“Halloo!” she called, cupping her hands around her mouth. Brad grabbed her shoulder, apparently wanting her to stop, and she shook him off emphatically. “Halloo, Billingsley!”
“Don’t do that, Bee,” Cammie Reed said. “It’s not wise.”
And what would be wise? Belinda thought. Just sitting on the kitchen floor and waiting for the cavalry to come?
“Hell, go on,” Johnny said. “What harm can it do? If the people who did the shooting are still around, I imagine that where we are is hardly a big secret to them.” An idea seemed to strike him at that, and he dropped on his hunkers in front of the late postman’s wife. “Kirsten, did David have a gun? A hunting rifle, or maybe-”
“There’s a pistol in his desk,” she said. “Second drawer on the left of the kneehole. That drawer’s locked, but the key’s in the wide drawer at the top. It’s on a piece of green yarn.”
Johnny nodded. “And the desk? Where’s that?”
“Oh. In his little office. Upstairs, the end of the hall.” She said all this while seeming to contemplate her own knees, then raised desperate, distracted eyes to look at him. “He’s out in the rain, Johnny. So is Susi’s friend. We shouldn’t leave them out in the rain.”
“It’s stopping,” Johnny said, and his face suggested he knew how inane that sounded. It seemed to satisfy Pie, though, at least temporarily, and Belinda supposed that was the important thing. Perhaps it was Johnny’s tone. The words might be inane, but Belinda had never heard him sound so gentle. “Just take care of your kids, Kirstie, and don’t concern yourself with the rest of it for the time being.”
He got up and started for the swinging door, walking in a battlefield crouch.
“Mr Marinville?” Jim Reed asked. “Can I come with you?” But when he attempted to set Ralphie aside, a panicked look came into the boy’s eyes. His thumb came out of his mouth with an audible pop and he clung to Jim like a barnacle, muttering, “No, Jim, no, Jim,” under his breath in a way that made Belinda feel like shivering. She thought mad people probably talked that way when they were alone in their cells at night.
“Stay where you are, Jim,” Johnny said. “Brad? What about you? Little trip to higher altitudes? Clear the old sinuses?”
“Sure.” Brad looked at his wife with that expression of love and exasperation that is the sole property of people who have been married over ten years. “You really think it’s okay for this woman of mine to be shooting off her mouth?”
“I repeat, what harm can it do?”
“Be careful,” Belinda said. She smoothed a hand briefly across Brad’s chest. “Keep your head down. Promise me.”
“I promise to keep my head down.”
She looked at Johnny. “Now you.”
“Huh? Oh.” He offered a charming grin, and Belinda had a sudden insight: that was the way Mr John Edward Marinville always grinned when he made promises to women. “I promise.”
They went out, dropping a little self-consciously to their knees as they passed through the swinging door and once more into the Carvers” front hall. Belinda leaned toward the screen again. Besides rain and wet grass, she could smell the old Hobart place burning. She realized she could hear it, too-a crackly, whooshing sound. The downpour would probably keep the fire from spreading, but where were the fire trucks, for Christ’s sake? What did they pay their taxes for? “Halloo, Billingsley’s! Who’s there?”
After a moment, a man’s voice (one she didn’t recognize) called back. “There are seven of us! The couple from up the block-”
That had to be the Sodersons, Belinda thought.
–plus the cop, and the guy married to the dead woman. There’s also Mr Billingsley, and
Cynthia, from the store!”
Who are you?” Belinda called.
“Steve Ames! I’m from New York! I was having trouble with my truck, pulled off the
Interstate, got lost! I stopped at the store down there to use the phone!”
“Poor guy,” Dave Reed said. “Like winning the lottery in hell.”
“What’s going on?” the voice from the other side of the stake fence called. “Do you know what’s going on?”
“No!” Belinda shouted back. She thought furiously. There must be more to say, other things to ask, but she couldn’t think of anything at all.
“Have you looked up the street? Is it clear?” Ames called.
Belinda opened her mouth to reply, and then was distracted momentarily by the spider’s web outside the screen. The window’s overhang had protected it from the worst of the squall, but raindrops hung from the gossamer threads like tiny, quivering diamonds. The owneroperator was at the center of the web. Not moving. Maybe dead.
“Ma’am? I asked-”
“I don’t know!” she called back. “Johnny Marinville and my husband looked, but now they’ve gone upstairs to-” But she didn’t want to mention the gun. Stupid, maybe-rathole thinking-but it didn’t change the way she felt.-to get a better look! What about you?”
“It’s been pretty busy here, ma’am! The woman from up the block-” A pause. “Does your phone work?”
“No!” Belinda called. “No phone, no electric!”
Another pause. Then, lower, barely audible over the diminishing hiss of the rain, she heard him say “Shit”. Then there was another voice, one she knew but couldn’t immediately place. “Belinda, is that you?”
“Yes!” she returned, and looked around at the others for help.
“It’s Mr Jackson,” Jim Reed said, speaking around Ralphie’s shoulder. The little boy had not quite managed to join his sister in the refuge of sleep, but Belinda didn’t think it would be long; his thumb had already begun to sag between his lips.
“I’ve been to the front door!” Peter called. “The street’s deserted all the way down to the corner! Completely deserted! No gawkers or rubberneckers from Hyacinth or the next block of Poplar. Does that make any sense to you?”
Belinda thought, frowning, then looked around. She saw only puzzled eyes and dropped heads. She turned back to the window. “No!”
Peter laughed. The sound chilled her the way that little Ralphie Carver’s distraught muttering had chilled her. “Join the club, Bee! Makes no sense to me, either!”
“Who’d come on the block?” Kim Geller scoffed. “Who in their right minds? With guns going off and people screaming and everything?”
Belinda didn’t know how to respond to that. It was logical, but it still didn’t hold water… because people didn’t behave logically when trouble broke out. They came and they gawked. Usually they did it at what they hoped was a safe distance, but they came.
“Are you sure there aren’t people down below the corner?” she called.
This time the pause was so long she was about to repeat the question when a third voice spoke up. She had no trouble recognizing Old Doc. “None of us sees anyone, but the rain has started a mist off the pavement! Until it clears, we can’t tell for sure!”
“But there are no sirens!” Peter again. “Do you hear any coming from the north?”
“No!” she returned. “It must be the storm!”
“I don’t think so,” Cammie Reed said. She spoke for herself, to herself, not the group; if YE OLDE PANTRIE hadn’t been in close proximity to the sink, Belinda wouldn’t have heard her. “Nope, I don’t think so at all.”
“I’m going out to get my wife!” Peter Jackson called. Other voices were immediately raised in protest against this idea. Belinda couldn’t make out the words, but the emotional tone was unmistakable.
Suddenly the spider-the one she had assumed was dead-scattered from the center of its web and mounting one of the silk strands scrambled up until it had disappeared under the eave. Not dead after all, Belinda thought. Only playing possum.
Then Kirsten Carver was leaning past her, bumping Belinda so hard with her shoulder that Belinda would have gone ass-deep into the sink if she hadn’t managed to grab the corner of an overhead cabinet. Pie’s face was parchment-pale, her eyes blazing with fear.
“Don’t you go out there!” she screamed. “They’ll come back and kill you! They’ll come back and kill us all!”
No answer from the other house for several moments, and then Collie Entragian spoke up in a voice that sounded both apologetic and bemused: “No good, ma’am! He’s gone!”
“You should have stopped him!” Kirsten screamed. Belinda put an arm around the woman’s shoulders and was frightened by the steady high vibration she felt. As if Kirste n was on the verge of exploding. What kind of policeman are you!”
“He’s not,” Kim said. She spoke in a just-what-the-hell-did-you-expect tone. “He got kicked off the force. He was running a hot-car ring.”
Susi raised her head. “I don’t believe it.”
“What do you know about it, a girl your age?” her mother asked.
Belinda was about to slide off the edge of the sink when she saw something on the back lawn that made her freeze. It was caught against one leg of the kids” swing set, and like the spider’s web, jeweled with hanging drops of rain.