The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady - Elizabeth Stuckey-French [0]
The First Paper Girl in Red Oak, Iowa
Mermaids on the Moon
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 by Elizabeth Stuckey-French
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.doubleday.com
DOUBLEDAY and the DD colophon are registered trademarks of
Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Stuckey-French, Elizabeth.
The revenge of the radioactive lady : a novel / by Elizabeth Stuckey-
French. —1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Older people—Fiction. 2. Florida—Fiction. 3. Domestic fiction.
I. Title.
PS3569.T832R48 2010
813′.54—dc22
2010014724
eISBN: 978-0-385-53403-1
Jacket design by Will Staehle
Jacket illustration © Coco Flamingo/Image200/Getty Images
v3.1
For Ned, Flannery, and especially Phoebe
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Part One - April 2006
Marylou
Part Two - May 2006
Chapter 1 - Suzi
Chapter 2 - Vic
Chapter 3 - Caroline
Chapter 4 - Ava
Chapter 5 - Otis
Part Three - June 2006
Chapter 6 - Suzi
Chapter 7 - Marylou
Chapter 8 - Vic
Part Four - July 2006
Chapter 9 - Caroline
Chapter 10 - Ava
Chapter 11 - Otis
Part Five - August 2006
Chapter 12 - Suzi
Chapter 13 - Marylou
Chapter 14 - Vic
Chapter 15 - Caroline
Chapter 16 - Ava
Chapter 17 - Otis
Chapter 18 - Suzi
Chapter 19 - Marylou
Chapter 20 - Vic
Chapter 21 - Caroline
Chapter 22 - Wilson
Chapter 23 - Marylou
Acknowledgements
Part One APRIL 2006
By the time Marylou Ahearn finally moved into the little ranch house in Tallahassee, she’d spent countless hours trying to come up with the best way to kill Wilson Spriggs. The only firm decision she’d made, however, was that proximity was crucial. You couldn’t kill someone if you lived in a different state. So she flew down from Memphis to Tallahassee and bought a house on the edge of Wilson’s neighborhood. Doing so had been no problem, because she had a chunk of money left from the government settlement as well as her retirement and social security. She furnished her new place quickly with generic “big warehouse sale” furniture. Back in Memphis she rounded up a graduate student couple she’d met at church—a husband and wife who both needed to give their spectacles a good cleaning—to house-sit, and then she transferred her base of operations to Tallahassee, informing friends only that she’d be taking an extended vacation.
Completing her task in Florida, unfortunately, was taking a while. Every morning when Marylou and her Welsh corgi, Buster, left their house at 22 Reeve’s Court and set out on their walk toward Wilson Spriggs’s house at 2208 Friar’s Way, Marylou chanted to herself: Today’s the day. Today’s the day. Today’s the day he’ll suffer and die. Every morning she fully believed that by the time she’d walked the three blocks to Wilson’s house she’d have figured out how to do him in, despite the fact that she’d been setting out on this very walk a few times a day for the past two weeks and it was nearly May and the best method and right time had yet to present themselves.
She tried to spur herself on with angry thoughts. Would she feel better after she’d killed him? Darn tootin’. She didn’t expect to go around giddy, not after all that had happened, but she expected to feel relieved, to have a sense of accomplishment, like when, fifteen years ago, she’d stepped out the doors of Humes High School, never to have to spoon-feed Chaucer to tenth graders again. It must be a good sign that she was now living in a neighborhood where the streets were named after Chaucer’s characters. The Canterbury Tales had returned to mark this next big passage in her life.
It didn’t help that the walk