How I Spent My Summer Vacation (29 page)

“You’d better keep an eye on him,” I said to the sky above my face. But I had a real sense that the grandma patrol had successfully intimidated her.

“Isn’t anybody going to do anything?” It was Eric again. I could see a long, tall two-headed body. Lucky was still riding Eric’s shoulders. “The old lady bashed Miss Pepper!”

“No…” someone in the crowd said.

“She did! The old lady’s crazy! And look—Miss Pepper’s bleeding!”

“Young man…” But the objections were less emphatic, enough so that I thought perhaps Eric had actually planted a seed of doubt. Maybe I’d reconsider that grade.

“Somebody ought to stop her,” Eric said. “I don’t care if she’s old.”

“Eric, please—” I began, but he couldn’t hear me. I was having a very bad day, and my back was having an even worse one. A splat on the boards is not a therapeutic alternative to a massage. I was probably paralyzed for life. And julienned. A very, very bad day.

“Where’s that cop she called?” somebody asked.

“You know how they are when you need them.”

They could await Norma’s cop along with world peace, and both would arrive at about the same time. I therefore had a chance, a window of opportunity, if only I could open it. My energy pumped back in, fueled by the vision of Norma Evans in pursuit of her imaginary telephone, melting into the traffic, ignored and invisible.

This was no time to be on my back. I rolled over, slowly, and worked my way into an undignified crawl position. Halfway there, I saw a tidy flash of gray about a block away. “There!” I shouted. “She’s—”

“She’s trying to stand up,” a woman explained to the others, as if I were some alien species. “Is that all right?”

Nobody bothered to answer. The little crowd was rapidly losing interest. We had lasted longer than a sound bite.

I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and pushed myself up onto elbows and knees. Norma Evans had disappeared into the horizon. What was visible was Georgette, staring at me and sobbing, her skirts shaking with misery.

“No,” I said. “I’m okay. Nothing bad happened.” I wasn’t sure which layer of her woeful history she was revisiting through the sight of me. “I’ll be fine.” I said it emphatically, and decided that perhaps it was actually so. Or maybe it was the four-footed position. This was how humans were meant to get around, and we’d screwed everything up trying to balance the whole shebang on two legs. Maybe I’d stay this way, start a trend.

“That woman,” I said to Georgette and anyone who’d listen, “that woman in the gray blouse—you can’t let her get away. She isn’t calling the police—she’s escaping. She killed two people.”

“Oh, really,” the scowling woman near me said. “I’ve heard crazy things in my time, but this…”

“Who?” Georgette sniffled, looked around. “What woman?”

Where was Norma Evans? I pushed on my hands and unscrunched into a standing position. My back throbbed out an S.O.S., demanded bed rest and peace, remembered that this was supposed to be my vacation. My bloody side seconded the motion.

I thought of people with broken backs who lifted cars off their injured children, or ran for help on shattered tibias.

But my new Spartan bite-the-bullet determination didn’t help me spot Norma. What I saw instead was a cluster of uncentered turbulence—Lala’s turquoise suit, Belle’s blue back, Tommy in spiffy whites, Eric with Lucky on his shoulders, and Georgette loping in their general direction, although she had a tendency to stop and talk en route.

They were all still moving, which meant Norma Evans was still uncaught but in their sight. I took an experimental step, winced, and clenching my teeth, made a second, slightly less painful move. I could do it. I would do it. I would get her.

“Here he is!” someone shouted. “The cop!”

Norma had actually called the police? I was stunned into immobility, and afraid, suddenly, that I’d made up everything about her. Good lord—maybe what she said was true and I was the criminal. I felt another attack of dizziness.

“Okay, who’s been shouting for help here?” The policeman did not look pleased by the commotion. He was beefy and slow, moving as if his bunions ached. “What’s the ruckus about? What’s going on?” His eyes squinted in suspicion.

“It’s like she told you when she called,” a woman said.

“Who you talking about?”

“That
lady
,” the woman insisted. “She was with this other lady, a younger one, who had a knife. I think she was mugged. The lady who called you.”

The straggly crowd’s attention had shifted to the patrolman, who had every right to be mystified about what was going on, since it was obvious to anyone who wasn’t fixed on Norma’s eternal innocence that she hadn’t called him. I felt some relief.

A burly man who, if he had a single operational brain cell, could have been helping to catch a murderer, instead pointed at me. “It’s her! She had a knife!” he shouted. “But I disarmed her.”

Disarmed me? Picked the thing up off the boardwalk was more like it.

“You still talking about the lady who supposedly called me?” the cop asked.

I backed up, step by step.

The burly man held out the knife. “See? I took it from her.” In a few days he’d probably receive the Mayor’s Award for heroism and believe he’d earned it.

He deserved the booby prize. He brandished the knife, obliterating whatever fingerprints might have been left. Didn’t he know anything? Watch TV or read books?

“Hey,” the policeman said. “If that’s evidence of some crime…”

I backed up more as the crowd moved in to see more clearly, to watch the handing over of the knife to the patrolman.

It was my exit cue. While the patrolman took out a notepad and asked him to explain everything again, I headed for the wings and ran. Or, more accurately, hobbled and staggered, hunched over.

“Hey!” a woman said. “She’s—Wasn’t she out cold? I thought—”

“Stop her!” the knife man called. “She’s the one!”

“The one what?” the policeman asked in his methodical voice.

“The one! The knife girl!”

It had a certain ring, that. Mandy the knife girl. As in, perhaps, knife girls finish last?

“She went after the old lady with a knife.”

“Oh,” the policeman said. “Stop!” He’d finally gotten it. “Stop!” he shouted, loudly enough for me to hear it a half block away. “Stop or I’ll—”

But he couldn’t shoot into a crowd of people. And meanwhile I was nearly at the second commotion, in front of a store with a green-and-white-striped awning.

“She was right here!” Lala said.

“Where?” I could see only my little band of stalwarts and a cluttered souvenir storefront window. And, of course, a lot of red streaks of pain.

“Stop!” the patrolman shouted.

“Maybe she went down the ramp,” Belle said. “Toward Pacific Avenue.” She and Lala and Tommy took off again. Georgette looked the wrong way, surveying the watery horizon. We were not the world’s best posse.

“No! She’s there!” Lucky shouted from atop Eric’s shoulders. He was barely noticed by the rest of what I’d begun to think of as our gang. Being five and ignorable was the story of his life. I followed the trajectory of his index finger. It led behind us, through the window filled with pennants and plastic Miss America and Bert Parks dolls and miniature rolling chairs and inflatable money and shell-encrusted picture frames and a red and yellow plastic globe that said I HAD A BALL IN A.C—and into the store. I wasn’t seven feet up in the air the way Lucky was, so I couldn’t see beyond the display, but the high wall of clutter made the store a perfect place to disappear. And it probably had a back door.

The patrolman approached. Talk about flatfoots. This man was not built for the chase. He waddled, side to side, in obvious foot pain. No wonder he was in such a testy mood. “Avoiding arrest is a serious offense, lady!” he shouted.

Being arrested seemed even more seriously offensive. I was too easy a scapegoat. Another bad girl from out of town, Sasha’s sidekick, trying for a third kill.

“Nobody ever listens to me,” Lucky whined.

“Lucky! Get down from there!” his mother shouted. “You could get hurt!”

“In a minute.” He was beginning to sound like a normal kid, and she like a normal mother.

I reached for the store’s door. It felt too heavy to move. My back pulsated.

“Stop!” It was the knife man taking vigilantism too seriously. “Gotcha!” But he hadn’t got me. Not quite. I pulled the door half open.

This time the man’s hand made contact. Actually, two did. They felt thick and damp and final, one on each of my shoulders.

“Not we!” I shouted. “I didn’t—” No use, no use. I could see through the half-open door that there, at the back of the store, was Norma in huddled conference with a salesperson. I guessed what she was asking, what safe exit she was requesting. And here we were, making a chaotic ruckus and justifying whatever paranoid story she’d tell.

Goodbye, Norma Evans. Hello, lockup.

Except that at precisely that instant there was the bellowing, cracked-voice, adolescent shout of “Go!”

And, almost simultaneously, a fearsome shriek—the long, banshee type that only young, young vocal cords can manage or find intriguing—and through the air, like a trapeze artist without any equipment, like Tarzan without vines, like a wild avenging bird or a cannonball with a five-year-old’s features, flew Lucky.

People screamed and rushed forward to grab him, but he arced down, landing smack on the man grabbing me.

The man bellowed and let go. Lucky, his face radiantly triumphant, clung to his back, pulling on his hair like a baby monkey.

I had never seen anything like it in my life. I applauded.

“Run, Miss Pepper!” Eric shouted. “Get her!”

An A, Eric. An A plus. The kid was a genius. Reckless, maybe, but definitely a creative thinker. My running was not quite as graceful as Lucky’s dive, but I raced into the store, inspired by both boys. If Lucky could ignore the laws of thermodynamics and fly, then I could move fast, ignore my twisted muscles and cuts.

“Stop!” I screamed because the saleswoman, a wrinkled and frightened creature, was pointing through a stack of cartons. That way to freedom, I was sure. The saleswoman relocated her pointing hand to her chest, crossed herself and mouthed a silent, urgent prayer.

Outside, there was a lot of audible scrambling. I could hear Lucky’s piping voice and the deep grumble of the patrolman. I knew what was next. The law would amble in, grab me, and let Norma become history.

The saleswoman could pray all she liked. Norma, a foot or two beyond my reach, was no dummy. She bolted in the direction the finger had pointed.

I had no choice but to do a Lucky.

It gets harder all the time to have the imagination and heart to fly, particularly from a standing position and with a seriously hurting back and side, but I did my best. I visualized myself in the NFL, a quarterback or a tight end, or whoever it was that used his body as a javelin and hurtled. I imagined myself a five-year-old boy with a daredevil’s heart. I even screeched, a la my mentor, and it indeed had a momentary opiate effect.

Just long enough for it to work. Not, perhaps, with grace and elegance. I managed more of a splat than a soar, but the thing is…I grounded her.

I grounded her and then, because I’d had a very long day and it definitely seemed time to relax, I sat on her. She was as comfortable as an ergonomic chair, and my back didn’t feel half bad.

The saleswoman sobbed, even though at this point crying seemed redundant and unnecessary. Even the dunderhead policeman would surely be swayed when he saw the contents of Norma’s pocketbook. I was sure she had been en route to her disappearance, and whatever she’d taken must be close to her person.

“Look, look!” the saleswoman cried. I had brought down more than Norma. We now sat and lay, respectively, amongst the porcelain shards of playing-card salt and pepper shakers and a music box, which had become excited by its plunge and played “By the Sea, By the Sea” in a tinny up-tempo while miniature bathers in 1890 suits twirled under a beach umbrella.

* * *

“My hero,” Mackenzie said later that evening, when I was allowed to violate visiting hours partially by virtue of having become an emergency room patient myself. “Notice my nonsexist language,” he added.

Half my side was bandaged and the other half was black and blue; my back felt as if it contained a large, electrically charged metal plate; my green blazer was ruined; and the saltwater people were not rehiring Sasha, which meant the two of us were stuck with the hotel bill.

“I have to be honest,” I said. “You make a pretty shabby Nero Wolfe. I was supposed to do a little footwork, that was all, then we were supposed to gather all the suspects around this bed. And then, you’d tell them who the guilty one was, and that guilty one would crumple.”

“I must have forgotten.” He looked almost sympathetic. His color was completely back, and his smile once again unfairly dazzling. “I would have helped you tomorrow, if you’d waited. They’re releasing me.”

“Sasha’s getting out, too,” I said. “It all worked quite tidily, don’t you think? You’re shot, she’s imprisoned, and I’m embarking on a life of chronic pain. This qualifies as the world’s worst vacation ever.”

“If, that is, I can establish that I have somebody to, well, kind of…” It wasn’t like Mackenzie to be coy or evasive. “Well, see,” he said, “I can’t move the leg for a while now, so I’m going to have some trouble takin’ care of…of ever’thin’. Of me.”

His eyes were back to their neon-blue and laugh lines—or perhaps slightly anxious lines—fanned out from them while he waited.

I spoke very softly. We were on thin and uncertain ground. “I assume that your medical coverage would handle a visiting nurse, wouldn’t it?”

He nodded.

“So this isn’t about saving money, as in C for cheap?”

He shook his head. “No, on both counts.”

“Or about having an in-house slavey?”

He shook his head so vigorously his salt and pepper curls bounced. “You’re a regionist. Unfair to the South and its people.”

His accent escalated even though he appeared semiconscious on the surface. “As an experiment?” he asked softly.