Life Expectancy

“You lived here all your life?”

“No. Just a year.”

This explained how I could have missed seeing her for twenty years. In a community of fourteen thousand, you can pass a long life and never speak to ninety percent of the population.

If I had just once glimpsed her turning a corner, however, I would never have forgotten her face. I would have spent long anxious nights awake, wondering who she was, where she’d gone, how I could find her.

She said, “I grew up in Los Angeles. Nineteen years in L.A. and I wasn’t totally bug-eyed crazy yet, so I knew I had almost no time left to get out.”

“Do you like it here in Snow Village?” he asked.

“So far, yeah. It’s nice.”

Still smiling, still twinkly-eyed, with his charm in full gear and none of the insane-guy edge to his voice, he nevertheless said, “Snow Village is an evil place.”

“Well,” Lorrie said, “sure, it’s evil, but parts of it are also kind of nice.”

“Like Morelli’s Restaurant,” I said.

Lorrie said, “They have fabulous chicken all’ Alba. And the Bijou is a terrific place.”

Delighted that we shared these favorite places, I said, “Imagine a movie theater actually called the Bijou.”

“All those cute Art Deco details,” she said. “And they use real butter on the popcorn.”

“I like Center Square Park,” I said.

The maniac disagreed: “No, that’s an evil place. I sat there earlier, watching the birds crap on the statue of Cornelius Randolph Snow.”

“What’s evil about that?” Lorrie wondered. “If he was half as pompous as the statue makes him look, the birds have got it right.”

“I don’t mean the birds are evil,” the maniac explained with sunny good humor. “Although they might be. What I mean is the park is evil, the ground, all the ground this town is built on.”

I wanted to talk to Lorrie about more things we liked, attitudes we might have in common, and I was pretty sure she wanted to have that conversation, too, but we felt we had to listen to the smiley guy because he had the gun.

“So … did they build the town on an Indian burial ground or something?” Lorrie wondered.

He shook his head. “No, no. The earth itself was good once long ago, but it was corrupted because of evil things that evil people did here.”

“Fortunately,” Lorrie said, “I don’t own any real estate. I’m a renter.”

“I live with my folks,” I told him, hoping this fact would exempt me from complicity with the evil earth.

“The time has come,” he said, “for payback.”

As if to emphasize his threat, a spider suddenly appeared and slowly descended on a silken thread from within the shade of one of the overhead lamps. Projected by the cone of light, the eight-legged shadow on the floor between us and the maniac was the size of a dinner plate, distorted and squirming.

“Answering evil with evil just means everyone loses,” Lorrie said.

“I’m not answering evil with evil,” he replied not angrily but with exasperation. “I’m answering evil with justice.”

“Well, that’s very different,” Lorrie said.

“If I were you,” I told the maniac, “I’d wonder how to know for sure that something I’m doing is justice and not just more evil. I mean, the thing about evil is it’s slippery. My mom says the devil knows how to mislead us into thinking we’re doing the right thing when what we’re really doing is the devil’s work.”

“Your mother sounds like a caring person,” he said.

Sensing I’d made a connection with him, I said, “She is. When I was growing up, she even ironed my socks.”

This revelation drew from Lorrie a look of troubled speculation.

Concerned that she might think I was an eccentric or, worse, a momma’s boy, I quickly added: “I’ve been doing my own ironing since I was seventeen. And I never iron my socks.”

Lorrie’s expression didn’t change.

“I don’t mean that my mother still irons them,” I hastened to assure her. “Nobody irons my socks anymore. Only an idiot irons socks.”

Lorrie frowned.

“Not that I mean my mother is an idiot,” I clarified. “She’s a wonderful woman. She’s not an idiot, she’s just caring. I mean other people who iron their socks are idiots.”

At once I saw that with the language skills of a lummox, I had talked myself into a corner.

“If either of you irons your socks,” I said, “I don’t mean that you’re idiots. I’m sure you’re just caring people, like my mom.”

With disturbingly similar expressions, Lorrie and the maniac stared at me as though I had just walked down the debarkation ramp from a flying saucer.

I thought that being shackled to me suddenly creeped her out, and I figured the maniac would decide that a single hostage was plenty of insurance, after all.

The descending spider still hung over our heads, but its shadow on the floor was smaller, now the size of a salad plate, and blurry.

To my surprise, the killer’s eyes grew misty. “That was very touching—the socks. Very sweet.”

My sock story didn’t seem to have struck a sentimental chord in Lorrie. She stared at me with squint-eyed intensity.

The maniac said, “You’re a very lucky man, Jimmy.”

“I am,” I agreed, although my only bit of luck—being cuffed to Lorrie Lynn Hicks instead of to a diseased wino—seemed to be turning sour.

“To have a caring mother,” the maniac mused. “What must that be like?”

“Good,” I said, “it’s good,” but I didn’t trust myself to say more.

Spinning gossamer from its innards, the spider unreeled a longer umbilical, finally dangling in front of our faces.

With dreamy-voiced eloquence, the killer said, “To have a caring mother who makes you hot cocoa each evening, tucks you in bed every night, kisses you on the cheek, reads you to sleep….”

Before I myself could read, I was almost always read to sleep because ours is a bookish family. More often than not, however, the reader had been my Grandma Rowena.

Sometimes the story was about a Snow White whose seven dwarf friends suffered fatal accidents and diseases until it was Snow alone against the evil queen. Come to think of it, a two-ton safe fell on Happy once. That was a lot cleaner than what happened to poor Sneezy. Or maybe Weena would read the one about Cinderella—the dangerous glass slippers splintering painfully around Cindy’s feet, the pumpkin coach plunging off the road into the ravine.

I was a grown man before I discovered that in Arnold Lobel’s charming Frog and Toad books, there was not always a scene in which one or the other of the title characters had a foot gnawed off by another meadowland creature.

“I didn’t have a caring mother,” the maniac said, a disturbing note of whiny distress entering his voice. “My childhood was hard, cold, and loveless.”

Now occurred an unexpected turn of events: My fear of being shot to death took second place to the dread that this guy would harangue us with a droning account of his victimization. Beaten with wire coathangers. Forced to wear girly clothes until he was six. Sent to bed without his porridge.

I didn’t need to get kidnapped, cuffed, and held at gunpoint to be subjected to a pityfest. I could have stayed home and watched daytime-TV talk shows.

Fortunately, he bit his lip, stiffened his spine, and said, “It’s a waste of time to dwell on the past. What’s done is done.”

Unfortunately, the glimmer of teary self-pity in his eyes was not replaced by that charming twinkle, but instead by a fanatical gleam.

The spider had not continued its descent. It hung in front of our faces, perhaps freaked out by the sight of us and frozen in fear.

As though he were a vintner plucking a grape from a vine, the maniac pinched the fat spider between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, crushed it, and brought the mangled remains to his nose to savor the scent.

I hoped he wouldn’t offer me a sniff. I have a highly refined sense of smell, which is one reason that I’m a natural-born baker.

Fortunately, he had no intention of sharing the heady fragrance.

Unfortunately, he brought the morsel to his mouth and delicately licked the arachnid paste. He savored this strange fruit, decided it was not sufficiently ripe, and wiped his fingers on the sleeve of his jacket.

Here was a graduate of Hannibal Lecter University, ready for a career in hospitality services as the new manager of the Bates Motel.

This spider-sampling had not been a performance for our benefit. The entire incident had been as unconscious as shooing away a fly, except the opposite.

Now, quite unaware of the effect his culinary curiosity had on us, he said, “Anyway, the time for talking is long past. It’s time for action now, for justice.”

“And how will that justice be achieved?” Lorrie wondered. For the moment, anyway, she was no longer able to maintain a sprightly, let alone flippant, let alone devil-may-care tone of voice.

In spite of his adult baritone, he sounded uncannily like an angry little boy: “I’m going to blow up a lot of stuff and kill a bunch of people and make this town sorry.”

“Sounds pretty ambitious,” she said.

“I’ve been planning this all my life.”

Having changed my mind, I said, “Actually, I’d really like to hear about the coathangers.”

“What coathangers?” he asked.

Before I could talk my way into a bullet between the eyes, Lorrie said, “Do you think I could have my purse?”

He frowned. “Why?”

“It’s a female emergency.”

I couldn’t believe she was going to do this. I knew I hadn’t won the argument, but I assumed that I’d put enough doubt in her mind to give her second thoughts.

“Female emergency?” the maniac asked. “What’s that mean?”

“You know,” she said coyly.

For a guy who looked like a babe magnet able to draw swooning women like iron filings from a hundred-mile radius, he proved surprisingly obtuse in this matter. “How would I know?”

“It’s that time of month,” she said.

He claimed bafflement. “The middle?”

As if it were infectious, Lorrie caught his bewilderment: “The middle?”

“It’s the middle of the month,” he reminded her. “The fifteenth of September. So what?”

“It’s my time of month,” she elucidated.

He just stared at her, befuddled.

“I’m having my period,” she declared impatiently.

The furrows in his brow were smoothed away by understanding. “Ah. A female emergency.”

“Yes. That’s right. Hallelujah. Now may I have my purse?”

“Why?”

If she ever got her hands on that nail file, she would plunge it into him with enthusiasm.

“I need a tampon,” she said.

“You’re saying there’s a tampon in your purse?”

“Yes.”

“And you need it now, you can’t wait?”

“No, I absolutely can’t wait,” she confirmed. Then she played to his compassionate side, which he hadn’t shown to the head-shot librarian, but which she seemed to think must be there, considering that he had not been actually rude: “I’m sorry, gee, this is so embarrassing.”

Regarding matters female, he might be a bit thick, but regarding Machiavellian schemes, he smelled a rat instantly: “What’s really in your purse—a gun?”

Admitting that she had been caught out, Lorrie shrugged. “No gun. Just a pointy metal nail file.”

“You were going to—what?—stab me in the carotid artery?”

“Only if I couldn’t get one of your eyes,” she said.

He raised his pistol, and though he pointed it at her, I figured that once he started blasting away, he’d drill me, too. I’d seen what he’d done to the newspaper.

“I should kill you dead right here,” he said, although without any animosity in his voice.

“You should,” she agreed. “I would if I were you.”

He grinned and shook his head. “What a piece of work.”

“Right back at ya,” she said, and matched his grin.

My teeth were revealed molar to molar, as well, though my grin was so tight with anxiety that it hurt my face.

“All these years, planning for this day,” the maniac said, “I expected it to be gratifying in a savage sort of way, even thrilling, but I never thought it would be as much fun as this.”

Lorrie said, “A party can never be better than the guests you invite.”

The lunatic killer considered this as if Lorrie had quoted one of the most complex philosophical propositions of Schopenhauer. He nodded solemnly, rolled his tongue over his teeth, uppers and lowers, as though he could taste the brilliance of those words, and finally he said, “How true. How very true.”

I realized that I wasn’t holding up my end of the conversation. I didn’t want him to get the idea that a party of two might be more fun than three.

When I opened my mouth—no doubt to say something even more inappropriate than my stupid coathangers line, something that would bring me closer to a bullet in the groin—a great hollow peal tolled through the vaulted subcellar. King Kong pounded his mighty fists one, two, three times against the giant door in the massive wall that separated his half of the island from the half where the nervous natives lived.

The maniac brightened at the sound. “That’ll be Honker and Crinkles. You’ll like them. They have the explosives.”

11

As it turned out, Cornelius Randolph Snow not only had a keen appreciation for fine Victorian architecture but also for Victorian hugger-mugger of the kind that flourished in melodramas of the period and that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had used with singular effect in his immortal Sherlock Holmes yarns: concealed doors, hidden rooms, blind staircases, secret passageways.

Hand in hand but only because of the steel cuffs, quickly but only because of the gun prodding us in the back, Lorrie and I went to the end of the room where the maniac had brutally shot the old newspaper.

Shelves spanned the width of that wall, rose from floor to ceiling. Stored thereon were periodicals in labeled slipcases.

The maniac studied several shelves, up and down, back and forth, maybe looking for the 1952 run of Life magazine, maybe hoping to spot a juicier spider.

Nope, neither. He was searching for a hidden switch. He found it, and a section of bookshelves pivoted open, revealing an alcove behind them.

At the back of the alcove, a stone wall embraced an iron-banded oak door. In an age that demanded harsher punishment for patrons with overdue books, they might have kept a tardy Jane Austen reader here until solitary confinement and a short ration of gruel brought the miscreant to remorse and contrition.

The maniac pounded one fist three times on the door—obviously an answering signal.

From the farther side came two knocks, hollow and loud.

After the maniac responded with two, a single knock came from the space beyond. He answered with one thump.

This seemed to be an unnecessarily complicated passcode, but the maniac was delighted by the ritual. He beamed happily at us.

His toothy smile no longer had quite the endearing quality that had marked it previously. He was an adorable-looking fellow, and against your better judgment, you still wanted to be charmed by him, but you kept scanning for dark hairy bits of spider on his lips and tongue.

A moment after the last knock, the buzz of a small high-speed motor arose from the farther side of the door. Then metal shrieked on metal.

A diamond-point steel drill bit thrust through the keyhole. The spinning shaft chewed up the lock mechanism and spat metal shavings on the floor.

Our host raised his voice and reported with boyish enthusiasm: “We tortured a member of the Snow Village Historical Preservation Society, but we couldn’t get keys out of him. I’m sure he’d have given them to us if he’d known where to get them, but it was our bad luck—and his—that we chose the wrong person to torture. So we’ve had to resort to this.”

Lorrie’s cuffed hand sought my cuffed hand and held it tight.

I wished that we had met under different circumstances. Like at a town picnic or even at a tea dance.

The drill withdrew from the lock plate, fell silent. The broken lock assembly rattled, clinked, twanged, and gave way as the door opened into the alcove.

I had a glimpse of what appeared to be an eerily lit tunnel beyond the door.

A dour man came through, out of the alcove, past the pivoted section of bookcase, into the library’s subcellar. A similar specimen followed him, pulling a handcart.

The first newcomer was about fifty, totally bald, with black eyebrows so shaggy that you could have knitted a child’s sweater from them. He wore khakis, a green Ban Lon shirt, and a shoulder holster with gun.

“Excellent, excellent. You’re right on time, Honker,” said the maniac.

I had no way of knowing whether the new guy’s name was, say, Bob Honker, or whether this was a nickname inspired by the size of his nose. He had an enormous nose. Once it must have been straight and proud, but time had rendered it a spongy lump, ruddy with a fine webbing of burst capillaries—the nose of a serious drinker.

Honker appeared to be sober now, but brooding and suspicious.

He scowled at me, at Lorrie, and said gruffly, “Who’re the bitch and Bigfoot?”

“Hostages,” the maniac explained.

“What the hell we need hostages for?”

“If something goes wrong.”

“You think something’ll go wrong?”

“No,” the maniac said, “but they entertain me.”

The second newcomer stepped away from the handcart to join the discussion. He resembled Art Garfunkel, the singer: a decadent choirboy’s face, electroshocked hair.

He wore a zippered nylon windbreaker over a T-shirt, but I could see the bulk of a holster and weapon beneath it.

“Whether something goes wrong or not,” he said, “we’ll have to waste them.”

“Of course,” the maniac said.

“It’d be a shame to off the bitch without using it,” said the choirboy.

More than their casual talk of murdering us, this reference to Lorrie as “it” chilled me.

Her hand gripped mine so tightly that my knuckles ached.

The maniac said, “Put her out of your mind, Crinkles. That isn’t going to happen.”

Whether this was the guy’s legal name or nickname, you might expect someone called Crinkles either to have a well-creased face or to be wonderfully amusing. His face looked as smooth as a hard-boiled egg, and he was about as amusing as an antibiotic-resistant streptococcus infection.

To the maniac, Crinkles said, “Why’s she off limits? She belong to you?”

“She belongs to nobody,” our host replied with some annoyance. “We didn’t come all this way just to score some quiff. If we don’t stay focused on the main objective, the whole operation will fall apart.”

I felt that I ought to say something to the effect that if they wanted to get at Lorrie, they would have to come through me. But the truth was, armed and crazy, they could come through me as easily as the blades of a kitchen mixer churning through cake batter.

The prospect of dying didn’t distress me nearly as much as the realization that I was helpless to defend her.

I hadn’t made pastry chef yet, but in my mind I had always been a hero—or could be in a crisis. As a kid, I often fantasized about whipping up soufflés au chocolat fit for kings while at the same time battling the evil minions of Darth Vader.

Now reality set in. These violent lunatics would eat Darth Vader in a pita pocket and pick their teeth with his light saber.

“Whether something goes wrong or not,” Crinkles repeated, “we’ll have to burn them.”

“We’ve already gone over this,” the maniac said impatiently.

“Because they’ve seen our faces,” Crinkles persisted, “we’ll have to whack them both.”

“I understand,” the maniac assured him.

Crinkles had eyes the color of brandy. They grew pale when he said, “The time comes, I want to be the one gets to ice the bitch.”

Waste, off, burn, whack, ice. This guy was a walking thesaurus when it came to synonyms for kill.

Maybe this meant he had croaked so many people that he found discussion of murder boring and therefore needed richer language to maintain his interest. Or, conversely, he might be a hit-man wannabe, all boast and jargon, with no guts when it came to doing the dirty deed.

Considering that Crinkles hung out with a madman who shot librarians for no reason and who saw no difference between spiders and bonbons, I decided that the wisest course was not to doubt his sincerity.

“You can whack her when we won’t need hostages anymore,” the maniac promised Crinkles. “I don’t have a problem with that.”

“Hell, you can whack both of them,” Honker said. “Means nothing to me.”

“Thanks,” Crinkles said. “I appreciate that.”

“De nada,” said Honker.

The maniac guided us to another pair of wooden chairs. Although he had backup now, he nevertheless secured our cuffs to one of the back-rails, as he had done previously.

The two newcomers began to unload the cargo on the handcart. There were at least a hundred one-kilo bricks of a gray substance wrapped in what appeared to be greasy, translucent paper.

I’m not a demolitions expert, not even a demolitions dabbler, but I figured these were the explosives of which the maniac had spoken.

Honker and Crinkles were physically the same type: burly and thick-necked but quick on their feet. They reminded me of the Beagle Boys.

In the Scrooge McDuck comic books that I loved as a child, a group of criminal brothers were perpetually scheming to raid Uncle Scrooge’s enormous money bin, where he swam through his fortune as if it were an ocean and occasionally recontoured the acres of gold coins with a bulldozer. These felons were blunt-faced, round-shouldered, barrel-chested, doglike creatures that stood erect in the manner of human beings, had hands instead of paws, and owned a signature wardrobe of prison-stripe shirts.

Although Honker and Crinkles chose not to advertise their villainy by the outfits they wore, they were body doubles for those comic-book villains. The Beagle Boys, however, were more handsome than Honker and a lot less scary-looking than Crinkles.

These two worked quickly, tirelessly. They were obviously happy to be occupied in useful criminal activity.

While his associates distributed bricks of plastic explosives to all points of the subcellar, in this room and others, the maniac sat at the study table. He carefully synchronized the clocks on more than a dozen detonators.

He hunched over his work, concentrating intensely. He pinched his tongue gently between his teeth. His dark hair fell across his forehead, and he kept brushing it back, out of his eyes.

If you squinted, blurring the scene just a little, he looked like a twelve-year-old hobbyist assembling a plastic model of a Navy fighter jet.

Lorrie and I were far enough away from him that we could talk privately if we kept our voices low.

Leaning close, she said conspiratorially, “If we’re in the room alone with Crinkles, I’m going to tell him I’m having a female emergency.”

Being in the hands of three psychotics instead of one, hearing herself referred to as it, listening to them discuss our execution with no more emotion than if they had been deciding who should take out the trash: I had thought all of that would surely give her second thoughts about reckless actions based on wildly exuberant optimism. To Lorrie Lynn, three psychotics just meant two more opportunities to bamboozle someone with the female-emergency story, get her hands on the nail file, and stab her way to freedom.

“You’re going to get us killed,” I warned again.

“That’s lame. They’re going to kill us anyway. Weren’t you listening?”

“But you’ll get us killed sooner,” I said, managing to make a whisper surprisingly shrill, and realized that I sounded as if I had a university degree in wimp.