Three
A scream sent the terrible dream flying apart in a
wild mosaic of images. The paralysis of sleep released Lori. She bolted
upright on her living room couch, hoping against hope itself that her
awakening was a false one and Virginia Cornell’s death part of a
particularly nasty lucid dream.
A nineteen-inch portable sitting atop the broken
console emitted a tinny din of distant voices. She remembered having
turned it on an hour ago, a little past noon, and having inadvertently
drifted back to sleep. She sighed in despair, because memories of the
previous night were indeed part of waking reality, the one she could never
escape by awakening.
But it hadn't been her own scream that had awakened
her. Seven-year-old Leslie had been dropped off at her doorstep at dawn
and it was Leslie who had screamed from somewhere out back. She closed
her eyes in hopes that it had been a one time scream of innocent
frustration, but the seven-year-old screamed again from alongside the
house, and then burst through the front screen door and screamed again at
a pitch Lori felt certain would shatter windows, if not her frayed nerves.
"Mom, I got stung by a bumblebird!"
Lori grimaced as the bizarre complaint registered.
"You got stung by a what?"
Leslie's eyes were wide with fear in his chubby
face. He twisted around and placed a forefinger alongside a bright bead
of blood on the calf of his right leg. "I got stung by a bumble…"
He caught himself committing a critical error of some
kind.
"A bumblebird, Tiger?"
"Well, it was buzzing and it had a long stinger!"
Lori shoved herself to her feet. She rounded the
couch and dropped to her knees before the little tyrant. A square of
tissue snatched from a box on the end table dabbed the single bead of
blood away. Nothing more than a tiny puncture mark remained of the
injury.
"Okay, now show me the bumblebird."
Leslie took her hand and pulled her through the
kitchen and out the back door. He stopped a safe distance from the row of
peonies blossoming alongside the sidewalk and pointed out the offending
bumblebird, a hovering enigma of blurred wings and iridescent feathers two
inches in length.
Laughter bubbled through her tension. "Honey, that's
a hummingbird!"
Leslie bristled with indignation. "But it's got a
stinger!"
"That's his beak for sipping nectar. Hummingbirds
don't sting. Where did this happen?"
He pointed a finger of accusation at a nearby rose
bush, then snatched it back when he realized what must have happened. The
bush hadn't entirely survived the winter, consisting of a single,
thorn-laden stem, three or four green leaves, and but one puny flower
sprouting low to the ground.
"Leslie, I think you backed into my rosebush and
pricked yourself on a thorn. I had a fence around that. What did you do
with it?"
He dipped his head in guilt. Lori scanned the yard
and saw the cylinder of wire doubling as a tunnel for a toy tank in the
sand box.
"If you put the fence back where you found it before
you destroy what's left of my rosebush, I won't breathe a word to your
father or your sister about the attack of the horrid bumblebird."
He looked up in genuine concern. "You won't, will
you?"
"Obey."
Leslie edged past the hummingbird darting from peony
to peony along the sidewalk. Only the distant howl of the semi-trailers
whining down the nearby highway competed with the faint hum of its wings.
He reached a tentative hand toward the elusive creature as he passed only
to have it zip disrespectfully away.
Lori wandered around the side of the house hoping to
see Wendy coming down the block. The episodic nightmare of the glass eye
had left her feeling edgy, and with Gloria missing, it was Wendy's safety
that primarily concerned her. She napped evenings and mornings in hopes
of avoiding the confrontation with the nightmare altogether. It had begun
several weeks ago as a moment of paralysis just before waking. Night by
night it had grown more vivid and detailed. Now, it boldly followed her
into the very light of day.
A premonition of Virginia Cornell's death? She
mulled over the notion and dismissed it as improbable. The dream and the
events of the previous night had nothing in common.
A feed truck from the local grain mill roared past,
piloted by a driver with a face baked to leather by the sun. He caught
sight of the lithe housewife in shorts and halter and gave her an
ear-splitting bellow of his air-horn.
Lori closed her eyes and sighed to calm jangled
nerves.
Carol Fisher rose from her flower garden across the
street dangling a spade in one hand and a fistful of weeds in the other.
A beige bikini valiantly defended a few square inches of the willowy
six-foot frame from prying eyes.
"Was that for me?" she called out in a broken voice
at about the same pitch and volume as the truck's air brakes squalling at
the edge of town.
"Not on your life!" Lori chortled, secretly pleased
that the trucker had been looking the wrong way on his drive through
town. She wasn't beneath appreciating an occasional, morale-boosting toot
of her own from time to time.
"Was that Leslie I heard screaming?" Carol wanted to
know.
"He sat on a thorn!"
Carol barked laughter. "Silly boy!"
"Aren't they all?"
Warming to the conversation, Carol dropped her spade
and weeds. She slapped the dirt from her hands and trotted barefoot
across the searing blacktop. Seeking the shade of a young maple at the
curb, she wiped beaded perspiration from her brow and forced a wane smile.
Lori joined her. "Got the morning off for a change?"
she said, reluctant to engage Carol in the inevitable topic of discussion
for the day, Virginia’s death.
"I gave Greg his final ultimatum," Carl said sternly,
"hire another waitress or I'll spike the eggs with jalapenos."
"Did you get your waitress?" Lori said with a smile,
"or was breakfast really hot this morning?"
"The help's certainly hot," Carol said with disgust.
"I got a seventeen-year-old trollop who's going to run off with the first
trucker with a flashy smile and a fistful of one hundred dollar bills."
The Highway Thirty Diner was one of the few surviving
businesses in town. During Lori's fifteen years of residence in Sorrel
with its population of fifteen hundred, Carol had become her closest
confidant. They sat in a corner booth at the cafe from time to time and
talked for hours on end about problems with life in general and men in
particular. Greg would never have managed the cafe without her, although
the two were not romantically inclined. In fact, Carol had a less than
untarnished reputation in that regard. Her latest beau was a purported
gang-banger on the run, a horrid little man named Ruben.
Carol pursed her lips and stared at the ground. "I
heard about last night, about the Cornell woman and all. I don’t suppose
you want to talk about it."
Lori looked away. "No, I don't want to talk about
it, but thanks for letting me use your car."
"I'm so sorry you got yourself involved."
"Karen sent me home before the deputies arrived. I
didn't get involved."
Carol's attitude toward Karen sprouted ice. "It's
bad enough she should be involved in something so sordid with her daughter
missing. And you with your problems with Dave and all."
Lori gave a nervous nod, willing at least to
acknowledge the extent of her own difficulties. "I'm still waiting for
Wendy to come home," she confessed. "Dave forgot about the school thing
last night. She and Leslie stayed overnight with friends. She should
have been home hours ago."
Carol frowned. "Hon, I'm so sorry. Is Dave staying
out late again?"
Lori bit her lower lip to hold back her tears.
Carol grew somber. "More bad dreams?"
Lori lowered her head dejectedly. Carol knew about
the recurring dream of the glass eye.
"Can you imagine that?" Carol
added, trying to add a note of glum humor to the strained conversation.
"Pigs."
Carol had made the connection on her own. Everybody
would. Tears came unbidden to her eyes. "Please don't give Karen a rough
time. It's just a figure of speech."
Carol looked unconvinced.
"And a horrible coincidence. Please?"
Carol relented. "It's poetic justice, but unfair, I
guess, even for Karen Radcliff. Still, I'll willing to bet it's going to
be a while before we hear any more idle threats about throttling somebody
and throwing them to the pigs. You knew pigs can be carnivorous, didn't
you?"
"For God's sake, no, I didn't know."
"Alcohol and swine don’t mix, although I’ve never run
across that one on a bumper sticker."
Lori took a deep breath to quiet her queasy stomach.
"My God," she murmured.
Carol grinned her toothy smile. "As for that
fourteen-year-old daughter of yours, maybe she found herself a boyfriend
in town. She will eventually, you know. Love and lust among the virgin
adolescent. Isn't that going to be fun?"
Lori groaned in misery.
Carol laughed. "But we take it one day at a time,
don't we, Hon?"
Lori's smile felt twisted. She nodded absently and
went back inside the house to escape the heat. She reached for the remote
control on an end table and obliterated the image of an exquisitely
dressed heroine delivering a tirade against an unfaithful husband who had
to be grossing one hundred thousand a year to afford the goodies crowding
the background.
"Fool," she muttered.
The abrupt silence closed in on her like a vice.
From the utter stillness came the ticking of the wall clock reminding her
that it was now twelve-thirty in the afternoon. Wendy was either being
her usual, inconsiderate self, or, if Lori let her paranoia run away with
her, she had been raped, murdered and buried in the countryside during the
course of the previous night, perhaps alongside the body of
thirteen-year-old Gloria Radcliff.
She wandered to the kitchen and stood at the sink
looking out at the green Volkswagen parked alongside the shed. What was
it going to take to get Dave to fix it? The car was one of the last
manufactured in the states, technically an antique and definitely a
collectors item, once upon a time the love of Dave’s life. Now, Dave
spent three hundred dollars a month on a new pickup. He had put the
Volkswagen in her name, but refused to fix it, content to keep his family
conveniently tucked away in the countryside without a means of
transportation of their own.
The front screen door slammed.
Lori started violently.
"Hi, Mom, I'm home!"
Wendy flashed a smile on her way through the kitchen
to her bedroom, kicked her door closed behind her, and fell into silence
within. Her school books finished their slow slide across the dining room
table. A paperback dropped to the floor with a slap.
Leslie followed in Wendy's wake and demanded
sustenance. At peace with the world now that her children had been safely
returned to her, Lori microwaved cheese and turkey-ham sandwiches and
poured milk for the two. Leslie took his meal to the living room in
search of a cartoon. Wendy ventured from her room off the kitchen long
enough to scoop her booty off the counter. She quietly vanished inside
again with the kitchen phone and its twenty-five foot extension cord held
to her ear.
A timid knock at the back door announced the arrival
of the third and last of Lori's trio of friends in town. Amy McBride,
twenty-two-year-old mother of twins, slipped through the screen door in
tears.
"Lori, something terrible has happened!"
A willowy wraith of a girl dressed in a purple shift,
battered by both her pathologically low self-esteem and her drunken
husband, Amy looked forever poverty-stricken with her dark-rimmed eyes and
frightened demeanor. "You heard about Virginia Cornell," Lori said
grimly.
"Ralph got fired yesterday! He went out drinking,
and I just know he's going to come home drunk tonight!"
Lori paused to shift mental gears. Ralph worked the
plant with Dave as did a good portion of the men about town. Clayton's
Denton tractor plant was the economic kingpin of surrounding communities.
"Dave didn't fire him, did he?" Considering the extent of Ralph's
drinking problem, it seemed the most likely possibility.
Amy took a seat at the table. She shook her head
nervously, jamming her hands into her lap in an effort to quell her
upset. "Something terrible happened. He won't tell me."
Something more terrible than a death in town? "Do
you want me to ask Dave what he might know about it?"
"Yes, if you would." Amy ran her fingers through the
tangle of her waist-length hair. "I really don't know what to do."
Lori extrapolated the extent of Amy’s crisis. Ralph
typically drank himself into oblivion on weekends. Unemployed, he’d
render Amy’s existence unendurable from day one.
What would any of them do if their respective
situations worsened?
Truck tires crunched gravel alongside the house.
Lori sank into abrupt despair at the thought of having to cope with Dave's
belligerent attitude for the balance of the weekend. "Christ, here we go
again," she murmured unhappily.
Amy muttered an abrupt apology and rose to leave.
She avoided Dave's look of disdain as they crossed paths on the back
porch. Dave paused at the sink, a hunched six-and-a-half-footer watching
Amy take flight across the yard. "I take it you've heard about Ralph," he
said in a flat tone of voice.
"What happened?" Lori asked the question as
unimposingly as possible.
"I'm sorry about last night. I was upset and I
needed time to myself to think some things through."
But he withheld his usual smile of apology, fair
warning that something serious was amiss.
Lori braced herself.
"Ralph got himself fired for insubordination and
drinking on the job," Dave said. "Not that he's any worse off than the
rest of us. The plant went crazy yesterday afternoon."
"Because of Virginia?"
Dave sighed. "Nothing to do with that. No, the
company called a big meeting and announced that the plant is closing in
August."
Lori went cold and empty inside.
Dave waited for her reaction. "Did you hear what I
said?"
She studied his expression. It had to be a bad
joke. "You're not serious," she said hopefully.
"We've got another two months at best, then it's all
gone."
Lori stood suspended in utter horror. There were no
other jobs to be had in the county. The end of the Denton plant meant the
end of everything.
Dave fetched a beer from the refrigerator. He
slammed the door hard enough to rattle the china on top. "Twenty goddamn
years down the drain. I got a bum knee and a hearing loss. I'm too
damned old to be starting over again. What the hell am I supposed to do
now?"
Lori knew better than to try to quell his upset.
Dave had a tendency to manhandle an annoyance when uncontrollably angry,
his one-hundred-and-five-pound wife included. She wandered onto the back
porch to nurse her panic in private and stood at the railing watching
Leslie throw rocks at bumblebirds.
Her world was coming apart at the seams. Bad dreams,
Virginia Cornell, and now this.
Dave bellowed from inside the house. Wendy screamed
back at him in defense of whatever transgression had tripped his
hair-trigger temper. The door to her bedroom off the kitchen slammed
shut.
And the china on the refrigerator rattled.
