The Best of Sisters in Crime (3 page)

“We’ll never get
a better chance.” Tess ticked off the rationale for the adventure by holding up
the fingers of her right hand, one at a time, an inch from her sister’s scared
face. “Dad’s gone. We’re in the barn. Mom’ll be asleep. It’s a new moon.” She
ran out of fingers on that hand and lifted her left thumb. “And the dogs know
us.”

“They’ll find
out!” Mandy wailed.

“Who’ll
find out?”

“Mom and Daddy
will!”

“They won’t! Who’s
gonna tell ’em? The gas-station owner? You think we left a trail of toilet
paper he’s going to follow from his station to here? And he’s gonna call the
sheriff and say lock up those Johnson girls, boys, they stole my toilet paper!”

“Yes!”

Together they
turned to gaze—one of them with pride and cunning, the other with pride and
trepidation—at the small hill of hay that was piled, for no apparent reason, in
the shadows of a far corner of the barn. Underneath that pile lay their
collection of six rolls of toilet paper—a new one filched from their own linen
closet, and five partly used ones (stolen one trip at a time and hidden in
their school jackets) from the ladies’ bathroom at the gas station in town.
Tess’s plan was for the two of them to “t.p.” their neighbor’s house that
night, after dark. Tess had lovely visions of how it would look—all ghostly and
spooky, with streamers of white hanging down from the tree limbs and waving
eerily in the breeze.

“They do it all
the time in Kansas City, jerk,” Tess proclaimed. “And I’ll bet they don’t make
any big crybaby deal out of it.” She wanted to be the first one in her class to
do it, and she wasn’t about to let her little sister chicken out on her. This
plan would, Tess was sure, make her famous in at least a four-county area. No
grown-up would ever figure out who had done it, but all the kids would know,
even if she had to tell them.

“Mom’ll kill us!”

“Nobody’ll know!”

“It’s gonna
rain!”

“It’s not gonna
rain.”

“We shouldn’t
leave Flopper!”

Now they looked,
together, at the baby bull calf in one of the stalls. It stared blindly in the
direction of their voices, tried to rise, but was too frail to do it.

“Don’t be a
dope. We leave him all the time.”

Mandy sighed.

Tess, who
recognized the sound of surrender when she heard it, smiled magnanimously at
her sister.

“You can throw
the first roll,” she offered.

In a truck stop
in Emporia, Mel Brown slopped up his supper gravy with the last third of a
cloverleaf roll. He had a table by a window. As he ate, he stared with pleasure
at his bike outside. If he moved his head just so, the rays from the setting
sun flashed off the handlebars. He thought about how the leather seat and grips
would feel soft and warm and supple, the way a woman in leather felt, when he
got back on. At the thought he got a warm feeling in his crotch, too, and he
smiled.

God, he loved
living like this.

When he was
hungry, he ate. When he was tired, he slept. When he was horny, he found a
woman. When he was thirsty, he stopped at a bar.

Right now Mel
felt like not paying the entire $5.46 for this lousy chicken-fried steak dinner
and coffee. He pulled four dollar bills out of his wallet and a couple of
quarters out of his right front pocket and set it all out on the table, with
the money sticking out from under the check.

Mel got up and
walked past the waitress.

“It’s on the
table,” he told her.

“No cherry pie?”
she asked him.

It sounded like
a proposition, so he grinned as he said, “Nah.”
If you weren’t so ugly,
he thought,
I just might stay for dessert.

“Come again,”
she said.

You wish, he
thought.

If they called
him back, he’d say he couldn’t read her handwriting. Her fault. No wonder she
didn’t get a tip. Smiling, he lifted a toothpick off the cashier’s counter and
used it to salute the man behind the cash register.

“Thanks,” the
man said.

“You bet.”

Outside, Mel
stood in the parking lot and stretched, shoving his arms high in the air,
letting anybody who was watching get a good look at him. Nothin’ to hide. Eat
your heart out, baby. Then he strolled over to his bike and kicked the stand up
with his heel. He poked around his mouth with the toothpick, spat out a sliver
of meat, then flipped the toothpick onto the ground. He climbed back on his
bike, letting out a breath of satisfaction when his butt hit the warm leather
seat.

Mel accelerated
slowly, savoring the surge of power building between his legs.

Jane Baum was in
bed by 10:30 that night, exhausted once again by her own fear. Lying there in
her late aunt’s double bed, she obsessed on the mistake she had made in moving
to this dreadful, empty place in the middle of nowhere. She had expected to
feel nervous for a while, as any other city dweller might who moved to the
country. But she hadn’t counted on being actually phobic about it—of being
possessed by a fear so strong that it seemed to inhabit every cell of her body
until at night, every night, she felt she could die from it. She hadn’t
known—how could she have known?— she would be one of those people who is
terrified by the vastness of the prairie. She had visited the farm only a few
times as a child, and from those visits she had remembered only warm and fuzzy
things like caterpillars and chicks. She had only dimly remembered how antlike
a human being feels on the prairie.

Her aunt’s house
had been broken into twice during the period between her aunt’s death and her
own occupancy. That fact cemented her fantasies in a foundation of terrifying
reality. When Cissy said, “It’s your imagination,” Janie retorted, “But it
happened twice before! Twice!” She wasn’t making it up! There
were
strange, brutal men—that’s how she imagined
them, they were never caught by the police— who broke in and took whatever they
wanted—cans in the cupboard, the radio in the kitchen. It could happen again,
Janie thought obsessively as she lay in the bed; it could happen over and over.
To me, to me, to me.

On the prairie,
the darkness seemed absolute to her. There were millions of stars but no
streetlights. Coyotes howled, or cattle bawled. Occasionally the big
night-riding semis whirred by out front. Their tire and engine sounds seemed to
come out of nowhere, build to an intolerable whine and then disappear in an
uncanny way. She pictured the drivers as big, rough, intense men hopped up on
amphetamines; she worried that one night she would hear truck tires turning
into her gravel drive, that an engine would switch off, that a truck door would
quietly open and then close, that careful footsteps would slur across her
gravel.

Her fear had
grown so huge, so bad, that she was even frightened of it. It was like a
monstrous balloon that inflated every time she breathed. Every night the fear
got worse. The balloon got bigger. It nearly filled the bedroom now.

The upstairs
bedroom where she lay was hot because she had the windows pulled down and
latched, and the curtains drawn. She could have cooled it with a fan on the
dressing table, but she was afraid the fan’s noise might cover the sound of
whatever might break into the first floor and climb the stairs to attack her.
She lay with a sheet and a blanket pulled up over her arms and shoulders, to
just under her chin. She was sweating, as if her fear-frozen body were melting,
but it felt warm and almost comfortable to her. She always wore pajamas and
thin wool socks to bed because she felt safer when she was completely dressed.
She especially felt more secure in pajama pants, which no dirty hand could
shove up onto her belly as it could a nightgown.

Lying in bed
like a quadriplegic, unmoving, eyes open, Janie reviewed her precautions. Every
door was locked, every window was permanently shut and locked, so that she didn’t
have to check them every night; all the curtains were drawn; the porch lights
were off; and her car was locked in the barn so no trucker would think she was
home.

Lately she had
taken to sleeping with her aunt’s loaded pistol on the pillow beside her head.

Cissy crawled
into bed just before midnight, tired from hours of accounting. She had been out
to the barn to check on her giggling girls and the blind calf. She had talked
to her husband when he called from Oklahoma City. Now she was thinking about
how she would try to start easing Janie Baum out of their lives.

“I’m sorry,
Janie, but I’m awfully busy today. I don’t think you ought to come over . . .”

Oh, but there
would be that meek, martyred little voice, just like a baby mouse needing
somebody to mother it. How would she deny that need? She was already feeling
guilty about refusing Janie’s request to sleep over.

“Well, I will. I
just will do it, that’s all. If I could say no to the FHA girls when they were
selling fruitcakes, I can start saying no more often to Janie Baum. Anyway, she’s
never going to get over her fears if I indulge them.”

Bob had said as
much when she’d complained to him long-distance. “Cissy, you’re not helping
her,” he’d said. “You’re just letting her get worse.” And then he’d said
something new that had disturbed her. “Anyway, I don’t like the girls being
around her so much. She’s getting too weird, Cissy.”

She thought of
her daughters—of fearless Tess and dear little Mandy—and of how
safe
and
nice
it was for children in the country. . . .

“Besides,” Bob
had said, “she’s
got
to do more of her own chores. We need Tess and Mandy to help out around our
place more; we can’t be having them always running off to mow her grass and
plant her flowers and feed her cows and water her horse and get her eggs, just
because she’s scared to stick her silly hand under a damned hen. . . .”

Counting the
chores put Cissy to sleep.

•  •  •

“Tess!” Mandy
hissed desperately. “Wait!”

The older girl
slowed, to give Mandy time to catch up to her, and then to touch Tess for
reassurance. They paused for a moment to catch their breath and to crouch in
the shadow of Jane Baum’s porch. Tess carried three rolls of toilet paper in a
makeshift pouch she’d formed in the belly of her black sweatshirt. (“We gotta
wear black, remember!”) and Mandy was similarly equipped. Tess decided that now
was the right moment to drop her bomb.

“I’ve been
thinking,” she whispered.

Mandy was struck
cold to her heart by that familiar and dreaded phrase. She moaned quietly. “What?”

“It might rain.”

“I told you!”

“So I think we
better do it inside.”

“
Inside?
”

“Shh! It’ll
scare her to death, it’ll be great! Nobody else’ll ever have the guts to do
anything as neat as this! We’ll do the kitchen, and if we have time, maybe the
dining room.”

“Ohhh, noooo.”

“She
thinks she’s got all the doors and windows locked, but she doesn’t!”
Tess giggled. She had it all figured out that when Jane Baum came downstairs in
the morning, she’d take one look, scream, faint, and then, when she woke up,
call everybody in town. The fact that Jane might also call the sheriff had
occurred to her, but since Tess didn’t have any faith in the ability of adults
to figure out anything important, she wasn’t worried about getting caught. “When
I took in her eggs, I unlocked the downstairs bathroom window! Come on! This’ll
be great!”

The ribbon of
darkness ahead of Mel Brown was no longer straight. It was now bunched into
long, steep hills. He hadn’t expected hills. Nobody had told him there was any
part of Kansas that wasn’t flat. So he wasn’t making as good time, and he
couldn’t run full-bore. But then, he wasn’t in a hurry, except for the hell of
it. And this was more interesting, more dangerous, and he liked the thrill of
that. He started edging closer to the centerline every time he roared up a
hill, playing a game of highway roulette in which he was the winner as long as
whatever coming from the other direction had its headlights on.

When that got
boring, he turned his own headlights off.

Now he roared
past cars and trucks like a dark demon.

Mel laughed
every time, thinking how surprised they must be, and how frightened. They’d
think,
Crazy fool, I could have hit him. . . .

He supposed he
wasn’t afraid of anything, except maybe going back to prison, and he didn’t
think they’d send him down on a speeding ticket. Besides, if Kansas was like
most states, it was long on roads and short on highway patrolmen. . . .

Roaring downhill
was even more fun, because of the way his stomach dropped out. He felt like a
kid, yelling “Fuuuuck,” all the way down the other side. What a goddamned
roller coaster of a state this was turning out to be.