'A black dress?'
'No. More like a sweat suit or something.'
'And sneakers.'
'Apparently.'
'But it could have been a man in a wig.'
'Well?Jesus Christ.'
'It couldn't have been?'
Heavey became flustered, unable even to consider it. 'What I saw was a woman.'
Maddox turned his flashlight beam at an angle to the window. He breathed onto the cooling glass, his warm breath revealing a few smudges and handprints. But all boy- sized.
'Neat trick,' said Heavey.
Maddox turned and ran his beam over the yard to the forest, inside which it was already night. 'This person ran into the trees. Where?'
Heavey showed him. Maddox skimmed his flashlight beam over the ground, but browned pine needles and last autumn's leaves obscured any footprints. 'Boys play army in here,' said Heavey. 'I don't know if I'd build a house on the edge of a forest again. You have kids?'
Maddox shook his head, looking back at the house, then circling to the right, just inside the perimeter. He kept checking the house, maybe looking for a good view of it from the trees.
Heavey said, 'Real sorry to hear about your mother. She had a fall?'
'She had been sick for a while. Her lungs. Medication made her unsteady.'
'Stairs?'
'Bathroom floor.'
'Most dangerous room in the house. I lost my mother two years ago this September, to viral pneumonia. I was the baby of the family. Your mother was insured?'
'Enough to cover the burial.'
'Good for her. I tell you, most people around here, they've either forgotten or never learned how to plan for the future. They got no cushion in their lives. Living day to day.'
Maddox found a good vantage point on the house, almost in line with the sneaker treads heading past the skateboard ramps. He scoured the ground with his flashlight beam, toeing at the soft forest floor. Heavey thought he saw something illuminated, white and small.
Maddox became very still, focusing his beam on this tiny object. Not as thick as a smoked-down cigarette butt, unless maybe it was the hand-rolled kind. It seemed important until, suddenly, with his hiking boot, Maddox scattered whatever it was back among the dead leaves, clicking off his light.
10
ZOO LADY
THE UPSTAIRS DOORBELL rang a fifth time, and Horton and Glynda scrambled back onto the front windowsill to scratch at the glass. Norman howled in despair from his pillow bed, unable to get up due to his leg splints. Felicia, the lamp- shade-collared beagle, fretted back and forth along the kitchen floor,
Penelope and Vernon would tear down her already shredded curtains unless somebody answered the front door. Miss Beverly shushed them to no avail, finally turning down Bill O'Reilly and shuffling through the living room to her door. She didn't realize she was barefoot until she was already out on the old black-and-white diamond tile of the entranceway, squeezing through with only two cats?Lucinda and Raoul?escaping.
She hated her damaged feet, her blunted toes and the perpetual bruising over the arch. The town knew her only as the Zoo Lady, foster mother to a menagerie of abandoned and rescued animals, but in her former life, she had been a dancer, and a great one. She had owned apartments in both Manhattan and Paris. She had hoofed on Broadway, and never in a chorus line. She had toured all of Europe, declined marriage proposals from four separate men, and once dined with a prince. She had danced for George Balanchine and with Gene Kelly. She had affairs with two movie stars, only one of which she regretted.
It was a policeman, and he had seen her there, and it was too late to go back inside for her shoes now, not with all the yipping and scratching at the door behind her. Impossible to keep a pair of slippers with all the gnawers in the house, which was why she stored her $750 orthopedic shoes in the refrigerator. A crazy-lady thing to do, she realized, but better that than allow them to become two very expensive chew toys.
If this young gentleman was the one who would someday break in and find her gone on to her final reward, he would also discover, along with the shoes, her last will sealed in plastic in the freezer. And her two-volume autobiography, neatly typed on four reams of rose-scented paper, light on scandal but heavy on a life of accrued knowledge, Part One in the meat drawer and Part Two in the crisper.
She had once read a newspaper story about an elderly shut-in found a week after her death, her hungry cats feasting upon her body. In fact, Miss Beverly thought that would be quite all right with her. She never had a little baby of her own to feed. She only hoped she tasted good enough.
She was not surprised to see a policeman at the door, nor foolish enough to ask why. She had considered herself fortunate, after a decade of declining health and ruinous investments, to find a landlord sympathetic to her animal ministry. Of course, Mr. Sinclair could little afford to complain, given that he had been compelled by law to disclose his probationary status as a convicted child molester to all prospective tenants. So the rent was low and her infirm pets tolerated.
She pulled open the front door just a few inches, so that no one would escape into the night.
No, she answered the policeman, she hadn't seen Mr. Sinclair at all today. Though she had heard his footsteps earlier, upstairs. But nothing for a few hours now.
He seemed angry, yet paid her the courtesy of politeness, which was not often the case anymore. People today felt justified in their anger and their right to broadcast it around.
He was handsome enough, in an American way. She could still notice these things. She hoped he would be the one who would eventually find her.
'No, no message,' he said, stepping back for another look up at Mr. Sinclair's black-curtained windows. 'I'll stop back some other time.'
11
FROND
FROM THE OUTSIDE, the Gas-Gulp-'N-Go looked like a bait shack with two old-fashioned fuel pumps in front. Inside, it didn't look much better. Nightcrawlers in Styrofoam cups of soil were stocked next to the butter and cream in the back coolers. The newly repealed Massachusetts blue laws meant that the liquor cabinet was no longer chained on church day. The Gulp was the only place in Black Falls where you could buy your milk, bread, newspaper, cigarettes, lottery, booze, and porn. A startling amount of porn, shrink-wrapped magazines and boxed VHS movies pasted with happy-face stickers to cover offending penetrations while leaving the rest of the image intact.
Randall Frond bumped the wire carousel as he passed it, the porn rack creaking guiltily. He was the only one in there, having just made it before the store's nine o'clock closing. Frond had a cold. He had tried his usual homeopathic herbal remedies?eucalyptus oil, ginger root, yarrow leaf, and elm bark?but found he couldn't sweat it away. So here he was, reduced to searching for off-the-shelf cold medicine, the taking of which went expressly against his New Age philosophy. But that's how bad he was plugged up. The last time he'd swallowed a Sudafed, in college during finals week, he had the craziest dreams in his life. Something that messes with your brain chemistry like that can't be any good for you. His girlfriend at the time saved his GPA by brewing him some cinnamon honey tea and feeding him echinacea and raw garlic.
And now, as he prepared to violate his closely held principles for the sake of his sinuses, what did he find before him but empty shelves. Plenty of liquid remedies, Robitussin and NyQuil, but no Sudafed, no Contac, nothing with enough punch to clean out the wad of wet cotton inside his head. Summer colds were the worst.
He brought a bag of Halls drops?their paltry 5.6 milligrams of menthol would have to do?to the front counter, where the owner of the Gulp, the man known as Big Bobby Loom, waited. Frond asked about the Sudafed and received a surly shrug.
Loom said, looking at him over the bag of cough suppressants, 'You're the witch, right?'
It wasn't a term Frond cared to deny. Only in its modern connotations was it inaccurate. 'That's right,' said Frond.
Loom took his money and made change and said not another word.
Feeling worse now than when he had walked in, Frond exited through the swinging door. That's what he got for staying in a town this size; everybody knew everybody else's business.
He was almost at his Jeep when headlights pulled in off Main. Frond made out the light rack on the roof of the patrol car, and slowed near the ice chest, cornered. He wanted to avoid another costly go-round with the Pail brothers. Bogus speeding tickets had already wiped out his 'Safe Driver' steps and raised his insurance rate three hundred dollars.
The cop parked right next to his car. Frond saw that it was
