One-Eyed Jack (21 page)

“
Jack’s gone missing
again,” he said.

My mouth literally fell open. For a
second I had no idea what to say.

“
He was on the bus this
morning, but when the school psychologist went to talk to him just
now the teacher said he’d never shown up for class.”

“
Are
you
serious
?” I said.

“
Yeah.” He looked
disgusted – and angry.

“
That is one stubborn
kid,” I said.

“
And a screwed-up one,”
Skees agreed.

“
Any idea where he
went?”

“
I was
hoping
you
might have a suggestion.”

I shook my head. “I don’t
know,” I said. “I don’t know whether he can see Jenny in daylight.
I’m pretty sure
I
can’t, I’ve never seen a ghost in daylight before, including
her, but maybe his connection with her gets around that
somehow.”

“
Katie said the hungry
lady disappeared at sunrise.”

“
Yeah.”

“
So you don’t think he can
go to her until it gets dark?”

“
That’s my theory, yeah.
But I don’t know for sure.”

“
So what would he do
instead?”

“
I don’t have a clue,” I
said. “But Katie might.”

Skees frowned at me. “The kid sister?
Why?”

“
Because this may be
something Jack and Jenny planned yesterday morning, before he took
Katie to McDonald’s, and Katie might have heard them talking about
it.” I remembered my chat with Jack on his front stoop, and his
insistence that he would find a way to make Jenny well. He might
have already known exactly what he was going to do.

If so, he’d done a pretty good job of
hiding it, for a kid.

But then, with
his
parents, he was
probably used to keeping secrets.

“
That’s a good idea,”
Skees said. He raised one hand to indicate I should wait where I
was, then talked into his phone, telling whoever was on the other
end to get some men to look around those trees at the end of the
Wilsons’ street, and to find someone non-threatening to question
the sister at school, see if she’d heard her brother make any
plans.

“
If she did, don’t try to
make sense of what she says,” Skees told whoever it was. “Just
write it down and get it to me. There’s a whole big fantasy thing
going on here, role-playing stuff.”

He listened, then said,
“No,
not
like
Dungeons and Dragons. Not a game. Just... role-playing.”

There was a pause, and then he said,
“No, don’t take her home. Talk to her at the school. It’s okay if
there are teachers present, but I don’t want her parents in the
room if we can help it.”

He listened for another moment, then
said, “Right. Get on it.” He closed the phone, and looked at
me.

“
You think he’s got a
plan?” he asked.

“
Probably,” I said. “I mean, he’s screwed up, but he’s not
stupid. He wouldn’t just take off without
some
idea what he was
going to do.”

“
Kids do just take off
sometimes.”

“
I’m sure they do, but
Jack – I don’t think Jack would.”

“
Neither do I. And I’m
pretty sure this has something to do with Jenny, even if he can’t
see her in daylight. The kid’s obsessed with her.”

“
Oh, yeah, it never even
occurred to me that it might not.”

He hesitated, then asked, “So you
can’t see her in the daytime?”

“
Nope.”

“
Does
she even
exist
in daytime?”

I thought that was a pretty good
question. “I think so, but I couldn’t swear to it.”

“
Could she hear you, if
you talked to her? I mean, if you were in the right
place?”

“
I don’t know,” I said.
“Sorry, I just don’t.”

“
Think you might want to
take a walk under that big tree and talk to yourself a
little?”

“
I won’t hear her
answer.”

“
I figured that, but you
could maybe let her know that we aren’t going to leave her alone
there.”

I nodded. “I can do that,” I
said.

“
I take it you aren’t
leaving town quite yet after all?”

“
I guess not,” I
agreed.

“
Thanks.” He handed me a
card. “Give me a call if you think of anything.”

I took the card and stuck it in my
pocket, then turned and headed to the front desk, to let them know
I might be staying another day or two.

I considered calling Mel to bring her
up to date, but it was still early, by her standards, so I decided
to hold off. Instead I went out to the car and headed for the
Wilsons’ street.

There was a cop car in front of the
house, but I drove past it and parked at the end of the street. I
sat in the car for a moment, looking at the trees.

By daylight, I couldn’t see anything
remotely strange or supernatural about the big tulip poplar; it was
just a tree. There were a lot of twigs scattered around, a few
leaves, and that black dust that tulip poplars drop, but that was
all.

Still, I got out of the car and walked
over to the tree. I stood there and said, “Jenny, if you hear me,
I’ve got a message for you. We aren’t going to let you have Jack,
or anyone else. We’re going to watch this place, and if he comes
here we’ll find him. We won’t let you be alone with him again – not
tonight, and not ever. Give it up. Go away.”

When I was done I stood and listened,
but I didn’t hear anything except wind in the leaves overhead, and
the distant hum of traffic on Winchester Road. I could smell mown
grass and the peanut butter factory.

I repeated my message.

Still nothing – but then,
what did I expect? I’d told Skees I couldn’t see or hear anything
supernatural by daylight, and that was the truth, plain and simple.
I didn’t know whether Jenny was there; she could have been standing
right in front of me and I wouldn’t know it. I’d thought maybe her
stolen finger and eye would show up somehow, but there was no sign
of them. Which didn’t mean she wasn’t there, but it didn’t mean
she
was
, either.
I didn’t know
where
she was.

I didn’t know where Jack
was, either, but I knew it wasn’t here, because I
would
have seen
him
.

But Jenny wasn’t a real person; she
was a twisted fantasy that had taken on an independent existence,
and so far as I knew, I could only see her at night.

And apparently Jack, like me, could
only see her at night, so there wasn’t any reason for him to come
here by daylight. He would need to wait until dark to talk to her
again.

So why had he taken off first thing in
the morning this time, instead of after school? What was he
planning to do all day? Was there somewhere he needed to go,
something he needed to do?

I was standing there, staring at the
tree, when a thought struck me – what had he and Katie been doing
yesterday morning after sunrise? They had spent the night out here
somewhere, talking to Jenny, but once the sun came up and Jenny
wasn’t visible, why hadn’t they gone straight home? Why had they
waited until lunchtime to go to McDonald’s – and a late lunch, at
that? What were they doing for all those hours?

Had Jack been trying to talk Katie
into letting Jenny eat her?

Was he going to meet Katie somewhere
later, to feed her to the monster? That didn’t seem right; how
could he hope to get at Katie again? She was going to have cops and
counselors around her all day, and Jack must know that.

Was he going to try to
feed some
other
kid to the ghost?

I got my phone out of my pocket, then
went digging for Detective Skees’ card.

He answered on the third ring.
“Skees,” he said.

“
Detective Skees, this is
Gregory Kraft,” I said. “You may have already thought of this, but
I was wondering whether there were any other kids missing from
Jack’s school. He may have taken someone with him, same as he took
his sister last time.”

“
Yeah, we checked that,”
Skees said. “No one’s missing. While we were at it we asked about
friends, and it seems he doesn’t really have any, so we’re not too
concerned about anyone skipping out later to join him.”

“
Oh,” I said.

That was a disappointment. I’d been
hoping I’d come up with something useful that the cops might have
missed, but they’d been all over it.

I wished I’d been surprised that Jack
didn’t have any friends, but I wasn’t.

“
Did Katie say anything
useful?” I asked.

“
We’re just now getting to
her. Checking attendance and asking teachers about a kid’s friends
takes five minutes; setting up to interrogate a seven-year-old
calls for jumping through a few more hoops than that.”

“
Oh.”

“
Anything
else?”

“
No,” I said, and ended
the call. I looked up the street; that cop car was still parked in
front of the Wilsons’ house, but otherwise the neighborhood was
quiet and calm.

I’d really thought I had something
there, but if all the other kids were still in school, then Jack
wasn’t dragging one of them off to be ghost food.

It was sad that the teachers said he
had no friends, but I really wasn’t surprised. That was one
screwed-up kid. If he’d had human friends, he might not have bonded
with Jenny so strongly.

What else could he need the day for,
other than talking some other kid into feeding the ghost? Had he
just run away? The cops would presumably check the bus stations,
and he was awfully young to hitchhike; most drivers wouldn’t pick
up a lone rider that young.

I still liked the idea that he was
looking for a victim, but where would he look, other than his
school? Where else would he find kids? Did he maybe have
home-schooled friends?

What
had
he and Katie done all yesterday
morning? I doubted anyone had really asked, or had paid any
attention to the answer; the only ones who really had any idea what
was going on here were me, Jack, and Ben Skees.

I walked slowly back to my car, trying
to think what I should do next.

I didn’t have any special abilities
that were useful in daylight. I wasn’t going to dream about Jack
again, and I couldn’t see Jenny in sunlight. The only thing I had
going for me that the cops or Jack’s parents didn’t was that I knew
more about Jenny than they did, and more about what Jack
wanted.

Jack wanted Jenny to love
him, and to be a real woman, someone who would be there all day,
not just at night. He thought he could get that by feeding her a
child. He had wanted it so much he almost fed himself to her – no,
not almost; he
did
feed her one of his fingers and his left eye.

Anything that intense wasn’t something
that was just going to go away. Wherever he was, and whatever he
was doing, it almost certainly had something to do with finding
prey for Jenny.

That made finding him more
urgent; I wasn’t just trying to save Jack this time, I was trying
to save some innocent sucker
from
Jack. If we didn’t find him, some poor kid might
die tonight.

But how did Jack plan to do it? How
did he expect to get his victim to her? He must know that someone
would be watching the tree. He couldn’t come here, let alone bring
another kid with him, without being seen.

So obviously, they weren’t going to
meet here. He must have arranged to meet Jenny somewhere else,
somewhere he could bring another kid, or where he could meet Jenny
and lead her to the kid.

Katie must have heard them making
plans; Jack wouldn’t have let her get far enough away that she
wouldn’t.

I got into the Chevy, but once I was
there I got out my phone and called Ben Skees again.

“
Listen,” I told him, “I’m
sure that Jack’s going to rendezvous with Jenny somewhere different
tonight, but Katie must have heard them discussing it.”

“
Yeah, we thought of
that,” Skees said. “It’s on the list of questions we’ll be asking
her. Near the top.”

“
Oh,” I said, a little
deflated.

“
Any idea where it might
be?”

“
I think it’ll be
somewhere near other kids,” I said.

“
So – a park or
playground, maybe? Or a school?”

“
I don’t know,” I
admitted.

“
Kids he
knows?”

“
Probably.”

“
The teachers were pretty
definite that he doesn’t have friends at school.”