Something new in the universe. Someone new to the family.
But for now, it was time to return to the stars.
Maggie began to rise from the island. Below her, the sea sent wave after wave to crash against the shore, each wave catching and surpassing the one before it, reaching a little further up the beach. Bits of sea foam floated up and rode the wind to parts unknown.
THE NORTH REVENA LADIES LITERARY SOCIETY
Catherine H. Shaffer
Catherine H. Shaffer lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and is a writer of science fiction and fantasy, and a freelance journalist. She reports full time for the biotechnology industry’s leading news outlet, BioWorld Today, and freelances for a number of other magazines, including Nature Biotechnology, Nature Medicine, Genetic Engineering News, Drug Discovery and Development, Wired News, and many others. Her fiction has appeared in Analog, Oceans of the Mind, Nature, and the anthologies Turn the Other Chick and Heroes in Training.
“The North Revena Ladies Literary Society” was published in Analog, in the year that that magazine’s longtime editor, Stanley Schmidt, retired. It is about a woman who leaves her job at the CIA to have kids. Joining the local ladies book club is, however, more than she bargained for. There’s enough action and understated humor here to satisfy.
BETH ALWAYS LOOKED forward to book-club meetings at Sandy’s house. Sandy made the best salsa, and had an ever-changing display of artwork on her walls. Book-club nights were Beth’s only chance to get away from the demands of caring for small children. She’d had a life before children, but sometimes it was hard to remember what it was like.
As usual, Sandy hadn’t read the book, a celebrity biography. “So busy!” she chirped.
Also as usual, Janine hated it. She dissected its shallow prose, its disordered structure, and, strangely, its loose morals.
“It’s a celebrity biography, Janine, what do you expect?” Dorothy Hensbecher asked her. Dottie was the senior member of the book-club, and she looked about a hundred years old. The other ladies tended to defer to her. Beth was still new, and although she respected Dottie, she still didn’t understand all of the group dynamics.
“Why couldn’t a celebrity biography have a moral compass?” Beth asked. “There’s no rule saying that every scene of debauchery and dissipation must be free of judgment or reflection.”
“See?” Janine said. She gestured to Beth with approval. “She gets it.”
Dottie lowered her chin slightly to acknowledge Janine’s comment, and then glanced at the clock on Sandy’s polished marble mantel. “It looks like we’re out of time, girls.”
Before anyone could move, the picture window exploded. Shards of plate glass flew across the room. Gunfire punched through the sound of people screaming. Precise holes appeared in the wall. Beth threw herself to the floor, as reflexes nearly twenty years old erupted to the surface of her psyche. She checked the exits, assessed the situation, triangulated the location of the shooter. She was unarmed and presently pinned down by the gunfire, so there was not much to do but keep her head down until the situation changed.
Beth had seen a lime-green Citroën parked in front of the house with a rifle barrel sticking out the passenger side window before she threw herself to the floor. That would be important to remember later.
Janine was on the floor next to Beth. She cried out and covered her face with her hands. Across the room, Dottie was also lying on the floor, but not crying. Beth couldn’t tell whether she’d broken her hip or what, but she was safe for the moment. Claire Fitz sat frozen on the Italian leather sofa, a small, tight cluster of round punctures decorating the cushion slightly to her left. She stared at her shattered window, still holding a tortilla chip, frozen in mid-air on its journey to her mouth.
“Claire!” shouted Beth. “Down! Get down!”
Sandy crawled back and forth across the room, holding a roll of paper towels. Every time the shooting stopped, she dabbed at a puddle of spilled wine on the carpet. Barb squatted in the corner, her face hidden in her hands. Beth would almost have thought Barb had kept her head, except that the entire contents of her purse lay scattered on the floor at her feet: cosmetics, clumps of receipts, crayons, crumbs, tampons, and a second cell phone, half open and beeping forlornly. Other women had scattered, running out of the house, into the basement, and even up the stairs.
Beth noticed, as if from a distance, the fear reaction of her own body. The delayed squeeze in her chest as adrenaline pumped into her system, the thumping of her own heart, a quivering in her knees and hands.
The attack was over almost as soon as it began. A car sped off, tires squealing in the sudden silence, to be replaced several minutes later by a police siren.
Police and firefighters escorted the women out of the house. Janine was sobbing into her own cell phone by now. Dottie stood alone looking barely ruffled in her green pant-suit, with her habitual ruby brooch pinned smartly on her lapel. Beth couldn’t remember who had helped her up from the floor and felt bad that she hadn’t thought of the older woman in her haste to get out of the house. Mrs. Hensbacher’s eyes glittered like two hard bits of black glass as she caught Beth’s gaze.
Beth leaned on the bumper of a police cruiser, looking cool but trying to get her legs to stop shaking. “Automatic rifle,” she said, “an AK-47, by the sound.”
“Right,” said the officer. “Your name?”
“Beth Pratchett.”
“Address?”
“606 Westbrooke Avenue,” she said.
“Occupation?”
“Housewife.”
The officer glanced up and raised an eyebrow. “Did you notice anything about the vehicle?”
This was actually the third time the police had asked her for a description of the attackers. “Lime green Citroën—you know, weird little French car? They’ve probably torched it already. Two young white men in baseball caps.” Baseball caps. A dark suspicion nagged at Beth. Her spine tingled and her heart pounded again. Just nonsense from the war. Twenty years and I’m still seeing ghosts.
“How big were they? Short, medium, tall?”
“I couldn’t tell.”
“Would you recognize them again if you saw them?”
“I doubt it.”
“Thanks,” said the officer, and walked away.
Beth began to walk casually up and down the curb, her eyes scanning the ground. Sure enough, she found what she was looking for and dropped it into her pocket.
* * *
“HOW WAS BOOK-CLUB?” Matt called out from the family room as Beth walked in. There were dirty dishes in the sink, toys scattered across the floor, a muted Detroit Pistons basketball on TV. Half-filled cardboard boxes cluttered the front entryway and Beth cringed at the chaos. Only five more weeks until they moved. She couldn’t wait for it to be over. Matt sat reclined with their youngest, Sarah, asleep on his chest. “You’re late.”
Beth walked over to him and without a word tossed an object down on the coffee table in front of him. It clattered on the wood and rolled to rest beside his foot. Matt lifted himself up, carefully, to avoid waking Sarah, and examined it. “Spent shell casing?” He looked closer. “What kind of book-club meeting is this?”
“A book-club meeting with a drive-by shooting.”
“Jesus!” Matt said. “Are you all right? What happened?”
“Couple of guys in a Citroën shot up Sandy’s house. No one was hurt. I thought Dottie broke her hip, but she looked all right after.”
“Crap,” Matt said.
“Listen, Matt,” said Beth. “Those two guys—you’re going to think I’m crazy, but something about them … they made me think of the desert, of Kuwait.”
“You don’t think—”
“Do you still have your black-light?”
“In the basement,” Matt said. He laid the sleeping baby on a blanket on the floor, her little rump thrust high in the air. She snored softly as the basketball game played on the TV above her.
Matt
had a collection of odd laboratory equipment, medical devices, and old computers gleaned from the University’s property disposition station. He rummaged through three different boxes before he came up with a hand-held black light. They turned off the basement lights and Beth put the spent shell casing under it. Immediately, they saw a splotch of color, glowing bright purple under the black-light. Matt whispered. “I haven’t seen one of these since…”
“1992,” said Beth. “Kuwait City.”
“Sirocco. They’re the only ones that use this type of ammunition. What are those psychos doing in North Revena? Were they after you or something?”
“As far as I could tell, they were trying hard not to hit anyone. Came this close,” Beth held two fingers up, “to hitting Claire. Broke the window. They’ll need a bucket of spackle and a leather repair kit. Everyone was all right.”
Beth and Matt had both been CIA operatives. They met in training and shipped out together, part of the same team. There had been a secret operation in the heart of Kuwait City, after the war, a hopeless mess of a mission cluttered with civilians and camels and enemies jumping out from around corners. It was so highly classified that in twenty years Matt and Beth had not dared to even discuss it with each other. The object of the mission was to capture an enemy operative from an organization known as Sirocco. It wasn’t an Iraqi group, or even necessarily an Arab one. Its members spanned the globe, and shared one common characteristic. Each one carried a brain implant whose only sign was a small metallic port in the back of the skull. The implant offered augmented mental and sensory capabilities, though it compromised free will. Beth never learned what Sirocco’s objective was or how they chose their targets. They were secretive, and shifty. Their MO was to strike without warning and disappear without a trace. They rarely left so much as a shell casing, and in fact marked each one in advance with fluorescent paint, to facilitate night-time cleanup.
The phone rang, startling Beth. She ran up the stairs and searched for it. The baby began to stir and fuss. Finally, on the fourth ring, she found the phone stuffed under a sofa cushion.
“Yes,” Beth said. She scooped up the fussing baby and nursed her absently.
“Hello, Beth, this is Dottie Hensbecher.”
“Hello Dottie,” Beth answered. “How are you feeling this evening?”
“Quite well,” Dottie said. “I hope you’re enjoying our book-club.”
Beth hesitated before answering. “Well, yes, I look forward to each meeting quite a lot.”
“We actually have an extra monthly enrichment meeting,” said Dottie. “There’s some additional reading, and frequently a guest speaker. It’s a smaller, more intimate group. Some of us feel that you would fit in quite well. Can you make it next Wednesday evening, at seven o’clock?”
“Certainly,” Beth said, wondering if Dottie were beginning to suffer from senile dementia. Who would make such a casual phone call on a night like this, never even mentioning that there was a shooting?
“Good. I’ll send you a list of readings,” Dottie answered.
* * *
“I WANT TO make them all dead,” said the strange little boy as he turned in circles on the merry-go-round. There weren’t many children at the park, and Beth’s son Jimmy seemed to enjoy playing with the little freak, so she just nodded and waved from her seat at the picnic table.
“Cute kid,” said Janine. “I always wanted children of my own.” Janine was the only black woman in the North Revena Ladies Literary Society. Today, she wore a bright African print skirt and blouse with a matching head wrap. Beth often wished she could copy Janine’s outfits, with their drama, bright colors, and exotic head coverings. But she couldn’t quite imagine it looking right with her pale skin, freckles, and dark blond hair.
They had the reading material for the enrichment meeting spread before them: journal articles in physics and mathematics and a book on quantum mechanics. Janine had received the same phone call from Dottie the night of the shooting. Sarah lay sleeping in her stroller nearby.
“What I don’t get,” said Janine, “is all these equations on page forty-seven.”
“You really need to study college calculus for that,” said Beth. “And even for someone like me, who did, years ago, it’s pretty complex.” Beth had been a physics major in college, but that was in the distant past. Janine worked at the local WIC office, handing out food coupons to expectant mothers and their children. It was something Beth loved about the book-club. It brought together women from so many different backgrounds. There was a journalist in the group, and a librarian, a veterinarian, and even an exotic dancer. The only thing they had in common was a love of reading. They accumulated knowledge for their own pleasure, cultivating bits of wisdom like never let a tulip go to seed and always bring your own pillow to the hospital when you have a baby along with the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the two other sides. True, the book-club had never read anything as challenging as physics papers before, but this was enrichment, after all. Expectations were higher.
“Don’t you think there’s something odd about this book-club?” said Janine.
“What do you mean?” said Beth.
“Well, I’ve never heard of such a thing as an enrichment meeting, but they’ve been going on the whole time without us knowing about it. What have they got to hide?”
Beth shrugged. “Just a little old-fashioned snobbery, I figure.”
Janine laughed. “I’m going to miss you so much when you move!”
A shout made Beth look up suddenly, her heart pounding. The weird kid knocked Jimmy to the ground and ripped a stick from his hand. The kid’s mother was engrossed in a conversation with another woman and didn’t even look up.
Beth stood up to her full height of five feet, ten inches and stalked over to the scene of the crime. She grabbed the little thief, who must have been four years old at least, and was much bigger than Jimmy, by the back of his OshKosh overalls and lifted him up off the ground. He craned his neck and glanced back at her, showing the white of his eyes like a frightened horse.
“I don’t like the way you play,” growled Beth. “Drop that stick.” He did.
“That’s my stick, dammit!” said Jimmy.
Suddenly, a woman shrieked behind them. “Get your hands off my son!” She ran over and grabbed the boy as Beth lowered him to the ground. “I’m going to call the police!”
Beth went and got a cell phone from her purse. She walked back to the woman, who was busy kissing and reassuring her son, and held it out in the woman’s face. “The number you want is 911,” Beth said. “I’ll wait.”
She stared at Beth, gaping, then pressed her lips together, jerked away, and said, “Come on, Huey, we’re going home.”
Janine doubled over laughing, and Beth smirked. Poor Jimmy cried because his playmate was leaving. Beth scooped up her papers and tapped the edges on the picnic table.
“Did you hear,” Janine said, giving Beth a sidelong glance, “that Barb’s phone was stolen last week, after the shooting?”
Beth remembered the phone, lying half-open on the floor, after Barb had dumped her purse to call the police. She raised her eyebrows. “How odd,” she said. “And unfortunate. That phone was a gift from her husband.”
Beth looked up and Janine was staring at her hard. Beth smiled awkwardly, confused by the sudden intensity of Janine’s stare. Then the moment passed, and Janine glanced away.
* * *
WHEN BETH STARTED with the North Revena Ladies Literary Society, Matt started his own book club. It was for men only, and there were a few differences. Instead of meeting at someone’s house, they met at a local sports bar. Instead of diet sodas and salsa, the fare was beer and pretzels.
And there was no book. It tended to run quite long, and according to Matt’s reports was well attended.
Not that he would have admitted it in front of the guys at his Friday night book club, but Matt actually did read all of Beth’s book-club books. E
ven the ones he claimed were simply chick flicks waiting to be optioned by Hollywood.
This time, Matt had resorted to sitting up late one night with the articles spread out on the dining room table, tapping on a calculator with one hand and occasionally swearing. “Couldn’t you guys have chosen something by John Grisham?” he complained.
“Sorry,” Beth had said. “We’ve read all of John Grisham’s books already.”
Now Beth decided she wouldn’t have minded rereading a Grisham title. Or skipping the meeting altogether. But the truth was that book-club night was her one night a month away from the constant needs and demands of three small children. Finally getting away for one evening made her feel grown up. It made her feel alive, intelligent, stimulated. It left her glowing and downright giddy. It was worth it in spite of the danger. And Beth had to smile at that thought, that a ladies’ book-club meeting could be dangerous. But what were they going to do? Stop meeting?
Honeysuckle and lilac perfumed the evening air as Beth stepped out of her car a month later. Tucked under her arm was a pocket folder full of notes she had taken on the supplemental reading. It still gave her a headache—quantum gravity, wormholes, and relativity. She wore a big sweater, to cover the bulk of the body armor that Matt had forced her to wear tonight. And a Colt 1911 weighted down her purse.
The chemical smell of wood stripper assaulted Beth’s nose as she walked into the sprawling bungalow on North Revena’s fashionable old west side. Plastic draped the floor and furniture in the entryway, to protect it while the woodwork was being restored.
“Beth! We’re in the family room. This way,” said Abby, the hostess. Her shoes clicked on oak floors as she led Beth to the back of the house.
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