Authors: Jack Ketchum

Tags: #Horror, #Fiction

The Girl Next Door (14 page)

BOOK: The Girl Next Door

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“You don’t want to fight? No?”

She shook her head.

Willie looked at his mother.

“Too bad,” he said quietly.

He still had her arm. And now he started twisting. She doubled over.

“Willie’s right,” said Ruth. “It is too bad. Come on, Meg honey,
fight.
Fight him.”

Willie twisted. She jumped with the pain and gasped and shook her head a third time.

“Well I guess she just won’t do it,” said Ruth. “This girl don’t want to do
anything
I say today.”

She shook the hand Meg had bitten and examined it. From where I sat it was just a red spot. Meg hadn’t broken the skin or anything.

“Let her go,” said Ruth.

He dropped her arm. Meg slumped forward. She was crying.

I didn’t like to watch. I glanced away.

I saw Susan standing in the hall, holding on to the wall, looking frightened, staring around the corner. Eyes riveted on her sister.

“I gotta go,” I said in a voice that sounded strangely thick to me.

“What about the brook?” said Willie. Sounding disappointed, the big ass. Like nothing had happened at all.

“Later,” I said. “I gotta go now”

I was aware of Ruth watching me.

I got up. I didn’t want to go by Meg for some reason. Instead I walked past Susan to the front door. She didn’t seem to notice me.

“David,” said Ruth. Her voice was very calm.

“Yes?”

“This is what you’d call a domestic dispute,” she said.

“Just between us here. You saw what you saw. But it’s nobody’s business but ours. You know? You understand?”

I hesitated, then nodded.

“Good boy,” she said. “I knew you were. I knew you’d understand.”

I walked outside. It was a hot, muggy day. Inside it had been cooler.

I walked back to the woods, cutting away from the path to the brook and into the deeper woods behind the Morino house.

It was cooler there. It smelled of pine and earth.

I kept seeing Meg slumped over, crying. And then I’d see her standing in front of Ruth looking her coolly in the eye saying I told you I said no. For some reason these alternated with remembering an argument with my mother earlier that week. You’re just like your father, she’d said. I’d responded furiously. Not nearly as well as Meg had. I’d lost it. I’d raged. I’d hated her. I thought about that now in a detached kind of way and then I thought about all this other stuff today.

It had been an amazing morning.

But it was as though everything canceled everything.

I walked through the woods.

I didn’t feel a thing.

Chapter Twenty

You could get from my house to Cozy Snacks through the woods by crossing the brook at the Big Rock and then walking along the far bank past two old houses and a construction site, and I was coming home that way the next day with a Three Musketeers, some red licorice and some Fleer’s Double Bubble—which, thinking of Meg, I’d actually paid for—in a paper bag when I heard Meg scream.

I knew it was her. It was just a scream. It could have been anybody’s. But I knew.

I got quiet. I moved along the bank.

She was standing on the Big Rock. Willie and Woofer must have surprised her there with her hand in the water because her sleeve was rolled up and the brook water beaded her forearm and you could see the long livid scar like a worm pulsing up through her skin.

They were pelting her with the cans from the cellar, and Woofer’s aim, at least, was good.

But then Willie was aiming for the head.

A harder target. He always went wide.

While Woofer hit her first on her bare knee and then, when she turned, in the center of the back.

She turned again and saw them pick up the glass peanut butter jars. Woofer fired.

Glass shattered at her feet, sprayed her legs.

It would have hurt her bad to get hit with one of those.

There was nowhere for her to go except into the brook. She couldn’t have scaled the high bank beside me, at least not in time. So that was what she did.

She went into the water.

The brook was running fast that day and the bottom was covered with mossy stones. I saw her trip and fall almost immediately while another jar smashed on a rock nearby. She hauled herself up, gasping and wet to the shoulders, and tried to run. She got four steps and fell again.

Willie and Woofer were howling, laughing so hard they forgot to throw their jars any more.

She got up and this time kept her footing and splashed downstream.

When she turned the corner there was good heavy thicket to cover her.

It was over.

Amazingly nobody had seen me. They still didn’t. I felt like a ghost.

I watched them gather up their few remaining cans and jars. Then they walked off laughing down the path to their house. I could hear them all the way, voices gradually fading.

Assholes,
I thought. There’s glass all over now. We can’t go wading. Not at least until it floods again.

I crossed carefully across the Rock to the other

Chapter Twenty-One

Meg fought back on the Fourth of July.

It was dusk, a warm night gracefully fading to dark, and there were hundreds of us out there on blankets in Memorial Field in front of the high school waiting for the fireworks to start.

Donny and I sat with my parents—I’d invited him over for dinner that night—and they sat with their friends the Hendersons, who lived two blocks away.

The Hendersons were Catholic and childless, which right away meant that something was wrong, though nobody seemed to know what it was exactly. Mr. Henderson was big and outdoorsy and given to plaid and corduroy, what you’d call a man’s man, kind of fun. He raised beagles in his backyard and let us shoot his BB guns sometimes when we went over. Mrs. Henderson was thin, blond, pug-nosed, and pretty.

Donny once said he couldn’t see the problem. He’d have fucked her in a minute.

From where we sat we could see Willie, Woofer, Meg, Susan and Ruth across the field sitting next to the Morino family.

The entire town was there.

If you could walk or drive or crawl, on the Fourth of July you came to the fireworks. Apart from the Memorial Day Parade it was our one big spectacle of the year.

And pro forma the cops were there. Nobody really expected any trouble. The town was still at that stage where everybody knew everybody, or knew somebody else who did. You went out and left your door open all day in case somebody came by and you weren’t there.

The cops were family friends, most of them. My dad knew them from the bar or from the VFW.

Mostly they were just making sure that nobody threw cherry bombs too near the blankets. Standing around waiting for the show like the rest of us.

Donny and I listened to Mr. Henderson, who was talking about the beagles’ new litter and drank iced tea from the Thermos and belched out pot roast fumes at one another, laughing. My mother always made pot roast with a lot of onions in it. It drove my father crazy but it was just the way we liked it. In half an hour we’d be farting.

The public address system blared John Philip Sousa.

A quarter-moon was up over the high school building.

In the dim gray light you could see little kids chasing each other through the crowd. People were lighting sparklers. Behind us a full pack of two-inchers went off like machine-gun fire.

We decided to get some ice cream.

The Good Humor truck was doing a bang-up business, kids wading in four deep. We gradually pushed our way through without getting stepped on. I got a Brown Cow and Donny got a Fudgesicle and we hauled ourselves back out again.

Then we saw Meg by the side of the truck, talking to Mr. Jennings.

And it stopped us dead in our tracks.

Because Mr. Jennings was also
Officer
Jennings. He was a cop.

And there was something in the way she was acting, gesturing with her hands, leaning forward sort of
into
him, so that we knew right away what she was saying.

It was scary, shocking.

We stood there rooted to the spot.

Meg was telling. Betraying Ruth. Betraying Donny and everybody.

She was facing away from us.

For a moment we just stared at her and then as if on cue we looked at one another.

Then we went over. Eating our ice creams. Very casual. We stood right beside her off to one side.

Mr. Jennings glanced at us for a second but then looked off in the general direction of Ruth and Willie and the others, and then, nodding, listening carefully, looked attentively back to Meg.

We worked studiously at the ice creams. We looked around.

“Well, that’s her right, I guess,” he said.

“No,”
said Meg. “You don’t understand.”

But then we couldn’t hear the rest of it.

Mr. Jennings smiled and shrugged. He put a big freckled hand on her shoulder.

“Listen,” he said. “For all I know maybe your parents would’ve felt exactly the same. Who’s to say? You’ve got to think of Miz Chandler as your mom now, don’t you?”

She shook her head.

And then he became aware of us, I think, really aware of Donny and me and who we were for the first time and what we might mean in terms of the conversation they were having there. You could see his face change. But Meg was still talking, arguing.

He watched us over her shoulder; looked at us long and hard.

Then he took her arm.

“Let’s walk,” he said.

I saw her glance nervously in Ruth’s direction but it was getting hard to see by now, pretty much full dark with only the moon and stars and the occasional sparkler to see by, so there wasn’t much chance that Ruth had noticed them together. From where I stood the crowd was already a shapeless mass like scrub and cactus studding a prairie. I knew where they were sitting but I couldn’t make them out or my parents and the Hendersons either.

But you knew perfectly well why she was scared. I felt scared myself. What she was doing felt exciting and forbidden, exactly like trying to see her through the windows from the birch tree.

Mr. Jennings turned his back to us and gently moved her away.

“Shit” whispered Donny.

I heard a whoosh. The sky exploded. Bright white puffballs popped and showered down.

Oooooooo
, went the crowd.

And in the ghostly white light of the aftershock I looked at him. I saw confusion and worry.

He had always been the reluctant one with Meg. He still was now.

“What are you going to do?” I asked him.

He shook his head.

“He won’t believe her,” he said. “He won’t do
nothin’.
Cops talk but they never do anything to you.”

It was like something Ruth had said to us once. Cops talk but they never
do.

He repeated it now as we walked back to our blankets like an article of faith. Like it
bad
to be.

Almost like a prayer.

Chapter Twenty-Two

The prowl car pulled in around eight the following evening. I saw Mr. Jennings walk up the steps and knock and Ruth let him in. Then I waited, watching out my living room window. Something turning over and over in my stomach.

My parents were at a birthday party at the Knights of Columbus and my sitter was Linda Cotton, eighteen and freckled and, I thought, cute, though nothing compared to Meg. At seventy-five cents an hour she couldn’t have cared less what I was doing so long as it was quiet and didn’t interfere with her watching
The Adventures of Ellery Queen
on the TV.

We had an agreement, Linda and I. I wouldn’t tell about her boyfriend Steve coming over or the two of them necking on the sofa all night and I could do pretty much whatever I wanted on condition that I was home in bed before my parents returned. She knew I was getting too old for sitters anyhow.

So I waited until the prowl car pulled away again and then I went next door. It was about quarter to nine.

They were sitting in the living room and dining room. All of them. It was quiet and nobody moved and I got the feeling it had been that way for a long time.

Everybody was staring at Meg. Even Susan was.

I had the strangest feeling.

BOOK: The Girl Next Door

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