Babysitter, page 14
Only gradually did she realize who it was. As the form became familiar, she pushed herself up off her haunches and began sobbing openly, happy that at least her daughter had been spared.
She put her arms out and locked Hedley tight into an embrace. She held her six-year-old daughter as if there were nothing more precious on the earth. And at the moment, nothing was.
“Oh, Hedley,” she said, there in the shadowy gloom of the second-floor landing.
She stroked her daughter’s hair and held her increasingly tighter, feeling the reassuring softness of Hedley’s body pressed against hers. “Oh, Hedley,” she said several times, seemingly incapable of saying anything more coherent or meaningful at the moment.
Finally pulling herself together, she said, “We’ve got to get the police.”
She eased herself away from Hedley and took three steps to the light switch on the landing. She turned on the light and then turned back to Hedley.
Her first impression was that Hedley had been torn up as much as her father had been. Her white pajamas were soaked with blood, and you could see purple pieces of ripped flesh clinging to various spots on her body.
It was when she saw Hedley’s eyes and fingers that Marietta knew the truth. The word shock occurred to her, but she rejected it at once. While Hedley’s blue eyes did seem removed from reality in some way, there was still in her gaze a ferocity, an anger that caused Marietta to step backwards to the wall.
The fingers told the rest of the tale. Blood, flesh, and innards like those on the floor covered and dripped from her hands. Her fingers appeared to have rended open her father’s body.
“My God,” Marietta said. “Your father—”
In a voice her mother did not recognize, a voice that belonged more properly to a sixty-year-old man, Hedley said, “I don’t want to kill you, too, Mother. Let me go. Please.”
“Go? But where?” Marietta was in shock, her mind dazed and dull. She looked down at the corpse of her husband--a fly buzzing noisily over the empty eye socket now—and then back at her daughter. As hard as she tried, Marietta could make no sense of this. None.
“Please, Mother,” Hedley said again, raising a bloody hand to indicate that she wanted to walk around her mother and down the stairs.
“Hedley, whatever happened—”
Hedley lunged at her then. The look in her eyes was not Hedley’s, for Hedley no longer existed. She had become some kind of alien animal, eyes the color of blood, mouth tight and drooling with a dark fluid, hands shaped into stubby claws.
Hedley grabbed her mother’s shoulder, ripping away the fabric of the black cocktail dress, the gesture so violent that Marietta was hurled back against the wall in the process.
“Hedley!” she called again, not knowing if she was pleading for mercy or asking her daughter to trust her mother. Probably it was both.
But Hedley had succeeded in doing what she’d wanted. She had maneuvered Marietta away from blocking the stairs. Hedley moved down them confidently, two at a time, down into the light, her auburn hair looking oddly beautiful in the glow from the chandelier.
Marietta struggled to her feet and ran after her. She was afraid that somehow Hedley would find Annie and—Reaching the front porch, Marietta paused and looked around. Her eyes had to adjust to the moonlit darkness before they were able to pick out Hedley.
The girl was going in the opposite direction from Annie, into the heavy woods to the east of the house. She certainly seemed to know just where she wanted to go.
Marietta quickly ran back upstairs to her bedroom. Tearing clothes from closet and drawers, she managed to put on a white blouse, jeans, and a pair of Nikes in less than a minute. Then, still buttoning her blouse, she ran down the stairs and back to Annie.
“You’re going to have to wait here some more, darling,” she said.
“Is Daddy all right?”
She had no choice but to lie. “Yes, he’s fine. And so is Hedley. But there’s something I have to do, so I have to have your word again that you won’t go in the house. All right?” Her words were coming out in convulsive sobs. She was icy with sweat and still vaguely nauseated from what she’d seen on the second-floor landing.
“So do you promise me?’
“I promise, Mommy,” Annie said, drawing herself into an even smaller ball on the right side of the big swing chained to the ceiling of the gazebo. Then she said, “My knee still hurts real bad.”
“When I get back, Annie, I promise you I’ll fix your knee. I promise.”
“You going to squirt me with Bactine?”
Marietta leaned forward and kissed her three-year-old on the forehead. She ran back to the house and phoned the police, trying to keep her voice steady. They would, they said, dispatch a car immediately.
Then she took off running, looking desperately for Hedley.
2
As any number of her lovers and both husbands had pointed out, Jody had never been very good at waiting for things. Once when she was a junior in college, she had feared she was pregnant. This was on a gray rainy Easter weekend. Instead of waiting till Monday and the university clinic, Jody took a 1963 Plymouth with two bad tires and only one headlight three hundred miles back home to an intern she’d dated a few times. He gave her good news (not p.g.) and then asked her out for that very same night. In gratitude Jody accepted and they ended up seeing Hang ‘em High, a Clint Eastwood movie that seemed to stir the intern up quite a lot but that left Jody vaguely depressed. There was just too much violence. She shook hands with the intern after the movie, kissed him once on the cheek, and then climbed into the Plymouth and headed back to the university in time to wear a new pastel blue suit and white pumps dyed to match to Easter Sunday services at First Presbyterian, a rather splendiferous red brick church that had the ability to make Jody feel holy. Then there was the incident of the broken window. Sometime during the malaise of her second marriage, and during the even more difficult malaise of coming to grips with her alcoholism, Jody accidentally smashed the back porch window. She felt so guilty—she’d been drinking and tripped against it and there was just no excuse for her behavior—she walked six miles to a Hardware Hank’s and back. Hubby had the only car. Hubby was off somewhere. But damned if she’d give him the satisfaction of seeing what her penchant for liquor had wrought this time.
Now, nine years later, she was waiting for word of her granddaughter Jenny, and she was no better at all at displaying patience. Not at all.
By this time she had worked out a sort of invisible path that traversed the living room eastward and then back again. Sam was still sleeping, thank God, and David Fairbain was angled boyishly in the recliner next to the end table that held the room’s most important object, the telephone.
“You could always sit down,” David said.
“Yes, I suppose I could, couldn’t I?” She hated herself when she got in these moods.
He said, “Sorry I brought it up.” Obviously, she’d hurt his feelings, just exactly what she’d both wanted to do and wanted not to do. Things could really get screwed up when you wanted to evoke two opposite responses from one person at the same time. PMS was all she could think of to explain her confusion. Jenny should never have vanished when Jody was about to start her period.
“No, David, I’m the one who’s sorry.” She paused in her pacing, looking at David across the room. “You’re such a help, and I treat you like this.”
He grinned. “Jody, you always sort of treated me like that.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Really.”
“God. Why didn’t you slap me or something?”
He sat there, a lot better-looking than he should have been at his age, and said, “I guess I thought I was in love with you, and my folks had always taught me to never slap somebody you really love.” He grinned again. “That was a joke.”
Her mind still on Jenny, she hadn’t gotten it. Now she offered a weak smile in return and said, “Maybe when this is all over, maybe then I’ll laugh.”
“We’re going to find her, Jody.”
“I know you’re just saying that. But go right ahead saying it. I mean, it sounds so good.”
“It’s the truth, Jody.”
She was about to start pacing again, but then she said, “Could I ask you to do me a favor?”
“What’s that?”
“Come over here and hug me. And I’m not being romantic, David, or coming on to you.”
“I understand, Jody. I understand.”
So he got up and came over and slid his arms around her waist and took her to him the way a parent takes a sad child, just holding her to his chest, just holding her.
She started crying, crying very softly, there against his chest, and as she did so she thought: this is the only good thing that’s happened all day, me being able to cry. Because there were times when she couldn’t cry at all. Times a coldness froze her into herself like some prehistoric animal trapped forever in ice, and only tears could melt her prison and free her.
“It was Uncle Bob’s fault,” she said suddenly and without prompting.
“What?” David pulled back and looked at her. There was a hint of boyishness in his confusion.
“The way I treated you back then. It was my Uncle Bob’s fault.” She drew a heavy sigh and pressed on. “I knew that you were hot for Lorna. I was upset. I was blabbering about it to my mom and Uncle Bob told me that the best way to make you want me was to ignore you.” She checked his face for a response.
David smiled. It was crooked and shy and made her adore him all the more. “So you liked me back then? Liked me, liked me?”
“Yes. And I did what Uncle Bob said and it didn’t work and then I didn’t know how to not do it anymore and . . .”
He kissed her then, hard and full on the mouth, with every bit of passion he could muster. It was a moment she had dreamed of a thousand times in her life, a moment she never really thought would come. She sank into arms, into his embrace. She melted.
When it was over, she felt her face reddening, her eyes burning and her head spinning. She touched one hand to her lips and looked at her feet like some giddy school girl.
She looked over at the phone and said, “I wish it would ring.”
“It’ll ring, Jody. It’ll ring,” David said softly.
“I’m just so scared for her,” Jody said. And then the tears really came.
3
At the far northern end of Winthrop stood a cemetery. It dated back to the first settlers in the area and was rumored to have been a Native American burial ground long before that. The rumors were circulated mostly by pre-teens and man-children, bent on frightening others and themselves into a good time. Representatives from several universities and historical societies had combed the place and never once had a single shred of evidence been found to support these rumors. Still, they persisted.
What the cemetery was, was a large, rambling, over-grown testament to just how much money could be spent on the afterlife. There were crypts here and huge statues. Some of the richest and most famous of Winthrop’s founders had been put to rest inside the ornate iron fence.
The back portion of the cemetery had been reserved for the poor, the lost, the unnamable. Their graves were marked with simple stones or crude wooden crosses. More often than not, they were not marked at all. It was in this bramble-covered section of the cemetery where Helen Campbell had been buried.
Her grave stood apart from the others, those empty space awaiting – it was presumed – other indigent townsfolk. Behind the grave lay the woods, tall stands of elm and fir, spotted with the occasional oak. Kudzu trailed up their trunks and made a bid for the graves but was beaten back twice a year, faithfully, by the caretaker, he of the stagger and half-full flask of whiskey.
The moon, bright as it was, cast a dismal shadow over the graves which sat at the back of the cemetery. The shrubs and branches which reached down in perpetual longing rustled now, shook and trembled. Small hands parted the branches and a girl stepped forward, her blond hair shining in the moonlight. Nikki.
In her hand she bore a package, a length of red silk wrapped tightly around its contents and shimmering in the captured light. She set it down upon the grave and glanced around. No one came to this section of the cemetery anymore, save for the caretaker – only twice a year – and even more infrequently teenagers seeking a thrill. Still, it wouldn’t do to be interrupted.
She set out the contents of her package, which number three items. There was a small bottle filled with some fluid or other and capped with an old and worn cork. There was a dagger. And there was a small spade.
From the pocket of her jeans, she produced a black candle and a box of matches. The candle, once lit, produced an ochre flame which spilled down over the headstone where the candle was perched.
Nikki began her work at once.
She chanted, softly, lest someone hear. The words were meant only for the spirits and for her grandmother who lie beneath the soil. As she chanted, she drew the tip of the dagger along the earth, making first a circle around the entire grave, then etching that familiar symbol into the center of it.
Swapping dagger for shovel, she worked at the earth with the small spade, prying it up delicately and pushing it aside. What lie beneath the sodden soil was large and Nikki lifted it in her hands, raising it slowly, reverently, to the moon.
Still she chanted. Her eyes closed then, her hands placing the skull softly on the ground before the headstone. With practiced precision, she grasped the vial, uncorking it gently and rotating the vial in a circle above the skull.
At just the right moment, with just the right words, she tilted the vial and let some of the liquid spill onto the skull. It hit with a splat and then trickled, leaving a trail of red down the sides and front.
The ground beneath her shook and so she knew she had done her work well.
Still, chanting, she placed the skull back onto her silk and re-capped the vial. The candle was blown out and all her items were wrapped tightly in the silk once more.
Then Nikki disappeared back into the woods from whence she had come.
4
“There may be some news about your granddaughter. At this point we can’t be sure, but I need to check what she was wearing again.”
Jody gave the officer on the phone a description of the clothes Jenny was wearing.
The officer said, “It could be her then. The caller wasn’t sure about the apparel, but it does sound quite a bit like your granddaughter.”
“Where was she seen?”
“Up near High Rock. You know where that is?”
“Sure. Up in the clay hills.”
“Umm-hmm. A little west of there, actually.”
“You’ve sent cars already?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
“I know it’s tempting, ma’am, but the best thing you can do is sit tight.”
Ordinarily, being called ma’am would have bothered Jody. But not now. Not tonight.
David stood next to her, tense as she was, holding one of her hands as she spoke.
“Are you going to check in pretty often?”
“As often as we can, ma’am. I can’t say when the first report will be. We’ve got several men up near the hills now.”
“Is there anything else around there these days?”
“Ma’am?”
“Anything that might attract a young girl. An amusement park, perhaps, something like that.”
“Not that I know of, ma’am.”
“Then why would she go off walking up there?”
“I’m afraid I can’t answer that, ma’am.”
She knew she was getting hysterical. There were tears in her voice. She didn’t give a damn. “Is there any average on youngsters who return?”
“Ma’am?”
“Do one out of two come back again safely?”
“Oh. I see. I’m not sure.”
“I thought I’d ask.”
“Is someone there with you, ma’am?”
“Yes. My daughter and my friend.”
“If you don’t mind my saying so, ma’am, why don’t you sit down and ask one of them to make you some tea or something.”
“I see.”
“Ma’am?”
“I meant I see what you’re saying. I’m sorry, officer, but this is difficult for me.”
“I understand, ma’am.”
“I appreciate your concern.”
“Quite all right.”
“You’ll call then?”
“The minute we get anything new.”
“Thanks, officer. Thanks very much.”
“You just sit down and let your daughter and your friend help you through this. All right?”
“Yes.”
Jody hung up, slipping her hand out of David’s, going over to the fabric-bare couch and sitting in the far corner all by herself. She began sobbing without any warning at all. David came over and was about to sit down with her but she waved him away. He went over by the television and stood watching her. She continued to cry like this for five minutes. David stared down at the TV screen occasionally, watching the images change from sitcom stars to local news anchors.
She got up as abruptly as she’d sat down. She said not a word to him. She went into the kitchen and flipped the overhead light inside of which were encased perhaps two million dead mosquitoes and moths. She took the Have A Good Day pad that had been magnetically affixed to the freezer part of the refrigerator and wrote a note to Sam.
She tore the note from the pad with a real ferocity. She handed it over her shoulder where she knew David to be. “Would you read that for me and tell me if it’s clear?”
“Sure.”
He read it and handed it back. “As a bell,” he said. “But I’m not sure it’s the right thing.”
“I didn’t ask you to go along.”
“No, but I’m going anyway.”
