Paradise County (11 page)

Anyway, there was no fixing what had happened with Pomfret. So what was the point of scolding about it? It would do nothing but put her at odds with her sister. And right now, they needed each other. They were all they had.

So maybe she wasn’t a stern enough guardian, Alex thought. Maybe Neely deserved to be yelled at, even punished. (What, by taking her makeup away? Now there was a thought.) With all the trauma they’d both been through recently, Alex just couldn’t bring herself to do either. Whether it was the proper course of action or not, she was going to take the high road, and get both of them past this relatively minor crisis as easily as she could.

Alex sighed. “Did I mention that you can be a real pain in the butt, sister? Fine. We’ll deal with the situation. We’ll start looking for another school first thing Monday morning. By the way, Mrs. Stanton very kindly said she’d help get you in somewhere else. She also said you have lots of good qualities.”

“Old goat,” Neely muttered, unimpressed. The phone rang. Neely jumped as if she’d been shot and grabbed her sister’s wrist when Alex stood up to answer it.

“Don’t!” Neely said sharply.

Alex stared at her. The phone stopped ringing. She presumed Inez had picked it up.

“What’s up with you?” Alex asked. Neely had never, ever, grabbed her wrist like that, or jumped when the phone rang for that matter, unless she was expecting a call from her boyfriend of the moment and was in a rush to answer before anyone else could, which wasn’t likely to be the case today. Alex felt a tingle of renewed apprehension. If Neely didn’t want her to answer the phone, there must be a good reason—like something that Neely didn’t want her to hear. Something bad, something in addition to the fact that Neely had been expelled from school, which she would have thought, in Neely’s case, was just about as bad as things could get. But maybe not. Alex felt her stomach tighten as she contemplated the possibilities.

“Alex.” Neely, brave, strong, ever-cocky Neely, sounded almost nervous. She stood up, and, instead of releasing Alex’s wrist, took both her hands in hers. Alex’s eyes widened with alarm. Whatever was coming must be as bad as it could be. Her hands tightened on Neely’s.

“Oh, God, please don’t tell me you’re pregnant,” she breathed. Short of her sister’s imminent death, that was the worst thing she could think of.

“What?” Neely looked at first taken aback, then indignant. “No, of course I’m not pregnant! Do I look stupid to you?”

“Thank God.” Alex took a deep breath, and felt her heart slow to nearly normal rhythm. She squeezed her sister’s hands. “Whatever it is you’re getting ready to tell me, just please spit it out. Nothing you’ve done could be as bad as the things I’m imagining.”

“Nothing
I’ve
done … This isn’t about me. It’s about you.”

“Me?” Alex stared at her sister. Neely looked uncomfortable. Her fingers entwined with Alex’s, and clung.

“I’ve got really bad news.” Neely wet her lips with the tip of her tongue before continuing. “Paul married Tara Gould last night.”

Neely winced, and looked as if she was bracing herself for a catastrophic response. When Alex didn’t immediately say anything, she hurried into speech again as though trying to forestall the inevitable.

“Her cousin—Carole Segal—goes to Pomfret too, and she got a call last night from her mother, who’d gotten a call from her brother, who is Tara’s father, saying that Tara had gone off and married Paul O’Neil and they were all so happy and there was going to be a big reception next weekend at the Philadelphia Country Club. Carole’s going to it. Can you believe that?” Then Neely’s voice softened. “I’m so
sorry,
Alex.”

“Cornelia Haywood, did you leave your school without permission, getting yourself expelled in the process, just to fly down here and tell me that?”

Neely nodded unhappily. “I didn’t want you to hear it from one of your gossipy friends, or anybody like that.”

Alex shook her head, then pulled her sister into her arms and gave her a big hug. Neely hugged her tightly back.

“Please don’t be sad,” Neely begged as they clung together. “I never liked Paul anyway. He’s a jerk.”

“He is, isn’t he?” Alex pulled back from the hug and smiled wryly at her sister. “A complete and total jerk. I’m better off without him. I’ve been thinking that ever since he called and told me what he’d done about half an hour ago.”

“What?” Neely looked, and sounded, aghast. “You
knew?
You mean I’ve gotten into all this trouble and come all this way and gone through all this hell worrying about how to break it to you for nothing? That’s the total pits!”

Alex smiled wryly. “No, actually, that’s the sweetest thing I’ve ever heard of in my life. Even if you are occasionally a pain in the butt, I’m glad you’re my sister, Neely Haywood.”

“Yeah, well, I’m glad you’re my sister too,” Neely muttered, still sounding aggrieved as she rested her forehead against Alex’s. For a moment they stood that way, arms around each other, foreheads touching. Then Alex stepped back, smiled, and shook her head.

“We’re a great pair. You’ve been expelled and I’ve been jilted. Now what do we do?”

Nine

T
he predator had had his eye on the dog for two days. It was a small dog, not much bigger than a cat really, and it was an ugly thing, part pit bull and part who-knew-what. Except for a single black patch on its coat, it was white and hairless-looking, with a stubby tail and a wide pink mouth that constantly threatened to drool. Every time he stepped outside, the dog was there, although it would slink out of sight as soon as he appeared.

“Come here, dog,” he said late in the afternoon of the second day, following it out to its hiding place, then dropping to one knee and snapping his fingers at it. Cowering under a parked car, the dog looked at him without obeying. “Come here.”

“Lookin’ to get yourself a pet?”

The predator glanced around to find that he was being observed. He knew the speaker, just as he knew everyone hereabouts.

“Thinkin’ about it,” he said amiably, and waved as the speaker got into his car and drove away.

Leaving the dog where it was for the time being, he stood up and went back to work. But not long after twilight he came outside again, this time bearing a slice of pizza on a paper plate. A blustery wind promised
rain later. The parking lot was full, although since everybody who’d come in the parked cars was inside there was no one else to be seen. Looking around, he thought for a moment that the dog had finally gone. But no, there it was, a pale shadow slinking around the corner to hide under the deep purple overhang of a bush. He walked toward it and set the paper plate on the ground where the dog couldn’t help but both see and smell it.

“Come here, dog,” he said again, crouching beside the plate and snapping his fingers. “Come here.”

This time the dog came crawling out. While it devoured the pizza, he petted it. He loved dogs, had loved them from the earliest days of his childhood. They had been among his first, and favorite, toys.

“Good dog,” he crooned. “Good dog.”

Then he went back inside.

Later, much later, when nearly all the cars were gone, he came out again. This time he carried a paper plate with a hamburger patty in one hand, and a makeshift leash in the other. It was raining now, and except for the lights in the building behind him it was so dark that he could barely see halfway across the parking lot. He was wearing a hooded raincoat, but the hamburger presented something of a problem: it would be drenched before he could find the dog and offer it to him. Would the dog come out of whatever hiding place it had chosen for itself for a soggy piece of meat?

Could he even find the dog in the darkness? He could always wait until tomorrow. And if the dog was gone in the morning, hey, such was fate.

But he really wanted to find the dog tonight.

In the end, just as he was getting ready to turn and go back inside without ever having set foot in the rain, he spied the dog. It was huddled in plain sight against the building, lit by the security lights, protected from the cascades of falling water by an overhanging eave.

The predator smiled, and, taking care not to get the paper plate with the hamburger wet, walked along the building toward the dog.

“Here, dog,” he said softly as he approached. The dog looked at him, appeared to remember him as its benefactor from earlier in the evening, and wagged its tail.

Getting down on one knee, he set the paper plate on the ground.

“Here dog,” he said again.

The dog looked at the glistening brown circle of meat, at him, and approached, head down, tail low and wagging gently from side to side.

“Good dog.” He patted the animal when it was close enough, and then, as it devoured the meat in two quick gulps, slid the makeshift leash—which was really a rope that he had tied into a slip-knotted noose at one end, with enough left over to serve as a lead—over its head.

The dog made no effort to get away.

“Good dog,” he said again, pleased. He patted the animal and stood up. “Come.”

He had half expected the dog to resist, but it didn’t, following him willingly as he skirted the building, staying under the protection of the eaves for as long as he could. His SUV was parked in the rear lot. The dog even followed him out into the rain without resistance, and when he opened the rear door of the vehicle jumped inside as docilely as one could wish.

The predator rewarded it with a pat on the head.

“Good dog,” he said again, and closed the door.

Sliding in behind the wheel, he brushed rain from the surface of his coat, decided it was useless to worry about getting water stains on his leather seats, and turned the ignition. He switched on the lights, engaged the transmission, and set out. It would take only about fifteen minutes to reach his destination, and he knew the way as well as he knew the way from his bed to the bathroom.

Lulled by the rush of the tires over the pavement and the rhythmic swish of the windshield wipers, the dog had curled up on the rear seat and settled down to nap, secure in its new position as a claimed possession, he thought. From the accepting way it had responded to both leash and car, he guessed that the animal probably had been someone’s pet, either lost or abandoned by the roadside. People were bad about abandoning pets out in the country, where they apparently expected some kindhearted farmer to give the forsaken creatures a home.

Human beings were, at heart, an intrinsically stupid species. Or intrinsically cruel, which amounted to much the same thing in the end.

Only one vehicle passed him en route, an eighteen-wheeler driving far too fast for the conditions. It nearly blew him off the road as it went by, and it splashed water all over his windshield. Those big trucks had no business off the expressway, he thought disapprovingly, and speculated that this one must be looking for gas or food. If so, the driver was out of luck. Just about everything hereabouts closed up shop around ten.

Reaching his destination, he pulled off the road and bumped through the woods and down a hill. There he parked where he always did, at the edge of Bob Toler’s cornfield. Removing a flashlight from the glove compartment, he got out. The dog was ready for him, standing eagerly on the seat as he opened the rear door. It jumped out without resistance even though the sky was, by now, pouring rain. Thunder crashed and lightning zigzagged overhead, lighting up the thick mass of tall, post-harvest cornstalks for an instant so that they looked like an audience of pale, slender ghosts.

Ghosts—he didn’t believe in them. But if ghosts existed, they might well be standing there, waiting silently for him to add to their numbers.

The idea amused him, and he was smiling faintly as he splashed across the shallow creek toward the perpendicular rock bank on the other side, the dog close on his heels. The bank was fifteen feet high in this particular spot, and heavily covered with vegetation that had grown undisturbed, except for his occasional visits, for years. Reaching the place he sought, still standing ankle-deep in water, he carefully lifted aside the heavy curtain of vines that hung over the bank. Beneath the vines, perhaps some three feet off the ground, was a hole in the rock that looked like it had once been an animal’s lair. It was, in reality, the mouth of a rather unique cave. He had discovered it as a child, and had made use of it ever since. Of course, since he’d grown older and bigger, fitting into the doorway to his subterranean world had become more difficult. But he could still do it if he slithered inside headfirst then scooted on his belly until the passage widened. The dog offered no resistance as he picked it up and set it inside the opening, and then wriggled in himself. It was dark as a grave in the passage, but he saw no particular reason to turn on his flashlight yet. He was as familiar with this route as he was his own bed.

Pushing the dog before him, he traversed the twelve or so feet that the passage retained the dimensions of a large animal’s burrow with practiced ease. Then, abruptly, he was there, wriggling through the hole after the dog and standing up with some care. He had cracked his head on the low ceiling more than once. The dog, clearly uncertain in this new setting, pressed nervously against his legs as he turned on the flashlight.