Babysitter, page 2
Then Jody didn’t cry any more.
She looked at the crude pencil drawing and did something very different.
She shuddered.
Chapter One
1
Jody had never been in a psychologist’s office before, not unless you counted that marriage counselor she’d seen at the time of her first divorce, the balding, chunky man with the big rings and the head shaved shiny like Telly Savalas, the man eager to part her legs as soon as Jody parted company with her first husband.
Or had that been her second divorce?
“And your relationship to Jenny, Mrs. Wagner?”
“Grandmother.” She leaned over and patted the knee of her granddaughter Jenny.
The shrink, a pleasant-looking woman, seemed surprised. “But you look so young?”
Jody smiled. “I thank you for that. But I’m actually forty-nine. I have a twenty-eight-year-old daughter tamed Samantha, and two ex-husbands who probably don’t speak very well of me.” She tried to continue the smile, but by the time she got to the part about the two ex-husbands, her voice became gritty with cigarettes (though she was proud to say she smoked her last Merit eighteen months ago) and alcohol (even prouder to say that she’d had her last drink ten years ago). She smiled over at Jenny again.
They were in one of those bland modern offices, all done in dead proper earth tones and filled with new but impersonal furniture, stuff you might buy at Sears on time. The air smelled of a Mr. Coffee working very hard on a narrow stand across the room. The nicest thing about the office was the big west window through which mid-afternoon sunlight streamed, making the imitation blue-period Picasso on the wall look much better than it should have. Jody and her eight-year-old granddaughter Jenny sat on the plaid couch and Dr. Ruth Peary sat in the plaid armchair. She was a few years older than Jody and wore a simple white summer dress and beige sandals. She had exceptionally good legs and the rather short length of her dress told you that she knew it. On one arm of the chair, idly, rested a steno pad and a gold Cross pen. Dr. Peary had yet to write anything down. Jody had apparently not said anything important yet.
“Jenny lives with you?”
“No, she lives with her mother—my daughter.”
“I see.” With this, Dr. Peary picked up her steno pad. With one of her sandaled feet, she also depressed a button built into the side of the coffee table. Somewhere nearby, a tape recorder had just been activated. “Do you mind, Mrs. Wagner, if I ask why her mother isn’t here today?”
“How about calling me Jody?”
“Fine. How about calling me Ruth?”
Jody nodded and, though she seemed about to speak, said nothing. Instead, she placed her long, tanned, capable hands over the tiny hands of the little girl next to her. Jody had the freckles and sun-tinted long blonde hair of a teenager. Clear blue eyes, solemn and somewhat pained, glanced from the doctor to the girl. In her white blouse, denim skirt, and scuffed Nikes, Jody managed to give the impression of being exciting and beautiful even while sitting very still. She said, “Jenny, I wonder if you’d do me a favor.”
For the first time, the small red-haired girl in the very carefully ironed tan blouse and blue gauze skirt showed at least a small sign of attention. Previously, she had resembled someone in a state not unlike catatonia. Now, she angled her pretty face up to glance at her grandmother.
“Do you remember the woman at the desk in the next office?”
Jenny nodded.
“Do you remember how she asked you if you’d like a Pepsi?”
Again, Jenny nodded.
“I wonder if you’d go out there and tell her you’d like a Pepsi, and then be a very good girl and wait for me a few minutes. Would you mind?”
Jenny shook her head, her pigtails flying.
Jody bent down and kissed her. “I love you, hon. Remember that, will you?”
Two minutes later, Jenny was seated on the waiting room couch, a comic on her lap and a can of Pepsi in her right hand. In the doctor’s office, the interview began.
“You asked why her mother wasn’t here.”
“Yes.”
“Her mother, Samantha, Sam for short, is a cocaine addict and she’s having a very bad time of it just now. I live back east. I’m a fashion illustrator. Strictly low level, so don’t get any romantic notions about Vogue parties or anything. I do things like maternity smocks for wholesale catalogs.
“Anyway, about Sam. She’s lived here in Winthrop and then moved away at least five times. Jenny came from her first marriage. We’ve each had two and neither of us was very good at either one of them. I moved away right after high school graduation. My mother and my Uncle Bob, whom she married when I was in eighth grade, were killed in a car accident that year. I didn’t see much reason to stick around.
“I went to New York and tried a little acting and tried a little dancing and ended up doing illustrations. Sam was born in New York, but for some reason she always had a fascination for Winthrop so whenever there was an excuse—one of my class reunions or the marriage of a cousin or something—I’d bring her back here. She loves this place.
“Up until a month ago she was working as an advertising copywriter in a Chicago agency. She’s divorced again —there’s just her and Jenny—and the coke got to her pretty badly. She’s been through three different formal programs but none of them have seemed to work. About three weeks ago, she got desperate and drove back here in the middle of the night. In the morning she rented a house from a realtor named Smythe and she and Jenny moved in. Two days ago she called me and I flew out here.”
Jody paused, sighing deeply. This was one of those times when she really wanted a cigarette. Funny, you’d think it was the alcohol she’d miss, but it was really the nicotine. Just one fresh pack of Merits
“And something happened to Jenny,” Jody said.
“Something?”
“You saw her. Her eyes. How pale she is. I have no idea what caused that. But she’s obviously disturbed. Badly disturbed.”
“Perhaps it’s a reaction to her mother’s problems.” Jody shook her head.
“I don’t think so.”
“Why?”
“Because there’s something Jenny won’t talk about. She’s started to a few times—and she has these terrible nightmares that I ask her about—but then she always stops.” Jody sighed again. “That’s why I brought her here. I’m hoping you can get her to talk.”
Dr. Peary put down her pad. “Her mother doesn’t presently have a boyfriend or anything?”
“No. Why?”
“I just wondered if we might be dealing with some kind of abuse here.” She hesitated. “Does Samantha abuse her?”
Jody took it in stride. “No. She’s got a very bad drug problem, but somehow she’s managed to be a reasonably decent mother through it all.”
“Have you taken Jenny to a GP or internist?”
“Yes. First thing after I got here.”
“And?”
“And low-grade fever, a few red spots on the throat, nothing that aspirin can’t handle.”
“I see.”
“I don’t mean to insult you—Ruth—but may I ask a question?”
“Of course.”
“Do you work with children very often?”
Ruth shook her head. “If you mean, am I a specialist, no. But because I’m Winthrop’s one and only shrink, I do more than my share with children. So I do have a lot of practical experience.”
“Good,” Jody said, and there was no humor in her voice whatsoever. “Because I sense you’re really going to need all of your experience. All of it.”
Ruth nodded. “Why don’t you go get Jenny and bring her in? Then why don’t you stop back in an hour or so and pick her up? I’ll make sure you and I have a few minutes to talk afterward. All right?”
“Fine,” Jody said, standing up. She was still usually the tallest woman in any room. She put out her hand and shook with Ruth Peary.
Then she went to the door and asked Jenny to come in.
2
“Nikki?”
“Yes. Hi.”
“Hi. Here,” he said, pushing open the Cadillac’s passenger door. “Get in.”
They were on a corner in downtown Winthrop, quite a busy corner actually, and more than a few people showed interest in what they were doing.
Forty-four-year-old Glen Stover had the well-deserved reputation of a chaser (his wife Marietta had filed for divorce on no less than six occasions) with a special taste for girls barely out of their teens, and certainly this one qualified—a slight, very striking brunette with a piece of cheap brown luggage in one hand and a cigarette in another. She wore a tight white T-shirt and stonewashed jeans. Beneath the T-shirt you could easily see the rose color of her precise little nipples.
Glen Stover, the local Cadillac dealer, had Maroon Five on the stereo, loud the way teenagers played it, and as the girl slid into the Brougham’s plush leather seat, Stover found himself anxiously touching his new toupee and wondering if it was exactly in place. This one was darker than he usually wore and had a little curl in it. A secretary of his—one of those unfortunate ones who’d taken their after-hours play a little too seriously and who had to be let go —had told him that when he turned just a certain way and in a certain light (she’d been pretty bombed at the time), he looked not exactly but then not unlike, uh, what’s-his-name, Ryan Reynolds, yes, uh, Ryan Reynolds.
He wondered if Nikki, in broad daylight and from the angle she was watching him, saw his resemblance to Ryan Reynolds.
“How about this heat?” he said.
She nodded. “Yes. It’s hot.”
He liked her lips. Those little bee-stung jobs. Pouty. “So you do this for a living, huh?”
“Right now. Till I go back to school next fall.”
“You like it?”
“Very much.”
“Very good,” he said, laughing loud and finding his first excuse to touch her. Just a little reassuring pat on her thigh. (Nice, nice thigh; that young firm flesh; shit.) He watched her face for a reaction. Sometimes when you touched them like that, they sensed something wrong and drew away.
She just sat there. Seemingly no response one way or the other. He let his foolish heart interpret this as a good omen.
“You’ve had a lot of experience, I’m told.”
She looked over at him. She had brown, doe-like eyes, the sort that made her a woman but kept her a kid, too. She was very, very pretty. “Since I was twelve.”
“Great.”
“With my cousins.”
“Cousins?”
“There were three of them. They lived down the block. My mother always said if you could handle them, you could handle anybody.”
He laughed. “Tough ones, huh?”
“Very tough.”
He couldn’t raise his eyes from the persistent little nipples poking at the cotton of her T-shirt. As they sat at a stoplight across from the town library, the one with the massive stone lions on either side of the wide stairs, he anxiously touched his toupee again. He was one of those people who couldn’t stand even a momentary silence, so he said, “So you’re not from around here?”
“No. I graduated from high school over in Central City three weeks ago. Then I moved over here so I could be closer to the community college. I live in the brick apartment house on the corner where you picked me up. It’s very nice except I have to share a bathroom.”
His stomach knotted. His mother had convinced him that using other people’s bathrooms was not only a filthy habit, but possibly a deadly one. All those germs. His mother, the most celebrated matron at the local country club, exerted an influence on all three of her sons, and not least on Glen. Perhaps if he hadn’t had to borrow so much money from her over the years
“I did mention that this is going to be a three-day job, didn’t I?”
“Yes,” she said, and patted the cheap suitcase on her lap.
“I mean, we’ll be in town and everything, and in and out of the house, but it’ll just be better if you’re there all the time.”
“Sure. That makes sense.”
“This is the club’s hundred-year anniversary. It’s kind of a big deal. Alex Trebec’s going to be there to give the keynote address and everything.”
“Oh. Great.”
But the way she said it, he knew she had no idea who Alex Trebec was. “He’s the host of Jeopardy.”
“Oh.”
“God,” he muttered, marveling at the age-gap between them the way others might marvel at the concept of quasars or black holes.
“Your children are how old?” Nikki said.
“Six and three.” He sighed. Whenever he thought of the kids, he knew what a shit he was.
“That’s a cute age.”
“Yes, yes, it is.”
“Planning to have any more?”
He felt idiotically flattered, as if she’d just complimented him on his virility. He smiled over at her and said, “No, I don’t think so.”
Just then the Cadillac swept up the driveway leading to a huge, Spanish-style house with a tiled roof, brilliant red against the white of the stucco and the china blue of the afternoon sky.
He heard her inhale sharply and knew that she, like most others on first seeing the family manse, was impressed. The house ran to eighteen rooms, with an eight-hole golf course in the back, a dish antenna on the slope of the west lawn, and twenty acres of perfectly trimmed and manicured blue grass. In front of a three-stall garage sat two other Cadillacs, one a conservative blue sedan, the other a canary yellow convertible with sweeping fins that marked it as a valuable collectible.
She glanced over at him and laughed. “Is it all right if I say wow?”
For the first time, he sensed her easing up on her middle-class anxiety. “Sweetie, you can say anything you like.”
“It’s beautiful.”
He sighed. “My brother designed it. He’s an architect —a very successful one—in Chicago, and sort of the family pet. At least he’s my mother’s pet.” Again, a note of bitterness gave his words an edge. He exhaled heavily, as if unburdening himself of some intolerable truth he could no longer carry. “So you like it?”
“I’ve never seen anything like it.” She shook her, head, as if in disbelief. “My Dad’s an accountant and we live in this nice little white frame house—”
This time he touched her shoulder. He had a hard time keeping his fingers away from the small tender swell of breast only inches from his grasp. He said, his voice thickening with desire, “Everything’s got its price.”
She shrugged. “I suppose.” Then she gazed at the late afternoon shadows, a deepening blue on the perfect white walls of the house, and she said, “It just seems so peaceful here.”
He thought of Marietta and all their battles over the years. There had been a time when he’d wanted Marietta just as badly as he wanted this fresh young girl here. He wondered why he’d been cursed with wanting so many women. He said, his voice still burry and his fingers still lingering on the freckled flesh of her slender shoulder, “It’ll be peaceful now that you’re here.”
Then he did something he was instantly ashamed of because he hated guys who operated like this. Cheap-shot artists who wore pinkie rings that were always winking at you.
But he couldn’t help it.
He said, “Here, let me carry that bag for you, Nikki.”
And as he said this—God, just how low could he sink, anyway?—he maneuvered his hand to cross perfectly against her breast and there he felt the nub of her nipple pressing the back of his hand.
He was in an agony of joy—the moment, the beautiful moment, extended there as if in slow motion—until he saw the blush start on her jawline and go all the way up her face.
She looked so young and mortified that even an aging ass-bandit like Glen Woodrow Stover had to back off and give her a break.
“Sorry,” he said. Now his voice was little more than a whisper.
He went to reach for her suitcase. His fingers touched one end of it and then jumped away.
The thing was hot. Literally. Like touching a pancake griddle just as you’re ready to pour on the batter.
Deftly, she swung the suitcase away from him, opened the door, and climbed out. Gone was her red face. Gone was her sense of vulnerability. There was an air of purposefulness about her now. She held the cheap suitcase tight against her leg. You could-see where her tiny knuckles were white from clutching the handle so tight.
All he could think of was hot. What the hell could she be carrying in a suitcase that was hot like that?
“Why don’t we go in and meet my wife and kids?”
“Great,” she said.
As she started to walk, he saw that he could get a very nice side view of her breasts if he moved just a step or two behind her.
God, he couldn’t believe it. He was walking into his own house with their weekend babysitter and he was as horned up as he used to get at frat parties.
By accident, he brushed the suitcase with his knee. Once more, he pulled back from the luggage, a sensation of heat searing through his body.
What the hell did she have in that thing anyway?
But then he didn’t have time to think about the suitcase or her breasts or his toupee or anything at all, because his wife Marietta had opened the door and was sweetly greeting Nikki and introducing her to their two young daughters.
Inside, the first thing Nikki asked was if she could be shown to her room so she could freshen up.
As he watched her, however, Glen Stover got the idea that she wanted to unload the suitcase before anybody got a chance to look at it too closely.
While he went to the bar and fixed himself a dry martini, Marietta took Nikki upstairs.
Glen, feeling the gin and vermouth almost immediately, glanced down at the hand that had brushed Nikki’s breast. Now he had put the mysterious suitcase out of his mind and was back on more familiar ground.
Over the years, Glen had managed to sleep with at least half a dozen of their young babysitters (that’s why he was so insistent that Marietta hire only those eighteen or over, so there could be no legal repercussions).
