it, why don’t you. I can do laundry later,” he said.
“Oh, I’ve got plenty of time. You work on your designs.”
She took the hamper with her, paused in the kitchen for the detergent and bleach, and blew him a kiss as she let herself out the door.
When she was gone, Peter frantically snatched the things from behind the shower curtain and looked at them with a mounting sense of panic. What was he going to do with all this? He couldn’t leave it here, that much was certain. Teri would be sure to find it sooner or later.
He went into the bedroom, dragged a big battered backpack off the closet shelf, and carried it hurriedly back to the bathroom, where he stuffed the wig, the fabric, the shoes, and purse into it. As an after thought, he went back to the living room to fetch the dress that Teri had found earlier on the sewing machine.
He had only given it a glance before. Now he held it up to look carefully at it. It was a beautiful fabric, a sea blue silk with a delicate white floral pattern running through it. He remembered the fabric all right. He had gotten it just a week or so ago, but the last he remembered, it had been neatly folded on his fabric shelf in the closet.
How on earth had it found its way to his sewing machine, and practically finished as a dress? Teri was right, too: it was huge, too big even for the women who constituted the “full figure” market, despite what he had told her. It might have been made with a drag sumo wrestler in mind. A particularly large sumo wrestler at that, he amended.
It was all too much for him to comprehend. He went back to the bathroom with the dress and stuffed it into the backpack with the other things and hid the backpack well behind his clothes in the closet. He would have to take it with him to work and try to find someplace there to hide it. Or, maybe he could just toss it all somewhere—say, in a dumpster between here and there. He was pretty sure there was one behind the Safeway store.
What had happened to him? He thought back over the previous night, but his memories were only a blur. He’d had those bizarre dreams, and had awakened with a splitting headache just before Teri got home.
But wait, now that he went back over them, not all of his memories were so fuzzy. He could remember the early part of the night clearly enough. He remembered arriving at work and feeling sleepy, and bored; nothing unusual about that. And he remembered, too, the laboratory, and—it came back to him in a flash, like a picture on a screen—the vial and the syringe he had found on the counter.
The syringe with the vitamins. Yes, that was it. It was after he had accidentally injected himself with that Alley Thing vitamin B12 that everything had gone blank.
He looked at his hands. The puncture wound from the syringe had vanished altogether. Even the marks where the cat had bitten him had healed up completely. There was no trace left of either of them. Whatever was happening to him, it was not the result of an infection, then, at least not from either of those. Actually, he had never known wounds to heal so completely so quickly. Still, he had to assume that the gap in his memory somehow connected to the syringe with the vitamins.
What if...? The thought sent a shiver up and down his spine.... What if that hadn’t been vitamins in the syringe? What if it was...? But here his mind balked. What on earth could it have been if not vitamins?
Alley Thing. He puzzled over the name. What could that mean? As far as that went, what were “alley things?” Rats, of course. And Cats. Homeless people and muggers. How did you put things like that into a syringe? And why?
Muggers. His mind circled back to that thought. Street toughs. Like the ones in his dream. Like the ones Teri had mentioned. The Moes, she called them. Could there be a connection? But what, and how?
One thing he knew for sure: he needed to talk to those women scientists at Wald Med. They were the ones with the answers.
Holy Moley, he thought with mounting dismay. What have I done to myself? Something really weird was happening, that much was obvious.
* * * *
He was just too weird, in her opinion. Gladys Kravitz sniffed and averted her eyes when Lee Appel came into the laundry room. It was not that she exactly disapproved of homosexuals, not really. Live and let live, was her motto. After all, she was a medical professional. She had seen it all in her forty-plus years as a registered nurse. People were just people, she liked to say to the other nurses.
On the other hand, male people of that persuasion did not have to flaunt themselves, did they? And a man dressing as a woman—which Lee tended to do a lot when he was not working—was definitely flaunting himself, in her opinion.
It especially galled her because he was a nurse too. It might have been different if he were, well, a civilian, so to speak. But, a nurse.... She regarded his habit of cross-dressing as a slap at the whole profession and maybe even at all of womanhood as well. If nothing else, it was undignified for a trained medical person.
Worse yet, he didn’t even go to the trouble to try to make himself look like a real woman—not that he would have fooled anybody, but still the attempt might have evidenced a little sincerity on his part. His beard, full and bushy, just looked bizarre with the housecoats and peignoirs and frilly dresses that he favored when he was off duty. Say what you might about sexual tolerance, and it was no kind of bias on her part, but she felt most certainly that a man with a beard just looked silly the way he was dressed this morning, in a muumuu and mules.
“Good morning,” he greeted her cheerily. As always, he seemed to be entirely oblivious to her disapproval. Which only irked her the more. The very least he could do was act repentant.
She sniffed again and nodded without speaking or even looking at him. Thankfully, her laundry was all but done. She folded the last of her husband’s boxer shorts, hoping fervently that Mister Appel was not paying undue attention to them—Abner most certainly would not want his most personal items ogled by a man in a muumuu, she felt sure. He might not even want to wear them after they had been contaminated like that, and who could blame him? She gathered up her things and went to leave, and nearly bumped into that Warren woman, the policewoman, coming through the door just at that moment with her own basket of laundry.
* * * *
“That woman is not a happy camper,” Teri said, setting her basket on the counter.
“It’s my costume,” Lee said with a shrug. “Though I can’t think why she should object to it. It’s such a nice print, really. I like the colors. Green and blue. Sky blue, as a matter of fact. And it’s from Macy’s, it’s not like I got it at Ross or some outlet store.” He glanced down at himself. “Maybe it’s the green. It is kind of olive-ish, isn’t it? Does it make me look sallow, do you think?”
“I think it’s lovely,” Teri said. “She is probably just jealous. I mean, the woman wears chenille. Puh-leeze.”
Lee giggled. “Really. Puh-leeze. And speaking of women’s wear, how is our favorite designer?”
Teri began sorting her laundry into piles. “To be honest, I’m not sure,” she said thoughtfully. “He seems to have something on his mind. Something troubling him, you know what I mean?”
“You are surely not thinking that he is straying? I mean, men do, of course. They’re like a bunch of tomcats, most of them, aren’t they? But not our Peter, surely.”
Teri did not miss the faintly hopeful note in Lee’s voice.
