“Henry Wackford thinks I did,” Franklin said. He pushed Marcey down on the closed toilet seat and got the door shut and locked behind him. “Sensible people don’t think that. How much of that stuff did you take, for God’s sake? You’re a mess.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Marcey said. “I’m just worried. And Miss Marbledale called to say Janey was in detention, and I tried to call you, but you didn’t answer. All I ever got was people from the store and they kept saying you couldn’t come to the phone, so I came down here, I had to. You have to see that.”
“Catherine Marbledale is a secular humanist, too,” Franklin said. “I don’t care what it is she pretends to be. Where did you get them? I thought I had them all locked up.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Marcey said again, and this time she sounded mulish. That was a very bad sign. That was the worst sign there was. “I had a good reason to talk to you. I did. You shouldn’t tell the people here not to put me through to you. I’m your wife. You’re supposed to talk to your wife.”
“I didn’t tell them not to put you through to me. I was probably busy.”
“You’re just lying,” Marcey said, and now her voice had gone from velvet to acid. It never took more than a moment. “You lie to me all the time, Franklin. You shouldn’t do that, and you know it. I had a right to talk to you. I had a real problem. You never want to deal with the real problems. You just want to yell and scream about secular humanists, and in the meantime that poisonous girl is turning your daughter into a—into a something. I don’t know what. But you won’t listen.”
“You have to go home,” Franklin said, trying to be calm. He was not calm. Marcey could panic him, sometimes. She always panicked him when she got like this.
“I’m not going to go home,” Marcey said, her voice rising up into the stratosphere. “I’m not going to go home and hide away like I’m ashamed of something. I’m not ashamed of anything. I’m not your crazy old aunt you can hide away in the attic. I’m your wife. And I want something done. I want something done about Barbie McGuffie and I want something done about Janey and I want something done now. I’m not going to have Janey suspended from school just because you won’t listen to me.”
“Marcey,” Franklin said.
“If you don’t do something, I’ll scream,” Marcey said.
And then she did. Franklin had known, from the moment he had realized she was in the store, that it was going to come to this. And she knew exactly what effect it would have, too. He could see it in her eyes. They weren’t teary anymore. They were hard and bright with malice. They sparkled.
“Marcey,” he said again.
She just put back her head and let it rip, a long, high-pitched wail that could be heard all the way out to Main Street, the sound of an animal in pain and dying, a sound that could break eardrums.
It only took a second before people were pounding on the bathroom door.
2
Henry Wackford was with a client when he heard the screaming start, and he knew what it was as soon as it pierced the glass of his closed front window. Edna Milton knew what it was, too, and Henry was willing to bet pretty much anything that everybody else on Main Street knew, too. After all, Main Street was a small street, Snow Hill was a small town, and Marcey Hale was very, very loud. She was loud even when she was screaming through the walls of her builder’s colonial out on the Cashman Road, and her neighbors there were a lot farther apart than Franklin’s neighbors were here.
When Henry stopped looking at the window and turned around to look at Edna, she had her head tilted and a smile on her face. Edna Milton was one of Henry’s closest allies in what he thought of as the War Against Idiocy, but told everybody else, in public, was the War Against Mediocrity. That had always seemed to him to be the best way to put it when he was running for school board. There wasn’t a parent alive who wanted his child to grow up to be a mediocrity. At least, there wasn’t one alive who would admit it out loud. Henry had the feeling that there were definitely people in Snow Hill who would be satisfied with nothing else but mediocrity in their children. Anything better than that would mean that their children were getting to be “stuck up.”
Edna was clucking. She was a short, compact middle-aged woman who didn’t like to fuss with herself, as she put it. She wore very little makeup, she had let her hair go grey long ago, and she cut it off short so that it wouldn’t be much of a bother. Even so, she’d been married twice, and she could have been married again if she’d wanted to be. That was partly force of personality, and partly the fact that she had a very good head for business.