she was trapped between a pair of Dumpsters and an idling patrol car, at three-something in the morning, was enough to set her teeth to rattling and her muscles to quivering. And being pinned in the glow of Terry’s high beams, like a moth, was unsettling, even if Terry was all threat and no action. He could always say the car just happened to accelerate.
Terry mulled that over, then said, “I don’t remember nothing like that in Mr. Naughton’s class. Maybe you’re thinkin’ of some art-fart course you took in college. Murder One, or—”
“That sounds more like something you would’ve taken in cop school—or is that joke about the law enforcement departments out here true?” Nonchalantly Anna leaned against the Dumpster, planning the streets she would use going home to miss Terry on his usual patrol route, while Terry took his time nibbling that bait. Finally, the line jerked.
“What joke?”
“That they wait outside the school for delinquent boys in Wales with a stack of sheriff and police force applications?”
In the light of the car Terry’s face went red, and as he leaned over to do something with the ignition, Anna took off in a northwest direction, running over the abandoned spur tracks. She hit Seventh Avenue, then ran east to Dean Avenue, parallel to Ewert Avenue, her full bags banging and clanking against her a thighs, until she had to stop, gasping for breath. Damning that case of bronchitis she’d had as a child (her lung capacity was so low she hadn’t even been able to resuscitate Resusi Anne dummies in freshman health class), Anna wheezed her way down Dean Avenue, forcing herself to keep up the pace. Detour or not, she had to be home by four, and home was half a mile away.
In the distance, she heard Mrs. Campbell drop another Dumpster lid. The old bat acted like she owned the town, not caring who heard her, or whether or not anyone saw her. Maybe it doesn’t matter when her late husband was one of the City Crew workers...no little stock-boy fucker would dare call her “Scum!”
Not that Arlene Campbell had ever done anything to Anna. Why, Anna now supposed that the old woman had actually meant to be friendly when she’d first seen Anna Dumpster diving several years back, and said, “I see you walk alone, too.” But at the time, Anna had simply ignored her and turned down a side street, unsure of how to react. And these days, when they’d approach the same Dumpster from different directions, the most Mrs. Campbell would do was diplomatically mutter, “Age before beauty,” or some such nice-but-barbed admonition, prior to planting herself in front of the Dumpster, hogging the bags within. But nevertheless, Anna detested the old bat.
I’m taking out everything Ma’s mother ever did to me on Mrs. Campbell, the college psychology professor voice in Anna’s head told her, but the college-grad-with-two-menial-jobs voice told the other voice, Mind your own fucking business, okay?
Anna’s labored breath was ragged enough to be clearly audible over the crunchy scrabble of the leaves she was dragging her feet through. She glanced up at the occasional lit windows in the houses on either side of the street. The ones with the unlined curtains drawn or the flimsy shades pulled only captured her attention for a few seconds; she couldn’t see much more than tantalizing strips of flowered wallpaper; angled ceilings, an occasional headboard, or closet door hung with empty padded hangers. But some windows were uncovered, the light within spilling out in warm squares and rectangles across the frost-nipped lawns and crack-veined gray sidewalks beyond.
Anna’s pace slowed as much as legally possible without being labeled a Peeping Tom as she looked into those windows, telling herself that if a woman went around showing everything she owned, people couldn’t really be blamed for looking, could they? For Anna, the same thing applied when it came to window-peeping. After all, who but a show-off would light up the inside of his or her house like a Christmas tree, and leave the drapes or shades up? It was as if those people were saying to Anna, Look, garbage picker, at the things you won’t ever have, no matter how many castoffs you grub out of Dumpsters and garbage cans.
And despite the imagined insult implied by the showy, well-lit windows, Anna willingly went along with it, eagerly looked at what others apparently sought to rub her face in, for it was the only way she could keep herself sane—keep herself from getting like her mother, who thought that the world was limited and bleak as the four walls that surrounded her come the end of each working day.
Her sneakered feet shuffling through light mounds of frost-backed leaves, and moving lightly over the ribbons of dried dead grass bisecting the slabs of concrete below, Anna stared at walnut Colonial living room ensembles; at plump, plaid sofas surmounted by grouped picture frames in artful configurations; at tasteful ceramic ginger-jar lamps positioned next to daring open staircases; at kitchens whose appliances all matched, the refrigerators bearing all-one-theme sets of magnets; at wall-mounted collector’s plates and full sets of old fine china in big dark wood cabinets. The people in those lit rooms acted as if they were oblivious to the street beyond.
Anna had seen things that would have gotten her arrested if one of the cops been driving past just as she had her head turned in the direction of some of the homes. The people who performed those acts in the spotlight seemed to taunt her: We can do what we wish, and no one will ask us where the skeletons of our great-grand-mothers are buried.
Anna knew her peeping was wrong, despite the apparent invitation to look that the bare glass presented. But she also knew that these people could be wrong, too, calling out things she and her Ma already knew, already wondered about themselves, though no answer was to be forthcoming, even after the passing of fifty years and more. Anna never knew if they’d taunted the old lady; she wouldn’t admit the sky was blue if you held her eyelids open with pliers and forced her to stare up at the heavens, let alone admit to Anna or her mother that she, too, had been greeted almost daily with that rote cry.
At any rate, if any of the cop cars ever were to stop her, Anna had the perfect retort ready: “Just looking for Granny, Sir.”
TWO—First Kill
Arlene Campbell let the Dumpster lid slam down, aware of the racket she made, but regally beyond it. With a sense of humor most of the citizens of Ewerton would have found astonishing, considering the image they had of her as a spare old crone in ratty head scarves and cheap Sears running shoes, Arlene privately dubbed herself duchess of the Dumpsters, queen of Ewert Avenue, the dowager of debris.
True, if any of the lowlifes who cruised the streets, party-hardying and tossing full beer cans out passenger windows whenever a squad car rolled past in the other direction, were ever to call her any such name, Arlene Campbell wouldn’t hesitate to take down their license numbers and phone in a complaint after she had walked home. But nothing of the sort ever happened.
Sometimes, Arlene wondered if it was the ghost of her Don that kept the hoods’ mouths shut—Don, with his steel brush butch, and his BB-shot eyes surmounting jowls that flapped like an old woman’s breasts. “Old tittie cheeks,” his co-workers used to call him; Arlene had heard them, but never had the heart—or sheer courage—to repeat the sentiment in Don’s presence. Bad enough that those fellows had to work under him.
And Arlene remembered how he’d bark and bitch at the kids who spent the summers painting the curbs and crossing lines of Ewerton’s asphalt-and-gravel patched streets yellow, some of the same kids who spent their Friday and Saturday nights whooping it up in the shoddy over-the-store apartments on Wisconsin and Ewert, with the whores who lived there, and then cruised the streets for hours afterward, shouting and slamming on the brakes ten feet after the stop signs.
If they can make all that noise and nothing is done, I can drop the Dumpster lids. Arlene thought as she started for the IGA. When she saw the white squad car slowing down by the Dumpsters, she hesitated. She’d seen the Von Kemp boy’s rather small head
