The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady - Elizabeth Stuckey-French [7]
Her mother had also told her to cross the street when she walked past one particular house in their neighborhood, a house where a registered sexual offender in his thirties lived with his parents because he’d just gotten out of jail. But then she told Suzi that she’d done an Internet search and discovered that all the guy had actually done was drug a woman—probably at a bar—and then, you know, taken advantage of her, so he wasn’t a child predator, which was the kind they really had to worry about, but even so, be careful! Like drugging and raping anybody wasn’t that bad! The way adults could talk themselves into and out of feeling okay about something always amazed her.
As she walked Parson through Canterbury Hills, Suzi played out scenarios in her head—Ted Bundy Jr. creeping up behind her with a fake cast on his arm—she’d kick him in the nuts and run to the nearest house. A bus full of gangstas offering her a milk shake with date rape drugs in it—she’d throw it in their faces and run to the nearest house. A pimpled geek on a bike exposing himself—she’d blow her whistle right in his ugly face. But never once had she imagined an encounter like the one she was about to have, nor could she have imagined the consequences of it.
It was too bad, really, that everyone tried to scare the crap out of kids about hanging out in their own neighborhoods, because if she didn’t always have to be “on guard,” these walks with Parson would’ve been her favorite part of the day.
On the morning she met the old lady she turned right at the top of her driveway so she could walk past her favorite house—the neighborhood’s original plantation, a two-story white clapboard house built in the 1800s. In their side yard there was a bronze tortoise, which the homeowner had ordered online, as big as a VW Bug. As Suzi and Parson walked past, she surveyed the plantation house and the tortoise and the front porch lined with rocking chairs as if it were her own house, just waiting for her to move in.
Their next-door neighbor John Kane, setting out in his Ford Ranger for his insurance business downtown, gave her a wave and a smile. Suzi waved back, deciding not to attribute his friendliness to a sick and twisted plan. From somewhere in the trees above her came a pileated woodpecker’s nutty laugh. She tried to imitate it and strike up a conversation, but the bird must not have been fooled, because it flew away, a shadow fluttering off through the live oak limbs. Its mother had probably warned it about people posing as woodpeckers.
She turned the corner, and she and Parson went down a small hill, passing a group of middle-aged women who walked together every morning, blabbing and hogging the whole road, then she started down Nun’s Drive, staying under the shaded canopy. She stopped beneath the line of confederate jasmine bushes to inhale their sweet smell, and this was when the old lady and her dog cornered her.
She’d seen this particular woman, in various spots around the neighborhood, a number of times on her walks (Suzi didn’t walk the same way every time, per instruction), and she didn’t pay much attention to her (old ladies are interchangeable), but her dog was cute. Parson thought so, too, and always whined and lunged toward the corgi, desperate for contact. Suzi always managed to pull Parson away and keep walking, but that morning in May, when the two dogs were lunging at each other, the old lady spoke up and said something more than the usual “Isn’t it a lovely day?”
“How about we let them get acquainted?” she said in a twangy Southern accent, an accent Suzi’s friends referred to as “country.”
“Buster here’s been awful bored with just me for company.”
Suzi—who’d been daydreaming about a certain boy in middle school to whom she was sending carefully plotted mixed signals, Dylan B. (there were four Dylans in middle school) with his shaggy red hair and deliciously round freckled face, calculating how much time she had to spare to placate this old woman before she was late getting