Church Hill

A bright moon, missing no more than a sliver from its left side, was already rising over the rooftops by the time Elizabeth parked her truck, humming happily with its new battery, beneath a gaslight. In the dim light, the sunflowers on the truck were washed into pale, spidery blobs and the ginkgo tree in the park, bright yellow by day, was a tall, ghostly cloud.

The porch light of the house glowed invitingly, and the warmth and aroma of dinner that greeted her when she opened the door were more inviting still. She hung her coat in the hall and walked back to the kitchen where she could hear Alice, Dirk, and Alice's favorite U2 CD.

When Elizabeth passed the music room, she could not resist stopping to take another look at the portrait that Alice had revealed when she relocated the Velvis. This was an old oil painting of an ascetic young man leaning on a paper strewn desk and holding a glass sphere. It wasn't dated or signed, but on the basis of the man's dress and the chiaroscuro (that freshman art history class was coming in handy), Elizabeth guessed it was seventeenth century. She was planning to dig up a stepladder so she could get up high enough to read the papers on the desk in the painting, to see if they held more information. She had already tried one of the library ladders, but had not been able to remove it from its track.

The scent of dinner drew her on.

In the dining room, a slight movement caught her eye, but when she looked more closely, she saw it was only the velvet Elvis blowing in a slight draft. His lip was curled and his hooded eyes had a frightening depth. Averting her own eyes, Elizabeth turned to leave and bumped into her sister.

"I thought I heard you come in," Alice said. "Dirk just put the pasta in." They walked together from the dining room and Alice asked about the shop.

"It was fine, except for the crazy woman who wanted to know where her out of print self-help book was."

Alice made a rude noise. "Oh, her. I bet every copy of that book has been composted."

"I mostly did data entry and ate cookies. Bob dropped in to get a catalog for his mom."

"Miss Price thinks he's the greatest thing. Too bad she isn't twenty years younger. Did she try and convince you to marry him?"

"Yes, and made veiled threats too," Elizabeth was saying as they entered the kitchen. "You were here first. Why don't you go out with him?"

Making a face, Alice shook her head from side to side. "No way. He's the perfect housemate and we get along well. Why would I want to spoil that?"

"You just don't get it, Alice." Over by the stove, Dirk stirred a huge steaming pot. Rififi wove between his ankles and wrapped his tail around Dirk's leg as he paused to give the humans a big pink yawn. "If perfect isn't good enough for you, you can always go out with Trip. Or is he Elizabeth's new boyfriend?"

"He just gave me a jump-start. He didn't ask me out," Elizabeth said.

"He will," said Alice.

"Does he ask everybody out?"

"More or less, except for me," said Dirk. "He's not a bad guy, but his family is insane. I knew his sister in college, and she was the total anorexia queen. You spend five minutes with her, and you'll swear on a bucket of french fries that you will never count calories again. Speaking of which, I hope you like olive oil. I put a ton of it in the pasta."

"What's for dinner?" asked Elizabeth.

"Dirk Muller's famous marinara." He lifted the lid off another pot and filled the kitchen with a dizzying whiff of garlic and tomatoes. "I'm one of the Sicilian Mullers."

Elizabeth's stomach growled. "That smells wonderful. I had no idea that I'd be living with a chef. I figured everyone would be living out of the freezer like Alice."

"I made the garlic bread," her sister pointed out.

"That's right," said Dirk. "She took it out of the freezer, and out of the box, and put in the oven herself."

"Just like momma taught me. Here, have some wine." Alice poured them each a glass of Chianti.

---

Elizabeth was still arranging her books in her built-in bookcases. Progress was slow. She kept dipping into her old favorites before placing them on the shelves and reconsidering the groupings. Mysteries here, Victorian England there, what about the Victorian mysteries? Puzzled, she looked at the copy of The Moonstone in her hand. Then she sat down and opened it. Somewhere down the hall, Dirk and Alice were giggling and running back and forth between their rooms.

"Hey, Reader Rabbit."

She looked up from the book to see Dirk standing in the doorway with a pair of glittering platform shoes, conjoined by a dingy old shoelace, dangling from his fingers.

"Alice says this is your idea, so you might as well come along."

Minutes later, Elizabeth was buckled into the backseat of her sister's car, zooming down the expressway. Dirk rolled down the window and stuck his arm out into the chill air. He made swimming motions.

"I can't believe we're doing this," he said. "Isn't it illegal?"

"Who cares? I see shoes hanging from power lines all over town, and I've never heard of anybody getting arrested for putting them there. We're just continuing a local tradition."

"Is that what you're going to tell the police if we get caught?"

"They have to catch us first. Besides Cary Street is totally empty at this hour. Everything is closed."

"You better hope Morticia doesn't see you. She'll put a voodoo hex on you," Dirk said.

"Big deal. She already put one on these shoes."

As Alice said, Cary Street was empty, more or less. Dark shop windows reflected the empty street outside. They passed two women holding hands and walking west towards one of the bars up the street. Overhead the moon was high and bright enough to light the sky, but could not outshine the sodium vapor streetlights.

They rolled up in front of the bookstore. A few cars were parked before the fancy restaurant in the previous block, but their car was the only one on this block. The restaurant door opened, releasing two patrons and the clink of cutlery on china. After a sluggish burst of traffic passed, the housemates climbed out of the car and went to the center of the street with Alice holding the shoes.

Standing in the crosswalk directly beneath the cable holding the traffic lights, she held the shoes apart, bent her knees, and tossed the shoes straight up in the air. They fell short of the cable and she had to skip backwards to avoid getting beaned on the head.

"I am so lame!" she exclaimed.

"That isn't how you do it," said Dirk. "You have get a little behind the cable and throw them over it." He picked the shoes up from where they lay in the crosswalk and proceeded to demonstrate. He awkwardly threw them overhand, but the shoes left his hands in a graceful parabola, the maximum of which was beneath the cable.

"You throw like a girl," Alice said.

"I knew someone was going to say that," said Dirk. "Thank you so much for not letting me down."

"Okay, your turn, Elizabeth," Alice said.

"They're your shoes, you try again. I'm only here for moral support."

Ignoring her protests, the others took her by the arms. They dragged her out into the street and thrust the shoes into her hands.

"Stand farther back," said Dirk when she took up a position beneath the cable.

"I'm going to do something different. I always wanted to try this," she said. She held one shoe in her hand and swung the other around until it built up momentum and spun in a circle around her hand.

"Oh, cool! She's making a bola like Johnny Quest," said Alice.

As the circling shoe came up, Elizabeth released the other and it flew from her hand. The shoes spun over each other with the shoelace taut between them. They went up and up and, much to Elizabeth's surprise, the shoelace struck the cable. One shoe brushed over the top of the cable and then they were hanging over it, oscillating gently from the energy of their trip.

Cheering and clapping, Alice and Dirk ran out into the crosswalk to congratulate her. At the far end of the street, the lights began turning green and a small armada of SUVs accelerated towards them. They ran back to the sidewalk and Alice continued her victory dance.

Elizabeth saw the SUVs slowing as they approached the intersection although the light was in their favor. "Maybe we should get out of here," she said.

"Oh my God! What the hell is that?" Dirk pointed into the sky where an enormous dark shaped flapped with menacing deliberateness across the face of the moon.

"It's a heron, there's a million of them over in the river," said Alice. "You don't need to be scared unless you're a fish."

"Come on," said Elizabeth.

Behind them the door of the shoe store creaked open to reveal Marla, the woman Elizabeth had seen emerging from the pale Cadillac. In one hand she held a black candle raised above her head. The flickering light threw terrifying shadows across her enraged face. In her other hand she held a coffee mug imprinted with a smiley face.

"What are you doing here?" she demanded.

Alice sneered, "Standing on the sidewalk, the public sidewalk. You have a problem with that?"

"I have a problem with you," Marla cried. She flung the contents of the mug over them and shouted something that Elizabeth did not understand. In a whirl of black rayon and noxious droplets of candle wax, she spun on her heel and slammed the shop door behind her. The bolt clicked.

"My jacket!" cried Dirk. He gingerly touched one of the spreading stains and sniffed his fingers. "What is this stuff?"

One after another, the SUVs pulled to a stop behind Alice's car and sat there with the engines running. The windows were tinted and the drivers invisible.

Elizabeth herded the others to their car. They quietly left, going straight back to the house without their planned celebration. Dirk and Alice bickered the whole way home.
He flipped on the dome light to inspect his jacket.

Alice flipped it off. "I can't see the road. You'll have to wait until we get home."

"I hope this stuff doesn't stain," he said. "You know how much this jacket cost?"

Alice was exasperated. "I'll get it cleaned for you. And it's not like it's virgin lambskin or something. It's microfiber. You know, polyester?"

"I think this is ketchup." Dirk sniffed his fingers again. "It'll never come out."

"Stop squirming. You'll get it all over the upholstery."

Elizabeth checked her own jacket for the substance, but found that she had escaped from the general spattering. Tuning out the volley of recriminations, she leaned back in her seat and watched the city unfurl, tinted orange by the streetlights. A black SUV caught up with them at the toll plaza and rode along in Alice's blind spot all through downtown before exiting onto I-95 South.

At home, Alice put her and Dirk's stained clothing to soak in her bathtub, except for Dirk's jacket which she left by the door and promised to take to the cleaners the next day. None of them could figure out what was in Marla's mixture. Dirk was certain about the ketchup, and Elizabeth thought she identified coffee grounds. The stains didn't smell like either ketchup or coffee grounds, though, and their eyes watered when they sniffed at it.

Rififi cautiously approached Dirk's jacket which lay in a heap on the floor. He took a few deep whiffs and put his ears back. The fur along his spine pricked up and he scooted away, back arched.

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