“Be not dismayed, hubby ours,” Claude said. “Everyone in this room, without exception, was Delia’s dupe.”
That was true. Claude had a way of cutting to the heart. He was also a mean flogger when the mood struck him.
“ All of us made a mistake,” continued Claude, “which we simply must, with all deliberate speed, rectify. If we visit right retribution upon our wayward school nurse, they’ll make us heroes all over again. The public loves seeing justice meted out. Calm down, Bray, sweetie. Let come what may.”
Claude sat back, not waiting to see if Bray followed his advice. Claude knew he would. His confidence, Bray thought, was irritating, but it wasn’t misplaced. Claude knew him.
Claude knew them both.
Had sexy Jonquil Brindisi not been so deeply bigoted, it would have been sweet and savory for them to have tripled up with her. But Claude, the more he and Winnie got to know him, was a pretty decent companion. He treated them well, he was fun to listen to, and he cooked a mean omelette.
“I just don’t like it,” Bray muttered, but only for form’s sake.
Winnie’s look said, I love you, you doofus, despite your fretting and moaning.
Meanwhile, Brest had clearly been struggling to make sense of the babble. As everyone spoke up, fitting in this or that piece of the puzzle for her, Trilby held her hand.
Pill leaned against her mother and listened, looking tired but otherwise like any other eight-year-old up past her bedtime.
Bray twiddled his fingers at her, a spastic butterfly caught chest high. Pill gave a wisp of a smile and twiddled back.
The plan for dealing with Delia Gaskin came in part from Futzy Buttweiler and in part-indeed the killer part- from Jenna Megrim.
Bray listened in fascination as their plan gathered shape and momentum. Carrying it out, he sensed, would provide the healing for which they had come together. As one part of the plan meshed with another, their conspiratorial circle took on centripetal force. Heads angled in like sharpened stakes in a concealed pit.
Only Jonquil held back, sipping her drink.
Bray gave her a brief look of wistful lust, to which Jonquil dutifully shot back an intolerant glare full of fire and fuck-you.
Still, her compact, killer, curvaceous legs, crossed just so, boggled Bray’s brain. He longed to uncross them, to shred those dark stockings, to dip down into the warm moist fire of her loins and tongue up the juices that sizzled there.
Right, he thought. Not in this lifetime.
Winnie elbowed him. Listen up, Bray, her look commanded him.
Bray listened.
Dex sat on the floor against an overstuffed armchair, intent on the grown-ups’ conversation.
Tweed sat huggably close on his right, her sister Jenna’s head on his left thigh.
Despite Dex’s graduation the previous spring and his coming-up-on six months at First National, clerking away as if he’d done it forever, he still felt very much a kid.
The terrors of the prom had indeed aged him. And this evening’s revelations went even further toward drawing his youth to a close. But maturity wasn’t something you snapped on like a toolbelt.
It was strange being a boy.
Boys were expected to show strength. Not to cry, or only on special occasions.
But really the girls were in charge.
With decent boys anyway.
He had heard of the rougher sort of guys, who threw their rage around and made things nasty for the women in their lives. They were just wacked-out dudes, far as he was concerned.
But among normal people, the women held sway and everybody knew it.
There were even jokes about it.
Now he had learned that it wasn’t sick-guy Gerber Waddell, but sick-girl Delia Gaskin, who had been the prom killer.
Poor Gerber, a kind retard with a nasty past and a brain pruned back to cut out his nastiness, they had futtered by mistake.
And Miss Gaskin walked about, bold as brass, wearing a mask of innocence, even trysting on the sly with the widows of the same Bix Donner whose life she herself had ended.
She had to be insane.
To think that he had visited the nurse’s office, what, at least half a dozen times during his four-year stint at Corundum High. She could have sliced him up, fed him poison pills, or God knows what -all.
She could have done that to anyone.
Maybe she had.
No doubt there would be an investigation. Odd incidents at the school. Rumors of excess pain, of prolonged illnesses, the examination of pill bottles in medicine chests.
Dex didn’t think anyone had died, but maybe he was wrong. Probably though, what with all the ribbing the nurse took, she had simply snapped.
On his left, Jenna stirred.
Tweed cuddled against him, almost hiding her head beneath his arm. Perhaps she was reliving those awful moments at the prom, and the death of her father. Dex would have to soothe her tonight, to assure her that she was safe in his arms and adored to the max.
But Tweed’s kid sister squirmed in a most delightful fashion at his thigh. As he watched her take in each speaker in the room, Dex could feel the tension in her body.
Jenna was a pert thing, a little more compact than Tweed but otherwise a knock-off of her.
And a knock-out.
Dex mused.
Sister-wives were not unheard of.
Jenna was currently nursing a crush on the sprightly Pish Balthasar and on Bo Meacham, a hot-shot quarterback with nothing but brawn and looks to recommend him.
Maybe after her prom, she would wise up and gaze upon her brother-in-law in a new way.
Dex hoped so.
But he thought it best to let that unfold on its own. It was inconceivable to bring it up with her. Maybe he could plant a seed in Tweed’s ear, letting sisterly magic weave its gossamer web.
Shame on him!
With all the upset and outrage sweeping through Mr. Versailles’ living room, here he was firmly focused on lust.
Maybe Tweed would chastise him tonight.
He loved their Private Flogger.
And he was glad it made such a racket, the buzz-build, the thwap!
Jenna, down the hall from their bedroom, was most likely listening, lying there stroking her lovelobe. Most likely, she had Pish and Bo on her mind as she stroked, but maybe not, maybe not.
He could dream, couldn’t he?
Tweed clung to Dex.
She missed her father’s melodious voice.
At first, her house had seemed empty without him. But Dex’s love for her had so filled it, and so filled her heart, that the ache of her father’s death had lost its edge in recent months.
Jenna’s presence helped too.
Their sisterly rivalry, always minor, had vanished completely in the sudden maturity prom night had brought on.
Jenna had recently taken up with Bo Meacham, whose outsized nose and dorkish grins were more than
