Nightmare Child (5 page)

Mindy held her arms out for Kitten, urging Jenny to run into her embrace.

Only that was not what happened.

Jenny took one step over the threshold and then did something most surprising for a girl her age and size.

She reached out and clawed her right hand down the side of Mindy's neck. Deep, dark blood appeared in long, ragged rivulets.

Mindy screamed.

Jenny had come home.

During this time, only a cleaning woman named Iona caught even so much as a glimpse of Jenny. One day when Iona was cleaning the bathroom in a master bedroom (you'd think a forty-nine-year-old man would learn to flush, for God's sake), she glanced outside and there in the window of the house next door was little Jenny, austere in her KISS T-shirt and almost ominous in those red, heart-shaped sunglasses she'd worn the past three Summers.

Jenny and the
McCays
were the one ceaseless topic of conversation in
Stoneridge
, their situation being even far more fun to speculate on than who was sleeping with whom in Parish Heights, the closed enclave estates twenty miles north, where the people were younger and more daring.

One thing everybody took note of, were the curtains in the
McCay
house.

They had not been opened once since the day Jenny had returned.

The Christmas season was beautiful in
Stoneridge
Estates. Not only were the rooftops and the scrub pines mantled festively in white, but on each home were hung elaborate electrical ornaments that at night were as spectacular as anything that could be seen in the downtown areas of large cities. Against the chill starry night sky you saw a red-cheeked Santa urging on his long team of reindeer; over the soft fall of feet through powdery snow, you heard a chorus sing "Silent Night" to a front-yard replica of the famous manger scene; and on a hill behind the Estates, you saw a large plastic Frosty the Snowman, lighted from inside, waving hello to all the good boys and girls.

This was also the time when the people of
Stoneridge
realized that they were friends and not just folks who happened to live next door to one another. Women exchanged recipes and cookies and holiday cakes; men exchanged Sunday-afternoon football highlights and hunting tips and helped in digging out a car buried in snow.

All the neighbors, that was, except the
McCays
.

From the time little Jenny had come home, the
McCays
had become almost suspiciously insular, showing a downright aversion to exchanging anything more than the briefest of greetings with their neighbors. Mindy—who had been variously "into"
Amway
, the Junior League, mall fashion shows, and the Negro-for-an-afternoon program that the country club once sponsored until one of the ungrateful little wretches bit the white hand that happened to be feeding it—was especially silent.

And skinnier.

The women of
Stoneridge
didn't know what kind of diet Mindy was on this time, but whatever it was, it certainly seemed to work. By
Stoneridge
estimates, Mindy had dropped as much as twenty-five pounds, the one drawback being that the woman's face looked terrible—gaunt, with eye rings as pronounced as a raccoon's, and a disposition problem that bordered on psychosis.

Eventually, the women of
Stoneridge
—who did not like to think of themselves as gossips but merely exchangers of information—came to realize that Mindy was on no diet at all.

No, the trouble was Jenny, whom none of the
Stoneridge
ladies had seen since the day of her return. Only Diane had seen her. Jenny's problems were so severe that they were causing Mindy to lose weight. That was the conclusion of the
Stoneridge
women, and presumably they were correct because since November 2, the day of Jenny's return, the
McCay
driveway had held the cars of three psychiatrists, a priest, a Bishop, an Orthodox Rabbi, a steel-haired Presbyterian Minister whom the
Stoneridge
women instantly dubbed "sexy," seven different officers from local, state, and federal bureaus, a psychic whom the
Stoneridge
ladies recognized from her show between bouts on the local professional wrestling "Saturday Wipeout," three women from a church bearing flowers, four men from the Jaycees bearing balloons, and two men in a hearse who said they were from Wisconsin and had devoted their lives to checking out stories of possible abductions by UFOs, of which poor little Jenny might be an example.

Diane knew why she'd baked the pie, of course. She just wouldn't quite admit it to herself.

All morning she fussed with the preparation —flour felt good on the fingers, and cutting the firm red apples with a paring knife was nice crisp work—and all afternoon she'd pause in her cleaning or her laundering to put her head into the kitchen and smell the sumptuous results of her labor.

Who could resist an apple pie? Could even secretive Mindy
McCay
turn her down?

At four, Diane went into the kitchen, tugged on a huge blue oven mitt, and brought forth her triumph, a plump, crusty pie that would serve six, or two extremely hungry ten-year-olds, especially if you served cold white milk on the side.

At five-thirty, the pie having cooled sufficiently, Diane wrapped up both it and herself, and proceeded across the snowy expanse separating her house from the
McCay's
. It was dark already, with stars bright in the gray-black firmament, and the pure chill evening excited her. She would see Robert Clark at seven-thirty. She would suggest a walk. He loved lagging behind, to knock off her festive red winter cap with a soft snowball.

No sound came from the house. Deep behind the downstairs curtain a faint light burned. The upstairs was utterly dark. She knocked.

A distant dog announced the night; a car somewhere fishtailed in too-deep snow, straining for traction; and over all lay the fine gray dusk and the fragile light of stars.

The door opened.

"Hi," Jeff
McCay
said. He left the chain lock on. Almost no one in
Stoneridge
Estates had chain locks on their front doors. It was tacky, redolent of brute life in the city.

"Hi. I brought a gift for you and your family."

Dressed in white shirt and dark slacks, smelling of cigarette tobacco and whiskey, handsome Jeff looked as hapless as his wife had lately.

"I'm afraid you'll have to open the door."

"Oh. Right."

Flustered, he first closed the door, ripped back the golden chain along its train, and then flung the door open again. Behind him the living room was lost in gloom. Farther back from the kitchen, came the soft yellow electric glow Diane had seen behind the curtains.

"Is everything all right?" Diane asked.

Too quickly, he said, "Everything's fine."

"I miss seeing Jenny."

"Well, she's not…quite right yet. You know, the kidnapping and all."

With that he bent forward and took the towel-wrapped pie from her.

"My God," he said, sniffing it. "This is wonderful. Homemade?"

She laughed. "You always did like my pies."

He held the pie even closer to his nose. His eyes closed; he seemed to be in some sort of sexual ecstasy. "You don't know how good this is."

She giggled uneasily. "It's just a pie, Jeff."

"No, what it represents, I mean."

"What it represents?"

"Yes." He glanced anxiously over his shoulder. "Normalcy, I mean. Life as we used to live it."

"You mean your life is…changed now?"

But before he could answer, a sharp voice that could only be Mindy's called from upstairs, "You're letting a draft in and Jenny's getting cold! Come up here right now, Jeff."

A draft? All the way upstairs?
What a weak excuse to pull Jeff back from her,
Diane thought.

"I'm sorry, I—"

"I understand," Diane said. She almost said "Mindy and her moods," but that was too presumptuous and bitchy so she stopped herself. "Just tell me one thing, if you can?"

"If I can."

"How is Jenny?"

He began closing the door.

"Did you hear me, Jeff?"

He met her eyes briefly. "I'd better not talk about that."

"But—"

"Thank you very much for the pie, Diane. But I'd really better be going now."

And with that the door was abruptly shut, and Diane was left alone like a locked-out child there in the pink-streaked dusk, the dying sun an explosion of purple on the curve of the earth.

Upstairs, Mindy began shrieking at Jeff. Diane couldn't catch the words but she certainly understood the tone. As if a child was being chastised. Apparently Mindy treated Jeff no better than she used to treat Jenny.

Shuddering, and not quite knowing why, she set off back to her house, her footsteps crunchy in the snow that the night made dark blue.

"You haven't seen her in how long?"

"Not since the day she came back."

"They never take her out?"

"Not that I can see."

"Do they leave her alone?"

"Occasionally. Hmm," Diane said. "That's something I hadn't thought about."

"What's that?" Robert Clark asked.

Three hours after Diane took the pie over to the
McCays
', she and the Chief of police—though you'd never deduce his occupation from the dark turtleneck sweater and jeans he wore—sat in front, of the fire in Diane's place, discussing her odd visit with Jeff
McCay
.

"Why would they leave a young girl like that alone? Especially after all the traumas she had."

Firelight flashing on various corners of the darkened living room, Clark leaned forward, put another plump white marshmallow on the willow stick he'd whittled earlier, and set the willow on the edge of the grate. "Maybe they have a baby-sitter you don't know about."

"I don't think so."

"Why not?"

"Because I'd see her coming and leaving."

He smiled. "Weren't you the one who once told me how much she disliked nosy neighbors?"

She knew the heat on her cheeks was caused by more than the warmth of the fire. She laughed comfortably at herself. "Gosh, I was being a hypocrite when I gave you that speech, wasn't I?"

"That's all right. We're all hypocrites—and all busybodies. It's just human nature." He set a big, but gentle, hand on her shoulder. "Is it all right to tell you how much I'm enjoying myself?"

She set her slender hand on his. "It's fine, Robert. In fact, if you hadn't said it, I would have."

For the next few minutes, they stared without words into the lapping fire, the glowing coals pleasant and reassuring on a night of five degrees below zero, with a wind-chill factor of minus eighteen. No words were necessary. Over the past three months, Diane and Robert had had five dinner dates, Diane being careful to confine their meetings to public places, and to end them all with almost childlike pecks on Robert's cheek. Neither of them wanting to make the same mistakes they had the first few times they'd gone out. Diane told Robert the truth—that she'd been a virgin when she married her husband and, consequently, the prospect of dating, let alone going to bed with anyone, terrified her. Plus, there was the residual guilt to work through. She still was not sure if it was "proper" for her to see anyone less than a year after her husband had been buried. If Robert could accept all her anxieties and hang-ups, then she thought that going out for dinner dates made sense. If he couldn't, if he was going to push as hard as he had the first few times, then there was no sense in seeing each other because they'd both just end up frustrated and hurt. Robert accepted her terms.

Tonight was the first time she'd ever fixed a meal for them. She'd had first-date flutters all day, worrying about everything from how clean the downstairs bathroom was to the quality of the rump roast she'd bought for tonight. Fortunately, everything had turned out fine thus far.

"I have to warn you about something," Robert said.

"Oh?"

"With the wind blowing and us nice and snug in here, I may be tempted to kiss you."

She laughed. "Now, that would be a shame, wouldn't it?"

"You mean, you wouldn't mind?"

"Not if that's all it is. A kiss."

"Like this, for instance?" he said.

And then they moved to embrace each other, the rustle of clothes temporarily louder than the crackle of the fire, the warmth of her vulnerable desire temporarily warmer than even the flames.

But while she should have been enjoying the kiss, she started worrying about all the things she'd always worried about during high school and college: Was her breath all right? Was she a good kisser? Did she seem interested but not forward?

Finally, she gave in to the moment, closing her eyes, running her fingers through the back of his hair, and letting him put his tongue in her mouth at least briefly.