The Best American Mystery Stories 2006

Jane Haddam Edelweiss

From Creature Cozies

That morning, the air was hot and muggy and thick, the way it can be only in central Florida in the winter, and Miss Caroline Edgerton was taking her cat to work. Shelley Altman saw them coming out of Miss Edgerton’s front door at seven forty-five in the morning, the earliest Shelley had ever seen Miss Edgerton head to work. By now, Shelley knew everything there was to know about “Miss Caroline,” as the paperboy called her, right down to the size of her underwear and the pattern she preferred at Victoria’s Secret. It was funny to think of Miss Edgerton shopping at Victoria’s Secret. She was sixty if she was a day, and she was probably a virgin on top of it. Shelley hadn’t found any birth control any of the last three times she’d searched the house. She’d been particularly looking for it, too, because Amanda absolutely insisted that that was one thing they needed to know. Was Miss Edgerton a virgin? Was she a lesbian? Was she anything at all besides a dried up old prune of a hag who had dedicated her life to making things miserable for girls who were younger than she was and prettier than she had ever been? It mattered, Amanda said, because the answers might change their minds about what they had decided to do. It was one thing to murder a woman who was nothing more than a waste of light and air. It was something else to murder a tragic victim of life’s circumstances. Maybe Miss Edgerton had once had a lover who had died in a war — Vietnam or World War II, whichever. Maybe Miss Edgerton had always wished and hoped for a lover but had been too poor or too ugly to get one. Maybe Miss Edgerton was pining right now for some young man at her office, who would never look at her because she was far too old. Whatever it was, they had to find out, just in case it made her less than the best of candidates. It wasn’t as if they were shy of people who deserved to be dead. Matahatchee was full of them. Amanda could name six right off the top of her head, and that was without going any farther afield than Main Street.

Out in the driveway next door, Miss Caroline Edgerton had put her cat very carefully into the cat carrier that she kept in the back seat for whenever she needed it. Her cat was named Edelweiss, because it was as purely white as some silly flower that grew in Switzerland, and it didn’t like going into the carrier for any reason whatsoever. Shelley was always a little surprised that Miss Edgerton didn’t take her cat to work every day. She surely lived with it like it was surgically attached when she was home. Sometimes, when Shelley looked into the windows at night, Miss Edgerton would be sitting in the big club chair in the living room with Edelweiss draped around her neck like a feather boa, the both of them watching something mind-numbingly boring on PBS. Shelley didn’t care if Miss Edgerton was somebody who had had a tragic life. She hated Miss Edgerton with everything inside herself, much the way she also hated Mrs. Keller who taught English at school and Mrs. Partree who ran that youth group at the Methodist church. Shelley’s parents went to the Methodist church. They made Shelley go with them. Twice a year they made Shelley go on a Bible retreat with the youth group, too. By now, Shelley had read through the really good parts of the Bible almost as often as she had watched Natural Born Killers — but only because she wasn’t allowed to watch Natural Born Killers in the house.

Miss Edgerton had Edelweiss safely in the cat carrier and the cat carrier safely on the floor of the back seat of the car. That was the safest place for Edelweiss to be if there was ever a car accident. Miss Edgerton came around front and got in behind the wheel. Her car was a trim little Volvo sedan, in navy blue, which matched her business suit today. Miss Edgerton always looked businesslike, even though she didn’t work at anything any more important than being a secretary.

Shelley moved away from her bedroom window and sat down on her bed. Her school clothes were hung on her closet door. Her makeup was laid out on the vanity table in front of the beveled mirror that was supposed to be good for making sure you covered up your flaws and imperfections. Her fingernails were bright green. It seemed impossible to her that she should have to get up and go out and spend the day at Matahatchee High School, where she was only a sophomore and not considered very important by the other girls in her class. Amanda was important. Amanda was so important, she was already a varsity cheerleader, and secretary of the student council, and a member of the Key Club. Once a month, at least, Amanda had her picture in the Matahatchee Echo, which was the school newspaper. Amanda was a peer tutor. Amanda was an anger management peer counselor. Amanda sang in the choir at church. Sometimes, when Shelley thought about killing somebody, Amanda seemed to be the very best one to kill. Then Shelley would think about Miss Edgerton and change her mind. It was just that the waiting was making her crazy. It got to the point sometimes when she couldn’t seem to make herself think. Now she got up and got her bright blue halter-top off its hanger and started to put it on. She didn’t know if she was glad to live in a place where it almost never got cold. She hated halter-tops. They made her feel as if someone were about to scrape away her skin.

School made Shelley feel as if she were already dead. It took her forever to get dressed to go there, and then it took her forever to walk the six long blocks that got her to its front door. To pass the time, she went looking for Miss Caroline Edgerton on Main Street, through the front window in the offices of Carmeth, Brane, and DeVoe, where she worked. Sometimes Miss Edgerton sat at the front desk there and answered the phone for hours. When she had the cat with her, the cat sat on the desk near the phone and looked up every time it rang. Sometimes the cat draped itself over the phone, as if it were a chicken and the phone was its egg. When it was like that and the phone rang, Miss Edgerton would lift the cat gently so that she could pick up the phone. She was never angry or impatient with the cat. She was better to Edelweiss than most parents were to their children. She was certainly better to Edelweiss than Shelley’s parents were to Shelley. This morning, though, neither Miss Edgerton nor the cat was anywhere to be seen. The woman behind the front desk was young and weighted down under a cascade of falls and hairpieces. Shelley went around the back to make sure Miss Edgerton’s car was in the parking lot — it was, right next to the bright red Porsche that belonged to Mr. DeVoe — and then she went to school, thinking about palm trees as she went. Amanda came from New York State someplace. She’d never seen a palm tree in person until her parents had moved here when she was still in junior high. Palm trees were the first thing she and Shelley had talked about, in Shelley’s backyard, on the day they met.

“They don’t look like real trees at all,” Amanda had said, and then she’d seen Miss Caroline Edgerton come out her back door to potter around in her yard.

Shelley went to her locker and stowed away most of her books in it. She brought books home every night, because if she didn’t, her parents screamed at her, her mother especially. They gave her lectures about how she would never amount to anything, and how she’d end up like those homeless people who slept every night on Segovia Avenue. She brought the books home, and she laid them out across the desk in her bedroom, but that was all she did with them. If she had homework and knew about it, she ignored it. Mostly she didn’t have homework, because if you weren’t in the college track, the teachers didn’t see any point in giving any. She did go to class. Not going was the surest way to get the principal to call your parents, and Shelley lived to make sure she wasn’t bothered by her parents.

She got her English book — Explorations in Literature, a complete bore — and headed down the hall to her homeroom. She would have skipped homeroom if she could have. It was nothing but sitting in a sea of people who didn’t want to talk to her and listening to announcements about things she wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. Chess Club. Glee Club. Future Teachers of America. Homeroom, though, was the one thing she could not skip, not ever. If you skipped that, you were counted absent for the entire day.

She was just adjusting the strap on her shoulder bag for the fiftieth time when she saw Amanda in the hall, and for the first few moments she didn’t pay attention. Amanda didn’t much like talking to her in school. Usually, they passed each other in the halls without even saying hello, and saved their conversations for after school, in their own bedrooms. Their houses were only across the street from each other. Shelley started to go on by and take her seat in Room 122, but Amanda snaked out her hand and grabbed her elbow.

“Go to the girls’ room,” Amanda said. “I’ll meet you there.”

Shelley hesitated. It really wasn’t all right to miss homeroom, although having to go to the bathroom was usually a good enough excuse for being tardy. She looked through the window in the door at Miss Carroll, who was wearing a sleeveless dress and a crucifix. She wore the crucifix because somebody’s father objected to the school board that they had a “Satanist” teaching in Matahatchee, by which it turned out he meant a Catholic. Shelley prodded at her hair. The school’s air-conditioning was only half working. Her hair was full of sweat.

“Go ahead,” Amanda said. “This is important.”

Miss Carroll looked up and saw Shelley standing outside the door. Shelley made hand motions meant to explain that she was heading to the bathroom. Miss Carroll nodded. In Shelley’s imaginary universe — the one where she and Amanda were masterminds, committing murder after murder, whenever they felt it was necessary — Miss Carroll was the second to go.

In the girls’ room, Amanda was standing near the sinks, putting on lipstick. She put on makeup four or five times a day. Her hair never looked full of sweat. Today she was wearing the short little kick-pleat skirt that was practically the uniform of the Key Club. If anybody wore one just like it who didn’t belong, the Key Club girls ganged up on her on the athletic field and made sure it would never happen again.

Shelley put down her books on a corner of the sink. She didn’t want to put on makeup. She didn’t want to look in the mirror at all. Mirrors made it impossible to forget that she had acne running all across the ridge of her jaw.

“What is it?” she asked, folding her arms across her chest. “I thought I wasn’t supposed to talk to you here. I thought it would compromise the operation.”

“You aren’t supposed to talk to me in public,” Amanda said. “It would compromise the operation. If everybody knew we were friends, they’d guess right away.”

“They’d guess about Miss Edgerton? Why? Why would our being friends mean we’d done something to—”

“Shh,” Amanda said. She abandoned the lipstick for some kind of powder. When Shelley put on makeup, it seemed to clot up on her skin. In a few hours, she looked as if she were walking around with pieces of plaster clinging to her face. Amanda’s makeup didn’t even look like makeup. When Amanda’s makeup had been on Amanda for a few hours, it just seemed to disappear.

“I don’t think it has anything to do with Miss Edgerton,” Shelley said. “I think that’s just a big cover so that you don’t have to talk to me in front of your popular friends. I mean, for God’s sake. What is that? Amanda the supercheerleader.”

Amanda had gone from powder to something for her eyebrows. “You could be popular, too, if you put in a little effort. I don’t know what’s wrong with you that you want to be by yourself all the time.”

“I don’t want to be by myself all the time. I want to be with you.”

“Well, that wouldn’t make much sense, under the circumstances. Especially today. Did you see her? She’s here.”

“Who’s here?”

“Miss Edgerton,” Amanda said. “Mr. DeVoe is here doing something or the other, and she’s come with him. She brought her cat, too. It’s in with Miss Lazio in the secretaries’ place, you know, the big room in front of the principal’s office. Anyway, she’s here, and I hung around the office for a little and from what I heard, she’s going to be here until noon.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Some legal thing having to do with the school, I’d guess. Mr. DeVoe is a lawyer. She’s a lawyer’s secretary. What does it matter?”

“That’s what I want to know,” Shelley said. “What does it matter? Why should we care where she is or what she does?”

Amanda stopped putting on makeup. “You must be joking. You know why we care.”

“I meant why should we care where she is or what she does today?” Shelley said. “I’m not a complete idiot, Amanda. I know why we care in the long run. But what does it matter if she’s here today?”

“Well,” Amanda said. “I was thinking. It might be the perfect chance.”

“The perfect chance for what?”

“For us to do what we want to do. Think about it. You live next door to her, right? She knows who you are?”

“Of course she does,” Shelley said. “She knows who you are, too. You live right across the street.”

“But she doesn’t know me that well. We only moved here a couple of years ago. She’s known you forever.”

“So?”

“So, you could ask her for a ride. You could go out to the parking lot, and run into her, and ask her for a ride somewhere.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know.” Amanda sounded impatient. “Make something up. Make somewhere up. How about out to Grandview Park?”

“It’s a swamp,” Shelley said.

“So?” Amanda said.

“Why would I want to go there? Why would she go out of her way to drive me out there? You aren’t making any sense.”

Amanda’s makeup things were spread all across the stainless steel shelf under the face mirror above the sinks. She opened her bag under the shelf and swept all the jars and tubes and bottles out of sight. She looked angry, the way only Amanda could look angry — as if she had every right to expect you to do what she wanted you to do, and you were being evil to refuse her.

“Listen,” Amanda said. “This was your idea as much as mine. You wanted this as much as I ever did. If you’re not interested anymore, just tell me.”

“Of course I’m interested,” Shelley said.

“Well, then. I’m going to be out at Grandview Park at twelve thirty this afternoon. You ask Miss Edgerton for a ride and get her out there and meet me. I don’t care what you tell her. Just be there. Or we can call the whole thing off.”

“You couldn’t do it without me,” Shelley said. “If you tried, I’d know it was you. I could go to the police and say it was you.”

“Meet me out there,” Amanda said again. Then she tossed her hair against her back, picked up her shoulder bag, and flounced out of the girls’ room. If the door hadn’t been on an air hinge, she would have made it slam.

Once she was gone, Shelley took a look at herself in the mirror. There really was a line of acne along her jaw. Her cheeks really were as puffy and round as a chipmunk’s. Everything the other girls said about her was true, except that she wasn’t actually stupid. If Amanda couldn’t do it on her own, she couldn’t, either, and she wanted to do it very much. She very certainly didn’t want to give it up.

Still, for a while there that morning, Shelley did think she’d give it up. At least, she’d give it up for now, and lay low for a year or two, until she was old enough to get out of Matahatchee, and go someplace where nobody had ever heard of her or of Amanda Marsh. It was depressing to walk through school all day watching Amanda in the middle of crowds of people, all of them looking like they’d just stepped off the cover of Seventeen magazine. It was even more depressing to hear Amanda’s name called out in homeroom for the honor roll the third time already this year. It seemed to Shelley that there should be some kind of balance. Pretty girls should be stupid girls. Not-so-pretty girls should be smart girls. That was the way it was in the movies, except that in the movies even the not-so-pretty girls were prettier than Shelley was, and they always blossomed into beautiful girls as soon as anybody paid any attention to them.

Shelley was not blossoming into beautiful, and by third period, she was already in trouble with three different teachers. She had forgotten her business math homework for the third time this week. She got caught talking in English class when the teacher was trying to read a poem. She got caught walking in the hall chewing gum, which had recently become verboten at Matahatchee High School, along with guns, knives, and charm bracelets. Charm bracelets were suspected of being vehicles for carrying gang symbols, although there had never been a gang of any kind at Matahatchee that anybody could remember. The trouble in English was stupid, too. The poem was this thing called “The Emperor of Ice Cream,” and if anybody had ever been able to make sense out of it, Shelley would gladly eat cow dung. Holding the pink slips that meant she was due in the office during lunchtime to discuss the “appropriate discipline,” wandering through the west wing corridor on the way to her study hall, Shelley found herself thinking about Miss Edgerton again. Miss Edgerton, who always wore the right thing at the right time. Miss Edgerton, who was always organized and polite. Miss Edgerton, whose car was always clean and whose clothes were always pressed. In some odd way that Shelley could not pin down, Miss Edgerton seemed to be at the root of all the trouble in the world, of all the trouble for people like Shelley. For some reason, she reminded Shelley of Amanda, all grown up.

It was the pink slips that decided it, in the end. Shelley had the pink slips and had to take them to the office. Miss Edgerton was in that very same office, doing some kind of work for the lawyer who was working for the Board of Education. Something. Shelley couldn’t remember. She only knew that as she made her way toward the center of the building, she felt better than she had in hours. She felt lightheaded and secure.

She’d expected to have to look around to find Miss Edgerton — in a back office, maybe, or closeted with the principal — but Miss Edgerton was right out front at a desk, next to Miss Lazio, and the cat was with her. Or rather, the cat was lying across a pile of papers, curled around a crystal paperweight that Shelley didn’t remember ever seeing before. Maybe it belonged to Miss Edgerton, or the cat, and Miss Edgerton had brought it along to keep the cat happy. Miss Lazio was certainly happy. She reached across to Miss Edgerton’s desk every once in a while to stroke Edelweiss’s back, and Edelweiss curled around to nuzzle the fingers when they came close. It was, Shelley thought, completely nauseating. They treated that cat the way they should have treated a child, except that neither of them had children. They probably didn’t even want them. Maybe Amanda was right. Maybe Miss Edgerton was a lesbian. Maybe Miss Lazio was her lover. Shelley seemed to be full of maybes today. It made no sense. She wished she could take off for the rest of the day and spend her time downtown, where there was nothing to do, but where nobody was watching her.

Miss Edgerton and Miss Lazio both looked up when she came into the office. Miss Lazio looked at the little clutch of pink slips with a frown. Miss Lazio was nowhere near as annoying as Miss Edgerton, because she was younger, and not so perfect. Her hair was forever falling out of the clips she used to try to hold it back.

“Well,” she said, as Shelley pushed her way up to the counter that separated the desks from the waiting area. “You seem to have been busy today. Let me see what you’ve got.”

She got out from behind her desk and came to where Shelley was standing. At the desk with the cat on it, Miss Edgerton sat still, staring. The cat was snaking around as if it were trying to rub itself rich. It was so white, it made everything near it look darker.

“I know you, don’t I?” Miss Edgerton said finally. “You live next door to me.”

“That’s right,” Shelley said.

Miss Lazio had gone through each of the pink slips. “I don’t want you to think she’s some kind of juvenile delinquent,” she said. “These are all minor enough. They always are, with Shelley.”

“That’s right,” Miss Edgerton said. “Shelley Altman. When you were younger, you used to play the piano.”

“I gave it up in fifth grade,” Shelley said.

“That’s a pity. It’s a fine talent, playing the piano. When I was younger, almost every girl learned. You should have had more ambition.”

“I like your cat,” Shelley said.

Miss Edgerton brightened and put out a hand to let Edelweiss nuzzle against it. The two of them together looked like some kind of joke: the old maid and her cat. Miss Edgerton had long fingers with blunt, well-tended nails. Her nail polish was clear and uneventful. Shelley wondered, suddenly, which of the Victoria’s Secret underwear sets she was wearing today.

“It can’t be helped,” Miss Lazio was saying. “Shelley? Are you listening? It can’t be helped. We’ve got the curricular plan for next year to get out of this office today. I’ve got Caroline here to help us with the legal documents we have to file. There’s just not going to be anybody free to talk to you about these until tomorrow. It would be different if you’d done something really serious. I could have sent you to Mr. Borden if you’d vandalized some property or threatened another student with bodily harm. But this—” Miss Lazio waved it all away with one hand. “This is barely worth talking about. You’ll have to come back tomorrow and talk to somebody then.”

“All right,” Shelley said.

“I don’t think it would have been better if she had vandalized property,” Miss Edgerton said.

Miss Lazio brushed hair out of her face. “Just let it go,” she said. “I’ll charge these off on the book. You can forget all about them. Except the homework, of course, and that’s up to your teacher. Why you girls don’t do homework is more than I can understand. But then, I don’t understand anything anymore, do I? We didn’t have air-conditioning when I went to high school. We got hot, that was all, and we learned to live with it. They never learn to live with anything.”

“I like your cat,” Shelley said again.

Miss Edgerton smiled. Then she leaned over and picked up Edelweiss and laid her across her shoulder. The cat purred and stretched and yawned.

“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. She’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.