The Twelfth Card

ahead of him Thompson saw a young blonde girl dressed in a school uniform approach a beige bungalow. His heart sped up a bit—just a beat or two—watching her climb the few concrete stairs, take a key from her book bag, open the door and walk inside.
    He continued on to this same house, which was as neat as the others, perhaps slightly more so, and featured a hitching-post jockey, with black features painted politically correct tan, and a series of small ceramic deer grazing on the tiny, yellowing lawn. He walked past the bungalow slowly, looking into the windows, and then continued up the block. Agust of wind blew the shopping bag in an arc and the cans clanked dully against each other. Hey, careful there, he told himself. And steadied the bag.
    At the end of the block he turned and looked back. A man jogging, a woman trying to parallel park, a boy dribbling a basketball on a leaf-covered driveway. No one paid him any attention.
    Thompson Boyd started back toward the house.
    *   *   *
    Inside her Queens bungalow Jeanne Starke told her daughter, “No book bags in the hall, Brit. Put ’em in the den.”
    “Mom,” the ten-year-old girl sighed, managing to get at least two syllables out of the word. She tossed her yellow hair, hung her uniform jacket on the hook and picked up the heavy knapsack, groaning in exasperation.
    “Homework?” her pretty, mid-thirties mother asked. She had a mass of curly brunette hair, today tied back with a rosy red scrunchy.
    “Don’t have any,” Britney said.
    “None?”
    “Nope.”
    “Last time you said no homework, you had homework,” her mother said pointedly.
    “It wasn’t really homework. It was a report. Just cutting something out of a magazine.”
    “You had work for school to do at home. Homework.”
    “Well, I don’t have any today.”
    Jeanne could tell there was more. She lifted an eyebrow.
    “It’s just we have to bring in something Italian. For show-and-tell. You know, for Columbus Day.Did you know he was Italian? I thought he was Spanish or something.”
    The mother of two did happen to know this fact. She was a high school graduate and the holder of an associate degree in nursing. She could have worked, if she’d wanted to, but her boyfriend made good money as a salesman and was happy to let her take care of the house, go shopping with her girlfriends and raise the children.
    Part of which was making sure they did their homework, whatever form it took, including show-and-tell.
    “That’s all? Loving, loving, tell the truth?”
    “Mommmmm.”
    “The truth?”
    “Yeah.”
    “ ‘Yes.’ Not ‘yeah.’ What’re you going to take?”
    “I don’t know. Something from Barrini’s deli maybe. Did you know that Columbus, like, was wrong? He thought he’d found Asia, not America. And he came here three times and still never got it right.”
    “Really?”
    “Yeah . . . yes. ” Britney vanished.
    Jeanne returned to the kitchen, thinking this fact she hadn’t known. Columbus really thought he’d found Japan or China? She dredged the chicken in flour, then egg, then bread crumbs, and started to lose herself in a fantasy about the family traveling in Asia—the images courtesy of cable TV. The girls would love that. Maybe . . . It was then that she happened to glance outside and, through the opaque curtain, saw the form of a man slow as he approached the house.
    This made her uneasy. Her boyfriend, whose company made computer components for governmentcontractors, had stirred up some paranoia inside her. Always be on the lookout for strangers, he’d say. You notice anybody slowing down as they drive past the house, anybody who seems unusually interested in the children . . . tell me about it right away. Once, not long ago, they’d been in the park up the street with the girls, who were playing on the swings, when a car slowed up and the driver, wearing sunglasses, glanced at the children. Her boyfriend had gotten all freaked and made them go back to the house.
    He’d explained: “Spies.”
    “What?”
    “No, not like CIA spies. Industrial spies—from our competitors. My company made over six billion dollars last year and I’m responsible for a good chunk of that. People would love to find out what I know about the market.”
    “Companies really do that?” Jeanne had asked.
    “You never really know about people,” had been his response.
    And Jeanne Starke, who had a rod imbedded in her arm where it’d been shattered by a