Harvestman Lodge (66 page)

The story involved a young woman, Marla. Born to unmarried parents unfit to raise her, she was raised instead by a man even more unsuitable. The man, her guardian of sorts, forced her into prostitution in her mid-teens, luring men to the house where she lived essentially in captivity, then threatening the men with public exposure if they revealed his vile little money-making scheme.

In the story, Marla had escaped her situation only when the house caught fire. Caldwell’s story described Marla’s flight from the burning house, how she had watched the firemen at work, vainly trying to save the place, then had made her way on foot down roads and across fields and even backyards, until finally a kindly motorist had offered her a ride and asked her where she needed to be taken. Having nowhere to go, she’d asked simply to be taken “to town,” and once there had departed from her benefactor and simply wandered on foot through the fictional town of Barton, a place she’d lived close to all her life, but had seen only through the tinted back windows of her captor’s car.

As a storm rose, fictional Marla was given refuge in the home of an eccentric recluse on property long-neglected and overgrown. Mistrustful of males for very good reason, she’d happily found the eccentric man to be kind and fully uninterested in exploiting her as her ersatz-grandfather guardian had. An attorney, Marla’s rescuer in the story helped her instead of hurting her, quietly obtaining for her a Social Security number and even a rather questionable birth certificate.

Melinda’s only complaint with that particular story was that it seemed incomplete and unsatisfying to her: the protagonist Marla ended up finding work and leaving her rescuer’s home. Not very dramatically satisfying. Real life usually just ticked and meandered along until it reached its end. A good piece of fiction, on the other hand, needed to go somewhere, to lead to something meaningful and gripping and even teleological, something hinting destiny and purpose was at work.

Caldwell had said many of the stories in this latest work were thinly fictionalized versions of true events. If this story was one of those, Melinda had to wonder who the real-life inspiration for Marla was.

Remembering the picture in Caldwell’s upstairs writing room, the one showing the young lady who had recently become Curtis Stokes’s fiance, it was easy to make a likely guess.

At last Melinda laid Caldwell’s manuscript aside, turned off her reading light, and rolled over to sleep, though she doubted sleep would be easily chased down after two cups of late-night coffee. It was at that moment her bedroom door opened and her little sister walked into the darkened room.

“Melly? Are you awake?”

“Yes. Is something wrong?”

“I had a bad dream. Can I sleep in your bed the rest of the night?”

Melinda never much minded the times her little sister came to her bed for refuge and comfort, beyond Megan’s tendency to sprawl and take up more than her share of mattress space. What could she say, though? Her little sister was fast growing up, and the time would come soon when she would no longer see Melinda as her older and wiser protector, someone to flee to when a dream had turned bad. Melinda would miss that.

“Crawl in, goofy-head.”

“Goofy-head? Well, you’re … you’re a … you’re a silly-butt.”

“Oh my! I guess I’ve really been put into my place now!” Melinda had to smile at the silliness of their childish repartee.

When they were settled, Melinda asked about the nightmare. “It was nothing I can even remember,” Megan said. “Just a spooky feeling, mostly. And when I woke up, everything in my room looked scary and mean.”

“I’ve had dreams like that,” Melinda said. “Not one of them ever turned out to be anything real, including the scary way my room looked after I woke up. It was just shadows, that was all. But shadows can be scary, that’s true.”

“Yeah. Like they are to that man in town who is afraid to go through telephone pole shadows.”

“I know that man. His name is Curtis and he’s actually a very nice fellow. I had a chance to visit with him this evening, me and Eli both. And you know what? Curtis isn’t afraid of those shadows now. He talked to himself and told himself there was nothing to be afraid of, until finally he believed what he was saying. Now he can walk through pole shadows like anybody else does.”

“That’s cool.”

“Very much so. And he’s starting to work at a real job, and he’s planning to get married.”

“Hey, is he the same one who sells pencils to people?”

“That’s him. Curtis Stokes, the pencil man.”

“Yeah, he always sits near the door at Discount World with a box of pencils and a change box. You know, Melly, sometimes people like that are scary and you just kind of know to stay away from them. But the Pencil Man never makes me feel that way.”

“I think that’s because he’s a good man, and it just kind of comes through his eyes and his manner and voice. Sometimes you can tell when a person has a good heart in them. You just know.” Having said that, Melinda realized that particular idea might be the wrong kind to plant in the mind of an adolescent girl. Not every kind-acting, apparently good person in the world was in fact kind and good. So she added, “But take that with a grain of salt. Sometimes people can seem to be nice and not really be that way.”

“Yeah, I know. Sometimes you can’t tell. But a lot of times you can, especially if somebody’s bad. Just from how they make you feel, how they look at you or things they say.”

“Has somebody made you feel that way?”

“Well, maybe. Kinda sorta.”

“Who?”
Good lord,
Melinda thought.
Am I turning into as big a worrier as my father?

“I don’t want, uh, to say. It makes me feel silly to talk about it.”

“You can tell me, Megan. I’m your sister, and I want to know what’s going on with you.”

“Well … it’s nobody, really. Mostly it’s the janitor at school, and one other man. Mr. Stockwell is the janitor.”

“I remember him. He was janitor there back when I was in school.”

“Well, all the girls think he’s creepy, the way he looks at us. And some of them say he has holes drilled through the wall of the girls’ dressing room beside the gym.”

“I don’t remember him that way. Do you think that’s true about the holes in the wall?”

“It isn’t true. Sara and me checked the wall. There aren’t any holes.”

“So … could it be he’s getting a bad rap, and isn’t all that creepy after all?”

“Well … he still seems creepy. He always tells the girls how pretty we are. And his eyes have this funny, twitchy thing about them.”

“I can see how that might creep you out. Back when I was with Rawls, sometimes the ‘Parvin glare’ he and the other male Parvins have would kind of make me feel that way.”

“Melly, what was Rawls trying to do to you when Daddy shot him?” The little girl had always been told he’d been trying to “hurt” her big sister, but as she’d grown and become more life-knowledgeable, had begun to suspect the matter had more to it than she had been told.

The question felt clumsier to Melinda than she would have expected. To her Megan was still very much a child, innocent, living in a world that shouldn’t ever have to take adult-life things into consideration.

It was ridiculous, of course, and Melinda knew it. When she was Megan’s age she’d known (however indirectly) almost all there was to know about such grownup matters.

“He was trying to make me have sex with him, Megan. Even though I didn’t want him to, and he knew it. He was going to force me.”

“That’s what that word means, isn’t it? The R-word?”

“That word is rape. It’s not a bad word, like the F-word is. It’s a bad, bad thing, but not a bad word in a cuss-word kind of way.”

“Daddy caught him?”

“Daddy walked in without knowing we were even there … and he saw what was happening and yelled at Rawls to stop. He had a loaded gun put away close by, and went for it. That scared Rawls, but not so much that he didn’t try to get the gun away from Dad. One thing led to another and Dad ended up shooting him. He hit him in the leg, even though at that time he was so mad I’ve always wondered if he was actually trying to shoot Rawls in … ”

Megan said, “In the testers … the testics … oh, whatever the name is.”

“Let’s just say he was aiming for the crotch. I’m pretty sure of that, anyway. What he hit, though, was Rawls’s leg. But you do know that a different story got told publicly about what happened.”

“The barn story. But Melly, you know what? Nobody believes that. Everybody knows that Daddy shot Rawls.”

“You’re right. The truth tends to creep out about things like that, over time.”

“Why did they make up a story about it to begin with?”

“The Parvins were the ones who made up the cover story. It was actually good for Daddy, though, because you can get in trouble for shooting somebody even if you have a good reason. And he could have had trouble from the Parvins, and his business could have suffered from people around who loved Rawls so much for his football talent that they would have blamed Dad because their favorite player couldn’t bring them big victories anymore.”

“Seems like Rawls would have wanted people to know the truth, then, just to cause trouble for Daddy.”

“It’s that pride thing. If I know big old tough guy Rawls like I think I do, he wouldn’t want people knowing he’d been shot by the father of his own girlfriend. That would have just been humiliating. Especially considering what he was trying to do when it happened. And being known as a would-be rapist would have made college football programs shy away from him even if he’d been able to play again. The real twist of it is, if he’d gone on to a real doctor and had treatment, then the right kind of physical therapy, he might have gotten healed up. But he couldn’t get past the belief he could hide behind a cover story. Now everybody seems to know the truth anyway.”

Conversation lulled for a while, Megan beginning to grow sleepy, while Melinda was still too caffeinated to sleep and stared at the ceiling, her mind active.

“Megan?”

“Huh?” The little girl stirred from the brink of sleep.

“You said there was ‘one other man’ besides the janitor who creeped you out. Who is that?”

“I don’t know his name. He’s not from here, I don’t think, and I’ve not seen him except lately. He was passing up on the street beside the school in his car, and he was watching some of us in the PE class, watching in a real scary-looking way.”

“Yeah, that’s spooky. Why do you think he’s not from here?”

“Because he’s Japanese, or Laotian, or Chinese, or something.”

“An Asian man.”

“Yeah. I don’t know what kind of Asian. Just Asian.”

Melinda sat up, truly wide-awake now. “Did he try to talk to you?”

“No. But he stared right at me, and kind of pointed. And then he smiled and I just wanted to run back inside the school.”

“Listen to me, Megan: you need to keep a lookout for that man. That all just doesn’t sound right. If you see him again, you get away from wherever he is. Fast.”

“Is he dangerous to me?”

“We don’t know, so we have to assume he is. You don’t need to get like Daddy, being afraid of everybody who is different or odd or whatever … but you do have to realize that there are bad people out there, and look out for yourself.”

“Yeah. Okay.”

“You watch for that man, and don’t let him get near you. You understand?”

“Yes, Melly. Now I want to go to sleep.”

“Okay. Good night, Megan.”

“G’night.”

Chapter Forty-One

MEGAN SLEPT SOUNDLY UNTIL MORNING, but did her usual sprawling thing and crowded Melinda to the point she felt like she was all but hanging off the side of her own bed. That, combined with the coffee she’d consumed far later than any sane person should consume caffeine, and a striking sense of worry roused by Megan’s talk about the man who had watched her on the schoolgrounds, kept Melinda awake.

As the night dragged on and morning was sneaking toward the horizon, Melinda gave up trying to fit into the bed her sister had claimed as her own, grabbed her alarm clock, and moved to the big couch in the family room.

WHEN HER ALARM SOUNDED, MELINDA groaned, slowly sat up, then called the television station to say she was sick and would not be working that day. It didn’t feel at all like a falsehood; she was so groggy and sleep-deprived she felt physically stunned. Melinda was healthy and strong, but never had been one to miss a night’s sleep and feel no bad effect from it. Even in her college days she had not been able to pull off the legendary pre-finals “all nighter” and get away with it. Once, after trying it, she’d been jolted rudely awake in mid-exam by nearly falling from her chair, sound asleep with pencil in hand.

She left a message on Eli’s office machine saying she would not be in, went back to her bedroom, which had by now been vacated by Megan, and there slept until after ten-thirty while Megan went to her day-long “drama camp” workshop. When finally Melinda got up, she made toast and scrambled eggs, then settled back in bed with a cup of coffee and a plate of food to finish reading Coleman Caldwell’s manuscript.