Full dark,no stars

She had checked out Ramona’s neighborhood on Google Earth, and it looked the same when she got there. So far, so good. Brewster was a small New England town, Lacemaker Lane was on the outskirts, and the houses were far apart. Tess cruised past number 75 at a sedately suburban twenty miles an hour, determining that the lights were on and only a single car-a late-model Subaru that almost screamed librarian-was in the driveway. There was no sign of a cab-over Pete or any other big rig. No old Bondo-patched pickup, either.

The street ended in a turnaround. Tess took it, came back, and turned into Norville’s driveway without giving herself a chance to hesitate. She killed the lights and the motor, then took a long, deep breath.

“Come back safe, Tess,” Tom said from his place on the dashboard. “Come back safe and I’ll take you to your next stop.”

“I’ll do my best.” She grabbed her yellow legal pad (there was now nothing written on it) and got out of her car. She held the pad to the front of her jacket as she walked to Ramona Norville’s door. Her moonshadow-perhaps all that was left of the Old Tess-walked beside her. – 34 -

Norville’s front door had beveled glass strips on either side. They were thick and warped the view, but Tess could make out nice wallpaper and a hallway floored with polished wood. There was an end table with a couple of magazines on it. Or maybe they were catalogues. There was a big room at the end of the hall. The sound of a TV came from there. She heard singing, so Ramona probably wasn’t watching Saw. In fact-if Tess was right and the song was “Climb Ev’ry Mountain”-Ramona was watching The Sound of Music.

Tess rang the doorbell. From inside came a run of chimes that sounded like the opening notes of “Dixie”-a strange choice for New England, but then, if Tess was right about her, Ramona Norville was a strange woman.

Tess heard the clump of big feet and made a half-turn, so the light from the beveled glass would catch only a bit of her face. She lowered her blank pad from her chest and made writing motions with one gloved hand. She let her shoulders slump a little. She was a woman taking some kind of survey. It was Sunday evening, she was tired, all she wanted was to discover the name of this woman’s favorite toothpaste (or maybe if she had Prince Albert in a can) and then go home.

Don’t worry, Ramona, you can open the door, anybody can see that I’m harmless, the kind of woman who wouldn’t say boo to a goose.

From the corner of her eye she glimpsed a distorted fish-face swim into view behind the beveled glass. There was a pause that seemed to last a very long time, then Ramona Norville opened the door. “Yes? Can I help y-”

Tess turned back. The light from the open door fell on her face. And the shock she saw on Norville’s face, the utter drop-jaw shock, told her everything she needed to know.

“You? What are you doing h-”

Tess pulled the Lemon Squeezer.38 from her right front pocket. On the drive from Stoke Village she had imagined it getting stuck in there-had imagined it with nightmarish clarity-but it came out smoothly.

“Move back from the door. If you try to shut it, I’ll shoot you.”

“You won’t,” Norville said. She didn’t move back, but she didn’t shut the door, either. “Are you crazy?”

“Get inside.”

Norville was wearing a big blue housecoat, and when Tess saw the front of it rise precipitously, she raised the gun. “If you even start to yell, I’ll shoot. You better believe me, bitch, because I’m not even close to kidding.”

Norville’s large bosom deflated. Her lips were drawn back from her teeth and her eyes were shifting from side to side in their sockets. She didn’t look like a librarian now, and she didn’t look jovial and welcoming. To Tess she looked like a rat caught outside its hole.

“If you fire that gun, the whole neighborhood will hear.”

Tess doubted that, but didn’t argue. “It won’t matter to you, because you’ll be dead. Get inside. If you behave yourself and answer my questions, you might still be alive tomorrow morning.”

Norville backed up, and Tess came in through the open door with the gun held stiffly out in front of her. As soon as she closed the door-she did it with her foot-Norville stopped moving. She was standing by the little table with the catalogues on it.

“No grabbing, no throwing,” Tess said, and saw by the twitch of the other woman’s mouth that grabbing and throwing had indeed been in Ramona’s mind. “I can read you like a book. Why else would I be here? Keep backing up. All the way down to the living room. I just love the Trapp Family when they’re really rocking.”

“You’re crazy,” Ramona said, but she began to back up again. She was wearing shoes. Even in her housecoat she was wearing big ugly shoes. Men’s laceups. “I have no idea what you’re doing here, but-”

“Don’t bullshit me, Mommy. Don’t you dare. It was all on your face when you opened the door. Every bit of it. You thought I was dead, didn’t you?”

“I don’t know what you’re-”

“It’s just us girls, so why not fess up?”