“I like my cat, too,” Miss Edgerton said. “Nobody can be completely without sense if they truly love a cat.”
~ * ~
Lunch was at eleven o’clock. Shelley didn’t eat it. After she was finished in the office, she went down the corridor and out the side door, to the teachers’ parking lot. She looked up and down the rows until she found Miss Edgerton’s car. Then she walked through the planters until she was standing beside it. It had not changed since the last time she’d seen it. There was no reason why she should have expected it would. It was still dark blue, and it still had the cat carrier in the back seat. The carrier’s door was propped open now, though, to make it easier for Miss Edgerton to get Edelweiss inside it when it was time to go. All the doors were locked, and the trunk was locked, too. Shelley tried it. Whatever she was going to do next, she wouldn’t be able to hide in the back seat or the trunk until Miss Edgerton decided to go home.
She walked around the car a few times. She sat down on the concrete bumper that defined the parking space inside its two white border lines. The teachers’ parking lot was full of these bumpers, although the student parking lot had none. Shelley had no idea what they were for. She didn’t know how to drive, and it if was up to her mother, she never would.
She walked around the car again, and again, and again. She felt dizzy, but she didn’t want to stop. She thought of going into Miss Edgerton’s house when Miss Edgerton wasn’t there, but the cat was. She’d been doing that long before Amanda had moved to Matahatchee and had come up with the idea of killing off Miss Edgerton, and not just Miss Edgerton, but lots of people, all the people who deserved to die. Shelley would have thought of it on her own, though, eventually, because when she was in Miss Edgerton’s house and it was quiet and cool and dark, she sometimes imagined Miss Edgerton dead, on the floor, on the couch, stone cold and unable ever to come back to life again. Every once in a while, she even dreamed of it. She turned over in bed and there she was, in her head, in that house, with the body cold in the bathtub or the garage or someplace else out of the way. She sat down at the kitchen table, and Edelweiss came up to sit in her lap. She lay down in the big queen-size sleigh bed — why did Miss Edgerton have a bed that size, when she was the only one who ever slept in it?— and Edelweiss came to lie across her stomach. It was not stupid to love a cat, Shelley thought, if you loved it the right way. It was only stupid to treat a cat as a child. She was sure she would never treat Edelweiss as a child, if Edelweiss was her own. The only problem would be her parents, who did not like the idea of a pet in the house. They didn’t like the idea of Edelweiss, either. When Edelweiss came across the yard to look for Shelley, Shelley’s mother would shoo it back home. Cats bring lice, Shelley’s mother always said. Then she gave Shelley a lecture on why it was more important, and more Christian, to love your fellow human beings instead of a cat.
The best thing, Shelley thought, would be to kill Miss Edgerton where nobody could see it and to hide the body where nobody could find it. That way, it could be months before someone came along to do something about the house, or the cat. She wouldn’t even have to worry about the grass growing out of control. Miss Edgerton didn’t have grass. She had pebbles in decorative colors, the way a lot of people did, so that they didn’t have to look at brown and dying lawns during the long months of water rationing in the summer.
Shelley got up from where she was sitting, walked around the car again, and sat down again. When she put her hands into the thick warm air, she could feel Edelweiss’s fur on her fingers. Buried in the white like that, her fingers looked as dark as sand.
~ * ~
It was ten minutes after twelve when Miss Edgerton came out of the building and headed for her car. Shelley was still there, in the parking lot, making no sense at all, and for a single frightened moment she thought that Miss Edgerton would not be alone. Mr. DeVoe would be with her, surely, or Miss Lazio would walk her out. That was the kind of thing adults did with each other. Shelley looked around, but the parking lot was deserted. So was the space at Miss Edgerton’s back. There was only Miss Edgerton, carrying the cat.
“Miss Altman?” Miss Edgerton said.
Shelley had only been called “Miss Altman” before by teachers— schoolteachers or Sunday-school teachers — and then because she was about to be in trouble. She blushed four shades of red and looked directly into Edelweiss’s eyes. He looked miserable. He looked as if he knew what was about to happen to him. And why shouldn’t he know? He’d probably been put in the car, and the cat carrier, often enough.
“I wasn’t doing anything,” Shelley said. “I was just —just —”
‘Just what?”
‘Just looking for somebody to give me a ride. Out to Grandview Park.”
“Grandview Park?” Miss Edgerton blinked. She had her keys in one hand. She had Edelweiss in the other, tucked under her arm like a loaf of bread. She got the back passenger door open and reached for the cat carrier. “Why ever would you want to go to Grandview Park?”
If Edelweiss had been her own cat, Shelley would never have put her in the cat carrier. She wouldn’t even put her in the car, if she didn’t like to drive places. She stared stupidly as Miss Edgerton got Edelweiss into the carrier. Why ever would she want to go to Grandview Park?
“Shelley?” Miss Edgerton said. “Why do you want to go to Grandview Park?”
“Oh,” Shelley said. “Well. My mother’s there. For the afternoon. You know. She does nature stuff.”
“Does she? I wasn’t aware of that.”
“Oh, yeah. She does. She always has. You know. Since college. She went to Agnes Scott, did you know that?”
“No.” Edelweiss was hunched down in the carrier, making a noise like an angry purr. Shelley had to hold herself back from trying to rescue her.
“Well,” Shelley said. “She did. Go to Agnes Scott. And now she does nature stuff. And she’s out at Grandview and I’m supposed to meet her there. Except my ride isn’t here.”
“Who is your ride?” Miss Edgerton asked. “Possibly we could phone him.” She reached into her bag and came out with a cell phone.
“I don’t know her name,” Shelley said quickly. “It’s somebody my mom knows at the Methodist church. I mean, I know her first name. It’s Elizabeth. I just don’t know her last one. If you see what I mean.”
“I see that this seems to be a very disorganized undertaking,” Miss Edgerton said. “Are you always this confused about your plans? Is your mother always this confused? She keeps such a nice house. I wouldn’t have imagined she wasn’t meticulous about her arrangements.”
“There’s never been any problem before,” Shelley said, wondering when, exactly, this before was supposed to have taken place. The last time she’d been out to Grandview Park, she’d been ten years old and on a hike with the United Methodist Church’s Girl Scout troop. That was when her mother was still insisting that she belong to the Girl Scouts, before it turned out the Girl Scouts didn’t have anything against atheists joining, or gays. Then Shelley’s mother had gone on a long tirade about how she should have known it all along. Girl Scouts were always such tomboys. They hiked and tied knots. They were as masculine as lady wrestlers.
Miss Edgerton was standing by the side of her car. She had her keys in her hand. She had her jacket over her shoulders as if the day was a cool one instead of a lethally hot one. She squinted in the sun.
“I suppose there’s no reason for me not to drop you off, if you have to go,” she said. “But I do worry about what your mother is likely to say. I’m sure she doesn’t want you driving around with strangers.”
“You’re not a stranger,” Shelley said. “You live next door.”
“Yes,” Miss Edgerton said. Then she got in behind the wheel and popped the locks on the two doors that were still closed.
Shelley closed the door next to Edelweiss’s cat carrier and opened the one to the front passenger seat. Behind her, she could hear the cat making that same low growl, miserable
and angry. Shelley knew she would be miserable and angry, too, if somebody had put her in a cage.
~ * ~
It got too much to listen to after a while. Shelley could hear the low tortured growl over the sound of the Volvo’s engine, even over the hum of National Public Radio, which seemed to have nothing else on it except people talking endlessly about things that didn’t make much sense. All the radio stations Shelley had ever listened to either played music or Rush Limbaugh. When Rush Limbaugh talked, he sounded excited, not hushed and secretive like these people here. Shelley tried to concentrate on the conversation — about gardening, and whether it was better to grow vegetables or flowers — but finally she couldn’t stand it anymore. She had to make Miss Edgerton stop.
“It’s not as if I mean to make the cat suffer,” Miss Edgerton said. “I put her in the back like that because it’s the best place for her. She’s safe there. If I put her up on the seat, she rocks the carrier until it falls over.”
“It’s all right,” Shelley said. They had stopped near the curb on one of those long stretches of two-lane road that were everywhere in this part of Florida. Palm trees lined the sidewalks on both sides, but nothing else did. Shelley looked around as she was getting the cat carrier out to put on her lap in the front seat, and there was nothing to see. The nearest house was blocks away, except you couldn’t call it blocks because there weren’t any blocks. The nearest gas station was half a mile down the road. She shut the back door and climbed into her seat with the cat carrier in her hands. She got her seat belt on and her arms around the carrier. She could put her fingers through the grille at the carrier’s front, the little cage part. Edelweiss nipped at her, causing no pain.
“She really is quite all right in the back,” Miss Edgerton said. “She doesn’t like it, it’s true, but we can’t always like all the things we have to do. I’m sure you don’t like all the things you have to do.”
“She doesn’t know any better,” Shelley said, although that was not what she meant. Edelweiss seemed to her to know better than just about anybody.
Miss Edgerton got back on the road. It wasn’t very far to Grandview Park now. If Shelley had ignored the noise, the cat would not have had to suffer any longer than a few more minutes. Still, Shelley felt better. Edelweiss had stopped nipping her fingers and begun to nuzzle them. She had stopped making that noise that sounded like agony.
Grandview Park announced itself with a tall gate that was always open, with a latticework arch above it that spelled out its name in metal letters. Miss Edgerton turned the Volvo into the drive and went in for the five hundred or so feet that were possible before all traffic had to stop. It was not really a park. It was a “wilderness area,” designated as such by the federal government, and set aside to remain completely undeveloped. Like the Everglades, its only purpose was to exist. Shelley got out of the car and looked around. There was no sign of Amanda she could see. There was no sign of anything except a narrow trail leading in through the Spanish moss and the high grass. Shelley shifted from one foot to the other, unsure what to do.
Miss Edgerton got out of the car. “Your mother doesn’t seem to be here. There’s no car parked anywhere I can see.”
“It’s probably parked around the other side.”
“Let’s go there, then.”
“Oh, no,” Shelley said. “That’s not necessary. I know where she goes. It’s easy enough to reach from here. It’s just —”
“Yes?”
“Well, if you wouldn’t mind, walking in with me? I get a little spooked by the stuff, you know. Bugs and things. And there are alligators.”
“If there are alligators, you shouldn’t go in at all.”
“Oh, the alligators aren’t roaming around loose. I mean, they are, but they live at the bottom of this clifflike thing, you know, and they never come out where they’re going to bother you. My mother comes out here bird-watching and stuff all the time.”
Shelley rubbed the side of her face. She had no idea what she was saying. The park could be crawling with alligators. There could be an alligator behind every bush. She really did not remember, in any detail, the last time she had been here, except that she had sat down on a path and cried when she found out they hadn’t brought any Coke. She should have brought a different kind of coke. That would have been the best idea. She looked around. She wished she knew where Amanda was. She wondered if she could do this on her own, and then decided she had to. If she had closed her eyes at just that moment, she could have seen Miss Edgerton dead again, this time on the overgrown grass, with alligators coming toward her.
Miss Edgerton looked from one side of her to the other, and then up the path. There was nothing to see there. The trees were too thick. So was the grass. So was the Spanish moss. When you looked up the path, all you saw was darkness.
“We’ll bring Edelweiss,” Miss Edgerton said suddenly. “I don’t like to leave her in the car very long in this heat. She’ll get dehydrated. Bring me the carrier now, and show me the way your mother will have gone. We’ll walk for a while, but if we don’t find her soon we’ll go back. I’m not going to have you wandering around a swamp in central Florida on your own.”
Shelley snatched Edelweiss in the carrier and came around the side of the car. Miss Edgerton took the carrier and nodded toward the path.
“You lead,” Miss Edgerton said. “You’re the one who knows where we’re going. And call out. Maybe your mother will hear us and show us some mercy.”
“Right,” Shelley said, looking back at Edelweiss in the carrier. All she could see were the eyes in white fir, eyes as black as the asphalt pebbles that sucked up onto the road every year in the worst heat of the summer.
She turned toward the path and started in, her stomach turning, her head full of fuzz. Now that the moment was here, she could barely think at all. She needed Amanda to be here, and Amanda was not. Amanda would know what to do. As it was, all Shelley could manage was to walk steadily forward, into the trees, into the brush, and to imagine, as she had always imagined. For some reason, though, she couldn’t seem to imagine Miss Edgerton dead— she couldn’t imagine Miss Edgerton at all. It was as if Miss Edgerton had never existed. All Shelley could concentrate on was the light on Edelweiss’s face as she let her out of the cat carrier and into the daylight. You shouldn’t keep an animal caged, Shelley thought, you really shouldn’t. Not even to ride in a car. If there was no way for Edelweiss to be safe in a car without a carrier, then she and Edelweiss would walk everywhere they went. They would start by walking home, as soon as Miss Edgerton was dead.
You shouldn’t keep an animal caged, Shelley told herself virtuously, one more time. And then something hit her hard, on the back of the head.
~ * ~
Farther back on the path, Miss Edgerton stopped and put the cat carrier down next to her feet. She had seen the poker arch and Shelley’s body fall, but she hadn’t witnessed the details of the wound, and she had no intention of doing so. That was why she had her helpers in the first place. She needed someone to handle the messy parts, and she had never much cared for the sight of blood. Now she waited patiently while Amanda walked farther up the path and threw the poker into the brush. Then she came back into view, stripping off her white cotton gloves. There was a time when women everywhere wore white cotton gloves as automatically as they wore panties, but those days were dead and gone, and Miss Edgerton knew it.
“Well,” she said.
“She wasn’t paying any attention,” Amanda said.
“They never do,” Miss Edgerton said. “They get distracted by the cat. I’d better give you a lift home, or people will start wondering where you are.”
She turned around and went back down the path, toward her car. She did not look back at Amanda, and would not have, no matter what she thought the girl was doing. She got to the car and put the cat carrier in the back seat, where it belonged. She got behind the wheel and waited. Amanda would want to look at the body, to prod it, to make sure of it. S
he’d been at this only six months, and this was only her third adventure.
Miss Edgerton could remember when she had been at this for only six months — but that was decades ago, and she had been younger then.
<
~ * ~
WILLIAM HARRISON
Texas Heat
From The Texas Review
Carla met him first: an oddly handsome, tall, grinning cowboy type with large red hands. He introduced himself as Boomer Smith and said he grew up in Harlingen and the valley, but moved around these days chasing deals. He wanted a nice house out in the hill country, he said, with a pool, a view, and, if possible, stables.
Carla told her partner, Mary Beth, about him. They owned a small realty company, Lantana, out on Highway 290, west of Austin, and specialized in small ranches.
“He bring a letter from a bank?” Mary Beth asked. “He sounds too good to be true.”
“Said he’d pay cash. But he also said we could check his credit, though I haven’t done it. I think we’re talking a buyer who’ll spend a million or two.”
The Best American Mystery Stories 2006 Page 11
