"Hope she pulls it off," Weather said. "She seemed like she was trying to do the right thing."
"I don't know," Lucas said. "I'm not smart enough to figure out all the what-ifs."
THEN LUCAS SAT tapping his fingers on the table for a minute, inspecting an olive that had squirted out of his sandwich, and finally, Weather said, "What?"
He put the sandwich down and made his face sincere, like when he wanted to do something that Weather might not like. "You think, uh, Letty might be able to move in with us for a while? Until things get figured out?"
Weather ripped open the nearly empty sack of potato chips, and dumped the last four chips on the table. She took two of them. "I wondered if you were going to ask. I think we could, though I would predict some trouble. She's tough, she's gonna do what she wants to do, and she doesn't mind giving you a hard time."
"Which reminds of us who?" Lucas asked.
Weather was puzzled. "Who?"
"Jesus Christ, Weather, you just described yourself perfectly." He took one of the remaining chips.
"I did not." She was amazed. "I'm the most flexible person I know."
"Aw, man… " He gave up. "But you think we can do that?"
"I think we could. I like her a lot," Weather said. "We've got plenty of room. Even if we have another child, the two little ones could sleep together until Letty went off to college… "
"Another… hmm."
"I'm not pregnant, dummy," she said. "I'm just talking theory, at this point."
Lucas looked at the table. "You gonna eat that chip?"
THAT SAME NIGHT, Margery Singleton was surprised to find her back door open when she got home. She always locked it. Or almost always-though, it being a small town, she sometimes forgot.
She pushed inside, trying to recapture the feeling of the morning. Hadn't she gotten the key stuck in the door that morning? Or was it yesterday?
She pushed the door closed, flipped the light, took a step into the kitchen and stopped. A woman was sitting at the table and Margery took a step back. "Who the hell are you?" Then she saw the pile of money on the table. "That's my money, there."
Ruth Lewis picked up Loren Singleton's.380.
"You killed my sister, Mom. And you killed those little girls with needle injections. And God only knows who else. Something has to be done about that." She was pointing the pistol at Margery's chest.
The pistol, which Ruth had picked up at the church, had been surprisingly simple to work. She'd done a little practice before she'd sent another one of the sisters across the border with her driver's license. Ruth would cross herself later that night, with that sister's ID. A simple-enough alibi-she'd learned to think like a criminal.
"Well, you can't just shoot me," Margery said. She was thinking ahead two squares, like she had with Loren. Loren had been dead and gone before he'd left her house that night, and she'd known it. But Loren was screwed up in the head, and if the cops had gotten a handle on him, he would've spilled all the beans. And when they found the little girls at the dump, and found those needle pricks… who would have thought they could do that, after all this time?
"You can't just shoot me," Margery was saying. If she could get close enough to the table…
Ruth said, "I don't see why not."
She flinched with the blast, deafeningly loud in the small room. But she showed that cold, wintery smile when Margery Singleton went down.