All for One (36 page)

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.”

“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.”

“Yeah?”

Joey swallowed. This wouldn’t be easy for his friend to hear. “Mike, she saw the detective there. And she saw Bryce with him.”

Michael’s face pulled noticeably back.

“They were eating ice cream together and she thought they were talking.”

“She...” Michael’s head shook slightly. “She must have made a mistake.”

“She’s positive, Mike. It was Bryce.”

Bryce? With the Kiddie Catcher?
“Bryce?”

Joey nodded. “Did you talk to him at all yesterday?”

“No,” Michael answered. His eyes slanted away and something thick and heavy crawled into his chest.
Bryce?

“You’re his best friend, Mike.” Joey scooted backward as the line shortened. “Can you try and get a hold of him?”

Michael nodded, his words gone momentarily as thoughts erupted like billiard balls after a vicious break. He had been acting weird. Like at the cemetery. And before, when he saw Guy’s writing on the note. And Friday at lunch when he said he couldn’t help with Chris. He seemed funny then.

“Mike?” Joey tapped his friend on the shoulder. “Mike?”

“Yeah?” Mike said, looking back to Joey now.

“Can you try and talk to him?”

“Sure. I’ll, um, stop by his house after church.”

“Okay,” Joey said, then turned back toward the head of the line. The confessionals were just a few feet away.

Behind, Michael was thinking of those small rooms, closets really, and all that went on in there. About confessing one’s sins in there, and how priests couldn’t tell anyone what you said. You could tell them anything. That you killed someone, or that you knew who had killed a certain person, and the they couldn’t tell a soul. And for a brief instant Michael thought to himself how good it might feel to tell someone. Just what a relief it would be to let it out.

He wondered if Bryce was thinking the same thing in a very different way.

*  *  *

It was Bryce who didn’t want to talk in the house, and Bryce who suggested they take a walk through Bigfoot Woods.

A hundred silent yards into the forest, Dooley asked his young acquaintance how the place got its name.

“It’s been called that for a long time,” Bryce answered, his eyes ahead and on the dark and damp path. He remembered PJ tripping, going down hard and almost on her face, and he didn’t want the same thing to happen to him. So he had to look ahead and not at the Kidd... at Dooley. (
Call me Dooley, okay? I’m not a cop right now; I’m trying to be a friend.
) Had to. Even when he felt Dooley eyeing him as they walked between the trees. He had to stay focused on not tripping. That was why he couldn’t look at him.