Finding the numbers for the Megrims and the Poindexters was just as easy. But mustering the will to dial them was another matter.
Winnie returned with a tub of Tuffskin in her hand, a prize from her rummage through bathroom cabinets. She carried as well a thick wad of bills and a set of keys on a chain, both of which she stuffed into Bray’s pants pockets. “Well?”
Bray pointed to the map. “We’re here. Over here’s Corundum High. It’s seven ten now. Apply the Tuffskin, let the stuff seal, hit the road at seven thirty, and we should be right on time.”
“Did you call them?”
“Not exactly, I—”
“Wimp!” She grabbed the pad and punched in a number. Six rings. “That’s right,” muttered Winnie, “catch some fast food and go bowling while your son dies.”
She hung up and punched in the other number, her index finger moving with strength and purpose. Ring one, ring two, ring three, followed by a click, and a singing voice, to which she began to say something, stopping when she realized it was a recording.
She drummed on the counter, then, “Yeah, hi, listen up. You don’t know me, but your daughter Tweed and her date were chosen as tonight’s prom victims. I have reason to believe they’ll be spared. Trust me, this is not a hoax. You’ll learn about it later this evening, but really now… don’t you think you should have done more to stop this outrage before it went this far?”
Winnie hung up. “That oughta jolt someone’s complacency.”
“You were unnecessarily cruel.”
“Tell it to the judge, Mister Promjumper.” She pried the lid off the tub and dipped a hand into the soft goo. “Turn your head left.” It burned going on, but Bray felt it harden and penetrate his skin as she kneaded and shaped it.
Thinned, Tuffskin concealed blemishes.
Applied more thickly, it gave heft to breast or cock.
A famous pianist had been said to extend his fingers this way, but anyone who understood music knew that had to be a wild lie.
“Now you do me,” she said, “and by God you’d better get it right.”
Her harshness had begun to amuse more than shame him, which was just as well. His hand held steady. He did his best to thin the Tuffskin and coat her lobe, concealing the pale green beneath flesh tones. Curiously, the more it reminded him of the lobes of girls he had lusted after when he was whole, the greater the urge grew to kiss it.
He planted a light one.
Winnie drew back. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Kissing my date’s friendship lobe.”
“Don’t you friendship me!” she retorted. “Let’s see what’s to eat. Ten minutes tops.”
Bray visited the john first.
When he returned, Winnie had a variety of meats and cheeses laid out on the table, along with three types of juice. He lifted a Jonathan from the fruit bowl, alternating bites of mozzarella and apple and feeling how weird it was to have a fake lobe moving to match his concealed stuffed lobebag on the left.
He’d give anything, he thought, to have it be real, to have this prom be his abandoned prom nine years before.
Between bites, he tried to filter his breath through his hand. The stench of death made eating an iffy proposition. Winnie, a thin shapely woman of fierce determination, chowed down oblivious of the smell. Her eyes darted between the wall clock and the sheaf of papers.
Bray grabbed another apple. One bite in, his date announced that it was garage time and headed back through the house. He tossed the apple in the trash.
Winnie’s instincts were unerring. At the end of the hall was the door to the garage, a standard three-car structure with a couple of cars and some boxes stacked against a side wall.
“Which one is least likely to have belonged to Fronemeyer?” she asked. “We don’t want to rouse suspicions in the parking lot.”
“This one’s got to be his.” Bray pointed to a newer foreign jobbie whose license plate frame read PAINTERS DO IT WITH ACRYLICRITY. A parking pass hung from its inside mirror.
“Good guess. We’ll take the other.” She started to open the passenger door. “What are you doing?”
“Holding the door for you.” Winnie looked creamy and scrumptious.
“Get the heck over to the other side of the car. And get serious, will you? There are three dead people inside that house. And we’re on a mission to turn things around in this cockeyed world.”
“Okay, okay, I’ll drive.”
“That’s right. You drive, I ride, I do the thinking, you follow orders. It’s that simple.”
Sliding in beside her, Brayton nit-nit-nitted the garage door open.
In this light, Winnie almost looked like Bonnie Dolan, the date he had disgraced through his cowardice. Maybe if he pretended as hard as he could, he might save himself and counterbalance the misery he had put the Dolans and his parents through so many years before.
He leaned toward her.
“Watch it!” she said.
“Fine.” He smiled. “But before this evening’s over, I bet you’re going to want to kiss me.”
“Bet away. Dream on. Hit the road.”
Brayton did.
All three.
Their babysitter had finked out on them, so they had her daughter Pill to contend with.
Even so, Trilby Donner thought that having the three of them, her and her spouses Bix and Brest, chaperone the prom was a swell idea.
In public Brest displayed much love for Bix, even as she spoke privately to Trilby of dumping him in favor of an all-girl threesome with Delia Gaskin. But Trilby felt that if only they could do more together as a triple and as a family, if they made the effort to identify common threads in their lives and intertwine them to gain tensile strength, their marriage was still salvageable.
That’s why she insisted so vehemently that they take Pill with them. It was, she felt a great idea, despite her embarrassment when Bix passed a bribe to Elwood Dunsmore and the lynx-eyed student inside the door checking passes. Hush-hush, no need to let anyone know an eight-year-old was on the grounds, she would be mouse-quiet in the faculty lounge and out of sight as the slasher stalks.
Dunsmore, a coffee-skinned shop teacher with a bristle mustache and a bulbous friendship lobe, winked, okay’d his fingers, and folded the bills into his coat pocket. “That’s called hush money,” he told the junior, who nodded and said, “Yeah, we learned about that stuff in Mr. Versailles’ class in the lesser vices.”
Now Pill was being difficult.
“Why the long face, honey? I’ll come in to check on you every half hour,” Trilby assured.
The child kept her head bent, her pre-adolescent earlobes forlorn in their naked innocence. In three or four years, when puberty struck, her baby Pill would need to be fitted for a lobebag.
“You’ve got your books, Gigi the goat, and a nice plush chair. There’s pear juice in the mini-fridge whenever you want it.”
Whiny voice, yet thank God no tears: “But I want you, Mommy.”
Brest and Bix stood by the door.
Trilby sensed them behind her, impatience and loverly interest intermingled. Later, in bed, she had no doubt they would use the delay caused by Pill’s whining as an excuse to vent their pent-up affection toward her. And she would do her best to counter with her worn riding crop.
“You’ll be a big girl, won’t you?” she asked. “You’ll take care of yourself?”
Pill nodded, hugging her stuffed goat.
“That’s my girl. Now remember, if you hear footsteps, what do you do before the people come in?”
The corners of Pill’s mouth flexed. “I miss Puff,” she said. Puff was her kitty.
