She looked to see if Brandon was still staring at the little shiny toys in the gumball machine, things he'd have swallowed and choked on just a few years ago when he was going through his swallowing phase. He was there, his lips moving silently. A small black girl in corn-rows and a Sponge Bob T-shirt came to stand near him, admiring the HomiePals dolls in the machine: wizened little hip-hop figures on shiny keychains. The girl turned to stare at Brandon, puzzled. He was a tall thirteen, too old to be enchanted by the machine. It was one of his autistic things—he didn't do it so much as he used to, though.
"Brandon, let's go!” she called, pushing the cart up near him, on the way to the door.
He didn't acknowledge her directly, of course, but he turned to go toward the door with her, and they walked side by side without speaking. He didn't ask for shiny things from gumball machines any more. The shiny things he looked at now were on MTV: Christina Aguilera especially. It kind of broke Judith's heart to see it. Even if Brandon had a girl, not just a pretty girl like that but any girl, he'd probably be afraid to let her touch him.
Brandon was getting better, she reminded herself. He was more in control of himself. He didn't do that spinning around anymore; he answered questions, most of the time. He was making some progress. The therapist she'd gone to for herself, before Roy had decided it was too expensive, had said she should look at the positive things going on in her life, to break up that depression spiral. She didn't get depressed much anyway, now, with the Prozac. It was a low dose, but it worked well enough.
She and Brandon went out to the Explorer. It was still misting outside. About halfway through loading the groceries, Brandon started to help her.
The wind was rising, she noticed. She hadn't gotten the palm trees clipped and they'd be throwing their old branches at the house again. Fronds, they're called, she reminded herself. But they were five and six feet long, with a piece of wood on the end, when they dropped off, more like branches to her.
She hoped Roy wasn't home when she got there, though she wasn't sure why she hoped for it.
Judith kept a damp cloth in the freezer for her hot flushes, and she was pressing that to her head when Roy came in the front door. She could tell by the abruptness of the sound that it was him, and not Cherie. She put the washcloth back. When Roy saw her treating her menopause symptoms in any way, he acted as if she were trying to prod him into some outburst of sympathy. “I don't want to hear about it,” he'd say. “If you need to go to a doctor, go, but all women dry up that way...” That last remark had been a stunning new level of insensitivity, even for Roy.
Now he came into the kitchen, frowning. “Has someone been up in the attic?"
How had he known, already? she wondered, drifting out to the living room. It was a bigger room—she didn't like being with him in so small a room as the kitchen. She was glad of the menopause, in a way, because before the change she'd felt more like being in bed with a man; someone, but not with Roy, and now she didn't much feel like sex with anyone. Roy hadn't asked for a long time and it was just as well. She didn't know if she could stand another of those sessions where he rubbed himself on her till he got excited, squeezing his eyes tight shut so she could tell he was picturing something else, and then making those oil-derrick pumpings into her. He'd made her feel like there was something wrong with her, when she'd tried to talk about their sex life. She had shrugged and accepted him that way—she hadn't married him for sex, anyway. And she couldn't go through another divorce.
"The cable man said there might be a short there or something, so I gave him the key,” she said, sounding as reasonable as she could. “You were going to have him up there anyway, on Monday."
She could tell by the way her husband was moving around the room, almost running as he went from object to object, flattening wrinkles on doilies, wiping dust from the tops of picture frames, that he was going to start shouting. She noticed that he'd changed the part in his hair again, to the other side. Every so often he shifted the part, and when he parted his stiff brown hair on the right side of his head it looked all wrong, somehow. His eyebrows were too light for his hair and it was always difficult to see what color his eyes were, because of his heavy lids; you had to really look close to see they were a sort of greenish brown. When they met he'd looked slightly odd but the oddity had grown over the years, as if his face were put together from parts of the faces of three men. He'd grown into his penchant for khaki pants and those golf shirts with the little alligators over the breast, too. He even wore that outfit to church—he never missed church. He had been in the choir for a long time. He had a nice singing voice, a pure alto. It seemed more than fifteen years since they'd met in the choir. He'd come over to practice parts, and she'd play piano, and they'd sing. They started doing show tunes, and then he'd asked her out. He'd had a sense of humor, sometimes, in those days. He'd sold the piano, four years ago, to help pay for suing a man who'd sideswiped his car. He'd stopped singing in the choir about the same time.
"You were told: only if there's a fire,” he was saying, adjusting the shade on a lamp.
"I was afraid there could be a fire, because he said there might be a short.” Change the subject, she thought. “We got calls from some attorney's office asking when we're going to make a payment on his legal bill? I didn't know you'd sued anybody else till she said—"
"Have those kids been moving things around in here?” he asked suddenly, the volume of his voice elevating two notches. His eyes darted to the ceiling, in the direction of the garage. “That chair wasn't so close to the wall.” He moved it six inches toward the center of the room.
He meant Brandon mostly. Cherie mostly managed to not be home when Roy was there. “No. Roy, the kids have hardly been here. Now please—how are we going to pay for this lawsuit? We can't pay for it by winning, they told me you already lost it—"
"The man was letting his bushes grow over our fence, and it was dropping seeds all over our land, and sending up shoots, and the roots from them damaged our pipes!"
"It just doesn't seem like ... like a priority thing, Roy—"
"Are you telling me what's important in my life?" he demanded, turning to her, commencing the brittle monotone shouting that she'd known was coming.
When her first husband, Barry, had shouted at her, he looked right at her and it'd felt kind of good, because she'd known he was just letting off steam and afterward they'd make up and even make love. When they were signing the divorce papers, he'd said he was sorry he'd ever yelled at her. Funny time to say it.
Roy's yelling was so much worse. He shouted at her but never looked at her as he did it.
"I have to ask, Roy, because we don't want to have to move again."
"I'm getting a settlement, is that what you want to hear? Well I am, from the county, and you're driving my blood pressure up, you're trying to kill me!"
She instinctively reached to pat his arm because the high blood pressure remark made her want to help him calm down, but he'd come to dislike being touched—maybe he'd always disliked it—and he pulled away, shouted at her to keep the kids away from his things.
"You didn't tell me we had another computer in the house. A second line."
"What is it, because your last husband had an affair, you're putting that on me? Did he meet her on the internet? That's not me. I am not him. Okay? I am researching things, the law, things like that. That's what I need it for. I want to work undisturbed. I told you, you just weren't listening. I have to research this, it's complicated as all Hell..."
He lectured her about the court case for a while, and how he wasn't going to let people damage his property. Judith was relieved when he finally went up to his attic.
He'd never told her about the extra internet line. She was sure of that.
She went to the family room, where Brandon was playing videogames. She leaned against the doorframe and watched him. It was a game with a Chinese name she couldn't remember, where you had to move a doll-like man in a gaudy warrior's ou
tfit around, so that he fought giant wizards and dragons. But sometimes the hero had to interact with friendly figures, and Brandon was making him approach a voluptuous big-eyed girl, wearing a sort of scaly looking bikini and boots. He made his hero do a kind of dance-step near her, so that she jumped back. Then his character leapt backwards, and that made her jump toward him. It didn't seem to be anything that advanced the game, but he kept at it, making the characters dance together as best he could.
Judith went to him, bent, and kissed him on top of the head. He took one hand off the controller, reached out, and patted the toe of her shoe, then went back to playing.
She smiled, feeling a little better, and went up to the sewing room she used as an office, to prep for class. It felt good to be teaching. If she could find a way to pay for the night school she could get a teacher's certificate, work with special ed kids full time. Roy didn't want to pay for the classes though. Money going to lawsuits couldn't be spared for classes. Maybe she could get a second job.
Late afternoon, coming home from work, she looked at her watch and decided Roy wouldn't be there for at least an hour. She had time to go into the attic.
She actually went into the attic room, this visit. After the cable man had left she'd gone up to lock the door and, really, to have a look inside. She just looked around at the models, and confirmed for herself he had a computer in there she didn't know about. A Dell laptop, connected to an HP printer.
On the right side of the garage attic Roy had set up a big, pretty thick piece of fiberboard over two sawhorses. It was bright with coronas of spray paint, but all Roy's modeling tools were neatly lined on it. To the left of the workbench, under the nailed-shut half-moon window with the frosted glass, a cable ran to a laptop computer on a small workstation desk that looked like it had come from Staples. She'd never seen the desk before.
Bent over, under the roof, she slipped down a narrow opening between the models and sat on the old piano stool he used for a seat in front of the laptop table. You had to sit or stoop, in here.
This time, looking around, she realized she just didn't want to be around Roy any more than she had to, not because of the things she knew he was prone to do but because he was a stranger, really, and she was afraid of feeling she was alone in the house with a stranger. Strangers might do things you couldn't anticipate.
People talked about finding out that they didn't know the people they were married to. But she didn't think they were experiencing it as completely as she was. She'd been married to him for ten years and she'd created a sort of model of him, her own glued-together model, in her mind. She used that model as her Roy. But that wasn't him.
Looking at the models, now—by Revelle and Astra and PlasCo—she felt like she was in some kind of Indian medicine man's cave. She didn't know why, but it felt that way, like something she'd seen on the Discovery channel. Maybe it was partly the way the wind groaned over the roof. So much louder than you'd hear it downstairs. It sounded angry.
The models were hanging from the inverted-V ceiling on fishing line, some lines longer than others so the models were all at about the same level. Even the ones that weren't models of flying things, like the PT boat from World War II, hung dangling from the ceiling. Lots of the models were from World War II, but some were from the Vietnam War, like the MiG and a helicopter. The Monitor and the Merrimac were from the Civil War. There were some cars, too, hanging from the ceiling. Who would hang cars from the ceiling? But plastic models of cars rotated slowly in the dusty air: a GTO and a Mustang and some kind of Mercury she wasn't sure of.
All of the models were perfectly made, without too much glue, without fingerprints, with smooth, expert use of modeling spraypaint, no paint where it shouldn't be. He trimmed the parts with emery boards and one-sided razorblades when they needed help fitting together. And all the parts fitted together exactly.
What especially made her think she knew Roy even less than she'd thought had to do with the miniature plastic people on the models. Roy had gotten them at Kroner's Hobbies, probably, and he'd gotten a tiny little paintbrush, with just two hairs on it—she could see it on his work desk—and he had painted a crooked line across each figure's neck. Every single one of the tiny figures, women in the cars and men in the planes and on the boats, was painted to show a purple and red line across their tiny little throats. The line was the color of a bruise.
She reached up and idly tapped one of the planes, a b-52, or something close to it. It spun around, with its tiny little man in the roof gunner's bubble, staring out at the whirling attic, showing the mark on his throat when he turned her way, spinning to look at the other models, showing the mark again. She reached out to stop the spinning and there came a loud crunching bang from the ceiling and she recoiled, her hand knocking into the model so it rocked violently into the back of the GTO. The little plastic trunk of the toy GTO popped off.
She sat with her fists balled white in her lap, staring at the broken model, listening. But she knew what the bang was, it was the frond from a palm tree shedding in the high wind. There were serrated edges like little shark teeth on each frond and they came down hard on the roof like a drumstick on a tom-tom, the whole house vibrating when they struck. She was glad Brandon was at the training center, the thumps always scared him.
She shook her head, feeling sheepish. The branch hitting the roof had scared her. It had made her feel like Roy was shouting at her for being in his sanctum; for touching his things.
She looked at her watch, as she waited for her pulse to slow. It was four o'clock. Roy wouldn't be home, likely, for another hour and fifteen minutes. Because of his blood pressure, Roy was working part time. His job for the county, assessing road damage and repair, was kind of dicey right now, since he was also suing the county, claiming they'd given him a disability—she didn't really understand the claim. But there was no talking to him about his lawsuits.
Letting out a long breath, Judith got up, careful not to bump her head. She found the trunk lid of the model GTO on the floor. It looked like it would fit neatly back on the car. But when she went to put it on, she saw a papery something rolled up in the trunk of the model GTO. She hesitated, then plucked it out, using the tips of her fingernails to get at it. She unrolled the paper. It was a small cutting from a digital-photo printout. Someone had clipped it from a bigger picture.
It was a photograph of a girl in the trunk of a car. She had a ball-gag in her mouth and her arms and feet were tied with rope. That was Roy's car. You could see the outline of the Taurus's rear fender, and you could just make out the top of the bumper sticker that said: wwjd? What Would Jesus Do?
"I told her no way was I going to get into the play but she said, ‘Oh just audition’ and I did and they gave me the part of Betty Rizzo and it's like the second best part in Grease—Mom are you listening?"
"What? Yes! Oh my God that's so great, you got ... Betty Rizzo!"
Cherie laughed, not something she often did spontaneously, and flipped through the script in her lap. She was a bottle blonde, she had that straight hair with just the suggestion of a curl at the bottom that celebrities had been affecting last year, but to Judith it looked like a haystack. She had some acne, and Barry's small nose, but she wasn't an unattractive girl, by any means, and she had a decent singing voice. Her blue eyes—Barry's eyes—shone with a kind of derisive joy now. “You don't even know who Betty Rizzo is! You don't even know that musical!"
"It's true,” Judith said, “I've never seen it, but I'm going to learn all about it—I have to help you memorize your lines!"
She had found a picture in each of four other models, the ones she could open without leaving an obvious trace. Four different young women, about Cherie's age. All were dead now.
"Mrs Duwitt said it's the biggest play the senior class has done in years, and—and!—Nathan's in it!"
Roy had killed all those girls, and some others. She recognized one of the girls from her picture in the paper, two years ago. Missing, foul play s
uspected.
"Nathan? Oh my gosh! Do you think you guys'll get back together?"
"I think so. I think he wanted an excuse to. I'm not mad at him anymore. I don't think he was really into Miranda."
It all came together now. A hundred little suspicions, converged like loose bricks becoming a house. She had thought for a long time Roy was hiding things, more than just lawsuits. She'd thought it was an affair. But then she'd wondered about worse things. Could he be stalking someone? Taking pictures in some girls’ locker room? Something. But this ... She remembered when he'd videotaped the news shows, for a long time, months. He'd said it was so he could talk to Cherie about current events, but they never talked about them. At about that time, more than half the news shows contained something about the SP Killer. SP for Smile Pretty, because he would take photos of the girls, tied up and terrified and about to die, and he'd sent the first of them to the police, with the caption smile pretty! printed on it. He videotaped more than just the shows that mentioned the SP Killer. He'd been careful to do that. But he'd gotten all the SP stories, she realized now.
There were some closed boxes in the attic along one wall. He must keep the videotapes in there. What else was on them?
"Are you okay, Mom? You're not doing those afternoon cocktails again."
"What? No, you know I gave up drinking. I ... Why?"
"You're so, like, distracted."
"I'm just so amazed by this great development for you."
Brandon came into the room, not looking at his sister, but he'd been listening and he said, as if to the air, “Great development. Cool Cherie."
Cherie smiled. “Thanks Brandon."
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