A Moment On the Edge : 100 Years of Crime Stories By Women

“It’s on the table,” he told her.

“No cherry pie?” she asked him.

It sounded like a proposition, so he grinned as he said, “Nah.” If you weren’t so ugly, he thought, I just might stay for dessert.

“Come again,” she said.

You wish, he thought.

If they called him back, he’d say he couldn’t read her handwriting.

Her fault. No wonder she didn’t get a tip. Smiling, he lifted a toothpick off the cashier’s counter and used it to salute the man behind the cash register.

“Thanks,” the man said.

“You bet.”

Outside, Mel stood in the parking lot and stretched, shoving his arms high in the air, letting anybody who was watching get a good look at him. Nothin’ to hide. Eat your heart out, baby. Then he strolled over to his bike and kicked the stand up with his heel. He poked around his mouth with the toothpick, spat out a sliver of meat, then flipped the toothpick onto the ground. He climbed back on his bike, letting out a breath of satisfaction when his butt hit the warm leather seat.

Mel accelerated slowly, savoring the surge of power building between his legs.

Jane Baum was in bed by 10:30 that night, exhausted once again by her own fear. Lying there in her late aunt’s double bed, she obsessed on the mistake she had made in moving to this dreadful, empty place in the middle of nowhere. She had expected to feel nervous for a while, as any other city dweller might who moved to the country. But she hadn’t counted on being actually phobic about it — of being possessed by a fear so strong that it seemed to inhabit every cell of her body until at night, every night, she felt she could die from it. She hadn’t known — how could she have known? — she would be one of those people who is terrified by the vastness of the prairie. She had visited the farm only a few times as a child, and from those visits she had remembered only warm and fuzzy things like caterpillars and chicks. She had only dimly remembered how antlike a human being feels on the prairie.

Her aunt’s house had been broken into twice during the period between her aunt’s death and her own occupancy. That fact cemented her fantasies in a foundation of terrifying reality. When Cissy said,

“It’s your imagination,” Janie retorted, “But it happened twice before!

Twice!” She wasn’t making it up! There were strange, brutal men — that’s how she imagined them, they were never caught by the police — who broke in and took whatever they wanted — cans in the cupboard, the radio in the kitchen. It could happen again, Janie thought obsessively as she lay in the bed; it could happen over and over. To me, to me, to me.

On the prairie, the darkness seemed absolute to her. There were millions of stars but no streetlights. Coyotes howled, or cattle bawled.

Occasionally the big night-riding semis whirred by out front. Their tire and engine sounds seemed to come out of nowhere, build to an intolerable whine and then disappear in an uncanny way. She pictured the drivers as big, rough, intense men hopped up on amphet-amines; she worried that one night she would hear truck tires turning into her gravel drive, that an engine would switch off, that a truck door would quietly open and then close, that careful footsteps would slur across her gravel.

Her fear had grown so huge, so bad, that she was even frightened of it. It was like a monstrous balloon that inflated every time she breathed. Every night the fear got worse. The balloon got bigger. It nearly filled the bedroom now.

The upstairs bedroom where she lay was hot because she had the windows pulled down and latched, and the curtains drawn.

She could have cooled it with a fan on the dressing table, but she was afraid the fan’s noise might cover the sound of whatever might break into the first floor and climb the stairs to attack her. She lay with a sheet and a blanket pulled up over her arms and shoulders, to just under her chin. She was sweating, as if her fear-frozen body were melting, but it felt warm and almost comfortable to her. She always wore pajamas and thin wool socks to bed because she felt safer when she was completely dressed. She especially felt more secure in pajama pants, which no dirty hand could shove up onto her belly as it could a nightgown.

Lying in bed like a quadriplegic, unmoving, eyes open, Janie reviewed her precautions. Every door was locked, every window was permanently shut and locked, so that she didn’t have to check them every night; all the curtains were drawn; the porch lights were off; and her car was locked in the barn so no trucker would think she was home.

Lately she had taken to sleeping with her aunt’s loaded pistol on the pillow beside her head.

Cissy crawled into bed just before midnight, tired from hours of accounting. She had been out to the barn to check on her giggling girls and the blind calf. She had talked to her husband when he called from Oklahoma City. Now she was thinking about how she would try to start easing Janie Baum out of their lives.

“I’m sorry, Janie, but I’m awfully busy today. I don’t think you ought to come over…”

Oh, but there would be that meek, martyred little voice, just like a baby mouse needing somebody to mother it. How would she deny that need? She was already feeling guilty about refusing Janie’s request to sleep over.

“Well, I will. I just will do it, that’s all. If I could say no to the FHA girls when they were selling fruitcakes, I can start saying no more often to Janie Baum. Anyway, she’s never going to get over her fears if I indulge them.”

Bob had said as much when she’d complained to him long-distance. “Cissy, you’re not helping her,” he’d said. “You’re just letting her get worse.” And then he’d said something new that had disturbed her. “Anyway, I don’t like the girls being around her so much. She’s getting too weird, Cissy.”

She thought of her daughters — of fearless Tess and dear little Mandy — and of how safe and nice it was for children in the country…

“Besides,” Bob had said, “she’s got to do more of her own chores.

We need Tess and Mandy to help out around our place more; we can’t be having them always running off to mow her grass and plant her flowers and feed her cows and water her horse and get her eggs, just because she’s scared to stick her silly hand under a damned hen…”

Counting the chores put Cissy to sleep.

“Tess!” Mandy hissed desperately. “Wait!”

The older girl slowed, to give Mandy time to catch up to her, and then to touch Tess for reassurance. They paused for a moment to catch their breath and to crouch in the shadow of Jane Baum’s porch.

Tess carried three rolls of toilet paper in a makeshift pouch she’d formed in the belly of her black sweatshirt. (“We gotta wear black, remember!”) and Mandy was similarly equipped. Tess decided that now was the right moment to drop her bomb.

“I’ve been thinking,” she whispered.

Mandy was struck cold to her heart by that familiar and dreaded phrase. She moaned quietly. “What?”

“It might rain.”

“I told you!”

“So I think we better do it inside.”

“Inside?”

“Shh! It’ll scare her to death, it’ll be great! Nobody else’ll ever have the guts to do anything as neat as this! We’ll do the kitchen, and if we have time, maybe the dining room.”

“Ohhh, noooo.”

“She thinks she’s got all the doors and windows locked, but she doesn’t!” Tess giggled. She had it all figured out that when Jane Baum came downstairs in the morning, she’d take one look, scream, faint, and then, when she woke up, call everybody in town. The fact that Jane might also call the sheriff had occurred to her, but since Tess didn’t have any faith in the ability of adults to figure out anything important, she wasn’t worried about getting caught. “When I took in her eggs, I unlocked the down-stairs bathroom window Come on! This’ll be great!”

The ribbon of darkness ahead of Mel Brown was no longer straight.

It was now bunched into long, steep hills. He hadn’t expected hills.

Nobody had told him there was any part of Kansas that wasn’t flat.