The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady (17 page)

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!