They had been brought together by technology. The Cupid computer, as it was informally known, spit out their names after analyzing their genetic histories and predilections. Those who were objective, who dared to challenge the infallibility of the modern world, concluded Cupid had made a gross error. Two people couldn’t look more incompatible. They always looked like strangers standing side by side at social events, waiting to be formally introduced to each other. No one had ever seen a sign of affection between them. William’s typical responses to Hattie’s conversation were usually nods, monosyllabic words, shrugs, or slight shakes of his head.
Most significantly, Hattie and William Scranton had never applied for a parents’ license. Early in the marriage, William had brought up the possibility, and she had told him they weren’t ready. She said she would let him know when they were. She had yet to do that, and after a while, he gave up on the whole idea, harboring the belief that it would be cruel to permit Hattie to mother any child.
He contented himself with his work, his detective stories, and his one secret: his pornography VRG films hidden in the basement wall of their home. Sex between him and Hattie had always been mechanical. She made him feel as if he were participating in a bodily necessity, not much more than going to the bathroom. Lately, he had trouble reaching a climax with her, but she didn’t seem to notice or care. She literally left him hanging.
Being married to a woman who carried so much informal authority in the community had its pros and cons. He recognized that it brought him far more respect than he would otherwise enjoy, even with his medical skills. However, he also sensed the fear people tried to cloak in his presence, their anxiety, and their nervousness. It forced him to remain further aloof from his patients than he would like. Women, especially, were overly ingratiating. He could read it in their eyes. They believed he could turn Hattie and her squad on them with a simple suggestion. He once complained about this to Hattie and asked her, “Do you know how hard it is to look into the eyes of people who are afraid of you and ask them to look forward, look at me?”
She smirked at him as if he had said the most ridiculous thing and replied, “Only the guilty look away.”
She had no idea, he thought. She didn’t have the talent, the perception to be doing what she was doing. He half expected this would become evident to the community after a while, and she would lose her grip on it, but this had yet to happen, and to him it indicated that the eyes he improved still remained blinded by the cataracts of fear they created in themselves.
William usually rose before Hattie on weekday mornings. To any casual observer, it would appear that he wanted to flee the bed they shared. Often, he would get up in the dark and tiptoe through the bedroom, barely running the water in the shower so as not to wake her. His coffee cup tinkled at breakfast. He moved like someone in a silent film, performing a dumb show in the kitchen below and then leaving the house like a soft breeze that had passed through, the door closing gently behind him. He was a ghost of himself and thought he wouldn’t be surprised if he passed a mirror and saw no image, not surprised at all.
Hattie didn’t mind his silent, swift morning exit. Waking up beside him and gazing at his sleeping face actually nauseated her. His mouth was always open too far, the air whistling through his lips carrying a sour halitosis that churned her stomach. His dark brown hair fell loosely over his creased forehead. He always looked as if he was having painful thoughts. It actually enraged her. Somehow she had been cheated. She had been denied romance, love, affection. Now, she was comfortable believing they were all illusions, anyway. It helped her to endure. She never revealed this to anyone, of course. She had devoted and loyal followers but no one she could rely on, confide in.
But this wasn’t her greatest secret. Her greatest secret related to her horrifying fantasy. She had learned that many women experienced it, but she had refused to acknowledge to anyone that she did, too. It was the fantasy of childbirth, the incredible sense of being pregnant, feeling a fetus turn and kick inside you, and then, on occasion, being inflicted with terrible cramps resembling labor pains. Some women even confessed to pushing an imaginary fetus from their wombs. Psychiatrists had been conjecturing about this phenomenon lately, comparing it to the sensation people with amputated limbs have, the feeling that the limb is still present. A radical theory that practically had the theoretician ostracized was the idea that the female body craved pregnancy and that to deny it that experience was to diminish its essence.
All of this helped to fan the flames of Hattie’s fiery determination to hunt down Abnormals and keep the community pure and successful. She was a woman on a mission to justify her own existence, her own identity. It was her vigilance, and her vigilance alone, that made them successful. She didn’t exactly think of it as a divine ordination. It was more like a genetic predisposition, her destiny determined before she was actually created.
This faith in herself, in her own perception, filled her with suspicions. Their cross-examination of the teenage girls was successful, but she couldn’t help feeling there was something else here, some darker, deeper thing to uncover. And now she had some reason to give that theory credence.
Today, she thought, she would focus on it intensely, and by the end of the day, she would expose it. She would be far more successful than that CID officer. He was too narrow of purpose, anyway. The murder was the least of it.
She practically leaped out of bed, a woman with a mission, impatient, determined, and, of course, heroic.
Perhaps nowhere was a secret more in jeopardy within the Sandburg high school building than in the girls’ bathroom. Much of the school was under surveillance. Cameras, microphones, metal detectors, alarms were in nearly every room. The only area left somewhat sacrosanct was the girls’ toilet stalls; however, there were built-in smoke detectors and explosive material detectors. If the stall door was closed, a sensor would detect more than one body in the stall by recording the body heat. However, the girls knew that if they left the stall door open, they could stand around outside the stall and whisper among themselves relatively securely. They ran faucets and flushed toilets if they had to cover up some dialogue as well.
Suki Astor, Shirley Keefer, Clair Kaufman, and Arlene Letz met in the girls’ bathroom shortly before the final bell for homeroom. It was their standard operating procedure. This morning, they were more anxious than ever to talk and share what they knew about Hattie and the baby squad’s investigation. Suki was raging with anger the moment she had stepped into the school. She practically ran to the girls’ room, impatiently awaiting the others.
“Someone here got me into a lot of trouble!” she accused as soon as they were all gathered around the stall. She sat on the toilet seat. “I’m grounded for the rest of the year!”
“They already knew a lot,” Shirley volunteered. It was as good as a confession. “They did!” she emphasized when the others glared at her. “They knew all our names, and they knew where we had met, and they knew lots of stuff. I couldn’t lie. I told them about Stocker,” she added, nodding and smiling. “That’s all they really wanted to know, anyway.”
“You didn’t have to tell them about the baby and the crib and all that,” Suki moaned. “You told them exactly where it all was. We didn’t have a chance to get rid of anything.”
“I couldn’t help it.”
“You could have called and warned her they were coming,” Arlene pointed out.
“My father ripped the video phone out of the wall as soon as they left our house,” Shirley sobbed. “I’m grounded, too.”
“I guess that’s what I’ve got to look forward to later when I go home today,” Clair said.
“Me, too,” Arlene added, her rage whitening the corners of her mouth.
“Stocker Robinson. I hate her,” Suki said through her clenched teeth.
“You think she really killed Lois?” Clair asked.
“She’s a maggot. She’s capable of anything,” Suki insisted.
“A p
iece of vermin,” Arlene said.
“An ugly, disgusting, horrid thing,” Shirley contributed. Having someone on which they could unload their anger and deflect it from one another was very helpful.
“Maybe she’s pregnant, too, and that’s why she had those vitamins in the first place,” Clair suggested. “Her mother’s an Abnormal, isn’t she? How do we know she really is an NL1?”
They were all silent for a moment, twisting and turning their anger and rage into some form of revenge.
“We’ll say we know that to be true, her pregnancy,” Suki suggested. “We’ll spread the story.”
“They’ll drag her out of here in disgrace to the clinic,” Clair said.
“Everyone will talk about her and forget about us,” Shirley hoped aloud.
“Let’s go to it,” Suki said, rising. She flushed the toilet. No one had even noticed that she had peed.
Hattie and her baby squad hadn’t told any of them not to say anything about their interrogations. Without fear or any hesitation, they fanned out to spread the stories as quickly as they could, often deliberately doing so in front of or near microphones and cameras. By lunch hour, the whole school was abuzz with rumors about Stocker Robinson. Stocker could feel the eyes of her classmates on her like a swarm of angry killer bees.
More furious than frightened, Stocker cut her last class of the morning and fled the building, even though it was a nearly impossible thing to do. Every student at the Sandburg high school as well as most every public and private school in the country wore an identification badge that carried a homing device enabling school authorities to tell where that student was located at all times. The entrances and exits of the building were armed with sensors that would ring on the central office monitor if a student left the building or attempted to leave at an unauthorized time. One had to receive permission for an early dismissal, and that was then programmed into the system.
The system not only made the structure impenetrable but also made it virtually impossible for a young person to go AWOL from school. Runaways as they were known in the twentieth century were rare, and if a young person did attempt such a thing, he or she was immediately brought to the juvenile authorities, and a homing chip was surgically implanted in the back of his or her neck. Not only was it difficult and painful to remove it, but it would set off an alarm and make the young person even more of a fugitive. That was punishable by imprisonment at a high-security juvenile facility.
Stocker was fully aware of all this, but she was also aware of a way to exit the building undetected. It wasn’t exactly a graceful portal of escape. She had to go down to the school basement and slide out the garbage chute, which would drop her into the Dumpster, usually full of food remnants by this time of day. She had done it once before at the end of the day just for the excitement and had not been caught since she had no class to attend where she would be missed.
This was different. They would be looking for her, but she was enraged and could no longer stand being treated like some sort of leper. She would not be a victim. She was going to see to that now.
She walked and ran most of the way back to the village and cut through some yards and some woods and fields she knew. Being a loner most of her life, she had spent a good deal of her time on solitary hikes, sneaking around other people’s homes, looking in windows for hours at a time, watching happier young people in their more loving homes. Having a mother who was a known Abnormal made life very difficult for her. She resented it and blamed her grandmother for giving birth to her mother the old-fashioned way. Stocker had her NL1 certificate prominently displayed on the wall of her bedroom, but who ever saw that? She had never had any girlfriends over to her home. The only people other than her parents who had been in her room were the members of that damn baby squad, and most of them looked as if they didn’t believe it, anyway.
Nearly an hour later, she cut through a patch of woods and emerged on the southeastern side of the Rosses’ home. She knew her mother was not working in the Rosses’ house today. She didn’t see her vehicle anywhere, and so she was confident there had been no change of schedule.
Even so, Stocker’s plan of action wasn’t completely clear to her yet. She thought she would confront Natalie Ross first, make her demands, and then, if that didn’t work, call her husband perhaps. If none of that worked, she would place an anonymous phone call to Chief McCalester or maybe even Hattie Scranton herself and let them know where the murder weapon could be found. One way or the other, she would lift the burden of all this guilt and anger off her and transfer it to where it belonged. In her way of thinking, all this was Natalie Ross’s fault, anyway. If she wasn’t pregnant and didn’t have those pills, none of this would have happened. It was a good way to rationalize her own responsibility away. She was very pleased with herself for thinking of it.
She approached the house cautiously and then pushed the door buzzer, deliberately looking into the camera. A door responder came on immediately, speaking in a mechanical computer voice.
“There is no one at home. Please leave a message in the door responder. If this is an unauthorized solicitation, be aware that the inhabitants do not receive such solicitations at any time. If this is a postal delivery, please leave the delivery in the package box. If the delivery requires a signature, please submit the signature card in the signature slot. Thank you.”
Stocker stepped back, her disappointment sharpening her rage. What was she supposed to do, return to school? Where was that bitch? Patience was not one of Stocker’s virtues. Her eagerness swirled inside her. She felt like Kasey-Lady lunging against that perennial leash and collar, and she had no tolerance for frustration.
I’m going to make a phone call, she thought. I’ll get what I want, and I’ll get it now.
Rather than return to school or even to her own home, she went to the rock and slipped out the spare key. Then she went into the garage and retrieved the flashlight, taking care to keep her fingerprints off it. She would tell Mrs. Ross she had found it in the house, if Mrs. Ross came home first. She would show her the bloodstains, and the woman would believe her husband might have killed Lois. If Mr. Ross returned before Mrs. Ross, she would tell him the same thing, and he might wonder if his wife hadn’t killed Lois. She had seen something like this in a movie she had watched just last week on her virtual reality glasses. It would be more exciting, more titillating, to do it this way anyhow, she thought and returned to the front door.
Using the proper key disarmed the alarm system, and she was in without any difficulty. For a moment, she just stood in the entryway, feeling this great sense of power, this wonderful voyeurism, invading the Rosses’ privacy. It was what made it so exciting when she had managed to slip away from her mother that day and sneak into Natalie Ross’s bedroom, at first just to explore and then to discover the pamphlets about pregnancy and the pills, obviously black market, hidden. Under a magnifying glass, she read the engraved “PNV” and felt the surge of excitement. She hadn’t discovered only contraband drugs; she had uncovered an Abnormal, a pregnant woman, and in this house, this important and powerful couple!
At the time, it wasn’t the information and knowledge that she found to be salable, however; it was the pills. Now it was an entirely different story. Now it was information.
She went upstairs to the bedroom and paused in the doorway. Drawers were open, and the closet door was open. It looked as if someone had robbed them. Curiosity growing, she went into the closet and searched for the cache of pills. They were gone! She stood in the bedroom thinking.
I better move quickly, she thought. There’s something going on here because of all the turmoil in the town.
Without hesitation, she went to the video phone and pressed for information. When Preston’s firm came up, she initiated a call.
“Mr. Ross,” she demanded when the receptionist answered.
“Who’s calling, please?”
“His niece,” she replied. Might as well be a member of the family, she t
hought with a smile.
Preston had just closed a folder and marked it with a red-ink rejection when Rose buzzed him.
“My niece? I have no niece.”
“You want me to refuse the call, Mr. Ross?”
He thought a moment. Maybe it was some sort of disguise Natalie was using, although she shouldn’t be able to call him from the limousine.
“No. I’ll take it,” he said.
He pressed the button and sat back as the screen formed a picture.
His eyebrows lifted. It was a teenage girl, but she looked as if she was in his bedroom. Huh?
“Hello. Who are you? What do you want? Where are you?” he fired.
Stocker smiled for the video phone camera.
“I know about your wife,” she said.
Ten
“The Rosses? Why would you want to know about them?” McCalester asked Ryan.
“I know about them. I want to know what you know about them,” Ryan replied dryly.
They were sitting in his office. Ryan was thinking it was pathetically small, almost no larger than some walk-in closets he had seen in the homes of wealthy people. McCalester’s desk was so small the big man looked as if he were sitting in a room full of children’s furniture. The dull gray walls were inundated with framed pictures of a younger McCalester standing with state politicians and county officials. Here and there were pictures of him with celebrities, movie and television stars who had come through the area or attended an event nearby.
“Well, they’re a great couple. She’s a very attractive woman, and he’s a good-looking man and, as you probably know, a very successful attorney. Matter of fact, he was recently promoted to partner in what you also probably know is the county’s most successful and important law firm.”
“I saw nothing about children. They’ve been married long enough to qualify,” Ryan said.
The Baby Squad Page 14
