Nebulon Horror (11 page)

They had discussed Jerri's attack on Vin, too. In depth. They were trying to understand why, even if the child had subconsciously wanted to hurt him in some way—in retaliation for some imagined offense, say—she had chosen that particular way to do it. Why the charge of "touching," screamed out at a public gathering? Why not something more in keeping with the workings of a seven-year-old mind?

Nothing had come of the talk, of course, except, in Olive's case, a feeling that at least she had done her best to find some answers. Calling Melanie now, she said in a troubled voice, "Jerri disobeyed me. She was at that damned house today."

"Are you sure, Olive?"

"She was there. Vin is almost certain he saw her."

"What does she say?"

"She denies it. Mel, what can I do? Tell me!"

After a brief hesitation Melanie said in a voice touched with anxiety and pitched even lower than usual, "Nothing, Olive. Leave it alone. If you force her into lying about it, you may make things worse. Look. Why don't you keep her out of school tomorrow and let Vin look after her at the nursery? Keith won't mind. For Saturday we'll think of something else, and you can be with her yourself on Sunday. Maybe before she has to go to school again Monday we'll know something."

Olive's answer was a sigh of relief.

Another who was relieved that week was Lois Ellstrom. Her freedom from anxiety came when Raymond's mother telephoned her at school. She and her husband thought it best, Mrs. Hostetter said, to keep Raymond at home in case the police wished to talk to him further about the incident at the park lake. "And of course we are still trying to find out why he behaved as he did at school, Mrs. Ellstrom, and why he ran away."

"Yes, Mrs. Hostetter."

"So we'll just forget about school this week. After that, we'll see."

"I quite understand."

Lois told Willard and he too was relieved. "I want to go to Miami," he said. "There's to be a demonstration of new products by one of the photo com
panies. I'd just about written the trip off, but if things are going to be quiet for you at school . . ."

"Of course you can go, Will."

"It's an evening thing. I'll have to stay over."

"I'll be quite all right. You go ahead."

Arriving in Miami about five, Willard phoned an old friend, a bachelor professor at Miami University, to see if they might have dinner together. John Holden taught in the department of anthropology. Over dinner in a cozy Coconut Grove restaurant, Willard told him some of what had been happening in Nebulon and showed him the copy Lois had made of the Hostetter boy's school-yard scratchings.

"A seven-year-old did this?" Holden said. He was a man almost as tall as Willard and had a bony face that quickly and clearly revealed his feelings. The face now showed he was startled and deeply interested.

"In the second grade," Willard said.

"Fascinating. May I copy it?"

"Keep it. I fished it out of a wastebasket after Lois threw it away."

"She threw it away? Good Lord, why?"

"Well, it seems our town librarian, a formidable Miss Peckham, told her it was just doodling. You think it may be more, eh?"

"I do. If I'm right, I'll give you a ring. It will take some looking into, of course. These esoteric things can lead one a merry chase over all sorts of murky roads." And like a treasure hunter who had just stumbled on a cryptic map, Professor Holden carefully put the sketch in his wallet for safe keeping.

At the Pink Swan on Friday Olive Jansen found herself serving her former husband. He came in alone and went to one of her tables without waiting to be seated. She was annoyed. She nearly refused to serve him. But when she saw the manager critically watching, she drew a veil over her annoyance and with exaggerated politeness took Hayden's order.

When she came with his lunch, he said, "1 want to talk to
you."

"I'm busy."

"I said I want to talk to you." His hand shot out and gripped her wrist. Physical strength, of course, was a thing he had possessed from the start, just as tact had always been a stranger to him.

Knowing his hand would only become a vise if she resisted, she forced herself to relax and said, "What do you want? Make it short."

His handsome face darkened. "Is it true what Jerri was yelling at the concert Sunday night? Did Otto make a pass at her?"

"No, of course not."

"Why did she say so, then?"

"She dreamed it."

"What are you talking about? She never dreamed anything like that in her life."

"She dreamed it, I tell you. Let me go. Mister Dion is watching us."

His grip tightened. He said in a low, threatening voice, "Let me tell you something. If I find out he did make a pass at my little girl, or if he ever does, I'll kill the bastard. You understand?"

She was free. She turned away. She served him the rest of his meal seething but in silence, and he did not touch her or speak to her again.

On her way home Olive stopped at the nursery to pick up her daughter and asked Vin Otto how Jerri had behaved. When she put the question, Vin was on his knees, wrapping the roots of a five-foot Hong Kong orchid tree he had just dug up. Jerri knelt on the other side of the excavation, adoringly watching him.

He looked up, grinned, and said, "She has been an angel." Olive could not help comparing the gentleness of his unhandsome face with the cruelty on the face of the Adonis she had married.

"You sure? No trouble?"

"Not the slightest."

"Come on then, Jerri. Say good-bye to the nice man and we'll go home. Where's Keith, Vin? I ought to thank him."

"He is out on a job. I will tell him for you."

Olive kissed him and took Jerri's hand. "We'll see you tonight." When she got to her car, she turned and waved to him. She was especially happy with Vin just now because the house they had looked at together had turned out to be suitable, and they had rented it. Now with a place to move into, they could be married.

Soon after Olive's departure Keith drove in, with Melanie Skipworth on the pickup seat beside him. "Sorry I'm late, pal," he said to Vin. "It occurred to me that my cooking has been lacking something lately, so I drove around to pick up an expert. It kind of helps that she's good-looking too, of course." He nodded approvingly at what Vin was doing. "Nice work, man. But run along now, hey? I told you to take things easy till that face healed."

Vin left.

Tucking Melanie's arm through his own with a flourish, Keith said, "Come walk with me, lady. I want you to see what's happening to those exotics I got last month. You, ma'am, didn't think they'd thrive up here, remember? You even hinted I might be stupid. Nice to have around, maybe, but stupid."

The plants he referred to were seedlings of, among other things, golden-dewdrop Duranta, lipstick trees, African tulip, and akee trees, all obtained from the man he had worked for while at college. They were in
a section of the nursery quite far from the house. As he led Melanie along the paths, a low sun stabbed shafts of golden light through the crowded gardens On an impulse he suddenly stopped, took her in his arms, and kissed her, taking his time about it and doing a thorough job.

"Thank you, sir," she said. "I was wondering when you'd get around to that."

"I should have got around to it an hour ago. No, that isn't right either. Now that I think of it, I've been wanting to do it since I woke up this morning. Forget the exotics. Let's go to the house."

"From exotic to erotic, huh?" Her laugh was a bright bird flashing through his beloved trees. "But I want to see what's going on. Honest. At least a quick look, huh?"

"A two-minute tour," he conceded grudgingly. "Not a second longer."

Each with an arm about the other, they traversed a plot of walking-iris and passed through a row of monkey-puzzle trees whose branches seemed a hopeless tangle. Keith was in a gay, warm, sensuous mood. Then abruptly, as though struck by an Arctic blast, the mood changed.

He froze in his tracks. His hand fell like lead from Melanie's slim waist. His face filled with shock and fury.

"Oh, Keith," Melanie said in sympathy. "Oh, my dear!"

Before them an entire section of garden was a scene of devastation. All but a scattered few of the more than two hundred seedling trees planted there had been pulled up and flung aside, helter-skelter. The tulip trees. The Durantas. The akees and lipsticks. Drying roots glittered like blazing twigs in the golden
light. Leaves were already curling as the sun sucked their moisture.

With his hands fiercely clenched and a muscle working visibly in his jaw, Keith strode along the rows, sizing up the damage. "Who, Mel?" he demanded. There were tears in his voice as real as those forming in his eyes. "Who would do such a thing? Who? Who?"

He stopped abruptly and looked down. The dark ground was firm in most places. There had been no rain lately, and trees as well established as these were not watered very frequently. But the earth that had been jarred loose from the roots of the flung-aside plants was soft, and where it had fallen in large enough patches it held imprints.

Keith knelt now to peer at one—an almost complete imprint of a child's shoe. He looked up at Melanie standing beside him, and his anguished face was all but empty of color. "Jerri?" He spoke the name almost in a whisper. "Jerri Jansen? I can't believe it. Why in God's name would she want to do this to me?"

"Maybe—maybe some other child was here, Keith. One who came with a customer. Or a neighbor's child. There are kids in the house next door, aren't there?"

Mechanically he shook his head. "Older. They're eleven and thirteen. The shoe that made this was Jerri's size, Mel. Look at it. And she was here with Vin all day today. All day long."

"Can they be replanted?" Melanie turned slowly to survey the total damage again. "You and I, darling? Now? Right now? Can we?"

He shook his head again. "We can't tackle a job that big at this hour. We'd be at it all night." For a moment he was silent; then at long last his hands unclenched and some of the tension left his body. "I'll get a hose and wet them down," he said. "Vin
and I can replant tomorrow. We'll save some of them I guess."

"Can I help you water them, Keith?"

"Why don't you go to the house and start supper. That way we'll be sure of something good to eat, at least."

"I . . . All right, I'll do that."

"I'll be along in half an hour. Go that way," he pointed. "It's shorter."

She left, and he went for a length of hose. While he was returning with it coiled over his shoulder he heard her calling him. In her voice was something close to hysteria that caused him suddenly to fear for her safety. Dropping the hose, he went plunging through the nursery toward where she ought to be.

He found her standing rigid in the middle of the yard-wide path she had been following. The branches of a medium tall sweet bay overhung the path, mottling it and her with shadow. The backs of her hands were pressed against her mouth as though to stifle a scream. Wide-eyed she stared at something on the path in front of her.

On halting his frantic rush at her side, Keith saw what she was looking at, and a chill seized him. "No," he whispered. His hands reached out, trembling, but hung suspended in mid air, touching nothing. He could feel his mouth shaping a cry of horror, then turning to stone before it could be uttered.

The thing lying before him on the path was a lightweight agricultural fork with a wooden handle, used for simple digging chores around the nursery. It had four flat tines with sharpened ends. But what looked like an oddly shaped lump of brown sod impaled on two of the sharp steel fingers was not sod. It was a small dead kitten, with a tine through one of its eyes.

He could not wrench his horrified gaze from the
creature's tiny face. The stabbed eye was a pool of hardened blood now. The mouth was stretched in a
silent shriek that bared a twisted purple tongue and teeth like those of a baby shark. And even in its agony it had fought fiercely against dying. Its unsheathed claws still clutched the sharp metal shaft that pierced its eye.

"Oh, dear Lord!" Forced out of him by shock, Keith's cry was nevertheless only a whimper. Groping for the instrument, he picked it up and gazed numbly
at the kitten impaled on it. The tiny creature had been dead for some time, apparently. Shaking his head
in disbelief, he gently laid the fork down again beside the path and then, remembering the shoeprints among the uprooted exotics, looked for more of them here but saw none.