She had forced herself to act very natural around Daria ever since. Nobody else knew about her seeing that familiar shadow, and nobody ever would know.
Even if she went down.
She went into her room, ignored the textbooks piled on the table, and picked up her electric guitar. For a while she just let her fingers walk around on the frets, plunking at random until she found a riff. She played it over and over, and then she started getting some of her fighting spirit back. Some lyrics appeared in her brain out of nowhere about a girl loser who makes a startling comeback.
She wrote down the lyrics in pencil on the back of a math worksheet so that she could read them while she played. Then she picked out the riff on her guitar and screamed the words in the general direction of the backyard, recording the whole thing into her computer and through headphones plugged into the mike jack of her bad box.
Afterward she played the bad box tape over and over and felt better. She had started a Web page a while back, although all it had at the moment was a picture of her with animated fire hair, a few poems she made up when she finished ahead of the slowpokes at school.
She designed a snapshot button for music, used a program to encode the computer version of music into MP3, and uploaded the song to her site, calling it “Comeback Girl.” Then, studying how it looked, she prefaced “Comeback” with the word “Sexy” for marketing purposes, just to see if anybody was out there listening.
After sending out her musical beacon, she had one more thought. She dragged out an old recording on cassette of her dad’s and uploaded it to her site. Afterward, she listened to it play, the tricky undercurrents of his bass runs, the sadness she thought she heard in his voice. She lay down on her bed, arms under her head, listening and waiting for Bob, who had promised to come by after school and maybe help her with something. Maybe she dozed for a few minutes, because when the phone rang, it surprised her. At first she thought it might be the officer that was supposed to call and check on her to make sure she was really at home. Then she got nervous Bob wanted to cancel on her.
“Bob?”
“Nicole Zack?”
Not Bob. This voice was nasal like somebody with sinus problems, older, with a really fake-sounding English accent. “Who is this?”
“Is this Nicole Zack?”
Well, it wasn’t a wrong number. “Yes.”
“You have something of mine.”
“Who is this?”
“Says in the newspaper that a witness saw you take something out of Sykes’s pool.”
“She lied,” Nikki said automatically.
“It’s mine and I want it back.”
A thought struck her. “Scott?” Could Scott disguise his voice like that? It was so fake sounding.
“Listen up, little girl. You will give me what’s mine. Return it now, and I won’t lay a hand on you or on that hot mama of yours, even though the thought has crossed my mind more than once.” He laughed, a nasty sound.
Jagged and fast as a flying spear, the idea ripped through her, lodging in her stomach. He had seen Daria. Was he following her? How could she get rid of him? She steadied herself and thought: He’s shaking your cage, just like Scott. He won’t really hurt you or Daria. He won’t. Get rid of him. Make him believe you. “Look, I’m sorry I can’t help, but I didn’t take anything.”
“Bullshit.”
“I can’t help you, mister,” she repeated, allowing just a little of the desperation she felt into her voice. “So leave us alone.”
“You have one chance and one chance only to make things right. Leave the stuff in the back seat of your mom’s car tonight. Leave the doors unlocked. Or I’ll cut on you. That’s a promise. And then I’ll cut on your mama’s pretty, pretty face . . .”
“I’m not putting anything in that car, and if you come near us, I’ll call the cops! I’m siccing my lawyer on you! She’ll trace this call and they’ll track you down and put you in jail where you belong! I’m not scared of you!”
“You dumb bitch,” he said, and his voice dropped to a whisper that was way more disturbing than the threats, because it sneaked inside her. “You don’t want to get in my way like this.”
“Fuck you!” Nikki said. She hung up and looked at the phone.
She thought of the pouch buried in the woods. It must be valuable! Just her luck, if Uncle Bill stole the stuff from someone else. And the jerk had threatened her and Daria! She was really, really tired of being scared. And of having things taken away.
She went into the kitchen, where they kept a shillelagh that Daria had squandered money they didn’t have on at an Irish fair. It hung on a cord behind the door to the yard. A cudgel with a thick knob on the end, it was varnished, hard and heavy as stone. An hour to go before Bob came. She spent the time sitting at the window looking out at the street holding the shillelagh, just in case. When she heard Daria fiddling at the door, Nikki ran to open it, struggling with a powerful impulse to tell her all about the threatening phone call. But she didn’t need Daria hysterical. That would throw her plans off.
“Great news!” Daria said.
“They’ve dropped the charges. I’m never going back to jail. I’ll graduate from Harvard and I’ll get married and have a child with some nice guy,” Nikki said.
Her mother winced slightly, then squared her shoulders. “I have a lead on a show!” she announced, dropping a brown bag of groceries on the kitchen table.
“Uh huh.”
“Really, Nikki. This is going to help so much. Remember the magician?”
She remembered the magician, the juggler, the clown, the big-band leader . . . a whole circus of men who had led Daria on, promising the impossible. Still, there was always that moment, probably the same moment her mother felt, when her heart expanded at the thought, opening up to allow a flood of hope and dreams inside. No one would ever know, and Nikki would be acquitted. Her mother would get her big break, would get famous and rich. Their ship would come in, all due to Daria’s exceptional talent and beauty . . . She looked hard at Daria, who pushed a gold wisp of hair out of eyes surrounded by a fine tangle of laugh lines.
Just for a second, she wanted to ask Daria why she had had to kill Uncle Bill, but she didn’t. There were just too many reasons why that wasn’t a good idea.
“He put me onto this friend, Kyle, who’s getting a troupe together to revive Music Man. I ran into him at a couple of auditions and I think I really made an impression!”
Nikki thought back to a few of her mother’s recent unexplained late evenings out and felt a small shiver of revulsion at the idea that the impression involved rumpled sheets in a casino hotel room.
“He says he’s giving me a major part. I’ll be Marian the Librarian. The love interest. The star!”
Nikki’s heart sank back to its usual place, down in the dumps. “Daria, you can’t sing,” she said.
“He says they’ll revamp the part. Make it more of a dancing role. Come on,” said Daria impatiently. “Aren’t you happy for us? This is so important. We need money! We can’t rely on Beth for everything, you know. She’s been such a doll. So generous, helping out with the rent and even paying for your defense.”
“Too bad it took her so long. Then maybe we wouldn’t be in this boat. And how come she never helped us before . . .?”
“We never asked,” Daria said.
“She knew how dead broke we were.”
Her mother slipped out of her shoes and rubbed her feet. “In a marriage, you don’t just throw money around to your relatives. Bill was thinking about letting go of his practice, according to Beth. He had to save for their retirement, don’t you see?”
Daria tried to put her arm around Nikki but Nikki felt her shoulders hardening. Her mother noticed the resistance and gave up, dropping her arm.
“But we had the money you got from Uncle Bill when you sold him the land!”
Daria said slowly, “I told you, I paid bills with that.”
“Daria, I’ve got time on my
hands around here and I added those bills up. There should have been enough to keep the bank off our backs.”
“Oh, all right. Rudy took it when he left.”
“That cocksucker!”
“Nikki! Watch your language. I don’t like hearing you talk like that about my friend.”
Nikki picked up the phone. “Call the police, Daria. If you don’t, I will. This has gone too far. You’re too easy on these lying skunks! He’s not going to get away with this. He can’t just steal from us like that . . .”
“He didn’t steal it, exactly. I mean, he’s going to pay me back. It’s a loan, honey.”
“Oh, Daria. Oh, shit. You sold that land, the only thing we had and then you gave that cocksucker the money?”
“He was sick. Plus . . .”
“I don’t want to hear it! I don’t want to hear another stupid sob story by some lame dog jabroni! Why do you listen to them?”
Daria began to put groceries away. “I don’t know why you always have to make such a drama out of everything, Nikki. We manage all right. And I don’t want to live in a world where friends don’t help friends in need.”
Nikki was damned if she would start crying. She pushed a fist hard into one eye, then the other, a trick she had used as a child. It worked. “Daria, you told me you sold that land because we were desperate, remember? You didn’t want to sell Grandpa’s land. You always wanted to go back and live in the desert again, and someday we were going to move out there. You must have told me that a million times. I dreamed about those places you told me about, the hot summers, the wide open spaces, the little animals that came out only at night, the incredible sunsets. How could you just throw it away!”
Daria slammed a cupboard door shut. “I wish you wouldn’t call me Daria,” she said in a low voice. “I’m your mother.”
Nikki sat down at the table and put her head in her hands. She thought, I’ll get a job at the Wendy’s, the car wash, anything. Then she remembered the house arrest and the charge against her. Her case was mentioned in the local newspaper almost every day, along with dire warnings from the fearmongers to the general public about rabid teens. Everyone in town knew about her and, even though some papers never mentioned her name, most people had figured out who she was by now like Scott had. Who’d hire her?
“Maybe you ought to tackle some of that homework the teacher sent home for you,” Daria said, reverting to her traditional method of getting Nikki out of her face.
“Later,” she said, slamming a cupboard door and sitting back down at the kitchen table. “Bob’s stopping by with some worksheets,” she lied.
“That’s nice,” said Daria, drifting out of the kitchen, holding her shoes in her hand. Nikki could see she was hurt. As if it was Nikki’s fault! “I’ll be in my room if you need me.”
Nikki heard Bob’s skateboard jumping a curb before she saw him. She flung open the door.
He handed her a bag. “Cookies. I’m starved.” They went back into the kitchen. “Your mom here?”
“In her room.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah.”
“ ’Cuz you look kind of funny.” Tearing open the package, he looked down at her foot. “What is that thing?”
“My ball and chain. Like in the old days, when they used to put them on convicts to keep them from running away.”
“What’s it do, shock you? Like in a Bond movie?”
“No. Just snitches to somebody somewhere if I leave the house. I’m not supposed to do that.”
“Can you take it off?”
“No, it’s twenty-four seven.” Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. She was in prison. The only real difference was the presence of her mother, not always necessarily a plus.
“That’s whack.” He pulled a cookie apart and licked the insides. “I bet you hate that.”
This was the boy who was going to save her. She couldn’t help smiling. “Yeah.”
“So what’s this thing you want me to help you with, Nik?”
“I need you to do some digging.”
“You mean like research?”
“No. I mean like with a shovel. Bob, you can’t tell anyone about this. Not the police. Not your mother.”
“There’s nothing illegal about it?”
“No.” She didn’t like to lie, but couldn’t see that she had a choice anymore.
“What do you want me to dig up?”
“The less you know about that, the better.” Pulling open a drawer, she grabbed a pad of lined yellow paper. “I’m going to draw you a map.”
“A treasure map.” He was on his eighth cookie, and had two more stuck in his hand.
“You’re gonna make yourself sick,” she said. “Daria got some food. How about a baloney sandwich?” She started to draw.
“No thanks, I have to be back home for dinner.” He leaned over her shoulder.
“Move back, you’re getting crumbs all over.”
“Sorry.” He sat back, finished his cookies, and rubbed his hands clean on his pants. “Milk?”
“Check the fridge.” Thinking hard, she drew. She had buried it in the woods behind the house, behind a tree she knew very well. But how many layers of trees were there before he would get to that particular spot?
Bob drank an entire glass of milk without stopping, set the glass in the sink, and exhaled a burp.
“Grow up,” she said.
“Will do,” he said.
She handed him the map.
“It’s behind your house.”
“Right.”
“In the woods.”
“Uh huh.”
“How deep?”
“Maybe a foot? Not very deep. I wrapped it in one of those plastic bags that zips tight. Gallon size.”
“So, not too big.” He stuffed the map in his back pocket. “I gotta go. I didn’t tell my mom I was coming here. She calls when I’m supposed to be home most days if she can.”
“When are you going to do it?”
“Tonight. I’ll come over after my mom’s in bed.”
“As soon as you can, okay?” She hadn’t forgotten the voice on the phone. She couldn’t. But she had told him she wasn’t going to put anything in her mother’s car, so he had no reason to be coming around. She had warned him off. “I’ll be watching. Be careful.” She walked Bob to the door.
He picked up the skateboard from where he had propped it on the porch. “I can’t look inside when I dig it up?”
“Please don’t, Bob.”
“What will you do, once you have it? I mean, you can’t leave the house.”
“That’s my business.”
“I have a bad feeling about this.”
“I know. I owe you.”
“No, Nik. You don’t owe me anything.”
“Hey, I made a tape for you. I wrote a song. Here. It’s a present.” She smiled, and he smiled back.
“You did?” He took the cassette and stuck it in his pocket. “You sang on it and everything?”
“It was easy. I didn’t need Scott. I put a song of my dad’s on there, too.”
“Cool.” He jumped on his board and rode off down the street.
After straying out to light up the landscape outside a few times in brief flashes like a faulty lamp, the moon finally tucked itself permanently behind low streaks of black clouds, leaving blackness behind. Nikki stayed in the living room until eleven o’clock watching The Matrix with her mother for the third time, then encouraged her off to bed.
“I ought to practice,” Daria said. “We have rehearsals starting next week.” Even so, she yawned.
Nikki knew better. Rehearsals would be postponed indefinitely while the magician tested out his powers on her mother. If he couldn’t get her to bed within a reasonable amount of time, he would do a final classic act of magic and disappear. “Get up early,” she suggested.
“I say I will then I don’t,” said Daria. “I’m a night owl.”
“I’ll get you up.” She wo
uldn’t, but Daria wouldn’t mind.
Once she could hear the even rhythms of her mother’s breathing, she closed the door to Daria’s bedroom and took up a post at the back window, watching for Bob. He said he would come, and he would.
A scratching at the back door awoke her. “Bob?”
“Let me in.”
She opened the door and he entered. “You bring a shovel?”
“Yep.”
“Got the map?”
Pulling the crumpled paper out of his back pocket to show her, he said, “I need to borrow a flashlight. This one’s broken.” He set a small plastic flashlight on the table beside her.
Nikki searched the hall closet, finding a hefty, industrial-sized one with a rubber handgrip. Putting fresh batteries into it, flicking it on and off to test it, she ran back into the kitchen.
“Thanks, Nik. Oof,” he said, playfully dropping his arm. “Weighs a ton.”
“Now get going!”
He hung back, reluctant. “I hated sneaking out. My mom will combust if she notices I’m gone.”
“That’s why you’ve got to be quick!”
“Nik?”
“Uh huh.”
“Don’t ask me to do anything like this again, okay?”
“I won’t, Bob. I promise.” She felt sick. So many circumstances in her life lately made her stomach hurt.
Shining the light into the backyard, he grabbed the shovel and took off.
The huge pines and firs, so friendly in the daytime, shot black tendrils against the lighter navy of the sky. Where there were clouds, the stars evaporated. The yellow beam that was Bob grew feeble, oscillated between the trunks of the trees, and faded to nothing.
Nikki waited. Unable to sit still, she walked from the front of the house to the back quietly, nervous about waking her mother, but Daria slept on, oblivious. Checking a few times as she passed, Nikki reassured herself of this. Her mother must not know.
Move to Strike Page 20
