Nebulon Horror (15 page)

"The books, maybe?"

"Maybe. I just don't know. But it's itching me like a dose of poison oak, and if I scratch hard enough I'll come up with it."

O
live Jansen put down the telephone and frowned at her daughter. The call from Chief Lighthill had upset her. Her mind's version of the conversation revolved in her head like a Fourth-of-July pinwheel, throwing off sparks.

"Olive, the Hostetter boy is missing again and I want to ask Jerri if she was at the Peckham house today and saw him there."

"She isn't allowed to go there, Chief."

"But she may know if he went there or was planning to." A pause, while she had put the question to Jerri and got a mumbled answer. "She doesn't know, Chief. She didn't talk to him in school today."

On the floor of the apartment living room Jerri now seemed suspiciously engrossed in a picture book for children. Olive watched her for some time, and then said,
"Did
you see the Hostetter boy today?"

"No, Mommy."

"You were late gettin' home from school. Mrs. Trevett told me it was after four when you showed up. Where were you?"

"I played around school a little while."

"Who with?"

"I don't remember. Teresa was there. And Debbie."

"Why don't you look at me when I'm talkin' to you? Is that book so great you can't lay it down? You're lyin', aren't you?"

Closing the book, Jerri lifted her head and silently returned her mother's gaze.

"What's wrong with your eyes?" Olive said.

"Wrong?"

Olive got up and went to her. Bending over, she put a hand under the child's chin and peered into her eyes. "They're red. You been readin' too much."

"Yes, Mommy."

"I want to talk to you, anyway. Put your book away and sit in a chair." Returning to her own chair, Olive waited for her daughter to obey. Then she said, "I want to go over what you told Keith and Melanie when they came here Friday after you spent the day at the nursery. I know we talked about it after, but I'm not satisfied."

Jerri gazed at her in silence, not squirming, not even blinking. There really was something wrong with the child's eyes, Olive thought. Maybe she should call Doc.

"Suppose we just begin again at the beginnin'," she said. "You told us the only time you left Vin at the
nursery was to go to the john. Vin says no. He says
he discovered you missin' three or four times when you was—when you were workin'. You wandered off
to play in other parts of the nursery, he says. He called to you and you answered. Now who of you is lyin'?"

"I never went to where the trees were pulled up, Mommy."

"But you did leave him."

"Not for long. Honest."

"Why'd you tell us you only left him to go to the john?"

"You were mad at me."

"I'm gonna be a whole heap madder if I don't get the truth out of you. You better believe me. Now if you never went to where the plants were tore up, how'd your footprints get there? Answer me that."

"I told you. There was another girl. She came in car with her mother."

"Baby, both Vin and Keith say that just isn't so. No customer came with any child."

"They didn't see her. Her mother left her in the car. But she didn't stay in the car." Jerri voiced an exaggerated sigh. "I've already told you this, Mommy. It's true."

And that's the one hope I have to cling to
, Olive thought:
Even if you lied about other things, there may really have been a little girl in a car.

It just might be true. Keith, of course, had taken the shoes Jerri wore that day and compared them with the prints, and there was no doubt the shoes and the prints matched. But she had bought those at Moody's in Nebulon. Plenty of other Nebulon children must be wearing the same kind and size.

But if the girl in the car was just a figment of Jerri's imagination—if she herself had pulled up those plants—the big question had to be why. Was it to make trouble for Vin, just as she had tried to get him in trouble at the concert?

Olive had been reading a book on the problems of divorced women. It contained a discussion of the hostility some children felt toward their stepfathers. Sometimes the feeling was not even recognized by the child, the book said. It could be subconscious.

Could this be the answer to Jerri's behavior? Was she, even without knowing it, revolting against having Vin for a father? That would explain the scene at the concert. It would explain her tearing up the young trees to get Vin in trouble with Keith Wilding. But what about the kitten?

"Jerri."

"Yes, Mommy?"

"I been thinkin'. We'll be movin' out of this apartment soon and goin' to the new house. Almost everybody who lives in a house has a pet of some kind. You know? A dog or a cat. Should we get a cat, you think? A kitten?"

"Oh yes, Mommy!"

"You like kittens?"

"Yes!"

"Then why'd you kill the one in the nursery?"

"Mommy, I didn't. I told you it wasn't me."

The four of them—Mel and Keith, she and Vin—had taken Jerri back to the nursery Friday evening
to confront her with the uprooted trees and demand
an explanation. To make her look again at what she had done to the kitten. To find out what the symbol or diagram meant. She had denied everything, of course. She still did. But there was something wrong all the same . . . and not just with her eyes.

If pressed to be specific about what was wrong, Olive could only have said the child seemed afraid of something. Yes. She had not been afraid when questioned Friday. Over the weekend she had seemed quite normal. But on Monday when Olive returned from work and picked her up at Mrs. Trevett's, downstairs, there had been something wrong.

Mrs. Trevett had noticed it too. "Something must have happened at school," she said. "The minute Jerri walked in here, I could tell she was upset."

"Did anything happen at school today, baby?" Olive had asked her daughter.

"No, Mommy."

"What are you so jumpy about, then?"

"I'm not."

She was, though. Usually in the evening she watched
TV or read a book or looked at magazines. She liked to draw—for a seven-year-old she was certainly artistic —and would often spend hours doing that. But Monday evening she had seemed unable to settle down. It was one thing after another, nothing lasting for more than a few minutes, until Olive, trying to do some ironing, became jittery herself and said, "For God's sake, Jerri, light someplace and do somethin'!"

"Mommy?"

"Now what?"

"Will Keith tell people what happened at the nursery?"

"I don't know."

"Will it be in the paper?"

"I suppose so, if he tells the police. If you didn't have anythin' to do with it, why should you care?"

"Will it rain tonight, Mommy?"

"Rain?" Apparently something
had
happened at school. "You mean hard enough so you won't have to go to school tomorrow?"

"Not for that. Just will it rain?"

"For God's sake, how do I know?"

It hadn't.

Yesterday, Tuesday, Jerri's nervousness had been even more obvious. She had gone to school scared and come back more so. In the evening she had asked whether there was anything in the paper about what "that girl in the car" had done at the nursery.

"No," Olive said. "And I don't suppose there will be. But I wish I knew why you're so interested."

"Will it rain
tonight,
Mommy?"

"That too. Why do you want it to rain?"

"Well, Keith put the plants back in the ground, didn't he? Rain will make them grow."

Olive had thought of something and tossed it into
the conversation on the mere chance it might hit home. "And a good rain would wash away that picture you scratched in the path, wouldn't it?" She had said this in the apartment's tiny kitchenette while preparing supper. Jerri was in the doorway.

The child's response had been so totally unexpected, it caused her to juggle a plate and drop it. The plate broke on the floor while Jerri's voice still screamed, "I didn't make any picture in the path! I didn't! Don't say I
did!"

The loss of the plate had angered Olive and she marched to the doorway. Sitting on her heels, she reached out and gripped Jerri's shoulders. "Now that'll be just quite enough!" she said sharply. "That's just all I want to hear out of you!"

Tears welled in her daughter's eyes. "I
didn't do it,
Mommy.
Please
don't say I
did
."

"So the girl in the car
did
it. All right. And you want rain so the plants'll grow again. I hear you. I don't believe a word you're tellin' me, but I hear you. Now go and wash for supper."

In the night it had rained, and this morning Jerri had seemed herself again, an innocent little girl with no problems. But now in the evening the fear seemed to be back. Olive gazed at her daughter, seated woodenly in a chair facing her, and wondered again if she ought to call Doc Broderick.

If she did, what would she say? "Jerri doesn't look right, Doc. She's pale. She acts as though something happened to frighten her again, but I can't think what it might be. She was late getting home from school today. Says she played around school with some of the kids. I'm not sure I believe her. Oh God, Doc, I don't know what to believe lately. I just don't."

Uh-uh. She couldn't be as vague as that.

"I think you ought to go to bed, baby," she said. "You look tired."

"Mommy, when will we move to the new house?"

"I'm not sure. Soon, though."

"Will I be going to a different school?"

"No, you'll still be in this district. Why? Don't you like the school you go to?"

Jerri did not have to answer that. Before she could do so there was a drumming of fingers on the hall door, a key turned in the lock, and Vin Otto walked in. "Hi." He kissed Olive, walked over to Jerri and touched his lips to the end of her nose. "I brought some ice cream from Ziegler's." He reached for Jerri's hand. "Come, sweetheart. Help me in the kitchen."

They ate butterscotch ice cream, Jerri's favorite flavor, and Vin talked about a woman who had come to the nursery asking for peanut trees. She had been reading a columnist in a Fort Lauderdale paper who kept up a running joke about his peanut-tree farm. It was good to laugh again, Olive thought. It was wonderful to hear Jerri laugh. "Peanuts don't grow on trees," Jerri said primly. "They grow in the ground."

Vin carried the dishes to the kitchen and washed them. Returning, he took from his shirt pocket a folded yellow envelope that had the words ELLSTROM'S PHOTO STUDIO printed on it. "Keith snapped some pictures of what happened at the nursery," he said. "It is a good thing he did, because the rain last night washed away the footprints and the diagram." He drew the prints out of the envelope and handed them to Olive.

She looked at them closely, placing each on the small table beside her chair as she finished with it. There were several photos of the uprooted exotics, showing the footprints among them. Two of the kit
ten. One of the diagrams scratched in the dirt where the paths crossed. "I suppose he had to do it," she said, shaking her head. "It's a thing I'd rather forget, though, I can tell you."

"All of us. But he feels we cannot be sure until we have seen the end of it."

"Oh God. Don't say that."

"We should have a record in the event something more happens, Keith says. It is strange. When I went
for these today, Willard Ellstrom seemed quite inter
ested in that one of the diagram. He inquired where it was taken. His wife discovered a drawing just like it in the school yard, he told me. The Hostetter boy did it. By the way, I bought something for the new house today at Caxton's. It was on sale."

"Oh? What?"

"Have you today's paper? There is a picture in the Caxton ad."