There's a (Slight) Chance I Might Be Going to Hell - v4 (17 page)

“You
have
to beat Rowena Spaulding at her own game,” Charlie agreed as the Honda waved to the bicyclist at the east stop sign to go ahead. “Dean Spaulding has always been nothing but kind and generous to me, but that crone of a wife of his is so awful she comes complete with her own opera-singing henchman. You have to beat her, Maye, there’s no two ways about it.”

“Well, certainly, the name of Cynthia McMahon sent a shock through her system,” Maye said as the bicyclist waved to the VW bus to go first. “Did you see her? I thought I heard a train whistle blow as steam came shooting out her ears. She has the kind of self-esteem you only see in people like Genghis Khan or a housewife in Orange County.”

“‘I’m Dean Spaulding’s wife and I have been for fifty years,’” Charlie mocked her, scrunching up his nose and squealing in a high-pitched voice as the VW bus made a run for it, then stopped when the Honda did the same. “She thinks she runs this town. You need to show her she can’t have everything.”

“I just don’t know why she hates me so much,” Maye added as the Honda started to go a second before the VW bus got a hit of gas, too, then both stopped short, just inches from the center of the intersection. “Does the woman really hate me because of a sweater? How can you hate someone because of a sweater? You can hate the sweater, but hating the person inside of it is ridiculous!”

“There’s something about you she can’t stand,” Charlie agreed as the Honda waved at the VW bus to go, the VW bus waved back, and in the meantime, the bicyclist shot through the intersection clear to the other side. “That is very clear. Maybe you remind her of someone she knows or used to know. I’ve met people like that before, haven’t you?”

“Sure,” she complied as the Honda waved to Charlie and the driver of the VW bus threw up his hands. “But I wouldn’t aggressively pick on them at a dinner party in front of their husbands’ colleagues!”

“Well, that’s true, but you didn’t help your cause much with the sweater of cows pulling a blind Santa,” Charlie chuckled as the VW bus, the Honda, and a new arrival, a Subaru, all turned and waved Charlie on at the exact same moment. “That stab was a bit obvious, if you ask me.”

“It was obvious, but I was trying to make a point,” she replied. “But I am worried that she hates me so much that she’ll make it difficult for you at the university.”

“Listen,” he said, turning toward her. “As long as you play fair and square, which I know you will, I don’t think there’s anything to worry about. I respect Dean Spaulding, and I really doubt that anything will happen to my position because of his meddling wife. When it comes to the department, I would be surprised if he let the workings of it become disrupted because of a beauty contest. That hardly seems professional.”

Charlie gunned through the intersection, and Mickey began to make a forlorn groaning sound.

“Why are you singing, Mickey?” Maye asked. “We don’t have the radio on.”

“That’s not singing,” Charlie said. “He’s not singing. I’ve never heard him make that noise before.”

Mickey continued to moan, and when they were four blocks from their house, the groan became a full somber howl.

“What’s the matter?” Maye said as she turned and tried to comfort her dog, but Mickey was inconsolable, his howls taking on a higher pitch.

“Oh God!” Charlie cried. “You don’t think he ate that hashish brick from Pebbles’s purse, do you?”

“He was the valedictorian of his class, Charlie,” Maye shot back. “If Sammy wasn’t going to eat a stale chunk of hallucinogens, Mickey wouldn’t either.”

“What’s wrong, boy?” Charlie asked Mickey. “What’s the matter?”

Charlie and Maye simply needed to look up to answer that question. What looked like a flashing parade lined and blanketed both sides of the street in front of their small, English-style cottage. Revolving red lights of fire engines whipped quickly across their front windows, alternating with flickering blue lights from the squad cars that silhouetted the towering pine trees and created a strobe-light effect. The bright, white lights of the ambulance lit up the usually darkened street like it was a movie set. There were so many emergency vehicles clogging the street that Maye and Charlie couldn’t even get close to their house.

“Oh my God,” Maye said as she looked at Charlie. “What is it? Can you see the house? Is it still there? Is it on fire?”

“I don’t know, I can’t get a good look from here,” Charlie replied, trying very hard to stay calm. “It looks like it’s standing; I can’t smell smoke. Do you smell smoke?”

Maye shook her head and got out of the car. They left Mickey in the backseat, now oddly and mournfully quiet, and started up the street. Even as they got closer it became hard to tell what was going on, and although there were dozens of people milling about, the street held an eerie silence, broken only by the static and garbled conversations of emergency radio broadcasts.

Now, in front of their house, which was indeed standing, Maye and Charlie stood and watched the scene for several moments, still unsure of what had happened, until Maye saw John Smith, the plumber cop, getting out of his police car.

“John!” Maye called into the stillness of the night, waving her hand, and walked over to him with Charlie by her side.

“Hey, Maye, Charlie,” John replied, nodding. “Sad thing. Sad, sad thing.”

“What happened?” Maye asked anxiously. “We just got home, we don’t know—what happened?”

John dropped his head and shook it again, this time more slowly, as if trying to collect himself. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he finally said, looking up at them. “There was an attack. It was murder, you could say.”

Maye and Charlie were too stunned to say anything. A murder. On their street. Dead. Someone was dead, possibly someone they knew.

“Someone’s dead?” Maye finally squeaked out. “Who? What happened? Someone on the street, one of our neighbors? Who was it? What happened, John?”

“We think it happened a couple of hours ago when it was still daylight,” the plumber cop explained. “She must have looked at him funny, is all we can figure, but when the husband came home, she was lying out in the backyard and there was that masked bandit, clawing at her face like it was trying to eat a Fruit Roll-Up. Doesn’t look like there was much of a struggle, maybe she was caught by surprise, but her neck is broken. In any case, she was dead by the time we got here. Nothing we could do. Not a thing. Like I said, never seen anything like it.”

Maye gasped and covered her mouth.

“A masked bandit? Did you catch him? Is he still out there?” she whispered.

“Probably up in one of these trees,” John said, pointing above them. “They can climb pretty fast once they get spooked.”

“What? Um, I’m sorry, if there’s a murderer in these trees, I think you guys should try to catch him
now
,” Maye said sternly. “What if he strikes again? What if there are more killings?”

“Naw,” John said, almost pooh-poohing her. “I’ll bet he’s sleeping up there. Just be careful in the daytime, if this one’s got distemper like we think.”

Maye was struck dumb for a second when she finally realized what the cop was saying. “You think the murderer is a raccoon?”

Plumber John pointed at her. “That’s what we’re thinking,” he concurred. “But the perp is still on the loose, we haven’t apprehended it yet, so I’d be careful in the daylight if I were you.”

Finally, Maye brought herself to ask again who it was that had been attacked. Was it one of the scooter women at Cynthia’s tea party who wouldn’t upgrade to the faster and more stylish Renegade model because it was too flashy when an extra two-mile-per-hour push might have saved her life from flying claws? Could it have been Agnes, with the Saran Wrap skin, who failed to fight off a mammal the size of a basset hound because of her toothpick bones and transparency? Who could it have been that was not strong enough to fight off a raccoon?

“It was the lady across the street,” John answered, and pointed at the cream-colored picket fence. “Nice lady. Real nice lady. Never so much as got a parking ticket, and kept her drains so clean they would sparkle, that Cynthia McMahon.”

Maye still couldn’t believe what had happened when she saw the headline on the front page of the paper the next day: MAD COON EATS OLD QUEEN.

It was incredible. It was simply inconceivable to Maye that Cynthia was not only dead but that she’d had her life light snuffed out by an adorable woodland creature, a friend of Bambi’s, no less, armed with alleged claws of death. It was akin to being mugged by Goofy or carjacked by Piglet, Maye thought. She walked around in a daze for the entire morning, hoping that Cynthia hadn’t suffered and that it was over quickly. Maye felt horrible—if she had been home, perhaps she would have heard the attack and been able to help in some way. And Cynthia’s poor husband, to come home and find his wife being nibbled on by a stuffed animal with bloodlust.

Although she admittedly didn’t know Cynthia all that well, the woman had never been anything but nice to her, except that part about accusing Maye of poisoning the earth, but then again, Maye had had no way of knowing about Styrofoam Day. It was a comment most easily forgiven, especially now.

It was just so unreal. She had just seen Cynthia several days earlier, and it seemed completely impossible that she was dead. And honestly, the more Maye thought about it, the more implausible the entire Killer Raccoon scenario became: Cynthia, a woman a little past her prime, sure, but otherwise in excellent physical shape, being ambushed by a scheming, plotting Rocky Raccoon, and mauled to death? How exactly would that happen? Why wouldn’t Cynthia have run back inside if the animal was acting odd? She hardly seemed the type to engage in feral-beast wrangling, even with one that had a high Disney snugglability factor. The more she thought about it, the more she didn’t believe it. Maye decided there had to be more to the story than a crazy raccoon with murder on its mind.

And then there was the pageant. Maye tried very, very, very hard not to be selfish in this time that required not thinking about yourself but being concerned only with others, but she couldn’t help it. There you go, Maye thought to herself as she slipped into Sewer Pipe Queen mode for the nth time that morning; there you go. And there was the equally bothersome thought about Maye’s playing Dick Deadeye and the question of whether she was still obligated to be in the play now that Cynthia was no longer alive. She didn’t want to be Dick Deadeye. She’d only agreed because fair was fair, and right now the scales of justice were a little tipped out of Maye’s favor. There’s a slight chance I may be going to hell now, she told herself when the selfish thought popped back into her head for the seventeenth time that day, but then she almost laughed when she asked herself who she thought she was kidding. It was simply another level of the underworld conquered and accomplished. By sneaking out of Cynthia’s house crouched behind the less mobile on scooters, Maye had already qualified for the basic level of hell that consisted of trudging along on a treadmill with nothing on television but
The View
for all eternity.

She had earned the intermediate level of hell by lying to Vegging Out Bob, which meant that she would spend the hereafter in a Wal-Mart store at 6 A.M. the day after Thanksgiving as shoppers jostled, pushed, and rubbed against her to secure the cheapest things hellishly possible, while their children, also known as demi-demons, cried, screamed, and begged for hell’s cuisine, corn dogs and Mountain Dew. She had graduated to the advanced level of hell shortly thereafter when she was caught by Vegging Out Bob whilst gnawing on a piece of pretty cow, which entitled her to experience the forever after in Miami in August, sitting in a filthy deli across from an old woman who smells of cat pee eating a pastrami sandwich with her mouth open.

Now, with her new sins propelling her to the doctoral level of hell, Maye was assured a spot back in seventh grade, where she would be forced to run that Chub Rub mile and then take a shower with girls much thinner, and prettier, and who had not reached the ranks of puberty that Maye had, until the end of time.

So to combat her guilty, selfish concern about losing her royal flush in the game of Sewer Pipe Queen, Maye decided to do the only nice thing she could do, and got her car keys to go and order flowers for Cynthia’s service. She was almost to her car when she saw a man who looked to be in his mid thirties crossing the street in her direction, carrying a video camera and a tripod.

“Hey!” he yelled, running faster as Maye opened the door to her car. “Hey! Excuse me! Excuse me!”

“Yes?” Maye replied. “How can I help you?”

“Well, I’m the reporter, anchor, producer, and photographer from WDRK, Spaulding’s Number One and Only News Choice, We Are News to You!” he called out as he slowed his moderately hefty body to a jog and then stopped, breathing heavily.

“Okay,” Maye said, shrugging.

“Um, did you know the victim across the street? The woman who was eaten?” he stumbled as he flipped over the cover of a small notebook he pulled from his shirt pocket. “Cynthia, Mrs. Cynthia McMahon? Did you know her?”

Maye nodded. “Yes, I did.”

“Oh, fantastic!” the man said as he set up his tripod in Maye’s driveway. “Do you mind if I ask you some questions about what happened last night?”

Maye hesitated but couldn’t really see the harm in it. She had been a reporter, she knew how important sources were when working on a story. “I guess that would be all right,” she answered. “What was your name?”

“Richard Titball,” the reporter/producer/photographer said. “Call me Rick.”

“Rick Titball,” Maye repeated, marveling that he’d physically survived a childhood surely overflowing with enough school-yard torture to qualify him for a serial killer’s profile or enrollment in clown college.

“Now, if you could just stand there…perfect,” Rick said. “That’s great. Just stand still, I need to set the shot up.”

He ran back behind the camera, adjusted the angle, apparently pushed “play,” and then ran around in front of the camera, next to Maye. He took several deep breaths, closed his eyes tightly, and counted to three, and at the same moment his eyes flew open, he shouted, “ACTION!”