Like she wasn’t what she was.
She drew her hands away from the objects of her desire and pushed them into the pockets of her jacket. Her third or fourth hand, shabby jacket.
A store speaker announced a special on toaster ovens on aisle six. Shopping carts squeaked that way.
* * *
Toaster ovens, Mandy thought, looking toward the ceiling and listening to the disembodied voice as she wandered away from the perfume counter smelling like ‘Spring Mélange, the season you can spray.’ She sniffed the inside of her wrist, giving an approving half smile as she silently asked herself, Why would anyone want a toaster oven?
It seemed the perfectly logical question. I mean, these people buying toaster ovens must have toasters, and they must have ovens, so why is there this need for something that is both and neither at the same time? I’m smart, not to mention pretty, and I can’t see a reason why someone would need both.
Well, the silly people could waste their money. Mandy would have no part of it. She headed purposely away from aisle six and walked slowly along shelves of delicate porcelain knickknacks. Hand painted, some were. Vibrant grape vines twisting around the gloss of a small picture frame. Flowers blooming on teapots.
“Hmmm,” Mandy grunted quietly, stopping to examine a clock, its gleaming white housing ornate with tiny bluebirds and sunflowers painted with smiles. How gaudy. It’s a clock. You draw on paper and not on clocks. You don’t do certain things on other things. Her head shook at the timepiece; the bluebirds were atrocious. I could draw much better bluebirds than those.
And she thought when she got home she just might do that. Yes, she would sit on her bed with her box of crayons and her tablet and go to it. She could draw a flock of bluebirds winging across the sky, in front of white clouds (the blue of the bluebirds would contrast nicely with the white of the clouds), and she would sign it with a green crayon By Mandy Fine. Yes. She would do that, and...
She began to smile, in spite of the ugly clock before her eyes.
...she would give the picture to her favorite teacher. Her picture of the bluebirds in the sky. And Miss Mary Austin (I know her name is Mary, and I wonder if any of the teacher’s pets know that, hah!) would surely love it. Would adore it. Would—
Mandy’s happy gaze moved ever so slightly from the horrid clock that had been the inspiration of her soon-to-be newest creation, not much but enough that for a split second she had looked past the clock and through a space between the shelves and the merchandise to the opposite side. And on the opposite side she saw something, saw someone, that swatted all thoughts of bluebirds away. Yes, this was much more interesting. Much more.
Mandy pressed close to the shelf and peeked around the clock to watch the poor girl meander through the racks.
PJ ‘Poor Girl’ Allenton. Her name was Paula Jean. Mandy knew that about her because Miss Mary Austin had let her enter grades before, and in the grade book it was required the names of all students be spelled out in full, thank you very much. No nicknames like PeeJay. So Miss Paula Jean was in Gorton’s, Mandy thought. Looking at (adoring?) actual girls’ clothes!
She can no more afford anything she’s looking at than I can grow wings and poop in the air like a seagull.
But there she was, moving by the racks, her eyes coveting the dresses, the skirts, the blouses, looking so out of place. Looking like Tom Sawyer in the girls’ department, less the straw hat of course. Mandy did not particularly care for Miss Paula Jean. She was one of the pets, after all. But (reluctant sigh), she had done a good thing with the Mr. Guy situation, and Mandy Fine was a proper young lady who knew to give credit when credit was due. She was not rude. Not (too) spiteful. The notes had been enough funning. So she wouldn’t embarrass Miss Paula Jean in person. She would simply...
PJ started to move out of the thicket of racks now, away from the clothes and toward the front of the store. Mandy followed, using the shelves of knickknacks as a shield.
...giggle at her from afar.
* * *
There was another thing PJ remembered from her long ago visits to Gorton’s. Something that was priceless, but not expensive, its value instead in its simplicity. In the pleasure it had given her then, for reasons only a child could understand. In the pleasure that it might still give.
She could smell it as she moved toward the front of the store, and hear it as she headed right, leaving the things that ‘cost’ behind. The sweet scent of butter hit her first, then the mild nuttiness of a few errant kernels burning. Gone was the swirling metal arm that had dragged the kernels through sizzling oil. Now hot air did the trick, and threw the finished product against the glass not unlike in the old days, if five or six years in the past could be called the ‘old days’.
And that was what she wanted now. Not the popcorn. She wanted the memory. She wanted the ignorance of that age, when nosing up to the popper’s warm glass to watch the kernels burst to the budded corn was something like watching magic. When not understanding was wondrous. When real life was a million years away.
She wanted that again, if just for a while. The pop... pop... pop-pop-pop... pop-pop... pop... guided her, and the smells drew her, and she could almost feel the pleasant heat on the tip of her nose and the prickly pecks of exploding kernels leaping against the glass. She moved closer, passing the inflow to the checkout lanes now, forgetting the stupid girl things. Now all she wanted was to see, and to hear, and to be where she was back then. Back at the popcorn machine at the snack counter. Back to—
PJ froze where she stood, her eyes going owlish at what she saw. At who she saw. At who she saw at the snack counter.
No...
And then, very suddenly, her brain kicked into gear and made her body move. She jumped to the right and ducked behind a tall wire basket that caged countless colorful balls as if they were dangerous toys. The crowded ball display hid her, and allowed her enough room between the wire cage and its contents to keep watching, unseen. To consider what she was seeing. To consider and wonder why.
This ignorance brought no childish bliss. Worry was its offspring.
PJ didn’t know it, but her head was shaking behind the obstruction. Her fingers curled around the stout wire and squeezed hard, gripping it like a prisoner might the bars that confined. Or like one might hold something as an anchor to keep from being pulled away. Or to be kept from bolting away. Bolting from a hiding place to loudly, wildly confront another.
Yes, PJ held tight to the huge ball basket and shook her head. And she watched. She watched and couldn’t understand.
* * *
Mandy was seeing it, too.
She had paralleled Miss Paula Jean’s path toward the snack counter, had even guessed that that was where she was going, and had immediately noticed that, near the cheapie toy displays placed strategically near the check out lanes, something had upset Miss Poor Girl quite completely. Something at the snack counter, Mandy could tell from the direction of PJ’s gaping stare, and so she looked that way too and saw it. Saw them.
Well, isn’t this interesting?
Behind the snack counter Mr. Yost was swirling silky vanilla ice cream into two waffle cones, moving them expertly to craft high, sweet peaks. When he’d finished he turned, smiling pleasantly, and passed them over the counter to the detective.
Dooley took one and gave the other to Bryce.
Very interesting.
Mandy watched the detective pay Mr. Yost, and she watched he and Bryce walk away from the snack counter, chatting between licks. They moved off toward a dim section of the store, where the bluish glow of a wall of televisions was the only light, and disappeared into the displays of boom boxes and video games.
Very...
And then Mandy looked back to PJ, but she was not by the cage of balls anymore. She had turned and was hurrying away, her pace approaching a slow run every few steps, one hand covering her mouth. And then she was gone, lost amidst the racks and shelves and aisles.
...troubling. Very
, very troubling.
Mandy turned her back to the shelves and brought her wrist to her face again. She sampled the scent with long, slow breaths as she thought. PJ would certainly tell her friends about what she had seen. Of that Mandy had no doubt. But coming from her the news, though certainly shocking, might not be shocking enough. Brycey Poo was their friend, after all, and they might not want to think him capable of what he was certainly doing with that detective. Or about to do.
Tattle.
They might not believe he would do that. Could do that.
Mandy took an especially long whiff of the springy scent on her wrist.
Well, if that was a possibility, then there was only one thing to do. Mandy hadn’t planned on any more, but now things were different. She wouldn’t be doing it with fun in mind this time. This was serious business now, thank you very much, and required some serious doings.
And she would start it all, give the first little nudge, with one more note.
* * *
Wires ran from her scalp, from her forehead, and from points unseen beneath her soft flannel nightgown, all gathering to a bunch near the head of the bed before snaking through a hole in the wall of the darkened room.
Elena stirred, eyes twitching beneath lids clamped shut against the artificial night. In a nearby observation room at the Raymond State University Sleep Disorder Clinic, styluses jittered on the paper spooling beneath them.
“Doctor,” the technician said, glancing at the monitors that carried the video feed from the sleep chamber, “we’ve got some spiking.”
Tim Markworth nervously watched the lines jump, while his wife’s attention was glued to the monitors. To the dim images of her little girl’s descent into the familiar, frightening sleep pattern of recent weeks.
Why, God? Willa Markworth asked the Almighty in silence, her eyes glistening as the doctor brushed past her. What is happening to my Elena?
“Where?” Doctor Cheryl Voss asked. She leaned over the instrument console as the technician directed her to a line of readouts.
“Systolic is rising, but she’s still in slow wave sleep.” The technician’s face shrugged. “I don’t get that?”
“What?” Tim Markworth asked, stepping close. He didn’t like the uncertainty in the technician’s voice.
Doctor Voss, who had been Elena’s psychiatrist for just two weeks, tuned out the worry of the man behind her and focused on the technician and his battery of instruments. She glanced briefly at a monitor showing a close-up of the eleven year-old’s face and said, “Her eyes are dancing. That’s REM.”
The technician shook his head at his console. “That looks like REM, but her brain is in S sleep. And look.” He pointed at a slow, evenly undulating line crawling along one of the paper strips. “That’s an alpha rhythm if I’ve ever seen one.”
“She’s asleep, for God’s sake,” the doctor commented roughly. “She can’t be in a light sleep and a deep sleep at the same time.”
A barely audible whimper crept into the observation room over one of the remote microphones. As it grew steadily louder, Elena’s shoulders began to jerk.
Willa Markworth began to cry as she watched her daughter begin to writhe in her sleep. “Doctor, what’s happening to her?”
The technician kept looking between his readouts and the monitors. “I don’t get it. She’s showing signs of deep sleep, and of near sleep. And REM. It’s like she’s—”
“You’re not here to make guesses,” Dr. Voss interrupted him sharply.
But the technician still thought it. ‘...like there’s something in her sleep, a dream or a memory, that she’s fighting to keep down.’
Elena began to thrash on the bed now, throwing the covers off, waves curling along the wires as her body bounced, and twisted, arms flailing and the whimper rising in gasps.
“Aaaahh. Aaaaahh. Aaaaaaaahhh.”
“What is it?” Tim Markworth demanded, his own angry eyes sniping at the doctor and the man sitting at the instrument console. His little girl’s cries rose more now, rose to what he had heard so often in the night of late. Rose and changed from cry to scream to wail.
“AAAAAAAHH! AAAAAHHHH! AAAAAHH!”
The technician made himself focus on the readouts. The answer was in them. It had to be. “We’ve got alternating alpha waves and beta waves. REM is heavy. Pulse is one forty.”
“WHAT IS IT?!” Tim Markworth screamed. His wife now had her face buried in her hands, eyes covered as the sound of her daughter’s terror echoed in and stung her deep.
Elena bolted straight up in bed, arms dead still at her side like withered vines, tears streaming down her cheeks from eyes shut tight. The screams leapt from her throat in erratic bursts that stopped only long enough for breaths to feed the frenzy.
Dr. Voss had had enough and swatted her hand at the technician’s shoulder. “Get someone in there.”
Willa Markworth and her husband bolted from the observation room. A few seconds later they and a nurse rushed into the sleep chamber. Dr. Voss watched on the monitor as Willa Markworth sat on the bed eased her daughter close. Tim Markworth was rubbing soft ovals on his little girl’s back when he looked to one of the cameras high on the wall and shook his head slowly, desperately.
The technician, too, was shaking his head, but at the printouts of data from the abbreviated session. “I don’t get this.” He looked to the monitor and the scene of consolation that had quieted the subject. “Or that. How does seeing a kid dead, or even seeing him get killed, do that to a child? How?”
“It doesn’t,” Dr. Voss answered calmly.
“Well, something’s doing a number on that kid,” the technician commented.
“Or did,” the doctor whispered to herself.
“What?”
“Nothing,” the doctor responded after a moment of silent, angry thought. When her eyes angled up to the scene on the monitor again, the sweet little girl cradled now between her parents, her anger doubled. She had thought this was all about death. The death of one young boy.
Now part of her was thinking that that might have been a good thing.
Thirty One
Michael dipped his fingers in the font of holy water and crossed himself before entering St. Anne’s with his mother and father. They were early by forty minutes, as were the few others who’d hoped to fit confession in before Sunday morning mass.
Michael’s mom put her hand on his shoulder as they walked to the left side of the church, toward the confessional where Father McDowell would be hearing the faithful admit their sins. His father did not follow, instead heading up the side aisle to stake out a good pew for the service. He was not the confessing type.
Almost to the line for Father McDowell, Michael glanced across the sanctuary at the line formed for Father Doran. It was longer by half than that letting into Father McDowell’s confessional, a testament to Father Doran’s somewhat greater appeal to the youth of the congregation. Michael’s mother preferred the traditional blandness Father McDowell offered, the simple Tell me your sins and this many Hail Marys will do approach to absolution. Michael didn’t mind that completely. It was quicker than Father Doran, who might spend a minute or two asking through the lattice privacy screen about your sins. Why you thought you had committed them? Would you be tempted again? How would you avoid this particular transgression in the future? The kinds of things that took more time, but made the process seem more important. More real. Not just a chore.
Some people joked that they sinned just so they could spend a few minutes a week having Father Doran lecture them amiably.
And when Michael’s gaze drifted along Father Doran’s line, it fixed on one sinner in particular. The one at the end. Joey.
“Mom,” Michael said. “Can I go to Father Doran today?”
Teri Prentiss looked across the empty pews. “The line’s longer...”
“I know, but Joey’s over there.”
Boys would be boys, she knew. “Keep you voice down.”
&
nbsp; “I will,” Michael said and hurried through an empty row of pews to the opposite side of the church, pausing very briefly upon entering the center aisle to genuflect toward the huge cross above and behind the linen-draped altar. He came up behind his friend and tapped him on the shoulder.
Joey looked back, his head rising in greeting. He did not smile. “Hey.”
“Where’s your mom?” Michael asked, his voice above a whisper but below that level that would make the nearest adult heads turn.
“She’s talking with one of the nuns. Sister Veronica, I think.”
“Eeesh,” Michael reacted, cringing into silence when an old lady kneeling in a nearby pew put her hard, crooked gaze on him. One far less frightening than Sister Veronica’s snag-tooth snarl that was supposed to pass for a smile.
“Did you have her for Sunday school?” Joey asked, but his thoughts seemed elsewhere.
Michael nodded, a thankfully silent gesture. “What’s your mom talking to her about?”
“Some fundraiser thing next month.”
The door to the confessional swung out and a high school girl emerged. She walked in silence, hands clasped and head bowed, to the kneeling rail at the front of the church, the eyes of the next in line, a boy about her age, fixed on the curve of her ass shimmying beneath a wonderfully short tartan skirt. She had knelt and crossed herself three or four times when a woman behind the boy flicked him on the ear, stunning him back to earth. He hurried into the confessional, sneaking one last look at the penitent girl.
Joey seemed to miss it all.
“Hey,” Michael said, extra soft this time.
“What?”
“Are you okay?”
Joey checked his six— he’d heard that in an old movie; Top Gun or something —and then stepped closer to his friend. “PJ called me last night.”
Michael hesitated. The hushed, obviously prefatory statement made him instantly worried. “Yeah?”
Again Joey surveyed his surroundings; no one was close enough to hear if they kept on whispering. “She saw something at Gorton’s yesterday.”
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