Lately she had taken to sleeping with her aunt’s loaded pistol on the pillow beside her head.
Cissy crawled into bed just before midnight, tired from hours of accounting. She had been out to the barn to check on her giggling girls and the blind calf. She had talked to her husband when he called from Oklahoma City. Now she was thinking about how she would try to start easing Janie Baum out of their lives.
“I’m sorry, Janie, but I’m awfully busy today. I don’t think you ought to come over…”
Oh, but there would be that meek, martyred little voice, just like a baby mouse needing somebody to mother it. How would she deny that need? She was already feeling guilty about refusing Janie’s request to sleep over.
“Well, I will. I just will do it, that’s all. If I could say no to the FHA girls when they were selling fruitcakes, I can start saying no more often to Janie Baum. Anyway, she’s never going to get over her fears if I indulge them.”
Bob had said as much when she’d complained to him long-distance. “Cissy, you’re not helping her,” he’d said. “You’re just letting her get worse.” And then he’d said something new that had disturbed her. “Anyway, I don’t like the girls being around her so much. She’s getting too weird, Cissy.”
She thought of her daughters — of fearless Tess and dear little Mandy — and of how safe and nice it was for children in the country…
“Besides,” Bob had said, “she’s got to do more of her own chores.
We need Tess and Mandy to help out around our place more; we can’t be having them always running off to mow her grass and plant her flowers and feed her cows and water her horse and get her eggs, just because she’s scared to stick her silly hand under a damned hen…”
Counting the chores put Cissy to sleep.
“Tess!” Mandy hissed desperately. “Wait!”
The older girl slowed, to give Mandy time to catch up to her, and then to touch Tess for reassurance. They paused for a moment to catch their breath and to crouch in the shadow of Jane Baum’s porch.
Tess carried three rolls of toilet paper in a makeshift pouch she’d formed in the belly of her black sweatshirt. (“We gotta wear black, remember!”) and Mandy was similarly equipped. Tess decided that now was the right moment to drop her bomb.
“I’ve been thinking,” she whispered.
Mandy was struck cold to her heart by that familiar and dreaded phrase. She moaned quietly. “What?”
“It might rain.”
“I told you!”
“So I think we better do it inside.”
“Inside?”
“Shh! It’ll scare her to death, it’ll be great! Nobody else’ll ever have the guts to do anything as neat as this! We’ll do the kitchen, and if we have time, maybe the dining room.”
“Ohhh, noooo.”
“She thinks she’s got all the doors and windows locked, but she doesn’t!” Tess giggled. She had it all figured out that when Jane Baum came downstairs in the morning, she’d take one look, scream, faint, and then, when she woke up, call everybody in town. The fact that Jane might also call the sheriff had occurred to her, but since Tess didn’t have any faith in the ability of adults to figure out anything important, she wasn’t worried about getting caught. “When I took in her eggs, I unlocked the down-stairs bathroom window Come on! This’ll be great!”
The ribbon of darkness ahead of Mel Brown was no longer straight.
It was now bunched into long, steep hills. He hadn’t expected hills.
Nobody had told him there was any part of Kansas that wasn’t flat.
So he wasn’t making as good time, and the couldn’t run full-bore.
But then, he wasn’t in a hurry, except for the hell of it. And this was more interesting, more dangerous, and he liked the thrill of that. He started edging closer to the centerline every time he roared up a hill, playing a game of highway roulette in which he was the winner as long as what-ever coming from the other direction had its headlights on.
When that got boring, he turned his own headlights off.
Now he roared past cars and trucks like a dark demon.
Mel laughed every time, thinking how surprised they must be, and how frightened. They’d think, Crazy fool, I could have hit him…
He supposed he wasn’t afraid of anything, except maybe going back to prison, and he didn’t think they’d send him down on a speeding ticket. Besides, if Kansas was like most states, it was long on roads and short on highway patrolmen…
Roaring downhill was even more fun, because of the way his stomach dropped out. He felt like a kid, yelling “Fuuuuck,” all the way down the other side. What a goddamned roller coaster of a state this was turning out to be.
The rain still looked miles away.
Mel felt as if he could ride all night. Except that his eyes were gritty, the first sign that he’d better start looking for a likely place to spend the night. He wasn’t one to sleep under the stars, not if he could find a ceiling.
Tess directed her sister to stack the rolls of toilet paper underneath the bathroom window on the first floor of Jane Baum’s house. The six rolls, all white, stacked three in a row, two high, gave Tess the little bit of height and leverage she needed to push up the glass with her palms. She stuck her fingers under the bottom edge and laboriously attempted to raise the window. It was stiff in its coats of paint.
“Damn!” she exclaimed, and let her arms slump. Beneath her feet, the toilet paper was getting squashed.
She tried again, and this time she showed her strength from lifting calves and tossing hay. With a crack of paint and a thump of wood on wood, the window slid all the way up.
“Shhh!” Mandy held her fists in front of her face and knocked her knuckles against each other in excitement and agitation. Her ears picked up the sound of a roaring engine on the highway, and she was immediately sure it was the sheriff, coming to arrest her and Tess. She tugged frantically at the calf of her sister’s right leg.
Tess jerked her leg out of Mandy’s grasp and disappeared through the open window.
The crack of the window and the thunder of the approaching motorcycle confused themselves in Jane’s sleeping consciousness, so that when she awoke from dreams full of anxiety — her eyes flying open, the rest of her body frozen — she imagined in a confused, hallucinat-ory kind of way that somebody was both coming to get her and already there in the house.
Jane then did as she had trained herself to do. She had practiced over and over every night, so that her actions would be instinctive.
She turned her face to the pistol on the other pillow and placed her thumb on the trigger.
Her fear — of rape, of torture, of kidnapping, of agony, of death — was a balloon, and she floated horribly in the center of it.
There were thumps and other sounds downstairs, and they joined her in the balloon. There was an engine roaring, and then suddenly it was silent, and a slurring of wheels in her gravel drive, and these sounds joined her in her balloon. When she couldn’t bear it any longer, she popped the balloon by shooting herself in the forehead.
In the driveway, Mel Brown heard the gun go off.
He slung his leg back onto his motorcycle and roared back out onto the highway. So the place had looked empty. So he’d been wrong. So he’d find someplace else. But holy shit. Get the fuck outta here.
Inside the house, in the bathroom, Tess also heard the shot and, being a ranch child, recognized it instantly for what it was, although she wasn’t exactly sure where it had come from. Cussing and sobbing, she clambered over the sink and back out the window, falling onto her head and shoulders on the rolls of toilet paper.