“I’ll sell twenty by the end of August,” Fred says with perfect confidence. All his worries have been temporarily swept away by this splendid little green machine, which can do a hell of a lot more than rototill; there are a number of sexy attachments that snap in and out as easily as the lining in a fall jacket. He wants to start it up, listen to it run. That two-cylinder engine looks pretty sweet.
“Fred?”
He looks around impatiently. It’s Ina Gaitskill, Ted Goltz’s secretary and the dealership receptionist. “What?”
“You’ve got a call on line one.” She points across the floor—alive with clanging machinery and the noisy whir of pneumatic screwdrivers loosening bolts on an old Case tractor—to the phone on the wall, where several lights are blinking.
“Can you take a message, Ina? I was going to help Rod get a battery in this little beast and then—”
“I think you should take the call. It’s a woman named Enid Purvis. A neighbor of yours?”
For a moment Fred blanks, and then his salesman’s mind, which stores up names compulsively, comes to his rescue. Enid Purvis. Wife of Deke. Corner of Robin Hood and Maid Marian. He saw Deke just this morning. They waved to each other.
At the same time, he becomes aware that Ina’s eyes are too big and her normally generous mouth is too small. She looks worried.
“What is it?” Dale asks. “Ina, what is it?”
“I don’t know.” Then, reluctantly: “Something about your wife.”
“Better take it, hoss,” Rod says, but Fred is already crossing the oil-stained concrete floor to the phone.
He arrives home ten minutes after leaving Goltz’s, peeling out of the employees’ parking lot and laying rubber like a teenager. The worst part had been Enid Purvis’s calm and careful delivery, how hard she’d been trying not to sound frightened.
She had been walking Potsie past the Marshall house, she said, when she heard Judy scream. Not once, but twice. Of course Enid had done what any good neighbor would, God bless her: gone up to the door, rapped, then pushed open the letter slot and called through it. If there had been no answer, she told Fred, she probably would have phoned the police. She wouldn’t even have gone back home to do it; she would have crossed the street to the Plotskys’ house and called from there. But—
“I’m all right,” Judy had called back, and then she had laughed. The laugh was shrill, ending in a tittery gasp. Enid had found this laugh somehow even more upsetting than the screams. “It was all a dream. Even Ty was a dream.”
“Did you cut yourself, dear?” Enid had called through the letter slot. “Did you fall down?”
“There was no creel,” Judy had called back. She might have said keel, but Enid was quite sure it was creel. “I dreamed that, too.” Then, Enid reluctantly told Fred, Judy Marshall had begun crying. It had been very upsetting, listening to that sound come to her through the letter slot. It had even made the dog whine.
Enid had called through one more time, asking if she could come in and make sure Judy wasn’t hurt.
“Go away!” Judy had called back. In the midst of her crying, she’d laughed again—an angry, distracted laugh. “You’re a dream, too. This whole world is a dream.” Then there had been the sound of shattering glass, as if she had struck a coffee mug or water tumbler and knocked it to the floor. Or thrown it at the wall.
“I didn’t call the police, because she sounded all right,” Enid told Fred (Fred standing with the phone jammed up against one ear and his hand plastered over the other to cut out all the yammering mechanical sounds, which he ordinarily enjoys and which at that moment seemed to go into his head like chrome spikes). “Physically all right, anyway. But Fred . . . I think you ought to go home and check on her.”
All of Judy’s recent oddities went through his mind in a whirl. So did Pat Skarda’s words. Mental dysfunction. . . . We hear people say “So-and-so snapped,” but there are usually signs . . .
And he has seen the signs, hasn’t he?
Seen them and done nothing.
Fred parks his car, a sensible Ford Explorer, in the driveway and hurries up the steps, already calling his wife’s name. There is no answer. Even when he has stepped through the front door (he pushes it open so hard the brass letter slot gives a nonsensical little clack), there is no answer. The air-conditioned interior of the house feels too cold on his skin and he realizes he’s sweating.
“Judy? Jude?”
Still no answer. He hurries down the hall to the kitchen, where he is most apt to find her if he comes home for something in the middle of the day.
The kitchen is sun-washed and empty. The table and the counter are clean; the appliances gleam; two coffee cups have been placed in the dish drainer, winking sun from their freshly washed surfaces. More sun winks from a heap of broken glass in the corner. Fred sees a flower decal on one piece and realizes it was the vase on the windowsill.
“Judy?” he calls again. He can feel the blood hammering in his throat and at his temples.
She doesn’t answer him, but he hears her upstairs, beginning to sing.
“Rock-a-bye baby . . . on the treetop . . . when the wind blows . . .”
Fred recognizes it, and instead of feeling relieved at the sound of her voice, his flesh goes even colder. She used to sing it to Tyler when their son was little. Ty’s lullabye. Fred hasn’t heard that particular ditty come out of her mouth in years.
He goes back down the hall to the stairs, now seeing what he missed on his first trip. The Andrew Wyeth print, Christina’s World, has been taken down and set against the baseboard heater. The wallpaper below the picture hook has been scraped away in several places, revealing the plasterboard beneath. Fred, colder than ever, knows that Judy did this. It isn’t intuition, exactly; not deduction, either. Call it the telepathy of the long married.
Floating down from above, beautiful and on-key yet at the same time perfectly empty: “. . . the cradle will rock. When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall . . .”
Fred is up the stairs two at a time, calling her name.
The upper hall is a scary mess. This is where they have hung the gallery of their past: Fred and Judy outside Madison Shoes, a blues club they sometimes went to when there was nothing interesting going on at the Chocolate Watchband; Fred and Judy dancing the first dance at their wedding reception while their folks happily looked on; Judy in a hospital bed, exhausted but smiling, holding the wrapped bundle that was Ty; the photo of the Marshall family farm that she always sniffed at; more.
Most of these framed photographs have been taken down. Some, like the one of the farm, have been thrown down. Glass litters the hall in sparkling sprays. And she has been at the wallpaper behind half a dozen. In the spot where the picture of Judy and Ty in the hospital had hung, the paper has been torn almost completely away, and he can see where she scraped at the wallboard beneath. Some of the scratches are dappled with drying spots of blood.
“Judy! Judy!”
Tyler’s door stands open. Fred sprints the length of the upstairs hall with glass crunching under his loafers.
“. . . and down will come Tyler, cradle and all.”
“Judy! Ju—”
He stands in the door, all words temporarily knocked out of him.
Ty’s room looks like the aftermath of a rough search in a detective movie. The drawers have been yanked out of his bureau and lie everywhere, most overturned. The bureau itself has been pulled away from the wall. Summer clothes are spread hell to breakfast—jeans and T-shirts and underwear and white athletic socks. The closet door is open and more clothes have been struck from the hangers; that same spousal telepathy tells him she tore Ty’s slacks and button-up shirts down so she could make sure nothing was behind them. The coat of Tyler’s only suit hangs askew from the closet’s doorknob. His posters have been pulled from the walls; Mark McGwire has been torn in half. In every case but one she has left the wallpaper behind the posters alone, but the one exception is a beaut. Behind the rectangle where the poster of the castle hung (COME BACK TO THE AULD SOD), the wallpaper has been almost entirely stripped away. There are more streaks of blood on the wallboard beneath.
Judy Marshall sits on the bare mattress of her son’s bed. The sheets are heaped in the corner, along with the pillow. The bed itself has been yanked away from the wall. Judy’s head is down. He can’t see her face—her hair is screening it—but she’s wearing shorts and he can see dapples and streaks of blood on her tanned thighs. Her hands are clasped below her knees, out of sight, and Fred is glad. He doesn’t want to see how badly she has hurt herself until he has to. His heart is hammering in his chest, his nervous system is redlining with adrenaline overload, and his mouth tastes like a burnt fuse.