Dead Crazy by Nancy Pickard

Author:Nancy Pickard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pocket Books

21

It was time to go home. I should have gone home. I figured that I had finally earned it. But beyond the darkened church basement and the empty lot beside it, lights glowed in the shabby little saltbox house where Grace Montgomery lived. If Marianne Miller was frightened, the crazy old pig lady was probably terrified—and all alone with her dementia.

Sure, I thought as I stood on the snowy sidewalk pondering the prospect of visiting her, she might scream at me, she might be way beyond reaching, she might not even open her door to me this time. I should forget it and go home. But would it kill me to try? Would it kill me to try to offer her the same small comfort that I had promised Marianne—that I’d call her as soon as the police made an arrest? Besides, it would only take a few more minutes.

I pulled my collar up more snugly around my throat, secured my purse strap over my left shoulder, stuck my gloved hands in my coat pockets, and bent my head into the blowing snow like a cow.

“Moo,” I said, and struck out cross country.

The church basement was a black, snow-covered hump, its front door barricaded by police bulletins that I sensed, more than saw, in the darkness under the eaves. The lot next door was a white square on a checkerboard. But the snow had turned Mrs. Montgomery’s place into a gingerbread house, quaint, small, and pretty. The fact that she had apparently turned on all her lights to scare the demons away only made her house look all the more, and ironically, cozy.

She surprised me by admitting me at once.

“Quick!” she whispered urgently and tugged at my arms with her crippled hands. “Come inside. He’s out there. You mustn’t be out there alone. Quick! Shut the door. Lock it, lock it! Draw the curtain! He can’t see us through the curtain. But he knows we’re here. He’s out there in the snow. Did you see him? I know what he looks like. The devil drives a red car. Is it locked? Did you get them all locked! Come in, come in. Here, you sit there—he can’t see us in the middle of the room. My piggies will protect us. They have eyes everywhere. Pigs are fierce, they’ll fight you to the death; my pigs will kill him if he tries to hurt us. My, you’re a pretty thing. He likes pretty things. And ugly things like Rodney Gardner. And ugly old things like me. Tea. I have tea. Drink some tea—”

The fact was that neither of us had moved an inch away from the front door after I had closed and locked it. She stood as if imprisoned in her aluminum walker, her eyes wild and staring all around her house. Her words poured out like tea from the nonexistent tea kettle. I touched her arm. “Mrs. Montgomery—”

She flinched, then raised her walker, and began to clump away from me.

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