Babysitter, page 12
“Please tell me who you are,” Jenny pleaded again. “Please.”
Without warning, hands were on her, hands she at first mistook for human as they clamped on her shoulders and pulled her forward.
But when she reached out her own hand to touch it, she felt nothing, air, a wisp of cold wind. Her mind ran rampant.
Jenny screamed.
It did no good.
The hands dragged her forward.
Chapter Five
1
There was a family joke about three-year-old Annie Stover. The joke was about her bladder and her frequent nighttime trips to the bathroom. “Six and counting,” her mother always laughed. Then six-year-old Hedley would laugh, and then Daddy would laugh, too.
Suddenly, confined by the swirl of sheets pulling at her like a whirlpool, Annie was awake. Rubbing her eyes and trying to figure out what had awakened her. Because, for once, she didn’t need to pee.
Moonlight through the French windows lent everything in her room the kind of deep shadows Annie associated with the scary movies Hedley always liked to watch on HBO. Annie looked around the room, hoping it would soon appear more familiar and reassuring.
Then she heard the sound again and knew at once it was the same sound that had awakened her.
She wondered what the sound was. She knew what it sounded like . . . like a chant without pause.
The room a bit less ominous now, Annie set one foot that tingled with sleep to the floor. She smacked her lips, realizing how thirsty she was. She needed a glass of water. She set her second foot to the floor and stood there in the moonlight, letting the silver wash spread a curious warmth through her pink cotton pajamas.
A minute later she eased open her door and peered out into the hallway. Even with the best of babysitters, she never felt comfortable when Mom and Dad were gone. But maybe they were home now. Maybe it was one of the impossible-to-imagine times, such as 3:00 or 4:00 A.M., and maybe Mom and Dad were asleep in their bed right down the hall.
But somehow she thought not.
The silence struck her as odd, and so did the fact that no lights burned downstairs.
Wouldn’t the babysitter be reading or eating a sandwich or something?
Annie ventured out into the hallway. Sweat began to paste her pajama top to her back. Now she did have to go to the bathroom.
She walked down the hall to the master bedroom, her bare feet feeling at intervals the smooth luxury of real Persian rugs. She opened the door wide. Shadows played across the white expanse of the bed. The empty bed.
Mom and Dad weren’t home.
Her tiny hand still on the big silver doorknob, she re-shut the door and went back down the hall to the bathroom.
The toilet seat, because of the air-conditioning, was cold on her bottom. She had a quick, good pee and felt much better afterwards.
While she was washing her hands, and reaching up for a towel, she heard the sound again.
The chanting.
She ran to the hallway, hands dripping soap, and listened.
Now it sounded like breathing, the heavy, almost painful way Dad had sounded when his bronchial condition acted up last winter.
But it couldn’t have been Daddy breathing. Daddy wasn’t here.
Ducking back into the bathroom, she dried off her hands, reached up on tiptoe to turn off the light, and then went back out to the hallway.
Instinctively, she began moving toward Hedley’s room. Even if the sound wasn’t coming from Hedley’s bed, Annie planned to tell her older sister just how weird everything was all of a sudden—the lights off downstairs; the chanting noise up here—so Hedley could reassure her that everything was going to be all right.
Hedley’s door was closed.
Annie moved up to it, put both hands on the knob, and with her whole body pushed in.
As soon as she’d done so, she knew exactly where the sound was coming from.
Here.
Hedley’s bed was around the corner of the room, away from the windows and sunlight that Hedley hated early in the morning. Consequently, Annie could not see her bed from here. But she certainly could hear the chanting. Without knowing why, Annie was afraid to go any farther into the room.
Afraid of her own sister? God!
From here she could see the big wooden toy box with the dolls and scooters and teddy bears arrayed in a very neat line along the front of the box. Mom always called Hedley “persnickety,” meaning, as close as Annie could figure out, that she got real mad if anything got out of place. She sure could get mad at Annie, anyway, when Annie messed up something in Hedley’s room.
“Hedley.”
No answer.
“Hedley.”
No answer.
Annie could never remember hearing the house so quiet. Now, as if somebody had been caught doing something they weren’t supposed to, now even the chanting stopped.
There wasn’t even the blowing noise of the air conditioner.
“Hedley. It’s me. Annie. Are you over there?” Nothing.
“Hedley.”
Annie took two steps toward the sharp angle of corner silhouetted in front of her. If she could get close enough to the corner and just sort of peer around it, then maybe she wouldn’t have to go all the way over to Hedley’s bed. She had convinced herself that the trouble was simple enough: Hedley was asleep and not able to hear Annie. But when Annie got to the edge of the corner and called her name, Hedley would wake up for sure.
Annie flattened herself against the wall, the way she’d seen private detectives do on those shows that Daddy always liked, and inched her way up to the end of the wall so she could peek around. The only other time her heart had ever beat this quickly was when Hedley had accidentally locked her in the basement and Annie, after an hour of yelling, had become convinced that she would never be found, and that at night monsters of various types would appear from the shadows and eat her.
Now, it was time.
She stood there, and all she had to do was just kind of turn her face to the left and take a quick glance back and then she’d be able to see that sleepyhead Hedley was in bed, and probably snoring, and that was why she hadn’t answered Annie.
Annie turned and looked and started screaming immediately.
She also began running as fast as she could out of Hedley’s room, tripping once over the hooked rug by the walk-in closet and banging her knee hurtfully, but not slowing down much at all.
She couldn’t stop screaming.
Couldn’t.
She ran down the long, curving staircase into the deep ocean of blackness below. When she reached the massive front door, she continued screaming, but now she was also sobbing, because now she had some sense of what had happened to her sister Hedley in her bedroom upstairs.
Annie got the door open and almost hurled herself out into the night.
She went straight for the huge oak that sat on the crest of the hill upon which their house had been built. She knelt by the oak and clung to it with outstretched hands, as if it were all the mommies and daddies in the world, because after what she had seen, it would take that many mommies and daddies to make her terrifying thoughts go away.
She had no idea where she could go next.
All she knew for sure was that nobody was ever going to get her to go back into that house.
Ever.
2
Glen Stover had been stopped once for drunk driving and he had been damned mad about it, pointing out to the arresting officer (a kid with freckles and braces!) that his name was Glen Stover, that Stover’s father built not only the hospital, but the football stadium and the Vietnam memorial in the center of City Park, and the fastest way to get in trouble in this town was to fuck with anybody who possessed, by blood or ceremony, the name Stover.
Seemingly untroubled, the kid (Stover wondered if he even had to shave yet) wiped sweat off his palms, leaned into the Caddy, jerked the keys from the steering post, and escorted Glen Stover first to the squad car and then to the county jail.
All kinds of hell was raised right after dawn, but until dawn Glen Stover had resided in the drunk tank with two of the most brutish men he’d ever seen, day laborer buddies who each had HATE tattooed on their knuckles, and who picked on Stover unmercifully all night. The funny thing was, though, the Chief did drop the charges, but he didn’t offer any apology for what the kid had done. About the only thing he did offer was a warning, sounding like a frigging auto safety commercial on TV. “Glen,” he said, “just about the most useless way you or your kids can die is to have some fucking drunk run into you.” He’d even waggled a finger. “Now the next g.d. time one of my officers catches you drunk behind the wheel, I’m really going to come down on you. You understand?”
Except for his father, nobody had ever talked this way to Glen Stover before. He found the man’s temper and sincerity fascinating in a weird way. Damn, but that guy had been mad.
Glen recalled all this as he drove approximately ten miles below the speed limit on the way back to his house. He still had vague intentions of seeing if the babysitter might be induced to join him in a little harmless sex, though by now his ardor had cooled, and his memory of spitting on the portrait of his brother had come to sicken him. There were times in his life when he saw exactly what a spoiled shit he was, and then for a time he would be better. Even drunk, he was going through one of those periods of remorse now, and thinking what a fine good woman he’d married, and what a terrible bastard he’d been to her.
He didn’t notice the car following him closely. Not for the first five miles anyway. He sat in an exaggeratedly straight way behind the wheel, his hands locked like vises onto the sculptured blue steering wheel. He kept staring at the speedometer. Although he knew that one sure way to spot a drunk was to look for any cars that were just putting along—though he knew this, he figured overcompensating would help. He didn’t know what else to do.
And suddenly he felt lost and alone, a man who now wanted nothing more than his own bed, where he could sleep off the booze and the venom.
The car forcing him off the road and into the curb was the damnedest thing he’d ever seen. It came swooping up, started to pass him, and then crowded right into a concrete gutter running along the west phalanx of Brady’s Golf Course.
Not until she came up to the Caddy, opened the door and edged him into the passenger’s seat, did he recognize his wife Marietta.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Now, Glen, what do you think? I borrowed Trish James’s car and came after you. She said she could catch a ride.” She sounded very calm and very sensible as she pulled the Caddy away from the curb, leaving the James’s car locked for the night. “You may not remember, but Chief Carella called me the morning we had to come down and get you. He told me what would happen to you next time.” She looked over at him, the moonlight and the dashboard light painting the lovely bones of her face with an odd burnished color. She was stunning, and in that moment he knew that he still loved her, however many times he’d strayed, however many times he’d been such a shit.
He said, “I know what you say about people who make pledges when they’re drunk.”
She glanced over at him and smiled. God, did she have a great smile. “Good, dear. I’m glad you remember.”
“But I want to make one.”
“A pledge?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I suppose, you being bigger than me, I really couldn’t stop you.”
“Good.”
“But that doesn’t mean I’ll listen.”
“Thanks.”
“Or take you seriously even if I do listen.”
“Great.”
“But that shouldn’t stop you. I mean, we’re just riding along, you may as well make a pledge. There really isn’t anything else to do.”
She was teasing him the way she used to when they’d first started going out, and God he’d loved it then. Nothing in his life had ever made him feel as important as her teasing. Somehow her wry words were proof that she loved him, better than ten thousand I-love-yous. He’d loved her teasing then and he loved it now.
“I’ve been a shit.”
“Oh, I wondered if it wasn’t going to be that one.”
“What?”
“The I’ve-been-such-a-shit pledge.”
He laughed. “Damn you.”
“Now there’s a friendly thing to say.”
“I just meant—”
“That you’ve been,” she said, “a terrible husband, a terrible father, and a terrible friend, and why in God’s name do you still love me, Marietta? Isn’t that how that one goes?”
He was laughing too hard to answer.
“But didn’t you leave out something? Isn’t there a sentence or two about how all this is going to change, just as soon as you wake up in the morning? Don’t I remember something like that?”
“You know I love you.”
“I know.”
“And you know I really am sorry.”
“I know.”
“And I really don’t know why you put up with me.”
“I know you don’t.”
“And I really wish there were some way I could make up for all the things I’ve done.”
“Saying you love me helps.”
“Really?”
“Really, Stover. I don’t know why myself, but I’ve never gotten tired of hearing you say it. As mad as I’ve been, as hurt as I’ve been, as disappointed as I’ve been, I guess I’ve always melted at least a little when you said it.”
“I really am going to change.”
“I know you want to.”
“I’m going to change for you.”
“You should change for yourself. I think that’s the only way those things work.”
“Then I’ll change for myself and the girls.”
“I guess they’d be worth changing for, the girls,” she said, and soft tears came into her eyes and voice. She put out her hand and he took it. Gently.
He kissed her hand.
“You haven’t done that in a long time.”
“It’s nice to know I’m not completely predictable.”
She looked at him and smiled. “Yes, I suppose it is.”
They were taking the long blacktop curve that led to their estate, a quarter mile of white pine and birch trees, the pine a spectral color now in the moonlight, the night air (he’d cracked his window some time ago) rich with heat and flowers.
“I love you,” he said again.
He said this just as Annie appeared in the headlights, her eyes wild, her nose running, and blood soaking one of her knees. Even above the thrum of the motor and the steady whoosh of the air conditioner, the Stovers could hear her screaming.
Stover was out of the car before Marietta braked to a complete stop. The taillights were blood red in the late night darkness.
3
“In 1967, a local woman killed her drunken, abusive, bastard of a husband.”
“Where did you hear about this?” Jody stifled a yawn.
“I read an article in the old newspaper morgue about it.”
Jody nodded, though she didn’t see how any of this could have anything to do with Jenny’s disappearance.
“And all through the trial, her daughter kept insisting that she was innocent. The daughter claimed she was the one who killed her father. The mother was convicted and executed but the daughter . . . that’s where the real story is.”
“What happened to her?” Sam asked, hugging herself and leaning forward.
“Well, for starters, she kept insisting that her mother was innocent, that she herself was the real killer. Finally, they had to institutionalize her. She was there for years and when they finally released her, nobody knows what happened to her. But here’s the weird thing.” He dry-swallowed dread and pressed on. “The girl spent every waking moment in the mental hospital drawing on her walls and chanting. Same thing over and over.”
Sam had the dread sense that David was about to tell her something that would forever change her perception of reality, something that would scare her down deep at her core. “God.” She hugged her mother more tightly.
“I saw what this girl drew, first in the newspaper article online. Then I saw it again, in the apartment the babysitter has been using.” David reached into his back pocket and drew out the piece of paper he had sketched the symbol on. “I saw this.”
Her eyes shimmering with tears and locked on David’s, Jody took the piece of paper from him, slowly lowering her gaze to it. With a great intake of air, she began to shake as soon as she laid eyes on it. The symbol – whatever it was called – was the same one from Jenny’s drawing. “My God!” she sobbed. “My God! This is the same symbol as the drawing that Jenny made at Dr. Peary’s office.”
David looked stricken. “Are you sure?”
“They’re identical, David.” She paused for a moment, her hand still trembling. Suddenly, her eyes shot to his and she gasped. “If we looked under Jenny’s bed right now, what do you think we’d find?”
David pulled her into his arms with a sigh. One hand held her tight, the other rubbed her back. “I’m not sure, Jody. But whatever we find, I think we have to look.” He pushed her out to arm’s length and looked deep into her eyes. Jody nodded acceptance.
“Damn right we do,” Sam said. She pushed off from the sofa and marched to Jenny’s room, one hand swiping on the light as she went.
David and Jody followed. In her whole life, Jody could never remember a time when Sam had been so strong, so self-assured, so courageous. Maybe this would be the time, the one shining moment that allowed her to kick her coke habit forever.
Without hesitating, Sam grabbed the end of the twin bed and pulled it away from the wall. When she stepped around it, bringing the floor beneath into full view, she cried out.
There, painted carefully on the floor in what seemed to be blood, was the same symbol that Jenny had drawn in Ruth Peary’s office.
Sam began to shake. Jody collapsed against David’s chest, tears soaking into his shirt.
“What does this mean?” Sam asked, her eyes searching theirs for an answer. “Did Jenny paint this here? Or did she see the babysitter, Nikki, do it? And is that blood? Whose blood?”
