When I grew up, that was what I was going to be—a Baptist. Ethel let me go with her every so often during the summer. It was the most fun I ever had at church. Reverend Joe preached with such pep. Even peppier than Barb the playground counselor, who was a pretty darn peppy paper shaker. After the service there was always a get-together in the backyard of the church, which really wasn’t a church but an old appliance store that still had the sign hanging out front that said in worn away letters: JOE KOOL’S SMALL AND LARGE APPLIANCES FOR THE DISCRIMINATING. They had a ton of fried chicken set out on top of red-checkered tablecloths next to some colored greens, which were like spinach but better. On the number 63 bus on the way back home I once asked, “Ethel? When we come down here again, could we please bring Mary Lane along because fried chicken is her absolute favorite?” Between laughs, Ethel said, “That’s a real thoughtful idea. Miss Mary Lane could use a little fattenin’ up. That girl is skinnier than a poor relation.”
Now, I closed my eyes and so did Troo as Ethel said in her praying voice, “Dear God, these little gals sure could use some help.” Ethel went on to tell Him that we were good girls and that our mother was sick and maybe could He please spare her for a little while longer so she could come back and take care of us. I got so sad in my chest then. A deep sadness, more like a wanting so badly of something. A starving sadness. I must’ve started crying because Troo kicked me.
Ethel got up with an
aaahhhmen
and kissed both of us on our foreheads and went back into the house with a slam of that screen door, her sweet lilies of the valley perfume staying behind to sit with us a while longer.
My head was on one end of the straw couch and Troo’s on the other and her bare feet were next to my tummy, so I rubbed them a little for her until she fell asleep, which was almost right away. Then I got up as quiet as it is when you can’t sleep at night. I stared down at Troo’s red waves streaming out of her coonskin cap. It was a full moon night and some of its glow was falling across her face and made her look like a saint. I pulled the sheet right up to her chin and then walked over to the edge of the screen porch so I could get a good look at Rasmussen’s house. It was all dark except for a light on in what I thought might be the kitchen. Maybe Rasmussen was out looking for Greasy Al Molinari like he told Mr. Fitzpatrick he would. Or maybe he was hiding right around the corner, waiting and watching for me like he had that first night when he chased me down the alley. After Rasmussen did away with me, Troo would be all alone. Even though she acted so tough sometimes, I remembered what she was like after Daddy died. She couldn’t take something like that again. She’d turn into a nutcase and have to go out to the county looney bin and live there with Mrs. Foosman from over on Hi Mount Street, who had tried to drown her two kids in the bathtub because God had told her they were little devils. I couldn’t let that happen. I could never let Daddy down like that. I’d rather be dead, that’s how much I loved my Trooper.
To keep her safe, I needed to make my scheme come true. I was going over to Rasmussen’s house and look around a little to see if I could find Sara’s other tennis shoe or Junie’s St. Christopher medal she got for her First Holy Communion, which Fast Susie Fazio said had never been found. And then I would come right back to the house and wake up Mr. Gary and he would take the shoe and the medal and drive them over to the police station and then the cops would come to get Rasmussen and electrocute him ASAP.
I wanted to ask Ethel for help, but I didn’t. Because I knew she
really
liked Rasmussen. She even did charitable things for him. Like watering his garden if it had been a hot day and he couldn’t come home from the police station. Or if he had to leave very early, Ethel would bring his milk and butter in from the chute and put it in his refrigerator.
One night, I asked Ethel while we were playing go fish why she liked Rasmussen so much. She leaned forward, quickly plucked three cards out of her hand and placed them facedown in front of me. The first card she flipped over was the jack of hearts. “See that?” she said. “Let’s say that’s Dave Rasmussen.” Then she flipped over the middle card. “And then let’s say”—she tapped the queen of hearts—“let’s say that’s . . .” She almost said a name, but caught herself. I slit my eyes at her. Ethel had her no-how-no-way look on her face, so I knew there was no use asking who had just been sitting on the tip of her tongue.
“You know why that jack of hearts has such a sad-lookin’ face?” Ethel asked.
I studied the card. “Because he has to wear those dumb-lookin’ clothes?”
Ethel snorted. “ ’Sides that.”
I am usually very good at guessing games because of my imagination, but for the life of me I couldn’t come up with anything. “I don’t know, Ethel. Why’s he look so sad?” He really did look awful.
“Well, it’s all because of this here queen.” Ethel picked the card up and waved it at me. “She was deep in love and wanted to marry this jack.” She put the cards together like a couple walking down an aisle. “But this jack”—she put it right up to my face—“even though he was deep in love, too, he told the queen he couldn’t marry her.” She
tsked
. . .
tsked
. . .
tsked
. “So the queen done went off and married someone else.” She turned over the last card. It was the king of diamonds. “So now the poor ole jack has got a permanent fracture of the heart.”
Sometimes I had to pay very close attention to Ethel and her stories. They could be as confusing as one of those soap opera stories she listened to on her kitchen radio while she was ironing.
“Ethel, are you tellin’ me that Rasmussen loved a woman with all his heart and soul and all the stars in the sky and starfish in the sea and she married somebody else?”
“That’s ’xactly what I’m tellin’ you, Miss Sally,” she said. “Truth be told”—she leaned in so close I could see the hairs in her nose—“that queen got married to somebody ’sides that jack more’n once.” And I could tell by the wrinkle that came between her eyebrows that the whole story had made Ethel, who was a real romantic woman, feel just terrible for Rasmussen.
Oh, poor Miss Ethel Jenkins from Calhoun County, Mississippi. Rasmussen had even fooled the smartest woman I knew. But he couldn’t fool me. I pulled carefully on the creaky screen door that led out of the porch so it didn’t wake Troo. Then I walked out of Mrs. Galecki’s yard into the alley because a white picket fence full of sleeping yellow roses separated the two yards and I didn’t want to come back later all scratched up. That would make Ethel suspicious in the morning. I held my breath and looked around. Nothin’ seemed like it shouldn’t, so I walked around Rasmussen’s garage and tried to peek in. I bet when he stole girls he brought them here to molest them. Because those girls were both taken right off the sidewalk. Sara had been on her way to get that milk for her mother and Junie, I heard, had been on the way to her dance class at Marsha’s Dance Studio, where they had children’s tap and ballet lessons. And they weren’t found right away after they disappeared. So Rasmussen had to have brought them somewhere after he grabbed them. He probably had a car like Mr. Gary. Hardly anybody had one around here. Most people took the bus or walked to where they had to go every morning, like to the Feelin’ Good Cookie Factory or to church or to the Kroger.
I snuck into Rasmussen’s backyard, slowly, slowly closing the gate but leaving it unlatched in case I had to make a fast getaway. I couldn’t believe my eyes! There was the garden Rasmussen had told me about. Oh, it was a sight. There was a birdbath with water and a little birdhouse on a stick. And carrots and tomatoes and radishes in rows. And small green beans growing on large poles that looked like a tepee. And so many different kinds of flowers, some I’d never seen before. It was truly a Garden of Eden. Mrs. Goldman would just go crazy for this garden. So would Daddy.
I walked on the grass real quietly up to the house. I leaned against his back door waiting for my heart to stop fluttering like a kite on a windy day. Then I crossed myself and slowly pulled the handle down. And it was then that the whole backyard lit up like daytime. A car was pulling into Rasmussen’s garage. I dropped down and belly-crawled as fast as I could toward the garden because that was about the only place to hide. It seemed like forever until Rasmussen pulled that garage door down with a
clickety clickety clickety
. I could hear his footsteps, but I couldn’t see him. I’d gotten inside the green bean tepee to wait for him to go into his house, to hear the slam of the door, but nothing happened. After a few minutes or so, I peeked. I shouldn’t have. They always tell you not to do that when you’re hiding from someone, but I had to know where Rasmussen was because he was tall enough to look over his fence and there would be Troo sleeping in the screen porch. Easy pickin’s, as Ethel would say. I held my breath and looked through the green bean leaves. And in the light of the moon, right next to the yellow roses, Rasmussen was sitting in his glider, rockin’ slowly back and forth. Crying his eyes out.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
When that puppy of his began barking from inside the house, Rasmussen blew his nose into a handkerchief and said, “Okay, okay, hold your horses, Lizzie, I’m comin’.”
After I heard the door clank shut, I sat in that green bean tepee counting up to sixty Mississippi until I thought it was safe to come out. A smart thing to do would’ve been to go back to Mrs. Galecki’s and get back under that sheet with Troo, but I guess I really wasn’t that smart like Nell always said because I didn’t do that. I had a scheme and I was sticking to it.
I looked around the yard for something to stand on so I could peep in on him. Next to the back door was an orangish flowerpot like the one on the front porch that was full of red geraniums, which I had noticed because they were Mother’s favorite flower. But this pot was empty so I kinda dragged it over to the side of his house, right below a window. I crouched up on it and straightened a little at a time. I could see right into Rasmussen’s house! There he was opening a can of something that must’ve been dog food because that puppy was jumping all over his leg like Butchy used to do when I’d feed him. All I could see was the kitchen. I needed to see more of what Rasmussen was doing, how a murderer and molester got ready for bed. Maybe he would take Sara’s shoe or Junie’s St. Christopher medal out of their hiding place.
I tiptoed down the path and then set the pot down outside another window that looked into the dining room, which seemed a lot like ours but didn’t have Pabst Blue Ribbon beer bottles all over the shiny wooden table. But it did have something else. Something so astounding that I wasn’t sure if I was imagining it. There, on the dining room wall, surrounded by a golden frame—and I could see this so clearly because there was a little light above it like a lamp—there was a picture of Junie Piaskowski in her First Holy Communion dress. It was the same picture of her that Rasmussen had in his wallet, only a lot bigger. I ducked down when he walked through the dining room. He didn’t even stop to look at the picture. Just went past it like it was no big deal.
I closed my eyes and thought maybe I had lost every one of my marbles. But when I opened them, there she still was—Junie. Then Rasmussen walked by again, now in his underwear, which were the boxer kind, and a bare naked chest. He turned off all the lights except for the one above Junie’s First Holy Communion picture and disappeared again with that little dog. I looked back at Junie again. She was smiling on an island of white light in the dark, her hands folded on her lap like she was praying the rosary she had wound around her fingers.
Rasmussen was the worst kind of creature there could ever be! Not only had he murdered and molested Junie, he had her picture hanging in his dining room like he was bragging. Like Mr. Jerbak did about those deer heads hangin’ on the wall up at the Beer ’n Bowl.
I had to go wake up Ethel and tell her immediately. Here was the proof! Maybe now she wouldn’t think Rasmussen was such a good ole boy. I didn’t even put the flowerpot back. I just ran right through the garden, back into the alley and through the screen door, past Troo and into Mrs. Galecki’s house. Ethel’s bedroom was off the kitchen like Nell’s was in our house and I didn’t even think of knocking, that’s how scared I was. I jumped right onto her bed and began shaking her by the hip. “Ethel . . . Ethel Jenkins . . . wake up.” Which I hated to do, because I knew that she was not good at this sort of in-the-middle-of-the-night scariness because that KKK club had given her some very bad memories. That’s when Ethel said the KKK liked to come. In the black velvet cloak of the night.
Ethel sat right up real fast. She had something over her hair like a hat or something. And she had on a white frilly nightie. “What’s wrong!?”
“Oh Ethel, you have to come see. You have to come see.” I pulled on her hand and she tossed back the sheet. She slid her feet into the slippers that she called mules and then let me pull her along out on the screen porch.
Ethel whispered, “Is it Miss Troo? Is she feelin’ poorly?” She looked over at Troo, who hadn’t moved one iota on the little straw couch.
“Troo’s fine,” I whispered back. “It’s Junie Piaskowski.”
Ethel looked at me when I said that and then put her hand on my forehead to check if I had a temperature. “You know, you’re beginning to worry Ethel.”
“Just come with me real quick, Ethel. Real quick. I have something to show you that you are not going to believe!” She looked at me again and then back at Troo but followed me back to Rasmussen’s, her mules slapping. Ethel stopped for a second after we went through the gate into his garden and did a whistle and said, “That man has a green thumb like I never seen.” She picked off a small tomato and popped it into her mouth, and then because she was getting more awake now and wondering what the heck I was doing, she said, “Miss Sally, I believe you are havin’ some kind of nightmare or walkin’ in your sleep. Let’s go back to bed.”