Chapter 7

Vivian’s sense of control at the switchboard had disappeared in about forty-five seconds of eavesdropping on that one call to Betty Miller, and had been replaced by blinking disbelief at what she’d just heard. When both women had said their goodbyes in her ear, Vivian realized she needed to disconnect the call. She flipped the switch, pulled the cord, and then stared, unseeing, at the darkened board as her disbelief bloated into anxiety and fear. The kind of anxiety and fear she used to feel when she’d worried about her Uncle Hugh being in an accident out on the road on his highway patrol motorcycle, but this was much, much worse.

Moving from habit, she unplugged her headset and wrapped it into a bundle. She pushed in her rolling chair, and mutely followed Dorothy and the others who finished at eleven as they slid into their coats and pulled their hats snugly over their ears. She did the same, without thinking, and without hearing any of the “good-night”s that sang out around her. It wasn’t until the icy wind hit her full force in the face as she stepped out onto East Liberty Street that the anxiety and fear froze in place, and from under that bubbled something hot. A roiling boil of hot anger. The churning lava flow of dark, horrible emotions coursed through her body as her worn, old ankle boots crunched back over the snow, retracing the steps she’d taken to get to work.

The temperature had dropped, but with her blood boiling the way it was, she hardly noticed. Vivian knew what rage felt like on the inside, and she also knew what it looked like from the outside. It looked like lifelong Democrat Roy Patterson when Herbert Hoover was elected president, and Jacob Starlin, when somebody stole his wheelbarrow from out of his backyard, and rage looked like poor Bill Parker, the day he found out about his wife leaving town with Gilbert Ogden after robbing the Wayne Building & Loan. Absconding.

Bill’s neighbors said they could swear he had smoke coming out of his nose and ears and the top of his head, and Vivian could practically feel the smoke charring the inside of her Beulah Bechtel hat.

“It was genuine smoke!” his neighbors had insisted.

Bill’d slammed open the screen door and flown out of the house, shotgun in one hand, hat in the other. The tires of his car had burned over the pavement so badly, you’d still be able to see the black marks from the rubber, if they weren’t covered with snow right now. Bill Parker’s rage. That was the kind of rage Vivian was feeling, with her fingernails cutting into the lining of her gloves as her fists clenched inside her coat pockets.

The anger propelled her breath out into the freezing night air in short bursts. She stopped in front of Freedlander’s window, now darkened and still, with no sign of all the festive holiday cheer she’d seen just a few short hours earlier, and no sign of that rich bitch Betty Miller, who was now sitting somewhere in her expensive house on Wooster’s north side, with some dangerous new knowledge she shouldn’t have. The woman in the reflection who looked back at Vivian was wearing her lovely blue hat, but was old and wretched, decades beyond her thirty-eight years. If everything under her feet hadn’t been covered in a hard pack of icy snow, she would’ve reached down for a loose brick in the sidewalk and then launched it through that window, splintering the stupid flocked glass and shattering the image of the old wretched woman she didn’t recognize.