Monday's Child (10 page)

Twenty-Three

“Thanks, Roger,” Katy Wright said as she started up the stairs to the second floor. She had on her tennis shoes but to be on the safe side, she tiptoed, holding onto the railing. “It was a great game.”

“My pleasure. I’m glad your mother let you come at such short notice.”

“Oh, she pretty much lets me do what I want.”

“Really?”

“Amazing, huh. All that freedom and I haven’t turned into a brat.” She looked over her shoulder at him, watching as he trudged steadily upward. “So, are you going to ask my mom out?”

Roger’s face reddened and he used a forefinger to push his glasses back to the bridge of his nose. “I don’t think so.”

“Why not? You like her, don’t you?”

“Well, yes. Why wouldn’t I?”

Katy couldn’t think of a reason so she shrugged. “I don’t know. Are you gay?”

“No, I’m not. Katy Wright, what kind of a question was that?”

“Just asking. My mom always says, you’ll never know unless you ask.” They’d reached the landing and she led the way down the hall to her front door. “You want to come in and say hi?”

He looked uncertain. “I don’t know. It’s late, almost midnight. Your mom might be asleep or . . .”

“In
déshabillé.
”

Roger tilted her chin so that she was looking up at him. “How old are you, really?”

People were always asking her that.

“As old as I need to be.” She dug into the pocket of her jean overalls and pulled out her apartment key. “So you don’t want to come in?”

“I’d better not. It might embarrass your mom if I saw her, you know, in her bathrobe.”

“Right.” He’d be the one who was embarrassed; her mom didn’t own a bathrobe. She unlocked both locks and turned the doorknob. “Anyhow, thanks for the game and the pizza afterwards.”

“Katy?”

She raised her eyebrows expectantly.

“If I did ask your mother out sometime, do you think she’d say yes?”

“That’s a very good question. What do you do for a living?”

“Katy, I’m serious.”

“So am I. I can’t answer your question until you answer mine.”

He made a face. “You know very well I work in a bank downtown.”

“Not a high-paying field unless you’re in management,” she observed.

“I work in New Accounts.”

“Some potential for advancement, then. Steady work if the bank is solid. It’s not one of those S
&
L’s that wrote a lot of questionable loans and was left holding a ton of paper?”

Roger shook his head, apparently nonplused.

“Hmm. A good job, a nice apartment, a nice car even if you do drive too slow. You pay your bills on time? What am I saying? . . . Of course you do. You probably have an IRA and don’t even wait until April 14th to fund it.”

“Would you like to look at my income tax records? Or my checkbook?”

“That’s all right,” she waved it off.
“I
trust you. But after taking everything into account, would she go out with you? I’d have to say, probably not. I’m sorry.”

“Why not?”

“You’re a nice guy, Roger.” She reached up to pat his shoulder. It was a stretch; he was also tall. “A very nice guy—”

“Why do I have the feeling that I’m being insulted?”

“The thing about my mom is,” she lowered her voice to a confidential level, “she craves excitement.”

“I can be exciting.”

“No offense, but I don’t think so. You don’t have it in you.”

“We went out tonight, and you had a good time, didn’t you? It was exciting.”

“I’m a little girl,” she said patiently, “it’s not the same. And anyway, most of the excitement came from watching the game. You have to
participate
in a relationship, Roger, and nice guys just don’t cut it.”

“I don’t see why not.”

She counted them off on her fingers. “Nice guys show up when they’re supposed to, call when they’ve promised to, don’t lie or cheat or get phone calls from other women, and they always remember birthdays.”

“So?”

“Where’s the excitement in that?” She looked down the hall in both directions, to make sure no one was listening. “Some women aren’t fully alive unless their blood is pumping with adrenaline and good righteous fury at the jerk who stood them up.”

“You’re telling me that she’d prefer me if I were a rat?”

“She’s experienced with rats.”

He gave her a skeptical look. “You’re kidding me, right?”

Her shoulders rose in an elaborate shrug. “Ask her and find out.”

“Maybe I will.”

She grinned and ducked inside the door. “Remember though, if she says yes, don’t treat her too good.”

The apartment smelled of slightly burnt something which a walk through the kitchen revealed to be cookies. Black-bottomed chocolate chip, her favorite.

Her mother had left the oven on and she turned it off. The sink was crammed with measuring cups and spoons, a couple of bowls and the dishes from breakfast.

She was really tired and she wanted to go to bed, but if there was an ant within a ten block radius, no doubt he’d find his way to their sink and the remnants of cookie dough. In the morning there would be a million of them, and her mother would go crazy with the Raid, and she’d wind up with a headache.

“Hopeless,” she said. She took off her sweater and found an apron, not wanting to take any chances on splashing dishwater on her purple Lakers t-shirt.

When she’d finished in the kitchen, she discovered her mother asleep on the couch. The television flickering its blue light across her features, making her look exotic and mysterious.

If Roger saw her this way and wasn’t already in love with her, he soon would be.

Katy sighed and went to get the comforter from her mother’s bed. When she flicked on the bedroom light she saw her own reflection in the mirror and wrinkled her nose.

No one had to tell Katy that she was plain. Brown eyes and brown hair, a dusting of freckles across her nose, and built sturdily, like a boy. Ordinary—from her ponytailed head to her wide and not at all dainty feet.

Worse, she’d been cursed with a mother that men were crazy about. While no one would call her mother beautiful, she was easy to look at and had the kind of face that grew on you the more you saw it.

Interesting, distinctive, haunting.

Katy guessed she’d taken after her dad. Whoever he was, she thought, and turned off the light.

She covered her mother with the comforter, hit the off button on the TV, and went to bed.

Saturday

Twenty-Four

Dave Baker felt as though someone had put a steel band around his forehead and was tightening it just slowly enough to make him think it wouldn’t get any worse. Not only had his headache worsened, it had lasted so long that he’d gotten to the point where he couldn’t remember what it felt like not to have it.

Aspirin hadn’t helped. Two codeine tablets hadn’t helped, and may have even hurt. A desperation shot of whiskey, neat, had burned like fire going down but gave no relief.

“Eat something,” one of the waitresses had suggested, but nothing—and he would never dare tell this to the chef—sounded appetizing.

In fact, the smell of food made his stomach queasy which made his head pound even more.

He’d closed himself up in his office, turned the air conditioner on full blast, lowered the lights, stretched out on the couch, and tried to wait it out.

At closing time he sent everyone home and locked up. It was his habit to stay and tally the day’s receipts, and then prepare the deposit to take to the night deposit drawer at the bank, but he settled for putting the register drawer in the safe.

He’d count it later, when he
could
count.

The night air helped a little, and he drove with the window down.

There were pockets of fog along the way, and maybe it was the moisture in that which made the difference, but by the time he’d reached the neighborhood where he lived, he felt almost human again.

His headlights swept across the road as he turned onto his street, and he saw them standing there. His foot hit the brake and the Blazer hunkered down, the wide tires hugging the road as it came to a dead stop.

Dogs.

Their eyes had caught the light, glowing yellow as they looked in his direction.

Dave felt a flash of annoyance at the way they were just standing there, smack in the middle of the road, as if they had a right to be there, and
he
was intruding.

“Fucking dogs,” he said.

There were four of them, or maybe five, it was hard to tell. The fog swirled around them, although driven by what he hadn’t a clue; there wasn’t any wind.

Even at a distance he knew these animals weren’t your usual family pets out for a prowl. Two looked as if they might be a German Shepherd mix of some kind; another resembled a Doberman but had a squarer mouth.

The others—and there were three more, he could see now—were smaller, thin and hungry-looking, with quick eyes that he thought might glow on a moonless night.

They looked like wolves.

He reached down and found the handle to roll up his window.

If not for the lateness of the hour—it was past one—he’d lay on the horn and startle the shit out of them. He was tempted to do so anyway, but knew it wouldn’t endear him to the neighbors.

He took his foot off the brake and inched the Blazer forward, hoping that it might scare them off.

They stood there motionless.

Waiting, he thought, for him to make a move.

He envisioned himself flooring the accelerator and smashing into the center of the pack before they had time to scatter. Staring into those yellow eyes he could almost hear the solid
thump
as the bumper caught them and hurled them into the air.

Would they yelp? He hoped so.

His hands flexed and tightened around the steering wheel.

At that instant, as if by signal, they turned and fled into the dark.

It wasn’t anything he’d done, he knew, but still he felt a moment of satisfaction.

As he pulled into his own driveway, he realized that his headache was gone.

Dave went into the kitchen, hit the lights, and headed straight for the refrigerator.

“Hallelujah,” he said. “Orange juice.”

Because there was no one to see him, he drank directly from the carton, pouring the tart liquid down his parched throat. He finished most of the quart before replacing the carton on the shelf and closing the door.

In recent months a red clip magnet on the refrigerator door had come to be the center of communication between Georgia and him. Usually he left notes for her, reminding her to do this or that, but tonight there was a folded note with his name on it.

Dave frowned, pulling it free.

Maybe she was peeved that he hadn’t called her and this was her way of telling him to sleep on the couch.

Big deal, he thought. She ought to understand by now that when he was at the restaurant, he was at work. Just because he owned the place didn’t mean he could waste time on personal phone calls.

None of his employees were allowed personal calls on company time. What was good for the goose, after all . . .

He opened the note and read:

Dave:

Beverly and Katy are coming tomorrow for a visit. Jill is not feeling well, so let her sleep in if she wants. Wake me when you get home. We need to talk.

Georgia

There were no other four words in the English language that he hated more than those: We need to talk.

He wadded the note into a ball and threw it in the trash before realizing that the smart thing to have done was leave the damned thing on the refrigerator. That way he could claim he’d never seen it.

He had no intention of waking his wife.

One headache per day was enough.

Twenty-Five

Mr. Rafferty had always been an early riser, for a long time by necessity and now by choice. It was quietest in that thirty minutes before the sun came up, and quiet was of value to a man his age.

He didn’t look it, nor would he admit to it, because it was no one’s business, but he was only a few weeks shy of his eighty-ninth birthday.

People took him to be seventy, maybe five years older than that, but no one guessed his true age, and he saw no reason to enlighten them.

He had no need for a hearing aid, but there were times he wished his hearing was less acute, because a hearing aid could be turned off. The noises that intruded on his private thoughts could not.

The country hadn’t really been quiet since Ford had started the human race towards damnation by producing an American automobile. Should have left the noise and stink and bother of it to the Germans.

And airplanes; if he’d known that one day the sky would be swarming with those pesky little two-passenger planes, with engines that sounded like riled mosquitoes, he’d have moved to Bora Bora and taken up basket weaving when he had had the chance.

There was altogether too much hustle and bustle going on, even in an out of the way place like Winslow.

So he got up, as he always had, at five-thirty, crushed a little eggshell into his coffee grounds and put the pot on the stove to perk, then sat by the kitchen window, savoring the solitude.

And the silence.

He especially enjoyed watching the sun come up. As many times as he’d seen it, nigh on eighty-nine years now, it still was something to marvel about.

Once he’d sat down with pencil and paper to add up how many sunsets he’d seen, and figured it to be over thirty thousand. That was a conservative estimate, he thought, subtracting maybe three or four years for his childhood when he was too small to be much help on the farm and was allowed to sleep to cock crow, and taking away a couple of years for those Sunday morning sunrises he’d missed as a grown man after a late night out on the town.

It’d been a goodly time since he’d been out on the town. If memory served, the last such occasion had been when he’d retired. His envious co-workers had poured so much booze into him that it nearly killed him.

Trying to save the company from having to pay his pension, he supposed.

Rafferty smiled remembering, but to be honest, he didn’t miss the carousing. Never married, he’d been free to do as he pleased, but it took so much out of him . . . after he got to be forty or so, the night before was never worth the day after.

And even when he was a young buck and full of vinegar, those nights had never quite been the equal of daybreak. The women, they came and went, but the glory of a sunrise stayed with him.

Of course, his eyes weren’t what they used to be and now he needed glasses to see it, but what the eye doctor couldn’t restore to him, his heart remembered.

When it was time to get about the day, Rafferty got up from his chair and went into the bedroom to exchange his slippers for a pair of worn loafers. He put on a second flannel long-sleeved shirt—he felt cold a lot of the time—and wrapped a long woolen scarf around his neck,

Now he was ready for his morning constitutional.

Almost ready, he corrected himself. Now where had he gone and left his cane?

A tour of the house failed to turn it up. After serious thought on the matter, he recalled that he’d left it in the cloak room at the hospital.

He preferred not to use it when he was working as a volunteer because too many of the patients commented on it when he escorted them to their rooms.

“Looks like
I
should be the one helping
you,”
they’d say, and laugh at their witticism.

There were only so many times a person should have to hear the same stupid remark.

Well, he’d manage this morning without it.

He left the house by the back door, and when he turned from locking it, was stopped short by the sight of what appeared to be a dark mist rising from the Bakers’ house.

A fire?

Rafferty sniffed the air, but did not detect any smoke. Whatever it was, it dissipated so quickly that he wondered if he’d even seen it.

He removed his glasses and wiped at his eyes which were stinging all of a sudden.

What was this? he wondered, a trifle uneasy. The stinging in his eyes grew worse. As he rubbed at them, knowing it was the wrong thing to do, he lost his grip on his glasses.

He held his breath, waiting for the sound of glass breaking, but luck was with him; they must have landed on the mat.

Rafferty reached blindly for the doorknob to steady himself while he leaned over to pick up his glasses, and rapped his knuckles sharply on the wood frame.

“Confound it.” He’d driven a splinter into his little finger, sure as he was standing there. “If this doesn’t beat all.”

He brought the injured finger to his mouth and tasted blood. It was deep, then.

He reached for the doorknob again, more carefully this time, and righted himself, making sure his feet were planted firmly before bending down and sweeping the door mat with his fingers.

He felt the glasses and grabbed at them, but only managed to knock them off the side of the porch.

Rafferty straightened, disgusted with himself. He really was a doddering old fool.

Grumbling to himself, he dug out the key and, after a few tries, inserted it into the lock. Inside, he walked haltingly across the kitchen, arms in front of him so he wouldn’t crash into anything, and to the junk drawer where he kept an extra pair of glasses.

He found them without any problem, and slipped them on with shaking hands. It was an old prescription, not as strong as he was used to, but they improved his vision to the point that he could see that the splinter had indeed drawn blood. It was too deep to pull out without a pair of tweezers.

First, though, he wanted to rescue his good pair of glasses.

He stomped down the porch stairs, his good mood sorely tested by the last five minutes.

As he turned the corner at the bottom of the porch, the last of his serenity left him.

His glasses had landed in the gutted body cavity of a large black dog.

Flies buzzed above the carcass, and he thought he saw white-bodied maggots swarming inside it. He prodded the dog with the toe of his shoe.

The maggots worried him.

The dog hadn’t been here yesterday, he was sure, but neither had it been dead that long—the flesh was still supple, he thought maybe he detected steam coming off the exposed innards as they cooled, and there wasn’t much of an odor.

All of which supported it being a recent death, and yet . . .

Growing up on a farm, he’d seen his share of dead animals, and he knew that it took
time
before the maggots appeared.

Not a long time, but longer than this.

Flies had to find the body, and lay their eggs. The eggs took a while to hatch into grubs or maggots, the larval form of the adult fly. How many hours were involved, he wasn’t sure—it wasn’t the kind of information got passed on from father to son during polite conversation at the family dinner table—but it
had
to be at least a full day, didn’t it?

And there were so many of them and they looked as if they’d been at it for some time.

Even so, this pooch had been alive an hour ago, he would swear it.

This was a fresh kill.

Rafferty studied the scene before him. After a moment he reached down and delicately plucked his good glasses from below the splayed ribcage.

One thing he knew, he didn’t want to come face to face with whatever had done this.

Around him the neighborhood was beginning to stir. The lay-a-beds reluctantly joining the day already in progress.

As he turned to go back in the house and call Animal Control to dispose of the body, he caught a glimpse of a face at a window. He waved.

It was the Baker girl, Jill.