“I’ll be very still so as not to wake your husband,” Theodore whispered. He saw her looking at his bandaged hand. “I burned myself,” he said. “Now, about the church. Oh, there’s someone knocking at your back door.”
“There is?”
When she’d gone into the kitchen, Theodore pulled open the hall closet door and dropped some photographs behind a pile of overshoes and garden tools. The door was shut when she returned.
“There wasn’t anyone,” she said.
“I could have sworn…” He smiled deprecatingly. He looked down at a circular bag on the floor. “Oh, does Mr. Backus bowl?”
“Wednesdays and Fridays when his shift is over,” she said. “There’s an all-night alley over on Western Avenue.”
“I love to bowl,” said Theodore.
He asked his questions about the church, then left. As he started down the path he heard loud voices from the Morton house.
“It wasn’t bad enough about Katherine McCann and
“But, Mom!” cried Walter, Jr.
Theodore awoke and turned the radio off. Standing, he put a small bottle of greyish powder in his pocket and slipped from the house. Reaching his destination, he sprinkled powder into the water bowl and stirred it with a finger until it dissolved.
Back in the house he scrawled four letters reading:
He signed the letter
This completed, he saw Mrs. Backus walking toward the boulevard and followed. “May I walk you?” he asked.
“Oh,” she said. “All right.”
“I missed your husband last night,” he told her.
She glanced at him.
“I thought I’d join him bowling,” Theodore said, “but I guess he was sick again.”
“Sick?”
“I asked the man behind the counter at the alley and he said that Mr. Backus hadn’t been coming in because he was sick.”
“Oh,” Mrs. Backus’s voice was thinly stricken.
“Well, maybe next Friday,” said Theodore.
Later, when he came back, he saw a panel truck in front of Henry Putnam’s house. A man came out of the alley carrying a blanket-wrapped body which he laid in the truck. The Putnam boys were crying as they watched.
Arthur Jefferson answered the door. Theodore showed the letter to Jefferson and his wife. “It came this morning,” he said.
“This is
“Of
While they were talking, Jefferson looked through the window at the Putnam house across the street.
Pale morning mist engulfed Sylmar Street. Theodore moved through it silently. Under the back porch of the Jeffersons’ house he set fire to a box of damp papers. As it began to smoulder he walked across the yard and, with a single knife stroke, slashed apart the rubber pool. He heard it pulsing water on the grass as he left. In the alley he dropped a book of matches that read
A little after six that morning he woke to the howl of sirens and felt the small house tremble at the heavy trucks passing by. Turning on his side, he yawned, and mumbled, “Goody.”
It was a paste-complexioned Dorothy Backus who answered Theodore’s knock.
“May I drive you to church?” asked Theodore.
“I—I don’t believe I—I’m not… feeling too well,” stumbled Mrs. Backus.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Theodore said. He saw the edges of some photographs protruding from her apron pocket.
As he left he saw the Mortons getting in their car, Bianca wordless, both Walters ill at ease. Up the street, a police car was parked in front of Arthur Jefferson’s house.
Theodore went to church with Donald Gorse who said that Eleanor was feeling ill.
“I’m so sorry,” Theodore said.
That afternoon, he spent a while at the Jefferson house helping clear away the charred debris of their back porch. When he saw the slashed rubber pool he drove immediately to a drug store and bought another one.
“But they love that pool,” said Theodore, when Patty Jefferson protested. “You told me so yourself.”
He winked at Arthur Jefferson but Jefferson was not communicative that afternoon.
Early in the evening Theodore saw Alston’s dog walking in the street. He got his BB gun and, from the bedroom window, soundlessly, fired. The dog nipped fiercely at its side and spun around. Then, whimpering, it started home.
Several minutes later, Theodore went outside and started pulling up the door to the garage. He saw the old man hurrying down his alley, the dog in his arms.
“What’s wrong?” asked Theodore.
“Don’t know,” said Alston in a breathless, frightened voice. “He’s hurt.”
“Quickly!” said Theodore. “Into my car!”
He rushed Alston and the dog to the nearest veterinary, passing three stop signs and groaning when the old man held his hand up, palsiedly, and whimpered, “
For three hours Theodore sat in the veterinary’s waiting room until the old man staggered forth, his face a greyish white.
He led the old man, weeping, to the car and drove him home. There, Alston said he’d rather be alone so Theodore left. Shortly afterward, the black and white police car rolled to a stop in front of Alston’s house and the old man led the two officers past Theodore’s house.
In a while, Theodore heard angry shouting up the street. It lasted quite a long time.
“Good evening,” said Theodore. He bowed.
Eleanor Gorse nodded stiffly.
“I’ve brought you and your father a casserole,” said Theodore, smiling, holding up a towel-wrapped dish. When she told him that her father was gone for the night, Theodore clucked and sighed as if he hadn’t seen the old man drive away that afternoon.
“Well then,” he said, proffering the dish, “for
Stepping off the porch he saw Arthur Jefferson and Henry Putnam standing under a street lamp down the block. While he watched, Arthur Jefferson struck the other man and, suddenly, they were brawling in the gutter. Theodore broke into a hurried run.
“But this is
“Stay out of this!” warned Jefferson, then, to Putnam, challenged, “You better tell me how that paint can got under your porch! The police may believe it was an accident I found that matchbook in my alley but I don’t!”
“I’ll tell you nothing,” Putnam said, contemptuously. “
“Coon! Oh, of course! You’d be the first to believe that, you stupid—!”
