My good Samaritan instincts were hampered by the old woman’s unyielding bulk. I fumbled and faltered, she pulled and struggled, and we looked like Laurel and Hardy in drag.
Finally, I had her standing up, braced against me.
“My ankle,” she said in a surprised, small voice. The lady was not used to leaning on anybody, and she kept putting tentative pressure on the offending leg, wincing each time, then leaning on my shoulder once again. Her right knee was scraped and slowly bleeding onto her dress.
I didn’t know what to do about her. I considered dropping her onto the blacktop or propping her like a piece of lumber against the supermarket wall. Both ideas lacked a certain finesse.
“I look a mess,” Mrs. Cole said.
Frankly, she hadn’t been eligible for any best-dressed lists before her tumble. Her flowery blue dress was the pick of a litter of Main Line frumpies. Over it, she had a slightly worn gray cashmere sweater and a patterned lilac scarf that crisscrossed her ample bosom. But now, her faded hair was rumpled, and the scrape on her knee oozed onto shredded stockings.
“I don’t feel at all well,” she added. “I should have stayed home.”
“Do you think you could sit on the curb while I get help?” My shoulder throbbed. She had elected the already-damaged one as her makeshift crutch.
“What curb?” There was merit to her question. The curb was low and sporadically nonexistent as it dissolved into market-basket ramps. “I’m not a young woman, Miss Pepper.”
“I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking clearly. But I should go get your son.”
“Isn’t he auctioneering now? I wouldn’t want him to stop, make a fuss, and disrupt everything. He’d be so angry. I wasn’t supposed to come. I wasn’t supposed to drive, either.” She winced again.
“Then I’ll ask Sissie to come.”
She shook her head. “Please. Sissie has Petey here and responsibilities, and she’s just like family—she’d be angry because I sneaked out, didn’t even have the driver bring me. Anyway, I would like to get out of these ripped stockings and get my ankle into some warm water. Could you possibly be very kind and drive me home? My house is nearby, in Ardmore. Five minutes away. You were there for the engagement party. You must remember.”
Of course I did. Who would forget the hilltop palazzo? Its grounds were the size of territories that issue stamps.
“If you’d drop me off, my housekeeper would help me, and my driver would bring you back.”
“But still, I should—”
“Ten minutes all told.” She sounded very unlike herself, fragile and frightened. “Oh, please, Miss Pepper?”
There is just so much pressure from disabled old ladies that I can withstand while maintaining my self-respect. “Which way is your car?” I asked.
She gestured, grunting with each slow step we took, and we made our way across the supermarket lot and down a side street. Finally we reached her car, a discreetly weathered gray Mercedes. At least I was chauffeuring in style.
What an interesting line the Coles teetered on, wrangling for the popular vote, proclaiming democracy, while hanging on to every vestigial aristocratic right.
I helped Mrs. Cole onto the right front seat, and I settled in behind the wheel. The leather was soft and luxurious. She handed me the keys.
“That’s it, you’re doing fine,” she said as I cautiously started the car and managed to pull away from the curb without denting the fender.
She fanned herself. “My! The exertion! I’m quite warm suddenly.”
I was sweaty myself. I don’t like to handle other people’s valuables, let alone drive them. I concentrated on the car, on finding the turn signal and making a smooth right off Lancaster Avenue. I bade a silent farewell to the lights of the fair.
Mrs. Cole meanwhile fanned herself and removed the drab sweater and pale scarf, folding the latter into a tidy square.
“Do I turn at this light?” I asked.
She didn’t seem to hear me, so I looked over, repeating myself. “Is it this next light or—” The words died as I viewed the newly revealed Mrs. Cole. Above the demure scoop of her blue frock, her bared neck bore the wattles and lines of age. But, more significantly, it also sported a small, filigreed locket.
She saw my stare, and she raised her hand protectively. “Next corner,” she said in a flat voice. “Is something wrong?” She looked down, toward her hidden cleavage.
I concentrated on driving and on locking my bottom jaw back into place.
“Dear? You looked…startled.”
“Oh, no,” I said. “I was just admiring your locket. A student of mine, Stacy Felkin, has one just like it.”
“I doubt that. Not like it at all.” Her voice was at its most imperial, somewhat amused that anyone could presume her locket was one of a series. “It’s quite impossible,” she said. “This was Grandmother Lucy Bolt Hayden’s, my dear. She gave it to my father, Benjamin Sedgewick Hayden.”
What is “déjà vu” for sounds? I’d heard those words, that same voice saying them before. Or a voice giving a perfect imitation. Liza, in my classroom, mimicking this woman. And Liza, wearing that locket while she spoke. It had been given to her with that presentation speech.
“It’s been in my family for generations,” she said sweetly.
I could still hear and see Liza, hunched a bit, making her body bulky and putting a nasal edge on her voice. But long ago was long ago. Had she kept the locket? I tried to think about last Monday morning.
“You can drive a bit faster, dear. My ankle is more painful than I realized at first.”
“I’m a little nervous.”
“Why?”
“The, ah—car. I’ve never driven a Mercedes before. Kind of intimidating.” I tugged out every memory of Monday morning. I remembered Liza’s gestures as she smoked and fidgeted with her hair, with her T-shirt, and with something at her neck. A glinting, gold thing. The locket. She always wore it. That’s why Stacy imitated it.
She was wearing it Monday morning.
But was she wearing it when I found her? I forced myself back over every second of that nightmare homecoming. I had buried the memory as far away as I could, but I forced myself to look at it, at her again. I had put my head on her chest, listening for a heartbeat. Was there a locket nearby? Could I feel its pressure on my temple? Could I see it at all?
“Turn right here, dear. The light’s green.”
I crept along.
Maybe the police had returned the locket to the family. Maybe I shouldn’t be leaping to conclusions.
Mrs. Cole was tidying up, shuffling around in her brown purse, putting away the folded scarf.
The ring had been on Liza’s hand. I remembered the police mentioned it, and I saw it, too. But the ring was new and hadn’t mattered to the Coles. Liza had said so.
Mrs. Cole held her hand up to her neck protectively again. “My grandmother, Lucy Bolt Hayden, was a fine woman,” she murmured, her voice placid and self-satisfied. “And her father was a great man.” She sounded almost like someone telling herself a beloved fairy tale.
I tried to sort out the questions bombarding my brain. I couldn’t think coherently with Mrs. Cole doing her genealogical monologue and my consciousness divided into the figuring-out part and the driving part, so I pulled over to the side of the road. Nobody passed us. Not one single moving vehicle troubled the Coles’ neighborhood with noise and exhaust fumes.
“Don’t stop the car,” Mrs. Cole said. “My ankle—”
“I’m dizzy for some reason.” Mackenzie! Mackenzie, we talked through the entire crime, except we didn’t realize that the necklace was a clue. Was it on the body when I found it?
Mrs. Cole stared at me intently.
I saw myself again, and again, bending over Liza, shaking her. I saw her head wobble.
There hadn’t been anything on that slender neck.
“Do you feel better now?” Mrs. Cole asked.
I nodded.
Would Hayden have removed the locket and returned it to his mother?
No. Nobody attached that degree of significance to it except the woman beside me. She had taken it herself. She had watched Liza die, waited for her to die, and then taken the locket.
I shuddered.
“Are you well?” Mrs. Cole asked.
“Chilly,” I said, fearing that my teeth were going to chatter. I thought of Mrs. Cole staring impassively at Liza and tried not to think of Mrs. Cole, now staring at me with mild and distant interest.
“Then please start driving again,” Mrs. Cole said. “I’ll put the heater on if you’re cold.”
I put the car into gear once more.
She didn’t know that I knew anything about the locket. I was safe. Innocent. I repeated the idea to myself several times. We passed the train station and crossed under the tracks of the Main Line of the railroad. We were now on the right side of the tracks. Literally. The Cole house was very near here, looming somewhere above our tree-lined, meandering road.
I glanced down at Mrs. Cole’s ankle. It looked just as it had before, swaddled in its wrinkled stocking. Shouldn’t it be swelling? Had she hurt it at all?
She swiveled toward me, using the “wounded” foot as a pivot, and I had my answer.
Why had she gotten me into her car? Why did she want me in her house? I didn’t think we had a similar conception of what could provide an evening’s amusement.
“How provident to find you on the parking lot,” Mrs. Cole murmured. “Turn right at the end of this road. We’re around that bend and off to the left.”
She took that locket off Liza’s neck, my brain said with finality. It printed it in caps. In neon.
SHE MURDERED LIZA.
I was near the corner. She murdered Liza. She murdered Eddie. Even an old lady can push. Even an old lady can pour boiling water. Even an old lady can tape newspaper headlines on a piece of paper and shove it through a mail slot. She knew I was at the carnival. Sissie phoned her. I sent regards. The only surprise was that I was right there for her on the lonely parking lot.
I turned left.
She is going to murder me.
I sped by the long entryway to the Coles’ estate.
“You’ve missed it! You missed the turn after I clearly—”
“I’m sorry! I’ll get us right back.”
But not back here. Back to the fair. I needed Mackenzie, who was undoubtedly sitting calmly at the auction, covering his Big Three suspects. Dear God, but we’d been stupid. Even the detective with his revealed truths. We’d figured out the probable why of the murders, but goofed by a mile on the who.
So now I was driving a two-time murderer around, and I believed the superstition that bad things go in threes. But still, the idea was ludicrous, because what did she want of me? She could, after all, have mugged me on the parking lot, if that was her ambition.
“What are you doing?” Mrs. Cole snapped. “There’s no need to creep along this way.”
“I have night blindness.”
“You saw well enough when you raced past my house.”
“Mrs. Cole, I’m not feeling well. I’m driving back to the fair. Hayden can take you home.” My teeth chattered, giving my act some credibility.
“You’ll do no such thing. Drive me back to my road and take me home.”
I shook my head, my teeth clattering away.
“Well,” she said with something like a genteel snort, “we’re not so sweet anymore, are we? You’re behaving very oddly, Miss Pepper. Why don’t you just say what’s on your mind? And meanwhile, turn this car around and do as I say.”
“Nothing’s on my mind.” I leaned over the steering wheel, peering into the dark, winding road.
“Oh, yes it is. You lie just the way she did. No wonder you were such good friends. Confidantes. You’re as much a liar as she was. Everything she said was a filthy lie, and she didn’t care that it would ruin my son, my plans, my name.”
I half expected her to mention her country and her universe as being at risk. But more upsetting than her overuse of personal pronouns was that she was admitting much too much to me. I did not want to hear any of it—at least not in these close quarters.
“Mrs. Cole,” I said in a soothing voice, “you’re upset. You’ve hurt yourself, and you’re feeling poorly. I don’t know what lies you’re talking about, but if they’re important, perhaps you should tell the police, not me.”
I continued creeping along, waiting for a turn that would bring me back toward Lancaster Avenue.
“The police? What have I to do with the police?”
I saw a turn ahead and I moved more quickly, then swung the steering wheel to the right.
“What are you doing?” Her voice had become shrill, a bit less cultivated. “This is the wrong way—”
But she was too late. The car sped ahead, down an incline and into the rain-swollen stream. This was not the time to discuss the peculiarities of the Main Line street system that includes a road that fords a stream. I crashed into the water and back up again onto dry land.
“Turn around right now. You get us back right now,” she ordered. “Right here, right now!” She waved her hand at the window.
I kept on going. Her one clear goal was to have me at her house, and I wasn’t going.
“I won’t—” she began.
“The brakes are wet. I can’t slow down. I can’t turn.” In the distance, behind acres of trees and green gardens, I thought I could make out the bright lights of my destination.
“You’ll take me home!” she repeated, rustling through her purse again. Her voice was no longer shrill or ruffled. It was smug and secure. As well it might be, considering what possession she now chose to show me.
A gun in the hand is worth a lot of self-confidence.
“Mrs. Cole! What are you doing?”
She sighed. “I didn’t want it this way. But I must finish it tonight.”
“By—by shooting me?”
“Not unless you make it necessary.”
“It isn’t! It’s not at all necessary. It won’t accomplish a thing.”
She shook her head. “Of course it would. It would stop the chain. End this business. Avoid shame.”
She was insane. But so was I, because I kept trying to reason with a madwoman. “Mrs. Cole, the police—”
“They know nothing. Not with Liza, not with that—that henchman of hers.” She pushed the gun into my rib cage. “Now drive me home,” she said calmly. “I don’t want to shoot you, but I will if you don’t cooperate.”
I nodded emphatically. Far be it from me to coerce someone into destroying my vital organs. “The next possible turn,” I whispered. “What henchman?” I added. “What do you mean?” Perhaps I could get her so involved in her own story that she would momentarily forget about the gun in my side. I made my face wide open and expectant, ready to be informed.
She chuckled nastily. “I’ve never appreciated your innocent act, but this time it’s silly. You know who it was. You led me to him, Miss Pepper.”
I was momentarily diverted, dazzled by her politeness. She would call me by my full name even while planning to kill me. Breeding certainly does tell.
“Him? Who?” My voice, when it returned, squeaked, but she didn’t mind.
“Eddie, of course. When Liza, when she was, well, upset, she tried to threaten me, said Eddie knew everything and he’d get me. I didn’t know who or what she meant. But I knew you would know. You were her closest friend. She stayed with you so often, confided in you. So I wasn’t surprised when I heard you say ‘Eddie’ at the viewing, and when I heard him say something about Liza. Sissie told me the rest of his name. I thought he might really know something, have something. But there was nothing there. Just his insinuations. They were two of a kind. Trash. Dirt. Nothings.”
She leaned back, looking at the roof of the car but keeping the gun at my side. I tried to comfort myself with reminders that guns were not her weapon of choice, and since there was no fireplace or boiling kettle around, I was probably safe.
“The problem was,” she said, “somebody might have believed them all the same. She was a convincing little actress. Threatening me with a press conference! Demanding money! She should have been grateful for what Hayden and I were doing for her. Instead, she was ready to ruin him and everything we stand for. She said we had used her, as if she were something valuable. But of course you know all that. It was even your house she chose for her disgusting act.”
She listed her grievances with gusto, giving me time.
“I didn’t know she was going to call you,” I said, playing her game.
“She didn’t. She called Hayden, but he wasn’t home. I returned the call, invited her to lunch. I was polite and gracious. And she said she should have called me in the first place because I would do just fine. She wanted to talk, she said. Talk! Threaten! Lie!”
I could see Mrs. Cole arriving at my house, dressed in a spring luncheon ensemble, a flowered hat on her head and white gloves. A gentlewoman in gloves wouldn’t leave prints.
“Get me home.”
For her own obscure reasons, Mrs. Cole didn’t want to kill me while we were driving. If need be, I would therefore drive throughout eternity. “That’s a one-way street,” I said, passing a possible turnoff.
“Oh.” Mrs. Cole’s voice was small and obedient. She only broke the big laws.
“Mrs. Cole,” I said calmly, “how can you possibly benefit by doing…this?” I didn’t yet know what “this” might be, so I left it vague, unwilling to plant ideas in her mind, although the gun at my side did indicate a certain seriousness of purpose. “You aren’t protecting your son or his name if you—”
“Of course I’m protecting my son. He doesn’t deserve it, the fool. I’ve spent my life saving him, pushing and prodding and having to take care of his every move. He hasn’t got his father’s courage, his family’s ambition. He’s…angry with me now. Suspicious.”
“Then if you—if I—if something happens, he’ll tell the police.”
“No,” she said firmly. “I know him. He won’t do a thing.”
We were seconds away from Lancaster Avenue and relative safety, or at least noise and light. I felt as if years had passed since I’d gotten into this car, but I realized it had been only a matter of minutes. Maybe Mackenzie wasn’t even suspicious. Maybe he thought a woman could primp for hours in a Porta-Jane.
But I needed only a little bit more time. “Mrs. Cole, even if he won’t do anything, the police will know who…did it to me.” My voice trailed off. It is difficult to discuss one’s own untimely death in a detached, clinical manner.
“They will not know a thing.”
“But this is your car. That is your gun. You won’t get away with it.”
“I have no intention of getting away with anything. Just of getting on with it. We are both going to die and end this entire business once and for all. You have to die. You know too much. But I will not go to prison, Miss Pepper. Coles do not go to prison.”
As interesting sociologically as that last idea was, I had another, more pressing line of questions.
“How?” I whispered. “How are we…going to…?”
“There is a dangerous, unfortunate embankment on the approach to my house. We’re going over it. You’ll already be dead, you see. I will then set the car in position, use the gasoline I have ready in the trunk, and release the brake. An accident, that’s all. Ascribable to my sedation, perhaps.”
“They’ll wonder why I was there,” I began.
“Let them wonder!”
That about ended that avenue of thought. I tried a new tack, a few civilized words against the project. I’d appeal to her patrician standards. “Mrs. Cole, it’s a foolish, meaningless, vile thing to do!”
“Foolish? Vile? How dare you speak to me that way?”
“How can you dare try to kill me! You can’t go around pushing people any which way. You’re no better than anyone else. You have no more rights than I do.” I kept driving and spouting elements of democracy, knowing I sounded like a fool, but a gun in one’s side can wreak havoc with one’s rhetoric.
“You—you’re just like her,” she said, her skin mottling. The gun wavered, lost pressure. She pulled in her breath in a broken, quivering gasp and steadied herself. The gun went back into position, more deeply, pressing hard and painfully against my rib cage.
The light was green ahead. I floored the accelerator, turned right, and looked with adoration at the carnival lights winking and blinking up ahead.
“Get off this street!” she screamed. “Do you hear me? You take me home this instant!”
But no matter what I’d ever said, I wanted to spend Saturday night at the fair, and I was going to. I took a deep breath in preparation for the next two blocks. “Thanks for the invitation,” I said calmly, “but I’d feel out of place at your house, so I’m not coming over tonight.”
“That’s very unwise, Miss Pepper. But it doesn’t matter. I see that now. I can be flexible. You’ll die now instead of later. I have nothing to lose either way.”
The gun left my ribs, and I turned. Mrs. Cole’s eyes were fierce, fanatical. She bit her lip to steady herself as she raised the barrel to my head.
“Don’t do it,” I said.
“Don’t tell me what to do.” She squinted and took a deep breath. She was probably yearning for something to bash me with. Guns weren’t her thing.
We were chugging away in deep fast traffic. I was afraid to slam on the brakes and leap out because I couldn’t judge the impact of the gun pointing at me, but it seemed a toss-up between being shot in the side or the back, depending on how quickly I moved. I had long since known that logic had no place in the woman’s thinking.
“Nobody tells me what to do,” she said. Her breath was somewhat labored.
She was right. Nobody did. Not ever. I suddenly saw Liza and Eddie, both paralyzed by bedrock politeness, stunned like animals in headlights while the little old lady advanced, aristocratic, regal, unshakable, and elderly. A deadly combination.
I had no time and only one possible weapon.
“Screw you, bitch!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. “Who the hell are you? You’re nothing, and you’re nobody! You’re a murderer! You’re trash!”
Her nostrils flared, her mouth opened speechlessly. Nobody had ever spoken to her that way. Nobody had spoken to her parents or grandparents that way. I had just upended the rule of generations. She gaped in wonder.
I seized the moment. I smacked down at the gun and it fell, heavily, across my right foot.
I reached for it, but so did she. I gave her first dibs.
I lifted my foot and stomped as hard as I could, down onto her hand as it stretched across the accelerator.
We took off, beginning the first Lancaster Avenue Grand Prix.
“You can’t!” she screamed, breathing heavily, clawing at my leg with her free hand, twisting to pull herself free of my foot.
“I can! I am!” I shouted as we zoomed through the intersection. “I’m not dying for your honor or anything else!” Where was a cop when I needed one? I wanted to be pulled over, arrested, lectured, put on trial. Rescued. But instead, cars honked and people shouted, and I headed for the carnival’s lights. “Please, God,” I said as shops and sidewalks blurred by, “everybody be at the auction, because—” I turned the wheel to the right, sharply.
She screamed, bringing her left arm up to my face, banging my head against the window. Her fingers clawed at my eyes. She was incredibly strong and agile.
The steering wheel in my left hand convulsed, but I couldn’t think about it as I pried her fingers. There was a part of me still fixated on the fact that she was an old woman—not a fierce male attacker, against whom I could be ruthless.
And then I mentally said what the hell and bit down on her hand until she yelped and yowled and pulled it away. For a flash, before the fist was back, hitting and pounding my temple, I saw Beth’s food stand zoom directly toward the windshield. I pulled at the wheel, but not enough. We amputated its right side. Glass and food flew into the air, over the car.
There was no time for regrets. We were heading toward—we were in and through—a game booth. Stuffed tigers and elephants banged onto the hood and ricocheted onto the ground. I didn’t know where to turn. We neared the edge of the carnival, but I wasn’t going to leave it. I might die there, but I wouldn’t leave it. I turned the wheel again, never releasing pressure on Mrs. Cole’s hand and the accelerator.
“Let me go!” she screamed. She started to cry, and she sounded like an angry child having a tantrum. “Let me go! Let me go! Let me go!”
The silent merry-go-round was directly ahead. I pulled violently on the wheel to get the car onto the walkway.
But nobody had designed the carnival for a runaway Mercedes. I heard a heartrending scream of metal against wood, and the car ground to a halt. The passenger side was now part of the decoration of the calliope, and a wide-eyed silver horse looked in through the smashed side window.
It was time to leave.
I threw open my car door and ran toward the supermarket, the auction, people, screaming for help. How could they not have heard the crash? How could the auction be so compelling that they’d stay with it through this?
My screams were drowned out by the sounds of more metal being loosened, more glass and wood crushing as the car started up again.
I ran faster.
Then suddenly, I was bathed in light. I turned and saw headlights, or one headlight, coming toward me. The Cole car was designed to last as long as the name. Nothing could stop it or its driver. Not a side door hanging loose. Not broken glass or garlands of doll innards and food. It was still running and it was aimed directly at me.
I ran toward the shops, the pavement at the back of the fair, then sideways, toward the auction.
She would get me, I suddenly knew. Whatever confidence and bravado I’d clung to disappeared, washed out in the headlight. She would crush me against the shops, killing us both, as she’d always intended.
And then the militia arrived.
I heard it before I saw it. Footsteps, screams, shouts. Hundreds of feet, chairs toppling far away and above it, over the microphone, Hayden’s voice shouting desperately, “Calm down, everyone. Let the security people find out what—calm down, please.”
“Terrorists!” a woman shouted. “Bombs!” another voice said.
People who had run toward the rubble shrieked. I didn’t stop to console them or to apologize. I headed straight into the mass of the crowd and kept running.
He was maybe the tenth person I passed. “Amanda!” he shouted. “Amanda!” He grabbed my shoulders and held on. It was hard for me to stop my feet. “Whaaa…whasit …ahbe…” His words blurred into one stunned drawl.
“It’s her. It was her all along. She’s going to—get these people back or she’ll kill us all! She doesn’t care!”
“Who? What?”
I waved my hand behind me, then turned. The car was gone.
A security guard appeared from behind Denim Heaven. He coughed apologetically. “I—there seemed nothing I could do when I saw what was…” He stopped and waited for us to make him feel better.
Mackenzie glared at the man, looked at me, looked at the dark sky. Then he spoke. “Yay-uss. Well, now you can just go call the local police.” The man slinked off.
A second guard, pale and shaken, waved his gun in the air from his hiding place nearby. “Gone!” he shouted. “Drove right through!” He pointed to the ruins of a booth. The ground was wet and covered with tiny goldfish. They should have let us catch them earlier.
“She killed them, too,” I said. “Killed them all. Mrs. Cole. She’s the guilty one. Except they were all ambitious, and who’s to say? That’s a good question. If you were to judge, then who? Liza? Macbeth? Eddie? Fate?”
“Are you all right?” He held me close. “It’s over,” he whispered. “You’re safe. You solved it. You’re the heroine of the day.”
“All the same,” I said, “I need a minute or two to collapse. Cry. Disintegrate.” Which I did, more or less, and he held me, making low, soft sounds of Southern comfort until I was calm again.
“Come with me,” he said then. “I have to take care of some things, but I don’t want to leave you.”
“You don’t have to. You don’t have to leave me. You don’t have to stop her. She’ll take care of it herself.”
“How can you be sure?”
“She told me. She won’t face the shame. She has a gun. Dear God, this is so ugly. Every piece of it, even now, her last face-saving.”
The local police arrived before the guard’s call summoned them. The echoes of the premature dismantling of the Main Line Charities Carnival had reached them. They left in pursuit of the decrepit gray Mercedes.
I became aware of two silent people nearby. Sissie, in her scarlet dress but without her wig, looked stunned. “Mother Cole?” she repeated several times to herself. She looked at Hayden. “I thought that…” Then she decided to let it go, and she stood, shaking her head.
Hayden said nothing. Perhaps his mother had been right. Perhaps he never would say anything, but his ashen face spoke volumes. I turned away from both of them.
“Can you talk about it now?” C.K. asked, and I nodded. I explained to him, then again to Beth and Sam, and then to a local policeman, what had just happened. By the third retelling, I got the thing down to a size where I could handle it. There were even parts I could laugh at.
* * *
“So now you have a story for your twilight years,” Mackenzie said as we got into his car later. “I can just see you with your great-grandchildren. ‘Hey, Granny,’ they’ll say, ‘tell us again how you stopped the crazy lady from shooting you.’”
“And I’ll say, ‘Kiddies, sometimes it pays to have no class.’”
“They never taught us about disarming somebody by bein’ uppity,” Mackenzie said.
“There are lots of things you didn’t learn at the police academy, Coriolanus. How lucky for you, then, to be in the company of one of the world’s finest teachers. And I do private tutoring, at home. I’m alive, and you’re alive, and there’s still enough weekend left in which to celebrate the fact of life.”