by Cave, Hugh
The plants he referred to were seedlings of, among other things, golden-dewdrop Duranta, lipstick trees, African tulip, and akee trees, all obtained from the man he had worked for while at college. They were in a section of the nursery quite far from the house. As he led Melanie along the paths, a low sun stabbed shafts of golden light through the crowded gardens On an impulse he suddenly stopped, took her in his arms, and kissed her, taking his time about it and doing a thorough job.
"Thank you, sir," she said. "I was wondering when you'd get around to that."
"I should have got around to it an hour ago. No, that isn't right either. Now that I think of it, I've been wanting to do it since I woke up this morning. Forget the exotics. Let's go to the house."
"From exotic to erotic, huh?" Her laugh was a bright bird flashing through his beloved trees. "But I want to see what's going on. Honest. At least a quick look, huh?"
"A two-minute tour," he conceded grudgingly. "Not a second longer."
Each with an arm about the other, they traversed a plot of walking-iris and passed through a row of monkey-puzzle trees whose branches seemed a hopeless tangle. Keith was in a gay, warm, sensuous mood. Then abruptly, as though struck by an Arctic blast, the mood changed.
He froze in his tracks. His hand fell like lead from Melanie's slim waist. His face filled with shock and fury.
"Oh, Keith," Melanie said in sympathy. "Oh, my dear!"
Before them an entire section of garden was a scene of devastation. All but a scattered few of the more than two hundred seedling trees planted there had been pulled up and flung aside, helter-skelter. The tulip trees. The Durantas. The akees and lipsticks. Drying roots glittered like blazing twigs in the golden light. Leaves were already curling as the sun sucked their moisture.
With his hands fiercely clenched and a muscle working visibly in his jaw, Keith strode along the rows, sizing up the damage. "Who, Mel?" he demanded. There were tears in his voice as real as those forming in his eyes. "Who would do such a thing? Who? Who?"
He stopped abruptly and looked down. The dark ground was firm in most places. There had been no rain lately, and trees as well established as these were not watered very frequently. But the earth that had been jarred loose from the roots of the flung-aside plants was soft, and where it had fallen in large enough patches it held imprints.
Keith knelt now to peer at one—an almost complete imprint of a child's shoe. He looked up at Melanie standing beside him, and his anguished face was all but empty of color. "Jerri?" He spoke the name almost in a whisper. "Jerri Jansen? I can't believe it. Why in God's name would she want to do this to me?"
"Maybe—maybe some other child was here, Keith. One who came with a customer. Or a neighbor's child. There are kids in the house next door, aren't there?"
Mechanically he shook his head. "Older. They're eleven and thirteen. The shoe that made this was Jerri's size, Mel. Look at it. And she was here with Vin all day today. All day long."
"Can they be replanted?" Melanie turned slowly to survey the total damage again. "You and I, darling? Now? Right now? Can we?"
He shook his head again. "We can't tackle a job that big at this hour. We'd be at it all night." For a moment he was silent; then at long last his hands unclenched and some of the tension left his body. "I'll get a hose and wet them down," he said. "Vin and I can replant tomorrow. We'll save some of them I guess."
"Can I help you water them, Keith?"
"Why don't you go to the house and start supper. That way we'll be sure of something good to eat, at least."
"I . . . All right, I'll do that."
"I'll be along in half an hour. Go that way," he pointed. "It's shorter."
She left, and he went for a length of hose. While he was returning with it coiled over his shoulder he heard her calling him. In her voice was something close to hysteria that caused him suddenly to fear for her safety. Dropping the hose, he went plunging through the nursery toward where she ought to be.
He found her standing rigid in the middle of the yard-wide path she had been following. The branches of a medium tall sweet bay overhung the path, mottling it and her with shadow. The backs of her hands were pressed against her mouth as though to stifle a scream. Wide-eyed she stared at something on the path in front of her.
On halting his frantic rush at her side, Keith saw what she was looking at, and a chill seized him. "No," he whispered. His hands reached out, trembling, but hung suspended in mid air, touching nothing. He could feel his mouth shaping a cry of horror, then turning to stone before it could be uttered.
The thing lying before him on the path was a lightweight agricultural fork with a wooden handle, used for simple digging chores around the nursery. It had four flat tines with sharpened ends. But what looked like an oddly shaped lump of brown sod impaled on two of the sharp steel fingers was not sod. It was a small dead kitten, with a tine through one of its eyes.
He could not wrench his horrified gaze from the creature's tiny face. The stabbed eye was a pool of hardened blood now. The mouth was stretched in a silent shriek that bared a twisted purple tongue and teeth like those of a baby shark. And even in its agony it had fought fiercely against dying. Its unsheathed claws still clutched the sharp metal shaft that pierced its eye.
"Oh, dear Lord!" Forced out of him by shock, Keith's cry was nevertheless only a whimper. Groping for the instrument, he picked it up and gazed numbly at the kitten impaled on it. The tiny creature had been dead for some time, apparently. Shaking his head in disbelief, he gently laid the fork down again beside the path and then, remembering the shoeprints among the uprooted exotics, looked for more of them here but saw none.
Their absence proved nothing, however. The path here was smooth and firm except where the tines of the fork had come down—two of them through its victim—and made four evenly spaced holes before the instrument toppled over. Or had the weapon remained upright until the perpetrator of this ghastly deed pulled it from the ground to gloat over the victim more closely? He had a mental picture of a child with a monstrous face grinning in unholy triumph at the impaled cat while blood dripped to form what was now a hard dark stain in the path.
Then he heard Melanie weeping.
Taking her by the hand, he gently pulled her into his arms and held her in silence, knowing how she felt because he was familiar with so many of her emotions. "It's a pet of the neighbors' kids we were talking about," he said then. "It wandered over here often. Come." The watering of the uprooted exotics could wait. Everything could wait. They had to find some answers.
As they went along the path, Melanie would not look again at the spot where the kitten had died. "Why, Keith?" Her voice was just barely under control. "What's going on here?"
"Not just here. Everywhere in Nebulon."
"But what? What's happening?"
"I wish I knew, hon. I wish to God someone—" Before he could finish, they came to a crossing of paths and he stopped again, jerking her to a halt too. "Now what the hell is this?" he demanded, darkly scowling.
They were looking down at a kind of symbol or diagram in the square of dirt where the two paths crossed. A. complex thing of rectangles, circles, triangles or pyramids, straight and wavy lines, obviously drawn with a stick.
Melanie broke the silence. "Keith ... she couldn't have done this. Not Jerri. She's too young."
The grotesque work of art had a strange effect on him, and he strove unsuccessfully to suppress his anger. "She's too young to have pulled up those seedlings and jabbed that fork through the kitten, too! Come on! We're going over there and have a talk with that child!"
11
The following day the town of Nebulon produced yet another mystery. A woman on Grove Road telephoned the police to say she felt something must be wrong at the home of her nearest neighbor, one Tom Ranney.
"You mean the Tom Ranney?" asked officer Worth Blair, who took the call.
"Well, I don't care," the woman retorted. "He's human, isn't he? Anyway, I haven't seen h
im in several days and there must be a million flies over there. I can hear them from here."
Wanting a breath of air anyway that hot Saturday afternoon, Blair turned the desk over to a fellow policeman and went to check out the report himself. Tom Ranney human? It was open to question. The old guy lived alone in a one-room shack on a weed-grown lot that for years had been the bane of the neighborhood. Walking to town he staggered. Sleeping in the park he snored. He was never sober. The fact that his neighbor had heard flies buzzing really meant nothing. There were nearly always flies around Tom Ranney.
Arriving at the scene, Blair parked his police car and trudged through the weeds and wild grass to the shack. It was a desolate place—should have been torn down long ago, he thought. The door was ajar. With those bent and rusted hinges it probably couldn't be closed, and certainly there was no lock left to secure it with. The interior was dark, though, except in the narrow lane of light from the doorway. The two windows were so layered with grime they might as well not have existed.
And the woman on the phone had been right: There were flies. The buzzing had been loud enough even when Blair first became aware of it while plodding through the grass. Now as he stepped over the termite-eaten threshold, the sound increased to an almost deafening whine as the disturbed creatures registered their resentment at the intrusion. It was both deafening and threatening. He threw up his hands to protect his face as he reluctantly advanced.
Somewhere in the shack a rat had died and was rotting. The sickly sweet smell of it, combined with the all-over reek of filth, all but stopped him. A sudden sense of personal danger, probably induced by the gloom and the flies, did as well. This was foolish, he told himself. He had been in ill-kept hovels before. Yet the sense of peril not only persisted, it increased with every step he took through the clutter and debris.
God in heaven, hadn't old Tom ever swept the place out or picked anything up? The floor was a town dump littered with old newspapers, heaps of rotten clothing, and piles of broken, rusting, useless items old Tom must have collected on his daily walks. Tin cans and empty bottles went spinning and slithering every which way when Blair unintentionally kicked them.
Then when his eyes finished adjusting to the lack of light, he saw that the shack also contained a shabby table with a partly eaten meal on it—a meal of hush puppies and green beans, it looked like—along with a soiled catsup bottle and a half-empty jar of pickles. And a lamp. The lamp hadn't been cleaned since it was bought, from the looks of it, but it had GOD BLESS OUR HOME etched with a flourish on its soot-blackened shade.
Blair almost laughed, partly at the lamp and partly to relieve the tension that was building up in him. He didn't, though. Just then he saw the cot and what was on it.
He stopped in his tracks and stood there, staring. Just staring. That lasted a minute or so. Then, what with the flies buzzing, the smell of decay in his nostrils, and the sight of the thing on the cot burning itself into his brain, he simply could not help contributing to the shack's unsavory condition for another minute or two.
On recovering at last, he wiped his mouth with his handkerchief, threw the handkerchief away, and staggered to the door. From there he groped his way back through the weeds and grass to his car and opened the car trunk. There was a folded blanket in the trunk, kept there for various kinds of emergencies. He took it out and shook it open. After waiting long enough for his stomach to settle and his lungs to fill with fresh air, he started back to the shack for a closer look, strenuously flapping the blanket in front of him to discourage the flies.
Someone, it seemed, must have had a terrible grudge against poor old Tom Ranney. As he lay there on the cot, on his back, his sliced throat gave him two gaping mouths instead of one—two slack-lipped openings, both caked with gouts of dry blood—and his eye sockets were empty except for more blood. If that hadn't been sufficient to kill him, Blair thought, there was almost enough blood around to have drowned him. The cot was like a butcher's table.
He must have been dead for days, Blair decided. And he must have been asleep or drunk when attacked, for there was no sign of any struggle. Of course, the shack was in such a shambles that signs of a struggle would have been hard to pinpoint.
He saw something else then. On the floor near the head of the cot lay a ten-inch kitchen knife with a cracked wooden handle. Strings of dry, brown blood still clung to its rusty blade. He reached for his handkerchief and remembered he had soiled it and thrown it away. Walking over to one of the piles of junk Ranney had collected, he found an old sport shirt and tore a sleeve from it. With that he picked the knife up and took it with him when he left.
12
On Monday Raymond Hostetter went to school and was a model of good behavior. At the end of the school day his mother waited in her white Cadillac to drive him home. Miss Aube, his teacher, noticed that several other pupils of hers walked to the car with him and stood in a group, watching, as his parent whisked him away.
On Tuesday Mrs. Hostetter picked him up again. But on Wednesday, having an appointment at her hairdresser's, she told him he could walk. "But I want your solemn promise you will come straight borne. Do you hear?"
"Yes, mother."
"Promise me."
"I promise."
Reatha Hostetter could see no reason for anxiety. After days of weighing what the school principal had told her about Raymond's disrupting the marble game and his behavior in her office, she had come to the conclusion it was rather a lot of fuss about nothing very important. Some of the children playing marbles must have given him cause to be angry. He was not a forceful child. At times he was even timid. Other children quite often took advantage of him.
As for the way he had talked to Mrs. Ellstrom, well, really, what did it amount to? He had called her a cripple, which in fact she was, and children were often cruel about such things. He had used those other words too, the crude ones, but Reatha Hostetter was certain her son had meant nothing by it. In his annoyance at being dragged into the principal's office, he had simply dropped a little naughtiness into the conversation to see what effect it might have.
There was, of course, the question of his running away from school and being missing until he turned up in the park hours later to witness that dreadful woman's drowning of her unwanted baby. He insisted he had just walked, and she believed him. It was the sort of thing a disturbed child would do.
She accepted his account of the drowning, too, in spite of Chief Lighthill's statement that the mother had taken a lie-detector test that proved she was telling the truth. Such tests were fallible, everyone knew that. Why on earth would Raymond lie about such a thing?
Reatha Hostetter returned from the hairdresser's at four thirty that Wednesday afternoon and was surprised and a trifle upset to find Raymond not at home. He should have reached home by half past three at the latest. Had he been kept after school for some reason? No, she decided. Miss Aube would never be so insensitive as to detain him this week.
She contemplated getting into her car and driving along her son's usual route to and from school, but she was to give a talk on civic duty that evening and wanted to go over her notes. She would wait fifteen minutes. If Raymond did not arrive by then, she would first phone the school and then, if necessary, go and look for him.
He did not come. She phoned. The school did not answer. Everyone there must have left.
She went looking for him and could not find him. When she returned to the house it was after five thirty and her husband was at home. "What's the matter?" he asked, noting her pallor and agitation.
"It's Raymond. He's—late."
His face showed his annoyance. "You mean you didn't pick him up? Or have him picked up?"
"Not today. I thought . . ."
"Oh God," Hostetter said. It was not a plea to the Almighty but a condemnation of his wife. "Where have you looked for him?"
"I drove to the school, Duane. The way he always walks. And back by the old Nebulon house in case he . . . Oh dear, he pr
omised me. He promised!"
Mayor Hostetter got into his car and went looking for his son. When a forty-minute drive around town failed to produce the boy or anyone who had seen him, he drove to the police station. Chief Lighthill was there and the mayor told him what had happened, barely concealing his anger at his wife's negligence.
"Did you ask at Miss Peckham's place?" the chief said.
"No. I only drove past."
Lighthill glanced at the clock on his wall and decided Elizabeth Peckham would be at home, not at the library. He looked up her number in the book and dialed it. After talking with her a moment he said, "How long have you been there, Miss Peckham?"
"About half an hour."
"Do you know if he was there before that?"
"The children never play here unless I am at home, Chief Lighthill."
"Oh yes they do. I've driven by and seen kids in that yard more than once when you've been at work."
"I'm sure you are mistaken."
"They've been there, Miss Peckham. Whether you know it or not."
"Well, they are not supposed to be, and you can be sure I shall look into it. As for Raymond, I haven't seen him. Not in days."
"Okay," the chief said. "Thanks." He hung up and looked at the mayor. "I'll get busy on it, Duane. You give me a ring if he turns up at home, hey?"
And what, Lighthill wondered, would the boy do this time? What was wrong with some people, anyway? Couldn't they have seen the kid was sick and needed help? That business in the school yard. Some kids could do a thing like that and use cruel, abusive language to a lady principal, and you could overlook it. Not a kid like Raymond Hostetter. When a boy like that suddenly began to act up, it was a sign something was wrong.
And the story he had told about the drowning. The Fortuna woman had taken a truth test, for God's sake, and the result wasn't even questionable. She simply had not done it.
