She took the Santa toad home and put it with the other figurines. The following morning, Monday, as she left the apartment, she found yet another plain white box on the doorstep. She opened a reluctantly. It contained a clear glass toad.
When Laura returned from the UCI campus that same afternoon Julie Ishimina was sitting at the dinette table, reading the daily paper and drinking a cup of coffee. “You got another one,” she said, pointing to a box on the kitchen counter. ‘ ‘Came in the mail.” Laura tore open the elaborately wrapped package. The sixth toad was actually a pair of toads—salt and pepper shakers.
She put the shakers with the other figurines on her nightstand and for a long while she sat on the edge of her bed, frowning at that growing collection.
At five o’clock that afternoon she called Thelma Ackerson in Los Angeles and told her about the toads.
Lacking a trust fund of any size, Thelma had not even considered college, but as she said, that was no tragedy because she was not interested in academics. Upon completing high school, she had gone straight from Caswell Hall to Los Angeles, intent upon breaking into show business as a stand-up comic.
Nearly every night, from about six o’clock until two in the morning, she hung around the comedy clubs—the Improv, the Comedy Store, and all their imitators—angling for a six-minute, unpaid shot on the stage, making contacts (or hoping to make them), competing with a horde of young comics for the coveted exposure.
She worked days to pay the rent, moving from job to job, some of them decidedly peculiar. Among other things she had worn a chicken suit and sung songs and waited tables in a weird “theme” pizza parlor, and she’d been a picket-line stand-in for a few Writers Guild West members who were required by their union to participate in a strike action but who preferred to pay someone a hundred bucks a day to carry a placard for them and sign their names on the duty roster.
Though they lived just ninety minutes apart, Laura and Thelma got together only two or three times a year, usually just for a long lunch or dinner, because they led busy lives. But regardless of the time between visits, they were instantly comfortable with each other and quick to share their most intimate thoughts and experiences. “The McIlroy-Caswell bond,” Thelma once said, “is stronger than being blood brothers, stronger than the Mafia covenant, stronger than the bond between Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble, and those two are close.”
Now, after she listened to Laura’s story, Thelma said, “So what’s your problem, Shane? Sounds to me like some big, shy of a guy has a crush on you. Lots of women would swoon over this.”
“Is that what it is, though? An innocent crush?”
“What else?”
“I don’t know. But it … makes me uneasy.”
“Uneasy? These toads are all cute little things, aren’t they? None of them is a snarling toad? None of them is holding a bloody butcher knife? Or a little ceramic chainsaw?”
“No.”
“He hasn’t sent you any beheaded toads, has he?”
“No. but—”
“Shane, the last few years have been calm, though of course you’ve had a pretty eventful life. It’s understandable that you’d expect this guy to be Charles Manson’s brother. But it’s almost a sure bet he’s just what he appears to be—a guy who admires you from afar, is maybe a little shy, and has a streak of romance in him about eighteen inches wide. How’s your sex life?”
“I don’t have any,” Laura said.
“Why not? You’re not a virgin. There was that guy last year—”
“Well, you know that didn’t work out.”
“Nobody since?”
“No. What do you think—I’m promiscuous?”
“Sheesh! Kiddo, two lovers in twenty-two years would not make you promiscuous even by the pope’s definition. Unbend a little. Relax. Stop being a worrier. Flow with this, see where it goes. He might just turn out to be Prince Charming.”
“Well . . . maybe I will. I guess you’re right.”
“But, Shane?”
“Yeah?”
“Just for luck, from now on you better carry a .357 Magnum.”