Babysitter, page 13
Jody went to her, enfolding her in her arms and stroking the back of her head. It was an instinctive move, perhaps the only one she’d ever experienced. “We don’t know what it means, hon. Or who put it there. But let’s not jump to conclusions, ok? Let’s go sit down and have a soda and think this through.”
David Fairbain eagerly shared with them everything he’d discovered both on the internet and in the files of the local police.
“So, after they released this girl, they have no idea what happened to her? Aren’t there supposed to be checks in place for this kind of thing? I mean, how could they just lose track of a mentally deranged girl?” Sam’s eyes blazed, her face was red. Jody had never seen her this worked up over anything.
David again shook his head. “That’s just it. Nobody knows for sure. Some people who knew Mary felt that she probably went west to Wyoming, where she had relatives. But others insisted that she stayed around here, back up in the hills, and took up where she left off with her interest in the occult.” He paused. “It was a few months after her release that things started happening to young girls.”
“What sort of things?” Sam asked. Obviously, she had started worrying about Jenny again. She was biting her nails with ferocity. Every few moments, her left hand would twitch.
David looked at Jody. “You know what happened to Lorna Daily?”
Jody nodded.
“Things like that.” He turned to Sam. “A young girl would seem perfectly normal one moment, then the next she would be attacking people. Really violently. The police as long ago as 1970 began to see a pattern in all this, so they’ve kept all the information in a single file. When you see that maybe as many as five girls have been affected by this—lost their minds literally—you see how ominous it is.”
“But what does that symbol mean?” Jody asked.
“I’m not sure. I found lots of examples on the internet, but no one seems to know precisely what it’s for. I do know that it was found under the bed of a young girl who killed her entire family.”
“And you think this has happened to Jenny?” Sam was up on her feet. She was also practically shouting.
Jody got up and took her daughter in her arms. “Honey, listen, please. We don’t have any proof that the same thing has happened to Jenny.”
David said, “Sam, why don’t you let me call your doctor and see if giving you another sleeping pill would be all right.”
Sam began crying. “But I want to know where Jenny is.” She sounded frenzied. “I want to know where my little girl is.”
“Come on, honey, come on now,” Jody said. She nodded to David. He went into the kitchen to use the phone.
After a few minutes, Sam lay down on her mussed bed. Jody went over and closed the drapes. The moonlight seemed unnaturally bright tonight. Sam lay with her robe off, just in white panties and a bra. She made a sound not unlike a moan.
“Mom, you really think she’s going to be all right?”
“Yes, honey, I really do.”
“You don’t think there’s any connection between what David found out and—”
“Honey, David didn’t find out anything except about a few coincidental occurrences, and we don’t even know for sure those actually took place. Even David said that most of the things said about those other girls were rumors.”
“But that occult symbol, the drawing she made—”
Jody leaned forward and wiped a thin layer of perspiration from Sam’s head. “Millions of people are interested in the occult. And in a town this size, I doubt it’s all that uncommon for five girls to have mental problems from 1967 till now.”
“You really mean that?”
“Sure, I do, honey.” Jody felt guilty about lying so glibly, but for now she had but one task. To get her daughter to sleep.
A minute later, David arrived with a small glass of water and two yellow tablets. “The doctor said Sam could take both of these as a matter of fact.”
“Thanks, David,” Jody said, taking the water and pills and handing them to Sam.
When Sam was finished with the water, she lay back, and Jody began stroking her forehead again. Hundreds of memories numbed Jody—Sam at First communion, Sam winning the fourth grade spelling bee, Sam’s first ninth-grade dance and the blue gardenia corsage. Jody wished there were some way to tell her troubled child just how much she really loved her, but any attempt to express it in words was doomed to a few clichés and nothing more.
Sam must have wanted badly to sleep, because she gave herself over to the pills very quickly. Within ten minutes, small soft snores came from between her lips, and a well-shaped arm dangled from the bed.
Jody stood by the bed, glad that David had taken the liberty of putting his arm around her shoulder. Jody broke away to kiss Sam good night.
Back in the living room, Jody said, “I wanted you to be truthful with Sam. Now I don’t know if that was a good idea.”
“She’d have to know eventually.”
Jody eyed him curiously. “Know what?”
David sighed. “Jody, you know damn well what. And you also know damn well what’s going on around here. You remember Lorna Daily.”
The name chilled Jody. She thought again of the beautiful young girl who had savagely attacked her parents, and then only a few days later attacked and eaten a neighborhood dog. “Yes,” she said. “I remember Lorna.”
“The police have her on their records.”
“Lorna?”
“Yes.”
“And you really think Jenny—?”
“I can’t be sure, but the pattern is sure the same. A babysitter in the previous forty-eight hours, a brief disappearance, and then a return home where they begin to exhibit really psychotic behavior.”
“But we don’t know that any of that will happen.”
“No, we don’t. Not for sure.”
“But you think it will?”
“I think it’s a possibility.”
“God,” Jody said, sounding devastated by his words. “What can we do?”
“Find out what’s going on. What’s really going on.”
“And how do we do that?”
“Find the babysitter.”
“But how?”
“That’s the hell of it,” David Fairbain said. “I don’t have any idea.”
4
In the white blast of the Cadillac’s headlights, Glen Stover hugged his three-year-old daughter Annie, lifting her into his arms.
“It’s all right, baby, it’s all right,” he said, sober now as he stroked her blonde hair. Her pink pajamas were torn and filthy, her backside soaked through with sweat. He could smell and feel the fact that she’d wet herself. Her face was covered with harsh red insect bites.
Marietta ran from the car to where they stood, just on the peak of the small hillock overlooking the large stone manor house below. The house, suspiciously, sat in complete darkness. She threw her arms around her husband and child, collecting them into a tight, protective circle.
“Honey, where’s your sister and the babysitter?”
But for the moment all Annie could do was sob so violently that it was terrifying for both her parents to watch.
“Let’s get her back to the house,” Glen Stover said. But at that suggestion, Annie began to cry even more furiously.
Frightened now, his mind attacking itself with images of all the fates that could have befallen his older daughter, Glen eased Annie’s rigid body into Marietta’s arms. “I’ll go ahead,” he said. “See where Hedley is.”
Marietta, above Annie’s tears, said, “The house is dark. Be careful.”
Glen nodded, then started down the narrow dirt path that wound up at the manor home’s back door. The night smelled of mint and his own sweat; of impending rain and the Scotch he’d been drinking. The path was pebbled. Twice he nearly fell. He would no longer permit his mind to conjure dire fates for Hedley. He refused to believe that she wasn’t inside, and safe.
As he ran, he realized his age and his lack of conditioning. He panted like a dog. He was very thirsty, too.
At the back door, nearly stumbling over a wrapped green snake of garden hose the maintenance man had mistakenly left out today, Glen didn’t bother to fumble for his keys. He took off his jacket, wrapped it around his fist, and smashed through a pane of back door glass. He reached in, snapped the deadbolt, and proceeded inside.
Instantly, he knew something was wrong. “Hedley!” he called out. There was no answer. He hadn’t really expected one.
As he penetrated deeper into the house, he flipped on lights. The vast house quickly shone with its usual splendor. The three-hundred-year-old Flemish brass chandelier, refitted for electricity, looked almost startling.
He put a hand on the banister, looking at the silken sweep of mahogany that vanished in the shadows of the second floor. A strangeness had settled on the house, one he could not account for, but one that made him feel as if he had mistakenly entered someone else’s home.
He called Hedley’s name again and went up the stairs, two at a time, panting even more than before.
When he reached the landing, he felt for a light switch on the west wall. From the shadowy glow of a nearby window, he saw his own silhouette—gigantic and menacing—lean in to flip the switch on. Then the shadow was gone and he was looking at rose patterns in the wallpaper surrounding the light switch.
He started his search of all the rooms on the second floor.
In the first three—Annie’s, the sewing room, the girls’ bathroom—he found nothing untoward. Annie’s room was a triumph of disorganization and clutter. Hedley’s would be completely different. He allowed himself a momentary smile as he thought of how dissimilar his two girls were.
The library yielded nothing, either. He had begun to wonder frantically if the babysitter might not have been a kidnapper in disguise. He cursed himself for even thinking of having sex with the girl. With Annie in shock and Hedley nowhere to be found, he felt as if his lust had betrayed everything he had ever held dear.
In Hedley’s room, he found a mussed bed and a clean, orderly hymn to tidiness. He found no trace of his daughter.
He leaned down to the light blue percale sheet and touched it with his fingers. He felt, or imagined he did, the last fading heat of where Hedley had lain. Terror and rage choked in his throat and his eyes watered over with tears.
When it happened, he was just turning to go back to the hallway and resume his search.
She appeared with no warning whatsoever—no grunt, no quick intake of breath—she simply dove at him and he did not have time to register the sight his eyes tried to deny. He just stood there, unable to move.
Finally, having calmed her some, Marietta sat Annie against the base of an oak tree. She had tried three times to take the girl down the path to the great stone house, but Annie refused.
“It’s still in there, Mom,” Annie said, her tears giving way now to hiccups and sharp but fewer sobs.
“What’s in there, dear?”
“You know.”
“No, I don’t know.”
“It must’ve been in there all along.”
Marietta sighed, kneeling closer to her daughter. “Do you know where Hedley is?”
Annie looked up with large, forlorn eyes and said, “The thing in her room. It got her.”
Marietta could not help herself. The way Annie spoke, so deliberately and melodramatically, like a heroine in a bad science fiction movie, Marietta had to smile.
“Now, Annie,” she said after thirty seconds. “I want you to think very hard.”
“All right.”
“Where did the babysitter go?”
“I don’t know, Mom, honest. When I woke up—” The tears were coming back.
Showing an impatience that was not customary, nor very helpful to Annie—an impatience she was immediately ashamed of—she said in the most reasonable manner she could summon, “Annie, I need you to do something for me.”
“Do what?”
“I need you to act like a big girl. Do you know how you always say that you wish you were a big girl like Hedley?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, now’s your chance to show me.”
“What do I have to do?”
“You have to let me stand up, and then you have to stand up, so I can put you in my arms and take you down the path to the house.”
“I’m afraid.”
“I know you’re afraid, Annie. But I won’t let anything happen to you. I promise.”
“It’s still down there.”
“Please be a big girl, Annie.”
“Can you go down here, and I’ll just wait for you and Daddy?”
“I’ve thought about that, but it’s not a good idea to leave you alone.”
“Is Daddy in the house?”
“Yes. And he’s waiting for us. Look down the hill, Annie. Look at all the lights.”
Annie had thus far carefully avoided looking at the manor house. “Are the lights on?”
“Yes, Annie. See for yourself”
“All the lights?”
“Most of the lights, Annie. Most of them. Please take a look.”
Slowly, almost ponderously, Annie turned around and stared back down the hill, rubbing a pajama sleeve against her runny nose as she moved. “The lights are on.”
“That’s what I said, dear. The lights are on.”
“And Daddy’s in there?”
“Yes, Daddy’s in there.”
“Do you think it would stay with the lights on?”
Marietta had decided to attribute some of her daughter’s words to a nightmare. Something had definitely happened here, but probably not what Annie hinted at. “No, I don’t think it would stay with the lights on.”
“You promise?”
“Yes, I promise.” With that, she leaned in and pressed a clean handkerchief from her purse to the cut on Annie’s leg.
“You won’t let anything happen?”
“No, dear. I’ve already explained—” Her patience was being tried again. No matter how much you love a child—
She was just putting on her best patient-mommy face when the screaming started from the stone house down below. She turned around just as Annie had done and stared down at the house.
“See, Mommy,” Annie said. “It’s still there, just like I told you.”
Chapter Six
1
“Now I want you to stay right here.”
“Yes, Mommy.”
“No matter what you hear from inside the house, stay right here.”
“Yes, Mommy.” Pause. “Mommy, I don’t want to go in there anyway.”
Marietta leaned over and kissed Annie. She sat her daughter in the swing seat of the gazebo, a sentimental touch her husband had added to the grounds the year she turned forty. The gazebo smelled woody from the hard rains of the past few days, and the flowers around it—Russian Sage, Live-Forever Sedums, and Balloon Flowers—joined in lending the night a rich, sweet nostalgia. They should be roasting wieners over a fire instead of—
“Just don’t move from here,” Marietta said emphatically. There was no other choice but to leave Annie here.
God only knew what Marietta would find inside. There had not been a scream for a minute now.
“Yes, Mommy,” Annie said, pulling her injured leg up closer to her and grimacing in the process.
Marietta had already taken off her pumps. It was like her to set them down—even in the midst of all the screaming—carefully by the rock garden so she would remember where to find them. She hated that side of herself.
Pebbles on the path chewed at her feet like tiny fish. A jogger, she easily reached the house and entered it within thirty seconds, calling out her husband’s name, hearing only her own echoes in return.
She ran into the living room, bumping against a sharp-edged coffee table, and cursing about it. She almost never cursed. She went through the first floor flipping on lights and moving her eyes around like a security camera, looking for any trace of Glen or Hedley. Aside from a messy sink—a red Jeno’s pizza carton resting on the counter—there was no evidence that anybody had been in the house tonight.
Turning her thoughts to upstairs, her fear became almost unbearable. If they were upstairs—and where else could they be?—and hadn’t answered any of her calls . . .
Glen kept a pistol somewhere, but right now she wasn’t sure where. From a kitchen drawer she took a formidable butcher knife—the same one Glen usually used on Thanksgiving and Christmas—and went back through the house to the staircase.
Swallowing hard, keeping the knife straight out in front of her, she started up the stairs, one careful step after another. She stopped once, thinking she had heard a muffled cry somewhere in the darkness of the second floor. Then she decided it had been the sound of a barn owl, that high peculiar bleating only a barn owl makes, and she went on.
She found him right at the head of the steps.
Not even in the grisliest supermarket tabloids had she ever seen anything like this.
Glen lay sprawled and broken, as if he had been dropped from a great height. His right arm was flung backwards over his left shoulder. His right eye rested like a plump blue bug on the edge of his forehead, the eye slowly sliding off, leaving a trail of slick white pus behind.
The rest of him looked even worse. His heart had been ripped out, leaving a bloody hole, dark and forbidding. His innards had been torn out, too, and now lay in a steaming heap on the floor next to him. They looked as if he had vomited them up.
But always her glance went back, however unwillingly, to the empty socket of his eye. It was so violent a wound, so overwhelming an outrage, that it momentarily killed all fight in her. She couldn’t even scream. She leaned back against the wall and began sliding down. She made a small, frail sound, not unlike the one the barn owl had made earlier.
Then she looked up as she heard a noise down the hall. The noise had been the unmistakable one of a human footstep on oaken floor. Since the only light came up from the floor below, she raised her eyes and tried to give shape to somebody moving toward her, coming out of the long dark tunnel of the hallway.
