Monday's Child (12 page)

Twenty-Nine

Katy felt as she imagined an anthropologist must when faced with a heretofore unimagined civilization, amazed and slightly dumbfounded. All she needed, she thought, was a pith helmet and maybe a whip.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of . . . what?

Her mother had called the town “quaint” when they’d driven through, marveling at the hand-carved wooden street signs and Colonial-style storefronts.

It was even more quaint on foot.

Main Street was a two-lane road. She didn’t see a single fast food restaurant, video rental store, photocopy center, frozen yogurt stand, sushi bar, or discount clothing outlet. Nor were there any businesses with names she recognized.

Katy supposed this far out, they’d never heard of chain stores or franchises.

No Winchell’s, Radio Shack, Kragen’s Auto Parts, Crown Books, Federated, or Thrifty’s.

More significantly, under the circumstances, was the fact that there wasn’t a Baskin-Robbins, Swensen’s, or Häagen-Dazs
ice cream parlor in sight.

The ice cream store they were going to was called Thelma’s. She’d bet next week’s allowance that there hadn’t been a marketing survey done on
that
name.

“Do you have a movie theater?” she asked Jill as they walked. Theaters were, to her way of thinking, the basic foundation of civilized life.

Jill shook her head. “There’s one down in Leland.”

“How many screens?”

That earned her an odd look. “Just one.”

“Oh. Has it got Dolby?”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“It’s a movie sound process,” Katy explained. “Like stereo, only better. A good system can shake you right out of your seat.”

“Well, we don’t go to the movies very often.”

“I guess not.” She noticed their reflection in one of the store windows and found her eyes drawn to the image of her cousin’s face. Jill, she saw, was watching her. “What
do
you do around here?”

“Go to school. Watch TV. Collect buttons.”

“Uh huh.” Jill had shown her the collection after the grown-ups had left, and while all the different colors were kind of pretty and it was sort of fun to sift them through your fingers, it hardly seemed to be something a kid would do for fun. “Is that all?”

“I guess so.”

“What about playing with the other kids? You aren’t the only kid in town, are you?”

“No, but I don’t play with the others.”

“Why not?” She bent down to pick up a rock which lay in the middle of the sidewalk, hefted it and then put it in the pocket of her overalls.

“I don’t like them.”

Katy frowned, “None of them?”

“No.”

“You mean, you don’t have one friend?”

Jill shook her head.

“Wow,” she said, and fell silent. She wondered how much that had to do with Jill being so pretty.

At her own school, the prettier girls tended to keep to themselves, preferring each other’s company. As if, she often thought, they were worried that being ugly was somehow catching, like the measles.

Her mom had once dated a guy who claimed there existed an ugly stick which had the power to change a person’s appearance.

“Looks like she got hit with the ugly stick,” he’d say about someone he saw passing on the street, and then laugh.

Katy, at age four, had believed him, and she’d gone to her mother in tears. “Someone hit me, mama, with that ugly stick.”

“There’s no such thing,” her mother told her. “Damn it, Bobby, what lies have you been filling this child’s head with?”

Bobby had moved on shortly after that.

Still, as they said in Hollywood, it was an intriguing concept.

If such a thing did exist, there were a few girls she knew that she’d enjoy using it on.
Then
see who they ate lunch with.

Not Jill, though.

Her cousin was a bit standoffish, but Katy could tell it wasn’t out of conceit. Jill probably knew she was pretty—how could she not?—and yet Katy had the impression that her looks weren’t important to her.

Better than that, when Jill looked at her, Katy didn’t feel that she was being judged and found wanting. What she saw in her cousin’s eyes was mild curiosity, and none of the smug superiority that might have been there.

She decided she liked Jill even though they weren’t true blood relatives.

“My mother says I can stay longer than the weekend if I want to,” Katy said.

“Do you think you will?”

“It depends. I mean, I’m used to staying pretty busy. I like to do stuff.”

“What stuff?”

“Lots of things. Movies, video games, sports, hanging out, that kind of thing. And when we can afford it, there are all those tourist things. Disneyland.”

“I’ve never been.”

“You’d like it,” Katy said. “They’ve got these lands, Fantasy Land, and Tomorrow Land, and there’s Bear Country, and the haunted house, a jungle cruise, and all kinds of stuff. Space Mountain is my favorite, the ride is so fast. You
have
to see it, it’s the best.”

“It sounds . . . interesting.”

“Bug your parents until they take you,” she advised.

“I don’t think they would.”

“Why not?”

“My father’s too busy.”

“Then ask your mom. My mom and I go lots of places, just the two of us. We came up here, didn’t we?”

“There isn’t time,” Jill said.

Katy didn’t know what to make of that, but hadn’t a chance to ponder it; they’d arrived at the ice cream store.

“Thelma’s,” she said with a shake of her head, and they went inside.

Thirty

The first thing Katy noticed was that this place didn’t have glass counters. You couldn’t see the ice cream, or watch as the guy served it up.

She guessed people in small towns were more trusting than those in the city, but personally she wanted to see that the ice cream scooper was clean when it dipped into her flavor.

She closed her hand around the five dollar bill in her pocket next to the rock. “You can have whatever you want,” she said, pleased to be able to share the wealth. “It’s my treat.”

Jill smiled faintly.

There was only one customer other than themselves, an elderly woman who was having some difficulty making up her mind from among Thelma’s twenty or so choices, and as they waited their turn, Katy took the opportunity to study her surroundings.

The shop had wood-paneled walls, and featured booths rather than those annoying wobbly-legged white metal tables so prevalent in LA’s ice cream parlors. The cushions in the booths were upholstered in a dark, rich red fabric. The floor was a black and white checkerboard pattern, and spotlessly clean.

Overall, the effect was understated, but elegant.

Katy approved; she secretly suspected that the bright colors favored by some food joints were intended to assault the eye and blunt the senses, and thus dull the taste buds to their mediocre fare.

By contrast, good old Thelma’s was restful. Even the tinkle of the bell which rang when they’d opened the door had sounded muted.

“Next,” the counterboy said.

They stepped up to the counter as the old lady turned away. After all the indecision, Katy noted that she’d picked strawberry.

“I’d like a chocolate ice cream soda, with three scoops, please,” Jill said.

The boy, who might have been sixteen, gave her cousin what Katy could only call a hot look. She feared for the ice cream’s safety.

“Whatever you want, pretty baby,” he said, and grinned. The tone of his voice was equally as heated as his eyes had been.

Katy raised her eyebrows. His suggestiveness was the kind of thing she often heard in the city, usually from unshaven old men who called out from dark doorways in abandoned buildings as little girls passed by. She hadn’t expected to hear it here.

“Hey,” she said, “the ice cream is melting. You want to knock off the heavy breathing?”

He looked surprised, and a tinge of pink appeared on his acned cheeks. His eyes darted from her to Jill and back again.

“Just being friendly,” he stammered.

“Save it.” She brought out the five dollar bill and showed it to him. “This is money. We came in here for ice cream, and nothing more. My cousin wants an ice cream soda and I want a banana split, extra whipped cream, and hold the nuts.”

“Okay, okay.”

She paid for their order, pocketed the change, then took Jill’s hand and led her over to one of the booths. “Do you know that guy?”

Jill glanced toward the counterboy, as if only now noticing him. “He’s Kevin’s older brother. One of the boys in my class.”

“Well, he’s a creep.”

Jill inclined her head in what Katy took to be agreement but didn’t comment.

“A regular dirty old man in training,” she said with distaste, watching him across the room. She would have to inspect her banana split carefully before eating it; she wouldn’t put it past him to spit in it or do something else equally disgusting.

“I wouldn’t worry about him,” Jill said. She depressed the lever on a straw dispenser, and delicately extracted the straw from the slot.

The guy brought their order to the table, put the glass boat in front of Katy and held the soda for a second before handing it to Jill.

“Enjoy it,” he said.

It seemed for a moment that he might just stand there and watch them eat, but thankfully the bell rang as the door opened and another customer came in. With obvious reluctance, he returned to work.

“His parents ought to get him fixed,” Katy said when he was gone. She frowned and turned the banana boat to check the other side. It looked okay to eat, so she picked up her spoon.

“What do you mean, fixed?”

“You know, like they do to dogs.” Didn’t she know anything? “They fix them so they can’t breed. It calms them down.”

“Oh.”

Katy took a bite of her banana split, savoring the blend of flavors. “This Thelma makes good ice cream, I’ll give her that.”

“He only put two scoops in my soda,” Jill said. “I asked for three.”

They both glanced toward the counter where the lady was counting coins into his outstretched hand.

“Forget it,” Katy advised. “If you go up there, he’s just gonna say something nasty. Take my word for it, it’s not worth it.”

“I wanted three scoops.”

These young kids, she thought, glad she was eight and not seven anymore.

“You can have some of mine. Look, I can scrape the butterscotch topping off the vanilla, and—”

“I asked,” Jill said again. Her hands had closed into fists. “I even said please.”

Katy was about to say that people didn’t always get what they asked for when the counterboy screamed. The sound sent shivers down her spine.

“Oh my God!” the woman customer said, her face turning ashen. “Oh my Lord.”

Katy jumped up and ran to the counter, leaning across and looking at the boy who was on his knees on the floor with his back to her.

“What happened?”

The lady didn’t answer. Instead she hurried to the end of the counter where it opened into the shop and went straight to the phone on the wall.

The counterboy’s shoulders were shaking, and he seemed to be sobbing. “My hand,” he cried between gulps of air, “my hand.”

“What happened?” Katy repeated, this time louder.

The woman pointed towards a huge mixer with a glass container which sat on a work shelf opposite the ice cream bins. Katy stared at it, not understanding. What did making a strawberry milkshake have to do with this guy crying on the floor?

But then she saw that the color of the shake was wrong, it was way too dark. Strawberries never got
that
red. Those were swirls of blood amidst the vanilla.

“He put his hand in there,” the woman said finally, but it was more to herself than to Katy. “He put his hand in and hit the switch, as pretty as you please.”

Fascinated, Katy noticed thick drops of blood on the checkerboard floor. It looked nothing like movie blood, she thought.

There was nothing pretty about it.

She turned, expecting to find Jill beside her, but her
cousin had remained at the table, and was sitting there
calmly drinking her soda.

Thirty-One

Noah Houston heard the siren well before he saw the flashing lights. He slowed his car and pulled to the side of the road to allow the ambulance to pass. As it did he caught a glimpse of the patient, a male who looked to be in his teens.

The young man’s face seemed familiar, but he couldn’t place it.

He accelerated back into traffic, which was light as always. Two hundred yards and three cars ahead of him, the ambulance slowed to make the left turn onto the hospital grounds. As was the custom, the driver killed the siren once they were off the public road, and it died out with a low-pitched growl.

He drove past the hospital, casting a sideways glance at the emergency room ambulance bay where the patient would be unloaded. Already a nurse was standing by.

These people dispensed good medicine; no one could accuse them of the indifference which seemed to plague the city hospitals where he worked.

Even he’d begun to feel it, a curious deadening of emotional response to the people who brought their shattered lives to him for healing. Once it had excited him, to think that he could intervene in a crisis and by his skill, change its outcome.

How long had it been since he’d felt that way?

Too damned long.

Idealism hadn’t a prayer when faced with realism, and in the real world, patients died even if you did everything right. Maybe they were tired of living, or maybe people came with an expiration date that no one could see except for a higher power who in the interest of quality control took the product off the shelf.

“Boy, are you losing it,” he said to his eyes in the rearview mirror. “God as a grocery clerk.”

His hatred of death was the legacy of his days and nights as a resident, when as the low man on the totem pole, he’d been the one who had to “pronounce” the patients who died during his thirty-six hour shift.

It was the height of medical arrogance, he’d always thought, that a patient could be blue-faced, cold, and as stiff as a board—some of them actually had been—but they weren’t officially dead until he, the mighty doctor, pronounced them so.

Once upon a time, during a particularly trying and tumultuous shift, he’d been tempted to refuse to pronounce a patient, just to see what the ramifications might be. Would they continue giving meds? Bring a breakfast tray? Take vital signs?

Why not? he’d thought with the crystalline logic of a young doctor who’d had two hours of sleep in a day and a half. They could continue to bill the insurance, couldn’t they?

In the end, however, he’d gone into the room, pulled back the sheet, placed the stethoscope on a motionless chest and verified that the patient was indeed dead. He signed the chart and then went and stood in the stairwell, shaking with exhaustion and rage that he couldn’t save everyone’s life.

But that was long ago, before any of this started.

Before he would come to realize that he might have to take a life to save many.

He had to correct the mistake he’d made by cutting that cord.

Houston parked on the street and checked the address he’d written in his notebook.

The number that he was looking for turned out to be a neat wood-frame house to the left of where he’d parked. He crossed the road and started up the pathway.

Voices were coming from the opened front door, and when he reached the doorstep he was nearly bowled over by a herd of red-haired children who quickly disappeared down the street.

“Don’t be ruining your appetite for dinner now,” a woman called after them, “or you’ll be having liver and onions for breakfast, and
I
mean it.”

“Mrs. Lassiter?”

The woman appeared in the doorway, as red-haired as her brood and easily six months pregnant. “I am. You’re the doctor who called?”

“Yes,” he held out his hand. “Noah Houston. I hope I’m not interrupting.” He hadn’t realized it was near the dinner hour, and he glanced at his watch. It was after five.

“Not at all. Come in.”

He followed her into the living room and watched as she lowered herself awkwardly onto the couch.

Catching him watching, she smiled. “This is the easy part. It’s not long and I’ll be needing a crane to help me get up from here.”

“When are you due?” he asked, more from habit than anything else.

“There are two schools of thought on that,” she said. Her right hand stroked her belly affectionately. “My doctor thinks mid-June but I’ll be damned if I’ll have a baby right when the others are getting out of school. I’m shooting for Memorial Day.”

He nodded as if he understood, then cleared his throat. “Mrs. Lassiter, I wanted to talk to you about Sarah. About what happened yesterday at school.”

“That was a terrible thing, wasn’t it? Poor Miss Appleton—”

“Yes, but—”

“—and I tried to stop by and see her today when I went in for the ultrasound, but there was a psychologist with her and I didn’t have time to wait. Can you imagine, they think she did it on purpose?”

“About Sarah?” Houston prompted gently.

“I’m sorry, but it’s insane for them to suggest that she’s, well, insane. We’ve only lived here since January, and I’m not saying I know her that well, but Miss Appleton was wonderful to Sarah, very attentive.”

“That’s nice, but—”

“It’s difficult on children to have to change schools in mid-term and she went out of her way to make Sarah feel at home. Why, she was the one who suggested we wait and have Sarah’s party during Easter week so more of the kids could come.”

“Mrs. Lassiter, excuse me for changing the subject, but about Sarah . . .”

“What about her?”

“Has she told you about yesterday?”

“Hardly a word. But then—” she smiled broadly “—with the other five as competition, sometimes she can’t get a word in edgewise.”

He nodded slightly. “Do you think she would have told you if something . . . strange . . . had happened?”

“Stranger than being knocked down by a flying teacher?” she said, and laughed. “I’m sorry, doctor, but it is absurd when you think of it.”

“Yes, it is. And that’s why I’m here. I need to find out if she noticed anything unusual prior to or after the accident.”

“Well, I suppose you’re going to have to ask her.”

“Will she be back soon?”

“I don’t imagine they’ll be too long. They’ve gone off to the market for eggs. We colored a whole dozen before one of the boys pointed out that we hadn’t bothered to hard-boil the blasted things.”

“Would you mind if I waited?”

“Not at all, if you don’t mind if I leave you to yourself while I finish a few things in the kitchen.”

“That’s fine. Oh, one other question?”

“Yes?”

“I understand that Sarah is British . . .”

“Oh, that,” she said. “Yesterday she was British, today she’s French, and tomorrow she’ll be, I don’t know, Chinese or something. It’s her way of being different in a family of carrot-tops where the first thing people notice about us is this.” She fingered a lock of her hair.

“She had the emergency room doctor fooled,” Houston said.

“Sarah’s a natural-born mimic. But you’ll see.”

He did see. Sarah Lassiter had a better French accent than Chevalier, with none of the “zees” that lesser talents resorted to.

“There was nothing,” she said, her lower lip showing a hint of a Gallic pout. “No warning. I was hit—
boom
—and never saw it coming.”

Houston was fascinated. It took an effort to regain his focus. “Did you happen to notice Jill Baker? She’s in your class, isn’t she?”

Sarah considered it. “She was there, yes, but not close by.”

“Did you see whether she was looking at your teacher?”

“
Oui.
They were looking at each other.”

Houston felt a charge of excitement. “For how long?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Miss Appleton was walking toward the school. You and several other children, including Jill, were on the steps. When did they see each other, and for how long were they looking in each other’s eyes?”

For the first time, the girl appeared troubled, a play of emotion on her face. “It wasn’t long,” she said, all trace of an accent vanished. “I counted to ten. That’s about how long it takes her.”

“Who?”

“Jill.” She brushed her hair back from her face. “She’s a witch, you know.”