Eighteen

She was too ill to run away.

He forced himself to move again, came quickly to her side. Her skin was jaundiced and she was so thin, almost skeletal, he thought, then pushed the thought away. Her hair, her beautiful hair, was dull in color and missing in patches. Her breathing was steady but rasping. He put his hands beneath her and lifted her frail body from the bed, keeping the blanket wrapped around her. He told himself that self-recrimination must wait.

Her big brown eyes were open now, watching him.

“Good to see you,” she whispered.

“My God, Ellie.” He tried to gather his wits. “How long has she been poisoning you?”

“Little at a time,” she said, wincing as she spoke.

“Don’t talk now, not if it hurts. Has it just been since I left?”

She nodded, the effort seeming to wear her out.

A month. A month of arsenic. “I’m not leaving again, Ellie. Except to take you with me.”

She continued to watch him, but now the barest smile came to her lips.

He had started down the stairs when Miriam, di

“What are you doing?” Miriam screeched.

“I’m taking her to a hospital. To see a real doctor. You had better pray to God that I’m not too late.”

Miriam tried to block his way. “She’s too ill to move! You have no business…”

“Careful, Miriam,” he said in a low voice. “She’s awake and lucid. Shall we discuss this in front of your guests, or do you want to wait until after Harry describes your so-called doctor to the gents at the sheriff’s office? Ellie’s bloodwork will probably give them all they need to go after both of you.”

Miriam paled, then stepped out of the way.

“What’s going on here?” one of the guests demanded.

“My sister’s…”

“Fiancé,” Bill supplied, as he reached the front door. “Her fiancé is taking her to a hospital.”

The group followed him toward the car. He wasn’t watching them. He was watching Ellie. She moved her hand, covered his with it. Her skin was cool and paper dry. “You’re safe now, Ellie,” he told her.

“I’m coming with you!” Miriam said, hearing the guests murmuring behind her.

“No you aren’t, miss,” Harry said, helping Bill into the backseat.

“She’s her sister!” one of guests protested.

“Her sister will remain here with you,” Bill said. “She wants to tell you about a Hitchcock film.”

“What are you talking about?” another man asked.

“Notorious,” Bill said, closing the car door.

“You’ve won, sir, haven’t you?” Harry said as they drove off.

“I’ve had help,” Bill replied. “All along, I’ve had help.”

Ellie squeezed his hand.

White Trash

The woman dressed in black ninja garb moved stealthily across the street, armed with a spray bottle of a popular herbicide purchased at her local hardware store. In the dim light of the streetlamp, she set the spray mechanism to “stream” and went to work. Quickly she moved the bottle in a graceful, sweeping motion. She left as furtively as she had arrived.

Three weeks later, much to the horror of the jerks who lived across the street, a rather obscene directive appeared on their lawn, spelled out in dead grass letters. Alas for these evil neighbors, the Suburban Avenger had succeeded once again…

I looked up from my bowl of cornflakes and glanced across the street, wondering-just wondering, mind you-if I could get away with it.

In every nearly perfect suburban neighborhood, there is the family that makes it “nearly” instead of “perfect.” In ours, it was the Nabbits. You could find the Nabbit house without a street number. I would sometimes use its distinctive features to guide other people to my own home. “We live across the street from the house with the pick-up truck parked on the lawn,” I’d say. Or, “Look for the old mattress propped up against the side of the garage, then pull into the driveway directly opposite the box springs.”

Sarah Cummings, who owned the pristine property to the right of the Nabbits, had warned us about these troublemakers from the day we moved into the neighborhood. “I call them the ‘Dag Nabbits,’” she said. “Nola Nabbit is a tramp. You watch. If Napolean’s army had been as big as the one that has marched through Nola’s bedroom doors, they’d be speaking French in Moscow today. Daisy, the little girl, is okay. But the kid! He’s a mess.”

The kid was Ricky. Ricky Nabbit, I soon learned, was a frequent guest of the California Youth Authority. He had a seasonal habit of breaking into houses, shoplifting, and other purely selfish acts.

“As long as it’s baseball season,” Sarah told me, “We won’t have any trouble. He’s a baseball nut. But every winter”-here, Sarah shivered-“he robs somebody.”

When Sarah heard that I would be working out of my home, she was elated. “Maybe you can help keep an eye on things,” she said. Specifically, she meant Ricky Nabbit.

We had moved into our home in the spring of the year when Ricky turned fourteen. I would watch him walk home from baseball practice at the nearby park. Ski

Sometimes I would see Ricky sitting on the front porch, oiling his glove, while from inside the house, I heard his mother and her boyfriend shouting obscenities at one another at the top of their lungs. Even with the doors and windows closed, we could hear them. This was especially true during the months when Clyde Who Parks on the Front Lawn reigned over the household.

Clyde was, perhaps, no worse than his predecessors. No more a loudmouth lowlife than Bellamy the Belcher (whose wide-ranging eructative skills included saying the word “breast” as he burped) or Horace the Hornblower (who honked his car horn at all hours, as a mere introduction to rolling down his window and hollering “Nola! Get your ass out here!”). These were not their real names, of course, but my husband and I used this system to refer to them when lamenting our luck.

Nola stayed with Clyde for most of the season, but broke up with him just before the World Series with a world class drunken brawl in the middle of the street. Nola got a shiner, Clyde got the boot.

Our doorbell rang a few days later, and when I looked out through the peephole, I was surprised to see Daisy standing on our front porch. She had long blond hair and beautiful green eyes, but was shy and slightly overweight. She was carrying a big cardboard box full of canisters of candy.

She stammered out a good afternoon and asked if I would buy some candy for her church school fund-raiser.

“Church school?” I asked.

She turned a deep red, and stepped back. If she had been a turtle, I would have been looking at nothing but a shell. I waited, tried to smile my encouragement. She swallowed hard and then explained that she attended a private school operated by a church. The church she named was a conservative Christian sect.

Even though her church school was part of a denomination other than our own, I bought a canister, telling myself that I was doing my bit for ecumenism and good neighborly relations.

I was leaving the house some hours later and saw her returning home, still carrying her box, looking weary and somewhat dejected. I noticed that the box was still nearly full.

“Daisy!” I called.

You would think I had fired a shot over her head. She halted, shrank back, and nearly dropped the box. As I crossed the street toward her, her eyes grew wide.

I stopped a few feet away from her. Out of striking distance. She relaxed a little. “I just remembered,” I said, “that I need some gifts for some clients. The candy would be perfect. Could I buy more?”

She looked at me in complete puzzlement.