She went to the kitchen and had a drink of water, but water wasn’t getting it. An old half-filled bottle of tequila had been brooding in a back corner of a kitchen cabinet for donkey’s years. She took it out, considered a glass, then nipped directly from the bottle. It stung her mouth and throat, but had a positive effect otherwise. She helped herself to more—a sip rather than a nip—and then put the bottle back. She had no intention of getting drunk. If she had ever needed her wits about her, she needed them about her today.
Rage—the biggest, truest rage of her adult life—had invaded her like a fever, but it wasn’t like any fever she had known previously. It circulated like weird serum, cold on the right side of her body, then hot on the left, where her heart was. It seemed to come nowhere near her head, which remained clear. Clearer since she’d had the tequila, actually.
She paced a series of rapid circles around the kitchen, head down, one hand massaging the ring of bruises around her throat. It did not occur to her that she was circling her kitchen as she had circled the deserted store after crawling out of the pipe Big Driver had meant for her tomb. Did she really think Ramona Norville had sent her, Tess, to her psychotic son like some kind of sacrifice? Was that likely? It was not. Could she even be sure that the two of them were mother and son, based on one bad photograph and her own memory?
But my memory’s good. Especially my memory for faces.
Well, so she thought, but probably everyone did. Right?
Yes, and the whole idea’s crazy. You have to admit it is.
She did admit it, but she had seen crazier things on true-crime programs (which she did watch). The ladies with the apartment house in San Francisco who had spent years killing their elderly tenants for their Social Security checks and burying them in the backyard. The airline pilot who murdered his wife, then froze the body so he could run her through the woodchipper behind the garage. The man who had doused his own children with gasoline and cooked them like Cornish game hens to make sure his wife never got the custody the courts had awarded her. A woman sending victims to her own son was shocking and unlikely… but not impossible. When it came to the dark fuckery of the human heart, there seemed to be no limit.
“Oh boy,” she heard herself saying in a voice that combined dismay and anger. “Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy.”
Find out. Find out for sure. If you can.
She went back to her trusty computer. Her hands were trembling badly, and it took her three tries to enter COLEWICH TRUCKING FIRMS in the search field at the top of the Google page. Finally she got it right, hit enter, and there it was, at the top of the list: RED HAWK TRUCKING. The entry took her to the Red Hawk website, which featured a badly animated big rig with what she assumed was a red hawk on the side and a bizarre smiley-head man behind the wheel. The truck crossed the screen from right to left, flipped and came back left to right, then flipped again. An endless crisscross journey. The company’s motto flashed red, white, and blue above the animated truck: THE SMILES COME WITH THE SERVICE!
For those wishing to journey beyond the welcome screen, there were four or five choices, including phone numbers, rates, and testimonials from satisfied customers. Tess skipped these and clicked on the last one, which read CHECK OUT THE NEWEST ADDITION TO OUR FLEET! And when the picture came up, the final piece fell into place.
It was a much better photograph than the one of Ramona Norville standing on the library steps. In it, Tess’s rapist was sitting behind the wheel of a shiny cab-over Pete with RED HAWK TRUCKING COLEWICH, MASSACHUSETTS written on the door in fancy script. He wasn’t wearing his bleach-splattered brown cap, and the bristly blond crewcut revealed by its absence made him look even more like his mother, almost eerily so. His cheerful, you-can-trust-me grin was the one Tess had seen yesterday afternoon. The one he’d still been wearing when he said Instead of changing your tire, how about I fuck you? How would that be?
Looking at the photo made the weird rage-serum cycle faster through her system. There was a pounding in her temples that wasn’t exactly a headache; in fact, it was almost pleasant.
He was wearing the red glass ring.
The caption below the picture read: “Al Strehlke, President of Red Hawk Trucking, seen here behind the wheel of the company’s newest acquisition, a 2008 Peterbilt 389. This horse of a hauler is now available to our customers, who are THE FINEST IN ALL THE LAND. Say! Doesn’t Al look like a Proud Papa?”
She heard him calling her a bitch, a whiny whore bitch, and clenched her hands into fists. She felt her fingernails sinking into her palms and clenched them even tighter, relishing the pain.
Proud Papa. That was what her eyes kept returning to. Proud Papa. The rage moved faster and faster, circling through her body the way she had circled her kitchen. The way she had circled the store last night, moving in and out of consciousness like an actress through a series of spotlights.
You’re going to pay, Al. And never mind the cops, I’m the one coming to collect.
And then there was Ramona Norville. The proud papa’s proud mama. Although Tess was still not sure of her. Partly it was not wanting to believe that a woman could allow something so horrible to happen to another woman, but she could also see an innocent explanation. Chicopee wasn’t that far from Colewich, and Ramona would have used the Stagg Road shortcut all the time when she went there.
“To visit her son,” Tess said, nodding. “To visit the proud papa with the new cab-over Pete. For all I know, she might be the one who took the picture of him behind the wheel.” And why wouldn’t she recommend her favorite route to that day’s speaker?
But why didn’t she say, “I go that way all the time to visit my son?” Wouldn’t that be natural?
“Maybe she doesn’t talk to strangers about the Strehlke phase of her life,” Tess said. “The phase before she discovered short hair and comfortable shoes.” It was possible, but there was the scatter of nail-studded boards to think about. The trap. Norville had sent her that way, and the trap had been set ahead of time. Because she had called him? Called him and said I’m sending you a juicy one, don’t miss out?
It still doesn’t mean she was involved… or not knowingly involved. The proud papa could keep track of her guest speakers, how hard would that be?
“Not hard at all,” Fritzy said after leaping up on her filing cabinet. He began to lick one of his paws.
“And if he saw a photo of one he liked… a reasonably attractive one… I suppose he’d know his mother would send her back by…” She stopped. “No, that doesn’t scan. Without some input from Ma, how would he know I wasn’t driving to my home in Boston? Or flying back to my home in New York City?”
“You googled him,” Fritzy said. “Maybe he googled you. Just like she did. Everything’s on the Internet these days; you said so yourself.”
That hung together, if only by a thread.
She thought there was one way to find out for sure, and that was to pay Ms. Norville a surprise visit. Look in her eyes when she saw Tess. If there was nothing in them but surprise and curiosity at the Return of the Willow Grove Scribe… to Ramona’s home rather than her library… that would be one thing. But if there was fear in them as well, the kind that might be prompted by the thought why are you here instead of in a rusty culvert on the Stagg Road … well…
“That would be different, Fritzy. Wouldn’t it?”
Fritzy looked at her with his cunning green eyes, still licking his paw. It looked harmless, that paw, but there were claws hidden inside it. Tess had seen them, and on occasion felt them.
She found out where I lived; let’s see if I can return the favor.
Tess went back to her computer, this time searching for a Books & Brown Baggers website. She was quite sure she’d find one—everybody had websites these days, there were prisoners doing life for murder who had websites—and she did. The Brown Baggers posted newsy notes about their members, book reviews, and informal summaries—not quite minutes—of their meetings. Tess chose the latter and began scrolling. It did not take her long to discover that the June 10 meeting had been held at Ramona Norville’s home in Brewster. Tess had never been to this town, but knew where it was, had passed a green turnpike sign pointing to it while on her way to yesterday’s gig. It was only two or three exits south of Chicopee.
Next she went to the Brewster Township tax records and scrolled down until she found Ramona’s name. She had paid $913.06 in property taxes the year before; said property at 75 Lacemaker Lane.
“Found you, dear,” Tess murmured.
“You need to think about how you’re going to handle this,” Fritzy said. “And about how far you’re willing to go.”
“If I’m right,” Tess said, “maybe quite far.”
She started to turn off her computer, then thought of one more thing worth checking out, although she knew it might come to nothing. She went to the Weekly Reminder ’s home page and clicked on OBITUARIES. There was a place to enter the name you were interested in, and Tess typed STREHLKE. There was a single hit, for a man named Roscoe Strehlke. According to the 1999 obit, he had died suddenly in his home, at the age of forty-eight. Survived by his wife, Ramona, and two sons: Alvin (23) and Lester (17). For a mystery writer, even of the bloodless sort known as “cozies,” died suddenly was a red flag. She searched the Reminder ’s general database and found nothing more.
She sat still for a moment, drumming her fingers restlessly against the arms of her chair as she did when she was working and found herself stuck for a word, a phrase, or a way of describing something. Then she looked for a list of newspapers in western and southern Massachusetts, and found the Springfield Republican. When she typed the name of Ramona Norville’s husband, the headline that came up was stark and to the point: CHICOPEE BUSINESSMAN COMMITS SUICIDE.
Strehlke had been discovered in his garage, hanging from a rafter. There was no note and Ramona wasn’t quoted, but a neighbor said that Mr. Strehlke had been distraught over “some trouble his older boy had been in.”
“What kind of trouble was Al in that got you so upset?” Tess asked the computer screen. “Was it something to do with a girl? Assault, maybe? Sexual battery? Was he working up to bigger things, even then? If that’s why you hung yourself, you were one chickenshit daddy.”
“Maybe Roscoe had help,” Fritzy said. “From Ramona. Big strong woman, you know. You ought to know; you saw her.”
Again, that didn’t sound like the voice she made when she was essentially talking to herself. She looked at Fritzy, startled. Fritzy looked back: green eyes asking who, me?
What Tess wanted to do was drive directly to Lacemaker Lane with her gun in her purse. What she ought to do was stop playing detective and call the police. Let them handle it. It was what the Old Tess would have done, but she was no longer that woman. That woman now seemed to her like a distant relative, the kind you sent a card to at Christmas and forgot for the rest of the year.
Because she couldn’t decide—and because she hurt all over—she went upstairs and back to bed. She slept for four hours and got up almost too stiff to walk. She took two extra-strength Tylenol, waited until they improved matters, then drove down to Blockbuster video. She carried the Lemon Squeezer in her purse. She thought she would always carry it now while she was riding alone.
She got to Blockbuster just before closing and asked for a Jodie Foster movie called The Courageous Woman. The clerk (who had green hair, a safety pin in one ear, and looked all of eighteen years old) smiled indulgently and told her the film was actually called The Brave One. Mr. Retro Punk told her that for an extra fifty cents, she could get a bag of microwave popcorn to go with. Tess almost said no, then reconsidered. “Why the fuck not?” she asked Mr. Retro Punk. “You only live once, right?”
He gave her a startled, reconsidering look, then smiled and agreed that it was a case of one life to a customer.
At home, she popped the corn, inserted the DVD, and plopped onto the couch with a pillow at the small of her back to cushion the scrape there. Fritzy joined her and they watched Jodie Foster go after the men (the punks, as in do you feel lucky, punk) who had killed her boyfriend. Foster got assorted other punks along the way, and used a pistol to do it. The Brave One was very much that kind of a movie, but Tess enjoyed it just the same. She thought it made perfect sense. She also thought that she had been missing something all these years: the low but authentic catharsis movies like The Brave One offered. When it was over, she turned to Fritzy and said, “I wish Richard Widmark had met Jodie Foster instead of the old lady in the wheelchair, don’t you?”
Fritzy agreed one thousand percent.
- 30 -
Lying in bed that night with an October wind getting up to dickens around the house and Fritzy beside her, curled up nose to tail, Tess made an agreement with herself: if she woke up tomorrow feeling as she did now, she would go to see Ramona Norville, and perhaps after Ramona—depending on how things turned out on Lacemaker Lane—she would pay a visit to Alvin “Big Driver” Strehlke. More likely she’d wake up with some semblance of sanity restored and call the police. No anonymous call, either; she’d face the music and dance. Proving actual rape forty hours and God knew how many showers after the fact might be difficult, but the signs of sexual battery were written all over her body.
And the women in the pipe: she was their advocate, like it or not.
Tomorrow all these revenge ideas will seem silly to me. Like the kind of delusions people have when they’re sick with a high fever.
But when she woke up on Sunday, she was still in full New Tess mode. She looked at the gun on the night table and thought, I want to use it. I want to take care of this myself, and given what I’ve been through, I deserve to take care of it myself.
“But I need to make sure, and I don’t want to get caught,” she said to Fritzy, who was now on his feet and stretching, getting ready for another exhausting day of lying around and snacking from his bowl.
Tess showered, dressed, then took a yellow legal pad out to the sun-porch. She stared at her back lawn for almost fifteen minutes, occasionally sipping at a cooling cup of tea. Finally she wrote DON’T GET CAUGHT at the top of the first sheet. She considered this soberly, and then began making notes. As with each day’s work when she was writing a book, she started slowly, but picked up speed.
- 31 -
By ten o’clock she was ravenous. She cooked herself a huge brunch and ate every bite. Then she took her movie back to Blockbuster and asked if they had Kiss of Death. They didn’t, but after ten minutes of browsing, she settled on a substitute called Last House on the Left. She took it home and watched closely. In the movie, men raped a young girl and left her for dead. It was so much like what had happened to her that Tess burst into tears, crying so loudly that Fritzy ran from the room. But she stuck with it and was rewarded with a happy ending: the parents of the young girl murdered the rapists.
She returned the disc to its case, which she left on the table in the hall. She would return it tomorrow, if she were still alive tomorrow. She planned to be, but nothing was certain; there were many strange twists and devious turns as one hopped down the overgrown bunny-trail of life. Tess had found this out for herself.
With time to kill—the daylight hours seemed to move so slowly—she went back online, searching for information about the trouble Al Strehlke had been in before his father committed suicide. She found nothing. Possibly the neighbor was full of shit (neighbors so often were), but Tess could think of another scenario: the trouble might have occurred while Strehlke was still a minor. In cases like that, names weren’t released to the press and the court records (assuming the case had even gone to court) were sealed.
“But maybe he got worse,” she told Fritzy.
“Those guys often do get worse,” Fritzy agreed. (This was rare; Tom was usually the agreeable one. Fritzy’s role tended to be devil’s advocate.)
“Then, a few years later, something else happened. Something worse. Say Mom helped him to cover it up—”
“Don’t forget the younger brother,” Fritzy said. “Lester. He might have been in on it, too.”
“Don’t confuse me with too many characters, Fritz. All I know is that Al Fucking Big Driver raped me, and his mother may have been an accessory. That’s enough for me.”
“Maybe Ramona’s his aunt,” Fritzy speculated.
“Oh, shut up,” Tess said, and Fritzy did.
- 32 -
She lay down at four o’clock, not expecting to sleep a wink, but her healing body had its own priorities. She went under almost instantly, and when she woke to the insistent dah-dah-dah of her bedside clock, she was glad she had set the alarm. Outside, a gusty October breeze was combing leaves from the trees and sending them across her backyard in colorful skitters. The light had gone that strange and depthless gold which seems the exclusive property of late-fall afternoons in New England.
Her nose was better—the pain there down to a dull throb—but her throat was still sore and she hobbled rather than walked to the bathroom. She got into the shower and stayed in the stall until the bathroom was as foggy as an English moor in a Sherlock Holmes story. The shower helped. A couple of Tylenol from the medicine cabinet would help even more.
She dried her hair, then swiped a clear place on the mirror. The woman in the glass looked back from eyes haunted by rage and sanity. The glass didn’t stay clear for long, but it was long enough for Tess to realize that she really meant to do this, no matter the consequences.
She dressed in a black turtleneck sweater and black cargo pants with big flap pockets. She tied her hair up in a bun and then yanked on a big black gimme cap. The bun made the cap bulge a little behind, but at least no potential witness would be able to say, I didn’t get a good look at her face, but she had long blond hair. It was tied back in one of those scrunchie things. You know, the kind you can buy at JCPenney.
She went down to the basement where her kayak had been stored since Labor Day and took the reel of yellow boat-line from the shelf above it. She used the hedge clippers to cut off four feet, wound it around her forearm, then slipped the coil into one of her big pants pockets. Upstairs again in the kitchen, she tucked her Swiss Army knife into the same pocket—the left. The right pocket was for the Lemon Squeezer .38… and one other item, which she took from the drawer next to the stove. Then she spooned out double rations for Fritzy, but before she let him start eating, she hugged him and kissed the top of his head. The old cat flattened his ears (more in surprise than distaste, probably; she wasn’t ordinarily a kissy mistress) and hurried to his dish as soon as she put him down.
“Make that last,” Tess told him. “Patsy will check on you eventually if I don’t come back, but it could be a couple of days.” She smiled a little and added, “I love you, you scruffy old thing.”
“Right, right,” Fritzy said, then got busy eating.
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