The girl looked at the boy.
He looked back and forth from the Mercedes to the truck as if gauging comparative values. Maybe he was sharper than she’d thought, Marianne decided. Which meant he would come to the obvious conclusion.
“Sure,” he agreed. “That’d be okay.”
Of course it would, Marianne thought as she took the truck keys he gave her. If the seller has your truck and you have her Mercedes, you know she’s going to come back.
Every weeknight, predictable as sin, Jennifer Ludlow went running in the cool night air after she got off work. After she got through “working” with Lee. After they had dinner together. After they did what ever else they did up in the office on the top floor after everybody but the cleaning crew had gone home, and while Marianne sat in her car on the street watching the lights in the executive suite.
She had Jennifer’s schedule nailed.
Up in the morning at 6 A.M., off to work at 7:30, home again at 9. Back outside again in one of her adorable running outfits at 9:10. Most of her route was along safe suburban streets that were regularly punctuated with streetlights, porch lights, yard lights, headlights, even the little flashlights that some late walkers carried. But there was one stretch of a quarter mile that curved through a tree-lined darkness. Keeping up her steady, tedious pace, Jennifer entered the darkness every night at around 9:25 and emerged into the next streetlight a very short time later.
It took ten minutes for Marianne to travel from the church parking lot, draw near to the dark stretch, park in front of a home, put the truck in idle, turn down the headlights, and slouch down in the driver’s seat. She found a baseball cap on the console and in a moment of inspiration stuck it backward on her head the way a boy would wear it.
Jennifer, thin, blond, young, sweet Jennifer whom everybody liked was right on time on this night, too. The moment her right foot stepped into the darkness, the black truck started up. It drove into the darkness behind her, picking up speed.
Jennifer Ludlow made a satisfying thud as she was struck full on her back, and then she made two more bumps as the heavy wheels rolled over her.
And then two more on the return trip.
Thud. Bump, bump. Bump, bump.
And there was a bonus: after one had struck her husband’s mistress with the truck, Marianne’s headlights picked up a surprise. Another runner was coming from the other direction and he had seen it all. She could tell by the horrified way the runner had his hands up to his mouth and how white his face was, how wide his eyes. He looked paralyzed on the other side of the road. Knowing he was blinded by her lights, she turned the truck around in the middle of the street so she could head back in the other direction. She slowed down a bit so he could plainly see her roll over the victim one more time—and so he could also see the letters and numbers on the lighted license plate.
All the way back to the church parking lot, Marianne tapped out the happy rhythm.
Thud. Bump, bump. Bump, bump.
Marianne knew the young couple would know to look for her behind the church, so this time she pulled the truck deep into the shadows at the far end of the lot, nose into the trees. She would be gone before they realized the spots on their windshield were blood, if they even noticed before morning, and long gone by the time they saw the bloody hood and grille.
They didn’t know her name, not even the false one she had been ready to give them, because they were too innocent to ask. All they had was a tiny bit of an index card with a phone number that couldn’t be traced to her, if they even still had that. Before the night was over, she would stop by the coffee shop to remove what ever was left of the card so the kids would never be able to prove it had ever existed. They would look like desperate people trying to lie their way out of hit-and-run homicide charges.
That was the plan.
Marianne checked the illuminated face of her wristwatch. Five after ten. They were a little late. No problem. It wasn’t as if she would need an alibi for the time of death. Nothing could connect her to it.
Ten after ten.
Where are they?
She had to return the Mercedes to her friends’ garage. God forbid they had been in a wreck with it. That was a contingency she had thought about but dismissed as highly unlikely. There were some things you just had to leave to chance, especially when the odds were in your favor.
At ten-thirty she stopped pacing and stood behind the truck willing them to come.
When, at ten forty-five, headlights turned off the street, she nearly sobbed with relief. She wouldn’t even read them the riot act; she’d just tell them they couldn’t have the car, and then she’d get the hell out of there and disappear from their lives forever.
The headlights picked her out of the dark.
Marianne, feeling like the star in a spotlight, smiled into it.
Maybe their daddy’s lawyers could get them off.
Suddenly a third light beamed at her.
An actual spotlight…
Marianne raised her hands to her eyes to shade them.
She heard a car door open and shut, and then a second one.
“Ma’am?” It was a policeman’s voice. “Is that your truck?”
“We scored this time, baby.”
The girl with the long brown hair looked across the lush leather seats of the Mercedes at her spike-haired boyfriend. “Beats that fucking truck.”
“What you got against trucks?” he joked. “That one got us from St. Louis to Kansas.”
“Next time? I want a convertible.”
“Sure. Why not?”
“Let’s get one in Denver.”
“Drive through the Rockies with the top down? Cool.”
They were on their way to California, maybe. Or maybe to somewhere else. Transportation was no problem. She was the one who’d had the idea to begin with. Find ads for private cars for sale. Take them for test drives and leave their own car behind as supposed collateral. And then all they had to do was keep on driving.
They had pulled it off three times already between New York and here.
He started laughing.
“What?”
“I was just thinking about her waiting back at that church for us.”
His girlfriend giggled, and soon they were laughing so hard he could barely see to drive and she was doubled over in hysterics in the passenger seat of the black 2005 Mercedes ML 350 SUV.
The Next-Door Collector
Elizabeth Massie
Life went downhill when the next-door collector moved in. She and all her writhing, wriggling pets, pressed against the window screens, mashed against the greasy glass, staring out, begging Anthea and all who looked their way to come in.
Come in.
Anthea Lonas’s house on Riverview Road was perfect. Two-story Victorian with a finished attic, a wraparound porch, and a detached garage, on a half-acre lot along which Anthea had planted roses, bird house gourds, sunflowers, azaleas, and colorful annuals in tidy raised plots. Several mature maple trees straddled the Lonas property and the unsold brick rancher next door, making for a natural delineation between the two properties. Anthea, her husband, Paul, and their twelve-year-old son, Dylan, had lived in the south-side Richmond house for nearly a year, having moved there from a crowded neighborhood in Chicago. Chicago just hadn’t worked out.
Things were fine throughout most of the summer. The sunflowers were nearly eight feet tall, their heavy, furry lion heads obediently scanning the sky for the sun. The gourds climbed the trellises to either side of the front porch, and the roses were only mildly infested with Japanese beetles. Dylan had made friends with twin boys, George and Gene Kidd, up the street, good kids from a good family, and they spent much of their vacation days at the local public swimming pool, watching television at alternating homes, and pounding on guitars-drums-keyboard in the twins’ carport in an attempt to whip up a band good enough to perform in the middle-school talent show come October. Paul, who worked as a highly skilled software
developer, was happy in his position, and was expecting advancement soon. Anthea gardened, worked out at the gym four times a week, and painted what the local art gallery called “brilliant, emotion-infused modern oils revealing nature on fire.” She spent a good deal of time alone except for hours with her family, and enjoyed her solitude.
And then the next-door neighbor moved in.
The woman’s name was Lisa Ferguson. She was in her late forties, newly divorced, with enough equity in her former home to put a down payment on the rancher. From the window in her art studio upstairs, Anthea had watched as the woman moved in. She studied the eclectic, shredded collection of furniture hauled out of the moving truck by the uniformed men, and the crates of animals Lisa herself carried into the house. Anthea tried to count the pets based on the number of crates, but it was hard to figure if each held one or more, and by the time Lisa was returning to her car for the fifth crate, Paul called from work and Anthea, who refused to have a phone in her gallery, had to leave her stakeout.
Then, Wednesday morning, when Anthea was laying down fresh mulch in the pansy plots along the property line, Lisa came outside. She was followed by three dagger-tailed, yellow felines with winking eyes and wrinkled noses. Lisa held out one hand and introduced herself with a big smile.
“Hi, I just bought the house next to you. You probably saw and heard me moving in yesterday. I’m Lisa Ferguson, and you’re…?”
Anthea wiped a tickle of loose hair from her forehead and put down her rake. “Anthea Lonas. Hi.” She shook Lisa’s dry, scratchy hand. The woman could do with a bit of hand lotion and a serious make over. She had short, slightly greasy brown hair going gray at the temples and round rimless glasses. Her face was angular, her teeth a bit crooked, and her breath smelled vaguely of coffee and chocolate.
“You have a family, Anthea? I see a bike in your yard. Children?”
Anthea nodded. “A son, Dylan.” Damn. She wasn’t keen on telling strangers too much. That had happened before, sharing too much too soon, and it had led to very unpleasant results. Like the young mother back in her old neighborhood who found out Anthea liked a particular soap opera and so for a good six months called Anthea every single evening during dinner to rant over who was screwing whom and who would fall in love with whom and whether Joan would have her sex-change operation and if Marshall was the baby’s father and if so, when the DNA test came back, would he stay and be a man or go off to Alaska and join the pipeline. Hopefully, Lisa Ferguson would not push the let’s-be-buddies routine too soon. If they were to be friends, it would happen naturally and with time. Though Anthea already had serious doubts, just looking at the woman.
“I love children. Do you have pets, too?” asked Lisa as the cats intertwined one another and then Lisa’s leg. “I adore animals.”
“We used to have a dog,” said Anthea. “A border collie. Unfortunately he developed such a bad case of arthritis we had to put him to sleep.” Too much information, Anthea.
“Pound animals are the best,” purred Lisa. She picked up a cat and draped it over her shoulders like a stole. “And strays. They are so needy. I love them all, I can’t help it.”
Anthea glanced over at the windows of the brick rancher. Cat faces and dog faces were pressed to the screens, watching Lisa. How many did the woman own?
“Excuse me, Lisa, but how many pets do you have?”
Lisa raised her brows and her eyes spun a little. “Oh, gosh, when did I last count? Twenty, twenty-two…”
Twenty-two pets? Good Lord. “That’s quite a few…”
“…cats. Dogs, hmm, I think there are nineteen last count. I have them spayed, don’t you worry about that. How responsible would that be, letting them breed over and over?”
“Not responsible at all.”
“I’ve seen those Animal Planet pet cop shows with all those crazy, inbred creatures.” Lisa shivered, then immediately brightened. “You should come over and meet my babies sometime.” She put the stole cat down and picked up another, cradling it upside down in her arms. “Not a grumpy one in the bunch. No fleas, either, though Lord knows I fight the good fight with that. Come for tea?”
“What?” Anthea realized she’d just been invited into a house filled with forty-one animals. For tea. To sit down on that scarred sofa or in an infested kitchen and try to sip at something as millions of pet hairs floated about her face. No way on this green earth would she do such a thing. “That’s sweet, Lisa. But do you know? I’m so busy this week. I’m an artist, not just a lowly gardener.” She laughed, and hoped it sounded apologetic. Sweat and gnats dribbled down the front of her blouse and she had the terrible urge to scratch her breasts. She didn’t. “The painting, the house, my son, my husband. It’s just crazy at times.”
Lisa nodded, her glasses bobbing on her nose. “I never had children, so I can’t imagine. I would have loved to, but the doctors declared this old garden to be sterile.” She patted her tummy. Anthea found that incredibly crude. “Too late now. Too old. So I love my fur babies.”
Fur babies. Give me a break.
Anthea excused herself, saying she heard the phone ringing although she didn’t. She went inside and peeked through the curtains as Lisa puttered in the yard, the three cats at her heels, then went back inside.
Dylan got home just after five, his hair a matted mess from the pool and one of his shoes missing. “Somebody stole it while I was swimming,” he complained. “I’d love to find out who took it. I’ll kill ’im!”
“No, you wouldn’t kill him,” Anthea said as she put a platter of baked chicken on the dining-room table. Dylan stabbed three pieces with the serving fork and dropped them onto his plate. Paul would be late tonight—eight or so—and supper couldn’t wait. “We’ll call the pool manager tomorrow morning and report your missing shoe. The lifeguards or somebody should pay better attention to what’s going on there.”
“That’s not the lifeguard’s job, Mom,” Dylan said with a rolling of eyes. “Don’t call. You’ll embarrass me.”
“Dylan,” said Anthea, crossing her arms firmly but feeling a surge of love for her scroungy offspring. “A mother’s job is to take care of her children. To protect them. To even protect their shoes if they go missing.”
“Or stolen!”
“Or stolen.”
“Yeah, what ever.” Dylan waved his hands to change the subject. They ate in silence until it was time for one of Dylan’s television shows. Anthea went to her studio and slapped red paints onto her newest painting, Sunflowers at Dawn.
Lisa put up a tall chain-link fence around her property. This was enough to keep most of the cats and dogs, newly sprung from house arrest, from running out into the road or into Anthea’s yard. However, a few of the more athletic cats did climb the links and then take dumps—uncovered, no less; who did the cats think they were, dogs?—beneath the sunflowers. Anthea continued to dodge the invitations to tea and Lisa continued to be oh, so understanding.
Then Lisa began collecting plastic, lidded containers. She brought them home and stacked them in the backyard, all sizes and all colors—gray, blue, pink, yellow—in several increasingly lopsided, spiraling towers near the trash barrel, lids stacked against the fence. Anthea was more than curious, but kept her questions to herself until one morning when she was watering the roses, Lisa parked her Toyota in front of her house and trotted around the side with yet another couple boxes.
“Hello, Lisa! What’s up with all the boxes?” she called through the chain link.
Lisa stopped, smiled, and said, “Aren’t they great?”
“Great? I suppose so.”
“You never know when you’ll need to put stuff in something, and keep the stuff dry.”
“I suppose not.”
Lisa continued on to the backyard and added her finds to one of the unsteady rainbow stalagmites. Four dogs followed her as if expecting a treat, while another good half dozen lay in the sun and wagged their tails at Anthea.
The neighborhood kids soon d
iscovered Lisa’s animal emporium. And they loved it. Nearly every morning, there was a collection of preteens playing with the pets in the yard. Anthea could only imagine the smashed feces the kids carried home with them on their shoes.
“I don’t want you over there,” Anthea told Dylan as he and Paul chewed on the French toast Anthea had served for breakfast. She sat in her chair at the table, her fork prongs pointing toward the ceiling, but she wasn’t going to eat anything until she and her son had an understanding. “I don’t believe it’s at all safe, and certainly not sanitary.”
“You don’t know,” said Dylan. “You never went over there. Lisa told me that she keeps inviting you but you never go.”
“No, but…” said Anthea. Dylan was right. But still. “Somebody who collects animals like that…it just isn’t…”
“Isn’t what?”
“Sane,” said Anthea.
“Now, hon.” This was Paul. He wiped syrup from his lower lip with his folded paper towel. He was a handsome man with dark hair and a trim beard. “That’s not really fair, do you think? I’ve spoken to her on occasion and she seems to have plenty of wits.”
“Do you think?” said Anthea. Paul’s comment was infuriating. He was supposed to be on her side with these kinds of things. “So tell me, what kind of wits?”
Paul shrugged. “She seems nice. A tad eccentric, but nice all the same. Harmless.” He did a little flick of the eye and tip of the head in Dylan’s direction. Clearly, Anthea’s husband didn’t want them saying bad things about the neighbor in front of their child. Anthea didn’t care. Nice wasn’t all it was cracked up to be sometimes.
“Nice, yes, fine, but that doesn’t excuse all those animals,” she said. “It’s like a pack of vermin over there, all eyes and paws and claws and tails. It’s a living nightmare. Paul, you’re gone most of the time, you have no idea.”
“She keeps them confined. They don’t look dirty or mangy.”
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