Mrs. Robinson wasn’t in her room where she usually sat by the window. She wasn’t on the sofa lording over the TV. Nor in the kitchen supervising the cooking, nor anywhere else in her two-bedroom house. In fact, Mrs. Robinson has been missing for three days, and speculation has already begun on whether she would ever return.
“She could be dead,” Samantha considered. The teenage girl spoke casually, as if wondering whether it would rain tomorrow. “Dead in a ditch, I figure. Went and got smacked by a car on her way home, with little pieces of her raining down all over the neighborhood.”
“Surely we would have seen the pieces?” Claire replied with undisguised horror. Claire was considerably smaller of the two girls, though they were both fifteen years old. She seemed even tinier now, with thin arms tightly clutching her baggy t-shirt against her body.
“Not necessarily,” Samantha replied solemnly. “It could have happened at night. If I were the driver who hit her, I would have jumped out and gathered up all the pieces to hide the evidence of my crime.”
“No!” Claire whined. She shrank farther into herself to form a sad little huddle which practically melted into her bed.
“Or maybe he didn’t have to gather her up at all, see,” Samantha continued, leaning forward to drive the words home. She was enjoying her friend’s alarm a little too much. “Maybe birds picked up the little pieces, so that by morning there wasn’t a single piece of Mrs. Robinson at all.”
“I don’t believe it!” Claire squealed.
Samantha shrugged, settling back into her seat. Her long black skirt swishing over the rough carpet beneath her chair. She began to pick at her lavender fingernails, peeking at Claire from the corner of her eye.
“Well I’m not pretending to know for certain. I’m just trying to cheer you up by giving you the good scenario. It could be much, much worse after-all.”
Claire bolted upright from where she lay on her bed. Her wide blue eyes quivered with apprehension. Her skin was so flushed that all her freckles seemed to dissolve.
“What could possibly be worse than being smashed into smithereens and eaten by birds?”
Samantha spent several exquisitely long seconds continuing to pick at her nails before looking up at Claire.
“Are we going to stay indoors all day? Don’t you have any games to play at your house?”
“What else could have happened to Mrs. Robinson?” Claire shouted. “Tell me, or I’m going to tell your mother that you’ve been horrible to me!”
A sly grin flirted with the corner of Samantha’s mouth. She narrowed her green eyes and leaned close to Claire, so that the girls’ faces were only inches apart.
“Well at least if she was hit by a car on her way home, then Mrs. Robinson would have at least still been trying to come home. There’s always the chance that she doesn’t much care for you, and would rather live with some fisherman on the beach. She might have made up her mind not to come home at all.”
Claire jerked away from Samantha as though struck by an invisible slap. She flung herself face first into her pillow. Samantha had never heard a sound so pitiful as the sobbing howl which blasted from the bed. The pillow only muffling it enough to provide a haunting echo to the cries. Samantha plugged her fingers into her ears and waited for Claire’s outpouring to stop—she must draw breath eventually. But even when Claire paused to inhale, the ragged breath only transformed into two cement trucks making love.
The door flew open and in fluttered Claire’s mother, Mrs. Thistle. She was a short, stout woman who appeared to possess a very soft hug, and she immediately demonstrated this upon her daughter. Unfortunately, the gesture only seemed to squeeze the remaining air from Claire, whose howl of anguish reached a truly piercing crescendo.
“Easy easy, there you go, I’ve got you,” Mrs. Thistle said, rocking Claire gently back and forth.
“Mrs. Robinson doesn’t love me anymore!” Claire cried, heaving for breath.
“Oh, darling, don’t say such a thing. Of course she does!”
Samantha silently shrugged behind Mrs. Thistle’s back. She made a gesture with her hands that looked convincingly like an explosion, complete with the wiggly fingers which surely represented the pieces flying every which way.
“She’s been smashed to bits then!” Claire howled.
Mrs. Thistle glared over her shoulder at Samantha, who was now avoiding her gaze by engrossing herself once more in her lavender nails.
“Anyway, I think my mom is going to pick me up soon…” Samantha started to say. But she never got any further, because she made the mistake of looking up and catching a full dose of Mrs. Thistle’s thundering glower.
“Well you can’t blame me for being honest—” Samantha began again, having forgotten that she was still a teenager, and that they could in fact be blamed for practically anything.
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
Ten minutes later, Samantha and Claire were both standing outside in the warm August sun. Samantha held a stack of “Missing” posters with Mrs. Robinson’s picture on it. From the foul expression on Samantha’s face, one might guess she was actually holding a heaping pile of someone else’s soggy underwear.
“Can’t you just buy a new cat?” Samantha grumbled. “Or adopt one from the shelter. It would think you’re a hero for saving it.”
“Mrs. Robinson wasn’t just any cat.”
Claire’s glare was cold enough to make Samantha shiver despite the sun.
“Dogs are nice,” Samantha mumbled, not meeting Claire’s eyes.
There wasn’t any fight left in her though. Samantha meekly followed her companion as they began their journey along Bentley Street where they both lived. Every time they reached a light or telephone pole, slap goes the picture of a very fat black cat stuffed into a very small glass bowl. Squeee goes the electric tape. Crinkle crinkle as it’s fastened on. Then they’re off again, no words exchanged. Samantha was beginning to feel repressed and stodgy from holding so many sarcastic comments in for so long. She worried that’s how people get ulcers and tumors: the growth of unsaid words which turned rotten inside. She was about to quip on how excellent dogs are at finding their way home, when Claire spoke first.
“I found Mrs. Robinson three years ago before mom and I moved here. She was in a plastic grocery bag along with four other kittens who were all black like her. Brothers and sisters probably. Someone had left them in the trash by the grocery store, right on top of a greasy old pizza box. The bag was tied at the top, and there wasn’t even a way for them to breathe. I don’t know how long they were in there, but none of them were moving when I found them. Not even Mrs. Robinson.”
Samantha didn’t know what she was supposed to say about that. She respected the wisdom of silence.
“We named her Mrs. Robinson after the song. There’s a line that goes ‘God bless you please, Mrs. Robinson’, so I just thought that if there was anyone who needed to be blessed, it had to be her. And I guess God really did, because pretty soon she started moving again. Even though none of the others did. We gave her some milk, then Mom rushed off to the store to get some real cat food and medical supplies, because it looked like Mrs. Robinson hadn’t eaten in a really long while. And the whole time mom was gone, I kept thinking that if Mrs. Robinson stops moving again, then that would be my fault. It was my job to keep her here, because I was the only one in the world who cared if she lived or died. And every time she swallowed a mouthful of milk, or turned her head a little to look at me, well that was just a miracle that might be taken back any second. And now it has. Three years later, and I still wasn’t ready.”
Samantha silently thanked her mother for giving her sunglasses to wear outside. She was very glad her friend couldn’t see the moisture in her eyes.
“Nobody looks at posters,” Samantha huffed. “We should knock on doors instead. We can do the whole block in less than an hour, and then we’ll know for sure if anyone saw her.”
The girls left their posters and their tape at the end of Claire’s driveway and began to knock on every door instead. There was no answer from the tall gray house with the carved lion head railings. There was an old woman named Warlinksi who lived in the next house with its forest of potted plants. She hadn’t seen Mrs. Robinson though, and said she wouldn’t tell them even if she did. Warlinski didn’t understand why people don’t just “mince cats up like any other critter”. Claire thanked her anyway, for she was raised to thank people for giving you their time, even if they didn’t spend it the way you hoped.
Samantha was making a real effort to be supportive now. She still wanted to skip the next house. All the kids in town knew that a murderer lived there, even if the adults didn’t want to admit it. The house even looked like the type of place a murderer would stay. It had perpetually dead trees rising like tombstones in the arid and withered garden. A rotten deck fell through in places, and a large collection of strange ornaments, wind chimes, and beaded necklaces with funny stones danglined from nails haphazardly hammered into the peeling plank walls.
“Mrs. Robinson wouldn’t have come here,” Samantha declared. “She had—has—better sense than that.”
“Then we won’t have to stay long,” Claire replied as she picked her way between the brown and stringy bushes. She hopped over the first rotten step to alight on the next solid one above.
“It’s just that my mom’s going to be picking me up soon, and —”
“Not until dinner time. My mom called and said you were going to help me because you’re a kind and gentle person. That is true, isn’t it, Sam?”
“That’s not fair.” Samantha grimaced. “Your mother knows full well that I’d rather be a witch and put curses on people. I only said I was good in my Christmas card last year, and that’s not fair to hold me to when it isn’t Christmas.”
Claire wasn’t paying attention. She faced the house, calling, “Hello, anyone home?” She rapped on the door with her fist. It rattled loosely in its frame. Samantha found sudden interest in peering through a hole in one of the dead trees. It was hollow, and turned out to be filled with colorful stones and broken glass. She giggled to herself. There are crazy people who live here. A crazy murderer, and us, his uninvited guests.
The muffled sound of a chair sliding against a padded floor. It came from inside the house. Claire looked over her shoulder and gestured emphatically for Samantha to join her on the old porch. Samantha pretended not to notice and dug her hand into the hollow tree.
Standing alone in front of the dilapidated house, the idea that a murderer might really live inside didn’t sound hard to believe after-all. And what would a murderer do if they opened the door to find two young girls, defenseless and alone? Claire’s mother thought they were still putting up posters on the public street. No one knew where they were, and if they did not come home again…
The door began to open. She stumbled back. All the worst parts of Claire’s imagination came out at once. She forgot about the decaying step in her haste, at least until her foot landed hard on the splintering wood. A shrill little scream preceded a thumping crash. She lost her footing and tumbled backward to sprawl on the dirt beyond. Claire scrambled to her feet, and was about to launch herself away once more. The moment she balanced her weight on the offended ankle however, she felt it buckle in protest. A sharp, stinging pain devoured her senses.
Claire was on the ground again. She stared at her scraped hands which broke her fall. There were footsteps behind her now, and Claire was absolutely certain that the murderer stood only a foot away. Could she outrun him? Not likely. Fight? As if more capable victims hadn't tried before. His shadow was already looming over her, and Claire’s lightning succession of thoughts only led to the inescapable conclusion of her impending demise. The sole reasonable course of action was to begin screaming again.