One-Eyed Jack (37 page)

Besides, while Mel might be done in
Lexington, I wasn’t. The Jenny monster was still there, and I was
the only adult who could see it. I didn’t know what I could do, but
I wasn’t quite ready to give up and go home yet. It was close – if
someone other than Mel had offered me a ride, or if Skees had told
me he didn’t need me anymore, or that he couldn’t pay me, I’d
probably have left. But there was no other ride, Skees seemed to
want me around, and there was that promise of a little money from
the police slush fund.

Further, I still didn’t know why I had
dreamed about Jack, or what was to become of him, and I wanted to
see if he might be able to do something useful with that psychic
power of his. I wanted to talk to him again, to at least give it a
try.

“
Thanks,” I said, “but
no.”

“
Don’t want to spend that
long cooped up with me?” She smiled wryly. “Well, I can’t say I
blame you.”

She
was
depressed, I thought. “I need to
stay and talk to Jack Wilson.” I didn’t want to explain my idea; I
was afraid it would sound stupid.

Besides, talking to Mel I
was afraid of
everything
.

“
Suit yourself,” she said,
starting toward the door.

I watched her go, and called
“Goodbye!” after her.

And that was that. She headed back to
Maryland, and I took my rental car back to the motel.

I didn’t sleep very well; those
scratches hurt, and that kept me awake. Eventually, though, morning
came.

I wondered how Trevor was doing. Had
he managed to sleep? Had the fake Jenny come back again, to beg him
to feed her?

I hoped not.

I got breakfast in the hotel,
uninterrupted by any policemen. It was after ten, and I’d worked my
way through the local paper, the Herald-Leader, when my phone
rang.

I answered, and Skees told me that I
could talk to Jack again, but he was home with his parents, so it
would be at their house. A social worker would be
present.

“
That’s fine,” I
said.

“
Can you be there around
3:00, then?” he asked.

“
Sure,” I
replied.

I spent the next couple of hours doing
nothing much – a little driving, a little reading. When I pulled up
in front of the Wilson house at 2:55, Skees was waiting on the
front lawn with a woman he introduced as Angie Ballard, from Youth
and Family Services.

“
I’m afraid I don’t really
understand why you’re here, Mr. Kraft,” she said, before we’d even
finished shaking hands. She was visibly trying not to stare at my
bandaged face.

I glanced at Skees, but he didn’t give
me any useful cues. “I’ve taken an interest in Jack, that’s all,” I
said. “I was the one who found him the night he lost his
eye.”

“
We’re hoping Mr. Kraft
can coax some more information about that out of Jack,” Skees said.
“It’s still an open investigation. Jack seems to trust Mr.
Kraft.”

“
If this is an
interrogation, Detective Skees, perhaps a lawyer should be
present.”

“
I’m not
a cop,” I said, “and it’s not an interrogation. I just want to talk
to him again, Ms. Ballard. I feel as if there must be
some
reason
our paths crossed the way they did – some higher purpose. I’m
hoping that Jack can maybe put me on the right track to figure out
a little more about that purpose.”

She clearly didn’t like the idea. She
frowned.

It was Skees who spoke, though.
“Angie, Jack and his parents have all agreed to let Mr. Kraft have
his chat. You’ll be there to stop it if anything’s out of
line.”

The frown stayed, but she stepped
aside. “Go ahead, then.”

I marched up the steps and rang the
bell, and Emily Wilson opened the door so quickly that she must
have been waiting just inside.

“
Hello, Mr. Kraft,” she
said. She didn’t have Angie Ballard’s control, and did stare at my
bandages.

“
Hi, Mrs. Wilson,” I said.
“How are you? How’s Katie?”

That apparently caught her off-guard,
that I would ask after Katie rather than Jack. She looked downright
astonished, but recovered in a second or two and said, “She’s fine,
thank you. We’re both fine.”

“
Is she still mad at
Jack?”

Emily looked at Angie Ballard and Ben
Skees before answering, “A little.”

I didn’t turn to see their
expressions, or whether they’d given her any signals. I just
nodded. “I would be, too. May I come in?”

“
Sure, come on in.” She
ushered me in.

The interior was exactly as I’d seen
it in my dreams; the door opened into a little foyer at the foot of
the stairs, with the undersized living room to the right, and a
passageway heading toward the back of the house on the left. I
tried not to look as if I’d seen it before as I followed her back
to the family room, where Jack was sprawled on the couch in front
of the TV, his eye-patch pushed up almost off his ruined socket –
he had slid down the upholstery, and the cord that went around his
head and held the patch in place had been pulled up against the
rough fabric.

I almost stopped dead when I saw him,
but managed to keep moving. “Hey, Jack,” I said.

He looked up, and his face seemed to
shimmer. That psychic aura, or whatever it was, had grown much more
intense; he seemed distorted, bright, the colors of his face and
hair and hands all strange and wrong. When he moved it almost
seemed as if there were lingering after-images. The black eye-patch
was like a hole in that vivid face.

I had never seen anything like it. It
had intensified visibly in just a day.

And he was still radiating
anger.

“
Hey,” he said. “Did you
get scratched up some more?”

“
A little,” I said. I
turned to Emily, and gestured at the chair next to Jack’s end of
the couch. “May I?”

“
Oh, of course! Can I get
you something to drink?”

“
A soda would be nice,” I
said. “A Coke, if you have it.”

She bustled off to the kitchen, and I
sat down. Angie Ballard perched herself carefully on the chair at
the other end of the couch, while Ben Skees took up a post by the
door, leaning against the frame with his arms folded across his
chest.

“
You wanted to talk to
me?” Jack said.

“
Yeah, I did. About
Jenny.”

He looked up at me, not moving from
his comfortable slouch. “Have you figured out some way I can kill
the bitch?”

Angie Ballard blinked, startled; I was
looking at Jack, but I could see her from the corner of my
eye.

“
I don’t know,” I
said.

He stared at me. I stared
back.

After a moment, he said, “You didn’t
say no.”

“
That’s right,” I
acknowledged. “I didn’t.”

He sat upright, his one good eye fixed
on me. “You think you might have a way?”

“
Mr. Kraft...” Ballard
began.

“
Jenny’s his imaginary
tormentor,” I said. “She’s invisible. She’s not a real person. I’m
not planning a murder.”

“
How do you know
that?”

“
We spoke at the hospital.
Right, Jack?”

“
That’s right.” He glanced
at Ballard, then turned back to me. “So what’s your
idea?”

“
Hang on.” I turned to
Ballard. “Look, this is going to sound crazy, but it’s part of this
sort of game we were playing after he lost his eye. Bear with me,
okay? I really think this could be helpful.”

“
Are you a psychologist,
Mr. Kraft?”

“
No, I’m a sales associate
at a home supply store, but give this a chance, okay?”

She looked at Skees, who was being
studiously uninvolved. She frowned. “Go on,” she said.

Just then Emily returned with a glass
of soda; I accepted it while Jack and the others watched in stony
silence. She looked around, aware of the atmosphere in the room,
and said brightly, “Would anyone else like a drink? I could put
some coffee on.”

“
That would be lovely,
Mrs. Wilson,” Ballard said.

Emily smiled and hurried back to the
kitchen.

“
Can she hear us?” I asked
Jack.

He shrugged. “If she wants to. She’s
good at not hearing things, though.”

I remembered the very first dream I
had, where Emily had sat silently while her husband berated their
children. “I bet,” I said.

“
Mr. Kraft, I don’t think
that’s an appropriate...” Ballard began.

“
Yeah, yeah, I’m sorry,” I
interrupted, holding up a hand. This would have been easier without
her there, but I wasn’t about to let her presence stop me. I set my
drink on the endtable and said, “Jack, you said you kept imagining
yourself chopping Jenny up, didn’t you?”

He looked at Ballard, considering,
then acknowledged, “Yeah, I said that.”

“
Are you still doing
that?”

“
Oh, yeah. All the time.”
His fists clenched, and the anger I felt from him intensified. I
could almost see the images myself – Jack’s hands pulling the ghost
apart. “I want to rip her to pieces, chop off her head and her
hands, and tear out her heart.”

Ballard looked seriously troubled, but
this time she didn’t say anything.

“
I know someone who used
to have a really horrible obsession like that,” I said.

“
Yeah?” Jack didn’t really
sound very interested. I think he was too busy picturing himself
killing the ghoul.

“
Yeah. A woman with three
young children. She kept imagining herself locking them in their
rooms until they starved to death.”

That
got his attention. “Yeah?”

“
Yup. She was constantly
picturing it, in elaborate detail.”

He stared at me, waiting for me to
continue. When I didn’t, he demanded, “So did she really do
it?”

“
No, no. She never hurt
them. What happened – well, somehow the obsession took on a life of
its own. It climbed right out of her, as if it was a ghost, or a
demon that had possessed her. It got out and never came
back.”

Jack clearly knew exactly what I was
talking about. He glanced at Ballard, then looked back at me.
“How?” he demanded. “How’d she do that?”

“
I don’t
know. But my idea was, I wondered if maybe
your
obsession might do
the same thing.”

He slumped back a little.
“What good would
that
do?”

“
Well, I know you want to
kill Jenny, but you can’t, because she’s... imaginary.
Right?”

“
Yeah, so?”

“
So
if
your
obsession... came loose, then it would be imaginary too,
right?”

“
You think it...” He
blinked his one eye. “Would that work? Could it kill
her?”

“
I don’t
know,” I admitted. “I told you when you asked me if I had figured
it out – I don’t know. But I think it might.
We
can’t touch her, but
maybe you could make something that can.”

I could see Ballard getting antsy,
sitting there listening to what must sound like pretty twisted
nonsense. I didn’t look directly at her; that would only encourage
her to say something.

I could just barely see Skees; he was
listening intently.

“
How?” Jack
repeated.

“
I don’t know. I was
hoping you could figure it out, maybe. Just... I don’t know, reject
wanting to kill her? Push it away?”

He thought for a moment, then shook
his head. “I don’t know how,” he said.

I had been afraid of that.
Jenny Derdiarian hadn’t known how she did it; it just happened. And
it had happened after months, maybe years, of fantasizing – she
said she didn’t remember when the starvation idea had first come to
her, but she had been through
at
least
seven or eight months of constant
obsessing before it split off. Jack had only wanted to kill the
monster for a couple of days.

But that – that
aura
of his was so
strong!

“
Can’t you think of some
way?”

“
No!” He
slumped back on the couch again. “No. I can’t. It’s... it’s not
a
ghost
,
it’s just this thought stuck in my head. How can I make anything
out of it? That’s just crazy.”

“
Try
, Jack,” I said. “You know what
Jenny’s like. You know what she did to Andrew McPhee. This may be
the only way to stop her.”

“
But it’s crazy! It’s
nuts. It’s just an idea, okay? What am I supposed to do, pull it
out of me like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat?” He
plucked at his sleeve. “I can’t do it. There’s nothing there to get
a hold of.”