“Oh, shut up,” Alice said. “You can go on like that all day and I won’t listen to it.”
“If you try to stop our club, we’ll complain to the federal government,” Judy said, “and then they’ll make you let us or they’ll take away the federal money we get around here and we get a lot of it. I’ve looked it up. We can start any kind of club we want to and you can’t stop us. We could start a Wicca club if we felt like it—”
“It isn’t legal to have Satan worship in schools,” Alice said. “And don’t you try to tell me it is.”
“Wicca isn’t Satan worship,” Judy said. “We can start any kind of club—”
And on and on. On and on. Alice stopped in her forward march and looked around. She had left the schools complex on foot, without her car. She had no idea why she had done that. She had just been so damned steamed up, so damned furious, at Judy Cornish and all the rest of them, and at Catherine Marbledale. Who did any of them think they were? She was Catherine Marbledale’s boss. She kept pointing that out. Catherine Marbledale didn’t seem to care.
“It’s that tenure,” Alice said, to the air, to the birds, to the cold, to nothing. She’d only learned about tenure since she’d been on the school board. Apparently, it meant that if a teacher had been around long enough, you couldn’t fire her, no matter what.
Alice stopped and tried to catch her breath, and that was when she realized she was almost all the way back to town—so maybe she wouldn’t walk all the way back to the schools complex. Maybe she’d have Lyman come out and fetch the car later. But she wasn’t just almost back to town. She was right there where the worst thing had happened, right in front of Annie-Vic Hadley’s house. It sat back from the road behind a high hedge, looking like something out of a horror story.
“Damn,” Alice said.
She was suddenly very cold, and she didn’t like being here. She really didn’t. She had never liked this house, even before all this trouble started. It was dark in a way she couldn’t define. It was made of dark wood, for one thing, and its bricks were brown instead of red, and the windows had slats what went sideways, as if they belonged in a monastery somewhere. Alice had never seen a monastery except in horror movies, and she was pretty sure she didn’t want to see one. This house always made her feel as if it were haunted. Maybe that’s what old Annie-Vic did in her spare time. Maybe she hung around and talked to ghosts.
There was a big gate in the hedge, but it didn’t have an actual gate. There was nothing to bar anybody’s way. Alice went up to posts that defined the entry and looked in. Some of Annie-Vic’s family had been staying in the house for a while, but they must have gone. Alice couldn’t see any sign of them. She edged right up to the opening. She’d never been so much as up the walk here. She wasn’t the kind of person Annie-Vic deigned to notice, except when she came into the diner, and then she treated everybody like they were fools and peons. Alice wondered what it was like in there. Maybe Annie-Vic was like those old women you heard about, the ones who collected things, bits of paper, lengths of string, cats. They piled everything on top of everything else and died in the garbage one night when it got too much for them to handle.
Alice looked behind her. There was nobody there. She looked to one side and then to the other. There was nobody anywhere. She was out here all by herself.
Alice looked back at the house. It was blank, the way empty houses were. It was much too big. She took a step on the flagstone entry path. She was standing right between two lines of hedges. She took another step. She was in the front yard. There was nothing much in the front yard. There were no lawn ornaments, and no flowerbeds. There was no lawn furniture for people to sit on when the weather got warm. People like Annie-Vic didn’t sit in their front yards when the weather got warm. If they did, they might have to talk to people who came walking by.
There really was nobody around to see her, and she didn’t mean to do damage or cause harm. It wouldn’t hurt to see what it was like, just this one time. Alice had always wanted to get herself into that house.
She took a deep breath. Then she looked behind her again, and from side to side. There was still nobody in sight.
It really wouldn’t hurt just to go up on that front porch and look in through the front door.
3
Ann-Victoria Hadley knew that time was passing, out there, somewhere, where she was not. She knew it because people came and went from her room. The problem was, too many people came and went from her room. There was Tom Willard, who seemed to be her doctor. He wasn’t local, but she knew him from hospital benefits and that kind of thing. There was Gary Albright, who kept coming back and coming back. At least, Annie-Vic thought he did. It turned out that when “time stood still,” that didn’t mean it just stopped, so that you were alive in an eternal present. No, that wasn’t it at all. Instead, time meshed, all the times in your life. There were so many people coming in and out who had nothing to do with her life in Snow Hill, or had something to do with it, but something that was long over. There was her father, looking as if he’d never passed the age of forty, pacing up and down in front of the window that looked out on the cemetery, smoking a pipe. They didn’t let you smoke pipes in hospitals any more. There was Miss Gardham, who had been her professor in Russian literature at Vassar, still looking twenty-two, or whatever she had been. She had been new Annie-Vic’s senior year, and the girls had all teased her. It was because of Miss Gardham that Annie-Vic kept thinking of that line from Chekov, from one of the short stories.