Before Nance/Marylou actually met Wilson, she hadn’t realized how complicated, and potentially unsatisfying it could be, trying to enact her revenge. She hadn’t even considered the possibility that Wilson might be losing his marbles, might not remember what she required him to remember.

On the third morning she read the New York Times to him, or pretended to read it, the two of them were sitting alone in his little den, drinking cups of coffee that Caroline had brought in; and he asked her if she was the one who’d sent him the package, which gave her hope that he did, finally, grasp the situation.

She said that, yes, it had been she who sent him the package full of photocopies of documents and letters from the government study, linking her and Wilson and Helen.

He asked her why she’d sent it to him.

She said to remind him of what he’d done.

He gave her that blank face. At least he was wearing his hearing aid today and had put on trousers with a short-sleeved button-up shirt tucked into them, instead of his usual bathrobe and pj’s.

“You’re as bad as a Nazi,” Marylou explained to him. “You’re a monster. Experimenting on human beings without their knowledge or consent. I should call you Heinrich. Or Adolf.”

He actually smiled. “Or Godzilla,” he said.

The smile was insufferable. “Do you know who I am?” she asked him.

“I believe I do.”

“Who? Who am I?”

The annoying little white poodle was out in the front yard, barking fiercely at Paula Coffey, in her white visor, jogging by. Wilson said, “You’re Mrs. Archer. Mrs. Archer with the lovely blue eyes.”

“I told you. My real name is Marylou Ahearn.”

His eyes behind their trifocals swept her up and down. “You look nice today.”

“Go straight to hell.”

He nodded. “Not yet,” he said, and crossed his legs so that his white calf showed. He glanced out the window, and she did, too. The dog was silent, but the city recycling truck was nearby, slamming glass bottles around. Moss hung in ghostly swaths from the huge live oak tree in the front yard. The sunlight coming into the room made her feel drowsy. The smell of warming dust made her feel drowsy. She didn’t want to feel drowsy. It was happening again. His bobbing and weaving was wearing her down. The previous two times she’d “read the newspaper” to him she’d given up badgering him after a while and just sat there, making small talk about Memphis and gardening and the weather, hoping that her mere presence was making him miserable, occasionally imagining flying across the room and strangling him. Breaking the table lamp over his head.

Then, because such images were so preposterous, she’d start wondering if maybe he was really the ogre she thought he was. Maybe he hadn’t really known what he was doing with that experiment and so on, until she actually found herself making excuses for him, trying to make sense of the fact that she and this nice, polite, rather handsome gentleman were sitting together, talking about daylilies, when what she really wanted to do was to kill him.

One day, after spying a key in the fork of a tree, she’d taken the opportunity to lock Wilson in the toxic garden shed, hoping that he’d suffocate in there or inhale enough deadly fumes to have a lasting effect. She knew that even if he hadn’t figured out who pushed him into the shed, they’d have to have figured out that she’d done it; and she planned to vehemently deny it when they confronted her. But nobody in the family even mentioned it to her the next time she showed up at their house to “read the paper” to Granddad, who seemed just as unflappable as ever.

Today, she decided, she wouldn’t give up. She took a sip of the strong coffee and set down her mug. She wasn’t going to fall back on small talk. She was done messing around. She informed him that she’d moved to Tallahassee with the singular goal of killing him.

“Is this another one of your jokes?”

“I am going to kill you. How much clearer can I be?”

He folded his arms on his chest. “Don’t talk like that. I could report you to the police.”

“You could,” she said, leaning forward, struggling to keep her voice low so that Caroline, nearby in the kitchen, wouldn’t hear her. “But if you told the police, it would all come out, what you’ve done. It would get in the papers. Your family—your daughter and grandkids—and all of greater Tallahassee will hear the details about how you are responsible for poisoning eight hundred women. And their unborn children.”

“Oh. Well. There’s already been a hearing in Washington,” he said. “When that fellow from Arkansas was president. Hillary’s husband. I gave a deposition for the hearing. And afterward the subjects were compensated. OJ was involved, too, somehow. The rental car guy.”

“I am a subject,” Marylou said. “Here I am. I got some money, but I do not consider myself to be compensated. I am an uncompensated individual. I’ve had many medical problems. And my daughter, Helen, died of cancer. At age eight. Can you imagine watching your child suffer and die, Adolf?”

He stared fixedly at his hands, which were now in his lap. “I’m sorry your daughter died.”

“Are you sorry that you killed her? That’s what you need to be sorry for.”

Would he say it? She watched his face closely. A shadow passed over it. “I’m not feeling well,” he said.

“You don’t feel bad enough, in my opinion.”

He seemed to sink even farther into the ugly chintz chair. “I need to lie down.”

“You’ll have plenty of time to lie down after I kill you.”

His voice sounded faint. “That’s funny.”

“Do you think I’m a stand-up comedian? Why did I say I came here?”

He picked up his coffee mug, a thick brown and white thing that looked like a passable murder weapon. “To read the paper to me,” he said. “And it’s very good of you.” He took a sip of the coffee.

“I’m supposed to read the paper to you. But notice I’m not. What am I doing?”

“You’re pestering me about something.”

“Pestering you?”

He looked over at the Tallahassee Democrat on the couch, tucked up close to Marylou where she could snatch it up and pretend to read if Caroline should come in. “Have we read Arts and Leisure yet?” he said. “Let’s see what movies are playing.”

“Listen. I’m going to keep telling you, as many times as it takes. I was one of the pregnant women you gave a radioactive drink to. In 1953. And here I am today, in 2006.”

He smiled at her, turning on the charm. “You look fine to me.”

“I’m not fine. My daughter died of bone cancer.”

He shook his head and sighed. “My wife died of cancer. She played her piano right up until the end. She played hymns, songs from West Side Story, everything.”

Marylou couldn’t help herself. “West Side Story? Yuk.”

“They have a piano here, but nobody plays it.”

“Cry me a river. It’s not the same thing. Helen died of cancer because you gave it to her. You gave me the radioactive cocktail and told me it was good for me. It was vitamins, you said. So you killed Helen. Can I be any more clear?”

“I gave you a cocktail?”

“No, you idiot. You were in charge of the study. At Memphis University. One of your minions gave me the drink. Nurse Bordner. But you were the doctor in charge. It was your study. You came by to say cheerio right after I’d drunk it. ‘We appreciate your cooperation,’ you said.”

“You’ve got the wrong person,” Wilson said.

“No, I don’t, but we’ll move on. I also saw you on the day Helen died. Do you remember that?”

He shook his head, so she refreshed both her memory and his.

It was on a February day in 1963. Helen lay on a bed at Memphis University Hospital—white sheet, white gown, white walls, gray girl—hours away from death. Marylou and Teddy were crouched on either side of her with their winter coats on. Teddy’s coat was red with a plaid hood. Why hadn’t they taken their coats off? By then Helen’s face had lost much of its Helenness, her lovely curving mouth now a hole drawing in ragged, irregular breaths, her formerly, plump freckled cheeks hollow. Marylou and Teddy said soothing things to the part of Helen who was there with them, kissed her forehead, alternately clinging to her and squeezing her hands and stroking her hair, hoping to get some last response, some acknowledgment that she knew them and knew she was loved—they would’ve been overjoyed to see her eyelids flickering—but there was nothing. How long had they done this? Were they crying? Or were they subdued and numb? Marylou had no idea.

What she did remember was hearing, at some point, behind her in the doorway, a rustling sound, and she’d automatically turned around, expecting to see one of the nurses or Helen’s doctor, but by that point, even if it had been President Kennedy himself she wouldn’t have cared. But it wasn’t President Kennedy; it was the same doctor she’d seen the day she’d been given the “vitamin cocktail” at the same hospital almost ten years earlier. Dr. Wilson Spriggs.

Once again he was standing in a doorway, even though it was a different doorway in an entirely different wing of the hospital. But she remembered him, even though his dark hair was graying and longer, curling around his ears, and his glasses were smaller and wire framed and he wore a fat paisley tie instead of a bow tie. He still looked foppish and pretentious. She had no idea in 1963 that the “vitamin drink” had given Helen the cancer that was killing her, and that Marylou and Helen had been guinea pigs in Dr. Spriggs’s secret government study, one of many such studies going on in the country back then. She didn’t know any of those things, but she hated Dr. Spriggs just the same, hated him for standing there useless and vain, for not saying anything to her or Teddy, even though he must’ve known what was happening in that room, whether he knew exactly who they were or not, and she hated him for his ability to walk away, as she imagined, untouched and unharmed.

“An angel of death,” Marylou told the old Wilson now. “You were the angel of death.”

“I’m sorry you think so.” There was a pause while Wilson took another sip of his coffee and set the mug back down with a shaky hand. “Are you feeling all right?” he asked her.

“I’m tired,” Marylou said.

“Have you been getting enough sleep?”

Actually, she hadn’t been. There was some funny business going on around her house at night that kept her awake. Just the night before she’d heard someone, around midnight, prancing around on her roof like a reindeer. The next morning a big hunk of roof shingles lay on the ground beside the garbage can, which convinced her that it had been a person on the roof, not an animal. As much as she longed to tell somebody about this—someone like her former husband Teddy—she would not allow herself to tell Wilson. So she said, in a mincing voice, “ ‘Have you been getting enough sleep? Have you been drinking your radiation like a good girl?’ Don’t be pulling that doctor crap with me.”

“I am a doctor,” Wilson said. “Tell me who you are.”

“I’m one of your guinea pigs. I’m leaving now, but I’ll be back. You are going to pay for what you did.”

“What is it you think I did?”

“You know what you did.”

Wilson frowned, looking bewildered. “Why are you so angry at me?”

“I’m not only angry at you, I’m going to kill you. I just haven’t figured out how.”

“You’d better go,” he said, looking alarmed for the first time. “Right now.”

Marylou stood up. “When I come back tomorrow you won’t remember anything we’ve talked about, and you won’t remember that I said I’m going to kill you.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Okay. What did I just say?”

He squirmed around in his chair, blinking like a spotlight was in his eyes. “It’s been real nice talking to you, but I’m not in a position to buy anything right now.”

It was so hot, walking home. Canterbury Hills was deserted in the middle of the day. She was glad that Buster was at home in the air-conditioning. The houses and trees receded, and it was all about the asphalt, pushing the heat up into her face. The heat here had a different quality than the heat in Memphis. In Memphis it was like a withering blast furnace, but at least there was movement in the blast. Here, she felt like a fish struggling in a hot shallow pond. It was unnatural to move in such heat. She tried not to cry, but tears leaked out of her eyes. She didn’t want to look conspicuous. She felt faint, but she kept going. Telling him about the day Helen died, that had taken it out of her. She hadn’t talked about that day in years. Her right hip was aching again. One foot, then the other. She would force Wilson, somehow, to acknowledge the depravity, the horror of what he’d done, and when it was clear that he understood and after he sincerely apologized to her, then she’d kill him, and she no longer cared how she did it. But right now the son of a bitch was too jolly. He refused to be miserable while she was turning the screws. Before she snuffed him out, she wanted him miserable. But how in the world could she change the outlook of a happy fool?

Desperation was the mother of invention. By the time she got back to Reeve’s Court, Marylou had devised a brand-new attack plan. She would continue with her efforts to make Wilson remember and apologize, but she would also take steps to destroy his family, the way he’d destroyed hers. It would surely make him miserable to watch his family suffer, the way she’d had to watch Helen and Teddy suffer.

Rather than killing all of them, which she didn’t think she had the guts to do—and, even if she did manage to do it, there was no way she wouldn’t get caught—she would get to know them better, each one of them, and then set about disrupting their lives. She would make sure that Wilson knew what she was doing, that it was she who was causing them trouble and that she was doing it because of what he’d done to her, and to Helen, and to those eight hundred other women and their children and husbands.

It was easy enough figuring out the best way to mess with each member of that family. She hadn’t spent twenty-five years as a high school English teacher for nothing. She was good at sizing people up, at displaying a kind of false cheeriness that made them feel comfortable with her, and she had an instinct about what people really needed—which usually wasn’t what they thought they needed. The only hitch was that she didn’t purely hate them, the way she did Wilson. These mixed feelings made it a little more difficult to plan and carry out a single-minded campaign to destroy them. But she would do her very best for Helen’s sake.

Suzi was a shining light, and for this reason she was a bit of a tough case, because although Marylou resented Suzi for being the sort of girl Helen would have been, for living the kind of life that Helen would’ve lived—Helen, who was bright and beautiful and wise and kind—she also liked Suzi for those very reasons. Right away, Marylou saw that Suzi was tired of striving to be perfect. There was no religious training in that household, and Suzi could use some. Marylou saw great religious potential in Suzi, and Suzi’s becoming a rabid Christian would have the added bonus of upsetting her liberal parents. Suzi already considered herself a Christian, but she’d been attending a Presbyterian Church, which was almost as bad as Unitarian. However, for Suzi to simply become a Southern Baptist, like Marylou, while that would be horrible for her parents, would not go far enough. Suzi needed exposure to one of those giant churches that met in buildings that resembled a Walmart. She needed to become the kind of Christian who quoted Bible verses irresponsibly and judged other people and scared them away. It seemed like a true gift from God that Marylou just happened to move across from a minister at the Genesis Church, a church that she’d hoped would fit the bill in every way. When she actually went to Genesis Church, though, she discovered that most of the people there weren’t scary or judgmental, but were just like the people at First Baptist in Memphis. Surprise! She actually liked Genesis Church, even if the minister did sling too many metaphors around in one sermon. It felt good just to be going to church again. She’d missed First Baptist more than she’d thought she would.

Six months ago when she first came up with the idea to kill Wilson, back when she was living in Memphis, she’d started going to church again. Since she was spending so much time thinking about sinister things, the least she could do, she reasoned, was to think about God and his love twice a week at church so that she wouldn’t become a total sociopath. And rather than kill other people who were stand-ins for the person she really wanted to kill, like serial killers did, she’d be kind and generous to others and hone in on the one who deserved to die. And her plan had worked extremely well. Since she’d started planning to kill Wilson, and then decided to destroy his family instead, she felt no animosity toward anyone but him. Almost none at all!

The first Sunday she’d lured Suzi into Genesis Church she’d gotten drunk with power. Thank God she’d gotten scared out of her wits and left her at Dunkin’ Donuts, unable to proceed with her impulsive plan to take Suzi out to Lake Jackson, propose a canoe ride, and then brain her with an oar. That didn’t pan out. Now she was back on track with her goal: creating Jesus freak Suzi.

At the same time she was seeing to Suzi, she was mounting her campaign on all fronts. Otis and Ava. There was something anxious and vulnerable and permanently innocent about both of them. Their mother tried to explain to Marylou that they had some sort of disability, and Marylou could see that there was definitely something different about them. She’d had quite a few students like them over the years, and although many of them had been troublesome and frustrating to deal with, she also found such students engaging because of their peculiar interests. They were always social outcasts, usually ignored and sometimes persecuted, and that broke her heart.

But she steeled herself and proceeded with her plans to derail Otis and Ava, telling herself it was for a good cause. She steered Ava away from her studies and toward the trashy world of modeling and shallow self-absorption. Otis she would merely expose by writing a letter to the EPA. There was all kinds of illegal stuff in that shed. She didn’t have to be a Nobel Prize–winning scientist to tell that.

Vic she felt little to no sympathy for. He was detached from his family, and nothing that went on in his house seemed to affect him. Vic was a cretin not to realize what he had. Work would be the best place to get him, so she signed on to be a scorer at FTA. She would cause as much trouble there as best she could.

Caroline was a neurotic, insecure woman, obsessed with Ava and merely tolerating everyone else. She was in desperate need of someone to help her and support her, the way her husband should’ve been doing, but Marylou did not intend to be that person. The best thing to do to Caroline, Marylou decided, was to pretend to be helpful and supportive but all the while work behind the scenes to poison everything Caroline took for granted.

Vic and Caroline needed to shit or get off the pot, as Teddy would’ve said. Their marriage stank to high heaven, but she wasn’t going to be the one to point this out to them. Let them wallow in their own filth while she dirtied the rest of their nest.

Of course she would have to make sure that, while she was doing her dirty deeds, the family would tolerate her, even want her around. In the long run, it probably would work in her favor that she’d left Suzi alone at Dunkin’ Donuts—it had established, in the minds of the Witherspoon family, that she was scatterbrained, which could come in handy later on. The truth was, she was the furthest thing from scatterbrained. Well, maybe not the furthest thing. But none of the Spriggs family members—except Wilson whom she’d told outright that she planned to kill him but it didn’t seem to faze him a bit—suspected that she was guilty of anything but being a pathetic and annoying busybody. They did probably suspect her of locking Wilson in the shed, but they’d never said anything to her about that. And Wilson, she knew, would never tell on her. He seemed not to care how badly she treated him or how much she threatened him.

In addition to her crushing-his-family agenda, she kept up her efforts to make him remember. Even though she reminded him every so often that she planned to kill him, he willingly climbed into her car. She took him to Barnes & Noble, “for a treat,” she told Caroline; and the two of them sat in the coffee shop for an hour and a half while she showed him books about the horrors of radiation. He sipped his café mocha and nodded, not even bothering to defend radiation, glancing around at the other café customers, especially the young pretty college women bent over their fashion magazines. Finally he announced that it had been a real pleasure talking to her, but didn’t they have any lighter reading material available at this bookstore?

Another day she took him to a nearby park, and they sat on a bench in the shade and watched the kids and their parents play on the thick plastic slides and jungle gyms, all connected to big plastic fortlike contraptions, so unlike the thin metal playground equipment Helen had enjoyed. And no more concrete under the equipment—now it was poky, splintery fresh-smelling cedar chips. Marylou spotted a little girl with long blond hair and fair skin like Helen’s and pointed her out to Wilson and reminded him again that he’d killed Helen. “Who is Helen?” he asked her. She’d told him a million times, but she’d try again. How could she begin to describe Helen?

She told him about how Helen used to love playgrounds and that there was one near their house in Overton Park with an old shell of a fire truck in it that Helen loved beyond reason when she was four, loved sitting in it and turning the wheel and making the siren noise, and she’d really wanted to be a fireman, and Teddy bought her a fire hat and toy fire trucks and books about fire trucks even though Marylou didn’t approve of encouraging something that a girl could never do, and had actually told Helen one night at dinner that girls could never be firemen, and Helen had physically attacked her mother, calling her a liar. The next day Helen threw away all her fire-related items, and now Marylou regretted saying such a thing to Helen, for all kinds of reasons, because of course today she could’ve been a firefighter if she’d wanted to be, but beyond that, why had she felt compelled to throw water on Helen’s dream? This wasn’t the kind of memory Marylou wanted to relive about Helen, and had never told anyone about this before, and in fact she never spoke about Helen anymore to anybody.

She realized she was trembling and then realized, that, sweet Jesus, Adolf was actually holding her hand, and she was letting him. She screeched and flung his hand aside.

Kids stopped their play and turned toward Marylou and Wilson.

“Are you all right?” said the nearest mother, wearing the playground mother’s uniform of baggy shorts and baggy T-shirt. Cedar chips hung from the front of her shirt.

“Ants,” Marylou said, brushing off her hand. “I got rid of them.”

After the playground got busy again, Wilson spoke up. “I remember that fire engine,” he said. “I used to take Caroline to Overton Park every Saturday, when she was in elementary school. She howled when she had to get off the swings. Remember that big monkey they had there in the late sixties, in the zoo, the one that used to get mouthfuls of water and spit on people? After he started doing that he disappeared. Wonder what they did with him. Poor bastard.”

Marylou did remember that monkey. He was as big as she was. “He probably got used in a radiation experiment,” she said. She grabbed Wilson’s upper arm and squeezed it hard. “No, wait. You only used humans for those.”

“The zoo was never the same after he left,” was all Wilson said.

“I could spit on you, if it would make you feel better.”

“No thanks. Don’t think it would.”

* * *

One Sunday she took Wilson to Genesis Church along with Suzi, hoping he’d feel the need to repent, but afterward he claimed that the sound system had screwed up his hearing aid and he couldn’t make heads or tails of what they were singing and saying. “All sounded like caterwauling to me,” he said.

Another time, in the evening, she took him for a walk around the neighborhood and as they were plodding down Nun’s Drive, him walking twice as slow as she was, she got an idea and stopped. “Just wait here,” she told him.

“What? Why?” It was nearly dark, and the crickets were striking up their chorus.

She pointed at a nearby house, no lights on, no cars in the drive. “Got to run ask my friend something. Be right back.”

She marched up the driveway as quickly as she could with her stiff ankle and gimpy hip. Fortunately her “friend” didn’t seem to have a dog. The back of the house was dark, too. How could she possibly explain herself if someone caught her? She was sneaking around just like the person who climbed up on her roof at night. She would hide back here until Wilson wandered away.

Suddenly, motion lights came on over the patio like a play was about to start, and she ducked into the shadows. That metal patio furniture. Bright colored chairs with backs like oyster shells. And a brick fireplace with a spit. She hadn’t seen chairs like that, or a fireplace like that, in years. Not since the fifties, not since that horrible patio party at Teddy’s boss’s house.

She hadn’t wanted to go to the damn party in the first place, mostly because she didn’t know anyone there. When they arrived, there were three couples sitting in the same kind of metal chairs on the flagstone patio—much like this one—drinking orange-colored drinks with cherries and colored umbrellas floating in them. Two of the men were dark, hairy, and bespeckled, just like she expected engineers to look, but the third man was blond and tanned like a country clubber. He was Teddy’s boss. The women were a bit harder to categorize. One wife was young, dark, and overmade-up. She was smoking a cigarette and scowling. Another wife was fat, fair, and pleased with herself. The third wife was old and wrinkly with white hair—she looked as old as a grandmother, though probably she was only fifty. It was impossible to figure out who went with whom.

The bossman stood up to shake their hands. His wife, it turned out, was the overmade-up smoking woman. She stubbed out her cigarette in a huge pink ceramic ashtray and asked them if they wanted mimosas, gesturing at a big glass pitcher on a white metal table.

Teddy asked for Coke, Marylou for lemonade. They were Baptists, after all.

“Oh, come on, drink a real drink!” cried Mrs. Boss. It appeared that Mrs. Boss had had a few mimosas already.

Teddy glanced at Marylou, then shrugged. “Guess it wouldn’t hurt none. Never had one of those things.”

Marylou felt annoyed by how quickly he gave in. “I don’t drink,” she said. “But thank you.”

Mrs. Boss poured Teddy’s drink in a tall fluted glass, dropped an umbrella and a cherry into it and handed it to him. Then she went into the house for a few minutes and returned with a clear, fizzy drink in a plastic tumbler for Marylou. No cherry or umbrella for her! “Tonic water,” Mrs. Boss said out of the side of her mouth.

Teddy sipped his mimosa and exclaimed about how good it was.

“Invented at the Ritz in Paris,” Mrs. Boss said. “Over there, we drank mimosas in the morning, but what the hell. I say they’re good anytime.”

“Buck’s fizz,” said Bossman. “That’s what the British call them.”

“A manmosa has beer instead of champagne,” added one of the hairy men. “Ever tried it that way?” he asked his boss, who shook his head.

“Uggh,” said Mrs. Boss, swinging her bare, tanned leg. “Sounds disgusting.”

Marylou, feeling swollen and pale and unsophisticated, sat in a springy metal chair, sipping her bitter, bubbly tonic water. She was plainly pregnant, wearing a ruffly flowered maternity dress, but nobody asked her about her baby. Nobody seemed interested. Instead they discussed some of the people they worked with, one of whom had just been arrested for indecent exposure at the Memphis Zoo, a scandal everyone but her seemed to know all about. So the next time around she accepted one of the mimosas. Mrs. Boss—Vivian?—poured more drinks for everyone, announcing that there was another pitcher waiting in the fridge.

Charcoal was smoking in the fireplace grill in the corner of the patio, but nobody was paying any attention to it, and there wasn’t any meat in evidence. There weren’t any finger foods or snacks available either. What kind of cookout was this? Marylou slurped down her drink, and had another and another, and by the end of the evening she and Vivian were lying in the yard sticking their stockinged legs up in the air, talking about how they were hanging off the side of the world! Wheee! Teddy had had to carry her home.

Nowadays pregnant women knew better. What kind of damage had she done to Helen that night? Maybe all those mimosas had contributed to Helen’s cancer as well.

The motion lights went dark. Play over. The end. Marylou was back in Tallahassee, trespassing in some stranger’s backyard. She crept around the side of the house, a two story with aluminum siding, and peeked around the corner. Wilson, damn him, was standing there, under the streetlight, where she’d left him. She stepped behind a prickly waist-high holly hedge and watched him, not minding the mosquitoes whining around her face. As long as she wasn’t standing on a fire ant nest, she could stand there forever.

He glanced left, then right. Somebody down the street slammed a car door. A bat swooped in a figure eight under the streetlight, but he didn’t appear to notice. He probably had no idea where he was or what he was doing there. Finally, he backed up and lowered himself down onto the edge of the lawn that sloped right up to where she was hiding.

She could sneak away now, walk back home, and it might be a while before anyone found him. But someone would find him, eventually, and eventually he’d be returned to his proper owner. His family would be very angry at her, but she might worm herself out of being blamed, since they seemed to be willing to believe anything that made their lives easier. But he wouldn’t care. Either he’d remember and forgive her, or he’d forget. Exasperating creature. She watched him a while longer, his white shirt and white hair glowing under the streetlight. The sharp smell of gasoline wafted up from the nearby garage. Her ankle went from stiff to achy. A car with rock music blasting came rushing past him, too close, but he didn’t budge. She didn’t feel sorry for him, she didn’t. But this wasn’t any fun.

Without deciding to, she broke through the hedge and strolled boldly down the strange lawn toward him, the ground soft from armadillo tunnels, praying she wouldn’t slip and fall. Hello, Canterbury Hills, I am making myself right at home here! “Yoo-hoo,” she called to Wilson. “Avon calling!”

He didn’t turn around. He didn’t even glance at her.

“Ready?” she said in a chipper voice. “My friend, Vivian, Viv, was making mimosas and wouldn’t give me one.” His legs stuck straight out in front of him, like a kid’s legs. Her white tennis shoes were half the size of his. “You got big feet. But then so does Viv.”

His cheeks were well shaven and smooth for an old man, but he smelled like fresh sweat. “Help me up,” he said. “Take me home.”

Glad that she wasn’t yet as old and stiff as he was, she pulled him to his feet and he walked off by himself, a little way down the street, and then turned around, facing her.

“Am I going the right way?” he asked.

“What is this, some existential drama?” she said. “Keep walking and find out.”

He exhaled loudly. “Just go ahead and kill me,” he said, “if that’s what you want to do. I’m right here. Get it over with.”

She almost burst out laughing. It was just like her fantasy, the one she’d had the first time she’d seen him in his yard overwatering his azalea bushes, when she wished he’d just pop up and ask to be killed and hurry up about it. “Should I hurry up about it?” she couldn’t resist saying.

“Please.”

“No. I won’t. You can’t make me.” She went forward, took his arm, and they started down the block in the direction home should’ve been in. Immediately she felt uneasy. Nun’s Drive looked different in the dark. Houses seemed to have rearranged themselves, driveways looked like streets, streets like driveways. Lights in the houses made them seem even more remote. One house had a huge TV, glowing blue and green like an aquarium, that took up most of a wall. Two large-sounding dogs in someone’s backyard barked ferociously. He was leaning on her, making it hard to walk. “I’ve changed my mind about killing you,” she said. “But I’m not done with you. You are not off the hook, Adolf.”

“Verna Tommy will have left the light on,” he said. “She never forgets.”

* * *

That night Tropical Storm Alberto crept over the Florida Panhandle. The next morning the weather channel reported that near Homosassa two people who did not evacuate required water rescue. And at Egmont Key State Park a woman fell off a boat when a band of showers and surging currents made navigation difficult; her husband and a friend drowned after jumping in to save her without life jackets, though the woman returned safely to the boat.

Marylou went outside into her twig-littered carport to get the newspaper, and she discovered that her blue rug had mysteriously reappeared. A couple of mornings ago it had disappeared from the bottom of the steps, and she’d looked all around the yard but couldn’t find it. Who, she’d wondered, would want an ugly little Walmart rug? And now it was back in the same place, looking exactly the same. Somebody had come out in a tropical storm to replace the rug, just to make her think she was losing her mind.

It was similar to the mysterious tennis-shoe thing. One morning Marylou’d found a brand-new pair of men’s black Converse sneakers, size 10, on her front porch. She threw them away, but the next morning there was another pair, exactly the same kind and size, in the same place. It might’ve been the same pair.

Was there some message intended? What did a disappearing and reappearing rug and black tennis shoes mean? She couldn’t tell anyone about this stuff, because it sounded crazy. She had no idea who would do such things, but, in her moments of paranoia, Marylou suspected that it must be someone who saw beneath her nice old lady exterior and was trying, in the creepiest sort of way, to let her know that she wasn’t fooling everyone.