The Unwanted

by John Saul

  But where had the cat come from? She’d never seen it before, couldn’t remember even seeing one that looked like it.

  She started toward it, stopping when the creature’s fur stood up and its hissing turned into a dangerous snarl. Rosemary glanced around the room but saw no weapon, nothing with which to fend the cat off. She picked up a pillow and threw it at the angry animal. The cat ducked away from the pillow, leaped from the windowsill, and disappeared under the bed. Instantly Rosemary ran to the window, jerked it open, and fumbled with the hooks. As soon as they were free and the screen was once more loose, she felt the cat brush past her. As she watched in astonishment, it leaped into the tree, dropped to the ground, then disappeared into the cemetery next to the church.

  Her heart beating rapidly, Rosemary waited by the window for a moment, trying to catch another glimpse of the cat, but then the burning pain in her arm penetrated her consciousness. Looking down, she saw four deep scratches in her wrist, a line of blood oozing from each of them. Slamming the window shut, she abandoned Cassie’s bedroom and hurried into the bathroom to wash her injured wrist.

  A cat, she thought. Where on earth had it come from, and what was it doing in Cassie’s room? But, of course, she already knew—it had come around begging, and Cassie had let it in. Well, there would be no more of that—if there was one thing Rosemary Winslow had never been able to stand, it was cats.

  Chapter 6

  “There she is!” Lisa Chambers whispered loudly, leaning forward across the cafeteria table to make sure Teri Bennett and Allayne Garvey could hear her. “Isn’t it spooky? I mean, just look at her!” She straightened up, brushing a stray lock of her blond hair back in place, then fell silent as her two best friends shifted their attention to the cafeteria door, where Cassie Winslow stood scanning the room as if she were looking for someone. After a few seconds she moved to the end of the food line and picked up a tray.

  “I don’t think she looks so weird,” Allayne commented, then wished she hadn’t said it when Lisa’s eyes raked her scornfully.

  “Are you nuts?” Lisa demanded, her voice no longer a whisper. “Look at the way she’s dressed. She looks like some kind of leftover hippie or something!”

  “What’s wrong with that?” Teri protested. “And she’s dressed just like everyone else, except her jeans are red. If I could find a pair that color, I’d buy them too.”

  Allayne, feeling more secure now that she knew Teri hadn’t seen anything particularly strange about Cassie either, nodded. “And her hair’s gorgeous,” she added. “It’s almost the same color as Eric’s, except his is curly and hers is straight.” At the mention of Eric’s name she saw Lisa’s color deepen, and suddenly understood what Lisa really had against Cassie. She grinned mischievously, and her voice took on a needling quality. “In fact I’ll bet she and Eric would look neat together, wouldn’t they, Teri?”

  “They would not,” Lisa snapped, instantly rising to Allayne’s bait. “Besides, Eric can’t stand her.”

  “Then why did he walk her to school this morning?” Teri asked with a deliberately innocent tone. She was enjoying Lisa’s obvious discomfort. Usually it was everyone else who felt uncomfortable while Lisa said whatever was on her mind. As Lisa struggled to find an answer to her question, Teri spoke again, keeping her voice blandly innocent. “Here come Eric and Jeff Maynard. Let’s ask Eric.”

  “Don’t you dare,” Lisa gasped, her face suddenly paling. “If you ask him, Teri, I swear I’ll never speak to you again!” As Eric dropped into the seat next to her, and Jeff into the one next to that, she fell silent.

  “What’s going on?” Eric asked as the two girls across the table stifled a giggle.

  “Nothing,” Allayne finally said. “We were just talking about Cassie. Lisa doesn’t like her very much.” Lisa’s eyes flashed her a warning, but Allayne decided to ignore it. “What’s she like?”

  Eric shrugged. “I don’t know. I only talked to her on the way to school this morning.”

  “Well, what did you talk about?” Teri pressed.

  Before Eric could answer, Cassie appeared next to the empty seat beside Teri Bennett.

  “Is anybody sitting here?” she asked, her voice betraying nervousness.

  Eric was about to shake his head when he felt Lisa’s elbow nudge him sharply.

  “It’s saved,” Lisa said. “Teri’s boyfriend always sits there, and he’ll be here any minute. Sorry.”

  Cassie hesitated, then moved off toward a small empty table next to the far wall. Teri stared at Lisa.

  “My boyfriend?” she echoed. “Would you mind telling me who that’s supposed to be?”

  “Well, why should she sit with us?” Lisa protested. “Can’t she make her own friends? Just because she lives next door to Eric doesn’t make her part of our group. She’s just a nobody, and I don’t think any of us should have anything to do with her.”

  A silence fell over the table as the other four teenagers looked at each other, each of them waiting for someone else to speak first. Finally Eric Cavanaugh broke the silence.

  “How’s she supposed to make friends if nobody will even talk to her?” he asked. Without another word he rewrapped his sandwich and put it back in the bag. Then, with his lunch in one hand and an open carton of milk in the other, he got up and walked over to the table where Cassie sat alone. As his friends watched in silence, he said something to Cassie. She nodded, and then he sat down.

  Finally Allayne Garvey leaned across the table. “I thought you said he couldn’t stand her.”

  Lisa’s eyes narrowed and her lips tightened with anger, but she said nothing.

  When the bell rang twenty minutes later, Eric began stuffing the remains of his lunch into the paper bag. Across from him Cassie didn’t seem to have heard the bell at all. “What’s your next class?” he asked.

  She started slightly, then shook her head. “I—I don’t know. Math, I think.”

  “Mr. Simms,” Eric grunted. “He’s a real creep. You want me to walk you up there?”

  But instead of answering his question, Cassie asked one of her own. “What’s Lisa’s next class?”

  Eric frowned. “Math. So what?”

  Cassie took a deep breath then stood up, hooking her right arm through the straps of her bag so she’d have both hands free to pick up her tray. “So, I guess I won’t go to class,” she said.

  “Not go?” Eric asked blankly. What was she talking about? You didn’t just decide not to go to classes. “What do you mean?”

  “Just that,” Cassie replied, her voice calm. “I decided during second period that if things didn’t get any better by lunchtime, I was going to leave.”

  “But you can’t leave,” Eric protested, scrambling to his feet to follow Cassie as she headed toward the bins of dirty dishes at one end of the long food counter. “Besides, what’s been so bad?”

  Cassie added her tray to the stack on the counter, then quickly sorted her dishes into the various bins. When she was done, Eric shoved his empty lunch bag into a trash barrel and fell in beside her as they started toward the cafeteria doors. “I just feel like everybody hates me,” Cassie replied. “They’re all talking about me, and Lisa’s the worst. So if she’s in the math class, I’m just not going to go.”

  “But what’ll you do?” Eric asked.

  Cassie shrugged. “I don’t know. Wander around, I guess. Maybe I’ll go to the beach.” She glanced at Eric. “Want to come with me? You could show me the beach.”

  Eric stared at her. He’d thought about cutting school, even talked about it with Jeff Maynard a few times. But he’d never actually done it, because he’d known what would happen if his father ever found out. And yet now, as Cassie challenged him with her eyes, he felt himself wavering. When she spoke again, it was as if she’d read his mind.

  “If your father catches you, I’ll tell him it was my fault. We’ll say I was feeling really sick and you were walking me home, but then I felt better and wanted to go to the beac
h. And you couldn’t just leave me by myself. I mean, what if I got sick again?”

  Eric knew his father wouldn’t buy a story like that, even if it were true. But as he opened his mouth to tell Cassie it wouldn’t work, he found himself agreeing to it.

  “Okay,” he said. “But if we get caught, I’m gonna be in big trouble.”

  “We won’t get caught,” Cassie replied. “Come on.”

  They walked down Maple Street to Cape Drive, crossed to the beach side, then started walking west, toward the mouth of the harbor. Cassie carried her tote bag in one hand and said little, concentrating instead on the weathered shingled houses that bordered the beach. They were spaced wide apart, and between them were expanses of grassy sand, broken here and there by low picket fences whose paint had long since been worn away by the storms of winter. The houses, their shutters closed, had a lonely look to them. Finally, as they passed the fifth one, Cassie turned to Eric.

  “Doesn’t anyone live in them?”

  “Not this time of year. They won’t be opened up until school lets out.”

  “You mean they’re empty all the time except during summer?”

  Eric shrugged. “They’re just summer houses. Who wants to go to the beach during the winter?”

  “I do,” Cassie replied. “At home that was one of my favorite times to go to the beach. There’d hardly be anybody there except me, and sometimes I’d go out on the bus all by myself and just walk for miles. The summer’s okay at the beach, but it gets too crowded. I mean, at the good beaches there’s so many people in the summer, you can hardly move. It gets really gross.”

  Eric grinned. “It’s never that crowded here, even when all the summer people are around. Unless you go out to Provincetown. Out there it gets really jammed.”

  They came to a path and turned right, then began climbing a series of low grass-covered dunes that separated the road from the beach itself. As they crested the last of the dunes, the soft roar of the surf grew louder. Suddenly the Atlantic lay spread before them. Cassie stopped abruptly, staring at the ocean.

  “It looks different,” she said, cocking her head thoughtfully. Then she understood. “It’s the sun. The sun’s coming from a different direction.” She dropped down onto the sand, stretched out on her back and stared straight up into the sky. Gulls wheeled overhead, and she could hear them screeching to each other as they dove down every few seconds to snatch something out of the water or off the sandy expanse of beach. Finally she rolled over, jumped to her feet, and ran down the beach toward the water line. A flock of sandpipers skittered away from her, then spread their wings and fluttered into the air. Flying straight out to sea, they suddenly banked around to the right, then glided in to land again, fifty yards farther along. Cassie watched them, entranced, then kicked off her shoes, stuffed them into her tote bag, rolled her jeans up to her knees, and waded into the water. Immediately a shriek burst from her throat. “It’s cold!” she shouted to Eric, who had followed her down onto the hard-packed sand of the beach, but not into the water.

  “What did you expect?” Eric shouted back. “It’s only April!”

  “At home everybody’s swimming already,” Cassie gasped, splashing out of the water. She dashed back up the beach to her tote bag and put her shoes back on. Then something at the far end of the beach caught her eye. “What’s that?” she asked.

  Eric squinted into the afternoon sun. “It’s the marker at Cranberry Point. It shows where the channel starts, so the boats don’t wind up in the marsh.”

  Cassie gazed thoughtfully at the channel marker for a few moments, then turned to face Eric. “Is that where Miranda Sikes lives?” she asked abruptly. “Down that way?”

  Eric blinked in surprise. “Why do you want to know that?” he asked.

  Cassie regarded Eric carefully. Should she tell him about the dreams she’d had, and that she was almost sure Miranda was the woman she’d seen in the dream? But it would sound crazy to him, wouldn’t it? Besides, she didn’t even know if it was true or not. Except that she had this feeling, deep inside …

  “I don’t know,” she said finally. “I just saw her yesterday, and she … well, she looked kind of interesting.”

  “She’s just a bag lady,” Eric replied, too quickly. “She’s nuts.”

  Cassie felt a surge of anger. “How do you know?” she demanded. “Have you ever talked to her?”

  Eric said nothing.

  “Then you shouldn’t talk about her,” Cassie plunged on. “You don’t know what she’s like any more than anyone knows what I’m like!” The memory of Lisa’s cutting words in the classroom came back to her. “Doesn’t anybody around here even want to get to know me? Or do you just not count unless you grew up here?”

  “Hey, that’s not fair—” Eric began. But then he remembered Lisa gossiping in the cafeteria, and realized that what Cassie had said wasn’t very far from the truth. “I want to get to know you,” he said quietly.

  But Cassie didn’t seem to hear him as she kicked moodily at the sand. “Maybe I never should have come here,” she said almost to herself.

  Eric frowned. “But you had to, didn’t you? What were you going to do, stay in California all by yourself?”

  Once more Cassie’s eyes met his. “Lots of kids my age live on their own. I could do it too.”

  “Sure,” Eric agreed. “And you could wind up hooking in the Combat Zone in Boston, and doing drugs too. Or you could even end up like Miranda.”

  Cassie’s eyes glistened with tears. “Well, maybe it would be better than this,” she said. “And what’s so awful about Miranda, anyway?”

  Eric opened his mouth to say something, then abruptly closed it again and looked out to sea. Cassie said nothing, waiting for Eric to make up his mind. Finally, still not looking at her, he shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know,” he said. Then he grinned crookedly, and managed to meet her eyes. “I guess you’re right. Nobody knows anything about her, really. She never talks to anybody, and nobody even looks at her anymore.”

  “Well, where does she live?” Cassie asked. “Does she work?”

  Again Eric looked nervous. He shook his head. “She must be on welfare or something. She lives down there,” he went on, nodding toward the point. “Down in the marsh. I—I can show you where it is, I guess.”

  “Then let’s go see,” Cassie said immediately. She got to her feet again and slung the bag over her shoulder. Without waiting for Eric to reply, she started toward the tall red channel marker barely visible in the distance. When Eric caught up with her a few moments later, her mood seemed to have changed. She glanced over at him, grinning happily. “Now, isn’t this better than school?” she asked. “Out here I can almost forget about everything and pretend everything’s perfect!”

  “It’s fun,” Eric admitted. “But what if we get caught?”

  “If you always worry about what will happen, how can you do anything?” Cassie asked. “Besides, what’s so great about school?”

  “If you want to go to college, it helps if you go to high school,” Eric pointed out.

  “I go,” Cassie replied. “Anyway, I go enough so I don’t get behind. Besides, all you’re supposed to do is learn the stuff they teach, so if I learn fast, why should I waste my time sitting in classes all day? Especially with people like Lisa.”

  Eric kicked self-consciously at the sand. “Lisa’s okay.”

  Cassie looked at Eric out of the corner of her eye. “Is she your girlfriend?”

  Eric felt himself flushing. “I—I don’t know. I guess she is. Anyway, she thinks she is, and my dad likes her.”

  Cassie stopped short. “Your dad likes her? What’s that got to do with anything?”

  Eric shrugged uncomfortably. “It—well, it just makes things easier if I go out with people my dad likes.” He could feel Cassie’s eyes on him then, and he tried not to look at her. At last he couldn’t help himself, and his eyes met hers. “That’s kind of stupid, isn’t it?” he asked.

 
; Cassie said nothing, but nodded her head.

  They continued walking along a few feet apart, and though neither of them said anything for a long time, there was nothing uncomfortable about the silence. When Cassie finally spoke again, Eric knew immediately what she was talking about.

  “I bet she’s rich, isn’t she?”

  “Uh-huh. Mr. Chambers married Kevin Smythe’s aunt, and the Smythes used to own most of False Harbor.”

  “I bet your dad wishes he’d married Kevin Smythe’s aunt.”

  Almost in spite of himself Eric snickered. “She wouldn’t have married him. She can’t stand my dad.”

  Cassie’s eyes rolled. “So your dad likes Lisa because of who her parents are, and her parents don’t like your dad but let Lisa go out with you?”

  Eric nodded.

  “What a bunch of crap. Doesn’t it make you want to puke sometimes?”

  Eric frowned. “I’m not sure what you’re talking about,” he said, even though he thought he knew exactly what she meant.

  “Just parents,” Cassie said. She tipped her face up into the breeze, enjoying the feel of the crisp air on her face. “They always do things for dumb reasons. Like my mom hated my dad and was always telling me how rotten he was.” Her voice took on a hard edge, but her eyes were glistening with tears. “She only kept me around so he couldn’t have me. Then she went out and got killed on the freeway, and how was that supposed to make me feel? I mean, Mom wanted me to hate Dad as much as she did, and now I have to live with him ’cause she’s dead.…” She hesitated, fighting the conflicting emotions that roiled inside her. “Well, it’s no big deal that she died—just because she was my mom didn’t give her the right to beat me up! And you know what? She was wrong about my dad. He’s not a bad guy. But what does he need me for? He’s got a whole other family.” She sniffled, then determinedly wiped her tears away and managed to smile weakly at Eric. “It makes you wonder why they bother to have kids in the first place.”

  Eric looked at the sand at his feet, embarrassed by Cassie’s outburst. And yet almost everything she’d said were things he himself had thought about. “But what can you do about it?” he asked softly. “You can’t choose who your parents are.”