Her old man went loony, again.
If she had lived in a big city, like New York or Chicago, she would have come home to find the house surrounded by a SWAT team, clad in black, wearing bullet-proof vests, poised to shoot canisters of tear gas through the front windows. But this was just Winsome Lake, Wisconsin. The person in question was just Rich Seagrove. So it was just a sheriff's car with its dome light flashing, a portable spot light--clipped to the open door of the squad car-- casting a lonely beam of light at the front of the weather-beaten house that had been in the Seagrove family for three generations, and Sheriff Bill Miller, without any backup at all, leisurely resting his paunchy form on the squeaky porch swing, while trying to talk sense to Rich through the front window.
Why Rich went occasionally batty was the subject of much town gossip. Some say it was because of the three tours of duty he'd served in Viet Nam. Others say it was that the Seagrove family, whose roots in Winsome Lake ran deep, was cursed by hereditary madness, with family members being affected every other generation. Others still-- including Rich while he suffered these bouts-- claim that he'd been abducted by aliens once, when he was at a young and at a critical stage of development, and had been the victim of a physical exam gone terribly wrong.
To Radcliff, it didn't matter why it happened. It was just a source of enormous embarrassment whenever it did happen.
This time it was on a beautiful early summer evening. School was out. The crickets chirruped happily. Fireflies flashed across the open field next to her house. As she walked home from her summer job at the Winsome Kwik-mart, the air she breathed smelled of freedom and serenity. It should have been a perfect night. Then, as she neared home, she saw the flashing dome light of the squad. She saw the spotlight splashed across on the house, which was badly in need of a paint job, and through the ancient oak tree out front, making sinister silhouettes of its crooked limbs.
“Not again,” she murmured to herself. She felt that awful sick sensation in the pit of her stomach, like the feeling you get when you go home to discover an unwanted relative, a drunken uncle or a lazy cousin, was lounging around your living room watching his favorite program on your television, and would be staying over until he got back on his feet, which may take weeks or months or maybe never. Wasn't it bad enough a name like Radcliff had been hung around her neck since birth? How much can a sixteen-year-old endure? She wondered what she had done to deserve it all.
As she approached the front porch, she could hear Sheriff Miller. “Come on, Rich, you know you don't have anything in there,” he was saying.
Inside her old man called back something she couldn't hear.
“You're always saying that, Rich, but you never mean it,” Sheriff Miller answered. When he noticed Radcliff standing there, at the foot of the porch stairs, he said to her, “Hey, Rad, he's at it again.” He said it in a casual way, as though they'd run into one another on the street, and he was commenting on the weather.
All she could do was roll her eyes, and shrug in an apologetic way.
Her old man called out something. His words were muffled, and reminded her of words of some old person in a nursing home, confined to a bed, lost in swirls of white covers, calling out to a relative to complain about the food or the way the nurse took blood every day or demanding to know why they just couldn't go home.
“Rich, you do not,” Sheriff Miller said, certain. “You never owned a gun in your life.” When no response came from within the house, he turned Radcliffe and asked, sounding less than certain, “He doesn't, does he?”
She shook her head weakly, biting her lower lip.
She took a couple meek steps up the front stairs, as though she were visiting the house of some stranger. “How're you enjoying your summer vacation so far?” Sheriff Miller asked her, letting Rich Seagrove mull something over inside the house. He spoke to her like someone stopping by for a neighborly visit-- a cup of coffee and a slice of homemade cake.
“All right,” Radcliff said.
Again the old man was yelling something.
“I'm telling you, Rich,” Sheriff Miller called back through the front window, which was opened a crack, “It was just old man Hazlett's dogs got loose.”
