Helens-of-Troy (34 page)

Tom clasped his hands together, raised
them and placed them on top of his head, a mannerism he often did
when he was verbally frustrated.

“
Ellie, I swear to you,” he
said, crossing his heart with his right hand, “I am not making fun
of you. You know Ryan’s in jail, right?”

“Yes, we know all about it.” Jacey
said. “The girl. The pond. We know. It’s all part of why we need
you to stay here while we go and do a little shopping,” she sighed.
She was getting impatient and Tom’s reluctance to shut up and
co-operate was taking its toll on her. A feeling deep within her
was telling her she needed to finish her scavenger hunt before
nightfall, and nightfall came early this time of year.

“You know what? Forget that.” Tom
pleaded, clearly frustrated. “Why don’t we all just stay here?
We’ll get Stan to fire up the Lachey’s computer and we can go
online and figure this out together. Jacey, you could go online and
buy whatever you need and Ellie...you can do whatever you want to
do so long as you stop being mad at me.”

“So, it’s okay if I’m still mad at
you?” Jacey retorted.

“No. I that’s not what I meant,” Tom
pleaded. “Ladies, please. You’re doing my head in.”

Jacey shook her head and started to
move towards him. “Sorry, sweetie. Ellie and I need to go right now
because,” she sighed, moving close enough to Tom that he could
smell her sweet scented cologne in the crisp winter air, “when we
get through with our little errand, we will have what we need to
come back and make you ... one ... happy ... man.”

“You will?” Tom questioned. Although
the thought of Jacey and Ellie making him happy more than appealed
to him, he was doubtful that Jacey really meant what his brain told
him she was suggesting.

“We will?” Ellie echoed, moving closer
towards the two of them. Like Tom, she wished she knew what Jacey
was up to. Ellie liked to flirt as much as the next girl, but Jacey
seemed to be going beyond flirting on the proposition
meter.

“Let Stan sleep,” Jacey continued.
“Ellie and I will be gone for about an hour or so, but when we come
back, we will rock ... your ... world.”

She smiled with confidence.

Ellie smiled with
uncertainty.

Tom smiled through his
pants.

“Okay, girls,” he grinned. “I’ll watch
the little Lachey for you. You just remember your part of the deal.
I will not be happy if you come back empty-handed and suddenly have
no memory of this whole conversation.”

“Oh we will,” Jacey said, tugging on
the black scarf hanging haphazardly around Tom’s neck. “Remember, I
mean. Don’t you worry your pretty little head about
that.”

She licked the lip-gloss off her lips
slowly and pursed her lips together, sending Tom an untouchable
kiss.

He swallowed hard.

Raising her eyebrow teasingly at him,
Jacey then turned and grabbed Ellie by the hand. “Come on,
girlfriend. We have to go get our toys,” she said saucily knowing
it would warp Tom’s mind.

Ellie swallowed hard.

Tom thought he was going to explode
right then and there merely from the innuendoes in the air. The two
girls promising togetherness, or even just suggesting togetherness,
was like throwing two candy breath mints into a full soda bottle
and letting it ejaculate itself into the next block.

“Babes,” he breathed softly, “I really
have to leave you now, but promise me, promise me, that you’re not
just jerking me around.”

Waiting for an answer and not getting
one, he tugged on the handle of the steel screen door at the side
of the Lachey house, nearly hitting himself in the head when the
door easily opened. “Don’t know my own strength,” he mumbled,
quickly opening the wooden door and heading inside, away from the
two robo-vixens in his own private hell.

“He’s going totally barmy, I swear,”
Jacey laughed.

“Was that fair?” Ellie asked, as Tom
disappeared inside the house, locking the door behind him. “What
you said to him. It so puts us on his level.”

“It’s all in his interpretation," Jacey
shrugged. “Not much we can do about that.”

“We’re not really going toyou
knowtogether with Tom are we?” Ellie asked timidly. She was
surprised that the thought both excited and turned her off at the
same time. Particularly since Jacey still hadn’t let go of her
hand. She hadn’t had another girl hold her hand since she was in
grade school and it felt strangely uncomfortable.

“I’m a bit surprised you’re
contemplating it, Ellie. And a bit flattered,” Jacey said, biting
her lip and giving Ellie a glance that simmered with erotic
bemusement.

“That’s not what I meant,” Ellie
insisted, unsure if Jacey was actually trying to pick her up, or
whether she was just imagining it. “I mean, you’re gorgeous and
everything but...”

Jacey laughed as she started to slide
purposefully down the slippery driveway, pulling Ellie along with
her.

“Come on, Goth-Chic. We’re not going to
have to worry about our sexuality at all if we don’t get done what
we need to do. When we get back, remind me to tell Tom he’s going
to have to get us some bullets from his dad’s hardware
store.”

“Jacey?”

“Silver ones.”

“Jacey! You’re really freaking me out,”
Ellie said, pulling her hand back to her own side. The afternoon
was getting more uncomfortable by the moment.

“Well, we can’t get those from St.
Mary’s,” Jacey shrugged.

“But they’re not on your list,” Ellie
noted. She didn’t dare ask where they were going to get a gun. On
the one hand she hoped that Jacey hadn’t got that far in her
thought process. On the other, she wondered whether Jacey already
had a loaded Sig-Sauer in the seemingly endless pocket of her
coat.

“Are you okay, El?” Jacey
asked.

“Stellar,” Ellie replied. Her mind ran
through the past twenty minutes she had spent with Jacey. First she
had hated her, then she liked her, then it got a bit weird, and
now, now she was thinking that maybe Ryan was right and this
beautiful, quasi-religious, possibly bi-sexual temptress was really
all of those things and none of those things at the same time.
“Spacey-Jacey,” she thought to herself.

But it was nice to have made a
friend.

Maybe.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Walking into the Lachey home was like
walking into a stranger’s house.

Tom walked up the landing steps and
into the kitchen without Betty yelling at him to get his dirty wet
shoes off her nice clean floor. Stan wasn’t parked in the living
room recliner chair, slurping pop from a straw while he drew yet
another picture to hang on the fridge with the other fifty thousand
pictures he had drawn the week before. And Ryan wasn’t locked in
the bathroom doing whatever the hell it was that Ryan did in the
bathroom.

It was like he was in an alternate
Lachey universe, and it was downright creepy.

He retraced his steps and glanced at
something that had caught his eye as he walked by Stan’s colorings.
There was a calendar hanging beside them that had a big red circle
around today’s date. It was Betty’s birthday.

“Happy freaking birthday, Betster,” he
said aloud.

There wasn’t going to be any
celebrating today, that was for damn sure. Betty was more likely to
have a sedative than her usual nightcap of orange brandy that she
poured for herself at precisely eleven o’clock. She had done it
every night since Ryan’s dad had left, he knew. Tonight being a
special occasion she would have started a little early, had one too
many and offered a wee drink to Ryan and himself so she wouldn’t
have to toast the occasion alone. It happened like that every
holiday at the Lachey’s.

Feeling a pang of guilt, Tom took his
runners off out of respect before he continued on up the carpeted
hallway stairs that led to the bedrooms on the second
floor.

The first room he passed was Betty’s.
The door was open and he could see that the bed was still made from
the day before. That was a bit unusual. Betty’s neat-freak
tendencies normally stopped at the staircase. If company wouldn’t
see the mess, she wasn’t as concerned.

The second room was Ryan’s. The door
was open and he could see it looked like a bomb had gone off in it.
Nothing unusual there. The room was waiting for Ryan to come back,
kick his clothes into a pile by the cupboard, and spend the next
hour or so lifting weights. That wasn’t going to happen today
either.

The third room was Stan’s. The door was
closed. That was a bad sign. Stan’s door was never closed. He was
afraid of the dark. They kept a night light on in the hallway for
him most nights. But apparently not last night. Tom reached down
and flicked the switch. The bulb had burned out.

“Poor bastard,” Tom thought. “He’s
probably been stuck in his room since he went to bed.”

He knocked on Stan’s door.

“Stan, it’s Tom. Are you awake? Can I
come in?”

He waited a few moments, and after
getting no answer, he slowly turned the doorknob. He knew there was
no chance of it being locked because Betty had removed all the
bedroom locks when she had caught Ryan up in his room with Tara.
Ryan had bitched to Tom about it for days. Betty had opened the
door at a really inopportune moment. Ryan said his mother probably
hadn’t seen him that erect since she had last changed his diaper
and he took a surprise whiz. It was summer, and Betty grounded Ryan
for a month, after a stern lecture about condoms. Betty wouldn’t
have grounded Ryan if he had done something during football season.
Betty had seasonal priorities.

“Stan?” Tom whispered, poking his head
through the doorframe.

The young Lachey was sitting straight
up in his bed with the covers pulled close to his body, his watery
eyes staring off into space as a steady stream of tears ran down
his cheeks.

“And they called me a deer in a
headlight,” Tom thought to himself. He tried to put himself in
Stan’s shoes, but quite frankly, nothing like this had ever
happened to him when he was that young. “Stan-man, get a grip. Ryan
would smack you one if he saw you like this.”

“Ryan’s not here,” Stan sniffed. “My
mom’s not here, or my dad either. I’ve just got the loaner.” He
wiped his nose on the sleeve of his thermal pajama top.

Tom laughed. “You could do worse,
Stan.” The ‘loaner’ term had come from Ryan, who thought the word
‘babysitter’ left nobody with any respect.

Tom came into the room and sat down on
Stan’s bed. He didn’t have any brothers or sisters, so relating to
someone Stan’s age wasn’t exactly easy for him to do. But he had
known Stan almost since the day the little Lachey kid was born, and
right now, he knew he was all Stan had. One look at his sad little
face and any plans Tom had of running him down to the cop shop
disappeared. He had to try to help him. He’d stay with Stan until
the girls got back. Or until Betty got back. The cruel facts of
life Stan needed to learn could wait another 24 hours or
so.

“I’m not really a loaner,” Tom told
him. “I’ve been around here way more than Jacey, or your dad for
that matter, so it kind of moves me up a notch. I’m kind of like a
stepbrother once removed.”

“What’s that?” Stan asked.

“I’m kind of like your big friend,” Tom
explained gently. He reached over to the tissue box on Stan’s study
desk and handed him a handful. “I know everything sucks right now,
so I got rid of the girls, thinking maybe we could hang out
together for a little while. Just you and me.”

Sure, it was a lie, but given the
situation, a little lying wasn’t going to hurt anyone.

Stan tried to smile. “It sucks the big
one,” he admitted.

Tom laughed. Ryan’s influence was all
over that statement, and Stan was lucky Betty wasn’t around to hear
him say it. Betty kept a special bar of soap in the bathroom for
just such an occasion.

“Too true,” Tom admitted. “Your powers
of observation are always impressive, Stan-man.”

“We’re in big trouble, Tom,” Stan said,
wiping the tears from his face. His sobs had quieted to the odd
sniffle. “Ryan’s in jail and they took my mom to the
nutter.”

“Yeah,” Tom replied. “I know that. But
Stan, your brother has been in trouble before and he’s always got
out of it, right? This time’s no different. And your mom’s not
exactly in the nutter, she’s just in the hospital getting a little
rest.”

“I guess so.”

“You can’t keep Ryan down, you know
that. And Betty,” Tom paused, trying to think of something
comforting to say, “well, that’s probably where Ryan gets his
toughness from. But don’t tell him I said that.”

“What did Ryan do?” Stan asked. “Nobody
will tell me what’s happening. It has something to do with T.H.E.M.
in Mrs. LaRose’s backyard, right? He said he was going to get
me.”

Tom thought back to the conversation
about the “corpse-o-matic 500 styling comb” on Halloween night.
Ryan had told Stan at the time he was only joking, but in hindsight
it had been a really stupid thing to say. Or ironic. Or insightful.
Or maybe all the above. Only time would tell.