“So stay here if you want to, but I’m going over there to see what’s going on.” Stan headed across the street and the lot of them followed. Claire stood where she was. She would have to calm the Mayor down. What was he doing over there on Dixon’s lawn, anyway? Between the cat wailing and the dog barking, she thought she’d go insane. She could turn the hose on him. You’d think he was trying to tell them something, the way he just wouldn’t let up. She went to follow the hose to the nozzle but it ended out back on the sprinkler. What the hell, he was closer to Dixon’s hose anyway. Claire went behind Mrs. Dixon’s garbage cans to turn on her hose. There was one can lopsided on a rock, and as she leaned across it she knocked the lid off. As she went to put it back she caught sight of something down deep in the can. Some magazine or something on cheap paper, a star on a red background and a child on a horse. The star was a pentagram, it occurred to her as she turned on the hose. And the child on the horse had no clothes on. She turned the hose back off. The Mayor looked at her. She looked, alarmed, back at the Mayor. With one last, painful snort, he dropped down onto the grass and was finally quiet.
It was quite a while ago—weeks—when this whole thing had started. She and the Mayor had been sleeping on the porch. The garbagemen had made their way down the block and the noise had awakened her. A golden Plymouth had rattled down the block. And Mrs. Dixon had slammed the lid down on the can and hurried back into the house. Mrs. Dixon. What had she been so in a hurry about? Wasn’t that the same day of the first gory murder? Hadn’t she had a strange feeling then? A premonition of some sort? Or had she simply been a witness to somebody getting rid of something they would rather no one saw? A pervert did not a murderer make. And then she noticed the screen right next to her, a little crooked. A little off. A little crooked for a house whose screens were all in straight as little soldiers. It was utterly ridiculous to think of Mrs. boring old Dixon involved in anything underhanded. She was her mother’s friend. Well, if not her friend, at least her dear old neighbor. With never a thought of suspicion. She and Mom walked to church together, after all. Since years. Years and years. They hadn’t always. Something had started it. What had happened years ago? Something with Michael? Hadn’t something happened to Michael that he’d never told her about? He was frightened of Mrs. Dixon. Yes, she knew that now. That’s why he wasn’t afraid to cut through Iris von Lillienfeld’s yard the way the rest of them were. Because the yard next to his own held some secret more terrifying. All his false bravado had been fear. And Mrs. Dixon and good-hearted Mom had taken to walking together to church. Suddenly she remembered where she’d seen that strange captioned picture: in Michael’s bottom drawer. Had Mrs. Dixon given Michael dirty pictures? Claire looked up at the big, fine house. She looked and looked. The garage door was open. Mrs. Dixon still kept Rudy’s cars in there. Old cars, they were. From back in the days when all the cars they made were black. Claire could hardly remember Rudy Dixon, how he was before he’d had his stroke and turned into a whiskered, uriney thing to be left by the window in the front parlor. He’d been sort of bald and flashy back then. Yes, very flashy.
Claire remembered herself as a small girl, out here in the driveway, just like this. Mr. Dixon was pulling out of the garage and he’d stopped to say how do. She’d hated him because he called her Red. “Hi ya, Red,” he’d said. “How do?” His beefy wrist was as still as an animal on the Pontiac door and his cufflinks, roulette wheels, had glittered like gold.
Claire returned to the present with a wheezing gasp.
“Johnny?” She shielded her eyes from the sun. “Johnny, can you come here a second? I don’t know. This is stupid. But there’s this screen loose here in a spot where Michaelaen could possibly have gotten into—”
“Who lives here?”
“Mrs. Dixon. You met her. My mother’s friend.”
Johnny remembered Mrs. Dixon. Hadn’t Ryan even asked him who the hell she was? So many of those Con-Tact sheets they’d taken from Claire’s darkroom had her kisser planted all over them. She was always getting in the way. Even the shots up in the woods were peppered with Mrs. Dixon.
“Who else lives here?” Johnny asked Claire.
“Else? Nobody else. She lives here alone.”
“Here? In this place?”
They looked up at the big well-kept house. It was so big that it suddenly seemed strange to Claire as well. “It’s just that I found something here in her garbage pail and I remember her husband, years ago, having a cufflink like the one I found in Carmela’s car and … Jesus, Johnny, if she has Michaelaen—”
“All right. Calm down. Where’s your mother?”
“They went over to Iris’s house because her Siamese … Johnny, they all think Iris has something to do with this but I don’t believe—”
He peered down into the can and gave a low whistle.
“You run over and get your mother so we can get through the front door and I’ll try and jimmy my way in this way. You tell them something else. Tell them”—he smashed his foot through the window—“that the kids broke her window and they want to get their ball. Or see the damages. Just get inside. And get Ryan over here. Tell him what’s happening.”
“Johnny, if she hurt Michaelaen—”
“Hurry up. Go. Hurry up.”