She needed to get up and close the office door. She needed to lock it tight.
She didn’t want anybody to see her in here, bent over her keyboard, breaking down.
2
Faye Dallmer had thirteen earthenware pots of mint to put out on the boards in the roadside stand this morning. She normally hired somebody to do that kind of thing for her, but today she needed to do it herself. She needed to be out of the house. She needed to be away from Zara Anne. Most importantly, she needed to be doing something physical. Ever since she had heard about the death of Kayla Anson, she had been agitated, and she wasn’t even sure why.
It isn’t as if it has anything to do with you, she kept telling herself, as she set mint pots into even, orderly rows. You didn’t even know Kayla Anson. You were out back mucking around in the dirt when whatever it was that happened, happened. You didn’t even have the Jeep.
It was the Jeep that was nagging at her, although that made no more sense than anything else. She had the Jeep back, after all. It was sitting right next to her little Escort in the garage. It was just more than a little banged up, that was all. There was bark all over it, as if somebody had smashed it into a tree, except that it wasn’t that smashed. She wondered who had taken it, back on Friday night. When kids took it, they always brought it back. They put it in the garage or left it parked in the driveway. Maybe this time, after they hit the tree or whatever it was, they had been too ashamed to return it
“It was chasing that girl’s car,” Zara Anne had said, that night, to the policemen who showed up at the door.
Faye had been able to tell that the policemen had not been taking Zara Anne seriously. Local people rarely did take her seriously. She was a hard young woman to take. By the time the pollcemen got there, she had put on all her jewelry, necklaces and bangles and earrings that dangled and shone. She sounded like a jewelry store walking whenever she moved. She had put on more eye makeup, too, including thick black liner that she had painted into wings at the sides of her eyes. Faye wondered why she had never noticed it before, this need of Zara Anne’s to be as ridiculous as possible.
“It was right up on the back of that car,” Zara Anne told them, “practically climbing up the bumper. Tailgating, that’s what it’s called. And it didn’t have to be. There wasn’t anybody else out there. It could have passed anytime.”
“I didn’t make it up,” Zara Anne had told Faye herself, the next morning. “I really did see it happen. I don’t understand why you won’t believe me.”
It wasn’t that Faye didn’t believe her. Not exactiy. It was more complicated than that. Part of it was that Faye was used to Zara Anne’s exaggerations. Five hits out of twenty on an ESP test became an “incredible proof of extrasensory perception. The failure of a checkout girl to make eye contact at the supermarket became “irrefutable evidence” of her Christian fundamentalism and hatred of Wicca.
“They all want to go back to burning witches at the stake,” Zara Anne would say, as they got back into the car after a long day of grocery shopping.
Faye had given up pointing out that nobody had ever burned a witch in the American colonies. Witches here were hanged, not burned. The hangings took place in Hartford.
Part of it was that there was something wrong with this—this vision of the Jeep chasing the BMW, tailing it, out there on the Litchfield Road. Faye made sure her rows of mint were straight and then went to the back of the stand to see what she still had in boxes on the ground. She took a box full of organically grown beets with their greens still on and lugged it to the front. She had on two thick cotton sweaters over her turtleneck, but she was still cold: If the weather went on like this, she didn’t know if she would be able to keep the stand open until November. She thought of Towne Corn out in Morris, where they kept the stand open almost forever. The people there wore heavy corduroy jackets lined with fleece and thick suede gloves.
I couldn’t do it like that, Faye said to herself, outside. Then she stopped working for a moment to watch a car pass on the road. On Sunday mornings like this, the road was nearly empty. They wouldn’t start to see any serious traffic until people started coming out of church.
“I think I could tell what he was thinking,” Zara Anne had said stubbornly, the next morning, when the news was everywhere that Kayla Anson was dead. “I didn’t know she was dead last night. I wasn’t trying to get in on the publicity. I didn’t know there was any publicity to get in on.”
“I wasn’t saying you were trying to get in on it last night,” Faye said. “I know we didn’t know anything last night. I said I thought you were trying to get in on it now.”