She shook her head.
“All I can do, Mrs. Ferrier, is perform an autopsy,” he shrugged. “If you care to go to that expense.”
“Yes,” she said. “I’d like to know, at least.” She was searching her mind, feeling vague guilt. Had she or George left out some poison? She could think of none. She drove home slowly, saddened. A brief letter arrived from the animal hospital three days later. Mandy, said the report, had apparently eaten of Datura stramonium, known as jimson-weed or Thornapple. The autopsy had found considerable amounts of hyoscyamine, atropine, scopolamine, and hyoscine, alkaloids common to the nightshade family of plants. It was, the vet reported with obvious pride, a rare case. It would probably be written up in a veterinary journal, since dogs seldom ate the poisonous weed, the few reported cases of jimson-weed poisoning in the state having been confined, in the past, to cattle and sheep.
“I’ll be damned,” George said. “We’re harboring killers on our estate.” He was touched by Gwen’s sadness, but, man-like, he would not admit his own feeling of loss over a mere dog. “I’ll take my trusty mower and lop off the heads of all the jimson-weed killers I can find.”
Gwen spoke quickly, without thinking. “They were only trying to—”
“To what?” George asked, looking at her questioningly.
“—to warn us,” she finished, with a weak little shrug and a smile.
“They who?”
“Oh, forget it,” she said. It was so silly. She could not understand why she had said such a foolish thing.
For days Gwen kept Sam, the surviving outside dog, in the house. He was fretful and restless, wanting to be outside to chase squirrels and enjoy the spring sun. She forgot to call him back from a morning outing and he once again roamed the woods, barking at the elusive tree dwellers and looking for Mandy.
Satan, the black ex-tom, was also an outdoor animal in warm weather. He showed off by climbing trees. He stalked birds with murderous intent but, fortunately for the birds, hunted with a casualness bred of good food and lazy living.
Meanwhile, Pine Tree Island’s own Paul Bunyan felled a forest of small brush. He worked in the evenings, becoming hard and muscular with the exercise, and cleared more and more as he moved around the house toward the clear pond. He planned his clearing as a general would plan a battle, walking ahead of his operation to consider the situation and the terrain before axing his way slowly through the brush.
“It’s the instinct of an Indian fighter,” he said. “In the old days on the frontier, they cut down all the trees around the house so that Injuns couldn’t sneak up from tree to tree to do them in. When I’m finished, we’ll be safe from bill collectors and magazine salesmen. Nary a one of them can sneak up on us.”
Gwen checked out books from the library. She remembered happy Mandy and was curious about the poisonous plant which she’d eaten. With the aid of books, she identified jimson-weed, growing on the far side of the clear pond. In addition, she identified a half dozen other varieties of more or less poisonous plants. Poison oak, ivy, and sumac were there in abundance. There was also some white snakeroot; hundreds of bracken fern, a cumulatively poison plant when eaten by animals; polkweed, a poisonous plant whose leaves were often eaten by people after proper cooking as a green; fumewort; and rattleweed. And, to compound her astonishment at the variety of plants which could kill or weaken, she discovered that the common oak, the most plentiful tree on the island, could poison with large amounts of tannic acid and a volatile oil if animals ate young shoots and leaves in quantity. Pines were poison. Some lilies were poison. Tobacco plants, if eaten by cattle, were poison. Dozens of varieties of plants caused effects ranging from itching and breaking out to painful death.
She shared her knowledge with George, who treated it lightly. “Murderer,” he said, kicking at an oak tree.
The mower roared, the ax flew, and the chain saw snarled. There was a pile of neatly stacked fireplace wood large enough to last for years. And the house was beginning to stand out from the woodlands, although the happy pioneer had left plenty of trees for cover and shade in his cleared areas. He was working his way around the clear pond, working also into late May, when the days had begun to show the promise of summer. He would end his work with a nude swim in the pond, and come up puffing and dripping to have his drink and dinner on the balcony, insisting on the outdoor bit in spite of vicious deer flies and mosquitoes. And his mornings began, as he’d dreamed, with a plunge into chill, clear water. His body, trimmed by the hard work, would slice into the water and disappear into the cool depths. He’d panic Gwen by staying under for impossible lengths of time, surfacing halfway across the pond.
Gwen began to live in shorts and bathing suits, but she was not, as yet, attracted to the water. “I need an outside temperature of at least ninety and a water temperature approximating a warm bath,” she would tell George when he coaxed her to join him in his twice daily swims.
She was sleeping slightly better, but her nights were still troubled by dreams. The dreams seemed to follow a pattern having to do with dismemberment and death. “You sonofabitch,” she told George, while discussing a dream with him, a particularly violent dream in which she had felt the pain of having both arms severed from her body, “you planted it in my mind with your talk about fears. Before that I was content with being chased by unseen monsters and being unable to move.”
“Your problem, kid, is that you need a—”
“—a good screw,” she finished for him.
On a Wednesday in early June, she got a good screw. If the treatment had been applied lovingly by Dr. George, the foremost practitioner of anti-lackanookie medicine, it would not have been unusual. However, this particular treatment was applied by a surprised and delighted meter reader from the rural electric cooperative. The effect on Gwen was much more than surprise.
6
At first she thought she was going mad and bounced words such as “schizophrenia” around in her muddled mind. Certainly, the girl who had performed that animal act on the chaise longue on the balcony, in broad daylight, was not Gwen Ferrier.
“Ummm,” that girl had said, spread-eagled, filled with relaxing man, “there’ll be more of that.”
That girl declined the half-embarrassed offer of a handkerchief. “I have this,” that girl said, pulling on her bikini bottom with sensual motions, displaying her body with pride even after the act. “This” was soaked with semen, a stained, horrible object held in a trembling hand, held at a distance, the offensive, musky odor of semen wafting upward to cause nausea in Gwen’s now hot, now cold body.
“I’d like for there to be more,” the meter reader had said.
“Call first,” that girl had said, actually reaching down to seize the limp member which, moments before, had been the point of concentration for her entire being.
That girl had still been in command when the meter reader walked jauntily away and rounded a corner. That girl was no longer present when the sound of the meter reader’s pick-up truck faded down the road. Instead, it was Gwen, holding her bikini top in front of still-moist breasts, breasts which reeked with the tobacco and male odor of the meter reader’s mouth. Gwen, back from a far place, screamed, exposing her breasts as she clamped one hand, filled with bikini top, to her mouth, and bit into a finger with painful force. It was Gwen, sobbing hysterically, who ran into the bath, vomited, ripped off the bikini bottom, and stared, horror-stricken, at the tell-tale moistness there. It was Gwen, face tear-stained and drawn, who sat on the red and gold sofa in the living room, George’s bird-shooting shotgun, loaded, near her lips. She was nude. The inner portions of her thighs were sticky. She felt calm, sure of her decision. Her right toe could reach the trigger. The double-barreled muzzle of the shotgun stretched her lips as she opened her mouth.