The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady - Elizabeth Stuckey-French [55]
“An angel of death,” Marylou told the old Wilson now. “You were the angel of death.”
“I’m sorry you think so.” There was a pause while Wilson took another sip of his coffee and set the mug back down with a shaky hand. “Are you feeling all right?” he asked her.
“I’m tired,” Marylou said.
“Have you been getting enough sleep?”
Actually, she hadn’t been. There was some funny business going on around her house at night that kept her awake. Just the night before she’d heard someone, around midnight, prancing around on her roof like a reindeer. The next morning a big hunk of roof shingles lay on the ground beside the garbage can, which convinced her that it had been a person on the roof, not an animal. As much as she longed to tell somebody about this—someone like her former husband Teddy—she would not allow herself to tell Wilson. So she said, in a mincing voice, “ ‘Have you been getting enough sleep? Have you been drinking your radiation like a good girl?’ Don’t be pulling that doctor crap with me.”
“I am a doctor,” Wilson said. “Tell me who you are.”
“I’m one of your guinea pigs. I’m leaving now, but I’ll be back. You are going to pay for what you did.”
“What is it you think I did?”
“You know what you did.”
Wilson frowned, looking bewildered. “Why are you so angry at me?”
“I’m not only angry at you, I’m going to kill you. I just haven’t figured out how.”
“You’d better go,” he said, looking alarmed for the first time. “Right now.”
Marylou stood up. “When I come back tomorrow you won’t remember anything we’ve talked about, and you won’t remember that I said I’m going to kill you.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Okay. What did I just say?”
He squirmed around in his chair, blinking like a spotlight was in his eyes. “It’s been real nice talking to you, but I’m not in a position to buy anything right now.”
It was so hot, walking home. Canterbury Hills was deserted in the middle of the day. She was glad that Buster was at home in the air-conditioning. The houses and trees receded, and it was all about the asphalt, pushing the heat up into her face. The heat here had a different quality than the heat in Memphis. In Memphis it was like a withering blast furnace, but at least there was movement in the blast. Here, she felt like a fish struggling in a hot shallow pond. It was unnatural to move in such heat. She tried not to cry, but tears leaked out of her eyes. She didn’t want to look conspicuous. She felt faint, but she kept going. Telling him about the day Helen died, that had taken it out of her. She hadn’t talked about that day in years. Her right hip was aching again. One foot, then the other. She would force Wilson, somehow, to acknowledge the depravity, the horror of what he’d done, and when it was clear that he understood and after he sincerely apologized to her, then she’d kill him, and she no longer cared how she did it. But right now the son of a bitch was too jolly. He refused to be miserable while she was turning the screws. Before she snuffed him out, she wanted him miserable. But how in the world could she change the outlook of a happy fool?
Desperation was the mother of invention. By the time she got back to Reeve’s Court, Marylou had devised a brand-new attack plan. She would continue with her efforts to make Wilson remember and apologize, but she would also take steps to destroy his family, the way he’d destroyed hers. It would surely make him miserable to watch his family suffer, the way she’d had to watch Helen and Teddy suffer.
Rather than killing all of them, which she