Rosalind (14 page)

He stopped what he was doing and walked over to the chart to write something down. Rosalind was relieved when he did. After a few scribbles, he turned to Susan.

"I don't see anything out of the ordinary, but a woman always has better insight to her own body. What I'd like to do is take some blood. You have a rabbit lying around somewhere?"

"W
e live on a farm, but we don't raise rabbits," Susan said.

He laughed.
"That's just a myth, anyway. Just a little medical humor. There's really nothing we can do aside from a very expensive test other than wait it out. If she misses her next cycle, then I guess we'll have our answer."

"Thank you, Doctor McClelland
. You'll be the first to know."

"Actually," he said, "She will. Like I said, a woman knows her body. Her uterus would be bigger if she were further along, but I think any physical indications of pregnancy are at least a month away."

He marked a few more things on the chart and said, "Is there anything else?" Rosalind shook her head. Susan pointed to the door. She got up and walked out of the room with the doctor in tow.

The doctor closed the door.

"Thank you for your discretion on this matter. I'll let Sheriff Hanes know."

"And I would also like to be kept informed. If this child is in any kind of danger, we have to report it," he said.

Susan looked horrified. The last thing she needed was any kind of attention drawn to her household with this scandal. "There was an incident a month ago. A break-in when Rosalind was staying at Nancy Fletcher's house." The doctor raised his eyebrows and nodded.

"Nancy Fletcher? Car accident?" he said.

Susan nodded. "It was horrible, but I assure you the sheriff is investigating the break-in and you will be informed. And more importantly, he'll catch the man responsible if indeed this ever took place at all."

"You don't sound convinced that it did," he said.

"I was a girl once. I did my fair share of lying and my butt was beaten every time I did, but with this girl I just don't know. She's had a horrible life and what her father did to her—"

"That was my next question. It should have been my first. Where are her parents?" he asked.

"They were killed in a fire up north a few months ago. He…did things to her."

The doctor looked at Susan thoughtfully. "In her chart it indicates that she was here previously for excessive bleeding, which turn out to be a miscarriage. Is that what you're talking about?"

Susan only nodded.

"
I see," he said. "And it happened again? I should have seen it when I looked at her. There was something missing," he said.

"What's missing?" she asked.

"Her youth. That girl in there may be sixteen, but she isn't a child. I don't think she'll ever be one, either." Susan saw it the first time she met Rosalind. She was even more upset with herself for her impatience with Rosalind. Although she'd never outwardly showed it, she'd felt it inside, and that was what counted. "I expect to be kept informed. Please tell the Sheriff that I will be calling him by the end of the week."

"Thank you. And I'll tell him," she said.

The doctor disappeared behind the nurse's station. Susan went back into the room, collected Rosalind, and the two left the hospital and drove back to Whispering Pines. Neither of them spoke the entire way.

John Byrd sat in his office looking at the clock. What had been an insatiable appetite for Rosalind had simmered to a moderate hunger since she had come to live with them. And with the sheriff coming around (or the possibility that he would at any moment), sticking his nose into his personal affairs, it was nearly impossible to do anything about it. Something had to be done about him. It was true; he hadn't yet graduated to murder, and he'd never even entertained the idea but a few times (one being his father when he told John that all he'd ever be was a farmer and that he'd better get used to it, and the other was William Ford, a high school chum who'd crossed the line when he declared his intentions to ask one Susan Armstrong out to a movie). He had to do something about the sheriff, but at this point, murder wasn't on the table. He could discredit him. Frame him in a scandal, even. But the uppity bastard was as clean as a bar of Dove soap. No, none of that would work anyway. Townsfolk were just as loyal to their choice of mayor as they were to their sheriff. Sheriff Hanes was a fixture for the time being.

He put the thought out of his mind and resumed his paperwork. The drivers were starting to come in and put their keys on his desk. The inner fire that burned soon died down. No
t from his self-control, but because it was almost quitting time. And that meant it was time to see his girl.

It hadn't snowed yet this winter, but when John got home, the sky let loose a heavy, quiet downfall that covered the entire county and showed no signs of ending. Rosalind looked out the window at the landscape and she smiled. She had always loved the snow and the way it always came to a rest on the tree branches around her home. Even her dilapidated trailer, when she could walk a hundred feet from it, looked like a hibernating dragon, tucked away against the hillside for winter. She wondered what this house would look like, so she put on her shoes and her jacket and went downstairs. John was hanging his coat on the coat rack and Susan was in the kitchen.

"Where are you going in such a hurry?" he asked. Rosalind froze and looked down. "
You're running like there was a fire under your feet."

Fire, she thought. She ran from a fire once. She ran all the way to Whispering Pines from that fire, and it didn't do any good.

"I wanted to see the snow, Mr. Byrd, " she said.

"
Call me John. We're all friends here, right?" She kept her head down and nodded. She didn't like talking to him at all. He had been nice enough to let her stay here and he'd never done wrong by her (at least to her knowledge), but there was just something about him that was intimidating and dark. Maybe it was that smell sneaking out from below the sliding doors of his den. Maybe it was the pipe. She hoped that she would get used to it, because for the first time in her life, she was starting to feel like she belonged. She raised her head and smiled at John. John leaned down and put his hand on her shoulder. She didn't recoil and he noticed that.

His plan had worked. He
had given her a wide berth.
That was the key
, he thought. He kept to his den mostly, but when he would come out for a cup of coffee, she'd be sitting there on the couch, flaunting her sex at him. But he had resisted! He sat back and waited. It was a testament to his character. The early bird may get the worm, but a patient Byrd will always get his piece of ass.

He patted her on the shoulder and retreated to his den.

Rosalind stepped onto the porch and felt the winter air on her face. The snow was still falling at an alarming rate, but there was nothing alarming about what spread out before her. The sun, which had poked its head out briefly between a small crack in the clouds had just fallen behind the trees on the other side of the road, and the snow turned from white to a purplish-blue.

Rosalind stepped out from the porch and into the snow. The flakes were as big as a silver dollar she had once seen at Nancy's diner. She stuck her tongue out and closed her eyes, but didn't catch anything. She tried opening her eyes and instead of landing in her mouth, one landed in her right eye. It tickled so she wiped it away and laughed. She closed her eyes one more time and put her tongue out and it happened. When it hit her tongue, the cold was quick to disappear and she felt a small crackling as the flake dissolved into her taste buds. It had a sort of metallic, industrial flavor to it, but she savored it. She had done this many times at her home, but didn't ever remember the flakes being so big, and for some reason, although they tasted different, she thought that they were better.
Everything was better.

Rosalind walked a few more feet into the yard, and then noticed the powder was halfway up to her knee
s. She still wore the shoes she had on when she ran from the blaze that consumed her previous life, but her feet and legs weren't cold. There was a new warmth in her to which no fire could ever compare. The warmth of happiness. The warmth of a comfortable bed. The warmth of a home where no one ever yelled. The warmth of looking forward to tomorrow.

She kicked through the snow and then made her way back to the house, but she stopped to see what it looked like against the dreamy landscape.
This was no sleeping dragon nestled against a tree-covered hillside. The upstairs lights were both on and they looked like eyes. The living room window, the door, and the bay window in the dining room formed a row that looked like a mouth. It was smiling at her. The house that sat against the darkening sky and the luminescent landscape and smiled at Rosalind. And in her mind she heard it whisper
welcome home
.

It was Christmas Eve and Susan was running around the house, frantically putting up decorations and cursing herself that she hadn’t done it sooner. The relentless downfall from a few days ago had stopped and left the countryside buried in powder. Susan took a break from putting up lights and tinsel and asked if Rosalind had ever decorated a tree. Rosalind nodded, and Susan, still trying to catch her breath, asked her to follow her out to the cellar where they kept some of the decorations. After seeing Rosalind out in the snow a few days back, Susan had asked the sheriff if he had any boots her size, and the sheriff said that "indeed, my daughter's grown out of hers." Rosalind put on the boots that the sheriff gave her and then waded out to the cellar with Susan. When they got there, Susan pulled out a ring of keys and then stuck a smaller, silver key in one of the locks, then the second one, and then the third one. She pulled the chains apart and set them in one of her tracks so she wouldn't lose sight of them.

When the door opened, Rosalind peeked in. But unlike the welcoming smile of the house a few nights ago, all she saw here was darkness. It
even
felt
dark.

Susan stepped in the doorway and stomped her feet on the dirt floor. She walked confidently down the hall and disappeared into
the black room, and Rosalind became scared.

"Miss Susan?" Rosalind whispered into the tunnel. Just as she did, a light came on and shadows started bouncing around the walls, stretching from normal squares to elongated, monstrous arms and then back again.

"It's alright, dear. Come on in," Susan said. Rosalind crept down the tunnel, her hand on one of the walls, almost as if she expected to fall through the floor. When she got to the rotunda, which was just a 16x16 room, Rosalind saw that various boxes were stacked against the left wall and on the right was a workbench with a conglomeration of tools, a small transistor radio, wooden blocks, rags, and an oil can. "I hate this place. Normally John just comes out here to do God knows what, but it's as good a place as any to store what won't fit in the house. If he ever fixed the ladder to the attic, I would prefer storing these decorations there. Some of them are glass and I can't tell you how many times I've come out here and found them in pieces." The light from overhead finally came to rest and the shadows of boxes and oil cans returned to normal. Rosalind was glad for that. Susan continued, "Did you know that we are directly under the house? Right smack-dab in the middle." She put her hands on her hips and looked up at the ceiling. "Sometimes I wish the house would just get sucked into this hole."

Rosalind walked around while Susan took boxes from one side, opened them, and tossed them aside in her search for the ornaments. She came to the workbench an
d drug her hands across the coarse surface. In some spots it was smooth, but in others it was ragged from either files or handsaws. Rosalind didn't know anything about tools or workbenches. She had seen her father use tools to fix the lawn mower at times, and her mother used one to clean the stove pipes, but that was the extent of her experience with tools. She bent down and looked underneath the bench and saw something behind it against the wall. She reached forward but her arm wasn't long enough. When she looked back at Susan, she expected to see her staring back, but Susan was still going through boxes and muttering to herself. She turned back to the object that was lodged between the bench and the wall. It was still there, but she could get to it if she climbed in on the lower shelf. She did so, and her right hands grasped the object. It wouldn't come loose at first, but she pulled harder and then let go, sending her tumbling backward into the cold dirt of the cellar floor.

Susan looked up.

"What the heck are you doing, girl?" she said with a laugh.

Rosalind stood up and held out her hand. In it was a girl's shoe. Susan stopped what she was doing and looked at the shoe, and it appeared to be a size six at cursory glance. She walked over to Rosalind and took it from her, inspecting it all around. Susan looked down at her feet and then at the shoe. She looked at Rosalind's feet and then back at the shoe. Too small to be Susan's and too big to be Rosalind's. "Where did you get this?"

"Behind the table," she replied.