by Ronald Malfi
Again—something faltered behind her eyes. She knew, all right. But it was probably something she didn’t want to think about. And did he really have any right forcing her to, anyway? He’d offered up his story about getting shot with little protest, but it was evident that he had crossed over into territory Nellie Worthridge probably preferred remain untouched. For whatever reason.
We’ve started opening all the doors, now, he thought. All sorts of doors…
When she spoke, her speech came out garbled. “I’m aware that some things were said, that I said them to Dr. Mendes, which caused him to become quite upset. I can’t recall what I said, but I know I upset him and I am sorry for that. My mind was in another place at that time.”
“You were medicated and just suffered a stroke,” he said in her defense.
“Afterwards, I tried warming up to the man, but he couldn’t reciprocate. I’d frightened him, that was evident. But beyond that…well, there’s nothing I can do about any of that now.”
For a moment, Josh thought she was talking about something much bigger than what had transpired between her and the doctor. Something just beyond his own ability to perceive, perhaps, although old Nellie Worthridge could see it just fine.
“Kelly,” she said, snapping him back to reality.
“Kelly?” Hearing the old woman speak her name startled him.
“Is she all right?”
It occurred to him that Nellie did not know Kelly was out of town. She might have been feeling hurt Kelly hadn’t shown up at the hospital. “She’s left town for a while, went upstate. Her parents’ house, where she grew up.”
“Is everything all right?” She sounded very concerned, which bothered him for some reason. He felt like he was in the middle of an empty room, and the walls were all beginning to fall in on him at once.
“She’s fine.” And thought, Kelly doesn’t know about your stroke and you don’t know about Kelly’s sister nearly being killed. I’m like a safety deposit box for sad little truths.
“When will she be back?”
He told her he didn’t know.
“You’ve spoken to her since she’s left?”
“No,” he said, “I haven’t.” Then, for whatever reason prompted him to do so, he said, “Do you think she’s all right?”
Nellie Worthridge only sipped her coffee, using one hand. There was a look of concern in her eyes, too obvious to be denied. It glistened there like drops of water on old boards. It was ridiculous, thinking he could find solace in the words of an old woman, particularly when she knew nothing of his concerns. He didn’t even know…
“I hope so,” she said finally, and with no relief. “I hope so.”
Chapter Twelve
No one noticed DeVonn Rotley was missing until well into the afternoon. When the dogs started barking.
Kelly had slept a restless sleep the night before and awoke late in the afternoon, groggy and with a sore neck. She would have probably slept longer too, if it wasn’t for the incessant barking coming from the rear of the house. The sound yanked her from sleep and she sat up like a bolt, running her fingers through her matted hair. She leaned over the edge of the bed and peered out the window (noticing that her window, like Becky’s, was now cracked open, though she couldn’t remember if it had been that way when she’d gone to sleep last night). Yes, there were dogs barking. An entire platoon of them, by the sound. Faintly, in the distance, someone was calling DeVonn Rotley’s name. It was her father—and there was some semblance of his long-gone intensity in his voice this morning. After some time, she saw Glenda hurry around the front of the house lugging a sack of dog food on her hip.
Kelly looked at the clock on the nightstand and saw that it was well after lunch time. She quickly dressed, unlocked her bedroom door (it was locked all night, she convinced herself, so how could anyone get in to crack open her window?), and slipped out into the upstairs hallway. Jiggling the knob on Becky’s bedroom door, she found it unlocked and poked her head inside. The room was quiet, the window shut. Very much like a porcelain doll, Becky Kellow rested with her bruised and sleeping head on a silk pillow.
Downstairs, she found her mother in the dining room, leafing through thick catalogues of flowers and sipping cognac. Some pastries had been set along the dining room table. Without looking up, her mother said, “I thought you would never wake. And locking your bedroom door—is that something you’ve become accustomed to from living in the city?”
“What’s that noise?”
“Those filthy hounds from hell,” her mother growled. “I don’t know where in the world Rotley’s disappeared to, but if someone doesn’t feed those dogs and shut them up quick, I’m going to go out there with your father’s hunting rifle and make peace with nature.”
Glenda swooped into the dining room from the kitchen entranceway, anxious to collect the uneaten pastries from the table. She saw Kelly standing disheveled in the doorway and smiled. “Looks like someone let the Baby out,” the woman chirped. “I’ve left some breakfast in the kitchen for you, dear. I’m afraid it’s cold now, but if you give me just a minute I can heat something up for you, after I take care of your sister.”
“I’m not hungry.” She went to the dining room windows, peered out. “You have dogs?”
“Your father has dogs,” her mother said quickly. Her voice was sharp, like she’d just been poked in the rear with a hot iron. “The man spends half his life butchering wildlife, and the other half collecting them in cages at the rear of the compound. He puzzles me, that man.”
“They should quiet down soon enough,” Glenda said. “I just came from feeding them.”
“That’s Rotley’s job. They’re his dogs, really.”
“I know, Mrs. Kellow.”
“Where is he, anyhow?”
“Don’t know,” Glenda said, filling her arms with pastries. Kelly went to her and took some of the load from her arms, followed her into the kitchen.
Helping the housekeeper put the food away, Kelly said, “Are you close with Becky?”
“Becky’s a lovely girl.” She seemed saddened just thinking about her. “I try to be close. We get along nicely. Not like us, though.”
“I remember,” Kelly said. “You were good to me. I never thanked you for that.”
“Oh, honey…”
“Really. You raised me, not them.”
“Your parents were busy people, dear.”
“No, they were just rich people, and that allowed them to keep busy. Growing up, I sometimes thought they forgot they even had a daughter.”
Glenda replaced a tray in the refrigerator, shaking her head. “Now, honey, you know that’s not true—”
“I know,” she said, “but it still felt that way sometimes.” She thought about her mother sitting at the dining room table, flipping absently through a gardening brochure. And then her father, standing in the middle of his once great purple room that was purple no more. He was almost a nonentity—back then, and even more so now, it seemed. It was the house, she thought, consuming them just like it had tried to consume her as a child.
This house had nothing to do with what happened to me, she thought, although she still couldn’t be certain. It was just a gut feeling. The memories of her childhood were like slices of Swiss cheese—riddled with holes and inconsistencies. It was something else, something I still can’t remember.
“You were the one who wanted to keep me here,” she said then, as if suddenly remembering. But she’d at least known this part all along. “They sent me to that institution but you tried to get me to stay. Thank you.”
Glenda was now leaning over the kitchen sink, staring out the window at the hedgerow in the yard. The windowpane was covered in a film of frost. “Don’t be hard on them,” she told Kelly. “They did what they thought was right. They only wanted what was best for you. You can’t keep hating them for that, darling.”
“Well,” Kelly said, putting a hand on the woman’s back. “Thank you nonetheless.”
It was cold outside, and Kelly hugged herself tightly about the shoulders as she crossed around to the rear of the house. She saw her father standing beside the large pen that housed DeVonn Rotley’s collection of Dobermans. His back was to her, and he stood staring down the valley into the immense swell of trees. She came up behind him, uncertain as to what she should say (or even if she should say anything at all), and stood watching him in silence for several moments. She thought of the painting of the giant kneeling down by the river. Despite his imposing size, her father no longer seemed like a giant, crouching or otherwise. Rather, his form evoked in her images of downed power lines, of aged cattle strewn without method or purpose about some green pasture, lost and forgotten. With the passage of so many years, and like magic, he’d somehow managed to regress in age, as if his physical self was desperate to return to its youth. She watched him, and when he sighed, he did so with a great heaving roll of his broad shoulders.
Yes, she thought, he looks like a child.
He turned. Her presence startled him. Some of the dogs behind the fence looked up at them.
“Sorry,” she said.
His complexion was sallow and pasty. His eyes looked too small, pushed too deep inside his head. “I was thinking of your sister.”
“I’m sorry,” she repeated.
“Becky would come out here, would scoot down this hill when she was younger. In the snow, she’d slide down on a sled or even without one, on her belly. Just laughing. I used to watch her from the window.” His eyes grew distant. “It snows every winter. You can almost count on it. Every year, every winter, like nature’s promise.”
“She’s going to be all right,” she told him, not really knowing whether or not that was true.
“Yes, she is.” He turned away from her again and looked back out over the forest below. “Just like you, Kelly. Always looking for adventure, always out seeking for something, always keeping busy. What do you suppose she looks for out there?”
“I don’t know.”
“What was it you were looking for?”
She thought of her childhood, of hiding in the woods by herself, keeping herself occupied with one thing or another. There’d been the bird book that one summer, and she’d taken to cataloguing birds. Or the toy boats she used to sail in the little stream. Always alone, always keeping busy. Alone…
“I don’t remember,” she told him, which was partially true, although she thought, I was looking for companionship. I was looking for someone to spend time with me. I was looking for what I never received from you and Mom.
“Did you ever find it, do you think?”
“I can’t remember that, either. Maybe.”
“Maybe,” he agreed. “It’s nice to think so, isn’t it?”
“She’s going to come out of it, Dad. And they’ll catch the person who did this.”
“Yes,” her father said, though without much conviction. Stuffing his hands into his pockets, he turned and pushed past her, making his way toward the house. She watched him go and, for the briefest moment, she saw him hesitate just as he made the turn as if he’d suddenly remembered something he wanted to say…but then he continued on his way, not stopping to look back.
Still cold, she breathed warmth into her hands and passed along the fence of the dog pen. Several of the large, black dogs poked their heads up again, watched her pass.
“Don’t you boys get cold out here? Doesn’t seem like those little houses keep you very warm.”
There was something small and dead half-buried in the ground on the other side of the pen, Kelly saw. A squirrel, it looked like. Dumb thing must have found its way into the pen, most likely attracted by the smell of the dog food, and before it knew what hit it, Rotley’s Dobermans had undoubtedly pounced.
An image broke through her mental veil: a stairway banister laden with the skulls of tiny forest creatures—squirrels, chipmunks, rabbits, mice. A dark, narrow stairwell leading neither up nor down, just there, like a bridge in need of crossing but attached to no land. Darkness. Canted, distorted walls. A floor made of…of…
A floor sometimes made of wood, sometimes made of leaves and dirt and earth…and sometimes littered with broken plastic forks, she thought suddenly, not fully understanding where such a memory—and was it even a memory?—had come from.
Plastic forks.
There’d been a broken plastic fork on the floor of Becky’s bedroom. And the connection between the two didn’t sit well with her, suddenly putting her on edge and making her nervous all over again. A broken plastic fork—it meant nothing to her, yet it suddenly scared the hell out of her.
A chill passed through her, and it wasn’t due to the cold.
She looked down the slope of the great valley, looked down into the black forest of trees. She’d spent most of her childhood hidden behind the veil of those firs, grew up there like a wood elf. Sailing boats in streams and watching birds and building forts and…
And broken plastic forks, her mind returned to her.
She backed away from the side of the hill, turned away from the trees and the sloping green valley, now powdered with frost.
Get back inside before you lose your mind out here, that same head-voice spoke up. And when Becky’s doctor gets here, it might not be a bad idea to suggest he give you a full examination, too. Maybe see a psychiatrist.
No, she didn’t need a psychiatrist. She just needed to get inside.
A young man with flowers stood on the front porch. As Kelly turned the corner of the house, the young man saw her the same moment she saw him and there was a flicker of recognition in her eyes, yet there and then gone just as quick as the report of a pistol.
The young man recognized her too. He quickly dismounted from the porch and moved almost hesitantly toward her, his eyes a mix of emotion, his features somehow growing more and more familiar with each step he took toward her.
From nowhere, Kelly pictured a set of bloody knees.
“Is…my God, Kelly?” the young man said, and she suddenly knew him in the instant that followed.
“Gabriel?”
It was him, now all grown up and a man. A handsome man. His eyes were bright and thick with lashes, his hair impossibly curly and cropped short. He was perhaps a bit thin, but he carried himself with great purpose.
Gabriel…
He paused just two feet in front of her. His lips decided on a smile, though it was an awkward and confused one. He said, “I don’t believe it,” and reached out to hug her with clumsy forcefulness, the handful of flowers pressed against her back. She returned his hug then allowed him to pull away. With some amusement, she watched his eyes skirt up and down her body, that awkward smile still firm on his face. “Guess you went and grew up, huh? I can’t believe it. You look good, Kelly.”
“You too,” she said. Gabriel Farmer, she thought.
“I didn’t know you were coming home. When did you get in?”
“Last night.”
“I just…” He was at a loss for words. Looking down, he pulled the bundle of flowers apart and handed half the arrangement to Kelly. “Here. I don’t think Becky would object.”
“You came to see her?”
“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I don’t know what else to say. Is she awake yet?”
“Not yet, no.”
“Soon, though,” he said.
“Yes. I think so. She’s sleeping, but she looks strong, you know? Healthy.”
“That’s good.”
“You still come around the house?” she asked him. In her own head she sounded giddy and beseeching, like a child.
“I do some work for your father on occasion. Mostly painting and yard work here and there.” He shrugged. “I’m still in town, might as well pick up what work I can.”
“The way you used to talk, I would have guessed you’d be far from Spires by now.” And thought, Damn it, am I trying to insult him?
“I guess I picked up a different track along the way.”
“Yes,” he said, “still plugging away. I actually had a small showing in the city last month. Nothing big, but it was something.”
“Damn, you should have looked me up. I didn’t know.”
“You’re in the city now?”
“Yes,” she said. “I’m so sorry I missed it. I would have loved it.”
“It was exciting.”
“I’m sure it was spectacular.”
“I wish I knew about you,” he said. “Being in the city, I mean. I would have loved for you to be there.”
She rubbed her shoulders and said, “It’s cold, let’s go inside.”
As a child, she first spied Gabriel through a thicket of trees. He’d been playing in the woods by himself—as was she—when she heard someone sobbing. She followed the sound through the thicket and happened upon a meek, wild-haired boy in square eyeglasses fighting back tears by the edge of the small brook that ran through the woods. Both his knees were cut and bleeding and he had managed to tear off a section of his filthy T-shirt, dip it in the cool brook water, and dab at his bloodied knees.
She stepped on a fallen branch and he jerked his head up. He saw her standing between the trees, a little forest nymph. Something inside her made her blush, like someone caught eavesdropping, and she unconsciously backed up a step. The boy watched her, his eyes swimming behind the thick lenses of his glasses, unmoving.
“Hello,” she nearly whispered. “Did you get hurt?”
“I fell,” the boy said. He pointed up and behind him where he—or someone—had tied a cut log to a rope suspended from a high tree branch. A makeshift swing.
“You’re hurt,” she said, stepping out from behind the trees and moving beside him. She caught their reflections in the rippling brook water and thought, No one ever comes up here in these woods. Kids from town are afraid of these woods.
“It’s not a big deal,” he said. He finished blotting his cut knees and wrung the wet piece of cloth over the water.
