The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady - Elizabeth Stuckey-French [53]
He actually smiled. “Or Godzilla,” he said.
The smile was insufferable. “Do you know who I am?” she asked him.
“I believe I do.”
“Who? Who am I?”
The annoying little white poodle was out in the front yard, barking fiercely at Paula Coffey, in her white visor, jogging by. Wilson said, “You’re Mrs. Archer. Mrs. Archer with the lovely blue eyes.”
“I told you. My real name is Marylou Ahearn.”
His eyes behind their trifocals swept her up and down. “You look nice today.”
“Go straight to hell.”
He nodded. “Not yet,” he said, and crossed his legs so that his white calf showed. He glanced out the window, and she did, too. The dog was silent, but the city recycling truck was nearby, slamming glass bottles around. Moss hung in ghostly swaths from the huge live oak tree in the front yard. The sunlight coming into the room made her feel drowsy. The smell of warming dust made her feel drowsy. She didn’t want to feel drowsy. It was happening again. His bobbing and weaving was wearing her down. The previous two times she’d “read the newspaper” to him she’d given up badgering him after a while and just sat there, making small talk about Memphis and gardening and the weather, hoping that her mere presence was making him miserable, occasionally imagining flying across the room and strangling him. Breaking the table lamp over his head.
Then, because such images were so preposterous, she’d start wondering if maybe he was really the ogre she thought he was. Maybe he hadn’t really known what he was doing with that experiment and so on, until she actually found herself making excuses for him, trying to make sense of the fact that she and this nice, polite, rather handsome gentleman were sitting together, talking about daylilies, when what she really wanted to do was to kill him.
One day, after spying a key in the fork of a tree, she’d taken the opportunity to lock Wilson in the toxic garden shed, hoping that he’d suffocate in there or inhale enough deadly fumes to have a lasting effect. She knew that even if he hadn’t figured out who pushed him into the shed, they’d have to have figured out that she’d done it; and she planned to vehemently deny it when they confronted her. But nobody in the family even mentioned it to her the next time she showed up at their house to “read the paper” to Granddad, who seemed just as unflappable as ever.
Today, she decided, she wouldn’t give up. She took a sip of the strong coffee and set down her mug. She wasn’t going to fall back on small talk. She was done messing around. She informed him that she’d moved to Tallahassee with the singular goal of killing him.
“Is this another one of your jokes?”
“I am going to kill you. How much clearer can I be?”
He folded his arms on his chest. “Don’t talk like that. I could report you to the police.”
“You could,” she said, leaning forward, struggling to keep her voice low so that Caroline, nearby in the kitchen, wouldn’t hear her. “But if you told the police, it would all come out, what you’ve done. It would get in the papers. Your family—your daughter and grandkids—and all of greater Tallahassee will hear the details about how you are responsible for poisoning eight hundred women. And their unborn children.”
“Oh. Well. There’s already been a hearing in Washington,” he said. “When that fellow from Arkansas was president. Hillary’s husband. I gave a deposition for the hearing. And afterward the subjects were compensated. OJ was involved, too, somehow. The rental car guy.”
“I am a subject,” Marylou said. “Here I am. I got some money, but I do not consider myself to be compensated. I am an uncompensated individual. I’ve had many medical problems. And my daughter, Helen, died of cancer. At age eight. Can you imagine watching your child suffer and die, Adolf?”
He stared fixedly at his hands, which were now in his lap. “I’m sorry your daughter died.”
“Are you sorry that you killed her? That’s what you need to be sorry for.”
Would he say it?