Grime and Punishment jj-1 Page 3

  “Yes, mandarin orange and regular orange. No tangerine."

  “Kool-Aid?"

  “Nope. I looked."

  “Jell-O?"

  “I want to flavor a salad, not glue it together.”

  “Let's check the gourmet section, ma'am.”

  “This is proving a fruitless effort, in several senses," Jane giggled.

  “You might try a health food store," he suggested, oblivious to her wit.

  Jane shuddered. The only time she'd been in such an establishment, she'd seen only stuff that looked slightly less appetizing than the hamsters' food. "I don't frequent health food stores. I don't even know where one is.”

  In a low voice, as if afraid of being overheard giving information to the enemy, he gave her directions to a store several miles away.

  Jane checked out and decided to do her other errands first. The health food store was the other way from her house. Smoking her second cigarette as she drove, she went to the bank, the office supply to pick up some graph paper Katie had requested, and to the dry cleaners to leave the sweater with the barbeque sauce on the sleeve. After a tiff with the girl at the desk, who insisted sourly that the stain looked like blood no matter what Jane might claim, she left.

  She waited while a car pulled in next to hers. "Oh, hello, Jane," the woman getting out said.

  “Robbie, you've done something to your hair. It looks nice.”

  Jane always went out of her way to compliment Robbie Jones, sensing that she needed it. Robbie was, to be generous, an extremely plain woman. She had a portly body and the skinniest arms and legs Jane had ever seen. In addition, she had a lantern jaw, low forehead, and a perpetually stern expression. But she had lovely auburn hair with a deep natural wave.

  “I just had it trimmed a bit, that's all. Bringing in your dry cleaning?”

  What else would I be doing at a dry cleaners? Jane wondered. Poor Robbie. She couldn't help it she was the world's worst conversationalist. Just shy, Jane supposed. Still, she often wondered how she did her job; Robbie worked part-time as a psychiatric nurse. A superb if boring organizer, she could handle work schedules and budgets with devastating competence, but she was the dreariest, most depressing person in their circle.

  “You're coming to Shelley's this evening, aren't you?" she asked her.

  “Certainly. I've got my food in the car to drop off in a while."

  “I can take it for you, if you'd like." '

  “No, thank you. I've got my driving plan worked out and that would throw it completely off. I'll see you tonight.”

  Jane got in the car, biting back a smile. "I must learn to like her," she said out loud as she pulled out of the parking lot. "It's the Christian thing to do.”

  When she got home, she flipped on the kitchen television to catch the noon news while she fixed a sandwich and smoked another cigarette. Shelley might make fun of her meat loaf, but cold, it made the best sandwich in the world. The weather report caught her attention. A cold front was heading in their direction and would arrive later in the week. Temperatures might drop into the fifties or lower.

  “Furnace—" she mumbled to herself. Every fall Steve did things to the furnace before it was turned on for the winter. But not this year. One more thing she'd have to figure out.

  It was amazing how many things there were to learn when you were a single parent and a homeowner. There seemed to be hundreds of boring chores somebody else had always done and which had to be learned. What surprised her most was how many of them seemed to be seasonal. Every time she thought she had a grip on things, the weather changed, and she had to start all over with a whole new set of problems.

  First it had been the snowblower. The rubber blades had worn down, and she and Mike had spent a hideous Saturday morning the previous February in a hardware store finding replacements. That was very soon after her world had caved in, and she'd made a fool of herself, breaking into tears, in public, when the hardware clerk told her how to have her husband attach the damned blades.

  Then spring had come, and there'd been all the assorted jobs and implements associated with keeping a suburban yard looking decent. The lawn mower had been bad enough, but Mike had manfully assumed responsibility for it. Then the underground sprinkler system had suffered a breakdown that caused all but one of the heads to put out a pitiful mist and the remaining one to look like Old Faithful. That she'd just abandoned. She bought a rotating sprinkler head and a couple of lengths of hose. She'd always felt an underground sprinkling system was a symbol of decadence anyway. Spring had also meant having the snow tires taken off the station wagon, and she'd stupidly bought an entire new set of tires without realizing they weren't an annual purchase and the old ones were in green plastic bags in the basement.

  When the weather had turned warm, the air conditioning had graciously consented to simply go on when she flipped the switch to "cool," and through some stroke of luck had worked all summer. But she was certain the furnace needed more than that. Something to do with the filter, she thought. Taking her last section of sandwich along, she went to the basement to look over the situation. She spent a useless half hour studying the thing and never found anything that faintly resembled a filter, but she did finda self-adhesive tag on the back of a little door that gave the name of the furnace repair company. Steve must have put it there.

  Giving up, Jane went upstairs to make an appointment for the company to send a man out to look the thing over, then got to work on the carrot salad. She peeled and sliced the carrots with her new knife and put them into a steamer. While they cooked, she went out to hose off the patio. She had just turned off the water and was surveying her work with a sense of accomplishment when she heard a car door. Dear God — Shelley back? She glanced at her watch. One o'clock. It couldn't be. She peered around the corner through the hedge that ran all the way from her house to Shelley's and saw Joyce Greenway approaching Shelley's kitchen door.

  “She's not home," Jane called out.

  Joyce peered into the shrubbery, trying to spot the source of the voice. "I know. She told me. Could you get the door? I'm about to drop this thing." Joyce was tiny — barely five feet and probably not over ninety-five pounds, all of it in exactly the right places. She had curly, silky-fine blond hair, and a very soft voice which hardly ever seemed to rise much above a whisper, but which she managed to project superbly. She'd been a professional actress for a few years and was still active in community theater. Jane supposed that's where she'd honed the skill of being heard.

  Jane went in through her garage and back out into the adjoining driveways. She opened Shelley's kitchen door and followed Joyce inside. "What've you got?"

  “Brisket. I'm not sure it's well enough done, but I was afraid to wait. Shelley's such a terror about getting the food over early. What did you make?"

  “Carrot salad — oh, Lord! — I forgot, the carrots are cooking! Gotta run. Can you find a place in the refrigerator for that?" Jane didn't wait for a reply. She was relieved to have a legitimate excuse to escape. Joyce was very nice, but awfully solicitous of Jane's single state — always asking how the children were doing without their father and was there anything she could do to help out. It got a bit tiresome.

  The water under the carrots had reduced itself to a mere skin on the bottom of the pan, but nothing had started to burn yet. Jane speared a carrot slice to see if it was done, and it practically dissolved under the assault. Damn it, she'd have to start over. This stuff would turn to carrot paste if she tried to stir it. Good thing she'd got plenty of carrots.

  This time she stood by the stove and turned the kitchen timer on for good measure. She spread the morning paper out and browsed through, but found nothing of earthshaking interest. Least of all ads for sales on tangerine juice. She paced, wishing the carrots would hurry up. She still had to find the last ingredient and put the salad together before Shelley got home and discovered her lapse. Finally, the timer went off. She jerked the pot off the burner, dumped the carrots into a b
owl, and set it in the refrigerator. Time to find the health food store.

  Yet another cook was arriving next door and, thinking it would be surly to ignore her — they’d had words once when Mike and her Eddie were in third grade about the room-mother assignments, and Jane was still feeling the need to mend fences — she stopped and said, "Hi, Laura.”

  Laura Stapler nearly threw her dish in the air. "Oh, Jane! I didn't see you. You shouldn't sneak up on people like that!"

  “Sorry. Shelley's not home, but you can go on in."

  “I know. She called and told me she'd be out. Doesn't she lock up the house when she leaves?”

  This question from Laura wasn't surprising. She was a timid, mousy woman who always looked like she had inside information that the world was about to end and was under orders not to tell anyone. Her husband had a franchised "safety store" in the nearest shopping mall. He had a tendency to bring his work home. Their house, which Jane had visited once, was locked up like an Egyptian tomb. They had dead bolts, alarm wires, and even a padlock on the side gate. "I'll bet she wears a chastity belt that's hooked up to the alarm system," Joyce had once said. To which Shelley replied with a malicious grin, "I've met her husband — I don't imagine the alarm goes off very often!"

  “There's someone there, Laura. The cleaning lady," Jane reassured her, thinking Laura would be afraid to even set foot in a house that wasn't properly secure.

  “Oh, I'm so glad!" Laura said.

  Jane found the health food store with difficulty. It was located, as she felt only proper, around the side of a line of shops, almost entirely out of sight. The derk, a man of enormous proportions, tugged at his skimpy beard and said, "Tangerine juice?Naw. We got peach nectar and unstrained apple juice and apricot nectar and unsweetened grapefruit juice and pressed carrot essence and some heart of celery cocktail — no liquor, of course. I think we've maybe got some plum nectar. You wouldn't like that, would you?"

  “Definitely not.”

  Even though she needed to hurry, Jane couldn't resist looking around a bit. Everything, she discovered quickly, was brown. Light brown and dark brown, pinkish brown or greenish brown. She glanced back at the clerk, now trying to squeeze his way along behind the counter, and wondered how in the world he had got that shape eating only the kind of stuff sold in the store. Maybe brown was a fattening color. That, she mused, might make a best-selling diet book. The NonBrown Way to Beauty.

  Musing about food colors, Jane returned to the car. Could you eat only red food? Rare steak, candied apples, new potatoes in their pink skins, cranberry juice, strawberry pie — she'd have to fix all that sometime and see how it looked. What about green? Okay for the vegetables, and some sort of mint dessert, but she couldn't think of a green meat, except some she had accidentally turned that shade in the refrigerator from time to time.

  She was passing a grocery story she'd never been in and decided it couldn't hurt to try. If she didn't find the tangerine juice there, she’d have to give up and use orange juice and just face Shelley's wrath. She turned back at the next corner, parked, and went in. With a panicked glance at her watch, she headed straight for the office booth next to the check-out stands. After waiting impatiently for a moment, she asked the young woman operating an adding machine if they carried tangerine juice.

  Without looking up, she replied, "We're out, ma'am, but we have an order coming in Monday."

  “I beg your pardon? You mean you actually carry it?"

  “Oh, sure. There might be a can that got mixed up with something else, if you want to look. Frozen concentrates.”

  Fortunately, this guess turned out to be right. Clutching the frigid can as if it were solid gold, Jane paid and hurried out to the car. Time was running short if she was going to have the salad waiting at Shelley's when she got home from lunching with her mother at the airport. It was 2:15 when she got home, and 2:45 by the time she'd finished the business of slicing the onions paper-thin as ordered while fending off several annoying phone calls from people who wanted to sell her roofing and siding and thermal windows.

  Finally, triumphantly bearing the bowl of carrot salad, she hurried across the two driveways and into Shelley's kitchen. She was home free; if Shelley came in now, she'd claim the salad had been there for hours and she'd just come in to check that the rest of the dishes had arrived. For the sake of backing up this story, if necessary, Jane looked around. The refrigerator's middle shelf contained three other bowls of salad, and the platter of sliced brisket she'd seen Joyce bring. Apparently nothing had interfered with Robbie Jones's driving schedule, because there was also a bowl of vegetable dip and a Tupperware container on the counter full of the butter-soaked, baked wheat-bread fingers that she always brought to this sort of thing. Next to this was the sheet cake.

  Jane was tempted to just nibble one of the wheat-bread goodies, but was afraid either Shelley or the cleaning lady would catch her at it. Besides, Robbie probably knew exactly how many she'd brought and would take roll call of them later. Jane went home instead, and cleaned up the mess she'd made fixing the carrot salad. A few minutes later she heard Shelley's minivan, and five minutes after that the phone rang again.

  “Jane—?"

  “Shelley? Is that you?"

  “Jane, come over!"

  “In a few minutes, Shelley. I just dropped a peanut butter jar and there's glass all over—"

  “Jane, shut up! Come over. The cleaning lady's dead. Do you hear me, Jane? She's dead! In my guest bedroom!”

  Four

  In all the years they'd been friends, Jane had never known Shelley to lose her cool. But on the phone she'd been shrill, nearly hysterical. As Jane raced across the driveways and into the Nowacks' kitchen door, Shelley met her, wringing her hands and looking like death. Her face could have been painted white.

  “I can't have heard you right," Jane panted. "She's dead, Jane. It's horrible."

  “Did you call the police and an ambulance?"

  “Not yet. An ambulance won't help her."

  “You don't know that, Shelley. It might be a heart attack or something. Maybe she just looks dead."

  “Jane, believe me—" Shelley turned away and put her hand over her mouth, retching.

  Jane ran up the stairs, skidding to a halt just inside the door to the guest room. She suddenly realized what Shelley meant. The cleaning lady was lying sprawled beside the bed, just inside the doorway. Feet toward the door, face down, her head was turned sideways, and what Jane could see was sickening. The woman's skin was a mottled purple, her eyes bulged, and some‑ thing fat and purplish and repulsive was sticking out of her mouth. It took Jane a few seconds to realize it was the woman's tongue.

  The vacuum cleaner cord was twisted savagely around her bruised throat.

  Jane's stomach heaved and she dashed for the bathroom. She clung to the sink, steeling herself. Then she rinsed her mouth, slapped some cold water on her face, and — carefully not looking toward the guest room — started downstairs. She had to lean on the banister for support. Her knees were shaking so badly she nearly tumbled forward twice.

  Shelley was at the bottom of the stairs, and they fell into each other's arms. "Oh, my God, Shelley—" Jane whimpered. Shelley was crying. "We have to call the police. They'll take care of — of everything." She knew she was babbling, but she needed to say something.

  “Oh, Jane…" Shelley moaned. "Take care of it? This is too awful. How could something so terrible happen?"

  “That's for the police to figure out," Jane said. Since the normally bossy Shelley was on the verge of going to pieces, Jane felt the need to be confident. But her voice came out in a croaking manner that didn't sound like herself.

  “Yes. Yes, you're right. I'll call," Shelley said, wiping her eyes on the sleeve of her elegant maroon suit. In other circumstances, Jane would have fainted from astonishment at seeing such a thing. Of course, in other circumstances, Shelley would never have done that.

  “What shall I say?"

  “I don
't know," Jane said, following her backto the kitchen. They were moving along like children, clinging to each other as if afraid to let go.

  Shelley picked up the phone, then put it back down. "I can't hear with that dishwasher going," she said. She looked down at the little light indicating the cycle. She went even whiter than before. "It's just on prewash. ." she said tonelessly.

  “So what? Just cancel the cycle— My God, Shelley!" Jane said, suddenly realizing the implications of this. "Did you start it before you found her?"

  “No, she" — she gestured helplessly toward the stairs—"must have."

  “Then that means she's only been dead a few minutes. Whoever did it might still be here.”

  They looked toward the family room, and suddenly the chairs and sofas became menacing — hiding places where murderers might be lurking. Jane grabbed Shelley's arm. "We'll call from my house."

  “We shouldn't leave her. It doesn't seem decent."

  “Decent! Nothing about this is decent, Shelley Anyway, we can't do her any good now.”

  Holding hands like terrified schoolgirls, they ran across the adjoining drives and into Jane's kitchen. Willard greeted them, then ran for cover, sensing that something was very wrong. After misdialing twice, Shelley finally managed to convey to the police that someone had been murdered in her house and that she was safely waiting at her neighbor's house. She gave her address and Jane's, and was barely through talk‑ ing when the faint wail of a siren sounded on the main thoroughfare a few blocks over.

  They stood looking at each other. "What do I do now?" Shelley asked.

  “Nothing. Just wait. Want a cigarette?”

  Shelley had quit nearly a year before, but accepted the offer with gratitude. "You'll stay with me, won't you?" she said, coughing a little as she took the first drag.

  “Yes, of course. I've got to take care of car pools." In spite of the situation, the mother part of Jane was still working, consulting a mental file cabinet of everyday responsibilities. "Mike will get himself home, and Katie is supposed to be staying for a pep rally and coming home with a friend. But Todd—”