The Regulators

Chapter Three

Moments after Collie, Cynthia, and the longhair from the Ryder truck go inside the store, a van pulls up on the southwestern corner of Poplar and Hyacinth, across from the E-Z Stop. It’s a flaked metallic blue with dark polarized windows. There’s no chrome gadget on its roof, but its sides are flared and scooped in a futuristic way that makes it look more like a scout-vehicle in a science-fiction movie than a van. The tires are entirely treadless, as smooth and blank as the surface of a freshly washed blackboard. Deep within the darkness behind the tinted windows, dim colored lights flash rhythmically, like telltales on a control panel.

Thunder rumbles, closer and sharper now. The summer brightness begins to fade from the sky; clouds, purple-black and threatening, are piling in from the west. They reach for the July sun and put it out. The temperature begins to sink at once.

The blue van hums quietly. Up the block, at the top of the hill, another van-this one the bright yellow of a fake banana-pulls up at the southeast corner of Bear Street and Poplar. It stops there, also humming quietly.

The first really sharp crack of thunder comes, and a bright shutter-flash of lightning follows. It shines in Hannibal’s glazing right eye for a moment, making it glow like a spirit-lamp.

Gary Soderson was still standing in the street when his wife joined him. “What the hell are you doing?” she asked. “You look like you’re in a trance, or something.”

“You didn’t hear it?”

“Hear what?” she asked irritably. “I was in the shower, what'm I gonna hear in there?” Gary had been married to the lady for nine years and knew that, in Marielle, irritation was a dominant trait. “The Reed kids with their Frisbee, I heard them. Their damn dog barking. Thunder. What else'm I gonna hear? The Norman Dickersnackle Choir?”

He pointed down the street, first toward the dog (she wouldn’t have Hannibal to complain about anymore, at least), then toward the twisted shape on the lawn of 240. “I don’t know for sure, but I think someone just shot the kid who delivers the Shopper.”

She peered in the direction of his finger, squinting, shading her eyes even though the sun had now disappeared (to Gary it felt as if the temperature had already dropped at least ten degrees). Brad Josephson was trudging up the sidewalk toward them. Peter Jackson was out in front of his house, looking curiously down the hill. So was Tom Billingsley, the vet most people called Old Doc. The Carver family was crossing the street from the store side to the side their house was on, the girl walking next to her mother and holding her hand. Dave Carver (looking to Gary like a boiled lobster in the bathing suit he was wearing-a soap-crusted boiled lobster, at that) was pulling his son in a little red wagon. The boy, who was sitting cross-legged and staring around with the imperious disdain of a pasha, had always struck Gary as about a 9.5 on the old Shithead-Meter.

“Hey, Dave!” Peter Jackson called. “What’s going on?”

Before Carver could reply, Marielle struck Gary’s shoulder with the heel of her hand, hard enough to slop the last of his martini out of his glass and on to his tatty old Converse sneakers. Maybe just as well. He might even do his liver a favor and take the night off.

“Are you deaf, Gary, or just stupid?” the light of his life enquired.

“Likely both,” he responded, thinking that if he ever decided to sober up for good, he would probably have to divorce Marielle first. Or at least slit her vocal cords. What did you say?”

“I asked you why in God’s name anyone would shoot the paperboy?

“Maybe it was someone didn’t get his double coupons last week,” Gary said. Thunder cracked-still west of them, but nearing. It seemed to run through the gathering clouds like a harpoon.

Johnny Marinville, who had once won the National Book Award for a novel of sexual obsession called Delight and who now wrote children’s books about a feline private detective named Pat the Kitty-Kat, stood looking down at his living-room telephone and feeling afraid. Something was going on here. He was trying not to be paranoid about it, but yeah, something was going on here.

“Maybe,” he said in a low voice.

Yeah, okay. Maybe. But the phone-

He had come in, propped his guitar in the corner, and punched 911. There had been an uncommonly long pause, so long he had been about to break the connection (What connection, ha-ha?) and try again when what might have been a child’s voice came on the line. The sound of that voice, both lilting and empty, had surprised Johnny and frightened him badly-he hadn’t even tried to kid himself that his fright was only a startled reflex.

“Little bitty baby Smitty,” the voice had lilted. “I seen you bite your mommy’s titty. Don’t you fret and don’t you pout, don’t you spit that titty out.”

There had been a click followed by the hum of an open line. Frowning, Johnny had redialled. Again the long pause, then a click, then a sound Johnny thought he recognized: a mouth-breather. The sound of a kid with a cold, maybe. Not that it mattered. Wha t mattered was that the phone-lines had gotten crossed somewhere in the neighborhood, and now instead of getting through to the cops-

“Who’s there?” he had asked sharply.

No answer. Just the mouth-breathing. And was that sound familiar? That was pretty ridiculous, wasn’t it? How in God’s name could the sound of breathing on the telephone be familiar? It couldn’t, of course, but all the same-

“Whoever you are, get the hell off the line,” Johnny said. “I have to call the police.”

The breath caught, stopped. Johnny was reaching to break the connection again when the voice returned. Mocking this time. He was sure it was. “Little bitty baby Smitty, stuck his prick in Mommy’s slitty. Don’t you fret and don’t you pout, she won’t make you take it out.” Then, in a voice that was flat and somehow terrible: “Don’t you call here no more, you old fool. Tak!”

Another click as the line went dead, but this time there was no open-line hum. This time there was just stillness.

Johnny hit the phone’s cutoff switch, stuttering lightly with the tip of a finger. Nothing happened. The line remained blank. Thunder boomed, still to the west but closing in, making him jump.

He dropped the phone into the cradle and went into the kitchen, noting how rapidly the light was fading out of the sky and reminding himself to close the upstairs windows if it started to rain… when it started to rain, judging from the way things looked now.

Out here the phone was on the wall by the kitchen table, where all he had to do was rock back in his chair and snag it if he happened to be eating a meal when it rang. Not that there were many calls; his ex-wife sometimes, that was all. His people in New York knew enough to leave their money-machine alone.

He unracked the phone, listened, and got a second helping of silence. No dial-tone, no staticky crackle when lightning flashed blue in the kitchen window, no wah-wah-wah signalling that the line was out of service. Just nothing. He tried 911 anyway, and there weren’t even any tone-beeps in his ear as he pushed the keypads. He hung the telephone up and looked at it in the darkening kitchen. “Little bitty baby Smitty,” he murmured, and suddenly shivered in a way that would have been taken for theatrical if he hadn’t been alone: a big backward-and-forward snapping of the shoulders. An ugly little jingle, and one he’d never heard before.

Never mind the jingle, he thought. What about the voice? You’ve heard that before… haven’t you?

“No,” he said out loud. “At least… I don’t know.”

Right. But the breathing…

“Fuck a duck, you don’t recognize a person’s breathing,” he told the empty kitchen. “Not unless your granddad’s got emphysema.”

He left the kitchen, heading for the front door. All at once he wanted to see what was going on out there in the street.

“What happened down there?” Peter Jackson asked David when the Carver family reached the east sidewalk. He bent his head toward David and lowered his voice so the kids wouldn’t hear. “Is that a body down there?”

“Yes,” David said in a similarly low voice. “Gary Ripton’s his name, I think.” He glanced at his wife for confirmation and Kirsten nodded. “The boy who delivers the Shopper on Monday afternoons. Guy in a van. A drive-by.”

“Someone shot Cary? That was impossible. Impossible that someone he had just been talking to should have been shot. But Carver was nodding his head. “Holy shit!”

David nodded. “Holy shit about covers it, I guess.”

“Hurry up, Daddy-doo,” Ralphie commanded from his place in the wagon.

David glanced back at him, gave the boy a smile, then looked at Peter again. This time he spoke in a voice so low it was really a whisper. “The kids were down at the store, buying sodas. I don’t know for sure, but I’ve got an idea the guy almost took a shot at them, too. Then the Reeds” dog came by and the man with the gun shot it, instead.”

“Jesus!” Peter said. The idea that someone had shot Hannibal-genial, Frisbee-chasing Hannibal with his jaunty neck-scarf-made it impossible not to accept. He didn’t know why that should be, but it was. “I mean Jesus Christ!”

David nodded. “Although if there was a little more Jesus in the world, there might be a lot less stuff like this. You know?”

Peter thought of the millions up through history who had been slaughtered in the name of Jesus, then pushed the thought away and nodded. He didn’t think this was quite the time for a theological argument with his neighbor.

“I want to get them inside, Dave,” Kirsten murmured. “Off the street, “kay?”

David nodded, started up the hill again past Peter, then stopped and looked back. “Where’s Mary?”

“Work,” Peter said. “She left a note to say she was probably going to swing by the Crossroads Mall on her way home. She should be here anytime, though-Mondays are her short days, she’s off at two. Why?”

“I’d make sure she comes right inside, that’s all. The guy’s probably long gone and hard to find, but you never know, do you? And a guy who’d shoot a paperboy-

Peter was nodding. Overhead, thunder boomed loudly. Ellie cringed against her mother’s leg, but in the wagon, Ralphie laughed.

Kirsten tugged David’s arm. “Come on. And don’t stop to talk to Doc.” She lifted her chin toward Billingsley, who was standing in the dry gutter with his hands in his pockets and peering down the street. Squinting as he was, his eyes were reduced to a pair of bright blue gleams, like exotic fish caught in nets of flesh.

David started pulling the wagon again. “How you doin”, Ralphie?” Peter asked as the wagon rolled past him. He noted the word BUSTER was written on the wagon’s side in fading white paint. Ralphie stuck his tongue out and made the wasp-in-the-jar sound again, blowing so hard that his cheeks bulged out like Dizzy Gillespie’s.

“Hey, that’s charming,” Peter said. “That’ll get you girls later in life. Trust me.”

“Bugger-doody!” the little scamp in the wagon cried, and made a rather mature jacking-off gesture at Peter with one hand.

“That’ll be enough of that, big guy,” David said indulgently, without turning around. His buttocks worked back and forth in the too-small bathing suit. To Peter they looked like biscuits on pistons.

“What happened?” Tom asked in his gruff voice as the wagon passed by.

Peter tuned out Carver’s reply (David, mindful of his wife’s concern, kept moving as he filled in the Doc) and looked up toward the corner for any sign of his wife’s Lumina. He saw no moving vehicles at all, only a parked van just this side of the Abelsons” house on Bear Street. It was painted a yellow so bright it all but screamed. He supposed that part of its brightness derived from the way the light was fading as the clouds advanced, but still, looking at it made his eyes ache. Must be kids, he thought. No one else would want something that color. It hardly looked like a real vehicle at all, more like something out of a Star Trek movie, or-

An idea suddenly hit him. Not a very good one.

“Dave?”

Carver looked back, his sunburned belly hanging over the front of his bathing suit, scales of soap from his car-washing operation drying on it.

What was he driving, the guy who shot Gary?”

“A red van.”

“That’s right,” Ralphie chipped in. “Red like Tracker Arrow.”

Peter hardly heard this. He was stuck on the word van, feeling his own stomach tighten up like something attached to a crank.

“The reddest red van you ever saw,” Kirsten added. “I saw it, too. I was looking out the window and I saw it go by. David, will you come on?

“Sure,” he said, and began pulling the wagon again. When David turned away, Peter (his momentary disquiet passing) suddenly stuck his tongue out at Ralphie, who just happened to be looking at him. Ralphie looked comically surprised.

Old Doc strolled down to Peter, hands still in his pockets. Thunder rolled. They looked up and saw dark shelves of clouds overspreading Poplar Street’s portion of the sky. Lightning stabbed forks at downtown Columbus.

“Going to rain a bitch,” the veterinarian said. His hair was thin, white, baby-fine. “I hope they’ll get the boy’s body decently covered before it comes.” He paused, took one hand out of his pocket, and passed it slowly over his brow, as if to soothe away the beginnings of a headache. “Terrible thing. He was a fine lad. Played ball.”

“I know.” Peter thought of the way Gary had laughed when he, Peter, had told him that next year it would be his turn to howl at shortstop, and felt a sudden pain in his stomach, the organ (not the heart, as the poets had always claimed) most attuned to humankind’s tender emotions. Suddenly it was all perfectly real to him. Gary Ripton wasn’t going to be the Wentworth Hawks” starting shortstop next summer; Gary Ripton wasn’t going to swing in through the back door tonight, asking what was for supper. Gary Ripton had flown off to Never-Never Land, leaving his shadow behind. He was one of the Lost Boys now.

Thunder bammed again, the sound so close and splintery this time that Peter jumped. “Look,” he said to Tom. “I’ve got a big sheet of plastic in my garage. The size of a car-cover, almost. If I got it, would you come down the street and help me cover him with it?”

“Officer Entragian might not like that,” the old man said.

“Screw Officer Entragian, he’s no more a cop than I am,” Peter said. “They fired his ass last year for graft.”

“The other police, though, when they come-”

“I don’t care about them, either,” Peter said. He wasn’t crying, exactly, but his voice had thickened and was no longer quite steady. “He was a nice kid, a really lovely kid, and some drugrunner shot him off his bike like an Indian off his pony in a John Ford movie. It’s going to rain and he’ll get soaked. I’d like to tell his mother I did what I could. So do you want to help me or not?”

“Well, since you put it like that,” Tom said. He clapped Peter on the shoulder. “Come on, Teach, let’s do it.”

“Good man.”

Kim Geller slept through the whole thing. She was still sleeping on the coverlet of her bed when Susi and Debbie Ross-the redhead with whom Gary Ripton had been so taken-came rushing into her bedroom and shook her awake. She sat up, muzzy and feeling almost hungover (sleeping on dog-hot days like this one was almost always a mistake, but sometimes you just couldn’t help it), trying to follow what the girls were saying and losing the thread of it almost at once. They seemed to be telling her that someone had been shot, shot on Poplar Street, and that was of course fantastic.

Still, when they got her over to the window, it seemed unde niable that something had happened. The Reed twins and Cammie, their mother, were standing at the end of their driveway. The Lush and the Bitch, known as the Sodersons in politer circles, were standing right in the middle of the street up by the end of the block… although now Marielle was tugging Gary in the direction of their house, and he seemed to be going. Beyond them, standing together on the sidewalk, were the Josephsons. And, across the way, she saw Peter Jackson and old man Billingsley coming out of the Jackson garage, carrying a great big piece of blue plastic between them. The wind was starting to rise, and the sheet of plastic was rippling.

Everyone on the street, just about. Everyone that was home, anyhow. It was no good trying to get a look at what they were gawking at from here, either. The side of the house cut off any view down the block to the corner.

Kimberly Geller turned back to the girls, trying hard to clear the cobwebs out of her mind. The girls were dancing from foot to foot as if they had to go to the bathroom; Debbie, she saw, was snapping her hands open and closed. They were both pale and excited, a combination Kim didn’t care for very much. But the idea that someone had been killed… they had to be wrong about that… didn’t they?

“Now tell me what happened,” she said. “No faking.”

“Someone killed Gary Ripton, we told you!” Susi cried impatiently, as if her mother were the dumbest thing in the world… which, at this particular moment, Kim felt herself to be. “Come on, Mom! We can watch the police come!”

“I want to see him again before someone covers him up!” Debbie yelled suddenly. She turned and raced off down the stairs. Susi paused for a moment, looking dubious-looking almost sick, in fact-then turned and followed her friend.

“Come on, Mom!” she called back over her shoulder, and then was thundering down the stairs, this spring’s Rose Queen at the high school prom and every bit as graceful as a water buffalo, making the windows rattle and the overhead light-fixture tingle.

Kim walked slowly across to the bed and slipped her bare feet into her sandals, feeling slow and late and confused.

“And you ran all the way down there?” Belinda Josephson asked for the third time. This seemed to be the part of the story she couldn’t quite get straight. “Fat as you are?”

“Shit, woman, I’m not fat,” Brad said. “Large is what I am.”

“Honey, that’s what they’ll put on your death certificate, if you do many more of those hundred-yard dashes,” Belinda said. “"The victim died of terminal largeness."” The words were nagging, the tone was not. She rubbed the back of his neck as she spoke, feeling the chilled sweat there.

He pointed down the street. “Look. Pete Jackson and Old Doc.”

“What are they doing?”

“Going to cover up the boy, I think,” he said, and started in that direction.

She yanked him back at once. “No you don’t, my friend. No sir, no way. You’ve had your trip downstreet for the day.”

He gave her what Belinda thought of as his Don’t Diss Me Woman look-a pretty good one for a Boston-raised black man whose chief knowledge of ghetto life came from TV-but made no argument. Perhaps he would have if Johnny Marinville hadn’t come down his walk just then. More thunder boomed. A steady breeze was blowing now. It felt cold to Belinda-showery-cold. There were purplish thunderheads rolling in overhead, ugly but not scary. What was scary-a little, anyway-was the yellow sky off to the southwest. She hoped to God they weren’t going to see a tornado funnel between now and dark; that would add the final touch to a day that had gone about as wrong as any day in recent memory.

She supposed that the rain would drive people indoors once it started, but for now just about everybody on the street was out, gawking down the hill at Entragian’s house. As she watched, Kim Geller came out of 243, looked around, then walked one house up to join Cammie Reed on the Reeds” front porch. The Reed twins (the stuff of which harmless housewife-fantasies were made, in Belinda Josephson’s humble opinion), along with Susi Geller and a dishy redhead Belinda didn’t know, were standing on the lawn. Davey Reed was kneeling and appeared to be wiping his feet with his shirt, God knew why-

Of course you know why, she told herself. There’s a body down there, all right, there really is, and Dave Reed vomited at the sight of it. Vomited and got some on himself, poor kid.

She saw people in front of every house or from every house except the old Hoba rt place, which was empty, the ex-cop’s house, and 247, the third house down on their side of the street. The Wyler place. There was a bad-luck family if there had ever been one. Neither Audrey nor the poor orphan child she was raising (not that a boy like Seth could ever exactly be raised, Belinda supposed; that was just the hell of it) were outside. Gone for the day? Maybe, but she was sure she’d seen Audrey as late as noon, lackadaisically setting up her lawn sprinkler. Belinda mulled this over and decided she had the time about right.

She remembered thinking that Audrey was letting herself go-both the shell top and the blue shorts she’d been wearing had looked dingy, and why the woman had ever dyed her perfectly nice brunette hair that horrible shade of purplish-red, Belinda would never know. If it was supposed to make her look young, it was a miserable failure. It needed washing, too-had a greasy, clumped-up look. As a teenager, Belinda had occasionally wished she were white-the white girls always seemed to be having more fun, and to be more relaxed-but now that she was pushing on toward fifty and menopause, she was very glad to be black. White women seemed to need so much more putting together as they went on. Maybe their glue was just not naturally strong.

“I tried to call the cops,” Johnny Marinville was saying. He stepped out into the street as if he meant to cross over to the Josephsons, then stopped. “My phone…” He trailed off, seemingly unsure of how to continue. Belinda found this extremely odd. She’d have thought this was one fellow who would keep on rattling even on his own deathbed; God would have to reach down and carry him through the golden door just to shut him up.

“Your phone what?” Brad asked.

Johnny paused yet a moment longer, seeming to sort through a variety of responses, then settled on a brief one. “It’s dead. You want to try yours?”

“I can,” Brad said, “but I imagine Entragian’s already called them from the store. He pretty much took over.”

“Did he?” Marinville said thoughtfully, and looked down the hill. “Did he indeed?” If he saw the two men with the rippling tarp between them and understood what they were up to, he didn’t say. He seemed lost in his own musings.

Movement caught Belinda’s eye. She looked up Bear Street and saw an olive green Lumina approaching the intersection. Mary Jackson’s car. It passed the yellow van parked near the corner, then slowed.

Made it back before the rain, good for you, Belinda thought. Although they were far from bosom buddies, she liked Mary Jackson as much as anyone on the street. She was funny and she had a strutty, no-bullshit way about her… although just lately she seemed preoccupied a lot of the time. It hadn’t gone to her looks like it had with Audrey Wyler, though. In fact Mary had just lately seemed to be blooming, like a dry flowerbed after a shower.

The pay-phone was by the newspaper rack, which was empty except for one lonely left-over copy of USA Today’s weekend edition and a couple of Shoppers. Last week’s. It gave Collie Entragian a queer, thoughtful feeling to realize that the boy who would have restocked the rack with a supply of the current issue was lying dead on his lawn. And meanwhile, this lousy convenience-store pay-telephone-

He slammed it into its cradle and walked back to the counter, using the towel to wipe the last of the shaving cream from his face. The cutiepie with the tu-tone hair and the aging hippie-type from the Ryder truck were both watching him, and he was acutely aware that he was minus his shirt. He felt more like a cashiered cop than ever.

“Damn pay-phone doesn’t work,” he told the girl. He saw she was wearing a little name-badge pinned to her smock. “Don’t you have an out-of-order sign, Cynthia?”

“Yeah, but it was working fine at one o’clock,” she said. “The bakery guy used it to call his girlfriend.” She rolled her eyes, then said something which Collie found almost surreal, under the circumstances: “Did you lose your quarter?”

He had, but it didn’t much matter, under the circumstances. He looked through the E-Z Stop’s door and saw Peter Jackson and the retired vet from up the street, approaching his lawn with a large piece of blue plastic. It was obvious that they meant to cover the body. Collie started toward the door, meaning to tell them to stand the hell clear, that was an evidence scene they were getting ready to screw around with, and then the thunder rolled again-the loudest blast so far, loud enough to make Cynthia cry out in surprise.

Fuck, he thought. Let them go ahead. It’s going to rain, anyhow.

Yes, maybe that would be best. The rain would very likely come before the cops got here (Collie didn’t even hear any sirens yet), and that would play hell with any hypothetical forensics. So, better to cover it… but he still had a dismaying feeling of events racing out of his control. And even that, he realized, was an illusion: nothing about the situation had ever been in his control to start with. He was, basically, just another citizen of Poplar Street. Not that that didn’t have its merits; if he fucked up the procedure, they couldn’t very well put it in his jacket, could they?

He opened the door, stepped out, and cupped his hands around his mouth so as to be heard above the rising wind. “Peter! Mr Jackson!”

Jackson looked over, face set, expecting to be told to quit what he was doing.

“Don’t touch the body!” he called. “Do not touch the body! Just kind of shake that thing down over him like it was a bedspread! Have you got that?”

“Yes!” Peter called. The vet was also nodding.

“There are some cement blocks in my garage, stacked up by the back wall!” Collie yelled. “The door’s unlocked! Get them and use them to weight down the tarp so it won’t blow away!” They were both nodding now, and Collie felt a little better.

We can stretch it to cover his bike, as well!” the old man called. “Should we?”

“Yes!” he called back, then had another idea. “There’s a piece of plastic in the garage, too-in the corner. You can use it to cover the dog, if you don’t mind carrying some more blocks.”

Jackson flashed him a thumb-and-forefinger circle, then the two of them started for the garage, leaving the tarp behind. Collie hoped they would get it spread and anchored before the wind strengthened enough to blow it away. He went back inside to ask Cynthia if there was a store phone-there had to be, of course-and saw she had already put it on the counter for him.

“Thanks.”

He picked it up, heard the dial-tone, tapped four numbers, then had to stop and shake his head and laugh at himself.

“What’s wrong?” the hippie-type asked.

“Nothing.” If he told the guy he’d just dialled the first four numbers of his old squadroom-like a retired horse clip-clopping back to the old firebarn-he wouldn’t understand. He tapped the cutoff button and dialled 911 instead.

The phone rang once in his ear… and it did ring, as if he had called a residence. Collie frowned. What you got when you dialled 911-unless they had changed it since the days when listening to the recordings had been part of his job-was a high toneless bleep sound.

Well, they did change it, that’s all, he thought. Made it a little more user-friendly.

It started to ring again and then was picked up. Only instead of getting the 911 robot, telling him what button to press for what emergency, he got soft, wet, snuffly breathing. What the hell-?

“Hello?”

“Trick or treat,” a voice responded. A young voice and somehow eerie. Eerie enough to send a scamper of gooseflesh up his back. “Smell my feet, give me something good to eat. If you don’t, I don’t care, you can smell my underwear.” This was followed by a high, adenoidal giggle.

“Who is this?”

“Don’t call here no more, partner,” the voice said. “Tak!”

The click in his ear was deafening, so deafening the girl heard it, too, and screamed. Not the phone, he thought. Thunder. She’s screaming at thunder. But the guy with the long hair was breaking for the door like his hair was on fire and his ass was catching, the phone was dead in his hand, as dead as the pay-telephone had been even after he dropped his quarter, and when the sound came again, he recognized it for what it was: not thunder but more gunfire.

Collie ran for the door, too.

Mary Jackson had left the accounting firm where she worked part-time not at two but at eleven. She hadn’t gone to the Crossroads Mall, though. She had gone to the Columbus Hotel. There she had met a man named Gene Martin, and for the next three hours she had done everything for him a woman could possibly do for a man except cut his toenails. She supposed she would have done that, too, if she had been asked. And now here she was, almost home and looking (at least as far as she could tell from the rearview mirror) pretty much put together… but she was going to have to get into the shower fast, before Peter got too good a look at her, maybe. And, she reminded herself, she would need to take a pair of panties out of her top drawer to throw into the hamper along with her skirt and blouse. The pair she had been wearing-what was left of them-were currently residing under the bed in room 203. Gene Martin, a wolf in accountant’s clothing if ever there had been one, had ripped them right off her. Ooo you beast, quoth the maiden fair.

The question was, what was she doing? And what was she going to do? She had loved Peter for the nine years of their marriage, even more after the miscarriage than before, if that was possible, and she still loved him. That didn’t change the fact that she already wanted to be with Gene again, doing things she had never even considered doing with Peter. Guilt was freezing half of her mind, lust was frying the other half, and in between, in a kind of shrinking twilight zone, was the reasonable, good-humored, rational woman she had always considered herself to be. She was having an adulterous affair, and the guy she was having it with was just as damned married as she was; she was on her way home to a good man who suspected nothing (She was sure he didn’t, prayed he didn’t, of course he didn’t, how could he?) with no underwear on under her skirt, she was still sore from their adventures, she didn’t quite know how all this had started or how she could want to continue anything so stupid and sordid, goddam Gene Martin didn’t have a brain in his head, except of course it wasn’t his head she was interested in, she could have cared less about his head, and what was she going to do? She didn’t know. She only knew one thing for sure, and that was how drug addicts felt, and she would never put them down again in her life. Just say no? Mother, please.

She drove with these chaotic thoughts swimming in her mind, the suburban streets passing like landmarks in a dream, hoping only that Peter wouldn’t be home when she got there, that he would have maybe gone over to Milly’s on the Square for ice cream (or maybe to Santa Fe to visit his mother for a few weeks, that would be great, that would maybe give her a chance to work through this awful fever). She didn’t notice the way the afternoon was darkening or the fact that many of the cars that passed her on the 290 were using their headlights; she didn’t hear the thunder or see the lightning. Neither did she see the yellow van parked near the corner of Bear Street and Poplar when she passed it.

What jerked her out of her reverie was seeing Brad and Belinda Josephson out in front of their house. Johnny Marinville was with them. Farther down the block she saw more people: David Carver, wearing a bathing suit that looked almost obscenely tight, standing on his walk, hands planted on his meaty hips… the Reed twins… Cammie, their mother… Susi Geller and a friend on their lawn with Kim Geller standing behind them…

A wild thought came to her: they knew. All of them knew. They were waiting for her, they were going to help Peter hang her from a sour apple tree or perhaps stone her the way the townspeople had stoned the woman in that Shirley Jackson story she’d read back in high school.

Don’t be stupid, the part of her that still belonged to her said. That part was dismayingly small these days, but it was still there. It’s not all about you, Mare; no matter what shit you’ve been rolling in, the world still doesn’t revolve just around you, so why don’t you just lighten up a little? You probably wouldn’t be half so paranoid if you weren’t riding around with no-

Oh shit. Was that Peter down at the end of the block? She couldn’t tell for sure, but she thought so. Peter and Old Doc from next door. They seemed to be covering something on the lawn of the house across from the little store.

Thunder bammed this time hard enough to make her jump and gasp. The first drops of rain spattered on to the glass of the windshield, sounding like flecks of metal. She realized she had been sitting here at the corner with the engine idling for… well, she didn’t know just how long, but for quite a while. The Josephsons and Johnny Marinville must have thought she’d lost her wits. Except the world really didn’t revolve just around her; they weren’t paying her any attention at all, she saw as she turned the corner. Belinda had given her that one little glance, and now she and the rest of them were looking back down the street again, at whatever her husband and old Billingsley were doing. At whatever they were covering.

Trying to see for herself, groping for the windshield wiper knob as more raindrops-big ones-began to spatter the glass, she didn’t have any idea that the yellow space-age van had followed her on to Poplar Street until it rear-ended her.

From Playthings, The International Merchandising Magazine of the Toy Industry, January 1994 (Vol. 94, No. 2), p. 96. Excerpted from Licensing ’94: An Overview, by John P. Muller: