Babysitter, page 7
“We’ve got a ‘Childwatch’ deal on both the local TV stations. Why don’t you or Jody call in the description right away. They’ll put it right on.”
“Good idea. Thanks, Hank.”
“No problem. Just tell Jody that I’m sure everything’s all right and that we’ll find her granddaughter.”
He thanked Hank again, hung up, and went back into the living room.
Sam sat like a child huddled in her mother’s arms. The small, shadowy light glowing from the tiny brass table lamp cast the two women in a soft color that resembled a Vermeer painting.
He came in quietly. He said nothing. He sat in a chair across from them and waited until Jody was finished stroking her daughter’s hair. Gently, gently. It was like trying to get an overtired small child to sleep. You had to be very patient and loving.
David Fairbain tried not to think of his own son he saw so seldom.
Finally, when Sam had fallen into a troubled sleep, he helped Jody carry her into the bedroom and stretch her out on the bed.
“I gave her a sleeping pill,” Jody said. “I’m just afraid she’s not strong enough to handle this.” She frowned. “This is a very bad point for an addict.”
The bedroom looked like the rest of the house. The walls were done in a gaudy pastel, plaster was chipped from the ceiling, and a light socket hung askew.
They stood over Sam, looking down at her as if she were their child.
David said, “Hank seems to think Jenny will show up on her own.”
“I wish I shared his optimism.”
David sighed. “I wish I did, too.” He thought for a moment, his brow deeply rutted. “I don’t suppose you have a computer somewhere here?”
Jody looked at him, her head tilting. “A laptop, yes. Why?”
“I’m going to track down the address of this babysitter. I still have a few accounts that I use for research and one of them just happens to be a place that does background checks. I can use that to do a reverse look-up on the babysitter’s phone number.”
“You always were brilliant.” She gave his arm a little squeeze and smiled at him. “The computer’s over here but I’m not sure there’s any internet access.”
“No problem. We’re not that far from the library and they have unsecured WiFi.”
“And you know this because . . .?”
“Because I’m brilliant.” His smile was warm and boyish and Jody felt herself fall in love with him all over again.
The two uniformed officers, both with bands of sweat around the light blue armpits of their uniform shirts, both with squeaking leather holsters for their Magnums, asked many of the same questions Hank had asked.
After giving both the officers diet Pepsis, Jody began to tell them everything she could think of about Jenny. When she told them about Jenny’s behavior in Dr. Peary’s office this afternoon, they got particularly curious.
The beefy one with the prematurely graying hair was Hanrahan. He said, “What did Dr. Peary make of all this?”
“That she was disturbed.”
“But she didn’t give any specific reason as to why?”
“Not really. She thought it might have something to do with the other night.”
“The other night?” This came from Krenkel. He looked something like a stereotypical accountant. Thin, with heavy eyebrows, and a somewhat prissy mouth, he said, “What about the other night?”
Jody shrugged. David noted how elegantly she moved. In grade school she’d been a tomboy. “That’s the big mystery. We don’t know what happened the other night. Nobody does except Jenny, and she won’t tell us.”
David almost reminded Jody that the babysitter knew, too, but stopped himself.
Hanrahan sipped gratefully at his cold diet Pepsi, made a kind of TV commercial “Ah” sound, and said, “We’re going to look around the house.”
“Do you really think she could just show up?” Jody sounded almost plaintive.
Hanrahan, obviously believing that keeping hope alive was the best sedative of all under these circumstances, said, “We had a little girl just three weeks ago. Wandered away, got lost, and then was picked up by a delivery man who brought her straight back home.”
“So you think—?”
“Absolutely,” Hanrahan said. “She’ll probably come strolling in very soon now.”
“But just to be on the safe side,” his partner said, “we’ll start checking out the neighborhood. Just in case something turns up.”
Both officers downed their soft drinks and stood up. Their gun leather creaked. They looked imposing and somehow wrong—almost menacing—in the shadowy light of the drab living room.
“Thank you,” Jody said.
“Thanks for the Pepsi,” Krenkel said.
Hanrahan, carrying a silver flashlight the size of a small baseball bat, led the way to the front door.
They nodded and left.
For a long moment, Jody stood frozen at the door, looking like a father-deserted child. Her grief was something David could feel tangibly all the way across the room.
Jody, in barely a whisper, said, “They’re not going to find her. They’re going to try because they’re good men, but they’re not going to find her.”
Then she was sobbing.
David went to her. At first it was awkward, sliding his arms around her middle and letting her come gently into his embrace.
Her tears were warm and wet against his face as she began hugging him so tightly it was almost painful.
“I just wish I understood what was going on here,” she said. “Why Jenny acted that way this afternoon, and why she ran away.”
Then she began crying again. She felt frail in his arms. She smelled of perfume and the day’s heat. He reached up and cupped the back of her head with one of his large, purposeful hands and brought her face to his neck.
After a time of silence, of her just holding him, he led her over to the couch and helped her he down, just as they’d both helped Sam into bed earlier.
He began stroking her cheeks and then her hair. She closed her eyes and he could see exhaustion working its way through her body. Tension was starting to drain her completely.
He said, “I’m going to do a little checking on the babysitter.”
“Why don’t I go with you?”
“Somebody has to be here when the police come back.”
“Oh. Yes.” By now her voice was fuzzy with her weariness.
“You can probably get a little nap, which will help you, and by that time, I’ll be back.”
“Did you find something out about her?”
He explained how he had located the address.
“Maybe she’ll be able to help us.” The plaintive tone was back in Jody’s voice.
“Yes. Maybe she will.”
Then she drifted off with the quick finality of a child falling asleep.
He leaned over and kissed her once softly on the forehead.
Something about all this tugged at the back of his mind. He had seen something somewhere, perhaps in the newspaper. Perhaps it was a bit of gossip unknowingly gleaned from those lunch counter gossips downtown. There were questions that needed answers. He was afraid of what those answers might be and so he needed to find them somewhere beyond the sad eyes of Jody.
Thanks to the untiring efforts of several dedicated employees and many more eager volunteers, the local newspaper had had all of its past issues scanned and made available to researchers. He had an account at that website and it had proved invaluable to his research. With a little luck, it might prove invaluable now as well.
He logged into the paper’s website and went straight to the morgue, the place where past issues were housed. He couldn’t help think how much better it was than cramming himself into a dark alcove and scouring dozens of micro fiche files.
He searched first for babysitter and came up nearly dry. His next search – for missing child – turned up more than he wanted. Still, he could cross-reference those three dozen some names with other crimes.
The cut and paste file grew by the moment, names of children gone missing, then returning just as suddenly. Lists of children transferred into a mental health facility or undergoing treatment only gave up a scant four children.
And then he hit upon an article which made his blood chill and his stomach roil.
In 1967, a woman named Helen Campbell was sent to prison for murdering her drunken and abusive husband. While she was on trial, her daughter, Mary, protested her innocence, claiming that it was she, Mary, who had killed her father. Still, the jury found Helen guilty and sentenced her to the death penalty. Stabbing your husband 57 times, they reasoned, was not only crazy, but good enough reason to put someone to death.
What happened to Mary was another article entirely. She proclaimed her mother’s innocence to the end, growing increasingly more violent as time wore on. Two years after her mother’s conviction – on the very night of her execution – young Mary was committed to the mental ward. She resided there for three years and was then summarily released. What became of her after that, no one knew.
David shuddered and looked over the top of the screen to make sure that Jody was still asleep. Then he continued his search.
Among all the articles about parent-killers and insane children – there were many more than he would have dared guess – one stood out above all the others. One young girl, Amy Wallace, disappeared shortly after her 9th birthday. She was, by all accounts, the model child. She was certainly pretty, if the picture in the newspaper did her any justice. Her grades were perfect, she attended church twice a week, and she had never once received a disciplinary notice. The girl was missing for two days, having walked right out her own front door in the middle of the night and then re-appeared the same way. But following her return, her parents began to notice changes in her.
The girl took to staying alone in her room, refusing to go to church, and throwing wild tantrums at the drop of a hat. Furthermore, she threatened other children with violence on the school yard. The final blow came when neighbors summoned the police to Amy’s family home one sunny Saturday morning to investigate a stench which emanated from the residence. The only officer willing to discuss what he had seen inside that house was the youngest of the five. His words struck a chord with David.
“‘It was like all the demons of hell had been set loose on them,’” the officer had said.
Both of the parents and the older brother had been killed, chopped into little pieces, and the pieces heaped upon their respective beds. Blood covered the walls, floors, furniture and ceiling, as well as the little girl who had committed the murders.
When police found her, Amy was sitting at the breakfast table, eating her Post Toasties and humming a song. Every inch of her was covered in gore and, as near as they could figure, she had no memory of what she had done. Yes, she had told them, she was aware that her family was dead. No, she had told them, she didn’t know who did it. The girl was remanded to the state mental hospital and no further mention of her could be found.
But the oddest thing about the case – and what set it apart from all the others – was that, during the investigation, police discovered a symbol painted in blood on the floor of the girl’s bedroom, right under her bed.
Oh, to have a printer! David did the best he could to sketch the symbol. He’d never seen anything like it before and, though his drawing skills were up to the task, he wasn’t sure how he would search it. Then he hit upon an idea . . . something that his co-worker used to do when someone put an image on Facebook that didn’t belong to them.
He opened a second window with Google in it, dragged the image into the image search box, then waited while the original URL and all matching images were produced.
Thousands. There were thousands of images which matched that one. They varied widely from tattoos to prints in obscure occult books and national newspaper articles. It was definitely a symbol of ancient magick, one used in certain beliefs to create a psychic bond between the living and the dead.
David sat back in his chair, sparing a quick glance at Jody. She purred softly from the sofa and he found himself smiling in spite of himself. Then his eyes returned to the screen and he began to scowl once more.
Questions buzzed in his head. Had all the other children who had killed their parents shared the same babysitter? Or that symbol? And what was the connection?
Back to the newspaper site. He scrolled through the search results, looking for other stories that jumped out at him. There was no more mention of the symbol, nor any mention at all of a babysitter. Clearly no one had made any connection between them.
“You’re a lucky man,” the doctor had told him on the night of his heart attack, that night being the dividing line in David Fairbain’s life. He would never again be the same man, and in some ways that was good, and in some ways that was bad.
After leaving Winthrop for four years of college at the state university, and then serving 4 years in the Army (he had no war stories; he’d worked in supply in a safe office in a massive concrete building), he came back to the Midwest, choosing Chicago, where he decided the only thing he could do with his English degree (teachers then being paid even less than now) was to go into public relations (“Write a little copy and kiss a lot of ass” as his first employer had always been fond of saying).
It was during his tenure with his third firm, PR agencies going in and out of business with turnstile frequency, that he met his wife Susan, who also wrote copy as a means of supporting herself. He had done what he usually did with beautiful women—fallen immediately and dangerously in love. He had long ago realized the shabby truth about himself—that he was one of those clinging, dependent, jealous men whom women (whatever their protests to the contrary, however “sensitive” they found the type) despised. Of course, even though every reasonable judgment found them not only incompatible but potentially very destructive as a couple, they had gotten married in one of those ceremonies of the early 80s, designed to somehow deny the fact that this was a marriage ceremony at all. The minister (a Unitarian who later on smoked as many joints as any of the other guests and who said a very loud and liberated “fuck” far oftener than most) read from Gibran, Rod McKuen, and Bob Dylan—words from the Bible being obviously for slobs who drank beer and went bowling in gaudy yellow shirts and who voted for Ronald Reagan. (One of David’s friends remarked that the only writer who hadn’t been read by the minister was Kafka.) The wedding night had been no better because, however much they tried to deny the fact, their sex life was pretty bad. She did not like oral sex (his or hers) and he was not especially enamored of all the mutual masturbation she found so exciting. They fell asleep in each other’s arms with her telling him that she had not changed her mind: there would be no children.
But a child, inadvertently and unhappily, had come along in the third year of their marriage (she had stormed their apartment for a full week, alternately sobbing and cursing, “I just don’t know what could have happened!”) and for the first and only time in their lives together, David became so angry that he struck her, a glancing slap on her cheek. The baby, he said, would not be aborted. They were thirty-five goddamn years old, and the years now were going too fast and their lives, from what he could see, were little more than the nightmare their generation had so happily created for itself—endless arcane debates about the rights of women, the rights of men, good sex, bad sex, black and white, straight and gay, accountability to one’s spouse, the freedom to do what one chose despite marital bonds, liberation, and principle over passion even if the principle was as ugly as 800,000 aborted fetuses a year.
There would be no goddamn abortion.
Ultimately, she had deferred to him, though he’d had the sense, that she was simply renting him the use of her body to birth the child he wanted so badly, and that the cost of such a rental would be nothing less than the demise of their marriage.
Six months after delivery of the boy they’d named Jerred (that spring Jerred was running a close second to Chad as the preferred name for boys), Susan took the first of a series of lovers and she made little if any attempt to disguise this fact. David had gone insane in the way only jealousy can make one insane. He’d had the sentimental hope that Jerred would turn her into a more traditional wife and mother, but it seemed to have the opposite effect. To make things worse, the recession came and David’s small agency, heavily dependent on oil money (how many lies he’d told the public about the good great intentions of the misunderstood oil barons; how much ass he’d kissed) folded, and he became a forerunner of the househusband, a job he liked more than he dared admit to either himself or his wife. Contrarily, her job fortunes soared. She became account manager in an ad agency and took over a huge cosmetics brand that was just then going international (thanks to the intercession of a quiet but socially ambitious Mafioso who made sure that the brand would be going into England, France, Spain, and Italy within three months of each other).
That autumn she also managed to infect both of them with clap, a singularly inelegant turn that made his demands of seeing a marriage counselor at last persuasive. He had to admit that she did seem to give the counselor her best honest effort. He also had to admit that during the course of their seventeen sessions he saw for the first time just what a wretched mate he’d been to her—a whining, overly dependent, moralizing twit who far too well reflected his fundamentalist religious upbringing in the small town Midwest. For the first time ever, he heard Susan cry tears that seemed genuine, and saw, for the first time ever, that if she had never quite loved him in the way he needed to be loved, she had nonetheless truly cared for him. He also learned how much she loved Jerred; just as much as he did. And he saw, finally, what most mates see at the splitting point—that each contributed more than the necessary share to tear apart the marriage.
As a consequence to all this, they had never been better friends than the day they stood outside the divorce court, both of them teary, both of them hugging. She was moving to Los Angeles to live with the doctor she’d met. Being unemployed, David was in no shape to take Jerred. He surprised himself by feeling comfortable with her taking Jerred for the foreseeable future, even though he knew how devastatingly lonely he would be without his son.
