Summer of Fear

by Lois Duncan

  I crossed the emptying lawn in front of the Jarvis home and went up the steps and in through the front door. Mom was standing at the hall phone, thumbing through a small leather-bound address book. She glanced up and asked, “Do you remember the married name of the Jarvises’ daughter?”

  “No,” I said, “but her first name is Bonnie. I think she lives in Clovis.” Shock had made my voice flat and strange. “Is he really dead?”

  “No,” Mom said. “There was a pulse, but it was a faint one. The EMT said he thought it was a stroke.” She flipped the pages of the book. “Here, this must be it—Bonnie Chavez in Clovis. Go see about Bobby, will you, Rae? I’ll be home as soon as I make this call.”

  “All right,” I said.

  When I went back outside Bobby was no longer where I had left him, so I walked slowly along the sidewalk toward our own house with the vague, unfocused feeling that I was moving through a dream. It’s not real, I thought. I just talked with him yesterday!

  The sidewalk was hot under my bare feet and above my head the leaves of the maples stirred softly in a breath of breeze. Professor Jarvis’s petunias were blooming joyously along the edge of his driveway. Beyond the trees the summer sky arched blue and high, and some skinny little strips of clouds were drifting lazily in the direction of the mountains.

  It can’t be true, I told myself. If I admitted that it was, even for a second, I would have to face the other fact as well—that I was the one responsible.

  “He’s a well-known authority on witchcraft,” I had announced to Julia the night before. “I’ve already talked to him about you. He’ll stand behind me.” And I hadn’t stopped there. I had gone so far as to call him by name.

  “Professor Jarvis used to be head of the sociology department at the University,” I had cried triumphantly.

  Julia had smiled, and it was no wonder. I had told her exactly what she needed to know.

  I’d been correct in my guess about the construction of the doll. My mistake had been in thinking I was the intended victim. It was useful to Julia to have another girl around, someone whose friends she could captivate, whose clothes she could wear, whose ways she could copy. And it was easier by far to remove the professor, who was the one person who could and would support my accusations. Without the help of Professor Jarvis I was helpless to convince my parents of anything.

  And so because of my stupidity a wonderful man lay dying, or perhaps by this time was already dead.

  I turned into our yard and she was there on the porch, waiting.

  My cousin Julia.

  Bobby was with her, and I could tell by the puffiness of his eyes and the smudges on his cheeks that he’d been crying. Julia had her arm around him just as I had only a short time before, and she was talking in a gentle voice.

  “Things like this are bound to happen when people get old,” she was saying as I came up the porch steps. “It’s all for the best, dear. Nobody can live forever. He was a poor, sick, old man.”

  “He was not!” I exclaimed vehemently. “He was a healthy, vital, energetic person! He hasn’t had a sick day in all the time that I’ve known him! He should have lived at least another fifteen years!”

  “Oh, really?” Julia’s eyes met mine across the top of Bobby’s blond head. “Well, in that case, perhaps he will. You never can tell about things like that. Some people go on as vegetables for incredibly long stretches of time.”

  “As vegetables!” I gasped.

  “Oh, you know what I mean. Not able to move or talk.” She turned to Bobby. “Let’s go inside, shall we? It’s getting so hot out here. I’ll fix us some lunch, and then we can play a game of dominoes.”

  “I’m not hungry,” Bobby said.

  “Then we’ll have the game first and lunch after.” She got to her feet, drawing him with her, and I was amazed to see him lean his head back against her shoulder in a way he never did with anyone but Mom. He blinked his eyes hard and wiped his nose with the back of his hand and said, “Okay, I’ll play you. But I don’t really feel like it.”

  “That’s a good boy,” Julia said warmly, and she even sounded like Mom. “You go wash your face and I’ll find the dominoes and get things set up.”

  They went into the house together, and I seated myself on the porch steps to wait for Mom. There seemed to be nothing I could do that wouldn’t make things worse. Nothing I said would carry any weight without the remains of the wax doll of the professor. Even if by some miracle I were able to locate it, there would be no one to support my suspicion that it was connected with what had happened.

  My reverie was interrupted by the mail carrier, who came swinging up the walk, whistling.

  “Hi, there,” he said jauntily. “I hear there’s been some excitement on your block. They’ve been talking about it at every house I’ve been to.”

  “I guess you could call it excitement,” I said. “I think a better word for it might be ‘tragedy.’”

  “It’s a shame,” the mail carrier agreed, dropping his lighthearted approach. “The professor’s a nice, friendly guy. Here’s your mail, a big pile of it today.”

  “Thanks,” I said as he dumped the letters into my lap.

  As I glanced down at the pile I saw that the top letter was for my father and bore the return address of a law firm called Becht and Bristol. I wondered what it was. My parents seldom received letters from attorneys. The only occasion I could remember was once when a magazine had used one of Mom’s photographs without paying for it and there had been correspondence between Mom and the lawyer who represented the magazine. This couldn’t be about something like that because the law firm was a local one and the letter was addressed not to Mom but to Dad.

  Setting the mail on the step beside me, I leaned my head against the porch railing and refocused my thoughts. If only it were possible to go back to yesterday and start over! But at this point I could only pray that Professor Jarvis would recover. If Julia could channel her mind to produce illness, I vowed that I would push mine as hard as I could to combat it. Maybe a volley of positive thoughts all surging toward him at once would help the professor hold out against the pressure Julia must be asserting from the other side.

  I closed my eyes and concentrated.

  Get well! I cried silently over and over in my mind. Please, Professor Jarvis, get well! You have to get well! You have to!

  When Mom came up the walk I was still at it and now completely exhausted.

  “I got hold of the professor’s daughter,” she said. “She and her husband are coming. It’s a four-and-a-half-hour drive so they should be here the later part of the afternoon. She was really upset, and there was so little I could tell her.”

  I opened my eyes and let my mind relax.

  “Should we call the hospital and see how he is?” I asked.

  “Mrs. Gallagher’s with him. The Gallaghers have been his next-door neighbors for so long that she feels almost like a relative. She’ll call us as soon as there’s anything to report.” She glanced at the pile of letters. “Is that today’s mail?”

  “Yes,” I said, handing it to her. “Dad has a letter from a law firm.”

  “It’s probably about the estate,” Mom said. “Ryan named Dad the executor of his and Marge’s wills.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked. “Everything goes to Julia, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes, but there’s a lot of red tape connected with settling an estate, even if there’s only one person to inherit. It takes time to get things ironed out.”

  “Will Julia be rich?” I asked.

  “Well, people’s ideas of what constitutes ‘rich’ differ. She will be well enough off so that she can do pretty much as she pleases in regard to college and travel and things like that.” She thumbed through the mail. “Here’s something for Peter from the University of New Mexico. It must be about pre-registration. A check from Discover magazine—that will be for those Halloween pictures. Oh, here’s a letter for Julia!”

  “For Julia?” I
snapped to attention. “From whom?”

  “Somebody named Mary Nesbitt in Boston. It must be a friend from her school. The letter was mailed to Lost Ridge and forwarded here.”

  “She’s never talked about any friend by that name,” I said.

  “I’ve never heard her talk about her school friends at all. Still, she must have them. She attended that boarding school for several years. It’s nice to know that one of them—”

  She broke off in mid-sentence at the sound of the telephone ringing.

  “Do you think that’s Mrs. Gallagher?” I asked, getting quickly to my feet.

  “I hope so—with good news.” Mom was only one step behind me as we hurried into the house.

  It was Mrs. Gallagher, but the news was short and inconclusive. In the opinion of the doctor who had examined Professor Jarvis, he had suffered a stroke. How serious it was couldn’t be determined, because he was still unconscious. Mrs. Gallagher was prepared to remain at the hospital until Bonnie Chavez arrived from Clovis, and she wondered if one of us would go next door and leave a note on the refrigerator for Mike and Mr. Gallagher.

  “I’ll take it over,” I offered.

  “All right,” Mom said and then frowned. “Wait—didn’t Dad say you were supposed to be grounded?”

  “Only till noon,” I said. “Besides, he didn’t know there was going to be an emergency.”

  “You’re right, I guess,” Mom said. “Go ahead. Put the time on the note so they know when it was written.”

  I went across to the Gallaghers’ yard and around to the back and in through the kitchen door. I knew their house almost as well as I did my own. Mrs. Gallagher kept a pencil and pad of paper on the counter under the kitchen phone. I tore off a sheet and wrote out the message and attached it to the refrigerator door with one of the little magnets she kept there.

  Once inside the house I couldn’t seem to get myself out again. I hadn’t been over since the morning after Mike had taken Julia to the dance. Now, standing in the quiet of the sunny kitchen, I was besieged with memories that went back to a time long before Mike and I had started dating.

  The cookie jar in the corner was the one Mike and I had raided when we were so little that we had had to drag a chair over to stand on so we could reach it. The pot holders on a hook by the stove were ones I had woven myself. The plant on the windowsill was the result of a Mother’s Day shopping trip we had made together; in our own kitchen at home there bloomed another plant just like it.

  Past the kitchen lay the dining room where I had sat as a guest on many occasions. Beyond that was the living room where Mike and I had spent evenings doing homework.

  Knowing I had no right to, I walked slowly through the rooms that had been so much a part of my childhood. In the family room was the footstool Mike had made in woodworking class in middle school. In the hallway at the foot of the stairs was the spot on which I had been standing almost a year ago on the night when he first kissed me.

  “You’ve got a smudge on your nose,” he had said, and reached out with his forefinger as though to rub it off. And then, as I had stood there looking up at him, the teasing look had gone out of his eyes. His hand had moved from my nose to rest against my cheek.

  “You’ve grown up a lot all of a sudden,” he had said softly. And then he had kissed me.

  Afterward neither of us had known what to say. We had stood staring at each other, only half hearing the sound of the television in the next room mingled with the voices of his parents.

  Finally he had said, “Was that—okay?”

  “Yes,” I had answered. “Very okay.” And suddenly we were laughing and his arm was around my shoulders, and it was like a beginning but also like a continuation of something that had really begun a long time ago.

  “Mike says you were just good friends,” Julia had told me, “that you’ve always been like a little sister to him.”

  That wasn’t true. Standing in the hallway, remembering the look in Mike’s eyes after that first kiss, I knew it wasn’t true.

  I paused, and then, knowing there was no excuse for the thing I was doing, I went up the stairs and down the hall to Mike’s room. I stood in the open doorway and looked in at it. His bed was made, but only just barely, with the spread yanked up over the lumps in the blanket. His swimming trophies stood in a row on the bookcase— I had been there when he had won most of them—and a batch of sports magazines were piled on the floor by the side of his bed, along with a ragged pair of sneakers with socks still in them and some empty Coke cans and an open bag of potato chips.

  I turned my gaze to the dresser. There, to my surprise, was my class picture, the one I had given him in exchange for his, plus a couple of snapshots taken the summer before on a picnic at the lake. In one I was standing on the bank in last year’s swimsuit, skinny and freckled and laughing, my eyes squinted against the glare of the afternoon sun. In another Mike and I were together, wearing silly sailor caps and making faces at the camera.

  So he had kept the pictures. It was something I hadn’t expected, but when I thought about it, there was no real reason why he would’ve thrown them away. They were part of a time that he might someday enjoy remembering. He probably hadn’t gotten around to transferring them to a scrapbook or to the back of a drawer.

  I turned away from the room, both glad and sorry that I had looked into it. The pain of loss was more acute than ever, but there was something reassuring in the fact that Mike himself was the same as he had always been, that he still munched potato chips while he was reading and dumped magazines on the floor and left his socks in his sneakers.

  Maybe someday, I thought, I’ll be able to just be friends with him. I’ll be fond of him in the same way I am of Peter. Perhaps someday—but not yet. Not for a while.

  I was halfway down the stairs when an odd thing occurred to me. In his room there had not been a single picture of Julia.

  I spent that afternoon moving my things into Bobby’s room. Not that it took all that long to transfer my clothing and a few personal belongings; what held things up were the constant confrontations with Bobby, who was not at all receptive to having a sister for a roommate.

  “You’re a girl, Rae,” he kept exclaiming. “You’re a girl!” And to Mom—“Rae’s a girl, Mom!”

  “So I’ve noticed,” Mom said drily, “and I can understand your feelings, but there doesn’t seem to be an alternative. She can’t get along in the same room with Julia, and she has to sleep somewhere.”

  “She could room with Peter,” Bobby suggested.

  “You know that’s impossible. Peter would have a fit. Besides, his room has only one bed.”

  “Then put her in the garage,” Bobby said. “Or let her go move in with her friend Carolyn.”

  “Rachel’s your sister,” Mom said, “and as difficult as she’s being these days, we can’t push her onto other people. If it’s your privacy you’re worried about we can hang a curtain down the center of the room to act as a partition.”

  So a good hour was spent in rigging up a kind of frame to hold the curtain, and another half hour at least in deciding what the curtain should consist of. We finally used a bedsheet, and by the time the room was divided to Bobby’s satisfaction and he had decided which side of the closet I could have, it was almost time for dinner.

  On my last trip to my old room I removed the photograph of Mike from the top of the dresser. Mike might not still be mine, but his picture was, and I didn’t plan to leave it behind to be enjoyed by Julia. I took the posters off the walls and rolled them up and put them under one of the beds, and I took my pink dress off its hanger and wadded it up and put it in the Goodwill bag in the laundry room. My books I had to leave on the shelves because there was no place in Bobby’s room to put them, but I did take with me the witchcraft books, which I put in a drawer with my underwear and pajamas.

  Standing in the doorway, giving the room one last once-over, I couldn’t help noticing how empty it was with my own things removed from it.
Julia had brought almost nothing with her when she made the move from Lost Ridge to Albuquerque! I hadn’t really noticed this before because my own stuff had filled the room with so much clutter, but with its removal there remained almost nothing to show that the room still had an occupant.

  It’s funny, I thought, she doesn’t even have a picture of her parents. There were no mementos or trinkets, no snapshots or scrapbooks, no favorite books or stuffed animals or wall decorations. It was as though the girl who lived here had come to us without a past, had materialized out of thin air on our doorstep with no link at all with another time or place.

  The only thing that was Julia’s was the letter that had come that morning, which she had tossed, unopened, onto the dresser.

  Good-bye, dear old room, I thought gloomily.

  If there had been a way to escape the family dinner table and eat alone in the kitchen I would have. I knew, however, that there was no sense in even bringing up the option. My parents considered the dinner hour a time for the family to be together and catch up on all the events of the day. And so I sat and poked at my food while Bobby gave Dad and Peter a full and exaggerated account of the morning’s excitement, playing up his own particular part in the drama.

  “I pushed the lawn mower down to his house,” he said, “and rang the doorbell. When nobody answered I got this feeling like something terrible had happened. I don’t know how I knew it, I just did. So I opened the door and there right in front of my eyes was Professor Jarvis with this rope—”

  “What?” I exclaimed, jolted into speech.

  “Well, not exactly a rope, but the way he was lying I couldn’t tell about that. So I said, ‘Professor, what happened?’ And he didn’t answer. So I rolled him over and listened to his heart—”

  “Bobby ran home and told us,” Mom said, taking over the story. “It was a stroke, poor man. I guess at his age that sort of thing is to be expected, but it’s still a shock when it occurs. I saw him just the other day out working in his yard and he looked so fit and healthy.”