Tea Cups & Tiger Claws (40 page)

Dorthea aimed the gun and squinted. Sarah closed her eyes. But then, just before the shot, someone grabbed her arm and jerked her to the ground. She looked up and saw Mack struggle to his feet. He had a pocketknife in his hand. He climbed the sandy, slippery slope toward Dorthea.

Dorthea
fired the gun. Mack flinched, grabbed his left shoulder, and kept climbing. She fired again. His left leg gave way but he quickly recovered and hobbled forward, now just ten feet from the top. Another fiery shot rang out and he fell face first into the dirt.

“
Mack!” screamed Sarah, as she scrambled up to him.

“In my hand…in my hand,” he gasped.
Sarah grabbed the knife. “When she squints, take a step to the right and then charge. Do it now. Do it now!”

Sarah
stood up. Dorthea aimed the gun and squinted. Sarah stepped to the right. Fire exploded from the barrel, but the shot missed. Sarah charged up the hill. Dorthea’s ghostly eyes got big. Sand and rocks shot from Sarah’s churning feet. Dorthea pulled back the hammer. Sarah clawed her way to the top. Dorthea raised the gun. Sarah smashed her closed fists, knife and all, down on Dorthea’s arms and knocked the gun from her hand. Dorthea stumbled forward from the blow. Sarah lunged blindly with the knife and sank it into the top of Dorthea’s shoulder. Dorthea screamed and stood up. The knife handle stuck out of her shoulder like a skinny parakeet. Sarah ripped it from her body, and moved in. Dorthea held up her hands in submission and backed away. Sarah didn’t care.

A
massive explosion, followed by wild screams from the verandah, broke Sarah’s trance. She turned and saw Ernest pointing a rifle at her, the same rifle he’d been marching with since the day he came to the manor. Smoke seeped from its two big barrels.

“Stop!
It’s over!” bellowed Ernest. He stared for a second and then loaded two new shells into the gun.

"Ernest! Ernest!" exclaimed Dorthea. “I need your help, son, I can't move this arm. You need to shoot her and then come help your mother. It's been a hard day, but I've been taking care of my Ernest.”

"Stop, Dorthea! Just this once, just stop!" exploded Ernest, before he melted back and said, "I'm not going to. It's over now. The whole thing is just…well…it's just over…that's all."

“Ernest, you don’t understand. We are this close to getting everything we ever wanted. Everything. You just need to listen one last time.”

"I said no, Dorthea.” He shifted his stance and pointed the rifle more at the ground than at Sarah. “And I mean it…that’s all."

Dorthea kneeled awkwardly
and picked up the gun from the ground.

“I said no!”
yelled Ernest.

She pulled back the hammer.

“No! I won’t allow it!”

Dorthea
aimed the gun at Sarah and, with an explosion that rattled windows, and a flash of light that pierced the canyon from wall to wall, Ernest Dodd shot his mother with an elephant gun. The power of the blast hurled her body twenty feet and dropped her in a mangled heap onto the gravel path between the hedge and rose bushes.

After the initial
terrified screams, complete silence blanketed the scene. The people on the verandah stood motionless and looked at Dorthea Railer and her unladylike predicament. Then Sarah yelled, “Call an ambulance! Someone call an ambulance! Is there a doctor here?”

“Uh…yes…up here. I’ll be right down.”

“Veronica!” yelled Sarah.

“I’m here,” said Veronica, running to her cousin, hugging her, and then saying, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know what to do so I turned on the lights. I thought if she saw everyone looking she’d stop.”

“You did the right thing,” said Sarah. Then, as she started to run back down to Mack, Sarah saw Ernest staring at her. He didn’t say a word and didn’t look like he had a word to say. He just stared with eternal sadness chiseled into his face. Then he dropped his gun and stumbled over to his mother. He fell to his knees and rocked back and forth over the dead, disfigured body. Soon, like a defective bellows, his pumping body produced a small shriek that grew into a loud, desperate wail. Flowing tears blended with the saliva that had ridden the winds of agony to all corners of his red, distorted face. The commingled fluids found a path around his gaping mouth and down his shuddering chin. From his hand fell a large marble. It bounced off a rock, rolled in the dirt, and came to a stop in a red puddle of his mother’s blood.

Suddenly he sat up straight,
took the gun from his mother’s hand, and put the barrel into his mouth. He closed his eyes and pulled the trigger. Click. The revolver was empty. He collapsed onto her body.

Sarah
ran down the hill to Mack.

This account has now come full circle, back to where it started, with the good people of Prospect Park. Did their unpleasant encounter with corruption and murder cause them to change? When their little world started to wobble, did it give them cause to look past the illusion? Not really. Dorthea all but destroyed the family that epitomized everything they stood for and, in the end, it didn’t faze them. They stood on Sunny Slope Manor’s verandah, dressed in ball gowns and tuxedos, and witnessed the sordid climax from beginning to end. And then they went home to their hillside mansions, to their lives of privilege, and resumed their pretense of heaven on earth. And for the flatlanders, always eager to be part of that pretense, Dorthea’s murderous destruction caused shock and disbelief and a fair amount of tongue wagging, but it didn’t stop their gaze up the hill or their dreams about mountaintop palaces of their own.

No, the good people didn’t change…except, maybe, the ones who had been especially close to the fire….

~~~

The latest and hopefully last winter storm of the season had just blown through
, and the little house down by the library felt like a refrigerator. Sarah lay under a pile of blankets where she indulged unkind thoughts about the wall heater. She also cast impatient glances at the lackadaisical alarm clock; Mack was coming home today, and she could hardly wait.

He’d proposed to her from his hospital bed.
When he tried to apologize for the lack of moonlight and violin music and other romantic stuff, she claimed to have a fetish for gauze and antiseptic and said the whole thing couldn’t have been more romantic. Now she had a wedding to plan, and this time she actually looked forward to it.

The doorbell interrupted her thoughts. She crawled out of bed,
wrapped herself in a blanket, and went to answer it.

“Hello cousin
, what do you think?” said Veronica, as she opened her coat and twirled around on the front porch, fashion show style, to show off a bright white uniform with a red patch below the shoulder that said, “Dairy Queen…we treat you right.” Her little white cap had the Dairy Queen logo and said, “The cone with the curl on top.”

“I don’t have time to stay,” said Veronica, “I just wanted you to know that I got a job…
I don’t know how long it’ll last…but I got a job.”

Sarah
, still wrapped in a blanket, stretched out an arm, gave her cousin a hug, and said, “I don’t think you have anything to worry about. Nobody in their right mind would fire Veronica Newfield. And what Dairy Queen manager doesn’t secretly want to have an employee who comes to work in a limousine?”

Veronica glanced over her shoulder
at the limo and said, “I know. I didn’t have the heart to drive myself. Poor Mr. Theo waxes the car five times a day and waits to drive me somewhere. Do you know anyone who needs a chauffeur?”

“Sorry.
Is that Ernest in there?”

“Yes
,” said Veronica, sheepishly. “He wants to be my first customer…and I kind of like him, Sarah. He hates all the things that get me into trouble. He can’t stand snobs, doesn’t care about money, and thinks Vicks Forty-Four is a psychedelic drug—it’s like being friends with a boy scout.”

“Can I tell you something about Ernest?” asked Sarah.

“Ok.”

“He’s a prince.”

“Yeah, he kind of is, isn’t he?”

“More than you know,” said Sarah.

“Well, we are married…I guess,” said Veronica with a shrug and smile. Then she gave her cousin a hug and said goodbye.

Sarah closed the door, hitched up the blanket, and
made a run for the bedroom. She ran past the ugly wormwood posts, the dreaded wall heater, the hodgepodge of religious wall hangings, and jumped back into bed. It felt good to be home.

The End

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