here, not even a roadhouse like The Stagger.

There was only a single vehicle parked at the pumps, facing out toward the road with a pump nozzle stuck in its gas hatch. It was an old Ford F-150 pickup with Bondo around the headlights. It was impossible to read the color in the harsh lighting, but Tess didn’t have to. She had seen that truck close up, and knew the color. The cab was empty.

“You don’t seem surprised, Tess,” Tom said as she slowed to a stop on the shoulder of the road and squinted at the store. She could make out a couple of people in there in spite of the glare from the harsh outside lighting, and she could see that one of them was big. Was he big or real big? Betsy Neal had asked.

“I’m not surprised at all,” she said. “He lives out here. Where else would he go to gas up?”

“Maybe he’s getting ready to take a trip.”

“This late on Sunday night? I don’t think so. I think he was at home, watching The Sound of Music. I think he drank up all of his beer and came down here for more. He decided to top off his tank while he was at it.”

“You could be wrong, though. Hadn’t you better pull in behind the store and follow him when he leaves?”

But Tess didn’t want to do that. The front of the truck-stop store was all glass. He might look out and see her when she drove in. Even if the bright lighting above the pump islands made it hard for him to see her face, he might recognize the vehicle. There were lots of Ford SUVs on the road, but after Friday night, Al Strehlke had to be particularly sensitized to black Ford Expeditions. And there was her license plate-surely he would have noticed her Connecticut license plate on Friday, when he pulled up beside her in the gone-to-weeds parking lot of the deserted store.

There was something else. Something even more important. She got rolling again, putting Richie’s Township Road Truck Stop in the rearview.

“I don’t want to be behind him,” she said. “I want to be ahead of him. I want to be waiting for him.”

“What if he’s married, Tess?” Tom asked. “What if he’s got a wife waiting for him?”

The idea startled her for a moment. Then she smiled, and not just because the only ring he’d been wearing was the one too big to be a ruby. “Guys like him don’t have wives,” she said. “Not ones that stick around, anyway. There was only one woman in Al’s life, and she’s dead.” – 37 -

Unlike Lacemaker Lane, there was nothing suburban about Township Road; it was as country as Travis Tritt. The houses were glimmering islands of electric light beneath the glow of the rising moon.

“Tess, you are approaching your destination,” Tom said in his non-imaginary voice.

She breasted a rise, and there on her left was a mailbox marked STREHLKE and 23. The driveway was long, rising on a curve, paved with asphalt, smooth as black ice. Tess turned in without hesitation, but apprehension dropped over her as soon as Township Road was behind her. She had to fight to keep from jamming on the brakes and backing out again. Because if she kept going, she had no choice. She’d be like a bug in a bottle. And even if he wasn’t married, what if someone else was up there at the house? Brother Les, for instance? What if Big Driver had been at Tommy’s buying beer and snacks not for one but for two?

Tess killed her headlights and drove on by moonlight.

In her keyed-up state, the driveway seemed to go on forever, but it could have been no more than an eighth of a mile before she saw the lights of Strehlke’s house. It was at the top of the hill, a tidy-looking place that was bigger than a cottage but smaller than a farmhouse. Not a house of bricks, but not a humble house of straw, either. In the story of the three little pigs and the big bad wolf, Tess reckoned this would have been the house of sticks.

Parked on the left side of the house was a long trailer-box with RED HAWK TRUCKING on the side. Parked at the end of the driveway, in front of the garage, was the cab-over Pete from the website. It looked haunted in the moonlight. Tess slowed as she approached it, and then she was flooded with a white glare that dazzled her eyes and lit the lawn and the driveway. It was a motion-activated pole light, and if Strehlke came back while it was on, he would be able to see its glow at the foot of his driveway. Maybe even while he was still approaching on Township Road.

She jammed on the brakes, feeling as she had when, as a teenager, she’d dreamed of finding herself in school with no clothes on. She heard a woman groaning. She supposed it was her, but it didn’t sound or feel like her.

“This isn’t good, Tess.”

“Shut up, Tom.”

“He could come back any minute, and you don’t know how long the timer on that thing is. You had trouble with the mother. He’s much bigger than her.”

“I said shut up!”

She tried to think, but that blaring light made it hard. Shadows from the parked cab-over and the long-box to her left seemed to reach for her with sharp black fingers-boogeyman fingers. Goddam pole light! Of course a man like him would have a pole light! She ought to go right now, just turn around on his lawn and drive back down to the road as fast as she could, but she would meet him if she did. She knew it. And with the element of surprise gone, she would die.

Think, Tessa Jean, think!

And oh God, just to make things a little worse, a dog started barking. There was a dog in the house. She imagined a pit bull with a headful of jutting teeth.

“If you’re going to stay, you need to get out of sight,” Tom said… and no, that didn’t sound like her voice. Or not exactly like her voice. Perhaps it was the one that belonged to her deepest self, the survivor. And the killer-her, too. How many unsuspected selves could a person have, hiding deep inside? She was beginning to think the number might be infinite.

She glanced into her rearview mirror, chewing at her still-swollen lower lip. No approaching headlights yet. But would she even be able to tell, given the combined brilliance of the moon and that Christing pole light?

“It’s on a timer,” Tom said, “but I’d do something before it goes out, Tess. If you move the car after it does, you’ll only trip it again.”

She threw the Expedition into four-wheel, started to swing around the cab-over, then stopped. There was high grass on that side. In the pitiless glare of the pole light, he couldn’t help but see the tracks she would leave. Even if the Christing light went out, it would come back on again when he drove up and then he would see them.

Inside, the dog continued to weigh in: Yark! Yark! YarkYarkYark!

“Drive across the lawn and put it behind the long-box,” Tom said.

“The tracks, though! The tracks!”

“You have to hide it somewhere,” Tom returned. He spoke apologetically but firmly. “At least the grass is mown on that side. Most people are pretty unobservant, you know. Doreen Marquis says that all the time.”

“Strehlke’s not a Knitting Society lady, he’s a fucking lunatic.”

But because there was really no choice-not now that she was up here-Tess drove onto the lawn and toward the parked silver long-box through a glare that seemed as bright as a summer noonday. She did it with her bottom slightly raised off the seat, as if by doing that she could somehow magically render the tracks of the Expedition’s passage less visible.

“Even if the motion light is still on when he comes back, he may not be suspicious,” Tom said. “I’ll bet deer trip it all the time. He might even have a light like that to scare them out of his vegetable garden.”

This made sense (and it sounded like her special Tom-voice again), but it did not comfort her much.

Yark! Yark! YarkYark! Whatever it was, it sounded like it was shitting nickels in there.

The ground behind the silver box was bumpy and bald-other freight-boxes had no doubt been parked on it from time to time-but solid enough. She drove the Expedition as deep into the long-box’s shadow as she could, then killed the engine. She was sweating heavily, producing a rank aroma no deodorant would be able to defeat.

She got out, and the motion light went out when she slammed the door. For one superstitious moment Tess thought she had done it herself, then realized the scary fucking thing had just timed out. She leaned over the warm hood of the Expedition, pulling in deep breaths and letting them out like a runner in the last quarter-mile of a marathon. It might come in handy to know how long it had been on, but that was a question she couldn’t answer. She’d been too scared. It had seemed like hours.

When she had herself under control again, she took inventory, forcing herself to move slowly and methodically. Pistol and oven glove. Both present and accounted for. She didn’t think the oven glove would muffle another shot, not with a hole in it; she’d have to count on the isolation of the little hilltop house. It was okay that she’d left the knife in Ramona’s belly; if she were reduced to trying to take out Big Driver with a butcher knife, she’d be in serious trouble.

And there are only four shots left in the gun, you better not forget that and just start spraying him. Why didn’t you bring any more bullets, Tessa Jean? You thought you were planning, but I don’t think you did a very good job.

“Shut up,” she whispered. “Tom or Fritzy or whoever you are, just shut up.”

The scolding voice ceased, and when it did, Tess realized the real world had also gone silent. The dog had ceased its mad barking when the pole light went off. Now the only sound was the wind and the only light was the moon. – 38 -

With that terrible glare gone, the long-box provided excellent cover, but she couldn’t stay there. Not if she meant to do what she had come here to do. Tess scurried around the back of the house, terrified of tripping another motion light, but feeling she had no choice. There was no light to trip, but the moon went behind a cloud and she stumbled over the cellar bulkhead, almost hitting her head on a wheelbarrow when she went to her knees. For a moment as she lay there, she wondered again what she had turned into. She was a member of the Authors Guild who had shot a woman in the head not long ago. After stabbing her in the stomach. I’ve gone entirely off the reservation. Then she thought of him calling her a bitch, a whiny whore bitch, and quit caring about whether she was on or off the reservation. It was a stupid saying, anyway. And racist in the bargain.

Strehlke did have a garden behind his house, but it was small and apparently not worth protecting from the depredations of the deer with a motion light. There was nothing left in it anyway except for a few pumpkins, most now rotting on the vine. She stepped over the rows, rounded the far corner of the house, and there was the cab-over. The moon had come out again and turned its chrome to the liquid silver of sword blades in fantasy novels.

Tess came up behind it, walked along the left side, and knelt by the chin-high (to her, at least) front wheel. She took the Lemon Squeezer out of her pocket. He couldn’t drive into his garage because the cab-over was in the way. Even if it hadn’t been, the garage was probably full of bachelor rickrack: tools, fishing gear, camping gear, truck parts, cases of discount soda.

That’s just guessing. It’s dangerous to guess. Doreen would scold you for it.

Of course she would, no one knew the Knitting Society ladies better than Tess did, but those dessert-loving babies rarely took chances. When you did take them, you were forced to make a certain number of guesses.

Tess looked at her watch and was astounded to see it was only twenty-five to ten. It seemed that she had fed Fritzy double rations and left the house four years ago. Maybe five. She thought she heard an approaching engine, then decided she didn’t. She wished the wind wasn’t blowing so hard, but wish in one hand and shit in the other, see which one fills up first. It was a saying no Knitting Society lady had ever voiced-Doreen Marquis and her friends were more into things like soonest begun, soonest done -but it was a true saying, just the same.