Fritzy looked at her with his cunning green eyes, still licking his paw. It looked harmless, that paw, but there were claws hidden inside it. Tess had seen them, and on occasion felt them.
She found out where I lived; let’s see if I can return the favor.
Tess went back to her computer, this time searching for a Books & Brown Baggers website. She was quite sure she’d find one-everybody had websites these days, there were prisoners doing life for murder who had websites—and she did. The Brown Baggers posted newsy notes about their members, book reviews, and informal summaries—not quite minutes—of their meetings. Tess chose the latter and began scrolling. It did not take her long to discover that the June 10 meeting had been held at Ramona Norville’s home in Brewster. Tess had never been to this town, but knew where it was, had passed a green turnpike sign pointing to it while on her way to yesterday’s gig. It was only two or three exits south of Chicopee.
Next she went to the Brewster Township tax records and scrolled down until she found Ramona’s name. She had paid $913.06 in property taxes the year before; said property at 75 Lacemaker Lane.
“Found you, dear,” Tess murmured.
“You need to think about how you’re going to handle this,” Fritzy said. “And about how far you’re willing to go.”
“If I’m right,” Tess said, “maybe quite far.”
She started to turn off her computer, then thought of one more thing worth checking out, although she knew it might come to nothing. She went to the Weekly Reminder ’s home page and clicked on OBITUARIES. There was a place to enter the name you were interested in, and Tess typed STREHLKE. There was a single hit, for a man named Roscoe Strehlke. According to the 1999 obit, he had died suddenly in his home, at the age of forty-eight. Survived by his wife, Ramona, and two sons: Alvin (23) and Lester (17). For a mystery writer, even of the bloodless sort known as “cozies,” died suddenly was a red flag. She searched the Reminder’s general database and found nothing more.
She sat still for a moment, drumming her fingers restlessly against the arms of her chair as she did when she was working and found herself stuck for a word, a phrase, or a way of describing something. Then she looked for a list of newspapers in western and southern Massachusetts, and found the Springfield Republican. When she typed the name of Ramona Norville’s husband, the headline that came up was stark and to the point: CHICOPEE BUSINESSMAN COMMITS SUICIDE.
Strehlke had been discovered in his garage, hanging from a rafter. There was no note and Ramona wasn’t quoted, but a neighbor said that Mr. Strehlke had been distraught over “some trouble his older boy had been in.”
“What kind of trouble was Al in that got you so upset?” Tess asked the computer screen. “Was it something to do with a girl? Assault, maybe? Sexual battery? Was he working up to bigger things, even then? If that’s why you hung yourself, you were one chickenshit daddy.”
“Maybe Roscoe had help,” Fritzy said. “From Ramona. Big strong woman, you know. You ought to know; you saw her.”
Again, that didn’t sound like the voice she made when she was essentially talking to herself. She looked at Fritzy, startled. Fritzy looked back: green eyes asking who, me?
What Tess wanted to do was drive directly to Lacemaker Lane with her gun in her purse. What she ought to do was stop playing detective and call the police. Let them handle it. It was what the Old Tess would have done, but she was no longer that woman. That woman now seemed to her like a distant relative, the kind you sent a card to at Christmas and forgot for the rest of the year.
Because she couldn’t decide—and because she hurt all over—she went upstairs and back to bed. She slept for four hours and got up almost too stiff to walk. She took two extra-strength Tylenol, waited until they improved matters, then drove down to Blockbuster video. She carried the Lemon Squeezer in her purse. She thought she would always carry it now while she was riding alone.
She got to Blockbuster just before closing and asked for a Jodie Foster movie called The Courageous Woman. The clerk (who had green hair, a safety pin in one ear, and looked all of eighteen years old) smiled indulgently and told her the film was actually called The Brave One. Mr. Retro Punk told her that for an extra fifty cents, she could get a bag of microwave popcorn to go with. Tess almost said no, then reconsidered. “Why the fuck not?” she asked Mr. Retro Punk. “You only live once, right?”
He gave her a startled, reconsidering look, then smiled and agreed that it was a case of one life to a customer.
At home, she popped the corn, inserted the DVD, and plopped onto the couch with a pillow at the small of her back to cushion the scrape there. Fritzy joined her and they watched Jodie Foster go after the men (the punks, as in do you feel lucky, punk) who had killed her boyfriend. Foster got assorted other punks along the way, and used a pistol to do it. The Brave One was very much that kind of a movie, but Tess enjoyed it just the same. She thought it made perfect sense. She also thought that she had been missing something all these years: the low but authentic catharsis movies like The Brave One offered. When it was over, she turned to Fritzy and said, “I wish Richard Widmark had met Jodie Foster instead of the old lady in the wheelchair, don’t you?”
Fritzy agreed one thousand percent.
– 30 –
Lying in bed that night with an October wind getting up to dickens around the house and Fritzy beside her, curled up nose to tail, Tess made an agreement with herself: if she woke up tomorrow feeling as she did now, she would go to see Ramona Norville, and perhaps after Ramona—depending on how things turned out on Lacemaker Lane—she would pay a visit to Alvin “Big Driver” Strehlke. More likely she’d wake up with some semblance of sanity restored and call the police. No anonymous call, either; she’d face the music and dance. Proving actual rape forty hours and God knew how many showers after the fact might be difficult, but the signs of sexual battery were written all over her body.
And the women in the pipe: she was their advocate, like it or not.
Tomorrow all these revenge ideas will seem silly to me. Like the kind of delusions people have when they’re sick with a high fever.
But when she woke up on Sunday, she was still in full New Tess mode. She looked at the gun on the night table and thought, I want to use it. I want to take care of this myself, and given what I’ve been through, I deserve to take care of it myself.
“But I need to make sure, and I don’t want to get caught,” she said to Fritzy, who was now on his feet and stretching, getting ready for another exhausting day of lying around and snacking from his bowl.
Tess showered, dressed, then took a yellow legal pad out to the sun-porch. She stared at her back lawn for almost fifteen minutes, occasionally sipping at a cooling cup of tea. Finally she wrote DON’T GET CAUGHT at the top of the first sheet. She considered this soberly, and then began making notes. As with each day’s work when she was writing a book, she started slowly, but picked up speed.
– 31 –
By ten o’clock she was ravenous. She cooked herself a huge brunch and ate every bite. Then she took her movie back to Blockbuster and asked if they had Kiss of Death. They didn’t, but after ten minutes of browsing, she settled on a substitute called Last House on the Left. She took it home and watched closely. In the movie, men raped a young girl and left her for dead. It was so much like what had happened to her that Tess burst into tears, crying so loudly that Fritzy ran from the room. But she stuck with it and was rewarded with a happy ending: the parents of the young girl murdered the rapists.
She returned the disc to its case, which she left on the table in the hall. She would return it tomorrow, if she were still alive tomorrow. She planned to be, but nothing was certain; there were many strange twists and devious turns as one hopped down the overgrown bunny-trail of life. Tess had found this out for herself.
With time to kill—the daylight hours seemed to move so slowly—she went back online, searching for information about the trouble Al Strehlke had been in before his father committed suicide. She found nothing. Possibly the neighbor was full of shit (neighbors so often were), but Tess could think of another scenario: the trouble might have occurred while Strehlke was still a minor. In cases like that, names weren’t released to the press and the court records (assuming the case had even gone to court) were sealed.