The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady (3 page)

Paula listened to Marylou complain, and her response was, “Get ready! After the pollen comes the mosquitoes and no-see-ums! It’s always something!”

Paula called on Marylou a few times, once bringing her lasagna and another time a key lime pie. When Paula brought the pie, her daughter Rusty came with her, a thin teenager dressed in black, skulking behind her big healthy mother like a dark cloud. When Marylou opened her front door and turned on the porch light, Paula introduced Rusty, who was holding the pie, but Rusty didn’t say a word to Marylou, just stared at her sullenly. The black rings around her eyes looked like she’d drawn them on with Magic Marker.

“Rusty made the pie,” Paula said, thrusting Rusty forward.

Rusty gave Marylou a squinty look. A little leather medicine bag hung on a cord around her neck. “Didn’t make it for
you,
” she mumbled.

“Rusty!” her mother said. “That’s not nice!”

“
I’m
not nice,” said Rusty, but she held out the pie, wrapped in foil and smelling delicious.

“I’m not nice either,” Marylou said. “Join the club.” She knew she
should invite them in and offer them some, but she couldn’t do it. She took the pie, planning to eat the whole thing as soon as she could get to a fork and a table. “Thanks so much, sweetheart!”

At this, Rusty gave her an even colder look. I should hire this kid to kill Wilson, Marylou thought. She could picture Rusty delivering a pie laced with antifreeze. But, no, she wanted the satisfaction of doing it herself.

As Paula and Rusty turned to leave, not being able to tell, apparently, that she was speaking to the Radioactive Lady, Paula invited her to go to church with her family.

“My husband Buff’s the youth minister at Genesis Church,” Paula said. “We’d love for you to be our guest! It’s a big church with a small church feel!”

“Oh God, here we go,” Rusty groaned. She hurled herself off the porch steps, black shirt flapping like bat wings, and darted across the street toward their house.

Paula stood there in her yoga suit, grinning at Marylou, and for a few seconds Marylou seriously considered saying yes right then but finally told Paula she’d think about it. Going to church with Paula’s family might make her feel less lonely, but she hadn’t moved to Tallahassee to make new friends. She had priorities. She had a vermin to exterminate.

So she and Buster walked and rested and walked again. And then one day, with no plan in mind, bereft of courage and inspiration, Marylou got the opportunity she’d been waiting for.

Q: How many times had Suzi been warned?

A: Every time she turned around.

Every time she turned on the TV or opened up a newspaper there were stories about perverts who scooped up children, locked them in closets, tortured them, raped them, strangled them, and buried their bodies in crawl spaces. What
was
a crawl space? And those were just the stories she found on her own, trolling the Internet. She was also warned directly by her parents, by the plastico chick on the evening news, by an Officer Friendly visiting their school who wore a protective puffy suit so he looked like the Michelin man and encouraged the kids to attack him with fury. “If someone tries to grab you, yell
fire
and run! Kick and punch and poke. Even adults you know might have bad intentions. Teachers, scout leaders, ministers, even Father himself. If an adult makes you uncomfortable, get the hell out of there. Tell another adult, hopefully not another child molester. Don’t be fooled by the ploys: ‘Your mother sent me. Help me find my lost puppy! Want some magic dust? Come to my house and drink beer and watch a dirty movie! Want to sleep in my tent?’ Don’t walk to school, or wait for the bus alone. Don’t ride your bike alone. Never be alone.”

But who would’ve suspected that an old woman living in her own neighborhood, a woman who walked her corgi morning and night,
who would’ve thought that this white-haired, slightly humpbacked old woman was the
very person
Suzi should’ve been on guard against?

Suzi had drawn the task of walking their mini poodle, Parson Brown, each morning before school and each evening after dinner, and her mother made her wear a whistle around her neck so she could blow it if someone tried to mess with her. Like a whistle would stop a maniac! Oh well, it showed that her mom cared about her at least a little. Suzi hadn’t blown the whistle in earnest yet, although she’d huffed on it a few times just for fun.

Her mother had also told her to cross the street when she walked past one particular house in their neighborhood, a house where a registered sexual offender in his thirties lived with his parents because he’d just gotten out of jail. But then she told Suzi that she’d done an Internet search and discovered that all the guy had actually done was drug a woman—probably at a bar—and then, you know, taken advantage of her, so he wasn’t a
child
predator, which was the kind they really had to worry about, but even so, be careful! Like drugging and raping anybody wasn’t that bad! The way adults could talk themselves into and out of feeling okay about something always amazed her.

As she walked Parson through Canterbury Hills, Suzi played out scenarios in her head—Ted Bundy Jr. creeping up behind her with a fake cast on his arm—she’d kick him in the nuts and run to the nearest house. A bus full of gangstas offering her a milk shake with date rape drugs in it—she’d throw it in their faces and run to the nearest house. A pimpled geek on a bike exposing himself—she’d blow her whistle right in his ugly face. But never once had she imagined an encounter like the one she was about to have, nor could she have imagined the consequences of it.

It was too bad, really, that everyone tried to scare the crap out of kids about hanging out in their own neighborhoods, because if she didn’t always have to be “on guard,” these walks with Parson would’ve been her favorite part of the day.

On the morning she met the old lady she turned right at the top of her driveway so she could walk past her favorite house—the neighborhood’s original plantation, a two-story white clapboard house built in the 1800s. In their side yard there was a bronze tortoise, which the homeowner had ordered online, as big as a VW Bug. As Suzi and Parson walked past, she surveyed the plantation house and the tortoise and the front porch lined with rocking chairs as if it were her own house, just waiting for her to move in.

Their next-door neighbor John Kane, setting out in his Ford Ranger for his insurance business downtown, gave her a wave and a smile. Suzi waved back, deciding not to attribute his friendliness to a sick and twisted plan. From somewhere in the trees above her came a pileated woodpecker’s nutty laugh. She tried to imitate it and strike up a conversation, but the bird must not have been fooled, because it flew away, a shadow fluttering off through the live oak limbs. Its mother had probably warned it about people posing as woodpeckers.

She turned the corner, and she and Parson went down a small hill, passing a group of middle-aged women who walked together every morning, blabbing and hogging the whole road, then she started down Nun’s Drive, staying under the shaded canopy. She stopped beneath the line of confederate jasmine bushes to inhale their sweet smell, and this was when the old lady and her dog cornered her.

She’d seen this particular woman, in various spots around the neighborhood, a number of times on her walks (Suzi didn’t walk the same way every time, per instruction), and she didn’t pay much attention to her (old ladies are interchangeable), but her dog was cute. Parson thought so, too, and always whined and lunged toward the corgi, desperate for contact. Suzi always managed to pull Parson away and keep walking, but that morning in May, when the two dogs were lunging at each other, the old lady spoke up and said something more than the usual “Isn’t it a lovely day?”

“How about we let them get acquainted?” she said in a twangy
Southern accent, an accent Suzi’s friends referred to as “country.”

“Buster here’s been awful bored with just me for company.”

Suzi—who’d been daydreaming about a certain boy in middle school to whom she was sending carefully plotted mixed signals, Dylan B. (there were four Dylans in middle school) with his shaggy red hair and deliciously round freckled face, calculating how much time she had to spare to placate this old woman before she was late getting home and would be late to school and unable to walk by Dylan’s locker and pointedly pretend not to notice him—decided it would be easier to go along than to be rude, which was, unfortunately, a decision Suzi often made.

The two dogs did their doggy sniffing thing, Parson Brown gradually becoming less interested, turning her head, then her body away, and the corgi, Buster, became more and more frantic trying to get her attention. Note to self, thought Suzi. Here was proof, straight from the animal kingdom. She was always trying to instruct Ava, her clueless older sister, not to seem so
interested
in a boy she liked, but would Ava listen?

“What’s her name?” the lady asked. She wore a straw hat; khaki pants; white long-sleeved shirt; and hideous, puffy white walking shoes. Typical old person. Even though it was May, and in the eighties, we have to keep every inch of our flesh covered! It looked like the old lady had no breasts at all under her shirt.

Suzi wore a denim skirt, flip-flops, and a tank shirt, and she felt suddenly like the sleazy little tramp her mother often suggested she looked like without ever actually coming out and saying it. “Are you going to wear
that
to school?”

The old lady’s blue eyes, in her pale face, were wide and intense. “Your dog’s name?” she said.

Suzi explained the origin of Parson’s name. Christmas, five years ago, they brought the poodle home and they were listening to that song all the time, and it was her favorite, “Winter Wonderland,” the Johnny Mathis version, and she noticed that their new little poodle, sitting on
her hind legs, looked just like the snowman they built in the meadow, hence, Parson Brown, even though the poodle was a girl. She tried to tell this in an animated way, even though she was sick to death of the story. They ought to just rename the damn dog.

“Well, isn’t that cute!” said the old lady, and then, with hardly a pause, “Where do you live?”

Suzi told her, thinking that this woman surely knew already, because she’d seen the woman watching from afar when she and Parson ran down their driveway, but maybe the old woman was just being polite.

“I live on Reeve’s Court,” the old lady volunteered, “down at the dead end, white house with blue shutters.”

Suzi made a polite sound, thinking of her soccer uniform and how she hadn’t assembled the parts yet and how angry it made her mother when she didn’t do it the night before, which she never did because she liked to live dangerously, and, okay, it was entertaining, she had to admit, watching her mother getting angrier and angrier while trying not to, so predictable, but she had to make sure her mother didn’t get too angry, or it would quickly stop being funny and start being scary. Whew. It was hard work being thirteen.

“You have a brother, am I right?” said the old lady.

The two dogs were sniffing each other’s faces now, so Suzi decided to give Parson another few seconds. Buster was so cute, with that long sausage body and little flap ears. If she ever was allowed to get another dog, she wanted a corgi.

“How old is he?” the woman asked her, leaning forward slightly. “Your brother?”

Suzi thought it was a rather peculiar question, but what else to do but answer? She told her about Otis, sixteen, and Ava, who was eighteen, and added that she was thirteen.

“I live alone now,” the old lady volunteered. “I moved here a few months ago when my son got a job teaching at the FSU medical school,
but then he lost his job—long story—and they moved to Houston and here I still am! I reckon I ought to follow them, but I just bought the house and I like Tallahassee.” She stretched her lips out in a sort-of smile.

The old kook must be as lonely as her dog, telling her whole life story to some random kid. And Suzi could’ve sworn she’d seen the woman for years in their neighborhood, but maybe not. “Oh,” said Suzi.

“Mrs. Archer’s my name,” said the woman. “Nancy Archer. My friends call me Nance.”

Nance? What kind of nickname was that for an old lady? Suzi—full name Suzannah—when she turned eleven, had toyed with the idea of making people call her Zan just to piss them off, but decided it wasn’t worth it.

“Who else lives in your house with you and your brother and sister and doggie?” Nance asked her. Buster was busily sniffing a mailbox and Parson was watching him, looking a little forlorn. This was another abnormal question, but Suzi answered it. Mom, Dad, Granddad. And now she really had to go, she said, or she’d be late for school. Nice meeting you!

“Oh, yes. I’ve seen your granddad. Working in the yard.”

Wait. So Nance already knew where she lived and that she had a granddad. But old people did get confused. Maybe she was just asking to make sure.

Nance suddenly reached out and grasped her wrist. “What’s his name?”