The Wicked Flea

noticed her feet? It was dreadfully hard to find anything in size eleven except clodhoppers, we used to call them, not to mention gloves. And it’s sadly clear that poor Sylvia was nothing more than a housemaid to the whole lazy pack of them because they’re living like little piggies without her, and not the slightest indication of grief. But mark my words! That Eric is the one to keep your eye on.” Evidently listening in on her own prattle, she blushed. “What am I saying! Or the one to keep your eye off, if he can’t manage to do up his buttons and zippers, and I can’t help wondering whether it was entirely accidental, if you understand me, or whether he had succumbed to a sick compulsion.” Perhaps I should remark on the unmistakably titillated quality of Ceci’s interest in the exhibitionist. Lingering beneath every sentence she spoke about him was an unvoiced and breathless question, namely, Is he going to expose himself to ME? Had she been his victim, she’d have hated the reality. But she adored the fantasy.
    Douglas responded to what struck me as Ceci’s ludicrous implication that the exhibitionist was Sylvia’s son. “Eric as the exhibitionist. That’s a new thought.”
    Noah promptly dismissed it. “Pia was the last victim. He wouldn’t go around exposing himself to his own sister.”
    Woman of the world, Ceci chimed back in. “You never know, do you? After all, it’s a sick individual we’re talking about. What if Sylvia caught him at it? There that Eric is, lurking in the woods up to you know what, and along comes his mother, and he shoots her!”
    Douglas cleared his throat. “He’s carrying a gun in case his mother strolls along and catches him, because if she does, he intends to kill her. That’s a bit farfetched.”
    “Sylvia threatened him,” Ceci hypothesized. “She threatened to turn him over to the police. And for all we know, Douglas, he carried a gun all the time. Maybe he still does!”
    “Hey, this is Newton,” Noah said. “A Newton mother who catches her son exposing himself packs him off to a psychiatrist. She doesn’t call the police.” The word psychiatrist made me jump. I covered my embarrassment by looking in every direction except Douglas’s. The stream was narrow and almost stagnant, its water brown with a greenish cast. Ulysses’ feet were coated in filth. Noah’s four dogs ran in a congenial little pack ahead of us. Their short coats would be easier to clean than Rowdy’s thick double coat. Although Quest was on leash and hadn’t left the path, his legs and feet were dirty, and Ceci would have a hard time removing the mud from his underbelly before she allowed him in the house. If you’ll forgive an interjection, let me comment that free association is a weird phenomenon. Psychiatrist leads to Douglas leads to dirt. No wonder I was having my head examined. And Douglas? What was his excuse?
    “Still,” I said, “I suppose it’s possible that the exhibitionist is the one who killed Sylvia. She could have recognized him, whoever he is. For all we know, he’s some fine, upstanding citizen with a lot to lose if Sylvia—”
    “Exposed him!” Noah exclaimed.
    I laughed obligingly. “Suppose he’s a doctor, or he’s in some other profession where that kind of scandal would do him in. Anyone would be humiliated, I guess, but not everyone’s livelihood would be threatened. Maybe that’s why he wears a ski mask. Exhibitionists don’t necessarily do that kind of thing, do they?”
    “The one they caught in the library didn’t,” Ceci said. “That one used to lurk on the third floor, and everyone knew what he looked like because there were those what-do-you-call-them drawings of him on posters all over the library, and then finally someone spotted him and had him arrested, but you have to wonder whether he didn’t get some sick sort of enjoyment from seeing his face plastered all over the library, because after all, when you think about it, it’s what these men want, isn’t it? To be looked at?”
    “On exhibition,” I agreed.
    “Like pictures,” said Ceci. “ ‘Pictures at an Exhibition,’ but I don’t suppose that what’s his name, Mussorgsky, was—”
    Douglas smiled at her. “You never know.”
    “Yeah, but it’s a whole different category,” Noah said. “It’s sick, but it’s not violent. It’s not in the same class as murder.”
    “That day when Pia ran into this guy?” I reminded everyone. “When she came