‘I told you not to leave Shep alone.’
‘He’s all right.’
‘He’s not all right, out there by himself,’ he said, raising his voice as though he had some legitimate authority over her.
‘Don’t you shout at me. Good lord, you drove here like a maniac, wouldn’t tell me why, bailed out of the truck, wouldn’t tell me why. And I’m supposed to – what? – to sit out there, just shift my brain into neutral like your good little woman, and wait like a stupid turkey standing in the rain with its mouth open, gawking at the sky, until it drowns?’
He glowered at her. ‘What are you talking about turkeys?’
‘You know exactly what I’m talking about.’
‘And it’s not raining.’
‘Don’t be obtuse.’
‘You have no sense of responsibility,’ he declared.
‘I have a huge sense of responsibility.’
‘You left Shep alone.’
‘He won’t go anywhere. I gave him a task to keep him busy. I said, “Shepherd, because of your rude and overbearing brother, I’m going to need at least one hundred polite synonyms for asshole.”‘
‘I don’t have time for this bickering.’
‘Who started it?’ she accused, and turned away from him, and might have left the room if she’d not been halted by the sight of the doves.
The flock still streamed through the hallway, past the open bedroom door, toward the stairs. By this time, if these apparitions had been real, the house would have been so fully packed that extreme bird pressure would have blown out all the windows as surely as a gas leak and a spark.
She willed them to vanish, but they flew, they flew, and she turned her back on them, fearing for her sanity once more. ‘We’ve got to get out of here. Marj will call the cops sooner or later.’
‘Marj?’
‘The woman who gave you the toad pin and somehow started all this. She’s Kenny’s grandma, Travis’s. What do you want me to do?’
* * *
In the bathroom, on her knees at the toilet, Becky had begun to reconsider her dinner, if not the entire direction of her life.
Dylan pointed to a straight-backed chair. He saw that Jilly got the message.
The bathroom door opened outward. With the chair tipped back and wedged under the knob, Becky would be imprisoned until the police arrived to let her out.
Dylan didn’t think that the girl would recover sufficiently to cut him to ribbons, but he didn’t want to be vomited on, either.
On the floor, six-way-wired Kenny had come unstrung. He was all tears and snot and spit bubbles, but still dangerous, speaking more curses and obscenities than sense, demanding immediate medical attention, promising revenge, and given half a chance he might prove whether or not his teeth were snake-sharp.
A threat to cave in Kenny’s skull sounded phony to Dylan when he made it, but the kid took it seriously, perhaps because he would not have hesitated to crush Dylan’s skull if their roles had been reversed. On demand, he produced handcuff and padlock keys from one of his embroidered shirt pockets with mother-of-pearl button snaps.
Jilly seemed reluctant to follow Dylan out of the bedroom, as if she feared other miscreants against whom insecticide might prove to be an inadequate defense. He assured her that Becky and Kenny were the sum of all evil under this roof. Nevertheless, wincing, hesitant, she crossed the hallway to the shackled boy’s room as though fear half blinded her, and repeatedly she glanced toward the window at the end of the hall, as if she saw a ghostly face pressed to the glass.
As he freed Travis, Dylan explained that Becky was not morally fit to compete in the Miss All-American Teen Pageant, and then they went downstairs to the kitchen.
When Marj rushed in from the back porch to embrace her grandson and to wail about his blackened eye, Travis all but disappeared in cuddling candy-stripe.
Dylan waited for the boy to half extract himself and then said, ‘Both Becky and Kenny need medical attention—’
‘And a prison cell until their social security kicks in,’ Jilly added.
‘—but give us two or three minutes before you call nine-one-one,’ Dylan finished.