Gardner Dozois - Dangerous Women. Part II

“Police. Some men are trying to break into a truck parked in front of my house. And one is wearing a pink backpack like my friend was wearing the night—”

“Slow down, ma’am. Name and address.”

She rattled them off.

“Can you describe the men?”

“It’s dark and my porch light is out. I’m alone here. I don’t want them to know I’m watching them and making this call.”

“How many men? Can you give a general description?”

“Are the police coming?” she demanded, suddenly angry at all the useless questions.

“Yes. I’ve dispatched someone. Now. Please tell me as much as you can about the men.”

Piss on it. She went to the door and looked out. He was gone. She looked up and down the street, but the night was hazy with fog. “They’re gone.”

“Are you the owner of the vehicle they were attempting to break into?”

“No. But the important thing is that one of them was wearing a pink backpack, just like the one my friend was wearing when she disappeared.”

“I see.” Sarah was sure the dispatcher didn’t see at all. “Ma’am, as this is not an immediate emergency, we will still send an officer, but he may not arrive immediately …”

“Fine.” She hung up. Stupid. She went to the door and looked out again. Upstairs in the dresser drawer under Russ’s work shirts there was a pistol, a little black .22 that she hadn’t shot in years. Instead she took her long, heavy flashlight from the bottom drawer and stepped out into the backyard. Sarge followed her. She walked quietly to the fence, snapped on the flashlight, and shone it on the old truck. The beam barely reached it. Up the street and down, baffled by the fog, the light showed her nothing. She went back in the house with Sarge, locked the door, but left the kitchen light on and went back to bed. She didn’t sleep.

The officer didn’t come by until ten thirty. She understood. Tacoma was a violent little town; they had to roll first on the calls where people were actually in danger. He came, he took her report, and he gave her an incident number. The pickup truck was gone. No, she didn’t know who it belonged to. Five young men, mid- to late teens, dressed in rough clothes, and the one with a pink backpack. She refused to guess their heights or their races. It had been dark. “But you saw the backpack clearly?”

She had. And she was certain it was identical to the one that Linda had been carrying.

The officer nodded and noted it down. He leaned on her kitchen table to look out the window. He frowned. “Ma’am, you said he hit the window with a fallen branch and it broke into pieces?”

“That’s right. But I don’t think the window broke.”

“Ma’am, there are no tree branches out there. Or pieces in the street.” He looked at her pityingly. “Is it possible you dreamed this? Because you were worried about your friend?”

She wanted to spit at him. “There’s the flashlight I used. Still on the counter where I left it.”

His eyebrows collided. “But you said it was dark and you couldn’t see anything.”

“I went out with the flashlight after I hung up with 911. To see if I could see where they had gone.”

“I see. Well, thank you for calling us on this.”

After he left, she went outside herself. She crossed the street to where the pickup had been parked. No pieces of branch on the ground. Not even a handful of leaves in the gutter. Her new neighbor had a lawn fetish. It was as groomed as Astroturf on a playfield, the gutters as clean as if vacuumed. She scowled to herself. Last night there had been dry leaves whispering as the wind blew, and there had definitely been a large, heavy rotten branch in the street. But the young apple trees in his planting strip were scarcely bigger around than a rake handle. Too small to have grown such a branch, let alone dropped one.

Sarah went back in her house. She wept for a time, then made a cup of tea and felt relieved that she hadn’t called Alex about it. She catalogued the work she could do: laundry, deadheading the roses, taking in the last of the green tomatoes and making chutney of them. She went upstairs and took a nap.

After three weeks the neighborhood quit gossiping about Linda. Her face still smiled from a “missing” poster at Safeway next to the pharmacy counter. Sarah ran into Maureen there, picking up pills for Hugh, and they got Starbucks and wondered what had become of Linda. They talked about the old days, soccer games and tux rentals for proms and the time Linda had hot-wired Hugh’s truck when no one could find the keys and Alex had needed stitches right away. They laughed a lot and wept a little, and worked their way back to the present. Maureen shared her news. Hugh was “holding his own” and Maureen said it as if being able to sit up in bed was all he really wanted to do. Maureen invited her to come pick the apples off their backyard tree. “I don’t have time to do anything with them, and there are more than we can eat. I hate to see them just fall and rot.”

It had felt good to have coffee and a conversation, and it made Sarah realize how long it had been since she had socialized. She thought about it the next morning as she sorted the mail on her table. A power bill, a brochure on long-term-care insurance, an AARP paper, and two brochures from retirement homes. She set the bill to one side and stacked the rest to recycle with the morning paper. She found a basket and was just leaving to raid Maureen’s apple tree when Alex came in. He sat down at her table and she microwaved the leftover morning coffee for them.

“I had to come into Tacoma for a seminar, so I thought I’d drop by. And I wanted to remind you that the second half of property taxes is due the end of this month. You pay it yet?”

“No. But it’s on my desk.” That, at least, was true. It was on her desk. Somewhere.

She saw him eying the retirement home brochures. “Junk mail,” she told him. “Ever since your dad signed us up for AARP, we get those things.”

“Do you?” He looked abashed. “I thought it was because I asked them to send them. I thought maybe you’d look at them and then we could talk.”

“About what? Recycling?” Her joke came out harder-edged than she had intended. Alex got his stubborn look. He would never eat broccoli—never. And he was going to have this conversation with her no matter what. She put a spoonful of sugar in her coffee and stirred it, resigned to an unpleasant half hour.

“Mom, we have to face facts.” He folded his hands on the edge of the table. “Taxes are coming due; the second half of them is seven hundred bucks. House insurance comes due in November. And oil prices are going up, with winter heating bills ahead of us, and this place isn’t exactly energy efficient.” He spoke as if she were a bit stupid as well as old.

“I’ll put on a sweater and move the little heater from room to room. Like I did last year. Zonal heating. Most efficient way to heat a home.” She sipped her coffee.

He opened his hands on the table. “That’s fine. Until we start to get mold in the house from damp in the unheated basement. Mom, this is a three-bedroom, two-bath house, and you live in maybe four rooms of it. The only bathtub is upstairs and the laundry is in the basement. That’s a lot of stairs for you each day. The electrical box should have been replaced years ago. The refrigerator needs a new seal. The living room carpeting is fraying where it meets the tile.”

All things she knew. She tried to make light of it. “And the bulb is burned out in the back porch light. Don’t forget that!”

He narrowed his eyes at her. “When the beech tree dumps its leaves, we’ll need to rake them off the lawn and get them out of the rain gutters. And next year the house is going to need paint.”