The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady - Elizabeth Stuckey-French [128]
Katya plopped down on an Oriental rug, crossing her legs underneath her. Her bare feet were dirty on the bottoms. The young man, Trevor, set down his empty cardboard box and perched on the arm of the leather chair.
It began to rain, and the raindrops blew against the tall windows in the living room.
“Marylou showed up here earlier today and told us we had to move out,” Katya said. “We were just house-sitting, but, yeah, we expected a little more notice.”
“I don’t expect anything from anyone,” Trev said. He had the entire alphabet tattooed around his hairy left calf.
“Um,” Katya said, hugging her knees. “We’re graduate students at Memphis University. English and philosophy. Trev’s getting ready to take his thingamajiggers. His exams.”
“If I don’t pass, I’ll be driving a bus,” Trev said.
Caroline looked around the living room. Old, comfortable furniture. Ceramic ashtray in the shape of Arkansas. Coffee table book about the Holy Land. Piano with a hymnal open on the music rack, old black-and-white pictures of dead people on top. This was a house that Marylou had lived in for a long time. “Did the man with her, Wilson, did he seem okay?” Caroline asked the couple.
Katya pulled her braid over her shoulder and swung the end back and forth. “He seemed fine to me.”
“Nobody ever seems fine to me,” said Trev.
“He wasn’t, like, trying to get away?” Suzi said.
“Or signaling for help?” Otis said.
“Why would he be doing that?” Trev said, dropping down onto the chair. He was interested now.
Lightning flashed outside, too close, and when it thundered, the lamp wavered.
“Ooh, I hate storms,” Katya said, hugging her knees.
How much should they tell Trevor and Katya? How well did Trevor and Katya know Marylou? Had Marylou told them anything about why she’d moved to Tallahassee?
Before Caroline could decide what to say, Suzi blurted out, “She kidnapped my grandfather!”
“No kidding,” Katya said, exchanging a glance with Trevor.
“Well, not kidnapped,” Caroline said. “They left town without telling us, and my dad’s having memory problems. I’m not sure how aware he is of what’s going on. We think that she took him against his will.”
“This is unbelievable!” Katya exclaimed, clapping her hands together. “Marylou, a kidnapper! Wow!”
“Nothing anybody does surprises me,” Trev said.
“Where’d they go?” Caroline asked the young couple. “After they left here?”
“Sightseeing, probably,” Katya said. “Maybe she took him to Graceland! Everyone ends up there.”
“Are they coming back?” Caroline asked them. “Where are they staying tonight?”
“Assumed they’d stay here,” Trev said. “Otherwise, why’d they tell us to get out?”
Lightning loomed right out front of the house. Katya screamed. Suzi squealed and plugged her ears. Thunder rattled the windows. Afterward they waited a minute, but nothing else happened. Suzi cautiously removed her hands from her ears.
“My grandfather was a scientist,” Otis said. “He was a nuclear researcher. He wasn’t always as out of it as he is now.”
“He grew up here in Memphis,” Caroline added, “but I doubt he remembers much about it. He needs his medications. Are you sure he seemed all right?”
“He was smiling,” Katya said. “We thought they were a couple!”
“That’s false!” Otis barked out. “She hates him. He hates her.”
“Lots of couples hate each other,” Trev added.
“So you don’t approve of their relationship?” Katya said.
Suzi snorted. “They don’t have a relationship,” she said.
“Looked like it to me.” Katya smiled mischievously.
“If you call Marylou planning to kill him a relationship!” Caroline said, thinking What the hell? She needed to talk to someone about Marylou’s insane behavior. So she and Otis and Suzi related to Trevor and Katya how Marylou had been a subject in her father’s experiments in the fifties, and that she’d always blamed her father for her daughter