Red 1-2-3

20

At first Sarah searched the crowd, hoping to spot Karen, but she stopped almost as quickly as she began, because she formulated some crazy notion in her head that if she was able to spot Red One, then so could the Wolf, as if he were seated next to her and would merely follow her gaze and know they were both in the stands and somehow manage to kill them simultaneously in front of everyone. So instead, she concentrated on the floor, trying to avoid spending too many moments eyeing Red Three. She picked out a player on the opposing team, gathered her name from the mimeographed programs scattered about the bleachers, and tried to act as if she was connected to some gangly teenager whom she had never seen before.

Once again, she had prepared carefully to go out in public. But this time she had made significant changes.

She had found a cheap jet-black wig left over from a Halloween costume party during happier times, when she’d dressed up as the Uma Thurman character in Pulp Fiction and her husband had adopted a black suit and thin tie like John Travolta playing Vincent the hired killer. She remembered the fun they’d had when they had taken to the dance floor and copied the almost painfully slow, exaggerated, slinky motions the movie couple had used to mesmerize audiences. She stuck one of her dead husband’s frayed baseball caps on top of the wig.

She hunted around until she found some of her old pregnancy clothing in an old cardboard box, and fastening a small throw pillow around her midsection with shipping tape, she created the appearance of someone perhaps five months along. Some dark sunglasses and an old brown oversized and out-of-style overcoat that she hadn’t used in years completed her disguise. She thought she looked as little like herself as she could manage on short notice.

Sarah did not consider it particularly good, as far as disguises went. She had no idea whether the Wolf would be able to recognize her, especially in a crowd, but she guessed he would, no matter how she altered her appearance. He’ll just smell me, she thought. She attributed unbelievable powers of detection to the Wolf. She assumed he’d seen her emerge from her house, although she had exited the rear door, scooted around the side, hunched over like a soldier dodging enemy fire to hide her fake pregnancy, and flung herself into her car. She had even carried her overcoat in a plastic garbage bag, so that the style and color were hidden until she put it on when she reached the game. She hadn’t been able to spot any out-of-the ordinary cars up and down her street as she peeled out, tires squealing. She had taken the usual elusive steps to avoid being followed.

A large part of her felt this was all foolishness. Trying to hide made no sense. The Wolf, she thought, was everywhere all at once.

Staring out at the basketball court, faking a cheer after a shot dropped through the net, all Sarah could actually see were wolf prints stenciled on the grave headstone. She had tried to examine those prints, but it was difficult for her. It seemed like the Wolf was lurking on the periphery of her existence, waiting for the right moment. The right moment, she thought. What creates the right moment?

She wedged herself between two couples and tried hard to engage each with banter about the players and the game, so that anyone watching her might think they had all come together that evening to watch. This illusion wasn’t hard to create.

Sarah breathed in, waiting for the clock to tick down toward the final buzzer. She closed her eyes and went over what she was supposed to do. It was a haphazard plan, rapidly constructed after calls to Red One and Red Three. Urgency seemed to stalk them in the same way the Wolf did.

The crowd let out mixed sounds of success and failure. The horn sounded, ending the game. People stood, stretching. Sarah saw the two teams lining up to shake hands. It was the moment where the busy-ness of the court transfers into the stands. Each team gave a perfunctory cheer for the other, but Sarah didn’t hear this. She was already digging her way through clutches of fans and parents who were jamming the aisles and walkways leading from the bleachers. She kept her head down, dodging people who were putting on jackets and talking animatedly about the game. She hoped that somewhere close, Red One was doing more or less the same.

With a quick glance back over her shoulder, Sarah ducked down a stairwell that led to the locker rooms. A second glance let her know she was alone. She paused, listening for steps behind her, but heard none. There was a distant echo of teenage voices laughing, but they seemed benign and un-Wolf-like. Red Three had told her that down the corridor she would see a door marked ladies. That was where she was headed. She pushed inside.

Sarah sighed when she realized she was alone. She thought, The Wolf won’t follow me in here. Again, she knew this was nonsense. A killer bent on murder wouldn’t really feel a sense of propriety about entering a women’s bathroom. Still, she felt oddly reassured.

There were three stalls to her right, across from some glistening sinks. She went into the farthest. Sarah locked the door behind her and sat down on the toilet to wait. Fifteen minutes, Red Three had told her. She checked her wristwatch. Time seemed to pass erratically, as if each minute had some different, odd number of seconds that bore no relation to the regular sixty.

Karen was hunched down in her car, waiting for the first flow of people to emerge through the gymnasium doors. Other than pinning her hair back and throwing on running shoes, she hadn’t taken any steps to disguise herself.

Instead, she had arrived in the parking lot outside the gym and stepped out of her car and walked up and down each row of vehicles, staring in at each, making certain they were all empty. This had seemed to her to be just on the near side of crazy behavior, but she felt reassured when she slipped back into her own car.

She had rolled down her window so that she could keep track of the game’s progress by listening for the muted cheers from the crowd. She had heard the buzzer signaling the end and known she would have to wait for only a few moments.

The first people through the doors were students. They were laughing as they disappeared into the slippery evening darkness. Then a steadier flow of teenagers, adults, and even some small children began to emerge.

That was her signal to move.

Like a fish swimming against the current, she ducked her head and zigzagged through the exiting crowd. She was the only person battling to get in. That had been her only plan. If the Wolf was behind her, he would create the same commotion she did. She kept looking back over her shoulder to see if there was someone trying to follow her through the knots of people. It did not seem so.

Karen headed toward the same stairwell that Sarah had passed down moments earlier. A few students were walking either up or down, but no Wolf. She found the ladies’ room as easily as Sarah. Unconsciously mimicking Red Two’s movements, she looked right and left, making sure she was alone. Then she, too, ducked inside.

She let a second of two of silence fill the room before she stage-whispered, “Sarah?”

“I’m right here,” came the reply from the stall. Sarah emerged from behind the door and the two women awkwardly embraced.

Karen stepped back and looked at the fake pregnancy outfit and the short black wig and managed a small smile before speaking. “You must have been…” Karen started, thinking about the paw prints on the headstones. She stopped, not knowing what word to use. Scared? Terrified? Upset?

“Totally freaked,” Sarah replied, grimly, even if her choice of words seemed easygoing. “When I called you, I was panicked. But I’ve gotten hold of myself. Sort of. Still a little shaky. How about you?”

Karen thought about describing being on stage and hearing the wolf whistle and thinking it was the Wolf’s whistle, but didn’t. She believed that stirring up Sarah’s already unsteady emotions couldn’t possibly help. Be the strong one, she insisted to herself. This admonition was part medical training and part the inability to see what else she could be.

“Have you been keeping time?” she asked.

Sarah nodded. “Maybe fifteen, right about now.”

“All right. Let’s go.”

The two women exited the toilet into the corridor. They were alone, but they could both hear loud teenage voices echoing from not too far away.

“Down and to the right,” Sarah said. “That’s what Jordan said.”

They waited another moment, both of them pivoting right and left. Karen thought it odd, the way they had developed of making sure they weren’t being followed. The idea that they were alone in the well-lit cinder-block hallway wasn’t reassuring. But neither did they want to see the Wolf, because each knew what that would mean: The end.

The girls’ locker room was just where Jordan had told them it would be. There were two teenage girls standing outside, jawing with a pair of boys. The girls’ hair was damp and their faces flushed, and Sarah recognized them from the game. They stood aside when the two women pushed past them and went into the locker room.

Heat and steam immediately surrounded them. The noise of running water splashed from a shower room. Laughter bounced off the white tile walls loudly.

“Nothing like winning,” Sarah said. “Makes other problems disappear.”

“Not really,” Jordan said, startling the two women. “Or actually, it doesn’t make our problem disappear,” she quickly added, emphasizing the one word with a lowered voice and a shake of her head.

She was only partially dressed, in a skimpy white T-shirt and black bikini underwear. She had a hairbrush in her hand and like the other girls on the team her hair was damp from the shower. Both older women felt a twinge of envy at the easy fitness of the teenager’s figure: muscles, flat stomach, narrow hips, and long legs that glistened with a few stray drops of water. Jordan was right at that age where skinny was easy and sensuality seemed to redden her skin like a brisk rub with a towel.

She smiled at Sarah. “I like your costume. Pregnant, right?”

Sarah nodded, then pulled up her sweater to show the pillow taped to her midsection.

“Cool. Probably work on a subway. Help you get a seat,” Jordan said.

She slid past Sarah and Karen to her locker and tugged on a pair of faded jeans and a hooded blue sweatshirt from Middlebury College. She smiled and pointed at the school’s name. “Prestige school,” she said. “Before this past year, I would have gotten in for sure. Now, no way.”

“Don’t sell yourself short,” Karen said with a maternal smile.

“I’m not,” Jordan replied. “But I’m a realist.”

Karen thought: No teenager is really a realist. But she did not say this out loud.

The three women sat on a wooden bench as Jordan slipped on running socks and shoes. She carefully double-knotted the laces, and without looking up at the other two Reds she asked, “What are we supposed to do now?”

Sarah was the first to respond. She pointed at the wig and pillow. “Hide?” she said, using the word as both a statement and a question.

“You mean run away,” Jordan replied.

“Yes. Exactly.”

Each woman was quiet for a moment, as if measuring the suggestion. Jordan broke the silence.

“If I just go home-and given the way things are at my house, that’s not really possible-what makes you think that the Wolf hasn’t anticipated that? I mean, we only know he’s been watching us for some time. Perhaps he’s followed me around my hometown, and that’s what he’s expecting me to do because it makes sense. Scare a kid…”-Jordan gestured to herself-“… and the kid runs home to mom and pop. Only I can’t do that, because my mom and pop are a mess.”

Karen shook her head, but answered in a contradictory way. “Maybe we could just each find some friend, visit them…”

“And how would we know for how long?” Jordan asked. “I mean, the Wolf doesn’t seem to be in any hurry. He probably has a schedule, but we don’t have a clue what it is. And eventually, we’re going to show up back here-I mean, this is where I go to school and you both live here-and bingo! It starts up all over again. Maybe he’s figured on that. Or maybe he wants us to run because the more we isolate ourselves the easier it is for him. Or maybe…” Jordan stopped.

Karen and Sarah were staring hard at her, and she smiled briefly. “I’ve been reading a lot about murders,” she said. “Not doing my regular homework. Just studying killers in the library.”

“What have you learned?” Sarah asked.

“That we don’t have a chance,” Jordan replied coldly, as if this were the simplest thing in the entire world and absolutely no big deal whatsoever.

Again the three Reds plummeted into silence. It fell to Karen to break the mood. “I just can’t up and leave anyway,” Karen said. “I have patients who’ve scheduled appointments months in advance and…”

She stopped. She realized how ridiculous this sounded. There were plenty of other doctors who could take over her practice. She could run. Never look back. The thought made her breathe in and out sharply.

Sarah closed her eyes and rocked back and forth just slightly. “I could go away. Maybe I should. Start over somewhere new. Change my name and find a job and just become someone different. Maybe I could run away and try to hide. It might work.”

It felt to her as if someone else was saying these things. Perhaps they made sense. But the idea that she could walk away forever from the two coffins buried so close by hurt her almost as much as the memory of her loss.

Karen must have seen some of this in Sarah’s eyes. “That’s what the cliché is,” she said. “Start over. But it’s not that easy. And you can’t really.”

Jordan added, “It’s no good anyway,” she said. “We like have no clue what the Wolf can and can’t do. So even if you managed to slip away and start over, maybe he can follow you. There’d be no way to ever know whether you were safe or not.”

She looked at the other two Reds. A quick thought came to her: We’re stronger together. Then a contradictory thought: Maybe that’s what he imagines we’ll think.

She felt herself shrugging her shoulders at the same time that her hands quivered slightly.

“I think we’re each locked here-we stick together, for better or for worse,” Jordan added. “I’m guessing the Wolf knows that, and took it into consideration when he chose us. So, really, there’s only one answer.”

“Which is?” Sarah asked.

“We have to misbehave.”

This word made the two older women stop in some confusion.

“What do you mean?”

“We have to not act normal.” Both Karen and Sarah started to interrupt, but Jordan held up her hand. “I know that’s what you said to do, but look, does it really help? No.”

She hesitated, and continued. “What are we?” she asked. Then she answered her own question. “We are products of our routines. What makes us feel a little safer? When we drive in circles and wear disguises and imagine that somehow we’re fooling the Wolf; and even when we know we’re not, it still makes us feel better. What I’m saying is that we each have to figure out how not to be ourselves, because the Wolf knows us and has followed us, and”-Jordan jabbed her index finger between her breasts, beating time to her words-“this fucking Little Red Riding Hood doesn’t want to just walk blindly into whatever trap he has set.”

Karen was astonished at the teenager’s muted fury. She was also taken aback by the intelligence of Jordan’s idea.

“If the Wolf is waiting for us in the forest, he knows…” she started, but Jordan finished.

“… Then we should be walking in a different forest on a different path.”

“Easier said than done,” Sarah said. “It’s like we’re locked into who we are. Jordan, are you going to suddenly skip a basketball game? Karen, you talked about all those patients. They’re scheduled. The Wolf has probably scheduled our deaths as well. How do you change who you are and what you do overnight?”

Karen nodded, then said, “Okay. I don’t know if it’ll work, but we can try. What else can we do?”

Jordan waved her arms around, pointing at the walls of the locker room. While they’d been speaking, the rest of the team had finished showering, dressed, and made their way out, so that now the three were alone in the rows of gray steel lockers. The heat from the showers was starting to dissipate in the humid air around them.

“What?” Sarah asked.

“Have you ever been to my school before?” Jordan asked.

“No.”

“What about you, Karen?”

“No.”

Jordan continued. “Well, I’ve never been to the school where you were a teacher, Sarah. And I don’t see a doctor in your building, Karen. It makes it all seem completely random, doesn’t it? As if the Wolf just picked out three redheads arbitrarily and began his plans. Look, if that’s the case, well, then I think we’re screwed; all we can do is buy more guns and wait. So that’s just crazy thinking. But maybe it isn’t random.” Jordan was going to continue, but suddenly didn’t know what to say.

Karen however, seemed to be trapped in some thought. Sarah started rocking back and forth again. They could hear a shower that some player hadn’t quite shut off dripping in the adjacent room.

“We’re a triangle,” Jordan said. “If we can find the right legs, we can see the connection. I think we’ve been going the wrong way on this,” Jordan said. “It’s the mistake everyone who gets stalked makes.”

Jordan waved her arms in front of her, slashing through the heavy locker room air. She opened her eyes and faced the other Reds. “We know the Wolf wants us. We have to make him want us so much that he hurries himself into a mistake.”

Again Jordan inspected the two other women. She thought they were mature, reasonable, intelligent, and accomplished, all the things that she expected to be someday. If she had a someday.

“If we were hunting a wolf, what would we do?”

“Get close enough to see him,” Karen said.

“Right, and then what?” Jordan asked. It seemed to her most curious: She was acting like the professor, while the others were responding like students. Neither Karen nor Sarah replied, so she answered her own question with a single word. “Ambush.”

Sarah quivered, then shrugged. Why not? she thought. I’m half-dead already. She did not know why, but she burst out in a shrill, humorless laugh, as if she alone had heard some slightly off-color joke that was both funny and offensive. She stood up and reached under her sweater and stripped off her fake pregnancy pillow, tossing all the packing tape she’d used to attach it to her stomach into a nearby wastebasket. Then she unpinned her wig and shook out her hair, so that it flowed freely, a little like lava running down the side of an active volcano.

At about the same moment, the Big Bad Wolf was standing beside his car, staring down at a tire that seemed partially flat. He was just outside of his house, carrying a briefcase with his tape recorder and his notepad and all the questions he’d painstakingly constructed for the Mystery Writers’ forensic experts’ evening lecture. Afternoon light was fading around him and his first thought was that he would miss the talk because of a bit of bad if not uncommon luck. He kicked at the tire angrily. He bent down and tried to see the nail that had created the slow leak, but he couldn’t. It was just as likely that he’d hit one of New England’s ever-present potholes and bent the inner tire rim. He knew he’d have to call road service, get them out to change the tire, and waste time the next day getting the damage repaired, and all this would tear him away from what he truly wanted to be doing, which was closing in on the three Reds.

He turned to head back inside, and saw Mrs. Big Bad Wolf standing in the doorway.

“What’s the problem, dear?” she asked.

“Flat tire. I’ll have to call a garage and-”

She smiled and interrupted him. “Just take my car. I’ll call the auto club and wait for them. I don’t mind at all and you can still go to your research meeting.”

“You absolutely sure you don’t mind?” the Big Bad Wolf asked, brightening considerably at the offer. “It’s a total pain in the butt, I know…”

“Not in the slightest. I was just going to watch television while you were away anyway. I can easily wait for the service guy while I’m watching.” She handed him the keys to her car. “Now, take care of my little baby,” she said, joking. “You know she doesn’t like to go fast on the thruway.”

The Big Bad Wolf looked down at his watch. He still had plenty of time. “Well, honey,” he said cheerily, “thanks. I’ll see you late tonight. Just leave a light on inside and I won’t wake you up when I come in.”

“You can wake me up. It’s okay,” she replied.

This was the most routine and commonplace of exchanges, one that a million couples have in some variation every day. It sang of normalcy.

“Here,” the Big Bad Wolf added. “Take my keys in case the auto guy needs to start it up.” He handed them to his wife without thinking, and got behind the wheel of her little car. He gave her a jaunty wave as he pulled down the driveway.