“Another myth shot to hell,” she said. “I’m strong. I work out. I lift weights. A woman alone has to be able to take care of herself. You aren’t much of a reporter, are you, Hildy? Came to find out about me and you didn’t learn the first thing.”
“I didn’t—I was trying to find out about him. Jesse. I never connected you with—”
“Nonsense,” she said.
“Help!” I shouted.
“Testing me?” She gave the knife another jab. Once again I told myself that if she were wounding me seriously I wouldn’t feel it this much, that superficial cuts hurt worse than deep ones because with the latter, the nerve was severed. Therefore, even as I felt the wet warmth of my own blood—therefore, I had to stifle my panic and understand that I had no more than a paper cut on my side. Several paper cuts. That’s why I hurt like hell.
I glanced down, just to check that no vital organs were now on the outside. What I saw was a small but growing rusty stain wending its way between the green linen fibers of my blazer. My jacket’s ruined, I thought inappropriately.
I controlled the urge to bawl.
I was less able to stifle a ridiculous flood of household hints that flashed onto my mental screen. Ought to get this into cold water. Pour baking soda on it—or was it club soda?
I was obviously losing my mind, worrying about laundry problems when I was being knifed.
And nobody turned to look, to wonder, to speculate on what my words—or the stain—meant.
Norma chuckled, a sound that made me shudder. But then, over the mildly insane laughter, I heard an Ethel Merman boom of a voice from somewhere behind me.
“How’m I supposed to find his mother, a woman I never saw?”
“Lala!” I shouted. “Help!” I could almost see my words absorbed by the noise of the machines, the clothing of the players, the distance.
But I had caught someone’s attention. A man actually looked up from something called a Triple-Play. “Need help?” he asked. His eyes, however, were on Norma. Nonetheless, I nodded, vigorously. “She has a kni—” Norma pressed and spoke right over me. “It’s all right.” Her voice was soothing, telegraphing not to worry, all was well, as long as all was in her hands. “She’s had these attacks since she was fifteen,” she said. “Chronic hysteria. Takes time and fresh air.”
The man looked from the great gray and solid woman to me.
“What kind of a mother leaves her little boy alone, anyway?” It was Lala again, somewhere close.
“Lala!” I screamed.
“Lala? Jesus.” The man twirled his finger in a small circle next to his head, using the universal sign for insanity. He whistled softly, then nodded sympathetically at Norma. “I don’t envy you,” he said. Of course. Who was he going to believe? Stability itself or incoherent, screaming, tear-streaked, and disheveled me? Lala’s parents chose a bizarre moniker—and it would cost me my life.
Norma jabbed me again. I was going to look like a scored piece of meat. I was going to be a scored piece of meat. “Absolutely no more screams.” Norma’s mouth was close to my ear. “Cut it out, or I will. Get it?” She laughed at her grisly pun. “You’re not even smiling,” she said. “But I, myself, find my wordplay side-splitting. Get it?” I felt mildly ill, couldn’t bear thinking about my split side, my injuries, my bleeding, and what they might mean. Not to mention my back, which at this point, all on its own, was enough to paralyze me with pain. I nodded woozily. We must have looked like mildly drunk women, steering ourselves toward the exit.
“I was really surprised to see you—little Hildy Johnson, from McKeesport, Pennsylvania, and formerly of His Girl Friday—showing up in a bar in Atlantic City? What an incredible coincidence, and what a stroke of luck. I never thought I’d find you again, although I wanted to.”
“I get around, so what? And why would you want to see me again?”
She pulled the outside door open and shoved me through it. “You stole a tape,” she added, as if that act were the very heart of the problem.
I instinctively pulled back, to express amazement, but she had me in her grip too tightly. “It wasn’t like it had state secrets on it,” I said. “The whole world was supposed to see it.”
We were outside now, on the boardwalk. I eyed the crowds.
Nobody eyed me back with any real interest. I felt again how alone a person could be no matter the numbers around her. I knew that if I screamed and Norma remained calm, looking like somebody caring for me, passersby, who didn’t want to be involved in the first place, would happily accept the idea that they weren’t needed and would move on. And then Norma would kill me with her stiletto. It seemed wiser to stay alert and see what she had planned next. Surely she didn’t intend to do away with me while this many witnesses were around. Since they weren’t gambling at the moment, they’d pay attention to a capital crime happening in front of their eyes, wouldn’t they?
She turned and stood in front of me now, as if in intense conversation, and the knife was rerouted to just below where I put my hand when I pledge allegiance to the flag. I tried to decide whether I could pull her off me with my one good arm and my very bad back faster than she could slice my heart.
“Let me go,” I said in a reasonable voice. “You’re outside now. You can leave.”
“Did you make a copy of that tape?” she asked. “Tell me the truth.”
“Are you telling me this is about pirating laws? I don’t get it. I’m sorry, but it was boring. Why on earth would I copy…?” But given that she was, as they say, in my face, almost literally, I thought about hers. That ignorable, forgettable face had been on the tape.
Somebody with the tape could identify her. Give the police five minutes of talking heads—her talking head. Otherwise, she was a woman no one would clearly remember, a woman who could disappear in a moment, and undoubtedly had planned to do just that. Maybe still did.
Her breath on my face was minty. “Jesse thought I’d be perfect. People would identify with me, he said. He was right. I was perfect. A pathetically perfect target for him. So yes. That was me playing me, telling the entire world that I was a single, self-supporting fool who invested her savings—all her savings—in Jesse Reese’s no-fail fund. That was his form of pension plan. He added to the amount twice a year, too. But who cares? He was leaving, skipping out, taking it all. Of course, when we filmed that, I had no idea he planned to rob me of everything.”
Of course. It wasn’t about pirating or love or power. How had I not realized that the same terror I felt and Lala felt and Lucky’s mother probably felt was driving Norma Evans as well? None of us wanted to wind up penniless and alone. And of the two options, alone was by far the preferable one. That’s all it was, and it was everything and all around me, like a message being shouted in Sensurround for days now—and I had missed it. I didn’t exactly feel sorry for her, but I did see her for the first time, and understand at least a bit of her. “How did you find out about what Jesse was doing?” I asked her.
She looked in pain herself. “That was the worst part. He didn’t even try to be subtle about it—as if he didn’t remember that I’m the one who took care of his life. That I knew every one of his secrets—his other secrets. Suddenly, he acted like I was an idiot—me! Like I was the same as everybody else. As if I wouldn’t notice that he was keeping his passport in his briefcase, or that he’d packed up his wife’s photograph, or—this was the giveaway—that he agreed to appointments with threatening lawyers and a bunch of really angry old people who were suing. For seventeen years he’d made me tell people he was out of town or already busy or otherwise unavailable if it was going to be a sticky situation. I always had to force him to deal with reality. He made sure it was next to impossible to see him when he didn’t want to be seen. Then suddenly, we had real problems—disaster looming—and he’d say sure, schedule them for next Tuesday, for June the tenth. Everything he wanted to avoid was scheduled—no problem—on June tenth or after, until I knew that he was going to disappear
on June ninth.”
She had one hand on my shoulder and the other, the knife hand, to my diaphragm, and she leaned in close, her face twisted with rage. To anyone passing by—to all the people passing us by in wide arcs—we looked like a local nuisance to be avoided.
I kept scanning them, however, looking for an expression of human concern. Human curiosity. Who is that woman being chewed out on the boardwalk, Mom? I thought I saw Eric Stotsle and a small dancing figure that could be Lucky up ahead. They’d been freed.
“But did Jesse Reese ever once say you must know what’s going on, Norma, but don’t worry—I’ve taken care of you, protected you? Did he say you won’t wind up without a job, without a cent, living out of a shopping cart? Did he care? Like I was invisible—or didn’t matter—he was going to rip me off along with everybody else! Or else he thought I was as dumb as his wife.”
“So you called her. Became partners, a team.”
“Why not? We had similar concerns. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that if your no-good husband skips the country with all the money anybody ever gave him—less the part he lost at the tables, of course—you’re never going to have your precious store.”
Those Reeses were really bad at picking partners.
“Besides,” she said, “together we could take him. She was the one could doctor his drink, invite him up for a quickie, as he called it. I surely couldn’t. But I’m strong. I could finish it. I made up some stupid pretext. Papers he forgot to sign. He didn’t pay enough attention to me to care. She was fine, until after, until she changed her mind about the fifty-fifty and wanted it all. She was the wife, she said. She was going to frame me and keep everything except for a pittance.”
It was amazing how wonderfully this two-time murderer distinguished between transgressions. Taking lives was a necessity, but taking money was serious.
“Since her accident, Poppy had painkillers that could stun a mule. We were going to make it look like a mugging—until we saw your friend. The hair, the room—it was perfect. Destiny.”
“You went in while the maid was turning down the beds, didn’t you? And stayed till she left, and wedged the door so it wouldn’t lock.” Why did I have to ask that? Why did I care, unless I wanted a tombstone that said, “She figured some of it out.”
Norma shrugged acknowledgment. Her mind was on the future, not the past. “Now,” she said, “we’re going around the corner.”
I felt the knife point at what I thought was my breast bone, and I froze in place. I really, truly, didn’t want to test out how penetrable or not that portion of my anatomy might be.
“Why?” I knew the answer. With great frugality, she was going to recycle her original mugging plan. Once off the boardwalk, Atlantic City’s untended streets are great places to get rid of somebody, and this time Norma could handle the job all on her own. And no Mackenzie to the rescue.
I knew I should have paid more attention in geometry. If only theorems would have mentioned times like this—times when the issue of whether a knee raised to a forty-five-degree angle is on the proper trajectory, and whether the impact of said knee would push the hand of the kicked forward or backward—seemed of vital importance. Or was that physics?
Too late to find out, except by experiment. I took a deep breath, looked her in the eye, and raised my knee as hard as I could, as fast as I could.
It didn’t have the same dramatic effect as it would have with a man. All the same, it surprised her and threw her off balance, which was enough. Her grip on me loosened, and I pushed and kicked. Even better, her grip on the knife also loosened. It clattered to the boards as she staggered back.
“Lookit!” A ten-year-old boy in a T-shirt that reached his knees stared at the knife covetously.
“Get over here, Tyler!” a woman in yellow screamed. “Right now!”
I raced to the knife. No pain, no gain, I told my back as it screamed in protest. No pain, no life. I put my foot on the knife. The boy galloped away.
Now, people were paying a little more attention. They stood back warily and kept their distance. “Somebody call the police!” I shouted. “Stop that woman!”
The two women nearest me looked puzzled by my remark. “Stop who?” one of them finally said.
The other shook her head. “She’s crazy,” she said. “Leave her alone.”
“Lucky?” A high-pitched voice called his name. “Lucky, where are you? It’s Mommy!”
“You better find him,” a familiar voice warned her. “It’s not right for a mother to leave her kid—I should tell the cops about you—Look over there! It’s her! Darling, it’s you, oh, my God!”
“Lala—” I realized that the spectator’s gallery thought I’d been the knife wielder, the one who’d dropped it. “And you,” I said to Lucky’s mother, “take care of your son or we’ll have to—” But this wasn’t the time. What I had to do was pay attention to Norma, who was backing her way into invisibility. “Her!” I shouted.
“Oh, hey!” Georgette had entered the circle. “Mandy. Where you been all day?”
People backed off from Georgette. I seized the moment and the knife and ran after Norma. The sight of me, knife in hand, triggered screaming, seething pandemonium. For the first time, somebody actually shouted for the police.
Meantime, I got to Norma, or at least to the gray collar of her blouse, and I tugged with my unarmed hand.
“It’s Miss Pepper,” I heard. “Miss Pepper in a catfight!”
“She has a knife!” somebody screamed.
That was true. I did. But I wasn’t planning to cut anyone with it, not even Norma. I didn’t even think to use it. My desires were simple—I wanted to make her stop killing people, including me.
We failed, however, to discuss our various agendas, and I’m afraid we couldn’t have made them mesh in any case. As it was, while people screamed and Eric enthused and Lucky’s mother called his name and Lala said, “Darling, you aren’t that kind of a girl, you have to stop,” and Georgette burst into tears, Norma twisted inside her blouse, just enough to give her a decent trajectory.
The patchwork pocketbook hit my head with much more force than I’d have predicted. It must be that geometry thing again. I don’t know what all she carried inside that bag. Not cosmetics, surely. Perhaps all of Reese’s money was in coins. Or she’d stolen Poppy’s stash of brass rivets along with Reese’s money. Most likely it was just another example of her skill and expertise at bonking—after all, she’d slammed Jesse with a lamp, and Poppy with a free weight. She was good at this.
But something hurt enough to make the clunk of impact the next sound I heard as I collapsed onto the boardwalk. It isn’t true that you see stars. I didn’t, at least. It was more like those damned casino lights—trails of them blinking and wound around with neon.
The last thing I heard was somebody saying, “Look at that drunk. Dead to the world.”
I knew he wasn’t right about the drunk part. I hoped he wasn’t right about the rest.
Twenty-Two
SOMETIMES IT TAKES A LOT—like a semiconscious woman sprawled on the boardwalk—to demonstrate the basic humanity and decency of people, even at America’s favorite vacation destination. The point is, they cared.
“You all right? Hey, lady, are you okay? She didn’t hurt you too much, did she? Need a doctor? Need help?”
Don’t tell me people have gotten callous, I thought. Despite the wind tunnel howling between my ears, I heard those lovely, considerate sentiments. They gave me heart, gave me reason to struggle to keep afloat, to fight the swirling dark that wanted to swamp me.
It took a half-dozen more solicitous questions for me to realize that not a one of them was directed down at me. All, all were for sweet graying, genteel Norma.
“Don’t worry. I got her knife,” a man said. “She can’t hurt you anymore.”
From then on, rage and indignation kept me from passing out. I wanted to tell them they were wrong, but I was in something like that
paralytic nightmare state when danger is at your heels but you can’t lift a foot to run, can’t move.
And while I struggled for breath and an end to the black dizziness gulping me down, I heard Norma play right back into their hands. She murmured something about “crazy young people and drugs,” and I heard a knee-jerk ready assent, as if I were the very image of a junkie.
“If you’ll keep her here, I’ll call the police,” Norma said.
“N-N—” I managed. The resourceful Miss Evans had just given herself an exit line. The odds against ever sighting her again escalated. My protests, however, became mush on my thick and cottony lips, and I could almost feel the boardwalk planks shake gently as she strode off with the crowd’s blessings.
Their attention turned to me, their captive. Some had never seen a junkie mugger before, and several felt obliged to share the nuances of their astonishment at the sight of me. But they didn’t quite know what to do next. The baddie was flat on her back. The goodie was off to get the sheriff. Wasn’t this the happy ending? Or was there some important, possibly dangerous element they hadn’t quite grasped?
There was a lot of speculation about what to do till the law arrived—tie me up, perhaps? One woman, for reasons that escaped me, gave me a long look, then screamed “Help! Help!” in a fake voice, like a bad movie extra. It certainly couldn’t have been because she feared me. There I lay, as threatening and active as road kill. Maybe I offended her aesthetically.
I began to understand that I was neither dead, unconscious, nor likely to become either. I had just been seriously stunned. I was becoming unstunned.
“Miss Pepper’s down! You see that, Lucky?” That was Eric, somewhere out of my line of vision—a line that for the moment only went straight up—behaving as if this were a sporting event. If I ever got him in my class, I was going to flunk him, based on today’s performance.
“You know her?” a spectator asked.
“She’s a teacher!” Eric said. “At Philly Prep, my school.”
How I Spent My Summer Vacation Page 22
