She closed the door and approached the object in the doorway.
One part of her mind, not quite coherent, told her to be very careful-it might be a bomb. As she passed the TV, she caught a hot, unpleasant aroma-a cross between singed insulation and burned bacon.
She squatted down by the package in the doorway and saw it wasn’t a package at all-at least, not in any ordinary sense. It was a rock with a piece of lined notebook paper wrapped around it and held in place with a rubber band. She pulled the paper out and read this message: I TOLD YOU TO LEAVE ME ALONE THIS IS YOUR LAST WARNING When she had read it twice, she looked at the other rock. She went over to it and pulled off the sheet of paper rubber-banded to it.
Identical paper, identical message. She stood up, holding one wrinkled sheet in each hand, looking from one to the other again and again, her eyes moving like those of a woman watching a hotly contested Ping-Pong match. Finally she spoke three words: “Nettle. That cunt.”
She walked into the kitchen and drew in breath over her teeth in a harsh, whistling gasp. She cut her hand on a sliver of glass taking the rock out of the microwave and picked the splinter absently out of her palm before removing the paper banded to the rock. It bore the same message.
Wilma walked quickly through the other rooms downstairs and observed more damage. She took all the notes. They were all the same.
Then she walked back to the kitchen. She looked at the damage unbelievingly.
“Nettle,” she said again.
At last the iceberg of shock around her was beginning to melt.
The first emotion to replace it was not anger but incredulity.
My, she thought, that woman really must be crazy. She really must, if she thought she could do something like this to me-to me!-and live to see the sun go down. Who did she think she was dealing with here, Rebecca of Fuckybrook Farm?
Wilma’s hand closed on the notes in a spasm. She bent over and rubbed the crumpled carnation of paper sticking out of her fist briskly over her wide bottom.
“I wipe my fucking ass on your last warning!” she cried, and threw the papers away.
She looked around the kitchen again with the wondering eyes of a child. A hole in the microwave. A big dent in the Amana refrigerator.
Broken glass all over. In the other room the TV, which had cost them almost sixteen hundred dollars, smelled like a FryO-Lator full of hot dogshit. And who had done it all? Who?
Why, Nettle Cobb had done it, that was who. Miss Mental Illness of 1991.
Wilma began to smile.
A person who did not know Wilma might have mistaken it for a gentle smile, a kindly smile, a smile of love and good fellowship.
Her eyes shone with some powerful emotion; the unwary might have mistaken it for exaltation. But if Peter jerzyck, who knew her best, had seen her face at that moment, he would have run the other way as fast as his legs could carry him.
“No,” Wilma said in a soft, almost caressing voice. “Oh, no, babe. You don’t understand. You don’t understand what it means to fuck with Wilma. You don’t have the slightest idea what it means to fuck with Wilma Wadlowski jerzyck.”
Her smile widened.
“But you will.”
Two magnetized steel strips had been mounted on the wall near the microwave. Most of the knives which had hung from these strips had been knocked loose by the rock Brian had pegged into the RadarRange; they lay on the counter in a pick-up-sticks jumble.
Wilma picked out the longest, a lcngsford carving knife with a white bone handle, and slowly ran her wounded palm along the side of the blade, smearing the cutting edge with blood.
“I’m going to teach you everything you need to know.”
Holding the knife in her fist, Wilma strode across the living room, crunching glass from the broken window and the TV picturetube under the low heels of her black for-church shoes. She went out the door without closing it and cut across her lawn in the direction of Ford Street.
15
At the same time Wilma was selecting a knife from the clutter of them on the counter, Nettle Cobb was pulling a meat-cleaver from one of her kitchen drawers. She knew it was sharp, because Bill Fullerton down at the barber shop had put an edge on it for her less than a month ago.
Nettle turned and walked slowly down the hallway toward her front door. She stopped and knelt for a moment beside Raider, her poor little dog who had never done anything to anyone.
“I warned her,” she said softly as she stroked Raider’s fur. “I warned her, I gave that crazy Polish woman every chance. I gave her every chance in the world. My dear little doggy. You wait for me.
You wait, because I’ll be with you soon.”
She got up and went out of her house, bothering with the door no more than Wilma had bothered with hers. Security had ceased to interest Nettle. She stood on the stoop for a moment, taking deep breaths, then cut across her lawn in the direction of Willow Street.
16
Danforth Keeton ran into his study and ripped open the closet door. He crawled all the way to the back. For a terrible moment he thought the game was gone, that the goddam intruding persecuting motherfucker Deputy Sheriff had taken it, and his future along with it.
Then his hands fell upon the box and he tore back the lid. The tin race-track was still there. And the envelope was still tucked beneath it. He bent it back and forth, listening to the bills crackle inside, and then replaced it.
He hurried to the window, looking out for Myrtle. She mustn’t see the pink slips. He had to take them all down before Myrtle got back, and how many were there? A hundred? He looked around his study and saw them stuck up everywhere. A thousand? Yes, maybe. Maybe a thousand. Even two thousand did not seem entirely out of the question.
Well, if she got here before he was done cleaning up, she would just have to wait on the step, because he wasn’t going to let her in until every one of these goddamned persecuting things was burning in the kitchen woodstove. Every… damned… one.
He snatched the slip dangling from the light-fixture. The tape stuck to his cheek and he pawed it away with a little squeal of anger.
On this one, a single word glared up from the line reserved for
OTHER VIOLATION(S):
He ran to the reading lamp by his easy chair. Snatched up the slip taped to the shade.
OTHER VIOLATION(S):
The TV:
HORSE-FUCKING The glass of his Lions Club Good Citizenship Award, mounted above the fireplace: CORNHOLING YOUR MOTHER The kitchen door: COMPULSIVE MONEY-CHUCKING AT LEWISTON RACEWAY The door to the garage: PSYCHOTIC GARBAGE-HEAD PARANOIA He gathered them up as fast as he could, eyes wide and bulging from his fleshy face, his thinning hair standing up in wild disarray.
He was soon panting and coughing, and an ugly reddish-purple color began to overspread his cheeks. He looked like a fat child with a grown-up’s face on some strange, desperately important treasure hunt.
He pulled one from the front of the china closet: STEALING FROM THE TOWN PENSION FUND TO PLAY THE PONIES Keeton hurried into his study with a pile of slips clutched in his right hand, strands of tape flying back from his fist, and began to pluck up more of the slips. The ones in here all stuck to a single subject, and with horrible accuracy: EMBEZZLEMENT.
MISAPPROPRIATION. BAD STEWARDSHIP. EMBEZZLEMENT. That word most of all, glaring, shouting, accusing: