The Almost Sisters(66)

I heard nothing, so I said a quick prayer and sped left, running over to Cypress Street. At the next corner, I stopped, hands on knees, head down, trying to get my breath back and listening. Still nothing. Either they were being quiet or I’d picked wrong and was moving away from them. Where could kids go to get a little horizontal in this neighborhood?

There was no place for that sort of nonsense here. If they went down to Loblolly, they’d be one block off the highway, by a gas station. Had they come out for Snickers bars and Slurpees? I shook my head. Hugh would know that that place closed at midnight.

Everything else, for blocks, was only houses. Who lived here?

That was the right question. In a flash I knew exactly where the kids were heading. I knew what was in the bag, too, and I’d been worried about all the wrong things.

I took off again at a fast trot. The kids would be on Crepe Myrtle, but I didn’t want to go all the way around the block. I looked for a backyard with no fence and no doghouse and then cut across.

I pushed through a stand of azaleas, and then I was in Martina Mack’s backyard. It wasn’t fully fenced, but she had a dog run off the back door, and there was a stake with a chain here, too.

I heard Lavender say something, then Hugh’s shushing noise, then stifled giggles. I hoped they wouldn’t wake Martina’s dogs up. She had three or four of them, medium-size browns and brindles with square heads and small eyes. Together they could bark the dead awake.

As I rounded the corner of the house, I saw them. No Jeffrey. I had half hoped he’d gone through Hugh’s room to use the same ladder, but it was only the two of them. I paused, surveying the yard. I’d been a scant few minutes behind them the whole way, but they’d made a lot of progress.

Hugh looked to me like a professional. As I watched, he released a roll of Charmin, holding the end. It sailed up in a perfect arc, streaming a long white tail as it unfurled, soaring straight over a branch of the tall loblolly pine in the center of Martina Mack’s front yard. That whole tree was already well swathed, a crisscross pattern running through the branches, bright white and blazing in the moonlight. The fat gardenia bush beside the mailbox had been swaddled, its white blooms mostly covered so that it looked like a single outsize toilet-paper rose.

The grocery bag lay open on the balding grass, and they’d already deployed at least half the rolls in the giant pack of TP.

“Perfect!” Lavender whisper-talked, admiring Hugh’s toss.

Lav was clearly new to rolling. She threw hers too hard, and the toilet paper broke, the roll thudding and bouncing away across the grass. She bounded after it, lithe as a fawn, her limbs going so suddenly graceful in her leap that it made my heart swell.

They were giddy with pleasure at their own boldness, rolling the house in response to Martina Mack’s horrific baiting of Birchie at the church. As revenge plots went, it was both too mild—given the chance to hurl Martina Mack into the Sarlacc to be digested for a thousand years, I would have been sorely tempted—but also too much. It was wrong to roll the yards of little old ladies, even vicious ones. Especially Martina, who was house-proud. Her tidy nana house had country heart cutouts on the shutters, and she kept her flower beds as beautiful as Birchie’s.

I had to nip this in the bud, but damn, they were having so much fun. Watching them gambol and romp in their astounding innocence, it made me happy, too. I needed a little innocence tonight.

I stepped up onto the low brick porch, sheltered from the moonlight in the shadows of the roof and wall, arms crossed to cover my shirt’s light pink letters. In my all-black outfit, I was invisible inside the darkness, so I gave them another minute. I would make them come back in the morning and apologize and clean it up. But right now I let them have the glory of watching the high arcs of paper unfurl, the stifled laughter, the simple pleasure.

Movement caught the corner of my eye. Beside me the screen door swung stealthily open. The dogs were silent, which could only mean that someone had told them to be silent.

Martina Mack stepped out in a voluminous flowered nightie, knee length, with a matching summer housecoat hanging open over it. Her skinny calves stuck out like leathery twigs beneath the hem, disappearing into huge puffy slippers. Her hair hung around her shoulders in iron-gray witch scraggles. She moved slow and crafty, and the kids, intent on wreaking their small havoc, did not see her any more than they saw me.

Her front lip pulled up like an angry donkey’s, and I saw that she’d taken the time to put her teeth in. She must have been up and seen them from the very start. I was about to speak to her, assure her that we would reverse this process, when I saw what she had cradled in her arms.

I was so shocked to see that double-barreled shotgun that my voice caught in my throat. She raised it, too, flesh hanging down in wrinkled dewlaps from her bare arms. She brought it up to bear in a smooth arc. Not at the sky. Not at the ground. Martina Mack raised the silver barrel, and in her mottled hands the shotgun’s arc of wide aim was pointed right at the children.





15




It wasn’t the heat. It was the humidity—so dense I felt that I’d been suspended in a liquid. Birchville had become Atlantis, and I was launching myself through air gone thick and salted toward that gun. I was so slow. I floated like Digby, every move blunted, rendered harmless as a flutter. The barrel swung up through the gelled air, and it moved slow as well, in a long, endless arc. The steel gleamed cold in the moonlight. The gun was almost all I could see, my vision pinholed to its shine.