Son of the Endless Night, page 35
Gina allowed herself to be led past a row of glass-fronted cubicles into a room of rosewood paneling and beige carpeting. Mrs. Wimbledon closed the door and they sat down together in facing leather chairs that bristled with metal studs.
"I've called Dr. Wersheba. Unfortunately he's in surgery at St. Anthony's, but another doctor will come as soon as possible."
"Why does she need a doctor?" Gina said; her face felt as if she were wearing a hard coat of glue and she could scarcely move her lips. But the rest of her was shaking.
"Hillary is in a— highly agitated condition. I don't think I should sugarcoat it for you— she's hysterical and must be sedated, then examined. There is a possibility that she was assaulted."
"Here? In the school?"
"I'm afraid so."
"I'll take her to the hospital myself!"
"I doubt that Hillary will go with you. She won't leave the sanctuary. She feels it's the only place that is safe for her right now."
"Well, what happened?"
"We know that she suffered abdominal cramps during her third-period class. Mr. Rauscher accompanied her upstairs to the infirmary, where Mrs. Groveman had her lie on the couch. Mrs. Groveman left Hillary alone for a few minutes to come down to the office to call you. The line was busy at first. When third period ended, Mr. Rauscher went back upstairs to see how Hillary was. As soon as he opened the infirmary door he saw Hillary standing very near a window which, we assume, she opened herself. She was pressed against the sill, leaning backwards, and Mr. Rauscher says she had a look of utter terror on her face."
"Did she— have her uniform on?"
Wimbledon nodded. "She was fully dressed. Mr. Rauscher had only a moment to take in everything. A sixth sense told him she was about to fall— or jump— from the window. You know Mr. Rauscher, don't you? He was an outstanding athlete in college, and has very quick reactions for someone of his size and strength. He got to Hillary just as she fell and managed to catch her by one leg and pull her back into the room. It was a close call."
Gina sat staring at the principal with tears streaming down her face.
"Why do you think— someone raped her?"
"But I didn't say rape, I said assaulted. The condition of her face— well, you have to see for yourself."
"Wait— wait just a minute." Gina dug into her big purse for a tissue, pushing aside the Colt Python revolver she was licensed to carry. She wiped her cheeks and looked at her eyes in a compact mirror; she decided they weren't too streaky. She nodded. "Okay, I'm ready."
Gina could hear her daughter as soon as she opened the side door to the sanctuary. Hillary's voice was fiercely high-pitched.
"BLESSED ART THOU AMONG WOMEN AND BLESSED IS THE FRUIT OF THY WOMB JESUS!"
Hillary was crouched low in the first pew on the left-hand side of the sanctuary. The Jesuit recently assigned to Blessed Sacrament, whose name was Toomey, sat beside her. The lights above the altar had been turned on.
"HOLY MARY MOTHER OF GOD ..."
She gasped for breath; her body trembled in an agony of complex emotion. She had a rosary in one fist.
"PRAY FOR US SINNERS NOW AND AT THE HOUR OF OUR DEATH AMEN!"
Gina ran across the sanctuary. Hillary and the priest heard her coming. Hillary looked up wildly and then cringed, as if she refused to recognize her mother. Her face was wet, from perspiration or tears. There was a bony handprint on her forehead. It looked hot as a sunburn.
Gina, shocked, stopped short of the pew and put her hands to her mouth. Father Toomey, a reedy young man, stood up, scratching perplexedly at a fuzzy receding hairline.
"Mrs. Devon?"
"I CAN'T TALK TO YOU! I HAVE TO PRAY!"
Gina had never seen such sick and tortured eyes. Feeling a seductive desire to faint, Gina braced herself instead. Hillary turned her head, looking at the statue on one side of the altar. A gray Lenten shroud had been partially torn away, perhaps by Hillary, revealing an enameled Virgin with opulent skin tones and shapely sorrowing eyes.
"HOLY MARY MOTHER OF GOD ..." The silvery beads rattled in her unsteady hands.
"What happened to Hillary's face?" Gina demanded of the priest.
"We don't know."
"We don't know." Mrs. Wimbledon repeated, appeas-ingly, behind her. Gina turned.
"Can't you get a doctor here?"
"... NOW AND AT THE HOUR OF OUR DEATH AMEN!"
Gina kneeled in front of her daughter.
"Hillary."
Hillary stopped her litany and panted; her eyes rolled in her head, ecstatically.
"Go away. Go away. I only want to talk to the Blessed Mother." She had bitten her tongue and there was blood on her lower lip. She looked up at the tall Jesuit; so did Gina. His smile seemed heartless, under the circumstances, but he was merely nervous. "She hears me, doesn't she? She'll protect me! She won't let them have me!"
"Won't let who have you?" Gina said. She tried with motherly firmness to take hold of her daughter's cold rosary-chained hands. Hillary rose screaming to her feet, jerking away from Gina.
"NOOOOOO!"
She scrambled bumpingly over the front of the pew and ran up to the altar, where she prostrated herself before the shrouded crucified Christ on the wall. As Gina was getting slowly to her feet a narthex door opened with a sound of cavernous thunder. She looked up the long aisle at a shadowy figure carrying what looked like a physician's bag in one hand.
"Hellloo! It's Dr. Richards."
"Oh, thank God," Gina murmured. She raised her voice. "This way, Doctor!"
Hillary was groveling and shrieking again. Gina held her stomach, feeling her daughter as a long-forgotten weight there, fetal but serene. It amplified her horror; she felt sickly from grief.
The doctor walked loose-jointedly down the center aisle. He wore a pin-striped gray suit and large rose-tinted glasses. He couldn't have been any older than Father Toomey. He very nearly lacked features: sketchy pimpled nose, thin pale eyebrows. By contrast his eyes were too intensely black and seemed to skitter like buttons around the inside surfaces of the curved and tinted lenses. Gina was reminded of certain Muppets, but this one wasn't cuddly or endearing; she felt repelled by Richards, by what she instinctively felt was an essentially frigid nature. Still, he was a doctor.
He glanced at Hillary, who was on her knees and elbows now, swaying, shrill. He looked at the adults.
"What seems to be the trouble here?"
Gina explained. "It's my daughter. Someone must have attacked her. She acts like she doesn't even know me. Can you do something?"
"What's her name?"
"Hillary Devon."
The doctor nodded and opened his bag. He took out a packaged disposable syringe and a small sealed bottle.
"First we'd better calm her down."
"What's that?"
"Tranquilizer. I'll need some help— you'll have to distract Hillary for a few seconds. And she'll be hard to hold. Be sure you get a good grip on her.''
He went to his bag again for a small bottle of alcohol and a sterile package of cotton, which he handed to Wimbledon.
"I'll want you to swab down a spot just above the elbow, as soon as Mrs. Devon has Hillary under control. The one thing we don't want to do is frighten her more than she's frightened already."
"I'll help hold her," Father Toomey said.
"Oh, no, Father; I think that's just too many of us crowding around her. But if you could bring a pitcher of cold water it would be helpful."
"I'll get it from the school cafeteria."
Richards looked thoughtfully at the priest as he walked to the side door of the sanctuary; then he smiled at the women, tightlipped, as if it hurt his asshole to smile. They went up to the tiled and carpeted altar together, where Hillary was praying at the top of her voice.
"What's that in her hand?" the doctor said, pausing as he was about to bend over the distraught girl.
"It's her rosary," Gina said. Every time she looked at the doctor's face he appeared subtly different to her, as if it were an image on the surface of water and not flesh she was seeing. Nerves, she thought.
"You'll have to take it from her." His tone was a little sharp, and Gina frowned. Richards backed off a step and smiled; his hardshell eyes ran aimlessly around the inside of his glasses. "She might hurt herself, or one of us, with it," he explained. "Put out an eye. You just don't know what can happen when they're like this. So— would you mind— ?"
"Yes, Doctor." Gina kneeled once more beside her daughter. Hillary yelled at this intrusion and tried to crawl away from her.
"Honey, honey . . . it's mom. Everything's going to be all right. Nobody's going to hurt you."
Hillary was motionless for several moments, and rigid, her head down. Then she toppled over into her mother's lap and Gina deftly removed the rosary from her right hand. She placed it in a pocket of her jacket while continuing to stroke her daughter's face. Hillary's eyes had closed. She felt very hot, especially where the imprint of a small hand, skeletal in its thinness, lay across her forehead. Her body twitched and she moaned.
"Could you just push her sleeve up, Mrs. Devon?" Hillary was wearing a short-sleeved light blue blouse with her plaid school jumper. "There, that's fine." Richards looked at the principal. "Now, then, if you'll wipe her arm down with the alcohol . . . ready, Mrs. Devon?"
Hillary's eyelids fluttered; Gina put an arm around her and held both hands at the wrist. The doctor popped in the needle of the syringe. Hillary gasped and arched her back, but in seconds it was done.
"The tranquilizer will be a few minutes taking effect. Just keep talking to her, Mrs. Devon, while I look her over."
"Doctor, her forehead— "
"Yes, she was hit very hard. A bruise on her leg here, but it looks like an old one. Let me have a look at the back of her head. Uh-huh. She may have a concussion. Something raised a heck of a lump. . . . Hillary. Hillary! Open your eyes, please."
Hillary responded slowly. She looked dazed. She was trying to speak, or to pray, but the words were unintelligible. Her lips were cracked and swollen.
Richards had taken a penlight from his bag, and he flicked it on.
"Look right here at me, Hillary. You're a very pretty girl, you know that? By the way, I'm Dr. Richards, but everybody has called me 'Pud' all my life. Kind of a funny name, isn't it? You can laugh if you want to."
Hillary didn't laugh. She stared dully at him, still twitching spasmodically, while he shone his light first into one eye, then the other.
"Pupils are equal and reactive. That's a good sign, but we'll want some skull shots regardless. I wonder if one of you good ladies would call an ambulance?" Gina looked scared; he put a hand reassuringly on her shoulder. "I don't want Hillary to be moved any more than necessary; it's only a precaution, Mrs. Devon."
"All of our phones have been out of order," Wimbledon said.
"Could you try again?"
"Surely." The principal looked at Gina. "There's a pay phone at the Exxon station. It's just two blocks ... in case I don't get through."
Gina nodded. "All right. I'll try from there."
Hillary, holding her hand, said in a toneless voice, "Mom."
At the point of tears, Gina kissed her daughter. "I won't be gone long. The doctor will stay with you."
"She'll be just fine, Mrs. Devon. The tranquilizer's starting to work now."
Gina followed Mrs. Wimbledon out the side door and ran for her Ford station wagon in the street. She felt, as she got in behind the wheel and reached into the wrong pocket for her car keys, finding Hillary's rosary instead, that this was a mistake, that she ought to remain with her daughter, although it would take her less than five minutes to make the call and return. It was a very bad time for the school's telephones to be out of order.
She hesitated, breathing hard, a hand on the ignition key, thinking of how helpless Hillary had looked lying on her back on the carpeted floor of the altar, her eyes so glassy. Get the ambulance. She turned the engine over and pulled screechingly away from the curb, flung the Ford around corners, and pulled up on the apron of the Exxon station, leaving the motor running and the door open. Gina had committed a lot of local phone numbers to memory, among them police, fire department, and volunteer ambulance service. She dialed and spoke to them. Hurry. Then back into the Ford, roaring into reverse, she returned to the school. No time to park. Gina zoomed in through the open gates and cut across the asphalt play yard to the rear door of the sanctuary, ran inside and found the altar, the entire church empty.
Gina screamed Hillary's name.
"Mrs. Devon?"
She turned to find Father Toomey standing in the chancel doorway.
"Where is she?"
The priest looked startled. "Hillary? Dr. Richards took her with him in his car. He said he didn't think he should wait for the ambulance, and you could meet him at— "
"Did you see him leave? What kind of car is he driving?"
"A— one of those Japanese imports. Toyota, I think. Four-door, dark blue."
"Which way did he go?"
"East on Oxendine."
As Gina hurried down the steps to her station wagon she heard the sound of the ambulance on its way. She was sick with dread. He wouldn't touch her while she had the rosary in her hand. Why? Where is he taking my daughter?
61
Oxendine was a wide residential street as far as the Watkins Mill Shopping Center, a four-corner sprawl of discount stores, fast-food outlets, and a supermarket, where the major intersection was with Massachusetts 38, here named Chopick Pond Road. The shopping center was three quarters of a mile from Blessed Sacrament parish, and the wrong way to go if one was en route to St. Anthony's Hospital.
Gina covered the distance to the shopping center at sixty miles an hour, eyes flicking to each side road for some sign of the car Richards was driving.
A block before the shopping center Oxendine became three lanes in each direction, with one lane for left turns only onto Route 38. It was a three-stage light in each direction, and the wait could be long: there was always a lot of traffic north and southbound. About three dozen cars had come to a stop in front of her, waiting on the red; one of them, third in line for a left turn, was a dark blue Toyota.
Gina stopped sharply in the left lane, the seventh car back. Leaving the engine running, she got out of the station wagon and ran to the Toyota along the raised snow-encrusted median strip, past several startled drivers. The wind whipped her hair into her eyes.
The blond man with the rose-colored glasses and the acne-stippled nose didn't look at her when she pounded on the driver's window of the Toyota. All of the windows of the sedan were rather darkly tinted; his youthful face behind glass was as pale and indistinct as a fish belly-up in a murky tank, and Gina couldn't see into the back seat. She tried the door; it was locked.
"Where's Hillary?" she screamed.
The green arrow flashed on the traffic signal ahead. The man who called himself Dr. Richards was oblivious of Gina, his hands motionless on the wheel, his eyes fixed straight ahead. He appeared to be sealed in a capsule without atmosphere, without life, as if breathing was no longer one of his requirements.
She looked around in desperation for something with which to break the glass of the window. The two cars in front of the Toyota began to move.
Richards turned suddenly and stared at her. His pudgy lips were pursed in a soulless kiss of contempt; the steel-framed lenses of his glasses glowed redly. Gina saw, momentarily, images of her daughter in those heated lenses, her eyes closed as if in eternal sleep, her hair in flames.
Gina knew then exactly what she was faced with, had been subconsciously trying to prepare herself for since the night Conor had returned from Chadbury with his nose broken and Hillary had fallen into an unexplained fit: she now had two choices, a split second to decide. She could surrender her daughter and go mad; or, on this windy suburban corner, under a sunless sky, she could fight.
Richards's face turned back toward the windshield, one hand slipping an inch on the wheel as he prepared to drive away. Gina reached into her purse, pulled out the Colt Python revolver, and, unconsciously assuming the two-handed grip and stance she'd been taught on the firing range of the Joshua Police Department, shot him in the head.
The .357 magnum slug took out a small piece of the window; the impact of bullet against bone knocked his head forward and down against the steering wheel. The left front windshield exploded in bloody crumbs of glass, his brains were on the dashboard and the hood of the car. Gina, jolted back one step by the recoil of the revolver, went suddenly deaf from shock. The day turned even grayer. Her field of vision narrowed to include only the nickel-plated revolver in her two hands, the dead man slumped over the wheel of the Toyota, the briny sparkle of pulverized glass. The red red flooding inside the Toyota.
On the other side of the divider strip a man in a delivery van had stopped to gawk at her; at least a dozen other people had seen her draw the revolver and fire into the Toyota, but she didn't know they were there. She was alone in the world with a man whom she had killed.
Then she was totally alone, because Richards straightened himself slowly behind the wheel, his shattered head erect, and drove away without a backward glance, making a left turn onto Chopick Pond Road.
Gina, finding this no more difficult to believe than the fact that she had killed him in the first place, ran after the Toyota, gun in hand, and was nearly struck down by a gasoline tanker as she crossed the highway. The Toyota pulled steadily away from her. She looked up at the astonished face of the tanker's driver, then turned and ran whimpering back to her station wagon.
She had left the engine running. It had died. She couldn't restart it as she kept her eyes on the blue Toyota, which was almost out of sight northbound.
"NO NO NO NO!"
Gina picked up the revolver from beside her on the seat and jumped out of the station wagon; she ran across Oxendine Road, dodging oncoming traffic, to the parking lot of Grand Union. Looking for a car, any car, to take up the chase. She was nearly hit in the stomach by a shopping cart as she crossed from one yellow-striped aisle to another.
