Elizabeth Stuckey-French - The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady

ALSO BY ELIZABETH STUCKEY-FRENCH

The First Paper Girl in Red Oak, Iowa
Mermaids on the Moon

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2011 by Elizabeth Stuckey-French

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.doubleday.com

DOUBLEDAY and the DD colophon are registered trademarks of
Random House, Inc.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Stuckey-French, Elizabeth.
The revenge of the radioactive lady : a novel / by Elizabeth Stuckey
French. 1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Older peopleFiction. 2. FloridaFiction. 3. Domestic fiction.
I. Title.
PS3569.T832R48 2010
813.54dc22
2010014724

eISBN: 978-0-385-53403-1

Jacket design by Will Staehle
Jacket illustration Coco Flamingo/Image200/Getty Images

v3.1

For Ned, Flannery, and especially Phoebe

By the time Marylou Ahearn finally moved into the little ranch house in Tallahassee, shed spent countless hours trying to come up with the best way to kill Wilson Spriggs. The only firm decision shed made, however, was that proximity was crucial. You couldnt kill someone if you lived in a different state. So she flew down from Memphis to Tallahassee and bought a house on the edge of Wilsons neighborhood. Doing so had been no problem, because she had a chunk of money left from the government settlement as well as her retirement and social security. She furnished her new place quickly with generic big warehouse sale furniture. Back in Memphis she rounded up a graduate student couple shed met at churcha husband and wife who both needed to give their spectacles a good cleaningto house-sit, and then she transferred her base of operations to Tallahassee, informing friends only that shed be taking an extended vacation.

Completing her task in Florida, unfortunately, was taking a while. Every morning when Marylou and her Welsh corgi, Buster, left their house at 22 Reeves Court and set out on their walk toward Wilson Spriggss house at 2208 Friars Way, Marylou chanted to herself: Todays the day. Todays the day. Todays the day hell suffer and die. Every morning she fully believed that by the time shed walked the three blocks to Wilsons house shed have figured out how to do him in, despite the fact that shed been setting out on this very walk a few times a day for the past two weeks and it was nearly May and the best method and right time had yet to present themselves.

She tried to spur herself on with angry thoughts. Would she feel better after shed killed him? Darn tootin. She didnt expect to go around giddy, not after all that had happened, but she expected to feel relieved, to have a sense of accomplishment, like when, fifteen years ago, shed stepped out the doors of Humes High School, never to have to spoon-feed Chaucer to tenth graders again. It must be a good sign that she was now living in a neighborhood where the streets were named after Chaucers characters. The Canterbury Tales had returned to mark this next big passage in her life.

It didnt help that the walk to Wilsons house was so pleasant. Canterbury Hills was once a suburb of Tallahassee; but the city, moving northward, had swallowed it up, and it was now spoken of by Realtors as Midtown. The homes in Canterbury Hills, mostly ranch houses from the fifties and sixties, werent as stately as the houses in her Memphis neighborhood, but they all sat on spacious lots full of flowering shrubs and well-tended flower gardens, shaded by live oak trees; and Marylou enjoyed looking around so much that she was always rattled when she found herself standing, again, in front of the evil yellow house where Wilson Spriggs lived with his daughter and her family, so rattled, in fact, that it took her a minute to reenter the murdering frame of mind.

She would stall in front, while Buster sniffed around in the grass, and stand beneath the magnolia tree that bloomed with fantastically white blossoms, hoping that Wilson himself would pop up in front of her and ask to be killed, please, and hurry up about it. When this failed to happen, she hoped to at least be struck either with the courage to storm the house or with a clever idea about how to sneak in undetected.

But she was struck by neither courage nor inspiration, and by the time she got back home she was so hot and weak and discouraged she had to lie down and rest.

In the evenings, after shed eaten some dinner, usually a fried egg and slice of toast, a kind of Chaucerian meager repast, shed hook Busters leash to his collar and theyd walk over to Friars Way again. Sometimes she saw a gray Volvo turn into the driveway of the yellow house or a navy blue minivan pull out of it, but she was never close enough to make out who was actually in the car. One time she saw a middle-aged man in a grungy black T-shirtmustve been the son-in-lawmowing the grass in the front yard, but he refused to look up at her; and one time she saw a girl and a little white dog running down the driveway. It was like they, the Spriggs family, were purposely keeping their distance from herbut how could they, when they had no idea she was nearby and looking to get even?

The whole being-in-limbo thing, the looking-to-get-even thing, was getting old. She was growing weary of wanting to kill Wilson, of imagining herself killing him; she was itchy to actually do it.

At first all the planning to kill Wilson had been, well, she had to admit it, fun. The idea started forming in her mind six months earlier, right after shed stumbled across the article about Wilson Spriggs on the Internet. Shed been googling Dr. Wilson Spriggs, as she did every so often, without ever finding anything recent about him, and one day there was a link to a little piece in the Tallahassee Democrat about Dr. Wilson Spriggs helping his teenage grandson Otis Witherspoon win a science fair prize. As she read the article, which had an accompanying picture of Otis holding the blue ribbon hed won at the Leon County Science Fair for his poster about the upside of nuclear power, she knew she had to do something, that Grandpappy Spriggs could not be allowed to go on living the way he had been, untouched by his cruel deeds.

Marylou and her former husband Teddy had recently stopped corresponding, so there wasnt anyone she could talk to about how she felt when she found the article. She began to scheme all by herself. She didnt tell another soul what shed decided to do, and she wrote nothing down, but she made the plot she was hatching into a story in her mind, a horror story, like that wonderfully dreadful old movie Attack of the 50 Foot Woman.

In the summer of 1958, when Helen was five, she and Teddy had gotten a babysitter and gone to see that movie at the Orpheum Theatre in downtown Memphis. Teddy had howled with derision all the way through it, as did most of the audience, some of whom began throwing their popcorn at the screen, but Marylou thoroughly enjoyed it, trashy and badly made as it was, especially the scenes of the giant (much taller than fifty feet) vaguely annoyed-looking heroine, Nancy Archer, stuffed into an unexplained bikini top and miniskirt like Jane of the California desert, scooping up a police car and throwing it, tearing apart electrical towers, ripping the roofs off buildings, slapping her weaselly husband and his tarted-up girlfriend and their drinking buddies across the bar like so many pesky insects.