Not that Wilma had forgotten Nettle, or forgiven her, or come to entertain the slightest doubt as to who had vandalized her bedlinen; no medicine on earth would have done those things.
Shortly after Pete left for work, Wilma got into her car and cruised slowly down Willow Street (plastered to the back bumper of the little yellow Yugo was a bumper sticker which told the world
IF YOU DON’T LIKE MY DRIVING DIAL 1-800-EAT-SHIT).
She turned right, onto Ford Street, and slowed to a crawl as she approached Nettle Cobb’s neat little house. She thought she saw one of the curtains twitch, and that was a good start… but only a start.
She went around the block (passing the Rusk home on Pond Street without a glance), past her own home on Willow, and around to Ford Street for the second time. This time she honked the Yugo’s horn twice as she approached Nettle’s house and then parked out front with the engine idling.
The curtain twitched again. No mistake this time. The woman was peering out at her. Wilma thought of her behind the curtain, I
trembling with guilt and terror, and found she enjoyed the image even more than she enjoyed the one she had gone to bed withthe one where she was twisting the crazy bitch’s noodle until it spun like that little girl’s head in The Exorcist.
“Peekaboo, I see you,” she said grimly as the curtain fell back in place. “Don’t think I don’t.”
She circled the block again and stopped in front of Nettle’s a second time, honking the horn to notify her prey of her arrival.
This time she sat out front for almost five minutes. The curtain twitched twice. At last she drove on again, satisfied.
Crazy broadwillspendthe rest oftheday lookingforme, she thought as she parked in her own driveway and got out. She’ll be afraid to set foot out of her door.
Wilma went inside, light of foot and heart, and plunked down on the sofa with a catalogue. Soon she was happily ordering three new sets of sheets-white, yellow, and paisley.
3
Raider sat in the middle of the living-room carpet, looking at his mistress. At last he whined uneasily, as if to remind Nettle that this was a working day and she was already half an hour late. Today was the day she was supposed to vacuum the upstairs at Polly’s, and the telephone man was coming with the new phones, the ones with the great big touch- tone pads. They were supposed to be easier for people who had the arthritis so terrible, like Polly did, to use.
But how could she go out?
That crazy Polish woman was out there someplace, cruising around in her little car.
Nettle sat in her chair, holding her lampshade in her lap. She had been holding it in her lap ever since the crazy Polish woman had driven past her house the first time. Then she had come again, parking and honking her horn. When she left, Nettle thought it might be over, but no-the woman had come back yet a third time.
Nettle had been sure the crazy Polish woman would try to come in.
She had sat in her chair, hugging the lampshade with one arm and Raider with the other, wondering what she would do when and if the crazy Polish woman did try-how she would defend herse f.
She didn’t know.
At last she had mustered enough courage to take another peek out the window, and the crazy Polish woman had been gone. Her first feeling of relief had been superseded by dread. She was afraid that the crazy Polish woman was patrolling the streets, waiting for her to come out; she was even more afraid that the crazy Polish woman would come here after she was gone.
That she would break in and see her beautiful lampshade and shatter it to a thousand fragments on the floor.
Raider whined again.
“I know,” she said in a voice which was almost a groan. “I know.”
She had to leave. She had a responsibility, and she knew what it was and to whom she owed it. Polly Chalmers had been good to her. It had been Polly who wrote the recommendation that had gotten her out of juniper Hill for good, and it had been Polly who had co-signed for her home loan at the bank. If not for Polly, whose father had been her father’s best friend, she would still be living in a rented room on the other side of the Tin Bridge.
But what if she left and the crazy Polish woman came back?
Raider couldn’t protect her lampshade; he was brave, but he was just a little dog. The crazy Polish woman might hurt him if he tried to stop her. Nettle felt her mind, caught in the vise of this horrible dilemma, beginning to slip. She groaned again.
And suddenly, mercifully, an idea occurred to her.
She got up, still cradling the lampshade in her arms, and crossed the living room, which was very gloomy with the shades drawn.
She walked through the kitchen and opened the door in its far corner. There was a shed tacked onto this end of the house. The shadows of the woodpile and a great many stored objects bulked in the gloom.
A single lightbulb hung down from the ceiling on a cord.
There was no switch or chain; you turned it on by screwing it firmly into its socket. She reached for this… then hesitated.
If the crazy Polish woman was lurking in the back yard, she would see the light go on. And if she saw the light go on, she would know exactly where to look for Nettle’s carnival glass lampshade, wouldn’t she?
“Oh no, you don’t get me that easy,” she said under her breath, feeling her way past her mother’s armoire and her mother’s old Dutch bookcase to the woodpile. “Oh no you don’t, Wilma Jersyck.
I’m not stupid, you know. I’m warning you of that.”
Holding the lampshade against her belly with her left hand, Nettle used her right to pull down the tangle of old, dirty cobwebs in front of the shed’s single window. Then she peered out into the back yard, her eyes jerking brightly from one spot to another. She remained so for almost a minute. Nothing in the back yard moved.
Once she thought she saw the crazy Polish woman crouching in the far left corner of the yard, but closer study convinced her it was only the shade of the oak at the back of the Fearons’ yard. The tree’s lower branches overhung her own yard. They were moving a little in the wind, and that was why the patch of shade back there had looked like a crazy woman (a crazy Polish woman, to be exact) for a second.
Raider whined from behind her. She looked around and saw him standing in the shed door, a black silhouette with his head cocked.
“I know,” she said. “I know, boy-but we’re going to fool her. She thinks I’m stupid. Well, I can teach her better news than that.”
She felt her way back. Her eyes were adjusting to the gloom and she decided she would not need to screw in the lightbulb after all.
She stood on tiptoe and felt along the top of the armoire until her fingers encountered the key which locked and unlocked the long cupboard on the left-hand side. The key which worked on the drawers had been missing for years, but that was all right-Nettle had the one she needed.
She opened the long cupboard and deposited the carnival glass lampshade inside, amid the dust bunnies and mouse-turds.
“It deserves to be in a better place and I know it,” she said softly to Raider. “But it’s safe, and that’s the important thing.”
She put the key back in the lock, turned it, then tried the cupboard door. It was tight, tight as a tick, and she felt suddenly as if a huge boulder had rolled off her heart. She tried the cupboard door again, nodded briskly, and slipped the key into the pocket of her ho ’ usedress. When she got to Polly’s house, she would put it on a piece of string and hang it around her neck. She would do it first thing.
“There!” she told Raider, who had begun wagging his tail. Per 7
haps he sensed that the crisis was past.
“That’s taken care of, big boy, and I must get to work! I’m late!”
As she was slipping into her coat, the telephone began to ring.
Nettle took two steps toward it and then stopped.
Raider uttered his single, severe bark and looked at her. Don’t you know what you’re supposed to do when the telephone rings?
his eyes asked her. Even I know that, and I’m only the dog.
“I won’t,” Nettle said.
I know what you did, you crazy bitch, I know what you did, I know what you did, and I… am going to… get you!
“I won’t answer it. I’m going to work. She’s the one who’s crazy, not me. I never did a thing to her! Not one solitary thing!”
Raider barked agreement.
The telephone stopped ringing.
Nettle relaxed a little… but her heart was still pounding hard.
“You be a good boy,” she told Raider, stroking him. “I’ll be back late, because I’m going in late. But I love you, and if you remember that, you will be a good doggy all day long.”
This was a going-to-work incantation which Raider knew well, and he wagged his tail. Nettle opened the front door and peered both ways before stepping out. She had a bad moment when she saw a bright flash of yellow, but it wasn’t the crazy Polish woman’s car; the Pollard boy had left his Fisher-Price tricycle out on the sidewalk, that was all.
Nettle used her housekey to lock the door behind her, then walked around to the rear of the house to make sure the shed door was locked.
It was. She set off for Polly’s house, her purse over her arm and her eyes searching for the crazy Polish woman’s car (she was trying to decide if she should hide behind a hedge or simply stand her ground if she saw it). She was almost to the end of the block when it came to her that she had not checked the front door as carefully as she should have done. She glanced anxiously at her watch and then retraced her steps. She checked the front door. It was locked tight. Nettle sighed with relief, and then decided she ought to check the lock on the woodshed door, too, just to be safe.
“Better safe than sorry,” she muttered under her breath, and went around to the back of the house.
Her hand froze in the act of pulling on the handle of the woodshed door.
