Better Living Through Plastic Explosives by Zsuzsi Gartner Page B

mountain has an uncanny sense of timing. The nanny will have just rounded the corner with the twins when she remembers she should have packed the rain cover for the stroller. She turns back. I was only gone for a minute, she’ll say later, looking heavenward, crossing herself over and over as if she has a nervous tic.
    Cockatiels, cats, dogs, hamsters, boa constrictors, and, once, a miniature goat—all manner of bewildered pets have been recovered at the scenes of the disappearances. The only human witness, a girl of four who had been left to play in the sandbox while her older sister took care of business with the boy next door, has been rendered mute. When asked to explain what happened, she forms a cup with her hands and smiles beatifically. The experts say post-traumatic stress disorder, while her mother insists her ADHD has been cured.
    Does anyone remember that aggrieved musician of Hamelin Town? Can anyone besides this enraptured girl hear his cunning tune?
    Honey Fortunata is turning onto the Caulfeild exit off the Upper Levels when her cellphone rings—no “La Macarena,” no Beethoven’s Fifth, for Honey is not a person who indulges in whimsy. As she listens to the voice at the other end, Honey’s lip begins to tremble so hard she has to press two fingers to her mouth to still it. The house on Decourcy, the one she was just about to close on, has joined the ranks of the disappeared.
    Honey snaps shut her cell and pulls over. She takes increasingly shallow breaths and watches as her commission on $7.4 million does this funny thing. It sprouts wings, white, downy ones like a Catholic schoolgirl’s version of an angel, and flits up and out of the Hummer, right through the windshield as if the glass were permeable, then hovers for a moment above the gleaming hood before tumbling up into the unnaturally clear sky, along with Honey’s chances of buying back her sister’s life.
    A clear, operatic soprano sings out, startling the silence. Honey fumbles with the stereo, but the music is not coming from the speakers. For the first time in her life a thing very much like the chokehold of fear closes around her throat. The aria is coming from the Virgin Mary on the dashboard—her voice like a young Jessye Norman singing “Ave Maria.” What look to be real tears trickle from the icon’s painted blue eyes and Honey finds that she, too, is crying.
    Nina wakes from what must have been a catnap; there’s still some light coming through the ground-level windows. Her head is muzzy, the inside of the mascot suit a moist cave, no doubt incubating new single-cell life forms by now. The TV is on, The Simpsons in perpetual rerun just ending—Lisa has saved Springfield again and wears yet another medal bestowed by the mayor. As the boy sits static in front of the set, the evening news leads with a missing-child story.
    Dan’s face is slack, a spent stocking. Please don’t hurt our son. But Patricia. She looks straight at Nina and threatens to rip her entrails out. Not so much in words but in an understanding that passes between them like a kind of heat. Patricia’s teeth now a serval cat’s, a guttural hiss issuing from deep in her throat. Nina’s striated flesh already clings to Patricia’s yellowed incisors and she’s crunching down on her bones as if they’re pretzels. Muscles roll like small ball bearings under the skin of her jaws.
    â€œI never knew my dad was such a good actor!” the boy says with evident admiration. “But Mom … ” He sighs and shrugs his shoulders, palms turned up, like a badly mugging child star, Jonathan Lipnicki maybe, without the owlish glasses. Nina has told him his parents had been enlisted by Miss Peach to go along with the pretend kidnapping in order to bring media attention to the marmot cause.
    â€œYou have a very nice burrow here, you know!” he tells her as he waits patiently in front of