“The video games?” he asked.
She kept rubbing. “I used to think it was Dave Harrison. I mean, really. A house divided. That child’s a mess. Or Charlie. Say what you want; two moms isn’t normal. But I don’t know. This stuff about Arlo.”
“What are you saying?”
“There’s been so many clues. The fad diets, those cheap Parliaments. I don’t think those boobs of Gertie’s are real and she flaunts them so shamelessly. Even when he’s happy, Arlo yells. They have no boundaries. We thought it ended there. We gave them credit they didn’t earn. But now it’s clear Arlo hurt Shelly. We know that. Rhea would never lie about something this important. She’s too precise a person.”
“I can see that.”
“What we did last night was the right thing.”
“I know.”
“I’ll bet my mint that she’s not even hurt. It’s impossible those bricks actually hit her.”
“I hadn’t thought of that. You’re right. She probably wasn’t hit at all.”
“We had to, Dom. Arlo did a terrible thing right under our noses.”
“Yeah. I hate thinking it.”
“That’s how it happens, because we fail to imagine the worst.”
Upstairs, the kids hooted. Something smashed. The guttural shouts they made didn’t quite seem human, but like the kids from Pinocchio who stay too long on Pleasure Island.
“You think he interfered with them,” Dominick said at last. “In our house. During some dinner.” It was the fear he’d had from the start—from the first time he’d heard this story. No, even before then. From the first day they’d moved in, all tattooed and cheap, bringing their misery through the barricades of suburbia, infecting everyone. It was why he hadn’t screamed at the twins just now, even though they’d earned it. Because they might be the victims. Because he’d let them down, and this behavior they were exhibiting came from pain. Something terrible the Wildes had done.
“Yes,” she answered. “I believe he did.”
And just like that, Dominick believed it, too.
A PARTICIPANT OF THE INTERACTIVE BROADWAY SHOW THE WILDES VS. MAPLE STREET, REGARDING HIS CHOICE TO PLAY RHEA SCHROEDER, THE MOST POPULAR CHARACTER
“Rhea’s my hero. She’s like Iago [from Othello], the poison whisperer. If you read that play, you can totally tell Desdemona never cheated. The scarf was planted evidence. Othello knew that. He wasn’t a meathead; he was a tactical military commander. Besides, why murder a woman just for cheating? He murdered Desdemona because he could. She threatened him in some way he couldn’t stand to confront. That’s Maple Street. They were scared of the Wildes… The Maple Street shootings happened about three years before the Great Collapse. I remember those days. You could feel it coming. You kind of knew the banks and farms and pretty much everything were about to fail. It’s a perfect metaphor—a hole that keeps getting wider, and you can try to ignore it, but one day you’re going to get swallowed. Those people were about to lose their jobs and their homes. They were about to become the Wildes.
“I don’t blame Rhea. I mean, Maple Street could have ignored her—told her to go take a nap or pop a Prozac or whatever. But they didn’t. They whispered the poison right back.
“Did you read her dissertation? It’s like Freud meets Frankenstein. She was totally delusional. So, no. I don’t blame her for what she did. I blame the people who knew better. I blame the people of Maple Street.” —Evan Kaufmann, Menlo Park, California
118 Maple Street
Monday, July 26
Ding-Dong!
Rhea Schroeder put down the brush she’d been using to clean the sticky crevices of her fingernails.
Ding-Dong!
“Don’t come out of your rooms,” she warned as she rushed on one good knee, one aching knee, out of the bathroom and down the steps to the hall. She scanned the floors for oil. Clean of evidence. No trace left. She swung open the door.
“Detective Bianchi, hi!” she said. A smile, under the circumstances, would be overkill. “Did they find my Shelly?”
“I’m sorry, no.”
This was the second police visit today. The first had come just after dawn, and she’d met them on the porch. Told them everybody else was asleep and played the my kid’s missing and probably dead so show some respect card. Now she leaned, so Bianchi couldn’t see inside.
“Is it something about Arlo Wilde?” she asked. “I thought after I made that complaint that something would happen. But nothing’s happened!”