A Crime in the Neighborhood (18 page)

As the days after the murder stretched on, what I wanted, what everyone wanted, was for the police to find the man who had killed Boyd Ellison so that we could all stop waiting for him to be found. Uncertainty had thinned from horrified excitement to a fearful impatience that buzzed through the whole neighborhood. You could almost hear it, a persistent, electrical noise, something like the steady hum of our refrigerator. It got louder as the days went by and the police had nothing to report. The bag boy who'd seen a brown car drive out of the parking lot quit his job and went to visit cousins in
Pennsylvania. The florist who'd heard a cry on the hillside closed up her shop for a week and left for the Jersey shore. And although it was the coolest place in the neighborhood, no one ventured into the woods behind the mall, where ribbons of yellow police tape still fluttered from the trunks of a few white pines.

Mrs. Lauder had put herself in charge of the Night Watch bake sale, the proceeds from which would go to buy a pair of walkie-talkies for the patrollers—what they would do with these walkie-talkies seemed undecided, but everyone agreed they should have them. The bake sale was held in the mall parking lot. Announcements on yellow construction paper had been posted throughout the neighborhood for the past few days; even my mother had acquiesced to tacking one to our crab apple tree.

Mrs. Lauder presided over two card tables set up near the mall's main entrance under a lamppost, to which she had taped a large, hand-lettered sign:
NIGHT WATCH BAKE SALE
. But she hadn't left enough room for all the words, an oversight that she tried to correct by squashing some letters together and shrinking others. From a distance the sign appeared to read “Night Witch Bakes.”

Most of the neighbors had made something. Mrs. Sperling supplied a plate of chocolate-chip cookies, the charred ones craftily arranged on the bottom. Mrs. Morris produced pecan
sandies. Mrs. Guibert donated a Bundt cake. Mrs. Reade made brownies; Mrs. Bridgeman made lemon squares. Mrs. Lauder herself had baked two dozen blueberry muffins and an angel-food cake, and had thrown in a tray of mocha fudge, which had begun to liquefy in the sun. Everything was comfortably overpriced. By the time we arrived with my mother's poppyseed lemon pound cake, Mrs. Lauder had already collected fifteen dollars.

“Have a seat.” Garbed in an orange floral muumuu, she nudged a plastic webbed lawn chair toward my mother almost as soon as we climbed out of the car. Behind her mother's chair, Luann hovered, clutching Tiffany by one bare leg.

“Sit down, Lois,” Mrs. Lauder said. “Don't stand there getting sunstroke.” Next to her voluminous muumuu, which I thought looked splendid—like something worn by a Hawaiian queen—my mother's navy skirt and pink blouse seemed clerical.

“Oh no. Really, I'd love to but I can't,” she said. “I've got to work—You know I've been selling—”

Mrs. Lauder smiled. “But it's Saturday, Lois.”

My mother flushed and set the pound cake on the table. “Well,” she said. “Maybe for a few minutes.”

“That's right.” Mrs. Lauder's dark hair seemed more askew than ever under her straw helmet of a sun hat but she was perfectly in her element there in the parking lot, orange muumuu luffing regally in the breeze, engaged in charitable work that required bossing people around.

“It's six dollars for the whole shebang,” she told a young pregnant woman with spiky eyelashes who had stopped to gaze at Mrs. Guibert's Bundt cake. “Better buy it now or you'll wish you had later. Don't listen to what they say about keeping your weight down. Fat lady makes fat baby.”

Mrs. Lauder laughed. The young woman moved off toward the brownies. Mrs. Lauder watched her, adjusting her straw helmet. “Here, you can be cashier.” She handed my mother a cigar box rattling with coins.

“I really can't stay long,” my mother insisted.

“Can I have a soda?” said Luann, kicking a chair leg.

“As I always say,” Mrs. Lauder continued. “Two heads in business are better than one.”

“I'm thirsty,” said Luann.

“I heard you,” said her mother. “Why don't you and Marsha go play under that tree.”

“Just ten minutes,” said my mother, lowering herself into the lawn chair next to Mrs. Lauder's. “Then I do have to go.”

“Sit,” Mrs. Lauder hissed at Luann.

So Luann and I sat in the meager shade of a maple sapling. Luann occasionally spat on the sidewalk to see if it was hot enough out to make her spit sizzle. I had brought along my notebook and showed Luann a few pages about Mr. Green.

“He is Satanic,” I said, trying out a new word from my Sherlock Holmes book. Luann nodded listlessly. The sun shimmered above the asphalt. If any day would be hot enough to bake a Night Witch, this was it.

By five o'clock, two-thirds of the cookies, muffins, and brownies had disappeared. Grocery shoppers, mainly women, had been the best customers. A few people from the neighborhood dropped by; a policeman bought several of Mrs. Sperling's chocolate-chip cookies, then frowned when he bit into a charred one.

Nobody bought a slice of my mother's poppyseed lemon pound cake, although she appeared not to notice. Several people from outside the neighborhood stopped at the little table to ask Mrs. Lauder if there had been any news about who committed the murder. Then everyone compared the hushed stories they had heard: it was a serial killer; it was a drug fiend.

From where I sat, I could hear my mother talking with Mrs. Lauder in between customers, even laughing. Several times she counted up the money in the cigar box; she seemed to enjoy making change out there in the hot sun, bumping elbows with Mrs. Lauder as they traded observations about a chubby girl who passed by in a yellow halter top.

Finally, she pulled a pack of Kools out of her purse, very hesitantly; but before she could ask whether Mrs. Lauder minded, Mrs. Lauder said, “
Cigarettes
. I quit two years ago but I've been dying for one all day.”

While our mothers smoked, Luann and I sat on our curb and stared at the backs of their heads. “I wish I had a orange soda,” Luann said moodily.

A seagull wheeled over the parking lot, which reminded
me of the afternoon my father had told us he was going away. It seemed such a long time ago, but actually he and Ada had been gone barely five weeks by then. “It is what it is,” he had said that day, looking down at me with his aviator glasses winking. What had he meant? Had he even known what he meant? Of course he must have known. Hadn't he said it? But what had he said?

My head began to ache. Luann spat again on the sidewalk. Overhead, the seagull cried and I remembered Rehoboth Beach, where we had gone the summer before with my father and Uncle Roger and Aunt Ada. Julie and Steven and I swam all day, and because none of their friends were around, they let me follow them up and down the boardwalk. We bought Cokes and drank them while we walked, something my mother never allowed because she considered eating on the street bad manners. The twins would make funny comments about the people we passed, and sometimes I would laugh while I was drinking my Coke and the carbonation would backfire up my nose. I felt that same piercing ache now when I thought of what they would say if they could see me sitting next to Luann Lauder. “Lagoon Lauder,” Steven called her. Julie said Luann had the personality of wet toilet paper. Of course, she said the same thing about me.

“I've got some money,” I told Luann. “I'll get us both sodas.”

Dizzy from the heat, I staggered to the mall and pushed through the double glass doors, pausing gratefully inside the sudden coolness to look at the bulletin board, fluttering with
advertisements for used sofa beds and almost-new electric guitars. One of the yellow flyers about the murder had been posted beside an announcement for a modern-dance workshop. Next to the bulletin board were two blue metal signs: “Positively
NO BICYCLES
” and “No Dogs Allowed.”

“Sorry, Swamp,” Steven always said when we passed that sign. “Guess you'll have to stay outside.”

I hurried past the drugstore, looking out for the black store manager in the red pants; but he wasn't anywhere visible. I still hadn't told my mother about Steven's stealing, but I had overhead him inform Julie that he'd “almost been nabbed.” He sounded proud of himself. “Oh damn,” Julie said in her best Noël Coward accent, yawning languidly. “We'll have to start snitching ciggies from the
madre
. Think, Rodney. Menthol.
Quelle
horror.”

Two women in the Safeway stared at my crutches while I slipped quarters into the Coke machine, which sat near the conveyor belt. It had always been one of my passionate desires to ride the conveyor belt with the gray grocery tubs, to pass through the black fringed curtains and be unloaded into my mother's waiting car. I sometimes thought it would be worth working in the Safeway, just to get that chance.

By the time I swung back outside, clouds had blown in over the parking lot and the breeze had quickened, rustling plastic wrap on the bake-sale table, and bringing with it the pewter smell of river water. Luann was waiting for me and looked almost grateful when I handed her a bottle. Together we
drank our orange sodas, burping quietly deep in our throats, watching the parking lot darken around us.

My mother hadn't noticed I was gone. Mrs. Lauder was describing a church scandal involving a youth director and the choirmaster, and forgot to lower her voice when she reached the moment they were discovered partially clothed in the recreation room behind the bongo drums. “Right under a banner that says ‘Love is Eternal,'” she said. “Oh no,” said my mother. “Oh
yes
,” said Mrs. Lauder, accepting another Kool.

A baby screamed from across the parking lot, which was darkening by the minute. With her cigarette burning, Mrs. Lauder ate a pecan sandy and a brownie. A letter, she said, had later been presented to the congregation. Far off toward Bethesda, bells began to chime.

“I say forgive and forget. People will do their sinning. There's no way around that.” Mrs. Lauder sighed and stared across the parking lot. “I mean, look at what happened right here. Look at what's happening everyplace. What's really interesting about people,” she continued in a low voice, “is how bad they can be.”

My mother nodded. Then she blew a smoke ring that floated above her own head like a halo.

“So what did happen, anyway?” Mrs. Lauder said. “With you and your husband?”

My mother sat very still. At last she shifted in her chair. “Larry?”

“Of course,” said Mrs. Lauder patiently. “Of course Larry.”

The bells continued to toll from Bethesda. The sky bulged. A sudden swoop of wind sent a can rattling across the parking lot. Mrs. Lauder peered at her from under the brim of her straw helmet.

“Larry,” said my mother, dropping her voice. “Larry left me because he was having an affair with my sister.”

Mrs. Lauder settled back in her chair, making the plastic webbing creak. She reached for another of Mrs. Morris's pecan sandies while my mother told her about my father's flight with Ada to Nova Scotia.

“Well, that's terrible,” Mrs. Lauder said after a considerable pause. “But you know these things do happen. It's not much help, but as I said, people make mistakes. They do awful things.”

My mother continued to stare straight ahead.

“It's hard on the kids, I bet. Hard on you.” Mrs. Lauder brushed crumbs off her bosom. “But the important thing now is for you to get on with
your
life, Lois. Don't let their mistake be
your
mistake. That would really be a crime. Do you hear from him at all?” she asked after a moment.

“One letter. A note, really, to say they were going.”

“Did you write back?”

“No address,” said my mother.

The parking lot began to empty as the sky turned a dusty purple. Beside me, Luann was hugging her knees and singing a song to herself. There was something comforting about her restrained, scratchy little voice in that wide parking lot,
even inspiring, no matter what the twins thought. I hoped she wasn't listening to what my mother was telling her mother.

A dragonfly glinted by. “So anyway, where did you find that condom thing?” I said at last, looking at my knees.

Luann stopped singing and turned to regard me gravely. She didn't seem either startled by this question or particularly interested in it. “I got it on the street. My mom threwed it down the toilet. It's for gathering the seed,” she added mysteriously. “That's what my mom says.”

While I digested this piece of information, Luann said, “I'm going to my uncle's church this Sunday. We're having a prayer sing.” She stuck the tip of her tongue out of the corner of her mouth.

Our mothers were standing up, gathering paper napkins and paper plates together. I wondered if Luann would see the youth director and the choirmaster, if she would speak to them. I pictured two skinny, squint-eyed adults huddled under a “Love is Eternal” banner, furtively pinching each other's bottoms. It was clear to me that my mold experiment could never interest someone like Luann. Nothing I knew surprised her. Even Steven's tootie pictures seemed mundane in comparison to the marvelous depravity of Roy and Tiffany, the youth director and the choirmaster.

Just then a brown Dodge drove up and parked close to where my mother was sliding leftover brownies in with the leftover lemon squares. The door opened; a moment later, one of Mr. Green's tasseled loafers appeared on the ground,
followed by the second one, followed by Mr. Green himself. Against the darkening sky, his face looked pinker than usual.

“Now isn't this a surprise.” Mrs. Lauder patted down the front of her muumuu, which had filled beautifully like a sail in the breeze. She gave my mother a sidelong glance as Mr. Green approached the table. “Hi there, neighbor.”