Black Bells

by Dawn Napier

  But somehow that wasn't the only reason she didn't want to climb those stairs.

  She stopped in Jenna's room first. At eight, the girl was starting to go through the dreaded teenybopper phase; posters of cuddly animals and cartoon princesses had recently been replaced by sleek pop stars with unlikely hair. But she still left teeth under her pillow for the Tooth Fairy, Megan thought. She wasn't safe yet.

  Now there was an odd thought. Safe from what?

  "Jenna," Megan said softly.

  No response from the tangle of blankets and stuffed animals.

  Her bedroom window was raised just a crack. Megan went and closed it quickly. Brian would have a cow over the wasted air conditioning.

  The thump of the window closing didn't rouse her daughter either. Megan sighed. "Jenna." Firmly this time.

  Still no response. Megan couldn't even see the kid. Time to pull out the big guns.

  "Jenna! Pancakes and bacon!"

  "Who za wha za pancakes?" Instantly Jenna was sitting up and looking around, wild as a cat.

  "Pancakes and bacon," Megan repeated. "Daddy's got your food ready. I'm about to go get your sister up."

  "Sister." Jenna's mouth drew down. "Yeah, okay. Go—go get Paige." Jenna rolled out of bed and wandered down the stairs. She walked with a stiff little limp, as though one of her legs had fallen asleep. She must not have slept well either. Megan smiled a little. Someone had once compared raising children to living with an alcoholic, and she always saw the resemblance first thing in the morning.

  Now for Paige. Five years old and prone to screaming tantrums, Brian had pragmatically put her in the room furthest from the master bedroom. Walking to her room sometimes felt like a trip to the highest point of the highest tower, though of course it was just on the other side of the guest bedroom.

  Her door stood open. Weird. Megan always kept the girls' doors shut at night to keep them cooler in the summer. Paige must have gotten up in the night to go to the bathroom. Megan thought that she should have heard her, though. She'd been up and down all night.

  "Paigey-Paige, pancakes and bacon!" Megan yelled. She wasn't even going to try the subtle approach this time.

  Like her sister's, Paige's bed was a jumbled mess of blankets, teddy bears, and picture books. Unlike her sister's bed, this one was devoid of human life.

  "Paige?" Megan stared. This was so unexpected that for a moment or two she wasn't sure how to react. "Paige," she repeated, louder.

  She looked all over the room. She wasn't in any of the corners and wasn't in her closet. She wasn't even under the bed. "Paige!" Her heart thumped in her ears.

  Maybe she'd already gone downstairs with her sister. Megan hurried down to the kitchen.

  Jenna was methodically tearing up and eating a pile of pancakes. She stared out the window as she ate, as though she were waiting for someone. Megan made a mental note to scold Brian for not cutting up her food for her; the child was making a righteous mess all over herself and the table. But she would save that for after they'd found Paige.

  "Have you seen Paige?" she asked Brian, who was still loading up the second kid's plate. This time he'd remembered to cut up the pancakes.

  "Nope. Maybe she's in the potty." Brian added four slices of bacon. That was way too much food. Brian tended to judge the kids' appetites by his own personal standards. Megan wouldn't scold him about that this time. She needed to find Paige.

  "Good thought." Megan squeezed his arm and went out again. She'd do a more careful search this time and check every room upstairs and downstairs. Maybe Paige was playing an impromptu game of hide-and-seek. She remembered once yelling frantically all over the park, one hand on her phone and ready to call 911, only to find her giggling under a bush next to the swings. Her mortification had made her want to kill both her daughter and herself.

  She passed through the living room again. At least her mission was taking her away from Brian's well-intentioned attempt to feed her. She didn't feel like she could even look at food right now. A little rabbit was starting to gallop in her chest, and she told herself to calm down. Paige was in the house somewhere. There was no way she couldn't be.

  Upstairs and downstairs she checked. Then she checked again. The rabbit galloped a little faster. She walked from room to room and flung doors open a little harder than she needed to. The rabbit began to leap, and she tried to tell it to be still. She swallowed a sour burp.

  Still no Paige.

  "She's nowhere in the house!" she yelled as she came back into the kitchen.

  "Are you sure?" Brian asked around a mouthful of bacon.

  No, I'm making shit up for fun. Megan resisted a sarcastic reply. She bit down on her tongue and said, "I've looked all over the house. Twice."

  "All right. Stay here with Jenna."

  He was going to go waste more time looking for her instead of taking her word for it. Typical. Megan dug her cell phone out of her purse in the hall closet. Jenna was a big girl, and she could damn well eat a pancake by herself. Even if she was tearing it to shit and getting syrup all over the table.

  Brian came back just as Megan was ending the call. "You're right, she's gone." His cheerful morning face was gone, leaving a pale blank ghost. "I'm going to call 911."

  "Way ahead of you. The cops are on their way."

  Brian grabbed her and hugged her tightly against his chest. Usually she felt comforted by his overly enthusiastic hugs, but right now she felt smothered. She wanted to pace and swing her arms and look out the window.

  Out the window. Maybe Paige was playing outside. She'd never gone outside by herself before, but there was a first time for everything.

  "I'm going to look for her outside," she told Brian's chest.

  "Oh hey, good idea." He released her, and she took a deep, cleansing breath.

  "Where's Paige?" Jenna asked. She spoke numbly, and she still stared out the kitchen window.

  "That's what we're trying to figure out," Megan said. She and went out the back door, figuring that if she was anywhere nearby she'd be on the swing set.

  Her bare feet were cold and wet, and she shuddered. Summer was drawing to a close, and there was a chilly edge to the morning. Paige surely wouldn't be out here. She'd be lonely and uncomfortable in minutes.

  "Paige!" she shouted. It felt weird to raise her voice on such a still morning, but the rabbit was running faster and faster, and it gave her voice an extra edge.

  There was no response. Megan looked in the clubhouse at the top of the slide, but there was no Paige hiding in the corner. She peeked under the porch, but no Paige peeked back from among the dirt and rocks.

  No Paige behind the storage shed, which was locked and impregnable. No Paige in the rose bushes. Everywhere Megan looked, Paige stubbornly wasn't.

  "Paige!" she screamed at the sky. "Paige, where the fuck are you?"

  The sky just stared back down at her, uncaring and unblinking. The sky had seen it all and didn't give a damn.

  When the police showed up minutes later, they called for an ambulance to treat the hysterical mother. The missing girl's pale, blue-lipped father declined a trip to the hospital when he saw that the sedative was doing an adequate job of calming his sobbing, shaking wife. The older daughter stared out the window and refused to speak or look at anyone.

  Chapter Three

  Megan felt drowsy and stoned. Brian had slipped her one of her pain-pills from the time she'd hurt her back skiing (or maybe she'd taken two or three), and now she was high as a kite. She still remembered that Paige was missing, but the pain was distant, as though it were being felt by someone else. It was something she could look at without being a part of it. She wanted to be angry at Brian for drugging her, but she couldn't feel much of anything right now. And that was all right. When the drug wore off she'd be good and pissed. She could wait.

  Being stoned gave her much needed perspective, though, and it helped her look at the situation more objectively. She was able to look at her dream about Jack and her daught
er's subsequent disappearance with an eye free of prejudice. While her consciousness was floating on Cloud Nine, it couldn't interrupt her with useless commentary like "That's impossible!" This made it easier for Megan to face the truth.

  She lay in bed and stared at the ceiling, at the pattern of faint colors that washed across it. The painkiller must have a mildly hallucinogenic effect, she thought. All the better; Jack Benimble had been her childhood version of LSD, hadn't he?

  Start with Debbie. Debbie had adored Jack, demanding new stories every night. Jack had been Megan's creation, but she thought Debbie had relied on him more. With an adult's perspective on certain childhood events, she understood why this was so.

  And now Debbie was dead. Suicide, clear as a bell. She'd drunk an entire bottle of vanilla-flavored vodka, scrawled the word "Goodbye" on the chalkboard in her kitchen, and jumped out of an upstairs window. Pretty cut and dried.

  And again, looking back, Megan saw with the clarity of hindsight that Debbie had never really gotten over It. All the different therapists, the different medications, even a stint in a mental hospital three years ago. Debbie had been haunted all these years. It. The bad thing. Even drugged up as she was, Megan didn't like to even think the R word.

  So Debbie was dead, and the night after her funeral Megan had dreamed about their old friend Jack. All grown up, just like them. He had come to take Megan away, away to the land of Far Faraway, and Megan had refused.

  And he had taken Paige instead.

  It was simple, once she could look at it from a reasonable perspective. Since what she was considering was completely insane, it only made sense that she needed to be high in order to look at it rationally.

  The police were still in the house, crawling all over everything like uniform-clad ants. They asked Brian question after question, often the same questions from different angles. She heard their questions, and Brian's mumbled replies, but the words made no sense to her. They were just words, like purple monkey dishwasher. But their tones were clear and understandable. The cops' voices were calm and reasonable, and they grew calmer and more reasonable as Brian's voice began to rise with irritation. “You understand why we have to ask you these questions”, they said over and over again. “Of course I do,” he responded. “Of course I do.” They were just repeating words, and Megan understood nothing.

  They came to Megan's bedside and asked some of the same questions, and she answered in a dry, colorless voice. She didn't mind answering questions. She didn't mind saying the same things over and over. None of it meant anything. They were just words. Jack was what mattered—Jack and Paige.

  At the moment, they were making no obvious plans to arrest either of them. Megan didn't worry about it, because she knew they wouldn't find anything. They wouldn't find Paige, and they wouldn't find any evidence that she or Brian had caused her disappearance. Unless they found a professional psychic who wasn't a complete fraud, Paige was beyond their reach and Megan beyond their suspicion.

  She had to go after Jack Benimble herself and get Paige back. But could she? She remembered her clumsy, abortive attempt to follow her younger self to Jupiter. She was too old; she knew that much about how the world worked. She probably couldn't do what a child could. Her brain was too crammed with knowledge and not enough imagination.

  Unless she could somehow reconnect with her childhood self, that happy daydreamer she'd been before the bad thing happened. That was her only hope.

  Megan rolled over onto her stomach and closed her eyes. She needed to sober up now. Wondering and imagining while stoned was all well and good, but for planning, sobriety was needed.

  She awoke to find Brian on the bed next to her. He lay on top of the covers and stroked her hair. "Hmm?" she inquired. The look on his face said that he wanted to talk to her.

  "Was Jenna's window open this morning when you went up there?" he asked softly.

  "Hm. Yeah. Closed it. Why?"

  "The cops keep asking. They keep going back to the open window, and they keep asking why you closed it instead of leaving it open for the investigators."

  "Told them a bunch of times. Didn't know Paige was gone. Thought Jenna opened it, so I closed it. They think I lied?"

  "Well, neither of us is under arrest yet. Officer Landon did say they might be back with more questions, though."

  "That shit in my system was like truth serum." Megan rolled painfully onto her back, and her joints crackled and popped. "Too stoned to lie. What are they doing about finding Paige?"

  "They've got an Amber Alert out, and there are also patrolmen on foot just in case she did leave on her own, and she's somewhere in the neighborhood. But the open window has them thinking kidnapper." His voice was cool and methodical, as though he were reciting a list of boring facts that must be memorized. He only sounded like that when he was deeply upset. “They’ve got a recorder attached to our phone line now, in case someone calls.”

  "If the kidnapper came through Jenna's window, maybe she saw him."

  "They had a police woman talk to her, but she's not saying much. She just keeps staring out the window. She hasn't left the kitchen table yet, and when the lady asks her a question, she just says ‘yeah’ or ‘no’. She says she was asleep and dreaming all night, and she didn't see anyone. We're not sure if she's telling the truth...?" His words ended on a questioning note, as though Megan would know anything.

  "Do they think it could have been Sarah?" Megan asked quietly.

  Brian stiffened at the name. It hadn't been spoken aloud in the house for almost two years. He adjusted the blanket around Megan's waist and answered, "Well, they're looking for her. She hasn't had a permanent address in six months or more, but the last anyone heard she was living down south somewhere."

  "She could have come back. She might have tracked us down." The more Megan thought about it, the more plausible it seemed. It was far more likely than the crazy fantasy her mind had been playing with.

  "I don't think she even knows the names we gave them after the adoption went through."

  "But she knows our last name, doesn't she?"

  "Campbell is a really common name, though."

  "You can't assume that she has no way of finding us. This is the Internet age, and Big Brother is everywhere. There's no real privacy anymore."

  Megan felt a twinge of guilt as she spoke. Something deep in her guts still insisted that the girls' birth mother had nothing to do with Paige's disappearance, and she was making a target of the poor woman for nothing. But now that the drug was wearing off, reason was taking over and shoving instinct into the back seat. If Sarah had found them, reason pointed out, that would explain everything. It would explain why neither girl had screamed or fought the kidnapper. It would explain Jenna's distant behavior; she might be upset that "Mommy" had taken her sister and left her. It even explained the open window. If Sarah had made it up the side of the house—unlikely given the woman's general health, but not impossible—Jenna might have opened the window for her.

  Instinct insisted faintly that it was Jack, Jack Benimble who had stolen Paige away, and time was running out to get her back. But now that Megan was awake and in control, instinct's voice was getting fainter and fainter.

  "Can I bring you anything?" Brian asked finally.

  "No, I'm getting up. Seems like I've been lying around too much lately." Megan heaved herself into a sitting position. "It's a wonder I don't have bedsores."

  Her joints creaked and popped again as she got up and walked slowly downstairs. Damn it was a drag getting older. Jenna still sat at the kitchen table, the remnants of her breakfast still in front of her. Megan glanced at the stove clock. It was past lunch time.

  "Has she been sitting here all this time?" she asked Brian.

  "She got up once to go to the bathroom."

  "Didn't the cops say anything? She looks catatonic."

  "That one guy, Erik, he said she's physically fine. Her temperature and vitals are normal. He asked if I wanted him to give her somethi
ng, but I said no. Drugs aren't good for little bodies. Honestly—I think she’s just looking for Paige."

  Megan studied her daughter. Jenna hadn't turned around or even moved her head since Megan had entered the kitchen. She gave no evidence of awareness, though surely she knew they were there.

  "Well, I think I'll go for a walk," Brian said. He backed out of the kitchen. "Walk around the neighborhood, see if the cops need any help. She might just be at a neighbor's house... who knows."

  "Who knows," Megan echoed faintly. She felt so strange. Like a stuffed doll. And her daughter was like a painting, beautiful and flat and so far away.

  She broke the illusion by sitting down in a chair and touching Jenna's arm. The girl felt warm and alive and real. Megan sighed with relief.

  "Hey," she said.

  "Hay is for horses," Jenna said. She still did not turn around.

  Megan's heart quickened. Jenna wasn't catatonic. She was still here, still with them. Everything would be all right. Brian was probably right; she just was watching out the window for her sister to come back.

  "Crazy morning, huh?" God, what a stupid thing to say. Why did bad experiences always make people talk like idiots?

  "Mommy, why did Jack take Paige away?"

  Megan's heart froze into a cold lump. "What do you mean, honey?"

  Jenna turned around and glared into Megan's eyes. Her face was pale, and her pupils were dilated. She looked like an angry cat. "Don't say stupid things, Mommy, don't act like such a grown-up! Just answer the damn question!"

  "Don't—don't say damn, Jenna." Megan leaned back and stared at her furious daughter. The stuffed-doll feeling was back. Maybe this was another dream, and she would soon wake up, and Paige would be back.

  Jenna just stared, and Megan finally said, "He came to take me away like he did Aunt Debbie. I told him no. I guess that's why he took Paige."

  "He didn't take Aunt Debbie. She fell out the window."

  "That's what I thought, too, but he told me he did." How odd to be having this impossible conversation with her daughter. As though they’d both had the same dream.