The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady - Elizabeth Stuckey-French [57]
But she steeled herself and proceeded with her plans to derail Otis and Ava, telling herself it was for a good cause. She steered Ava away from her studies and toward the trashy world of modeling and shallow self-absorption. Otis she would merely expose by writing a letter to the EPA. There was all kinds of illegal stuff in that shed. She didn’t have to be a Nobel Prize–winning scientist to tell that.
Vic she felt little to no sympathy for. He was detached from his family, and nothing that went on in his house seemed to affect him. Vic was a cretin not to realize what he had. Work would be the best place to get him, so she signed on to be a scorer at FTA. She would cause as much trouble there as best she could.
Caroline was a neurotic, insecure woman, obsessed with Ava and merely tolerating everyone else. She was in desperate need of someone to help her and support her, the way her husband should’ve been doing, but Marylou did not intend to be that person. The best thing to do to Caroline, Marylou decided, was to pretend to be helpful and supportive but all the while work behind the scenes to poison everything Caroline took for granted.
Vic and Caroline needed to shit or get off the pot, as Teddy would’ve said. Their marriage stank to high heaven, but she wasn’t going to be the one to point this out to them. Let them wallow in their own filth while she dirtied the rest of their nest.
Of course she would have to make sure that, while she was doing her dirty deeds, the family would tolerate her, even want her around. In the long run, it probably would work in her favor that she’d left Suzi alone at Dunkin’ Donuts—it had established, in the minds of the Witherspoon family, that she was scatterbrained, which could come in handy later on. The truth was, she was the furthest thing from scatterbrained. Well, maybe not the furthest thing. But none of the Spriggs family members—except Wilson whom she’d told outright that she planned to kill him but it didn’t seem to faze him a bit—suspected that she was guilty of anything but being a pathetic and annoying busybody. They did probably suspect her of locking Wilson in the shed, but they’d never said anything to her about that. And Wilson, she knew, would never tell on her. He seemed not to care how badly she treated him or how much she threatened him.
In addition to her crushing-his-family agenda, she kept up her efforts to make him remember. Even though she reminded him every so often that she planned to kill him, he willingly climbed into her car. She took him to Barnes & Noble, “for a treat,” she told Caroline; and the two of them sat in the coffee shop for an hour and a half while she showed him books about the horrors of radiation. He sipped his café mocha and nodded, not even bothering to defend radiation, glancing around at the other café customers, especially the young pretty college women bent over their fashion magazines. Finally he announced that it had been a real pleasure talking to her, but didn’t they have any lighter reading material available at this bookstore?
Another day she took him to a nearby park, and they sat on a bench in the shade and watched the kids and their parents play on the thick plastic slides and jungle gyms, all connected to big plastic fortlike contraptions, so unlike the thin metal playground equipment Helen had enjoyed. And no more concrete under the equipment—now it was poky, splintery fresh-smelling cedar chips. Marylou spotted a little girl with long blond hair and fair skin like Helen’s and pointed her out to Wilson and reminded him again that he’d killed