The Rate of a Rumour

It started with a bat.

And two women who couldn't keep their mouths shut.

It was a rumour that began its circulation with Dorothy Myers telling Agatha Simpson that her daughter Judith had killed her husband's pet bat named Emily.

Agatha, who was nearly deaf, didn't quite hear: "A rat? Did you say your daughter killed a rat named Beverly?"

Dorothy nodded, apparently without hearing how Agatha had misheard her story. Her eyes were wide with excitement, a hunger for the pleasure of the thing enlarging her pupils and making her round face appear even more odd than was normal.

Agatha, finding great pleasure in knowing this juicy tidbit, told her friend Caroline who listened intently so she might tell all the ladies in her knitting club.

Caroline suffered from a lack of memory. She couldn't quite recall the details of Agatha's story, just that it involved someone named Beverly, but she decided that gossip was gossip and it wouldn't much matter if the details were askew. So, as it turned out, by the time the tale reached the ears of the many pink clad women in the local knitting club, it involved not a rat, but a woman. After all, what was the point of the intensity of the rumour as long as it provided sufficient conversation at the next meeting of the South Park Nitpicky Knitters.

"Oh, the scandal of it! Killing your husband's mistress! Imagine it!" said Caroline on Monday evening after the consumption of bowls and bowls of buttermints and coleslaw and the sharing of the latest gossip from the next town over.

And all of Caroline's knitting friends agreed that it was indeed a scandal, though why none of them thought to investigate what was now a murder is lost to history.

By Wednesday morning, all of South Park was buzzing with the news.

"A murder? Really? And Dorothy Myer's daughter, too! How awful."

"I can't believe I'm only now hearing of this. I wonder how Dorothy is faring with the news!"

Even the local priest, a normally calm, placid man, was invigorated by the tale.

"So this is what comes of jealousy!" he roared from the pulpit on Sunday morning. "Death! Murder! Pain!"

Dorothy herself could not be found to conform or deny the story. She was visiting her daughter three hours away and every man, woman, and child in South Park assumed it was to offer comfort to her criminal offspring.

All to soon, it began to circulate that perhaps Judith was on the run from the police, a theory that was put forward by Tim, who owned the Tim's Revolvers and saw this as an opportunity for business.

"Arm yourselves, folks. You never know when that criminal could come sauntering through our town."

Now Judith was a murderer and an escapee, and South Park had never had a better time in its two hundred years of existence.

Agatha, who had heard the great exaggeration of the gossip yet found the new details more interesting, took it upon herself to be the contact between South Park and poor Dorothy Myers with the criminal daughter.

"Dorothy says that Judith's trial is set for June, yet her child is nowhere to be found! They have investigators searching the country, the world even, for her!"

Due to some whispered gossip among the avid busybodies of the city, South Park soon recognized Judith as not merely a murderer, but a serial killer.

"More than ten women, I heard! Shot 'em all upside the head."

"Ten? I thought it was one. Where'd you hear ten?"

"Jody Jackson heard it from Agatha who heard it from Tim who said he read about it somewhere."

And so this new, minute detail was accepted as fact and all of South Park rounded themselves up for a town meeting to discuss the threat of a possible serial killer in their midst.

"Now if you would all just listen to me!" Tim stood in front of the crowd, hands raised to silence the angry group of elderlies and parents all gathered in concern for their children's safety, since it was now known that Judith was a child killer.

"I can give you guns! Half off, too!" Tim's urgings went relatively unheard as an uproar of shouts and cries went up just then at a man from the back of the crowd who declared that Judith was at still at large, armed, and on a fresh killing spree.

Agatha, greatly enjoying herself, stood up and gave a loud whoop to silence the crowd. "Now calm yourselves, people! We need to reason through this together and carefully! I heard from Dorothy today that they plan on giving Judith the death sentence as soon as they find her. No trial or anything. Now if we aid in any way at all with finding her, each and every one of us will receive a two-hundred dollar cash reward!"

This sent the crowd into a surprised outburst.

"Money? For us?!?"

"I think I saw her in town yesterday? Where do I claim my reward?!"

"I personally know where she is! Do my kids get money, too?!"

Mr. Pigeon, a rotund, bespectacled man who happened to be the mayor of South Park climbed onto the stage to address the chaotic crowd.

"Now we must collect ourselves! There is no reason to assume that she is anywhere near our town, or that there is a cash reward! We have to clarify these details before we fall apart completely!"

"What for?'' Came the complaint of one woman in the second row. "I tell you I saw her! Why clarify! I'm trustworthy."

Mr. Pigeon, now thoroughly fed up with all of this Judith nonsense declared his extreme headache to his secretary and left the building. Immediately following his departure, the crowd was on its feet, shouting and stamping. It was a mob now, much to the jolly amusement of Agatha, who sat with lips peeled back in a fake-toothed, gleeful smile.

The next Monday, two weeks after the rumour began, it was mutually decided by the entirety of South Park that Judith was somewhere in the city, plotting her revenge on everyone for the death of her dog, and disguised as an old, arthritic woman.

"What happened to Judith being a child killer?" One skeptic asked of his wife.

"What child killer? Everyone knows that Judith is planning our destruction because of the murder of her golden retriever."

"And where did this information come from?"

"Oh, come now, Harold, its a common fact!"

The local tailor began to distribute t-shirts, inlaid with a picture of Judith, which he had stealthily acquired from Dorothy's home, and sporting captions which said things like: "DOWN WITH JUDITH, PLOTTER OF REVENGE," and, "WELCOME TO SOUTH PARK, WE OFFER CUSTOM KILLINGS."

One unfortunate tourist, pulled into the tide of Judith haters who held Judith hating rallies and sold t-shirts and distributed slogans, decided to join in on the excitement and claim that Judith had visited his hotel room and threatened to kill his dog if he didn't spill the tea about who the richest people in South Park were and where they lived.

"Now she wants not only our dogs, but our dough, too," remarked one homeless man who slept on a bench in South Park Park. "I found a great place to hide my seven bucks."

His companion didn't seem to hear, but he did push his tattered wallet deeper into his tattered pocket.

Well, the mood in South Park went from bad to worse. Sheriff Skillings was responding to calls about possible Judith sightings and Judith break-ins around the clock. By the time Memorial Day rolled around, only one of those calls had actually resulted in catching the thief, which turned out to be a local kid, hungry for attention.

Judith sightings, however, became more and more frequent and complex. Judith was no longer disguised as an old, arthritic woman, but a beautiful movie star in a black limousine.

But there were no limousines in South Park, nor had there ever been, and the beautiful movie star fizzled back into an old, arthritic woman.

By the time the 4th of July came and went, no one remembered how the Judith phenomenon had began, and no one cared to. New versions of the story erupted every day and were accepted as fact until they weren't. Judith sightings were now commonplace and every time a dog went missing, Judith was to blame.

She even became a sort of a verb among South Park families.

"Quit being such a Judith," was a frequently used phrase from an annoyed parent to his equally annoying child.

Dorothy Myers never came back to South Park, and no one except Agatha knew why. By October, it seemed that one even remembered who Dorothy was and that it was she who began the Judith rumour. Only Agatha knew that Dorothy had moved to California, sick and tired of the Minnesota weather.

So the rumour went on.

And on.

And on.

But, as all phenomenons must come to an end, so did the Judith craze.

One excruciatingly warm Summer day, more than a year after Dorothy told Agatha about her daughter killing her husband's pet rat, a black Cadillac rolled into South Park. It squeaked so loudly on its wheels that it captured the attention of dozens of South Park citizens. Hundreds of eyes followed the car as it crept slowly to a halt in front of Betty Lou's Bakery. The door opened, and a collective gasp escaped from hundreds of lips as Judith stepped out. Not disguised as a beautiful actress, nor as an arthritic old woman, but just plain Judith sporting trendy pants and fashionably gray hair.

"It's her!" Pointed one young mother who had four or five children gathered around her legs. "It's the thief!"

Judith cocked her head to one side and smiled dazedly. "Excuse me?"

A crowd gathered around the confused woman, shouting, cursing, and pointing.

"It's the dog killer!"

"The murderess!"

"A curse be upon you, woman!"

Judith put out her hands in defense. "Look, I don't know what you all are talking about!"

"You are Judith, Dorothy Myer's daughter, aren't you?" Asked Caroline, Agatha's friend, who had seemingly forgotten her part in beginning the Judith craze.

Judith nodded.

"So you are the dog killer?"

Judith threw back her head and laughed. 'What? Are you all crazy? I don't know any of you, and I've never even owned a dog. I just came back to finalize the sale of my mom's house."

And so, that night, hundreds of South Park citizens gathered in the town hall for an emergency meeting called by an exasperated Mayor Pigeon.

"It would seem that this entire city has fallen victim to the spreading of gossip. I have spoken with Agatha Simpson, who confessed to me today tht she is partially to blame for beginning this whole thing. Judith did not kill or steal anything. Well, I mean, what actually happened is that she killed her husband's pet rat, Beverly."

Poor Judith, who had attended the meeting in the hopes of straightening out this whole mess, stood up. "It was a pet bat named Emily and it was a complete accident. And you all are just crazy! I mean, who even started this whole thing? It's just... crazy! Me, a dog-killer? And... what else was it?"

"Child-killer!"

"Serial-killer!"

Judith dug her fists into her temples and let out a long groan. "I'm so confused. And I'm really, really, weirded out. And a little mad, because this has really put a hole in my day. But I'm willing to put this all behind me if we can end this nonsense now."

And, for no apparent reason other than their extreme agreeability with anything that was new and exciting, South Park agreed. The crowd dispersed. The t-shirts were thrown out or burned, the posters and car stickers were ripped up and discarded, and, within a week, no more talk of Judith and her criminal acts was heard.

Caroline, however, never quite learned her lesson, and at the next meeting of the South Park Nitpicky Knitters, she began the night with a bit of gossip. Just a harmless rumour that she had heard from Darcy Jenkins who had heard it from Adelaide Smith.

And just as she always did, she craned her neck into the circle of women, eyes bugged out and lips puckered with juicy excitement.

"Did any of you hear about Amy and her husband..."