Nebulon Horror (8 page)

"I don't know. I saw the girl splashing around in the lake and she came out with the child in her arms. That man took it from her and has been trying to revive it. Another man ran to telephone the rescue team."

Melanie stood staring, her face ashen and heart pounding so hard she felt it might burst.

The crowd grew a little larger, though there were never many people passing through the park at this hour. Melanie's gaze swept the circle of intent faces. The only other one she recognized was that of the mayor's little boy, Raymond. Living in one of the elegant homes on the other side of the lake, he often played in the park and sometimes spoke to her as she walked through on her way to or from work.

She heard the pulsing wail of an approaching siren. At the same time, a policeman came sprinting across the grass and burst through the circle of spectators. He looked down at the man giving mouth-to-mouth respiration. After watching for a moment he nudged the man aside and took his place. The policeman seemed more sure of himself, but the infant's face remained a death mask.

The fire department's rescue wagon wailed its way to the parking lot but could come no farther because of the trees. Firemen trotted the rest of the way burdened with equipment. They took over from the policeman. He in turn drew the woman away so she would not impede their efforts. Melanie was close enough to hear him say, "What happened, ma'am? Can you tell me?"

That must have been what the woman wanted: to tell someone, to let it out. Almost hysterically she said, "I only left him for a minute, to go to the foun
tain for a drink of water. Only a minute! When I got back, the carriage was empty and I thought he'd been stolen. I ran around looking for him. Whoever took him couldn't be far away; I wasn't gone that long. But I couldn't find him. Then—oh, my God—I saw him in the lake. Somebody must have taken him out of the carriage and thrown him in the water." The hysteria fled and her voice diminished to a whisper. And suddenly Raymond Hostetter was standing there saying, "She's lying."

The policeman said "What?" before he realized who had spoken. Then he said hoarsely, "Hey! We've been looking all over for you!"

"She's lying," Raymond repeated. He stood very straight and still, one thin arm rigidly pointing at the baby's mother. "She did it herself," he said calmly in a high, reedy voice. "I saw her do it. She took the baby out of the carriage herself and walked down to the lake and threw it in. The story she just told you is a lie."

The crowd gasped.

There was a flurry of activity on the grass then. A fireman stood up with the infant in his arms. Another said to the policeman, "We're taking him to the wagon. Better bring his mother along."

The woman had turned to stare at Raymond. She looked at him as though she could not believe she had heard him say what he had just said. If she had any thought of answering him, though, the policeman dispelled it by saying, "Go with them, ma'am. I'll be right along."

He turned to Melanie, and she saw he was having trouble deciding where his duty lay. "Miss Skipworth," he said, "you suppose -you could do me a favor and take Raymond home? He's been missing since before noon, in case you don't know. Ran away from school.

If he was to disappear again now, I'd be in big trouble. But that woman and her baby . . ."

"I'll walk him home."

"Thanks."

Taking the boy's hand, she said, "Come on, Raymond," and was glad to get him and herself away from the onlookers who, after hearing him accuse the woman, were staring at him as though they too were incapable of believing he had said it. Leaving the small crowd behind, she said, "So you ran away from school, did you'? Why?"

"I wanted to."

"Well, I suppose that's as good a reason as any. Especially if you're the mayor's son. Where did you go?"

"I'm not telling."

"You're not telling. All right, I don't really want to know. But I
would
like to know why you told that awful lie back there about that poor woman."

"It wasn't a lie. That's what she did—she took the baby out of the carriage and threw it in the lake."

They were alone now on a path made almost dark by the broad, spreading crown of one of the largest trees in the park. Raymond's home was in sight. Still holding his hand, Melanie halted, forcing him to halt too. "Raymond Hostetter," she said, "I don't believe you."

He smiled. It was a frightening kind of smile, not childish at all but old and wise. "You will, though," he said calmly, and Melanie wondered whether his eyes were really the color they seemed to be.

If the tree under which they stood had been a turkey oak in the fall, with a turkey oak's flaming red leaves, she could have blamed the strange glow on that. But it wasn't. It was a live oak and its leaves were green.

A few minutes after seven that evening Dr. Norman Broderick—"Doc" he was called by nearly everyone—said good-bye to Olive and Jerri Jansen and locked his office door. He had no evening hours on Mondays and would not have seen these two so late in the day had not Olive seemed so distraught over the phone when requesting an appointment.

Lighting a cigarette—he allowed himself five a day now—he climbed a flight of stairs and entered his living room. A widower, he lived alone on a tree-lined street near the library, using the downstairs floor of the house for his practice and the remodeled upstairs for his living quarters. He was fifty-six years old and a fine specimen of manhood, with a mop of unruly dark hair that would have looked more appropriate on a medical student.

Strange, he thought, relaxing in his favorite chair to enjoy his smoke. Damned strange, the way little Jerri Jansen had answered some of his questions. What was the meaning of that repeated reference to a door?

In the beginning he had talked to the two of them together, thinking they had come only about Jerri's behavior at the concert. He knew about that, of course. Vin Otto had come for treatment last night after it happened. And Olive did talk about it for a while, mainly to bring out the point that the child did not
remember the incident. Then she had gone on to talk about the frog and Elizabeth Peckham's accusatory telephone call.

This he found more interesting. Elizabeth had been a patient of his until a couple of years ago. Then for some reason she had switched to old Victor Yambor in the nearby town of Glendevon. Yambor had been Gustave Nebulon's doctor and was practically retired now. She took Teresa to the old man too, though he, Broderick, had brought her into the world and looked after her parents while they lived.

He had asked both Olive and Jerri a number of questions, getting nowhere much and realizing at last he was just going in circles. Then he said, "Suppose you sit in the waiting room, Olive, while Jerri and I discuss a few deep secrets."

Olive left the room and he beckoned the little girl to him. He lifted her onto his knee. "Now tell me," he said, "is it true what Teresa told Miss Peckham, that you put her up to doing that to the frog?"

"Uh-uh." Emphatically she wagged her head in denial.

"I didn't think it could be. What do you do when you go over there, anyway?"

"We just play."

"At what?"

"Different things. Like hide-and-seek."

"Hide-and-seek, hey? I used to play that when I was your age. Where do you play it, outdoors or in the house?"

"Both, but mostly in the house. Sometimes we open the door."

"What door?"

"The
door. But I'm not supposed to tell. It's a secret."

"Who says it's a secret? Teresa?"

"Uh-huh. She says if I tell, we won't get to open it any more. So don't you let on I said anything."

Doc had never been inside the Gustave Nebulon house—Elizabeth had not lived there when she was his patient—and had no idea what she was talking about. The word
door
intrigued him. He said, "Where is this door, Jerri?"

She shrugged. "I don't know."

"You open a door and you don't know where it is? What kind of talk is that?"

"Well, I don't. Honest."

He had been told that Elizabeth Peckham used only part of the huge house and kept a number of rooms locked. Old Gustave too was said to have used only part of it after his wife died and he sent the servants packing. "You mean you go into one of those closed-up rooms?" he asked the child on his knee.

She briskly wagged her head. "I'm not telling."

"It must be kind of spooky, going into a room that's been shut up so long. Does Miss Peckham know you go in there?"

"I'm not telling."

"I bet there's lots of interesting things in that room. Old things that used to belong to Mister Nebulon." The child tried to wriggle off his knee but he held her. "But if you go into a locked-up room, you must know where the door is. So you lied to me just now, didn't you?"

"I wasn't talking about
that
door," she said with a snort of impatience.

Hold on, boy, here we go 'round in circles again
, Doc thought. But he persisted a while longer. "All right. You open a locked door, or at any rate one that's usually kept closed, and you go into one of those secret rooms, but that isn't the door you've been talking about. Where is the one you're talking about?"

"I told you I don't know."

"But you said a while back that you and Teresa sometimes open it. How can you open it if you don't know where it is?"

"I'm not telling.

"Well, what do you do when you go through it?"

"We don't go through."

"What's the good of opening it, then?"

"I'm not telling. If I tell, we can't ever do it again. I told you that. Please . . . can I go home now?"

He tried for a few minutes longer but it was no use. Either she was determined not to tell him more or there was no more to tell. Reluctantly he walked her out to the waiting room, where he managed to convey to Olive that he had better not talk to her with Jerri present and would phone her later.

Seated in his easy chair, Doc finished his cigarette and carefully stubbed it out. Strange. He had always had a desire to see the inside of that old house, and now his curiosity was keener than ever.

He thought of something. Rising, he crossed the living room and went into his study.

The telephone on his desk there began ringing before he reached it. Annoyed, he picked it up. "Yes?"

"Norman, this is Will. Are you very busy?" Willard Ellstrom never called him Doc.

"Well, I'll be damned. I was just about to call you and ask if . . . Never mind. Is something wrong?"

"It's Lois. Did you hear the local news this evening?"

"No.
"

"There was a baby drowned in the park lake. She feels she . . . Look, Norman, it's too long a story for the telephone. Can you come over?"

"I want to. It's what I was going to call you for, to ask if I might."

"Good, good."

"Be there in ten minutes," Doc said, and hung up.

He could have walked—it was perhaps a quarter mile from his place near the library to the Ellstrom home on Carissa Road. There had been an urgency in his friend's voice that dissuaded him, though, and he took his car. It was a Cadillac purchased only a month ago at the agency of Nebulon's Mayor Hostetter. When he got out of it at his destination, six-foot-five Willard Ellstrom was on the veranda waiting for him like a basketball player at the foul line drawing deep breaths to steady himself for a shot.

They did not shake hands. They were old friends and felt no need to. "What's wrong?" Doc asked as they went inside.

"I'm afraid Lois may be going to have a breakdown."

"Nonsense. Why?"

"She blames herself for what happened."

They entered the living room and Lois Ellstrom struggled up from her chair as Doc walked toward her. He took her hands and peered at her face. "Oh-oh," he said. "What in God's name have you been up to? You trying to put yourself in the hospital?"

Normally she would have answered with a gentle repartee. Now she remained silent, her mouth quivering.

"Easy now," Doc said. "Sit down, Lois."

As she lowered herself back into the chair, he watched her. She seemed to have trouble controlling her movements, those of her legs especially.