Strangers (27 page)

“Just teasing,” Jorja confirmed.

“Oh, no, I’m not!” Kara Persaghian said. She came through the doorway, onto the front walk, a grandmotherly woman in a housedress and apron. “A coal necklace…and
maybe
a set of matching coal earrings.”

Marcie giggled again.

Kara was not Marcie’s aunt, merely her after-school babysitter. Marcie called her “Aunt Kara” from the second week she knew her, and the sitter was obviously delighted by that affectionately bestowed honorary title. Kara was carrying Marcie’s jacket, a big coloring-book picture of Santa that they had been working on for a few days, and a plate of cookies. Jorja gave the picture and jacket to Marcie, accepted the cookies with expressions of gratitude and with some chatter about diets, and then Kara said, “Jorja, could I speak with you a moment—just the two of us?”

“Sure.” Jorja sent Marcie to the car with the cookies and turned inquisitively to Kara. “It’s about…Marcie. What’s she done?”

“Oh, nothing bad. She’s an angel, that one. Couldn’t misbehave if she tried. But today…well, she was talking about how the thing she wants most for Christmas is that Little Ms. Doctor play kit—”

“It’s the first time she’s ever really
nagged
me about a toy,” Jorja said. “I don’t know why she’s obsessed with it.”

“She talks about it every day. You are getting it for her?”

Jorja glanced at the Chevette, confirming that Marcie was out of earshot, then smiled. “Yes, Santa definitely has it in his bag.”

“Good. She’d be heartbroken if you didn’t. But the oddest thing happened today, and it made me wonder if she’d ever been seriously ill.”

“Serious illness? No. She’s an exceptionally healthy kid.”

“Never been in the hospital?”

“No. Why?”

Kara frowned. “Well, today she started talking about the Little Ms. Doctor kit, and she told me she wanted to be a doctor when she grew up because then she could treat herself when she got sick. She said she never wanted a doctor to touch her again because she was once hurt real bad by doctors. I asked her what she meant, and she got quiet for a while, and I thought she wasn’t going to answer me. Then finally, in this
very
somber
voice, she said some doctors had once strapped her down in a hospital bed so she couldn’t get out, and then they stuck her full of needles and flashed lights in her face and did all sorts of horrible things to her. She said they hurt her real bad, so she was going to become her own doctor and treat herself from now on.”

“Really? Well, it’s not true,” Jorja said. “I don’t know why she’d make up such a story. That
is
odd.”

“Oh, that’s not the odd part. When she told me all this, I was concerned. I was surprised you’d never told me. I mean, if she’d been seriously ill, I ought to’ve been told in case there was a possibility of a recurrence. So I questioned her about it—just casually, the way you coax things out of a child—and suddenly the poor little thing just
burst
into tears. We were in the kitchen, making cookies, and she started to cry…and shake. Just shaking like a leaf. I tried to calm her, but that only made her cry harder. Then she pulled away from me and ran. I found her in the living room, in the corner behind the big green Lay-Z-Boy, huddled down as if she were hiding from someone.”

“Good heavens,” Jorja said.

Kara said, “Took me at least five minutes to get her to stop crying and another ten to coax her out of her hidey-hole behind that chair. She made me promise, if those doctors ever came for her again, that I’d let her hide behind the chair and not tell them where she was. I mean, Jorja, she was in a real
state.
”

•

On the way home, Jorja said, “That was some story you told Kara.”

“What story?” Marcie asked, looking straight ahead, barely able to see over the dashboard.

“That story about the doctors.”

“Oh.”

“Being strapped in bed. Why’d you make up a thing like that?”

“It’s true,” Marcie said.

“But it isn’t.”

“Yes, it is.” The girl’s voice was little more than a whisper.

“The only hospital you were ever in was the one where you were born, and I’m
sure
you don’t remember that.” Jorja sighed. “A few months ago we had a little talk about fibbing. Remember what happened to Danny Duck when he fibbed?”

“The Truth Fairy wouldn’t let him go to the woodchuck’s party.”

“That’s right.”

“Fibbing’s bad,” Marcie said softly. “Nobody likes fibbers—’specially not woodchucks and squirrels.”

Disarmed, Jorja had to bite back a laugh and struggle to keep a stern tone in her voice. “
Nobody
likes fibbers.”

They stopped at a red traffic light, but Marcie still looked straight ahead, refusing to meet Jorja’s eyes. The girl said, “It’s ’specially bad to fib to your mommy or your daddy.”

“Or to
anyone
who cares about you. And making up stories to scare Kara—that’s the same as fibbing.”

“Wasn’t tryin’ to scare her,” Marcie said.

“Trying to get sympathy, then. You were never in a hospital.”

“Was.”

“Oh, yeah?” Marcie nodded vigorously, and Jorja said, “When?”

“Don’t ’member when.”

“You don’t remember, huh?”

“Almost.”

“Almost isn’t good enough. Where was this hospital?”

“I’m not sure. Sometimes…I ’member it better than other times. Sometimes I can hardly ’member it at all, and sometimes I ’member it real good, and then I…I get scared.”

“Right now you don’t remember too well, huh?”

“Nope. But today I ’membered real good…and scared myself.”

The traffic light changed, and Jorja drove in silence, wondering how best to handle the situation. She had no notion what to make of it. It was foolish ever to believe that you understood your child. Marcie had always been able to surprise Jorja with actions, statements, big ideas, musings, and questions that seemed not to have come from within herself but which it seemed she had carefully selected from some secret book of startling behavior that was known to all kids but not to adults, some cosmic volume perhaps titled
Keeping Mom and Dad Off-Balance.

As if she had just dipped into that book again, Marcie said, “Why were all Santa Claus’s kids deformed?”

“What?”

“Well, see, Santa and Mrs. Claus had a whole bunch of kids, but all of them was
elves.
”

“The elves aren’t their children. They work for Santa.”

“Really? How much does he pay ’em?”

“He doesn’t pay them anything, honey.”

“How do they buy food, then?”

“They don’t have to buy anything. Santa gives them all they need.” This was certainly the last Christmas that Marcie would believe in Santa; nearly all of her classmates were already doubters. Recently, she had been asking these probing questions. Jorja would be sorry to see the fantasy
disproved, the magic lost. “The elves are part of his family, honey, and they work with him simply for the love of it.”

“You mean the elves are adopted? So Santa doesn’t have real kids of his own? That’s sad.”

“No, ’cause he’s got all the elves to love.”

God, I love this kid, Jorja thought. Thank you, God. Thank you for this kid, even if I did have to get tied up with Alan Rykoff to get her. Dark clouds and silver linings.

She turned into the two-lane driveway that encircled Las Huevos Apartments and parked the Chevette in the fourth carport. Las Huevos. The Eggs. After five years in the place, she still couldn’t understand why anyone would name an apartment complex The Eggs.

The instant the car stopped, Marcie was out of it with the poster from the coloring book and the plate of cookies, dashing up the walkway to their entrance. The girl had deftly changed the subject just long enough to finish the ride and escape from the confines of the car.

Jorja wondered if she should press the issue further. It was Christmas Eve, and she had no desire to spoil the holiday. Marcie was a good kid, better than most, and this business about being hurt by doctors was an extremely rare instance of fabrication. Jorja had made the point that fibbing was not acceptable, and Marcie had understood (even if she had persisted a bit with her medical fantasy), and her sudden change of subject had probably been an admission of wrongdoing. So it was an aberration. Nothing would be gained by harping on it, especially not at the risk of ruining Christmas.

Jorja was confident she would hear no more about it.

5

Laguna Beach, California

During the afternoon, Dominick Corvaisis must have read the unsigned typewritten note a hundred times:

In addition to the letter’s lack of signature and return address, the postmark on the plain white envelope was double-struck and badly smeared, so he could not determine whether it had been mailed in Laguna Beach or from another city.

After he paid for his breakfast and left The Cottage, he sat in his car, the copy of
Twilight in Babylon
forgotten on the seat beside him,
and read the note half a dozen times. It made him so nervous that he withdrew a pair of Valiums from his jacket pocket and almost took one without water. But as he put the tablet to his lips, he hesitated. To explore all the ramifications of the note, he would need a clear mind. For the first time in weeks, he denied himself chemical escape from his anxieties; he returned the Valium to his pocket.

He drove to South Coast Plaza, a huge shopping mall in Costa Mesa, to buy some last-minute Christmas gifts. In each store he visited, while he waited for the clerks to gift-wrap his purchases, he took the curious message from his pocket and read it again and again.

For a while Dom had wondered if the note had come from Parker, if perhaps the artist had sent it to jolt him and intrigue him and propel him out of his drug-induced haze. Parker might be capable of such highly theatrical, amateur psychotherapy. But finally Dom dismissed that idea. Machiavellian maneuvers were simply not aspects of the painter’s personality. He was, in fact, almost excessively forthright.

Parker was not the author of the note, but he was certain to have some original speculations about who might be behind it. Together, they might be able to decide just how the arrival of this letter changed things and how they ought to proceed.

Later, back in Laguna, when Dom was within a block of Parker’s house, he was suddenly shaken by a previously unconsidered, profoundly troubling possibility. This new idea was
so
disconcerting that he pulled the Firebird to the curb and stopped. He got the note from his pocket, read it again, fingered the paper. He felt cold inside. He looked into the reflection of his own eyes in the rearview mirror, and he did not like what he saw.

Could he have written the note himself?

He could have composed it on the Displaywriter while asleep. But it was outlandish to suppose he’d dressed, gone to the mailbox, deposited the note, returned home, and changed into pajamas again without waking up. Impossible. Wasn’t it? If he had done such a thing, his mental imbalance was worse than he had thought.

His hands were clammy. He blotted them on his trousers.

Only three people in the world were aware of his sleepwalking: himself, Parker Faine, and Dr. Cobletz. He had already eliminated Parker. Dr. Cobletz had certainly not sent the note. So if Dom himself had not sent it—who had?

When he pulled away from the curb at last, he did not continue to Parker’s house but headed home instead.

Ten minutes later, in his study, he took the by-now rumpled note from his pocket. He typed those two sentences, which appeared on the
Displaywriter’s dark screen in glowing green letters. Then he switched on the printer and instructed the computer to produce a hard copy of the document. He watched as it hammered out those twenty-three words.

The Displaywriter came with two printwheels in two typefaces. He had bought two more to provide options for different tasks. Now, Dom used the three additional printwheels to produce a total of four copies of the note, and with a pencil he labeled each according to the style of type used for it:
PRESTIGE ELITE, ARTISAN 10, COURIER 10, LETTER GOTHIC
.

He smoothed out the original rumpled note and placed each of the copies beside it for comparison. He hoped to eliminate all four type styles that he possessed, disproving the theory that he had sent the note to himself. But the Courier 10 appeared to be a perfect match.

That did not conclusively prove he’d written the note. In offices and homes all over the country, there must be millions of printwheels and printer elements in the Courier face.

He compared the paper of the original note to that of the copy he had made. They were both twenty-pound, 8½ x 11, standard products sold under a dozen labels in thousands of stores in all fifty states. Neither sheet was of sufficient quality to contain fibers. Dom held them up to the light and saw that neither page featured a mill seal or brand-name watermark, which might have proven that the original note had not been typed on paper from his own stock.

He thought: Parker, Dr. Cobletz, and me. Who else could know?

And what was the note trying to tell him, exactly? What secret was buried in his past? What suppressed trauma or forgotten event lay at the root of his somnambulism?

Sitting at his desk, staring at the night beyond the big window, straining blindly toward understanding, he grew tense. Again, he felt a need for Valium, almost a craving, but he resisted.

The note engaged his curiosity, logic, and reason. He was able to focus his intellect on the search for a solution and concentrate with an intensity of which he had not been capable recently, and thus he found the will power to forsake the solace of tranquilization.

He was beginning to feel good about himself for the first time in weeks. In spite of the helplessness in which he had been wallowing, he now realized that, after all, he still had the power to shape and direct the course of his own life. All he had needed was something like the note, something tangible on which he could focus.