Toni's explanation was that Rod might have to bring a client in at any moment, and that client had to be impressed from the moment he walked in the door. But Jennie figured that even Toni knew better than that, just from the hesitant way in which she offered the rather lame explanation. This was just one more way that Rod controlled his wife and proved his control to others.
Only one room was off-limits; the locked office. Toni didn't even have a key to it. Every time she came, Jennie surreptitiously checked the door, but it always remained locked, and behind that door there was nothing to Medicine Senses but a black hole. Frustrating. Very frustrating.
Still, if she could not get into the office, she nevertheless had the mission of getting Toni and her kids out of Rod's influence so that the mi-ah-luschka would leave them alone. She had a foreboding feeling that the Little People were losing what little patience they possessed, and would start something soon. Toni started at every odd sound, and kept looking for something out of the corner of her eye. She might just have started to see them . . . which would mean they were preparing to work some revenge.
Slowly, she began planting hints. How "normal" husbands might lose their tempers once in a while, but they didn't blame their wives for everything that went wrong. And that adult human beings did not take out their frustrations on other humans beings. When Toni seemed, tentatively, to be receptive, she planted a few more hints, describing the Women's Shelter and some of the women she had taken there for help.
She began planting other hints as well; especially after she learned that Toni had some remote Cherokee blood in her. She told stories over coffee, about spiritual or supernatural experiences of any number of people she'd known. Harmless stories, mostly, involving brief glimpses into the Spirit Worlds and the like, and stressing how people who might think they were hallucinating could very well actually be seeing things that those with less open minds could not.
Jennie was reminded irresistibly of the winter that Mooncrow taught her how to make wild birds eat out of her hand. She had spent hours at a time, sitting in the snow, with a handful of sunflower seeds. Not daring to move, hardly daring to breathe, while the cardinals, titmice, and chickadees ventured nearer and nearer.
Eventually, her patience had paid off to the point where the birds would swoop down and perch on her hat as soon as they saw her coming.
Could she get this bird to come to her, too?
It might mean more than this case; it might mean the saving of a woman's sanity and the salvation of her childrens' lives. Jennie did not like the increasingly frightened look in Toni Calligan's eyes whenever she thought she heard her husband's car in the driveway.
It reminded her more and more of the look she had seen in the eyes of a trapped and helpless deer.
If the rest of her life had not been so hellish, the entrance of Jennie Talldeer into it would have been cause for celebration. For the first time since her marriage to Rod, Toni Calligan had a friend.
She used to have friends; she used to have a lot of them. But Rod had driven them away, one by one, with his sarcastic remarks and his constant badgering questions. Other women got tired of being interrogated about where they had been, where they were going, what they were going to do, and did their own husbands and fathers know about it. They didn't like the way that Rod watched them when he was home-"As if he thinks I'm going to steal the silverware or turn you into a Moonie," Frieda Miller had complained. They didn't like the remarks that one of her former girlfriends had called "sexist."
But Jennie Talldeer somehow had a sixth sense for when Rod was going to return, and she never visited when he was around, or left any signs that "she had ever been there at all. Jennie was bright, fun to talk to, and didn't seem much like a private investigator at all, just like "one of the girls."
Best of all, Jennie understood. Even if some of the things she had to say-about husbands in general," admittedly, and never directly accusing Rod-made Toni acutely uncomfortable. Then again, maybe Jennie was simply telling Toni in a roundabout way why she was avoiding Rod. When Jennie was gone, and Toni sat alone over the coffee, she had to admit that what Jennie said made sense.
The things Rod did, to her and to Ryan and Jill-they just weren't right. All those cruel taunts, and the way he kept trying to frighten Ryan under the guise of "making the boy tough."
And the scolding sessions that had gone from words to blows. . . .
True, Toni's father had never been a very warm or loving man, but he had never hit her mother. Although he had been just as sarcastic and cutting as Rod. He'd always known what to say to just devastate a person.
So did Rod.
Well, that made sense too, from what Jennie said. Funny, she had never thought what a weapon words could be, until Jennie pointed it out. Words could hurt worse than knives, because they cut you where it didn't show.
On the outside. On the outside.
She had begun thinking over things, in the leisure granted her by Jennie's willingness to pitch in and help. She often had as much as an hour or two, now, when she could just sit and think, and a lot of her thoughts were very uncomfortable.
She had to admit, if only to herself, that Rod never had been the Prince Charming she'd thought. In fact, in a lot of ways, he was more like Ivan the Terrible. But she'd been so busy, what with one thing and another, that she'd never really thought about how she was less his wife and more like his housekeeper, errand-runner, and-
Admit it, Toni. Punching bag.
That was how Jennie, detached, but compassionate, had described some of her clients, women she had met at the Women's Shelter or women she had taken there. They were punching bags for their husbands, she'd said, sighing. Whenever something went wrong for the man, he came home and took it out on her or the kids, or both. I mean, in a way I can almost understand it. These guys all had nowhere to go, no way to express their anger and frustration, and their wives were the only creatures they knew weaker and less powerful than they were. It's like chickens in a chicken house; the big chickens pick on the littler ones, and so on down the line, until it comes to the last chicken in the chicken house, who gets abuse from everybody. But that doesn't make it right. People aren't chickens. People know better. Uncomfortable thinking.
She'd asked Toni about what she'd done before she married Rod; pointed out that she could still make a living for herself, even if Rod wasn't there. That was something that hadn't occurred to her in ages, and Toni had started to wonder just what life would be like without Rod around.
Jennie was a pretty smart cookie, when it came down to it. Everything she said made sense.
She'd said other things too; things that were beginning to make Toni wonder about being crazy or not. She had a lot of funny, and sometimes not-so-funny, stories about people who'd seen what she called Spirits, things that weren't necessarily ghosts, but certainly weren't physical. And what Jennie said about the Spirits sure matched those Indians Toni kept seeing. ...
She was seeing them, out of the corner of her eye, all the time now, half-seen shadows, or transparent ghost-images. Sometimes they even showed up when Rod was home, though never in the same area of the house as he was; they seemed to wait to try and catch her alone. The only time they weren't there was when Jennie was visiting. Toni really wished they would show up then, so she could find out if Jennie saw them too, but they never obliged. Like a kid, they were never there when you wanted them. They lurked around the house to the point where she saw them at least twice or three times a night, peering in the windows, grimacing at her, and disappearing when she turned to look straight at them.
They tended to show up after dark, too, which made them pretty unnerving. She hadn't told Jennie about them, but it was almost as if Jennie knew about them, just like she knew about Rod without being told anything.
Almost as if she knew-and understood.
Thunder growled, making them both look up.
"Gripes, where did that come from?" Jennie Talldeer said, glancing at her watch and then up at the growing storm outside. "I really have got to go, before this breaks.
It looks like it's going to be hell to drive in."
Toni nodded, surreptitiously rubbing her sore wrist, hoping Jennie wouldn't notice. But Jennie spotted the movement anyway, and raised an eyebrow at her.
"Arthritis?" she asked. Grateful for the "out," Toni nodded. Rod had grabbed her wrist and yanked her around last night, shaking her; the wrist had been swollen this morning. It had gone down some, but this coming storm made it twinge.
"I guess so," Toni replied, hoping her flush of guilt at lying didn't show. "It was real sore this morning. I hate to think of having arthritis already, though; it makes me feel so old,"
Jennie shrugged. "My brother broke his ankle fancy-dancing on uneven ground, and it gives him all kinds of hell whenever it's about to rain. And my fingers hurt, sometimes. Trust me, arthritis doesn't care how old you are! But I really need to go, Toni, much as I hate to."
Because the minute the rain breaks, Rod will be coming back home, Toni thought with a sigh. Jennie knows. But she's too nice to say that. She doesn't want to run into him, I'm sure. If he knows that she's supposed to be checking him out, he 'II be nice to her but take it out on me. And if he doesn't, he'll be rotten to her just to get rid of her.
"Well thanks for coming over and giving me a hand with everything," she said, instead, and smiled. "Come on, I'll see you off."
Jennie grimaced as they got outside and saw the true magnitude of the storm on the western horizon. The window in the kitchen looked north, while this "boomer" was coming straight out of the west. Huge black thunderheads loomed thousands of feet up in the air, their tops forming the "anvil" formations that meant dangerous weather to come. The roofs of the houses hid the bottoms of the clouds, but they wouldn't for long, and the angry growl of thunder was testament enough to the amount of lightning hitting the ground at the leading edge of the storm.
"You'd better go turn on a radio," Jennie advised, as she got into her little truck. "Keep the TV off though, and stay away from the windows. This looks like it could brew up a tornado, and there's going to be a lot of lightning, for sure. You might want to get the kids ready to duck into the bathroom if we get a tornado alert."
"I'll do that," Toni said, just as the wind picked up, with three chilly gusts that sent garbage cans flying into the street and flattened her clothing against her. The air was full of rain-and ozone-smell. "You'd better get going!" she added, over the distant growl of thunder. "This may flood the underpasses!"
Jennie pulled out, with a backward wave.
She hurried into the backyard to gather up the kids; Ryan and Jill were only too happy to come inside, but Rod sassed her. "I want to watch!" he said. "It's not here yet! You think I'm gonna melt if I get a little wet?"
Toni gave his rump a little smack for the sass. "You get in that house when I tell you to, mister," she scolded, shagging him inside after the other two. "You're not too big for me to spank; you better remember that!"
Ryan and Jill went to their rooms, and she assumed that Rod followed. She went straight to the kitchen to turn on a radio; they didn't have cable anymore, and she didn't trust the television in a thunderstorm. Jennie was right to warn her. The antenna that Rod had put up before they got cable was too high and he had never taken it down; it was on a tower that made it the tallest thing in the neighborhood, and whenever there was lightning, she was always afraid it would get hit. Rod laughed at her for her fears, but she would never allow the set on during a storm if he wasn't there to insist on it.
Outside, the sky turned black, and the kitchen went as dark as if the sun were setting. She tuned in right in the middle of a National Weather Service bulletin; they were always so scratchy and full of static she had to concentrate to make out what the man was saying. Strong winds, damaging hail, severe thunderstorm. . . . Not even a "watch"; this one, as any fool could see, was already here. No talk of tornadoes, though-
She caught the sound of the television from the living room, and hurried in to find young Rod messing with it in the gloom of the living room. The only light came from the screen.
"You get away from that!" she snapped. "I have told you and told you, don't use the TV in a thunderstorm!"