Alice: What if I don’t? What do you propose to do?
Lawrence nodded approvingly at the way Alice had kept her caller talking.
Man: Something awful might happen to you. Is that what you want? All so a bunch of queers can walk in the parade?
Alice: You know what? I’ll bet even the lesbians in that parade have more balls than a guy who phones people up anonymously and threatens them. Have you looked in your shorts lately? Is there anything down there at all?
Man: You bitch! How dare you-
Voice: (from afar) Hi, Mr. Henry!
Man: Shit! (hangs up)
Lawrence looked at me and I smiled. Lawrence smiled. Alice Holland smiled. Only her husband George still looked angry.
“Fuck me,” said Lawrence.
I said, “Now, is this where you use your years of police training and honing your deductive skills to try to figure out who the caller is?”
Now Alice was laughing, and Lawrence was starting to laugh. Even George was starting to loosen up, unclenching his fists.
The voice in the background had sounded like a teenage girl. Alice, imitating the voice, said, “Hi, Mr. Henry!”
Now I was starting to laugh, and pretty soon, all of us were clutching our stomachs, clutching the kitchen counter to keep from collapsing.
“Oh God,” said Alice. “This is too much.”
“I think I’ve figured it out,” Lawrence said, deadpan. “But I have to hear it one more time to be sure.”
He cued up the call again, played the last part of the exchange between Alice and the caller again.
“Stop it,” I said. “I’m gonna die.”
Slowly, we all pulled ourselves together.
“Oh man,” said Alice. “Whoo.”
“Okay,” said George, who had completely regained his composure. “Now let’s go kill him.”
We took two cars. George Holland led the way in theirs, taking us back through Braynor, past Henry’s Grocery and the phone booth just down from it, then a left down a street of boring, boxy brick houses that were probably built in the sixties. George put on his blinker and turned into the driveway of a two-story red brick house, blocking in a black Ford Taurus sedan. Lawrence pulled over onto the shoulder and we all got out.
As we walked up the drive, Lawrence, small briefcase in hand, glanced into the back windows of the Taurus and said, “Hello.”
“What?” I said.
“Check it out,” he said, and opened the back door on the passenger side. He reached down behind the seat to the floor and brought up a container of eggs.
“Odd place for eggs,” I said.
Alice and George watched with interest.
Lawrence opened the top of the cardboard container. Five of the dozen eggs were missing. “Now, I could see forgetting some of your groceries in the car when you came home, but I can’t see taking your eggs into the house one at a time.” He handed me the carton to carry.
Alice went on ahead and rang the doorbell. An over-weight frizzy-haired woman opened the door, and when she saw who it was, said, “Oh, hello, Mayor.”
“We’re here to see Charles,” she said.
The woman looked back into the house. “Chuck!” she screamed. “Visitors!”
By the time Braynor grocery store magnate Charles Henry was at the door, all four of us were standing there, looking, I suspect, fairly intimidating.
“What’s this about?” he said nervously, half standing behind the door. You could tell, just looking at him, the way he was sweating already, that he knew the jig was up.
“I thought maybe you’d like to talk to the bitch in person,” Alice said.
“What? What’s that supposed to mean? Alice, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Lawrence held up his case. “We’ve got it all, man. You want to hear it? The last part, where the kid shouts ‘Hi, Mr. Henry!’? You have to hear that for yourself. You’ll bust a fucking gut.”
George moved forward. “I ought to take your head off, you miserable little worm.”
Henry tried to close the door but George shoved it back and walked in, the rest of us following. Down at the end of the hall I could see Mrs. Henry in the kitchen, cleaning up after dinner. Two girls, about eight and ten, ran giggling from the kitchen, down the hall and up the stairs.
“Maybe we should play it for them,” I taunted Henry. “Here’s how Daddy talks to grown-up girls.”
“Shhhh,” he said, running a hand over the top of his head. “Just, just come downstairs.”
He led us down into a rec room that didn’t appear to have been changed since the 1960s. Brown shag carpeting, dark paneled walls, a pool table covered with boxes of Christmas decorations that had evidently been sitting there for months. With Christmas only a few months away, there wasn’t much point putting them away now.
“Chuck?” his wife shouted downstairs. “What’s going on?”
“Shut the damn door!” he shouted at her. The door slammed shut. He said to us, “What do you want?”
Lawrence found a corner of the pool table on which to rest his laptop, opened it up, and played the recording of his call to Alice Holland’s house, finishing with “Hi, Mr. Henry!”
Henry shook his head. “Goddamn that Violet.”
“Violet?” I said.
“Cashier,” said Alice, who clearly knew everyone in town. “Grade 12 student, works part-time for Charles. She see you at the pay phone after her shift?”
Charles Henry said nothing.
“First thing I want is,” said Alice, “I want you to own up to what you’ve been doing.”
I held up the egg carton from the car. “And we’re not talking just the phone calls. You’ve been paying some visits to the comics store in Red Lake.”
It was cool in the basement, but Charles Henry was still sweating.
“I don’t know anything about any comics store.”
“Really?” said Lawrence. “What do you think will happen when I give this carton of eggs to my friends at the forensic lab, and they compare the DNA of these eggs to the DNA of the eggs splattered all over Stuart Lethbridge’s store?”
I looked at Lawrence.
“Oh my God,” Henry said, clearly overwhelmed by what science apparently could do. “Okay, okay, I egged the place. And I’m really sorry about the phone calls.”
George Holland made a snorting noise. “He’s fucking sorry.”
“You’re sorry you got caught,” Alice Holland said. “This is what I want you to do. I want you to call Tracy over at the
