The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady - Elizabeth Stuckey-French [1]
She would stall in front, while Buster sniffed around in the grass, and stand beneath the magnolia tree that bloomed with fantastically white blossoms, hoping that Wilson himself would pop up in front of her and ask to be killed, please, and hurry up about it. When this failed to happen, she hoped to at least be struck either with the courage to storm the house or with a clever idea about how to sneak in undetected.
But she was struck by neither courage nor inspiration, and by the time she got back home she was so hot and weak and discouraged she had to lie down and rest.
In the evenings, after she’d eaten some dinner, usually a fried egg and slice of toast, a kind of Chaucerian meager repast, she’d hook Buster’s leash to his collar and they’d walk over to Friar’s Way again. Sometimes she saw a gray Volvo turn into the driveway of the yellow house or a navy blue minivan pull out of it, but she was never close enough to make out who was actually in the car. One time she saw a middle-aged man in a grungy black T-shirt—must’ve been the son-in-law—mowing the grass in the front yard, but he refused to look up at her; and one time she saw a girl and a little white dog running down the driveway. It was like they, the Spriggs family, were purposely keeping their distance from her—but how could they, when they had no idea she was nearby and looking to get even?
The whole being-in-limbo thing, the looking-to-get-even thing, was getting old. She was growing weary of wanting to kill Wilson, of imagining herself killing him; she was itchy to actually do it.
At first all the planning to kill Wilson had been, well, she had to admit it, fun. The idea started forming in her mind six months earlier, right after she’d stumbled across the article about Wilson Spriggs on the Internet. She’d been googling “Dr. Wilson Spriggs,” as she did every so often, without ever finding anything recent about him, and one day there was a link to a little piece in the Tallahassee Democrat about Dr. Wilson Spriggs helping his teenage grandson Otis Witherspoon win a science fair prize. As she read the article, which had an accompanying picture of Otis holding the blue ribbon he’d won at the Leon County Science Fair for his poster about the upside of nuclear power, she knew she had to do something, that Grandpappy Spriggs could not be allowed to go on living the way he had been, untouched by his cruel deeds.
Marylou and her former husband Teddy had recently stopped corresponding, so there wasn’t anyone she could talk to about how she felt when she found the article. She began to scheme all by herself. She didn’t tell another soul what she’d decided to do, and she wrote nothing down, but she made the plot she was hatching into a story in her mind, a horror story, like that wonderfully dreadful old movie Attack of the 50 Foot Woman.
In the summer of 1958, when Helen was five, she and Teddy had gotten a babysitter and gone to see that movie at the Orpheum Theatre in downtown Memphis. Teddy had howled with derision all the way through it, as did most of the audience, some of whom began throwing their popcorn at the screen, but Marylou thoroughly enjoyed it, trashy and badly made as it was, especially the scenes of the giant (much taller than fifty feet) vaguely annoyed-looking heroine, Nancy Archer, stuffed into an unexplained bikini