Читать книгу The Amulet - A.R. Morlan - Страница 8

CHAPTER ONE

Monday, October 19, 1987

ONE—Anna (1)

Clawed leaves skittered before Anna Sudek’s sneakered feet as she walked down Ewert Avenue, crossing from the shabby residential section into the business district. The brittle oak, maple, and elm leaves thinned as Anna passed the first of the rough-siding and shake-shingle-roofed businesses on the left­ hand side of the street. Soon, she found herself walking down a dimly lamp lit, cracked, and pitted cement sidewalk as queasily luminescent and lightly pocked as the thin vestiges of the last quarter moon above her.

Despite their now dead state, Anna missed the rustling of the wind blown leaves. Ewert Avenue at 2:30 in the morning was a hollow, wind-sucking discarded bottle of a place, a length of quiet emptiness enclosed by the overhangs of two- and three-story brick and frame offices and stores. The comparative silence was broken only by the lonely, rusty scree of the illuminated revolving clock/ thermometer mounted on the corner of the tan brick Savings and Loan building. The bright yellow dots against black numerals indicated that the temper­ature was a brisk thirty degrees, but Anna knew that the wind chill made it much colder.

Over at the intersection of Ewert and First Avenue West, a Mountain Dew can clunked against the sewer grating; the sound was overloud, tinny, ringing in the predawn quietude.

Kneeling down to pick up the empty pop can, Anna saw movement out of the corner of her eye—a chunk of darkness, breaking free of the dimly lit alley behind her side of the street—and huddled against the flaking yellow-painted sloping curb, bottle-bug green can clenched in her gloved fingers, until the moving darkness resolved itself into a brisk-walking sneakered figure clad in a navy pea coat and layered babushkas.

Anna saw just how tense she’d been when she dropped the can into her plastic mesh bag—the swirling red and green Mountain Dew logo was crushed beyond legibility. As she continued down the avenue, now walking in the middle of the street, Anna scolded herself. Great going. Now I’m freaking out over old lady Campbell. If some yahoo creep bastard came up behind me, I’d roll over and spread ’em wide without being asked to.

In the distance, Anna could hear Mrs. Campbell opening one of the Dumpsters in back of the Ewerton Bakery. “Shit,” she muttered. Usually Anna made it to the bakery first, especially on Monday mornings. Sunday night was when they threw out the last of the leftover pastries and stale bread, and sometimes the paper tubes of hardened decorating frosting Ma liked so much. As Anna neared the bakery, the sounds of Mrs. Campbell rooting around in the Dumpster, ripping open white plastic bags of crumb-encrusted baking parchment and bent foil baking pans, became clearer.

Anna made a diagonal shift to the east, toward the IGA which had its own in-store bakery. While it didn’t usually throw out as many baked goods, there was a chance that she’d at least find a frosting tube or two. Anything to get Ma out of her mood, Anna told herself with an unconscious frown, as she reached Wisconsin Street, where the large brick-fronted supermarket was located. It was close to Sixth Avenue East—only a block from the law enforcement building.

Not that the cops or sheriff’s deputies were any problem (they were long used to seeing one of the Sudek women—occasionally both of them—out dumpster diving, and some of the friendlier officers even honked and waved in passing, but Anna never really felt comfortable with the thought that Ewerton’s finest were watching her grub around in Dumpsters for lid-popped jars of pasta sauce, or half-rotted tomatoes and onions. She had gone to school with too many of them, and it galled her to think that they were secretly smirking at her in the wire mesh and crackling radio confines of their cop cars, no doubt thinking over their steaming Styrofoam cups of coffee from the café over on Third Avenue West, Looking for Granny’s body, Sudek?

Anna didn’t think her supposition was paranoia; she’d heard that taunt over and over during her twenty-nine years—in the sandbox at Ewerton Elementary, as she searched her locker for a missing Algebra B book, and as she surreptitiously peered in an EHS trash can in search of almost-blank notebooks tossed out at semester’s end. And several of the nitwits who’d uttered those words had become deputies, patrolmen, and meter maids since graduation. Ma had heard the same jibes, but she had been able to laugh them off.

Setting down her black mesh bag next to the first dented and paint-flaking white dumpster behind the IGA, Anna thought as she raised the cracked and misshapen black plastic lid, with the embossed clench-fisted gorilla logo on it, I wonder if Ma had that sonic-boom laugh when she was at EHS...if she only knew that the more they hurt her the louder she gets. Ripping open the first plastic garbage bag after feeling the outlines of baking pans inside, Anna extracted the foil pans, faintly slimy with cold, moist cake residue. Bending down, so that she was hidden from view just in case any early worker opened the loading doors, Anna pulled the plaid shopping bag out of her mesh bag, and pushed the first two inside. Ma may have liked the old baked goods the IGA pitched, but Anna thought the pans were more valuable. Washed and cut into strips, then stuffed into her scavenged cans, they added weight to her weekly load of aluminum­—sometimes as much as an extra two pounds.

And that extra dollar or eighty cents of can money (depending on the going price per pound) often meant two more cans of food for the cats. Ma kept threatening to throw both of them out the door, but then she’d get over her latest rage and go on a cat food-buying binge, using the money they’d earmarked for their own food.

Having put the pans in her plaid bag, Anna stood up and leaned over the Dumpster again, pulling out pans, a few Mountain Dew and Diet Coke cans, and a clear plastic bag of raw, pale yellow sweet dough. (She’d fry that off for the birds, come winter.) But there was nothing else edible in the bag—not even so much as a wrinkled bit of parchment dotted with cookie crumbs.

“Shit,” Anna muttered as she felt the rest of the bags on both sides of the Dumpster. They contained only regular trash. After fighting the town’s stray cats for the contents of Ewerton’s Dumpsters on a daily basis for the past seven years (and doing it catch as catch can during her high school and college years), Anna had developed a feel for what was worth scavenging and what wasn’t worth the effort of ripping open the slippery plastic bags. Even through gloves or mittens, her blunt fingertips (her peeling, brittle nails kept short thanks to a combination of a mediocre diet and two part-time cleaning jobs) knew what was packed into Dumpster bags. Anna supposed that in a half-assed way, her ability was a talent, no doubt inherited from her mother, who had been doing much the same thing ever since her father had taken off back in 1960.

And the old lady could have helped us out even then, Anna reminded herself as she softly lowered the wobbly plastic Dumpster lid and bent down to pick up her two bags. When she was about to straighten up, she saw moving beams of light cross her sneakered instep, then wash up over her knees

Praying that it wasn’t an IGA employee (once, a little putz of a stock boy had caught her grabbing some thawed pizzas out of a Dumpster full of once-frozen vegetables after the store had had that power failure in the frozen food section; he’d chased her for half a block, shouting, “Bring those back, thief! Scum! That’s store property!” but she did get even with the four-eyed blond squirt when she put a negative comment about him in the customer suggestion box inside the store, after she’d learned what his name was), Anna defiantly stood her ground and stared at the source of the headlights.

A blue horizontal-striped white car with the rectangular gumball machine on top. Sheriff’s patrol—just what she needed. Terry Von Kemp was on duty every other Monday—­Terry of the swinging greasy bangs and the open-lipped grin. Even before he rolled down the driver’s side window, Ann knew what was coming.

“You lookin’ for Granny, Sudek? After all this time, I’d think you could smell her out.”

“Weren’t you paying any attention in biology, Terry? Bodies decay down to bone in a few weeks—less, if the weather’s right. I figure fifty-some years would be enough to do it, no?” Anna shivered in her denim jacket, glad that it was a size too big for her. As familiar as the old jibe was, hearing it when she was trapped between a pair of Dumpsters and an idling patrol car, at three-something in the morning, was enough to set her teeth to rattling and her muscles to quivering. And being pinned in the glow of Terry’s high beams, like a moth, was unsettling, even if Terry was all threat and no action. He could always say the car just happened to accelerate.

Terry mulled that over, then said, “I don’t remember nothing like that in Mr. Naughton’s class. Maybe you’re thinkin’ of some art-fart course you took in college. Murder One, or—”

“That sounds more like something you would’ve taken in cop school—or is that joke about the law enforcement depart­ments out here true?” Nonchalantly Anna leaned against the Dumpster, planning the streets she would use going home to miss Terry on his usual patrol route, while Terry took his time nibbling that bait. Finally, the line jerked.

“What joke?”

“That they wait outside the school for delinquent boys in Wales with a stack of sheriff and police force applications?”

In the light of the car Terry’s face went red, and as he leaned over to do something with the ignition, Anna took off in a northwest direction, running over the abandoned spur tracks. She hit Seventh Avenue, then ran east to Dean Avenue, parallel to Ewert Avenue, her full bags banging and clanking against her a thighs, until she had to stop, gasping for breath. Damning that case of bronchitis she’d had as a child (her lung capacity was so low she hadn’t even been able to resuscitate Resusi Anne dummies in freshman health class), Anna wheezed her way down Dean Avenue, forcing herself to keep up the pace. Detour or not, she had to be home by four, and home was half a mile away.

In the distance, she heard Mrs. Campbell drop another Dumpster lid. The old bat acted like she owned the town, not caring who heard her, or whether or not anyone saw her. Maybe it doesn’t matter when her late husband was one of the City Crew workers...no little stock-boy fucker would dare call her “Scum!”

Not that Arlene Campbell had ever done anything to Anna. Why, Anna now supposed that the old woman had actually meant to be friendly when she’d first seen Anna Dumpster diving several years back, and said, “I see you walk alone, too.” But at the time, Anna had simply ignored her and turned down a side street, unsure of how to react. And these days, when they’d approach the same Dumpster from different directions, the most Mrs. Campbell would do was diplomati­cally mutter, “Age before beauty,” or some such nice-but­-barbed admonition, prior to planting herself in front of the Dumpster, hogging the bags within. But nevertheless, Anna detested the old bat.

I’m taking out everything Ma’s mother ever did to me on Mrs. Campbell, the college psychology professor voice in Anna’s head told her, but the college-grad-with-two-menial-­jobs voice told the other voice, Mind your own fucking business, okay?

Anna’s labored breath was ragged enough to be clearly audible over the crunchy scrabble of the leaves she was dragging her feet through. She glanced up at the occasional lit windows in the houses on either side of the street. The ones with the unlined curtains drawn or the flimsy shades pulled only captured her attention for a few seconds; she couldn’t see much more than tantalizing strips of flowered wallpaper; angled ceilings, an occasional headboard, or closet door hung with empty padded hangers. But some windows were uncov­ered, the light within spilling out in warm squares and rectangles across the frost-nipped lawns and crack-veined gray sidewalks beyond.

Anna’s pace slowed as much as legally possible without being labeled a Peeping Tom as she looked into those win­dows, telling herself that if a woman went around showing everything she owned, people couldn’t really be blamed for looking, could they? For Anna, the same thing applied when it came to window-peeping. After all, who but a show-off would light up the inside of his or her house like a Christmas tree, and leave the drapes or shades up? It was as if those people were saying to Anna, Look, garbage picker, at the things you won’t ever have, no matter how many castoffs you grub out of Dumpsters and garbage cans.

And despite the imagined insult implied by the showy, well-lit windows, Anna willingly went along with it, eagerly looked at what others apparently sought to rub her face in, for it was the only way she could keep herself sane—keep herself from getting like her mother, who thought that the world was limited and bleak as the four walls that surrounded her come the end of each working day.

Her sneakered feet shuffling through light mounds of frost-backed leaves, and moving lightly over the ribbons of dried dead grass bisecting the slabs of concrete below, Anna stared at walnut Colonial living room ensembles; at plump, plaid sofas surmounted by grouped picture frames in artful configurations; at tasteful ceramic ginger-jar lamps positioned next to daring open staircases; at kitchens whose appliances all matched, the refrigerators bearing all-one-theme sets of mag­nets; at wall-mounted collector’s plates and full sets of old fine china in big dark wood cabinets. The people in those lit rooms acted as if they were oblivious to the street beyond.

Anna had seen things that would have gotten her arrested if one of the cops been driving past just as she had her head turned in the direction of some of the homes. The people who performed those acts in the spotlight seemed to taunt her: We can do what we wish, and no one will ask us where the skeletons of our great-grand-mothers are buried.

Anna knew her peeping was wrong, despite the apparent invitation to look that the bare glass presented. But she also knew that these people could be wrong, too, calling out things she and her Ma already knew, already wondered about them­selves, though no answer was to be forthcoming, even after the passing of fifty years and more. Anna never knew if they’d taunted the old lady; she wouldn’t admit the sky was blue if you held her eyelids open with pliers and forced her to stare up at the heavens, let alone admit to Anna or her mother that she, too, had been greeted almost daily with that rote cry.

At any rate, if any of the cop cars ever were to stop her, Anna had the perfect retort ready: “Just looking for Granny, Sir.”

TWO—First Kill

Arlene Campbell let the Dumpster lid slam down, aware of the racket she made, but regally beyond it. With a sense of humor most of the citizens of Ewerton would have found astonishing, considering the image they had of her as a spare old crone in ratty head scarves and cheap Sears running shoes, Arlene privately dubbed herself duchess of the Dumpsters, queen of Ewert Avenue, the dowager of debris.

True, if any of the lowlifes who cruised the streets, party-hardying and tossing full beer cans out passenger win­dows whenever a squad car rolled past in the other direction, were ever to call her any such name, Arlene Campbell wouldn’t hesitate to take down their license numbers and phone in a complaint after she had walked home. But nothing of the sort ever happened.

Sometimes, Arlene wondered if it was the ghost of her Don that kept the hoods’ mouths shut—Don, with his steel brush butch, and his BB-shot eyes surmounting jowls that flapped like an old woman’s breasts. “Old tittie cheeks,” his co-workers used to call him; Arlene had heard them, but never had the heart—or sheer courage—to repeat the sentiment in Don’s presence. Bad enough that those fellows had to work under him.

And Arlene remembered how he’d bark and bitch at the kids who spent the summers painting the curbs and crossing lines of Ewerton’s asphalt-and-gravel patched streets yellow, some of the same kids who spent their Friday and Saturday nights whooping it up in the shoddy over-the-store apartments on Wisconsin and Ewert, with the whores who lived there, and then cruised the streets for hours afterward, shouting and slamming on the brakes ten feet after the stop signs.

If they can make all that noise and nothing is done, I can drop the Dumpster lids. Arlene thought as she started for the IGA. When she saw the white squad car slowing down by the Dumpsters, she hesitated. She’d seen the Von Kemp boy’s rather small head and narrow shoulders in silhouette as the car had passed her earlier that morning. She knew that Sheriff Sawyer only kept him on because he was somehow very distantly related to Stu Sawyer’s wife Val, but nepotism wasn’t enough to forgive idiocy, in Arlene’s opinion.

Arlene ducked into a shadow between two scabby, silver­ street lamps and watched the squad car stop, its lights on that Sudek girl, the one Arlene had tried to make friendly conversation with years ago, only to be rebuffed, not that she actually held it against the child. Arlene Campbell had lived long enough in Ewerton to know how it could warp the perceptions of those less favored in the townspeople’s eyes. Faintly, from a distance, she heard garbled voices, and caught the word “Granny.”

That nonsense again. The Alvin Miner case had been the talk of Ewerton’s lowlife population for much too long—ever since Arlene could remember. The silly questions the other children had asked little Lucy ever since it happened (the questions little Arlene Weiss herself had asked, even though old Arlene Campbell conveniently forgot uttering them), and kept on asking long after Lucy wasn’t so little anymore.

“Where’s Granny?”

“What happened to Granny?”

“Seen Granny lately?”

“Find some more of Granny anywhere?”

Childish, spiteful questions that remained unanswered, and thus kept curiosity alive and thriving, especially among those who refused to give up puerile curiosity. Morbid curios­ity, some might call it.

Not wanting to listen, even at a distance, to what that Von Kemp trash was saying to the Sudek girl, Arlene walked back Wisconsin Street and began peering in the piles of boxes behind the businesses there, in hopes of finding something as good as the cast-off boot trees she’d picked up behind Happy Step Shoes, or the big box of dress patterns she’d found behind the clothing and fabric store on Fourth Avenue East this past summer.

Nothing.

From its nest somewhere above the novelty­ secondhand store an owl hooted—a low, reverberating sound that almost always made Arlene lose control of her bladder for a few dribbling seconds. Silly, it’s only a bird—a dumb animal. How much harm is it going to do you? Have to watch out for the two-footed beasts, she thought, getting out of the alley and crossing over to Ewert Avenue.

Still no luck. Banging down lid after lid, Arlene found herself walking to the point where Seventh Avenue West and East met in one long, unbroken street, close to the new ugly law enforcement building and the rusted railroad tracks be­yond. Past the abandoned Soo Line tracks (oh, North Central used them on occasion, but Arlene didn’t consider a train made up of an engine and two boxcars really using the tracks) was the Sash and Door to the west, and a smallish patch of woods bisected with the fairground road directly north.

Kids used those woods for drinking, and what came after. And that meant cans. Arlene usually left those to the Sudek girl (payment for letting Arlene have first pick of the bakery), but she knew for a fact that the Sudek girl never ventured into the woods, or anywhere beyond the railroad tracks, after daylight saving time ended. If I were her age, and had a bosom like hers, I wouldn’t go in the woods now, either. But who wants a flat old biddy—Don Campbell’s old biddy, at that?

There wasn’t much light out this way. The last street lamp was a block behind her, and even though the law enforcement building (police, sheriff, and jail) was lit in the front, the building was facing away from the woods, so Arlene fumbled the little flashlight scavenged last summer from behind Norm Hibbing’s novelty shop out of her jacket pocket and thumbed it on.

The small batteries inside offered only a rancid circle of light, but combined with the faint moonlight above, Arlene could see well enough to move forward without tripping. As she crossed the slanting railroad tracks, something emerged from the woods to her left—something dark and small and scissors-legged, with eyes that flared green-gold when it passed through her flashlight’s weak beam.

A cat, she began to think, until a minor but disturbing point crossed her mind. Eyes are in the wrong place—at least, one is. But by the time she’d realized what was wrong, the animal—cat, skunk, small dog, whatever—was gone, lost in the high grass near the abandoned depot to the northeast.

Arlene told herself she was too old, too tough, and too practical to be letting herself get all riled up over a silly animal, and kept on walking forward, into the woods, casting her flashlight about as she moved. The sallow beam picked up the glint of a Coors can—no, two Coors cans—and the shed skin of a rubber beneath. Arlene recoiled as her fingers brushed against the slightly sticky pinkish latex, still faintly body­-moist. Through the twist-limbed trees, most still adorned with withered leaves, she could see the streetlights on Ewert Hill to the east, where all the fancy old houses were. Few people lived out that way anymore, but the fact that there were houses and lights beyond gave her a mild sense of security. And the law building behind her helped, too.

Aiming her light downward, reading the play of shadow and flickering light with all the intensity of a palmist studying a client’s hand, Arlene looked beyond the shadows cast by the fallen leaves, to the deeper places below—places where things dropped became things lost, waiting to be found.

The woods were only a couple of blocks long where they were bisected by the road, but to Arlene’s left they were much deeper, thicker, and noisier. She could hear subtle rustlings—snaps and low squelching sounds she hoped were animal in origin. She had no idea how some pair of lovebirds might react to being discovered out here, in mid-thrust, as it were. Maybe it’s some of those boors who drive up and down my street at midnight, waking me up when I’d rather sleep, she thought petulantly, like the Arlene Weiss of old. A deliciously nasty thought came to her, nurtured by too many years lived under Don’s callused thumb: Suppose she were to sneak up on a couple and shine them like a pair of deer?

Her ribbed rubbery soles searching out secure footing below, Arlene followed the direction of the almost inaudible squelching, taking care not to let her bags make too much noise as they grazed the lower branches of the trees that surrounded her. For a second, the thought that she was close to the place the where the strange animal had emerged from the woods made her pause, but the prospect of having some harmless fun, of turning the tables on at least two of those little shits who broke her sleep many a night, kept her going. And that cat, dog, or whatever had flitted by so quickly that the odd shine could have been anything—a tag—

(But I didn’t see any collar on it—)

She was sixty, after all, even if Dr. Isham said she didn’t need glasses. Old eyes play funny tricks, especially in the dark.

But it wasn’t quite as dark now. Even though the sun wasn’t due to come up for hours, there was a faint rim of half luminescence lying low across the horizon behind her, silhouetting ­the random trees and houses with cut-paper sharpness. Even the places where her flashlight beam didn’t touch, Arlene could half-see shapes, near-colors...and that soft, almost strangled little squelching sound was louder.

Much louder, as in almost on top of her, yet Arlene detected no movement, no breathing, heavy or otherwise. Running her pale tongue over her rough lips, she slowly panned her flashlight in a half-circle before her. Nothing but tree trunks, fallen branches, leaves, an old shoe...two shoes—filled with stockinged feet, toes up, but tilted away from each other in a bottomless “v”.

Gripping her bags in her left hand until her swollen knuckles protested, Arlene trained her right hand toward the legs attached to the feet. Tight jeans, the paint ’em on your body kind, with zippered ankles. Hands, resting on the thighs, dirt-rimmed nails peering out from chipped paint over the moons. Blackish streaks on the tops of the hands—a liquid shimmering black that turned another color altogether when Arlene’s light hit them. The saffron beam jiggled a little as it played over the slumped torso; the metallic threads running through the cheap, tight sweater; the forward-lolling head with the jagged, moving, leaking parts in the bleach-blond hair—the parts no comb had made in that frizzled curtain of curls.

The torn furrows in her flesh dripped blood, producing a most unpleasant squelching sound.

THREE—Ma

“Shit.”

Anna paused in the doorway between the living room and the dining room, bags in one hand, her house keys in the other. Before her, the dining room table was as it had been when she had gotten up that morning, as it had been when she and Ma had gone to bed at seven the night before. Anna’s beige mug rested next to the two-day-old newspaper Ma had found at her FmHA job, their two place mats askew near the middle. Ma’s purse sitting open near the place opposite to where Anna sat. The only difference was that Ma was sitting at her usual place, the kitchen door, her thin arms crossed, pointy elbows resting on the edge of the table. From Ma’s tone of voice alone, Anna could guess that the older woman wasn’t over last night’s funk, but as if to bring the point home to Anna, her mother’s face was scrunched up like a tear-crumpled Kleenex, all creases between her eyes, around her thin-lipped mouth, and under her wobbling chin.

Not bothering to actually look at Anna, or acknowledge her presence, Ma repeated, “Shit. Shit, shit, shit!”

Uncertain what to do, Anna just stood there, trying out scenarios in her mind. If I ask her what’s wrong, she’ll say, “You.” or “Everything.” but if I ignore her, she’ll start raging that I never pay attention to her. If I try and make breakfast myself, she’ll start in on how I’m not doing this or that right, or how I waste water filling the coffee pot, or something. Christ, she’s had all morning to think of something that I’m bound to do wrong. But if I just stand here, she’ll­—

Anna’s mother got up with a flurry of pink flannel and jerking limbs. She and Anna were within five pounds of the same weight, but she managed to make her pounds look and act smaller, swifter, the way a horse seems leaner and thinner than a cow, even if they’re the same size. Ma stomped into the kitchen. Through the open doorway to the basement below, Anna heard the floor joists protest uselessly. Over the whine and pop of the floor, Anna gradually made out words. Her mother was mumbling just loud enough to taunt, without making herself completely clear.

“...control...always trying to live my life through me...won’t work this time...she wants her little Anna, she can have her...old bitch.”

Anna didn’t realize she’d lost her grip on her bags until they fell to the floor with a muted thump. Instinctively, she tried to make herself as insignificant as Ma always told her that was, but Ma was already storming back into the dining room, eyes blazing behind her oversized wire-rimmed glasses, wisps of permed, pale-blonde hair shaking around her heart­-shaped face, the furrow between her eyes as lethal as a sharpened dagger.

“Goddamn fuckin’ clumsy bitch.”

Anna knew that the challenge had been given—she either had to take what was coming, or try to stand up for herself. Dammit, I stood up to that Von Kemp yahoo, and he was armed and in a car that could’ve rammed me. She’s only got her tongue.

“What’s wrong?” Neutral enough, Anna hoped, as she dimly wondered where the cats were.

“What’s wrong?” Ma mocked Anna, making her voice higher and more nasal, in scathing imitation of her child. She jabbed at the air, the table, and Anna with one pink-nailed forefinger as she shouted, “That’s what’s wrong—look at the damned table!”

Anna looked. She had to move her head to see what Ma was talking about. At the right angle, the shine of the overhead light picked up a faint sheen of moisture on one of the plastic place mats. Ma’s place mat—the one that didn’t have a white smeared streak where a portion of the stylized pattern of farm fields and a far-off house and barn had rubbed off. As Ma sputtered, “Look what your damned cat did,” Anna realized what had happened, and cursed herself for not taking the time to push the cats into her bedroom before she had left the house that morning. Mouth, their female tiger cat, had a bladder problem. Sometimes, when she was excited or upset, she dribbled. And Mouth was wont to climb on the furniture, including the table. But I couldn’t put her in the bedroom—Bruiser doesn’t get along with her. And if I put Mouth in the bathroom and shut the door, Ma yells because she’s not sure if I’m in there or what, and Ma doesn’t want the cats in her room.

Anna made a break for the kitchen, mumbling, “I’ll go wipe it up,” but Ma blocked her way, lean arms crossed, elbows pointing out like the narrow ends of billy clubs. Anna backed up, intending to circle the table and edge into the kitchen behind Ma, but when she was halfway around the table Ma shifted position to further block her way. Shaking, Anna tried to squeeze past Ma anyhow, but her big bust got in the way, for Anna couldn’t press her right arm close enough to her body. When the elbow of her jacket grazed Ma’s pink nightgown, Ma pushed her into the small easy chair that sat near the opposite side of the kitchen doorway.

As her face hit the rounded back of the chair, hard, Anna told herself, Don’t cry out, for Chrissakes—she’ll only get angrier. My god, what has happened to us? We were actually happy here, just a couple of years ago.

“Get up and clean off that table.”

Later on, Anna wasn’t sure if it was the tone of Ma’s voice—more metallic than usual—or the cumulative effect of having that same voice shout out so many orders, curses, and insults over the past two years, the years of the old lady—

(“I wanted a daughter, a human being, not you!” “You clumsy moose, can’t you do anything without—” “You’re just like the old lady, just fuckin’ like her—and her crazy old man—”)

—but whatever it was, something in Anna snapped.

“No way.” Pressing herself into the chair, the cat dander on the throw tickling her nose, Anna looked up at her mother, whose fore­head furrow grew impossibly black and deep, like a widening cleft in her very skull. Ma glared down at Anna.

“No, what?” One good thing, Ma wasn’t ripping skin off her lips, or tearing strips of skin off the sides of her fingernails, hurting herself in a seething rage that often boiled over to splatter her daughter. Anna slowly shifted until she had her feet on the floor and one hand stationed on the left armrest before saying, “I’m not cleaning up something you could have cleaned yourself. You know Mouth has accidents. A little cat pee won’t hurt anything.”

“Yes it will!” Ma pounded the table with her fist, shouting, “It hurts me! I’m sick of always cleaning up after the fucking cat! Isn’t it enough I had to pick up after the old lady almost all my life? Now it’s pick up after them! Not when I’m picking garbage to eat while they—” she pointed in the direction of Anna’s room “eat fancy fucking cat food!”

“But they eat garbage, too. That beef from when they get done grinding at—”

“Screw that! That’s not what I’m talking about!”

“What are you talking about, then? We just don’t always find cat food, that’s all—”

“Fuck finding the cat food!” Ma bellowed, kicking at Anna’s legs with her house-slippered bare feet, unconsciously mimicking the actions of her own mother when Ma was a girl. Ma’s thin toes hung far enough out of the yellow scuffs for the bones of her toes to connect ringingly with Anna’s tibia, but Ma didn’t feel the connec­tion, for she kept on screaming, “Can’t you understand I’m tired of it all? Tired of waking up to find cat piss on the fucking table, tired of going garbage picking, tired of playing nursemaid and playmate to that crazy old lady, tired of listening to the old lady ask why her little Anna won’t come see her, just tired of it all!”

Anna didn’t know what to say. She never did know what to say when Ma started on an “I’m tired” tirade. It wasn’t as if Ma was the only one suffering in the house; at least she’d been married once, and had had a kid, which was enough to make her less of an object of ridicule. Anna was twenty-nine and had never so much as dated, or even been able to pay a guy to take her someplace. Not that there was any guy poor enough in town to need to accept date money from someone like Anna Sudek, descendant of the embarrassment of Ewerton. And after years of going without male companionship, Anna no longer wanted it or needed it—it was simply easier to give up the search without ever having really begun it in the first place. Even if it meant not being able to sweet-talk any of her former classmates into hiring her now.

Ma above all should have realized just how damned hard it would be for Anna to get anything more than menial jobs, despite her degree. No jobs would be forthcoming to Anna Sudek, any more than they were forthcoming for her mother, Tina Miner Sudek.

It was as if what had happened fifty-some years ago had oc­curred yesterday. People who had actually been there were mostly gone, but the memory lingered on, thanks to the oft-told tales. And with the memory came the smoldering rage that someone had dared to give Ewerton a bad name, had dared to do something embarrass­ing—and that the Miner-Sudek clan still had the audacity to remain in town.

Not that Anna and her mother actually wanted to remain in Ewerton. While free to go in one sense, they were chained in other, less obvious ways. Lack of money, for starters. Ma had managed to break free of town when she was a teenager­—had made it all the way to neighboring Wright County, in fact—but her divorce had sent her scuttling back home, Anna in tow, to the bitter sanctity of the old lady’s house, to be her unpaid slave. And when things got to be too much there, she and Anna had pooled the money Anna had earned doing work study in college (said education paid for by Uncle Sam, thanks to Anna’s unacknowledged-at-EHS intelligence, and ability to supplement her grant with scholarships) with the little money she had, and moved halfway across town, to this ticky-tacky house on Wilkerson Avenue, close to the smelly paper mill.

When Ma and Anna had gone looking for work, no one had wanted to hire them, even though they weren’t the ultimate untouch­ables—out-of-towners. In Ma’s case they claimed she was under-qualified; in Anna’s that she was overqualified. Job Service wouldn’t touch them. Employers round-filed their applications. Scavenging took them through the first lean year—that and finding money on the streets, in the runner rims of the washing machines in the Super Suds Launderette, and in the many phone booths around town. They blew what money they held in reserve on bills, until the home cleaning service out in the hoity-toity Willow Hill section of town decided that they’d take a chance on the Sudeks, and offered them office cleaning jobs. (The service also handled in-home care for the elderly, but they were the ones who definitely remembered the Miner case.)

During the past six years, Ma had cleaned the FmHA and paper mill offices, while Anna cleaned the Super Suds and two insurance offices. They pulled down enough to keep them selves and their two cats from being kicked out of the county, and the adjusted mortgage on the house helped, too. Surprisingly, though, she and Ma had be­come friends, getting along better—for a few years, at least—than they had during all the years spent under the old lady’s thumb. But it wasn’t meant to last, this fragile sense of well-being in the Sudek household.

For Anna kept on getting older, and less marriageable by the year, just as their bills grew steadily thanks to inflation and rising costs, and eventually Ma fell victim to rages of angry words and tiny, self-inflicted wounds after the old lady had called their house two years ago, claiming to have fallen and hurt her hip.

“Claimed” was how Anna chose to think about it; it was funny how the old lady supposedly perked up after Ma resumed relations with her. Of course, Anna didn’t know for sure that the old lady had improved; after the fights that precipitated the exodus from the Miner house on Evans Street seven years back, Anna had refused to go see the old lady. Why, for four years she had refused to even speak on the phone with the old woman, when she had called her on little Anna’s birthdays.

But Ma had gone back, almost eagerly, thanks to the little gifts of money from the old lady, the latter’s little trick to make Ma obli­gated to do even more for her, to keep giving more and more of her­self to the old lady. And Ma spent most of every day with the old woman, doing the very odd jobs that had helped spark the original fight seven years ago, listening to the old lady’s tales of what her father had done so long ago.

And the more time Ma spent with the old lady, commis­erating, griping about how this or that person had crossed her or Anna, the more Tina Sudek grew dissatisfied with the marginal existence she and Anna had carved out for them­selves. Suddenly, Dumpster diving was no longer an honor­able, if slightly messy way of steering clear of welfare. And suddenly, every little thing the cats did was wrong, filthy, evil—just as the old lady used to say about things that dis­pleased her.

But Ma had been duty-bound to go back to the old lady, to help her out, just as Anna had considered herself duty-bound to stay at home with Ma, and give over her money to her. That sense of duty, of obligation, had been drummed into Anna’s head by the old lady since she was small—that, plus other things.

“Good girls stay at home. Only bad little girls go out and play.”

“If I could have, I would have taken care of my Ma all the time, even when she was old.”

“Boys are bad. When they put that thing in you, it makes an ugly sound, like ham fat jiggling.”

“I knew you were no good from the time you were born—lying there, kicking off your blankets, showing off your plum.”

“Mark my words, Tina, she’s no good—gonna be knocked up by the time she’s sixteen, and kicked out of school.”

“You’ll both starve without me. You’ll be back in a week.”

No, they hadn’t come back in a week, and they hadn’t starved, but the old lady had Ma back, and had gone to work on her, until now all Ma did was sit scrunch-faced, mouth and eyes bitter under her light fringe of bangs, flailing at Anna with words and fists, jab­bing elbows and kicking feet.

Anna watched her mother sit and cry, without covering her mouth or eyes with her hands. In a high, quivering squeak, she bawled, “I am so tired of this all, you hear me? Just so tired. And it’s all your fault—everything. This is all because you can’t stand her.”

Unable to watch her mother, Anna glanced down at her watch. It was almost five, and the launderette’s automatic doors opened at five-thirty. Leaving the bags where she’d dropped them, Anna qui­etly got up and went into the kitchen, grabbing an old sweet roll be­fore she hurried to her bedroom, peeked in to see that the cats were all right (Bruiser was cornering Mouth, but they were both big cats, able to stand each other off for hours), then rushed out of the house.

She supposed that she should have gone over to her mother and done something, said something comforting, but that time was long past between them. She was sorry for her mother, even as she wasn’t sorry at all.

Anna could never forgive her mother for the way she had turned her back on the warmth and friendship they had finally shared, all because of one of the old lady’s all-too-transparent “I need help” ruses. Lucy Miner had been using the same sympathy-seeking tactics on Anna and Tina for years. It just didn’t cut it with Anna anymore.

FOUR—Arlene (1)

Arlene Campbell sat on her sofa, old rotary-dial phone perched on her lap, the cats playing with the Velcro flaps on her shoes, for even she wasn’t sure how long, before she finally dialed the police. Even then, she hung up before the last number went through. The actual calling to report what she’d seen wasn’t the problem; it she wasn’t even afraid to give her name. But what did bother Arlene was the thought of the questions:

What were you doing out at that time of the morning?

What were you in the woods, off the path?

What were you looking for?

Why did you wait this long to call, ma’am?

Why didn’t you come right to the station?

Arlene put the phone back on its little black painted phone stand and sat down on Don’s old wing chair, the one she had never been allowed to sit on when he was alive. Screw you, Donald, she thought, picking petulantly at a loose thread in the right antimacas­sar, while mulling over her dilemma.

Clearly, she had a choice here—either tell what she knew and have her name splashed all over the paper (and even if they kept her name out of the paper, people would know anyhow­—you couldn’t break wind in Ewerton without everyone and his third cousin knowing you ate beans for supper), and worse yet, have people know for a fact that she was nothing but an old garbage picker, (“See, I tole you Don’ didn’t leave her squirt—”), or sit back and wait until someone else found the body. If she waited long enough, Chief Stanley or Sheriff Sawyer would be able to smell it for themselves, and save her the trouble of coming forward.

But then again, if there was a murderer about, he or she might have seen her, and be waiting to shut her up before she told. In that case, it would be best if the police were at least aware that she was in danger.

Brushing her cat Silky off her lap, Arlene got up and went to the phone, fishing in her smock pocket for a handkerchief as she did so.

FIVE—After Work

Anna let herself into the house early that afternoon without bothering to knock. Even though Ma got done with work an hour or so before Anna, the young woman knew better than to expect Ma to open the door for her, or for there to be any meal on the table. Not after one of her “I’m so tired!” episodes. If things went as they usu­ally did, it wouldn’t be until late Tuesday or early Wednesday that Ma would so much as talk to Anna, or quit banging into Anna whenever she passed her in the hallway.

From past experience, Anna knew that things might be smoothed over for the moment if she simply acted as if nothing had happened that morning, so as she closed the door behind her, Anna said, “You wouldn’t believe what those pigs did this time. Broke both gumball machines and then threw the gumballs in one of the driers and turned that on...the crap was baked on the drum. I had to call Gordy to come down and look at it, and naturally he acted as if it was my damned fault.”

Silence from Ma. Anna pulled off her knit cap and fluffed her hair out with her fingers as she continued, “And I don’t know, if it was the same people or what, but someone dumped a couple of cans of soda all over the carpeting, so I had to mop that up before I could use the vacuum on it. Geez, you’d think they’d drink the whole can after paying fifty cents for it....” Anna let her voice trail off as she wiggled out of her coat, her mouth going dry in the too-quiet house. Apparently, smoothing things over wasn’t going to be easy this time.

Biting her lip as she hung her coat up, Anna sniffed deeply and thought, The least you could have done was change the cat pan. How would you like it if you were locked in an outhouse for five hours? Not to mention that Anna would have to sleep in a smelly room that night, if she was destined to get any sleep at all. Usually Ma made sure she sat up all night with the TV turned up full blast. Ma could sleep, open-mouthed and snoring blattily, anywhere and at any time, regardless of any noise around her, waking up only when Anna ventured out to turn down the volume.

Anna went into the bedroom, dodging Mouth as the fat tiger spay ran out into the hallway. Hoping that Ma wouldn’t do anything to the cat while she was busy in the bedroom, Anna held her breath and attacked the full litter pan. As she scraped up the used litter and rolls of poop with a piece of cardboard, dumping the offal onto a sheet of newspaper, Bruiser came sliding up behind her, butting and rubbing his massive head against her back and behind, making soft, high-pitched churrup noises.

“You’re Mama’s good Bruiser, huh, boy?” she asked the huge black tom, who churruped in reply. Fastidiously, the cat began to scrape the carpet nap over the mound of litter and cat dirt on the big sheet of newspaper spread out before Anna’s knees. Twisting the mess into the middle she said, “There, all gone. See? Mama made all gone with it.”

Bruiser sat there solemnly regarding his mistress (he was Anna’s cat—Ma wouldn’t even look at him, or allow him out of Anna’s bedroom very often), his wide-spaced green eyes loving and luminous. Ever since he’d relented last January­—after two years of roaming around outside the house—and allowed Anna to take him inside, Bruiser had been her boy. Ma claimed that the only reason the eighteen-pound male had allowed Anna to take him in was be­cause his hind feet were slightly frostbitten, that the winter of ’86 was just too much for him, pride or not.

“The cold killed old man Holiday, didn’t it? So, it was enough to make him come to you. The cold, not love,” as Ma liked to insist, to try and spoil the total, utter affection between Anna and the huge black cat with the thick neck and ropes of muscles across his shoul­ders. True, Anna still loved her other cat, but somehow, with Bruiser, it was different. And it didn’t bother Anna to admit that she loved the cat more than her own family. Bruiser never yelled at her or made her feel as if she was somehow less than human.

“Oh, no, no water. Oh, Brupie, Mama’s sorry,” Anna crooned, after glancing at the empty blue water dish on the floor. Bruiser rubbed his big head against her palm, snorting softly, as if to say, “I forgive you.”

Anna gently nudged the cat back into the room as she backed out, thinking that she had to face Ma sooner or later, so it might as well be now. But Ma wasn’t in the bathroom, even though the door was shut (If I pulled that kind of a stunt, she’d be all over me—), and she wasn’t in the kitchen, either. The basement light wasn’t on, but that didn’t mean anything—Ma had superb night vision, and some­times went into the basement without turning on the lights, just to show Anna how wasteful she was when she turned her light on to clean the cat pan down there.

After giving Bruiser his water, Anna swallowed her pride and knocked on her mother’s bedroom door. No answer. She cracked open the door and peered in. The bed was unmade, and Ma’s clothes were strewn around the room, some in piles on the floor, others draped over chairs. Nothing terribly unusual there. But no Ma, ei­ther.

“Office at the FmHA must have been dirty,” she muttered as she went back into the kitchen, finally noticing that her mother’s coat wasn’t hung in its usual place—on a hanger outside the big double closet in the dining room. If Anna were to leave her coat out like that, it would mean another round of swearing and shouting.

Telling herself that nobody had promised her life would be fair, Anna peered in the refrigerator, trying to make out the back in the darkness (the light had gone out months ago—some sort of short in the wiring), gave up, and turned on the kitchen light.

“There you are, my pretties.” Anna grabbed the package of freezer-burn-discolored hot dogs she’d found at the IGA last week and went to set them on the counter, before getting a pot from under the stove...until what she saw on the cabinet door made her stand there, arms limp at her sides, the hot dogs fallen to the floor.

It was as if the very wood of the cupboards was bleeding. Viscid fluid bubbled up from between the coarse pale grain in huge, mis­shapen, oozing letters:

I’M FUCKING GONE!!!

Drops of smeary crimson had settled to the counter below, like splatters of arterial flow. Anna looked at them for a few seconds, unable to digest the reality of the dripping words, until she saw the nearly empty squeeze bottle of catsup resting on its side on the floor, where Ma must have dropped it—where Anna hoped that, indeed, her mother had dropped it.

SIX—Black Monday

“—fell 508 points, or twenty-two percent, to close at 1,738.74, the big­gest one-day drop since—”

“Arnie, can’t you find anything else on the frigging dial? I’m sick and tired of all this Dow-Jones crapola. Won’t mean a hill of beans to anyone around here.” Palmer Winston, Anna’s former English teacher from EHS, banged his squaw-decorated white and red can of Leinenkugel’s on the worn Formica table until Arnie the bartender switched channels on small portable wall-mounted TV.

“—the offshore platforms were suspected to be bases for Iranian gunboats—”

“Oh, screw it, Arnie, put on that Empty-Tee-Vee shit. They don’t carry any bad news.” Old man Winston stubbed out his Lucky Strike in his round black ashtray, then leaned over in his maple cap­tain’s chair until he could see Anna, where she was sitting in one of the Rusty Hinge’s dim back booths.

“Anna Sudek? Is that my best pupil hiding back there?”

Anna slurped her rum and Coke, then rocked the slightly greasy glass back and forth in her hand, until the ice cubes battered each other under the sloshing brown liquid. God, I must be blessed, she thought, before giving the retired teacher a little wave and nod. She was glad that the small, wood­-paneled bar wasn’t busy tonight, al­though, for all she knew, perhaps five customers was busy for this place on a Monday night. With ten bars to choose from in Ewerton and the surrounding smaller towns, people weren’t exactly limited when it came to watering holes.

But the Rusty Hinge was long regarded in Ewerton and the sur­rounding towns of Lumbe and Hunterstown as an old fart’s bar, the kind of place where the “decor” consisted of scenic jigsaw puzzles assembled and glued onto sheets of warped cardboard and thumb-tacked onto the smoke-grimed walls; glossy stand-up display cards hung with naked-women car air fresheners, brightly enameled nail clippers, and greasy bags of fried pork rinds. The blackened smoke-eater hung above the bar was permanently on the fritz, and the sur­face of the tiny pizza oven behind the bar always bore burned-on free-form squiggles of cheese. It was the sort of seedy yet comfort­able watering hole where old buddies and tolerated enemies could sit and gas the afternoon and evening away, with no disapproving glares from Ewerton’s pseudo-Yuppie upper middle class to distract from their pleasure.

And Anna was especially grateful that no other patron here to­day was younger than forty-five. Among her former classmates, she was a freak. Among the beer-guzzling, snack­-munching oldsters, she was just pitiable, a spinster to be coddled and treated with benign condescension.

Anna had long ago learned that pity was more tolerable than horrified disdain.

When Mr. Winston realized that Anna wasn’t about to leave the confines of the orange-seated booth to sit with him, he nodded in reply and fished another Lucky Strike out of his battered pack, all the while keeping one almond-shaped blue eye on her. Anna leaned over her drink, letting her hair fall partly over her face, thinking, The old fuck must know about it, whole frigging town must be discussing it over dessert. Wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t know where the hell she is now, either.

After Anna had read the dripping red message on the cabinet (Ma’s words had slopped across the whole north set of doors where the dishes were kept), she had gone back to her mother’s room and had discovered that one of the suitcases she’d received for a college graduation present was missing (as if to bring the point home to Anna, Ma had taken the smallest case in the set), along with a cou­ple of Ma’s blouses and pairs of pants, some underwear, a pair of shoes, and Ma’s bank book. That was it.

Anna had felt a momentary twinge of mingled guilt and relief that afternoon. Ma was gone, but at least they had had separate bank accounts, thanks to the advice of a woman Anna had met in college, whose husband died a few years ago. The woman had been broke for a month, until her joint accounts with her husband cleared through probate. Now, because of that woman’s advice, Anna had enough money to live on for a few weeks, not counting what she would earn cleaning. And while Anna never was sure exactly when Ma had left, a phone call she received a half hour after she came home gave her an inkling—Ma had never shown up at the FmHA building near the four-way stop that morning. Considering that Anna had left home around five, and Ma was expected at work around six-thirty, Ma must either have not bothered with work, or left before then. Either way, gone was gone. Anna placed a call to the woman who ran the cleaning service, telling her that Ma wouldn’t be coming in for a while, and that she should find someone else to handle Ma’s jobs.

Hanging up the phone, Anna knew that she should have taken on Ma’s jobs and just kept on sending in Ma’s time card, but she didn’t care anymore. She didn’t mind garbage picking—at least, not the way Ma did once the old lady started filling her head with doubt and shame.

Hope you’re happy, old bat. Ma didn’t want to live with you any more, so now you fixed it so she wasn’t satisfied living with me, ei­ther. There was no doubt in Anna’s mind as to what old lady had done. Once Anna and Ma moved out, the old lady was truly alone. From what Ma had told Anna after she’d started going to visit the old lady, no one wanted to mow the lawn or shovel snow for her anymore after a couple of years, and after being insulted once too often, even the Meals on Wheels crew refused to drive out and serve her.

Not that the old lady had ever been Miss Popularity or Miss Congeniality. Anna remembered the time when several of their neighbors came up to Mom as she hung out clothes in the backyard of the old lady’s house, and politely yet apprehen­sively explained that Ma shouldn’t think it was anything personal, but none of them would be talking or paying any attention to the old lady anymore—and the same went for Ma and little Anna.

Apparently, the neighbors had elected Mrs. Armstrong from across the alley to be the main spokeswoman. She was the one who told Ma, “Please don’t think we mean you any ill will, Tina, but that mother of yours...well, we’ve put up with about as much as we’re going to take. The backbiting, the things she yells at us out the win­dow when you and little Anna are gone, the other things we think she’s doing—”

“What do you mean, think she’s doing?” At five years old, Anna knew when her mother was ready to blow; that vertical fore­head furrow was already in place, even though Ma was only twenty-one years old.

Mrs. Armstrong began wiping her chapped hands on her apron, smoothing it against her thighs with dry, scratchy sounds. “Now, Tina, we don’t know for certain that your mother is to blame, but...well, it’s just an awfully strange coincidence that every time one of us has a tiff of some sort with her, we find—”

Mrs. Armstrong hung her head, cheeks red, so Mrs. Cooper finished for her, arms crossed over her flat freckled chest. “We think your mother is doing...dirt on our back lawn. And then scratching grass and dirt over it, like a dog or—”

And that was when Ma threw them out of the yard. But people still don’t hold it against Ma. Didn’t she have that nice hearty, break-your-eardrums laugh whenever she met her neighbors in some public place? And didn’t Ma always smile at everyone she knew?

And didn’t Ma take it out on me when we were alone? Anna found herself thinking, as she swirled the last, near­-melted nubs of ice around in her half-empty glass.

“—been a shitty year all around, I say,” Mr. Winston was pontificating over at the round Colonial table near the door. He and his long-time, also sixty-some-year-old buddy Palmer Nemmitz (whose wife Bitsy made ugly fabric-vegetable refrigerator magnets to sell at the Methodist Market each spring, and she was so popular—and related to so many people—that they sold out) were chewing the fat with fiftyish Lenny Wilkes and that oily middle-aged geek Wayne Mesabi (father of that stick-in-the-cement dip Heidi, who had graduated from EHS two years after Anna), the distributor who furnished the Hinge with Old Dutch chips and snacks. Mesabi was scarfing down a bag of them right now, using a big onion and garlic chip to punctuate his reply.

“I agree with Win—heck, everybody worth a hill of beans passed on this year, and it ain’t even November yet. Think about it. No more Rita Hayworth, no Lee Marvin, no Sammy Kaye—”

“Did he take ‘Swing and Sway’ with him, like Lombardo took New Year’s—”

“Shuddup, Nemmitz, you old cynic—”

“—and John Houston, and Liberace—”

“Always said the man was a—”

“Nemmitz, put a lid on it!”

“And don’t forget about Lorne Greene and Dan Rowan. Why me and Millie used to watch that Laugh-In every week.”

“You also watch Hee-Haw, Lenny.”

“Butt out, Winston. You’re as bad as that buddy of yours, and Bob Preston, and Jackie Gleason, and Danny Kaye, and—”

“Pola Negri died, too,” Winston interjected, sipping on his Leinenkugel’s. Wayne Mesabi stopped pointing his chip at everyone and asked, “Who?”

“Somebody he screwed a long time ago,” Nemmitz cut in, then added before Winston could rebuff him, “And Randolph Scott died, and that soup can fella, Warhol, and Buddy Rich—”

“Millie and I, we used to listen to his records,” Lenny said, sneaking one of Wayne’s chips, even though he really didn’t need it.

“Well, the one that broke me up the worst was Fred—”

“Didn’t you get enough of that old fuck Ferger when he was around? Didn’t think anyone could miss Dead Fred—”

“Wayne, would you let me finish? Astaire. I’m talking about Fred Astaire,” Nemmitz said, grabbing Mesabi’s chip out of his fingers and tossing it to the imitation wood Formica below.

“So you didn’t care when Dead Fred died?”

“That is not the point, you lamebrain—”

“Hey, that reminds me. Arnie, switch that TV back to channel thirteen. Almost time for the news. I’m gonna be on—”

“Lenny lives for death,” old man Winston said to no one in particular, as he glanced over at Anna. Behind him, the other men had rearranged their chairs to face the small set mounted above the cluttered kitschy bar.

Wondering who had died, giving Coroner Lenny Wilkes another shot at TV stardom this year—his round, flat-topped face was a staple for any Ewerton or Dean County deaths deemed newsworthy enough for Eau Claire’s nightly news­—Anna slid forward along the booth’s cigarette-burned orange seat, until she could just see the sharply angled screen.

Seeing her perched precariously on the edge of her seat, Mr. Winston pulled a chair over from an adjoining empty table and motioned to her. Reluctantly, drink in hand, Anna came over to join the four men, but pulled her chair as far away as politely possible.

Above the collector bottle and shlock-filled glass bar shelves, the off-screen announcer on WEAU was announcing the lead stories for the night. After mentioning the Wall Street crash (“Shit, there’s no escaping it, is there Anna?” her ex-teacher asked with a smoke-hazed wink), and a couple of Eau Claire events, the announcer said, “And up in Dean County, a body is discovered in a wooded part of Ewerton.”

Around her, the other men cheered. Draining her glass, Anna thought, Must have been someone even more unpopular than my clan. For a delirious, delicious moment, she wondered if the old lady had finally ventured out of her house, perhaps in search of Ma, but then discounted it. Anna wasn’t the lucky type.

Suddenly, she stiffened. Mr. Winston was tracing the design on the back of her satiny stadium jacket. “If you’re a regular, how come I haven’t seen you in here more often?”

“Huh? Oh, my jacket.” Anna had found her silvery nylon jacket with the black and gray banded cuffs at the launderette one morning, tossed in one of the brown garbage cans. It was a mess—the flannel lining torn; the sleeves sticky with some sort of pink stuff, the deep gray enamel worn off the buttons. The lining was soon pieced together like a soft Springbok puzzle, the pink glop washed off after three tries, and she repainted the snap buttons silver with enamel.

She had wanted a stadium jacket for years, so she hadn’t minded that there was a black screen-printed logo on the back advertising the Rusty Hinge. Everyone in town over fifteen wore stadium jackets advertising something, including bars. Wearing that jacket was one of the few things Anna did that people found acceptable, even though she seldom drank, herself. And tonight, when she finally felt that she needed a drink, in a place away from the house that still shook with the echoes of Ma’s rage, the silvery jacket was her ticket into a place where she might not otherwise be truly welcome. And yet, it was reflective enough for her to be visible during her long walk home.

“Uh...someone gave this to me. For a gift,” she added defensively, even though Mr. Winston was well aware of her financial state. The old man’s hooded blue eyes shifted to her own hazel ones. A look passed between them—if that’s what you want to say, it’s fine with me, but I know you, kiddo—and then he directed his attention to the screen.

The commercial was going off, and the perky female anchor said, “A grim discovery was made near the Dean County Fairgrounds, in the county seat of Ewerton. An anonymous phone call was made early this morning to the Ewerton Police, stating that there was a body in a patch of woods a few blocks from the fairgrounds. There police found the body of Inez Hibbing, age unknown, the former wife of Norm Hibbing, a Ewerton businessman.”

“Businessman, my ass. That novelty shop is a friggin’ joke,” Winston snorted over his beer, while Lenny reached over and slapped his arm, whispering, “I’m on next, you old fart, so shaddup.”

“While foul play was initially suspected, preliminary results of an autopsy conducted at Ewerton Memorial Hospital Nursing Home soon ruled out murder, according to Dean County Cor—”

“Here goes, here goes,” Lenny was chanting, as Mr. Winston nudged Anna and rolled his almond-shaped eyes.

“There’s Lenny!” Mesabi shouted, while Arnie turned up the volume on the wall-mounted set.

Lenny’s broad, bovine face, brown eyes darting around like flies caught in a windowless room, was sweating slightly as he said on camera, “Well, there had been some bleeding from head wounds, which made us think it was a homicide, but after the wounds was cleaned off, we found that they were—”

“We, huh? Since when did you become a pathologist—”

“Shaddup, Nemmitz!”

“—scratches, probably from a bobcat or fox, both of which we got up this way—”

“My God, Lenny, what a marvelous pitch for the hunting season. Chamber of Commerce should put you on salary,” Winston reflected dryly, as Lenny’s over-amplified voice droned on, “—but Doc Calder, he found evidence of a heart attack, even though Miz Hibbing wasn’t too old—”

“That’s your opinion, Len,” Arnie said, as he leaned against the counter drying an old-fashioned glass. “That hussy’s been coming in here since, oh, 1965 or 1966, and she didn’t need no ID card then.”

“—so we’re considerin’ the case closed, although we still don’t know how she came to be in the woods, or who it was who called the police—”

“That was Dean County Coroner Leonard Wilkes. And in weather—”

Arnie switched the TV to MTV—David Lee Roth hover­ing in midair with a microphone stand in his hand. Over at the table, Mesabi said, “You was sweating, Lenny. You looked better when Dead Fred Ferger kicked off. That time you had on a better shirt, too. Don’t you know, you ain’t ’sposed to wear green on TV? Makes you look like a fish.”

“Or a corpse. Len, was old Inez really bloodied up good?” Nemmitz sounded as if he hoped the corpse was mangled. Flushed with stardom, Lenny regally took a sip of Bud before saying, “Not all that bad. But she was scratched up in the agonal stage—that’s when she was alive, but dyin’—and you know how head wounds are.”

“Seen enough of them in ’Nam,” Wayne said sagely, and the others all nodded, even though none of them had ever seen actual combat.

“Well, even though it wasn’t bad, I still didn’t ever see nothing like it. She was just sittin’ there, head all raked up, and palms, too. Like she was pushin’ off something fanged but gave up mighty quick. On ’count of her heart gave out, I ’spose.”

“Could she have been startled by an animal, and that brought on the heart attack?” Winston slurped down the rest of his squaw piss, then dropped his cigarette butt into the can. A line of smoke rose out of the can, as if the squaw pictured there had taken up the peace pipe, then was quenched.

“’Spose so. Doc Calder said she was on a toot. Enough alcohol in her blood to douse a bakery full of fruitcake. Old man threw her out, y’know.”

“We knew, we knew. Only question was why Norm was dumb enough to marry her in the first place,” Wayne reflected around a mouthful of chips.

“Nother question’s who called in about the body. Bib Stanley’s goin’ nuts tryin’ to figger that one out. At first, he thought whoever called it in done it,” Lenny said.

“What was it, some guy? Inez was with half the town, at the least. Only ones I know she hadn’t fucked for sure are you, Wayne, me, and old Arnie back there,”

“And what about me?” Winston pretended to be indignant, yet winked at Anna, who stared down at her tiny melted ice cubes.

“Oh, you. I think there’s some kindergarten kid over in Lumbe that you haven’t diddled—isn’t that right, kiddo? You had him in school.”

Anna looked up at Mr. Nemmitz. His green eyes were friendly, so she answered, “Mr. Winston knew better than to tangle with me. I would’ve sicced Grandma on him.” Calling the old lady Grandma gave Anna a funny taste in her mouth, as if she had just chomped down on a piece of bread and butter covered with cigarette ashes.

“That grandmother of yours—I haven’t seen her around lately. Is she well?” Suddenly, the mood at the men’s table shifted. When old man Nemmitz turned solicitous, Anna knew she had to get her guard up.

“Oh, she’s okay. Hasn’t been out of the house in years, but otherwise, she’s doing fine. Ma’s been taking care of her, so—”

“You heard from your mother yet? My Bitsy, she says she talked to her before she caught the bus for Eau Claire this morning. Out by the courthouse,” Nemmitz added, as if Anna didn’t know where the weekly bus downstate parked each week. Anna swallowed down the watery rum and Coke at the bottom of her glass before answering.

“Yeah, she got down there okay. She called before I left the house. She’s okay.”

The other men were silent for a few seconds; even Mesabi quit his open-mouthed chewing. Anna sensed that they were waiting for her to say something, give a reason why Ma left town. No doubt they knew she hadn’t gone in to the FmHA, too. Lenny’s daughter-in-law, Heather Wilkes, used to work there, before she got knocked up again. And Heather “worshiped the great phone god,” (as Lenny himself had said many a time) as did her former co-workers.... Finally:

“I really hate to run, but I have to get up early tomorrow. It was nice talking to you.”

“Any time, kiddo. Just pull up a chair next time you’re in. I promise, I won’t put out my smokes in your drink.” Mr. Winston winked at her, and Anna felt like she’d just drunk down a glass of warm grease. Even though she was one of the few female EHS students who’d never done whatever it was the other girls used to do with him to get better grades in English, Anna felt a flush of guilt and shame just being around him. Bad enough she felt dirty over what her great-grandfather had done fifty-odd (or was it fifty-even?) years ago.

As she began to push open the door, Lenny yelled behind her, “Anna, you want I should give you a lift home? It’s on my way.”

Anna stood there, shoulder braced against the door, mulling it over. She needed to walk, to clear her head, but still, if there was something out there that caused that old bleach­-blonde barfly Inez to croak from fear—“Okay, as long as it’s not out of your way.” Lenny was safe—a big teddy bear of a guy with penny loafers and shirts that never stayed tucked in his pants. Anna doubted that he and Millie ever got it on much; Lenny seemed almost neuter, like a deballed bull. And he even blushed when Mr. Winston got raunchy. In Ewerton, that alone was proof that a guy was safe.

* * * *

“Here’s my house,” Anna said, as Lenny’s ten-year-old Dodge passed her next door neighbor’s house. It was the first thing she’d said since getting into the car with Lenny back at the Hinge. From the way he’d been trying to make small talk all the way from Sixth Avenue East to her house over half a mile away. Anna guessed that he’d found out that Ma hadn’t shown up for work, but little else that wasn’t already known. And that was the way Anna intended to keep it.

Lenny played the real gentleman, stopping the car and getting out to open her door. Anna was glad that the neighbors were out, no doubt whooping it up in some bar at the city. Yahoos like the Downings and the Effertzes tended to hang out where it was okay to bay like rabid dogs and throw ice at the bartender, the better to come home honking and burning rubber come midnight.

And Lenny didn’t pull away until after she had the key in the lock and pushed the door open. And even then, as she closed the door, she could hear his car pull very slowly away, accelerating until it reached the corner. Lenny was a buffoon, and a mediocre coroner, but he was okay.

For a long time after she locked the door, Anna stood there in the living room, staring at the house she’d inherited. Part of her mind was calmly ticking off her added responsibilities—no problem with the FmHA check, they’ve accepted them with my signature when she’s been too angry with me to sign them, and they’ll take cash for the rest of the bills, and I suppose I can take on more jobs through the service—), even as the little girl in her raged, Why in hell did you pick up and leave? Do you really think it’ll be any better somewhere else? You’ll always be you, with the same emotional baggage as before...and you’ll see—the old lady will find out where you are, and call you with some imagined complaint.

“Oh, fuck,” Anna said as she stared at the roomful of castoffs, found wall schlock, and cat-chewed houseplants that didn’t reflect either her own or her mother’s tastes—a sort of hell’s waiting room she’d been forced to spend her time in for lack of any other place to go. “Now I have to take care of the old lady.”

She wondered if the old lady had tried to call her when she was out at the bar. The old lady only used her phone to make outgoing calls. If Anna or Ma wanted to call her, they had to use a complicated code of one ring, disconnect, then two rings, then one after another disconnect, and then wait for the old lady to call them. All because the old lady claimed that people were calling her and not saying anything when she answered the phone. And considering the delegation of less-than­-neighborly neighbors who had spoken to Ma over twenty years ago, there was a good possibility that the old lady’s claims were true—even if she wouldn’t let the phone company install a tracer on the line.

Guilt nibbled on the sense of grief Anna was just beginning to feel over Ma’s leaving her. Letting a stream of air out past her upcurled bottom lip, until her bangs flew away from her eyes in a puff of light brown, she dialed the old lady’s number and began the signaling sequence. Afterward, she sat on the edge of the old trunk next to the phone stand and adjusted the shade of the black metal and gold glass lamp that sat on the black trunk, along with a nearly denuded avocado plant and one of the cat baskets.

It was no use waiting, hand on the receiver, since the old lady always took her sweet time calling back. Claimed she couldn’t get up too fast out of her rocker, that she became dizzy, or worse, or so Ma said. Anna had tried to argue that the old lady was only in her sixties (sixty-three in late December, as a matter of fact), and nowadays, that wasn’t old in the least.

(“For Chrissakes, Ma, Fred Astaire was still hoofing in his late sixties, and he looked pretty damn good before he died in his eighties—”

(“The old lady don’t like him.”

(“So?”

(“So she don’t care how fit Fred Astaire was when he died. He had things a lot easier than she did—”

(“Oh come off it. You know she was well-taken care of after...after you know. Her aunts took good care of her—”

(“How the hell do you know?”

(“All right, did they make her work? Sell papers, matches? It was the Depression, and she had a house to live in and food to eat. And clothes on her back, I’ve seen those dresses of hers—”

(“The ones you ruined on her?”

(“‘Ruined,’ my ass. It was her fault she made me try them on when she knew I was fatter than she was as a kid—”

(“That’s right, you were a goddamn fat moose of a—”) The ringing phone snapped Anna out of her bad memories; reaching over, she picked up the beige receiver and said, “Hello?”

“You rang?” Ma had been right about one thing. For a woman of only sixty-two, the old lady did sound like an octogenarian, or older. What Anna especially hated was that quavery, phlegm-sliding-down-stucco quality in the old woman’s voice, and that false, coquettish lilt on the word rang. Leaning against the lamp shade, until the room’s shadows were all off-kilter, Anna said, “Ma’s gone. I heard she’s down in Eau Claire. She took the bus. Has she tried to call you?”

“So Mother took off. Are you all right there? You can sleep in my house,” she said in that quivering singsong that Anna had hated for years, ever since the old lady’s voice went bad back in the late seventies.

“No...no. I have the cats to look after. Unless you want me to bring—”

“Oh, no. Ma told me about that big kitty of yours—”

“We have two big cats.” Anna felt herself getting ready to snap. She wished Mouth would wake up and start caterwauling—anything to drown out the old lady’s gravel-in­-grease gurgle.

“I know that,” the old lady said with an explosive hiss. I’m talking about that big kitty—the mean one.”

“Brupie? He’s a sweetie. Big softie of a—”

“That’s not what Ma says,” the old woman warbled, like a knowing child kicking up sand as she pumped herself higher, higher on a playground swing. For a second, Anna pitied the two maiden aunts who had come up from downstate to look after her grandmother in 1931, after great-grandpa had gone berserk.

“Your Ma says that Bruiser is a vicious animal.”

“Because he nipped at her when she touched his frostbit ­toes. You’d nip too if you were in his paws.”

Wheezing laughter drifted out of the receiver’s tiny holes. Stunned, Anna thought, Hey, old bat, your daughter’s just off, and you’re laughing? as the old lady went on, “How would I fit them on?” followed by more of that hissing mirth.

Rum and cola bile hung at the back of Anna’s throat as she snapped. “How would you fit into what?” Her grandmother could be worse than a six-year-old who had just discovered knock-knock jokes.

“His paws! I have bigger feet, you know,” she added, as if Anna were too dense to understand her.

Anna’s head hurt. For a second, she felt pure empathy for her mother; sometimes Ma stayed with the old lady for hours on end. It was almost enough to let Anna forgive Ma for all the names she’d called her over the years.

Almost.

“—see the news on Channel Eighteen?”

“What?”

“The news about that Inez bitch—the one who fired—”

“Oh, that. Yeah. I saw it.”

“On Channel Eighteen?”

“No. Thirteen. In the bar—the Rusty Hinge,” she added defiantly.

“Oh. Looking for a fella in there? Your Ma, she used to—”

“No, I went because of my jack—Listen, it’s getting late. I need to get up early, okay? I’ll talk to you later.”

“No, you’ll see me later.”

Ye gods, she’s right. Tuesday is the day Mom picks up her bills and stuff. Oh, shit. And I didn’t want to see her again until she was on a stand in the Reish-Byrne Funeral Home. Damn.

“Yeah, well, okay. I’ll be around sometime tomorrow. ’Bye.”

“Bye-bye,” the old lady hissed triumphantly as Anna let the receiver drop to the cradle with a brittle clack.

Leaning against the lamp until the shade began to buckle, Anna looked around her, and thought, Those jerks in New York don’t even know the meaning of Black Monday, and began to cry open-faced, her hands resting palm up on her thighs—in almost exactly the same position Inez Hibbing had been found that morning.

SEVEN—Inez

Across town, the body of the former Inez Hibbing, until recently wife of Norm Hibbing (who really should have known better than to marry the town mattress), of the Wisconsin Street novelty and used clothing store, was zipped naked into a black body bag lying on the floor of the Reish-Byrne Funeral Home. Such casual placement of her body was not accidental—not after Craig Reish had caught her back in 1978, in the process of trying to get his retarded Uncle Cooper tanked up, prior to attempting to roll the hapless man for the loose change he happened to be carrying in his fatigue jacket pocket.

Craig Reish had never forgiven the bleached-blonde, roach-faced woman of indeterminate race (some in town said Indian, others were sure she was Mexican, while still others, namely Bitsy Nemmitz and Pearl Vincent, swore that the woman was what they called a light “Nag-ro”), nor was he planning to do much of a reconstruction job on her come morning. He wasn’t going to let his wife Susie affix false white-blonde hair (from the assortment of many-hued hanks she kept in an old tackle box) to cover the wide-shaved swath that resembled a reverse Mohawk on the dead woman’s scalp, nor was he planning to use makeup, wax, or Hydrol tissue builder to fill in the long ragged claw marks that grooved her faintly black-stubbled dark scalp.

And Susie wasn’t going to put any fresh nail polish on those cat claws of Inez’s, either—not a single drop from the dozens of half-empty bottles she kept close to his embalming supplies.

Considering what Inez had done to Uncle Cooper (when­ever someone treated the heavy-set gentleman badly, he became “Uncle Cooper”; otherwise, he was better known around town as “The Happy Wanderer,” or, in the Reish household, as “Your nutty uncle”), the dead woman was lucky to be getting embalmed at all, let alone buried at county expense, or so Craig Reish had decided upon viewing the now naked remains of Mrs. Hibbing when Lenny brought them over that after­noon.

He’d grunted over the carelessly black-sutured chest as Lenny explained about her heart attack, thinking, Heart attack, fart attack. I only hope you suffered, cunt, before assuring Lenny that he’d do everything possible for the deceased, before her ex-husband came back from his out-of-town trip the next afternoon.

Watery brown eyes anxious, Lenny had said, “You’ll make her look nice, won’tcha, Craig? Her landlady sent over these clothes. Norm, he’s a jerk, but really a nice guy. You’ll do her up right, won’t you?”

Craig was upstairs at that very moment, tossing under the covers in gleeful delight over the prospect of seeing Norm Hibbing’s farsighted blue eyes goggle out when Craig lifted the lid and exposed the neo-Punk corpse within, as he officiously explained that there was nothing else he could do on such short notice.

And since Craig was so bent on revenge, and since old Doc Calder wasn’t the most observant family practitioner-cum-makeshift pathologist in Dean County (let alone Wisconsin), neither man—to both of whom the dead were nothing new, or exotic, or above all, frightening—had taken all that good of a look at the sets of long scratches on Inez Hibbing’s shorn scalp. For while the scratches were mostly close set, and in obvious paw arrangement, there were a few scratches here and there that were wider set, with ample space between the separate ragged wounds.

Spaces roughly the width between human fingers, and fingernails.

EIGHT—Dream Time

“Don’t wanna have my picture taken.... I wanna open my presents!” little Anna cried. Mommy tried to hush her, but Gramma was listening, as she pretended to sleep under the big blue quilt, and before Mommy could grab Anna away from by the bed, Gramma’s hand snaked out from under the covers, nails curved in a horny yellowish line, and before Anna knew what had happened, Gramma’s claw-hand had raked her left cheek. Gramma hissed, “Woke me up, you little mutt.”

And little Anna felt blood welling in the four jagged furrows on her cheek, and on her earlobe, where Gramma’s horny thumb had caught the tender nub of dangling flesh. Anna screamed, “No, Gramma, no!” but Gramma reached up and did it again, and every time the nails raked Anna’s cheek they felt like real claws, and Mommy didn’t do anything, but stare while Gramma hissed from under the covers, “Woke me up, woke me up.”

Mommy put makeup over little Anna’s cheek once the blood was all gone, but the makeup felt all funny—not like the powder in the round compact at all. It was waxy, and smelled like something stale and dead, like when Great-Aunt Joan was in that box and old Mr. Byrne lifted her up to see the husk of a woman, and little Anna had to smile while she opened the gifts under the tree, for if she didn’t smile Gramma was gonna be mad, and do the flapping thing that even scared Mommy so bad she’d never admit it had ever happened, after it did, but little Anna wanted to cry, not smile, so suddenly Gramma came at her, all brown and wrinkled and fuzzy and flapping.

The flapping noise in Anna’s bedroom was real. The snicking echoes filled her head when she woke up from her nightmare of Christmas of 1962—the time when the old lady had clawed up Anna’s cheeks.

Real flapping, in this room, she thought, pulling her sheet closer to her chin. She felt the weight of the cats on her legs, but she was afraid to open her eyes—fraid of what she might half see against the dark ceiling and walls. She knew there were bats in the sealed-off attic and between the walls of the house; often the cats would sit for hours, listening to the walls. Somehow, one of those filthy things had knocked aside the ceiling tiles and squeezed through.

There was no more flapping, not even the echo of a sound. Her cheek still carried the ache of the scratches and the makeup burning the sore furrows (weird, that I dreamed of mortician’s wax. Ma put Max Factor on my cheeks. You can see how dark they were in the pictures), and her eyes were actually tearing. Easing a hand out from under the covers, Anna rubbed her still-closed eyes, as she became aware that Bruiser was resting with his body crosswise to her, his bottom up against her right leg, his head facing the window.

The window—that was it. Opening her moist eyes, Anna saw a faint patch of lightness against the dark wall. Bruiser had pulled his old trick again, pawing at her drawn shade until he created enough tension to raise it himself. Often, he was able to raise it only a foot or so, but occasionally, he could make it go all the way up to the top.

She hadn’t taught him to do that; somehow, probably through feline observation and with the help of better than average cat smarts, Bruiser had figured out how to raise the light-filtering shade on his own.

His trick had actually scared Ma; inexplicably, she found it utterly terrifying to think that a mere animal had the brains to perform a “human” task. It was around that time, in fact, that Ma claimed she hated the muscular black animal.

“Whatcha see, huh, Brupie? Bunnies out there? Another cat?” Bruiser turned his massive head her way for a second, then resumed looking out the window. He’d butted the filmy curtain aside, and was staring intently at something in the backyard, following its movements with his broad, small-eared head. Tiny burbling sounds escaped his throat as he tensed up, butt wiggling against Anna’s leg.

Curious, she leaned forward at the waist and put her hand on Bruiser’s smooth back, asking softly, “What is it? The neighbors? What do you see?” as if she fully expected the cat to supply her with a rational answer.

Her own night vision wasn’t the best; unlike her mother, Anna needed at least a few street lamps, or even full moon­light, to see reasonably well in the dark, and thus she kept a small but fairly powerful flashlight under her pillow, just in case the cats started acting up. Usually, all she had to do was train the light on them and they’d quiet down. Staring into her dark, tree- and shrub-filled backyard was almost totally useless without the flashlight, since all she could initially make out was the faint sheen of moonlight on frosty ground, and bulking shapes of foliage—until she aimed the flashlight into the yard, and saw what had captured Bruiser’s attention.

Something dark and small—quite small, in fact—was moving fluidly across the yard on a northwest diagonal. Against the faint paleness of the frosty grass and leaves, all Anna could make out was a vague sense of thin legs crisscross­ing, below a body that refused to come into focus. But her flashlight’s beam captured one detail—an all-too-brief glimmer of color against the surrounding maw of blackness that comprised the creature’s head.

A reflected glow of green-brown, roundish and fast­-moving, as if the head had turned in her direction, then turned away again—a blink-and-you-miss-it movement that had lasted just long enough for her to register one disquieting, irrational fact.

She had seen the glow of three eyes on that formless head. And for no good reason, she remembered what Lenny Wilkes others had said in the Rusty Hinge about that Inez shrew being clawed by an animal, perhaps being frightened into a heart attack by some strange beast.

If three eyes aren’t strange, I don’t know what is. And the way Inez was always snockered, she could have imagined it was the devil himself come to bring her home to Papa.

Anna knew she was safe as long as she stayed in bed, with the comforting warmth and weight of the cats on her legs, but she still felt vulnerable, violated—there was a whatever roaming her yard, and there was always the possibility that it would come right up to the window and peer in at her.

As if intuiting her fears, Bruiser began to growl, a low rumble deep in his chest that woke Mouth up. Soon the window was crowded with cats, blotting out the view through the bottom fifth of the window—but not enough that Anna couldn’t see the dark shape pause, turn her way again, and quite obviously hiss, the dim moonlight glinting off the incisors within the ill-defined mouth.

And in that instant, Anna saw where the third “eye” was. It wasn’t in line with the real eyes, but situated lower down, close to the mouth. It was a tag, a damned rabies tag, twin to the ones Anna had for both of her cats—a green cut-out bell shape with a hole poked in the top. But the tags were over an inch in diameter, and quite wide at the bottom, while this spot of green luminescence was small—only slightly bigger than a cat’s real eye.

Reflexively, Anna got up on her knees and reached up to pull down her shade, telling herself, It’s an address tag, like they sell at the vet’s office. Some of those are tiny little circles of metal or plastic. No, don’t think plastic, it doesn’t reflect like that.

The shade safely in place, Anna flopped back down on the bed and pulled her covers over her, not even daring to poke her head out again when Bruiser began to paw at the shade frantically.

In the morning, she thought, I’ll go back there and see what kind of tracks the thing left, even as she prayed that it would turn warm overnight and thaw the delicate frost on the soil.

NINE—Arlene (2)

Much like her fellow Dumpster diver Anna Sudek, Arlene Campbell was asleep, dreaming, as her cats crowded around her bedroom window, peering out through the drawn chintz curtains at the strange wandering beast scampering on the lawn below. Hers too was a worried sleep, with awful dreams; a dripping Inez Hibbing, dirty-nailed fingers clutching long tufts of her shorn-at-the-scalp brittle hair, was waiting on Arlene in the store her ex-husband owned, even though Arlene told the woman she’d much rather have Norm handle the ringing up of her purchases.

But Inez was nonplused. Using her bloody, hair-wound fingers, she punched up the numbers on the till, as the dying fluorescent light above made the bare swath of scalp between the bloody, tangled lengths of blonde hair over her ears and neck gleam in the dingy, musty store.

And even when that Sudek girl, Anna, came in from the back room where she’d been stocking new merchandise, Inez wouldn’t let her ring up Arlene’s order, even though she begged the walking corpse to let Anna handle it.

“Don’t you know? I’m going to fire her,” Inez’s corpse said, without moving its clawed lips. “I don’t want no murderer’s relative working in my store,” and then the display window crashed in a shimmer of ice chips and clear confetti, bringing with it a small, dark-furred thing with widespread claws and three glowing, baleful eyes.

And just as Arlene passed from the nightmare into wakefulness, she noticed that the outstretched paws of the sleek dark thing were covered with what looked like pressed face powder.

Snorting, pawing at her face with trembling hands, Arlene sat up in bed, mumbling, “No...oh, please, no,” for as the hyper-colored dream images left her mind, one last detail filtered into her consciousness—the face of the blackish beast.

It was fur-covered, and chinless in the way of small beasts, but it was not the face of an animal—oh, no, not at all. Like a small child wearing a cat mask, the eyes of knowledge, of calculated intent, shone through the painted gauze over the eyeholes.

And as she covered her mouth with shaking hands, Arlene Campbell remembered exactly which face she’d just seen all fur-skinned and fangs out in the nightmare novelty shop—a face well-known to little Arlene Weiss and her playmates, from over fifty years ago.

Worse than the dream, and worse than the remembering, was the knowledge that the owner of that pinched, crafty child’s face was still alive.

It was then Arlene noticed that all her cats were crowded in the window, watching the yard. Being much older than Anna Sudek, it wasn’t so easy for her to bend at the waist to get a good look out the window as she sat in the bed; she had to get up and shuffle around the footboard to look out the window. Past Silky’s huge ears, and Puff and Fluff’s round Persian heads, she saw a dark shape gliding across the lawn, leaving definite dark impressions in the crunchy white grass.

If her Don had still been alive, he would have charged out the door, shotgun in hand, ready to blow off the beast’s nebulous head, and never mind the law against shooting inside city limits. He was Don Campbell, scourge of the city works crew, master of the snowplow and the street sweeper, king of the pickup trucks, wasn’t he?

And while Arlene had never shared her husband’s temper, she did have a healthy sense of curiosity, that same sense of needing to know that had led her to find the body that morning, and later to phone in that hankie-muffled report of the incident, because she simply had to know what had happened (not that she bought that heart attack story—Clive Calder couldn’t tell an anus from an aorta).

In the darkness, she felt for her clothes and put them on, easing her shoes over her bare feet before she hurried downstairs and outside, flashlight in hand. Sure enough, something dark and darting was in the yard. Arlene saw it, and it saw her—with all three of its eyes.

“Shoo!” she warbled, clapping her free hand against her thigh. The beast took off on an angle to the north, skidding across the frost-slippery grass. Not bothering to see where it went, Arlene shone her flashlight at the creature’s tracks across her lawn. They were cat prints, or maybe skunk. Only, not exactly right, either, for the gait was all wrong, as if it had been trying to walk en pointe on its paws, in a vaguely human, pattern not quite like that of a cat or a skunk.

And farther away from her, on her neighbor’s lawn, actually, the print became different—almost dog-size. When she saw the odd prints (That can’t be. Things get smaller when they’re farther away—don’t they?), Arlene thumbed off her light and hurried back into her house, knees protesting all the way, and slammed the door behind her with a shotgun-loud report of aged wood hitting aged wood. But if Arlene had decided to follow the strange tracks leading away from her house, she would have been very puzzled to see that they changed once more—for one step, to the scrabbly claw of a bird, and then there was nothing at all to mar the white-rimed grass below.