CHAPTER 28
Left or right—which way should I go? Wrong way, and chances were I’d run into an armed woman. Instead of bolting, I hesitated, overthinking and not reacting. For a few seconds my feet stayed rooted to the ground, with half my brain screaming to run and the other half debating which way.
Five seconds at most. That’s what it took to decide. Five quick ticks of the clock, but as it turned out, it was three ticks too many. When I broke left—which happened to be the right way to go—I almost made it to the side of the house when I heard a scratchy, hoarse-sounding female voice shout from behind me.
“You stop or I shoot!”
I stopped, all right. The world around me turned gray, as if all its color had gone swirling down a fast-draining tub. My eyes closed tightly, while my hands went unprompted above my head.
I heard footsteps approaching, slow moving. Either she was being cautious or she couldn’t move quickly. I kept my hands up and turned around . . . nice . . . and . . . slow. I can’t say which I saw first, the woman or the double-barreled shotgun pointed at my chest. We’ll call it a tie.
The woman, rollers in her hair, wore a faded white nightgown in mid-afternoon and had no shoes on her feet. Her cheeks were sunken, as though the bones beneath had dissolved over time. As for her face, she radiated toughness, a look enhanced by her leathery skin, which had crinkled the way a potato dries in the sun. Her lips creased back into a snarl, while her eyes, milky and blue, could not conceal the hatred that probably accompanied her every waking second.
“Who are you?” she said.
I could tell by the rasp that she inhaled at least three packs a day. She stood about twenty feet from me, but that gun shortened the distance between us considerably. This was probably how poor Giovanni felt, scared and cornered, though he had an aluminum bat stashed at his disposal, whereas I was unarmed.
The woman took a threatening step forward. “Who are you?” she asked again. “And what do you want?”
I kept my hands in the air and didn’t take a single step. I went rigid like the Tin Man, but I had a heart, and that organ was pounding away mightily.
“I’m looking for Carl Swain,” I said. My dry throat put a little crack in my voice.
“What for?” she asked. The word for came out sounding like “foah.” She took another step forward, keeping the gun pointed at my chest. Her toes curled in the dirt to show me that she was digging in. Hopefully, that meant she wouldn’t be coming any closer. Then again, she could blow me away just fine from this distance.
“I’d like to ask him about Elliot and Tanya Uretsky,” I said.
“Carl’s not here, and you shouldn’t be here, either,” she said. “So get off my property, or I’m going to shoot, and then I’ll call the cops.”
She raised the gun, taking aim with her eye. The skin of her arms where it had loosened from the underlying muscles flapped like two white, sun-spotted wings. Her toes curled deeper into the dirt. I was taking a cautious backward step when I caught movement behind her. It took me a couple blinks of the eye to realize that it was Ruby.
“Stop!” I heard Ruby shout. “You stop it right now!”
The woman whirled around and trained the gun at Ruby’s head. My breath caught in my throat, and I lunged forward, ready to tackle the woman to the ground and wrestle the gun away, but Ruby held up a hand that told me to stay put. So I stayed put.
Wearing her sun hat and glasses, Ruby looked about as threatening as Annie Hall, but she did not back down. Rather, she took a couple steps forward, her finger wagging at the weathered woman like a scolding schoolmarm’s. Ruby, who was a card-carrying member of the ASPCA, who checked food labels for genetically modified organisms, who loved to do yoga before she got sick, who contemplated veganism, and who read Mahatma Gandhi’s biography twice, did not appear ready or even able to preach the power of nonviolence. Instead, she strode right up to the woman and stopped maybe a foot away.
“You put that gun away right now!” Ruby said. My wife ripped off her sunglasses so the seriousness of her expression could not be misunderstood. “Right now!” Ruby said.
The woman hesitated, the standoff in full effect. Ruby didn’t back down, but the woman eventually did. She set the butt of the gun on the ground, the barrel aiming skyward, with one of her knotty hands still positioned near the trigger mechanism, ready to make a quick move if necessary.
“How dare you point a gun at my husband?” Ruby said. “How dare you? You could have killed him!”
“What’s he doing sneaking around my property?” the woman said.
“We weren’t sneaking,” Ruby said. “We knocked on your door.”
“And I rang the bell,” I added.
The woman twisted her neck around to glare at me through those milky, dying eyes. Guess she didn’t need to know that part.
“You get off my property, and don’t ever come here,” she said.
“We have enough trouble just living as it is. Why don’t you leave us alone? My boy hasn’t done nothing to no one. You just leave and leave him be.”
Now, I may not be a professional detective, but even I could deduce that this angry old woman was Carl’s mother. I walked past Mama Meanie, taking quick and purposeful steps. Carl’s mom eyed me with contempt, holding on to the shotgun in a way that reminded me of the American Gothic painting. I only wished that she brandished a pitchfork.
Ruby took hold of my hand, and we slinked away backward, instinct telling us that vigilance was still necessary.
The woman followed us to the front of the house. Once again we were back inside Ziggy; once again we were driving away from this neighborhood. I kept looking in the rearview mirror, half expecting to see Carl’s mom standing in the middle of the road, leveling her shotgun and readying it to take a lucky shot. But I saw nothing more than a sunny street and rows of pleasant-looking houses—pleasant except for two of them, Carl Swain’s and Elliot Uretsky’s.