The Best American Mystery Stories 2002

Michael Malone Maniac Loose

From A Confederacy of Crime

Holding a yellow smiley-face coffee mug, Lucy Rhoads sat in her dead husband’s bathrobe and looked at two photographs. She had just made a discovery about her recently deceased spouse that surprised her. Prewitt Rhoads — a booster of domestic sanguinity, whose mind was a map of cheerful clichés out of which his thoughts never wandered, whose monogamy she had no more doubted than his optimism — her spouse Prewitt Rhoads (dead three weeks ago of a sudden heart attack) had for years lived a secret life of sexual deceit with a widow two blocks away in the pretty subdivision of Painton, Alabama, where he had insisted on their living for reasons Lucy only now understood. This was the same man who had brought her home Mylar balloons proclaiming, “I Love You,” and white cuddly Valentine bears making the same claims, and an endless series of these smiley-face coffee mugs — all from the gifts, cards, and party supplies shop he owned in Annie Sullivan Mall and called The Fun House. This was the same man who had disparaged her slightest criticism of the human condition, who had continually urged her, “Lucy, can’t you stop turning over rocks just to look at all the bugs crawling underneath them?”

Well, now Lucy had tripped over a boulder of a rock to see in the exposed mud below her own Prewitt Rhoads scurrying around in lustful circles with their widowed neighbor Amorette Strumlander, Lucy’s mediocre Gardenia Club bridge partner for more than fifteen years; Amorette Strumlander, who had dated Prewitt long ago at Painton High School, who had never lived anywhere in her life but Painton, Alabama, where perhaps for years she had sat patiently waiting, like the black widow she’d proved herself to be, until Prewitt came back to her. Of course, on his timid travels into the world beyond Painton, Alabama, Amorette’s old boyfriend had picked up a wife in Charlotte (Lucy) and two children in Atlanta before returning to his hometown to open The Fun House. But what did Amorette Strumlander care about those encumbrances? Apparently nothing at all.

Lucy poured black coffee into the grimacing cup. Soon Amorette herself would tap her horn in her distinctive pattern, honk honk honk pause honk honk, to take Lucy to the Playhouse in nearby Tuscumbia so they could see The Miracle Worker together. Lucy was free to go because she had been forced to accept a leave of absence from her job as a town clerk at Painton Municipal Hall in order to recover from her loss. Amorette had insisted on the phone that The Miracle Worker would be just the thing to cheer up the grieving Mrs. Rhoads after the sudden loss of her husband to his unexpected heart attack. “I always thought it would be me,” said Amorette, who’d boasted of a heart murmur since it had forced her to drop out of Agnes Scott College for Women when she was twenty and kept her from getting a job or doing any housework ever since. Apparently, Lucy noted, the long affair with Prewitt hadn’t strained the woman’s heart at all.

Lucy wasn’t at all interested in seeing The Miracle Worker; she had already seen it a number of times, for the Playhouse put it on every summer in Tuscumbia, where the famous blind deaf mute Helen Keller had grown up. The bordering town of Painton had no famous people to boast of in its own long, hot, languid history, and no exciting events either; not even the Yankees ever came through the hamlet to burn it down, although a contingent of Confederate women (including an ancestor of Amorette’s) was waiting to shoot them if they did. A typical little Deep South community, Painton had run off its Indians, brought in its slaves, made its money on cotton, and then after the War between the States had gone to sleep for a hundred years except for a few little irritable spasms of wakefulness over the decades to burn a cross, or (on the other side) to send a student to march with Martin Luther King, or to campaign against anything that might destroy the American Way of Life.

In its long history, Painton could claim only three modest celebrities: There was Amorette Strumlander’s twice-great-grandmother who’d threatened to shoot the Yankees if they ever showed up; she’d been a maid of honor at Jefferson Davis’s wedding and had attended his inauguration as president of the Confederacy in Montgomery. Fifty years later there was a Baptist missionary killed in the Congo either by a hippopotamus or by hepatitis; it was impossible for his relatives to make out his wife’s handwriting on the note she’d sent from Africa. And thirty years ago there was a linebacker in an Alabama Rose Bowl victory who’d played an entire quarter with a broken collarbone.

But of course none of these celebrities could hold a candle to Helen Keller, as even Amorette admitted — proud as she was of her ancestral acquaintance of Jefferson Davis. Indeed no one loved the Helen Keller story as told by The Miracle Worker more than she. “You can never ever get too much of a good thing, Lucy, especially in your time of need,” Mrs. Strumlander had wheedled when she’d called to pester Lucy into going to the play today. “The Miracle Worker shows how we can triumph over the dark days even if we’re blind, deaf, and dumb, poor little thing.”

Although at the very moment that her honey-voiced neighbor had phoned, Lucy Rhoads was squeezing in her fist the key to her husband’s secret box of adulterous love letters from the deceptive Amorette, she had replied only, “All right, come on over, Amorette, because I’m having a real dark day here today.”

Still Lucy wasn’t getting ready. She was drinking black coffee in her dead husband’s robe and looking at the photos she’d found in the box. She was listening to the radio tell her to stay off the streets of Painton today because there was a chance that the streets weren’t safe. In general, the town of Painton didn’t like to admit to problems; the motto on the billboard at the town limits proclaimed in red, white, and blue letters, THERE’S NO PAIN IN PAINTON, THE CHEERFULEST TOWN IN ALABAMA. There was always a patrol car hidden behind this billboard with a radar gun to catch innocent strangers going thirty-six miles an hour and slap huge fines on them. If Deputy Sheriff Hews Puddleston had heard one hapless driver joke, “I thought you said there was no pain in Painton,” he’d heard a thousand of them.

The local billboard annoyed Lucy, as did the phrasing of this radio warning; she thought that a town so near the home of Helen Keller had no business suggesting life was “cheerful” or that the streets were ever safe. The reporter on the radio went on to explain rather melodramatically that there was a maniac loose. A young man had gone crazy at Annie Sullivan Mall on the outskirts of Painton and tried to kill his wife. Right now, live on the radio, this man was shooting out the windows of a florist shop in the mall, and the reporter was outside in the atrium hiding behind a cart selling crystals and pewter dwarves. No one was stopping the man because he had a nine-millimeter automatic assault weapon with him, and he had yelled out the window that he had no problem using it. The reporter had shouted at him, “No problem,” and urged the police to hurry up. The reporter happened to be there broadcasting live at the mall because it was the Painton Merchants Super Savers Summertime Sale for the benefit of the Painton Panthers High School football team, 1992 state semifinalists, and he’d been sent to cover it. But a maniac trying to kill his wife was naturally a bigger story, and the reporter was naturally very excited.

Lucy turned on her police scanner as she searched around for an old pack of the cigarettes Prewitt had always been hiding so she wouldn’t realize he’d gone back to smoking again despite his high cholesterol. He’d never hidden them very well, not nearly as well as his sexual escapades, and she’d constantly come across crumpled packs that he’d lost track of. Lucy had never smoked herself, and had little patience with the Gardenia Club members’ endless conversations about when they’d quit, how they’d quit, or why they’d quit. But today Lucy decided to start. Why not? Why play by the rules when what did it get you? Lighting the match, she sucked in the smoke deeply; it set her whole body into an unpleasant spasm of coughing and tingling nerves. She liked the sensation; it matched her mood.

On the police scanner she heard the dispatcher rushing patrol cars to the mall. This maniac fascinated her, and she went back to the radio, where the reporter was explaining the situation. Apparently the young man had gone to the mall to shoot his wife because she’d left him for another man. According to the maniac’s grievance to the reporter, his wife was still using his credit cards and had been in the midst of a shopping spree at the mall before he caught up with her in the Hank Williams Concourse, where they’d fought over her plan to run off with this other man and stick the maniac with the bills. She’d fled down the concourse to the other man, who owned a florist shop at the east end of the concourse. It was here that the maniac caught up with her again, this time with the gun he’d run back to his sports van to collect. He’d shot them both, but in trying to avoid other customers had managed only to hit the florist in the leg and to pulverize one of his wife’s shopping bags. Plaster flying from a black swan with a dracaena plant in its back gouged a hole out of his wife’s chin. He’d allowed the other customers to run out of the shop but held the lovers hostage.

Lucy could hear the sirens of the approaching patrol cars even on the radio. But by the time the police ran into the atrium with all their new equipment, the florist was hopping out of his shop on one foot, holding on to his bleeding leg and shouting that the husband had run out the back door. The police ran after him while the reporter gave a running commentary as if it were a radio play. As the florist was wheeled into the ambulance, he told the reporter that the maniac had “totally trashed” his shop, “terminator time.” He sounded amazingly high-spirited about it. The reporter also interviewed the wife as she was brought out in angry hysterics with a bandage on her chin. She said that her husband had lost his mind and had nobody but himself to blame if the police killed him. She was then driven off to the hospital with the florist.

Lucy made herself eat a tuna sandwich, although she never seemed to be hungry anymore. When she finished, the maniac was still on the loose and still in possession of the nine-millimeter gun that he’d bought only a few months earlier at the same mall. News of the failure of the police to capture him was oddly satisfying. Lucy imagined herself running beside this betrayed husband through the streets of Painton, hearing the same hum in their hearts. The radio said that neighbors were taking care of the couple’s four-year-old triplets, Greer, Gerry, and Griffin, who hadn’t been told that their father had turned into a maniac in Annie Sullivan Mall. The couple’s neighbors on Fairy Dell Drive were shocked; such a nice man, they said, a good provider and a family man. “I’dah never thought Jimmy’d do something like this in a million years, and you ask anybody else in Painton, they’ll tell you the same,” protested his sister, who’d driven to the mall to plead with her brother to come out of the florist shop, but who had arrived too late.

The reporter was obliged temporarily to return the station to its Mellow Music program, Songs of Your Life, playing Les Brown’s Band of Renown doing “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries.” Lucy twisted the dial to OFF. She did not believe that life was a bowl of cherries, and she never had. In her view life was something more along the lines of a barefoot sprint over broken glass. She felt this strongly, although she herself had lived a life so devoid of horror that she might easily have been tricked into thinking life was the bowl of sweet fruit that her husband Prewitt had always insisted it was. The surprised reaction of the Mall Maniac’s neighbors and family annoyed her. Why hadn’t they suspected? But then, why hadn’t she suspected Prewitt and Amorette of betraying her? At least the maniac had noticed what was going on around him — that his wife was stockpiling possessions on his credit cards while planning to run off with the florist. Lucy herself had been such an idiot that when years ago she’d wanted to leave Prewitt and start her life over, he’d talked her out of it with all his pieties about commitment and family values and the children’s happiness, when at the exact same time, he’d been secretly sleeping with Amorette Strumlander!

Lucy smashed the smiley mug against the lip of the kitchen counter until it broke and her finger was left squeezed around its yellow handle as if she’d hooked a carousel’s brass ring. There, that was the last one. She’d broken all the rest this morning, and she still felt like screaming. It occurred to her there was no reason why she shouldn’t. She didn’t have to worry about disturbing her “family” anymore.

It had been twenty-one days now since the death of the perfidious Prewitt. Last Sunday the Rhoads son and daughter had finally returned to their separate lives in Atlanta, after rushing home to bury their father and console their mother. These two young people, whom Prewitt had named Ronny after Reagan and Julie after Andrews, took after their father, and they thought life was a bowl of cherries too, or at least a bowl of margaritas. They were affable at the funeral, chatting to family friends like Amorette Strumlander about their new jobs and new condo clusters. They liked Amorette (and had Lucy not distinctly recalled giving birth to them, she could have sworn Amorette was their mother, for like her they both were slyly jejune). Ronny and Julie were happy with their lifestyles, which they had mimicked from trendy magazines. These magazines did not explain things like how to behave at a father’s funeral, and perhaps as a result Ronny and Julie had acted during the service and at the reception afterward with that convivial sardonic tolerance for the older generation that they had displayed at all other types of family functions. Amorette later told Lucy she thought “the kids held up wonderfully.”

Lucy was not surprised by her children’s lack of instinct for grief. Their father would have behaved the same way at his funeral had he not been the one in the casket. “The kids and I are day people,” Prewitt had told his wife whenever she mentioned any of life’s little imperfections like wars and earthquakes and pogroms and such. “You’re stuck in the night, Lucy. That’s your problem.” It was true. Maybe she should have grown up in the North, where skies darkened sooner and the earth froze and the landscape turned black and gray, where there wasn’t so much Southern sun and heat and light and daytime. For life, in Lucy’s judgment, was no daytime affair. Life was stuck in the night; daytime was just the intermission, the waiting between the acts of the real show. When she listened to police calls on the radio scanner, the reports of domestic violence, highway carnage, fire, poison, electrocution, suffocation, maniacs loose in the vicinity of Annie Sullivan Mall always struck her as what life was really about. It suddenly occurred to her that there must have been a police dispatch for Prewitt after she’d phoned 911. She’d found him by the opened refrigerator on the kitchen floor lying beside a broken bowl of barbecued chicken wings. The scanner must have said: “Apparent heart attack victim, male, Caucasian, forty-eight.”

Prewitt had died without having much noticed that that’s what he was doing, just as her day children had driven off with whatever possessions of Prewitt’s they wanted (Ronny took his golf clubs and his yellow and pink cashmere V-necks; Julie took his Toyota) without having really noticed that their father was gone for good. If Prewitt had known he’d be dead within hours, presumably he would have destroyed the evidence of his adultery with Amorette Strumlander, since marriage vows and commitment were so important to him. But apparently Prewitt Rhoads had persisted in thinking life a bowl of imperishable plastic cherries to the very last. Apparently he had never seen death coming, the specter leaping up and grinning right in his face, so he had died as surprised as he could be, eyes wide open, baffled, asking Lucy, “What’s the matter with me?”

Amorette Strumlander had been equally unprepared when she’d heard about Prewitt’s sudden demise from their Gardenia Club president, Gloria Peters, the next morning. She had run up the lawn shrieking at Lucy, “I heard it from Gloria Peters at the nail salon!” as if getting the bad news that way had made the news worse. Of course, Lucy hadn’t known then that Prewitt and Amorette had been having their long affair; admittedly that fact must have made the news harder on Amorette. It must have been tough hearing about her lover’s death from Gloria Peters, who had never once invited Amorette to her dinner parties, where apparently Martha Stewart recipes were served by a real maid in a uniform. In fact, that morning after Prewitt’s death when Amorette had come running at her, Lucy had actually apologized for not calling her neighbor sooner. And Amorette had grabbed her and sobbed, “Now we’re both widows!” Lucy naturally thought Amorette was referring to her own dead husband, Charlie Strumlander, but maybe she had meant her lover, Prewitt.

Honk honk honk pause honk honk. Honk honk honk pause honk honk.

Amazingly it was two in the afternoon, and Lucy was still standing in the middle of the kitchen with the yellow coffee mug handle still dangling from her finger. She quickly shoved the photographs she’d found in the bathrobe pocket as Amorette came tapping and whoohooing through the house without waiting to be invited in. She had never waited for Lucy to open the door.

“Lucy? Lucy, oh, why, oh, good Lord, you’re not even ready. What are you doing in a robe at this time? Didn’t you hear me honking?” Mrs. Strumlander was a petite woman, fluttery as a hungry bird, as she swirled around the table in a summer coat that matched her shoes and her purse. She patted her heart as she was always doing to remind people that she suffered from a murmur. “I have been scared to death with this maniac on the loose! Did you hear about that on the radio?”

Lucy said that yes she had, and that she felt sorry for the young man.

“Sorry for him! Well, you are the weirdest thing that ever lived! You come on and go get dressed before we’re late to the play. I know when you see that poor little blind deaf-and-dumb girl running around the stage spelling out ‘water,’ it’s going to put your own troubles in perspective for you, like it always does mine.”

“You think?” asked Lucy flatly, and walked back through the house into the bedroom she had shared with Prewitt. She was followed by Amorette, who even went so far as to pull dresses from Lucy’s closet and make suggestions about which one she ought to wear.

“Lucy,” Amorette advised her as she tossed a dress on the bed, “just because this maniac goes out of his mind at the Annie Sullivan Mall, don’t you take it as proof the world’s gone all wrong, because believe me most people are leading a normal life. If you keep slipping into this negative notion of yours without poor Prewitt to hold you up, you could just slide I don’t know where, way deep. Now, how ’bout this nice mustard silk with the beige jacket?”

Lucy put her hand into her dead husband’s bathrobe pocket. She touched the photos and squeezed the key to the secret letters into the fleshy pads of her palm. The key opened a green tin box she’d found in a little square room in the basement, a room with pine paneling and a plaid couch that Prewitt considered his special private place and called his “study.” He’d gone there happily in the evenings to fix lamps and listen to vinyl big band albums he’d bought at tag sales, to do his homework for his correspondence course in Internet investing in the stock market. And, apparently, he went there to write love letters to Amorette Strumlander. Lucy had never violated the privacy of Prewitt’s space. Over the years as she had sat with her black coffee in the unlit kitchen, watching the night outside, she had occasionally fantasized that Prewitt was secretly down in his study bent over a microscope in a search of the origins of life, or down there composing an opera, or plotting ingenious crimes. But she was not surprised when, the day after her children left for Atlanta, she’d unlocked the “study” door and discovered no mysterious test tubes, no ink-splotched sheets of music, no dynamite to blow up Fort Knox.

What she had found there were toy trains and love letters. Apparently Prewitt had devoted all those nights to building a perfect plastic world for a dozen electric trains to pass through. This world rested on a large board eight feet square. All the tiny houses and stores and trees were laid out on the board on plastic earth and AstroTurf. In front of a little house, a tiny dad and mom and boy and girl stood beside the track to watch the train go by. The tiny woman had blond hair and wore a pink coat, just like Amorette Strumlander.

Lucy found the love letters in a green tin box in a secret drawer built under the board beneath the train depot. There were dozens of letters written on legal pad paper, on pink flowered notepaper, on the backs of envelopes, hand-delivered letters from Amorette to Prewitt, and even a few drafts of his own letters to her. They were all about love as Prewitt and Amorette had experienced it. There was nothing to suggest to Lucy that passion had flung these adulterers beyond the limits of their ordinary personalities, nothing to suggest Anna Karenina or The English Patient. No torment, no suicidal gestures. The letters resembled the Valentines Prewitt sold in his gifts, cards, and party supplies shop in downtown Painton. Lacy hearts, fat toddlers hugging, fat doves cooing. Amorette had written, “Dearest dear one. Tell Lucy you have to be at The Fun House doing inventory all Sat. morn. Charlie leaves for golf at ten. Kisses on the neck.” Prewitt had written, “Sweetheart, You looked so [great, scratched out] beautiful yesterday and you’re so sweet to me, I couldn’t get through life without my sunshine.”

Beneath the letters, at the bottom of the box, Lucy had found the two Polaroid pictures she now touched in the bathrobe pocket. One showed Amorette in shortie pajamas on Lucy’s bed, rubbing a kitten against her cheek. (Lucy recognized the kitten as Sugar, whom Prewitt had brought home for Julie and who, grown into an obese flatulent tabby, had been run over five years ago by a passing car.) The other photograph showed Amorette seated on the hope chest in her own bedroom, naked from the waist up, one hand provocatively held beneath each untanned breast. After looking at the pictures and reading the letters, Lucy had put them back in the box, then turned on Prewitt’s electric trains and sped them up faster and faster until finally they’d slung themselves off their tracks and crashed through the plastic villages and farms and plummeted to the floor in a satisfying smashup.

Now, in the bathroom, listening to Amorette outside in the bedroom she clearly knew all too well, still rummaging through the closet, Lucy transferred the key and the photos from the bathrobe pocket to her purse. Returning to the bedroom, she asked Amorette, “Do you miss Prewitt much?”

Mrs. Strumlander was on her knees at the closet looking for shoes to go with the dress she’d picked out for Lucy. “Don’t we all?” she replied. “But let time handle it, Lucy. Because of my murmur I have always had to live my life one day at a time as the Good Book says, and that’s all any of us can do. Let’s just hope this crazy man keeps on shooting people he knows and doesn’t start in on strangers!” She laughed at her little joke and crawled backward out of the closet with beige pumps in her hand. “Because there are sick individuals just opening fire whenever and wherever they feel like it, and I’d hate for something like that to happen to us in the middle of The Miracle Worker tonight. Here, put that dress on.”

Lucy put on the dress. “Have you ever been down in Prewitt’s study, Amorette?”

“Ummum.” The dainty woman shook her head ambiguously, patting her carefully styled blond hair.

“Would you like to see it now?” Lucy asked her.

Amorette gave her a curipus look. “We don’t have time to look at Prewitt’s study now, honey. We are waaay late already. Not that jacket, it doesn’t go at all. Sometimes, Lucy... This one. Oh, you look so pretty when you want to.”

Lucy followed her dead husband’s mistress out to her car. Amorette called to her to come along: “Hop in now, and if you see that mall shooter, duck!” She merrily laughed.

As they drove toward the interstate to Tuscumbia through Painton’s flower-edged, unsafe streets, Lucy leaned back in the green velour seat of her neighbor’s Toyota (had Amorette and Prewitt gotten a special deal for buying two at once?) and closed her eyes. Amorette babbled on about how someone with no handicaps at all had used the handicapped-parking space at the Winn-Dixie and how this fact as well as the Mall Maniac proved that the South might as well be the North these days. Amorette had taken to locking her doors with dead bolts and might drop dead herself one night from the shock of the strange noises she was hearing after dark and suspected might be burglars or rapists. It was then that Lucy said, “Amorette, when did you and Prewitt start sleeping together?”

The little sedan lurched forward with a jolt. Then it slowed and slowed, almost to a stop. Pink splotched Amorette’s cheeks, until they matched the color of her coat, but her nose turned as white as a sheet. “Who told you that?” she finally whispered, her hand on her heart. “Was it Gloria Peters?”

Lucy shrugged. “What difference does it make?”

“It was, wasn’t it! It was Gloria Peters. She hates me.”

Lucy took one of Prewitt’s left-behind hidden cigarettes out of her purse and lit up. “Oh, calm down, nobody told me. I found things.”

“What things? Lucy, what are you talking about? You’ve gotten all mixed up about something—”

Blowing out smoke, Lucy reached in her purse. She thrust in front of the driver the Polaroid picture of her younger self, flash-eyed, cupping her breasts.

Now the car bumped up on the curb, hit a mailbox, and stopped.

The two widows sat in the car on a residential avenue where oleander blossoms banked the sidewalks and honeysuckle made the air as sweet as syrup. There was no one around, except a bored teenage girl in a bathing suit who Rollerbladed back and forth and looked blatantly in the car window each time she passed it.

Lucy kept smoking. “I found all your love letters down in Prewitt’s study,” she added. “Didn’t you two worry that I might?”

With little heaves Amorette shook herself into tears. She pushed her face against the steering wheel, crying and talking at the same time. “Oh, Lucy, this is just the worst possible thing. Prewitt was a wonderful man, now, don’t start thinking he wasn’t. We never meant to hurt you. He knew how much I needed a little bit of attention because Charlie was too wrapped up in the law office to know if I had two eyes or three, much less be sympathetic to my murmur when I couldn’t do the things he wanted me to.”

“Amorette, I don’t care to hear this,” said Lucy.

But Amorette went on anyhow. “Prewitt and I were both so unhappy, and we just needed a little chance to laugh. And then it all just happened without us ever meaning it to. Won’t you believe me that we really didn’t want you to get yourself hurt.”

Lucy, dragging smoke through the cigarette, thought this over. “I just want to know how long?”

“Wuh, what, what?” sobbed her neighbor.

“How long were you screwing my husband? Five years, ten years, till the day Prewitt died?”

“Oh, Lucy, no!” Amorette had sobbed herself into gasping hiccups that made the sound eeuck. “No! Eeuck. Eeuck. We never... after Charlie died. I just didn’t think that would be fair. Eeuck. Eeuck.”

“Charlie died a year ago. We’ve been in Painton fifteen.” Lucy squashed her cigarette butt in the unused ashtray. She flashed to an image of the maniac smashing the glass storefronts that looked out on the concourse of the shopping mall. “So, Amorette, I guess I don’t know what the goddamn shit ‘fair’ means to you.” She lit another cigarette.

Amorette shrank away, shocked and breathing hard. “Don’t you talk that way to me, Lucy Rhoads! I won’t listen to that kind of language in my car.” Back on moral ground, she flapped her hand frantically at the thick smoke. “And put out that cigarette. You don’t smoke.”

Lucy stared at her. “I do smoke. I am smoking. Just like you were screwing my husband. You and Prewitt were a couple of lying shits.”

Amorette rolled down her window and tried to gulp in air. “All right, if you’re going to judge us—”

Lucy snorted with laughter that hurt her throat. “Of course I’m going to judge you.”

“Well, then, the truth is...” Amorette was now nodding at her like a toy dog with its head on a spring. “The truth is, Lucy, your negativity and being so down on the world the way you are just got to Prewitt sometimes. Sometimes Prewitt just needed somebody to look on the bright side with.”

Lucy snorted again. “A shoulder to laugh on.”

“I think you’re being mean on purpose,” whimpered Amorette. “My doctor says I can’t afford to get upset like this.”

Lucy looked hard into the round brown candy eyes of her old bridge partner. Could the woman indeed be this obtuse? Was she as banal of brain as the tiny plastic mom down on the board waving at Prewitt’s electric train? So imbecilic that any action she took would have to be excused? That any action Lucy took would be unforgivable? But as Lucy kept staring at Amorette Strumlander, she saw deep down in the pupils of her neighbor’s eyes the tiniest flash of self-satisfaction, a flicker that was quickly hidden behind a tearful blink. It was a smugness as bland and benighted as Painton, Alabama’s, history.

Lucy suddenly felt a strong desire to do something, and as the feeling surged through her, she imagined the maniac from the mall bounding down this residential street and tossing his gun to her through the car window. It felt as if the butt of the gun hit her stomach with a terrible pain. She wanted to pick up the gun and shoot into the eye of Amorette’s smugness. But she didn’t have a gun. Besides, what good did the gun do the maniac, who had probably by now been caught by the police? Words popped out of Lucy’s mouth before she could stop them. She said, “Amorette, did you know that Prewitt was sleeping with Gloria Peters at the same time he was sleeping with you, and he kept on with her after you two ended things?”

“What?”

“Did you know there were pictures, naked pictures, of Gloria Peters locked up in Prewitt’s letter box too?”

Mrs. Strumlander turned green, actually apple green, just as Prewitt had turned blue on the ambulance stretcher after his coronary. Amorette had also stopped breathing; when she started up again, she started with a horrible-sounding gasp. “Oh, my God, don’t do this; tell me the truth,” she wheezed.

Lucy shook her head sadly. “I am telling the truth. You didn’t know about Gloria? Well, he tricked us both. And there were some very ugly pictures I found down in the study too, things he’d bought, about pretty sick things being done to naked women. Prewitt had all sorts of magazines and videos down in that study of his. I don’t think you even want to hear about what was in those videos.” (There were no other pictures, of course, any more than there had been an affair with Gloria Peters. The Polaroid shot of Amorette’s cupped breasts was doubtless as decadent an image as Prewitt could conceive. Every sentiment the man ever had could have been taken from one of his Mylar balloons or greeting cards.)

“Please tell me you’re lying about Gloria!” begged Amorette. She was green as grass.

Instead, Lucy opened the car door and stepped out. “Prewitt said my problem was I couldn’t stop telling the truth. And this is the truth. I saw naked pictures of Gloria posing just like you’d done and laughing because she was copying your pose. That’s what she said in a letter, that he’d shown her the picture of you and she was mimicking it.”

“Lucy, stop. I feel sick. Something’s wrong. Hand me my purse off the back seat.”

Lucy ignored the request. “Actually I read lots of letters Gloria wrote Prewitt making fun of you, Amorette. You know how witty she can be. The two of them really got a laugh out of you.”

Unable to breathe, Amorette shrank back deep into the seat of her car and whispered for Lucy please to call her doctor for her because she felt like something very scary was happening.

“Well, just take it one day at a time,” Lucy advised her neighbor. “And look on the bright side.”

“Lucy, Lucy, don’t leave me!”

But Lucy slammed the door and began to walk rapidly along beside the oleander hedge. She was pulling off fistfuls of oleander petals as she went, throwing them down on the sidewalk ahead of her. The teenage girl on Rollerblades came zipping close, eyes and mouth big as her skates carried her within inches of Lucy’s red face. She shot by the car quickly and didn’t notice that Amorette Strumlander had slumped over onto the front seat.

Lucy walked on, block after block, until the oleander stopped and lawns spread flat to the doorsteps of brick ranch houses with little white columns. A heel on her beige pump came loose and she kicked both shoes off. Then she threw off her jacket. She could feel the maniac on the loose right beside her as she jerked at her dress until she broke the buttons off. She flung the dress to the curb. Seeing her do it, a man ran his power mower over his marigold beds, whirring out pieces of red and orange. Lucy unsnapped her bra and tossed it on the man’s close-cropped emerald green grass. She didn’t look at him, but she saw him. A boy driving a pizza van swerved toward her, yelling a war whoop out his window. Lucy didn’t so much as turn her head, but she took off her panty hose and threw it in his direction.

Naked in her panties, carrying her purse, she walked on until the sun had finished with its daytime tricks and night was back. She walked all the way to the outskirts of Helen Keller’s hometown.

When the police car pulled up beside her, she could hear the familiar voice of the scanner dispatcher on the radio inside, then a flashlight was shining in her eyes and then Deputy Sheriff Hews Puddleston was covering her with his jacket. He knew Lucy Rhoads from the Painton Town Hall, where she clerked. “Hey, now,” he said. “You can’t walk around like this in public, Mrs. Rhoads.” He looked at her carefully. “You all right?”

“Not really,” Lucy admitted.

“You had something to drink? Some kind of pill maybe?”

“No, Mr. Puddleston, I’m sorry, I’ve just been so upset about Prewitt, I just, I just...”

“Shhh. It’s okay,” he promised her.

At the police station back in Painton, they were handcuffing a youngish bald man to the orange plastic seats. Lucy shook loose of her escort and went up to him. “Are you the one from the shopping mall?”

The handcuffed man said, “What?”

“Are you the one who shot his wife? Because I know how you feel.”

The man tugged with his handcuffed arms at the two cops beside him. “She crazy?” he wanted to know.

“She’s just upset. She lost her husband,” the desk sergeant explained.

Prewitt’s lawyer had Lucy released within an hour. An hour later Amorette Strumlander died in the hospital of the heart defect that Gloria Peters had always sarcastically claimed was only Amorette’s trick to get out of cleaning her house.

Three months afterward, Lucy had her hearing for creating a public disturbance by walking naked through the streets of Painton, the cheerfulest town in America. It was in the courtroom across the hall from the trial of the Mall Maniac, so she did finally get to see the young man. He was younger than she’d thought he’d be, ordinary-looking, with sad, puzzled eyes. She smiled at him and he smiled back at her, just for a second, then his head turned to his wife, who by now had filed for divorce. His wife still had the scar on her chin from where the plaster piece of the swan had hit her in the florist shop. The florist sat beside her, holding her hand.

Testifying over his lawyer’s protest that he’d tried to kill his wife and her lover but had “just messed it up,” the maniac pleaded guilty. So did Lucy. She admitted she was creating as much of a public disturbance as she could. But unlike the maniac’s, her sentence was suspended, and afterward the whole charge was erased from the record. Prewitt’s lawyer made a convincing case to a judge (who also knew Lucy) that grief at her husband’s death, aggravated by the shock of the car accident from which her best friend was to suffer a coronary, had sent poor Mrs. Rhoads wandering down the sidewalk in “a temporarily irrational state of mind.” He suggested that she might even have struck her head on the dashboard, that she might not even have been aware of what she was doing when she “disrobed in public.” After all, Lucy Rhoads was an upright citizen, a city employee, and a decent woman, and if she’d gone momentarily berserk and exposed herself in a nice neighborhood, she’d done it in a state of emotional and physical shock. Prewitt’s lawyer promised she’d never do it again. She never did.

A few months later, Lucy went to visit the maniac at the state penitentiary. She brought him a huge box of presents from the going-out-of-business sale at The Fun House. They talked for a while, but conversation wasn’t easy, despite the fact that Lucy felt not only that they had a great deal in common, but that she could have taught him a lot about getting away with murder.