Femme Fatale and other stories

the land. The corporate headquarters for his pharmaceutical company were in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, no more than an hour’s drive away. His chauffeur-driven Town Car pulled out of the quarter-mile driveway promptly at seven every weekday morning and returned thirteen hours later. Mrs. Delafield, who did not work, was left at home with Hugo and a live-in housekeeper, who apparently terrified her. She hired Terri to come on Tuesdays, the housekeeper’s day off, and spell her for exactly four hours, from three to seven, for $5 an hour. Finding something to do with those four hours was a terrible chore for Mrs. Delafield. She tried tennis, but she wasn’t coordinated. She tried shopping, but she found the nearest stores disappointing, preferring to purchase her clothes on seasonal excursions to New York. She signed up for ceramics class, but she didn’t like what it did to her acrylic nails. Still, she was strict with herself, throwing herself into her Porsche SUV every Tuesday as if it were a grim duty.
    She always returned promptly at seven, sometimes stepping out of her clothes as she crossed the threshold—whatever she had been in her past life, it had left her without modesty. She then handed Terri $25 and fixed a drink. Terri wasn’t sure if the extra five dollars was a tip or a math error, and she didn’t ask Mrs. Delafield for fear of embarrassing her. Mrs. Delafield was shy about her lack of education, to which she made vague, sinister references. “When I had to leave school …,” or “I wish I could have stayed for prom, but there was just no way.” Sometimes she examined Terri’s armload of textbooks, as if just touching them might convey the knowledge she had failed to acquire. “Is algebra hard? When they say European history, do they mean all the countries, even the little-bitty ones? Why would they want to you to study psychics?” The last was a misreading of “physics,” but Terri didn’t have the heart to correct her. Instead, she told Mrs. Delafield that River Run High School had been founded at a time when there were a lot of alternative theories about education—perfectly true—and that it still retained a certain touchy-feely quality. Also true, although parents such as Terri’s, who had known the original River Run, were always complaining it had become a ruthless college factory.
    Given that the Delafields’ house, like the Delafields’ baby, was so huge, it had taken Terri a while to inventory its contents. Still, the wonders of Mrs. Delafield’s underwear drawer were well known to her long before she found the gun. Drawers, really, because Mrs. Delafield had an entire bureau just for underwear and nightgowns. The bureau was built into the wall of a walk-in closet, one of two off the master bedroom, both almost as big as Terri’s bedroom, but her family lived in a Phase II house. Terri had been through those drawers several times, so she was certain that the elegant little handgun she found there one March afternoon was a new addition, along with the rather nasty-looking tap pants of transparent blue gauze, with a slit where the crotch should be. Terri did not try on the tap pants, which she considered gross, but she did ease an emerald-green nightgown over her bra and panties. Small and compact, with thin legs and rather large breasts, Terri could not have looked less like Mrs. Delafield. Still, she rather liked the effect.
    It never occurred to her to touch the gun, not at first. In fact, she was petrified just reaching around it to pick out various bits of lingerie. She treated it as if it were an explosive sachet. To Terri’s knowledge, guns were like coiled snakes, always ready to strike. Didn’t everyone know about the Shellenberg brothers, perhaps River Run’s greatest tragedy? Not to mention that scene in
Pulp Fiction.
    But as time went by, and Terri kept returning to the lingerie drawers, the gun began to seem integral to the clothes she found there, an accessory, no different than the shoes and purses arrayed on the nearby shelves. It was so … pretty, that little silver gun, small and ladylike. Such a gun would never go off heedlessly. One Tuesday afternoon, Terri pulled on a black lace nightgown, one that was probably loose and flowing on Mrs. Delafield. On her, it bunched around the upper part of her body and tangled around her ankles. She slipped on a pair of Mrs. Delafield’s high heels so she wouldn’t trip on the hem, picked up the gun in her