“Duncan. Hel o. Are you hungry? Take a seat. We're stil on the macaroni and cheese" Jim made the mistake of resting his hand on the boy's shoulder. Duncan shook it off with disdain. Arlene whispered, "Cooties" in Samantha's ear. Sam had to bite her lip to keep from laughing. Duncan had looked childish.
Duncan Cowley inhabited that curious limbo between childhood and adulthood, cal ed, depending on the speaker, "the best years of your life,”
“the process of self-actualization," or "teen hel ." To stake out his own particular territory in this strange land, Duncan had chosen to dress al in black. Today he wore a Metal ica concert T-shirt under an unbuttoned black denim shirt, black jeans, and black high-top L.A. Lites, untied and without socks. A black leather bracelet complete with lethal metal spikes completed the ensemble.
“His parents should make him smel his shoes for punishment," Samantha said, adding, "I thought only elementary school kids wore those shoes that light up.
You're right. What a loser.”
Without a word to his stepfather, Duncan made his way to the kitchen, his shoes indeed flashing tiny red spots of light as he walked. The girls turned to the wal . It was the kind of thing that could send them into uncontrol able fits of the giggles.
“And he stinks, too! What is that smel ?" Samantha gasped.
“Musk and B.O."
“Poor Valerie." Samantha was in total sympathy with his mother, something that would have astonished some of her Aleford friends. But then, she wasn't in Aleford, and besides, Valerie wasn't like a regular parent.
At dinner that night, Samantha couldn't stop talking about the Athertons. She and her mother had taken big bowls of chili down to the deck by their own boathouse. Life with Samantha was turning out to be very relaxed, Pix thought as she reached for a tortil a chip straight from the bag. She hadn't even bothered with a bowl and she pushed thoughts of what Mother—and Faith—would say far from her mind. Instead, she concentrated on a cold Dos Equis—
Faith would at least approve of the beer—and on what Samantha was saying. Obviously, the girl was in love.
Had Pix's own besotted crush on their neighbor, Priscil a Graham, been as boring, and even slightly irritating to Ursula? Pix sighed. If she was going to have to listen to paens to Valerie every night, she'd better lay in some more booze. What made it worse was that Valerie was a pretty fascinating creature and Pix liked her. She also knew, though, that in terms of types of women, she, Pix, was somewhere in Julia Ward Howedom, while Valerie inhabited the realms of Carole Lombard and Claudette Colbert, women who could and did wear satin.
“You have got to see him, Mom. He wears an earring, but not one like normal people—it's a notebook ring. I don't even want to think about how he got it through!”
It was an unappetizing thought, Pix agreed. Her mind swerved to the current fashion that bestowed normalcy on male earrings and she laughed aloud. She liked the freedom today's kids had to dress the way they did, although she stil wished Samantha would cut her hair. In Pix's day, the most outré thing one dared do was wear one's Pandora cardigan buttoned up the back instead of the front.
“What are you laughing at?"
“Nothing in particular. I was just thinking about how differently teenagers dress now compared with when I was growing up."
“Your kilts and kneesocks? Your Weejuns? Your circle pin?" Samantha teased her.
“Someone told me circle pins were coming back. I always used to get so confused about which side to wear it on that I never wore mine much—one side meant you were ànice' girl and one meant the opposite. The middle meant something, too, but I can't remember what.”
Now Samantha laughed. "Where would you have put it?"
“None of your business." Pix was not the type of parent who believed in revealing al to her children, especial y before they had passed through the particular stage.
“Do you real y think Duncan put the dead mice on the counter?" Pix was ready to move on to another topic. This had been the first thing Samantha had blurted out to her mother when Pix picked her up. Pix knew there could be no possible connection with Mitchel Pierce's murder, but it was another unsettling event in a place usual y devoid of such things.
“I don't know. It's no secret he hates Jim, hates the camp, maybe even hates his mother for bringing him here.
Arlene says he only has a couple of loser friends, mostly younger kids who are together not because they particularly want to be, but because nobody else likes them. They al wear a lot of black and listen to mope rock, that kind of stuff."
“Mope rock?" This was a new one, but Pix had grown to expect unrelenting novelty after raising one adolescent.
The temps and mores changed at roughly the speed of light.
“Yeah, The Cure, New Order. I mean, I like them sometimes, except it gets a little much—tormented souls, desperate love. It's depressing."
“I think these were the kids who used to write poetry and try to get their parents to let them take the train down to Greenwich Vil age in an earlier day."
“Beatniks! I read about them in my American history book.”
Sometimes children could make you feel very, very old with merely a few wel -chosen words.
“I've read about them, too," Pix countered. She picked up her empty bowl and glass—she had taken the trouble to pour the beer from the bottle—and stood up. It was stil light and she hated to go indoors, but she told Samantha, "I real y have to cal Faith. The kids should be asleep by now"
“I can't wait until they come. I miss seeing Ben and Amy. By August, they're going to be al different. Amy probably won't even remember me." Samantha had gone straight from passionate involvement with horses to smal children, and now, it appeared, to soignée thirty something women, as wel .
“I'm sure the Fairchilds can't wait to see you, either,"
Pix assured her, silently adding, Especial y Faith.
“So what's going on? No more bodies I trust." Faith felt she could be flippant. If another corpse had turned up, in their wel , say, surely Pix would have cal ed her at once.
Besides, she knew every nuance of her friend's speech.
From the moment Pix had said hel o on Sunday, Faith had known something was disastrously wrong on Sanpere.
Tonight's greeting had been cheerful, everyday Pix.
“No, not human ones, anyway." Pix hadn't intended to start the conversation by tel ing Faith about the mice, but here it was.
Faith's reaction was similar to Pix's. "It seems unlikely that the two events have anything to do with each other, except proximity in time, and the use of knives. But why three mice? Were they blind?"
“I imagine they weren't taking in any movies," Pix said.
"I've tried to think of a connection with the rhyme, but Valerie Atherton isn't a farmer's wife, nor are you, and there aren't any other wives involved."
“That we know of," Faith reminded her.
“That we know of. Besides, if it was meant to il ustrate the nursery rhyme, their tails, not their heads, would have been cut off."
“Maybe the person has a bad memory and thought it was `cut off their heads with a carving knife.' “
This actual y made sense. Pix often misremembered childhood ditties, much to her mother's dismay. Her mother was supposed to be in the time of life when one's gray matter retreated into the shadows. Ursula's was a veritable Costa del Sol.
“What kind of mice were they?" Faith asked.
“Common field mice, I suppose. They're al over the island, you know.”
Faith did not know and wasn't sure she was grateful for this new information.
“Not white mice, the kind kids keep as pets?”
“Samantha didn't say, but I don't think they were; otherwise, she would have mentioned it."