Violet Eyes (3 page)

Rachel shook her head. She’d never heard the phone. “Damn it,” she whispered. “I can’t do this. I can’t be the mom and the dad all in one. I
can’t
.”

She leaned against the kitchen wall and remembered Anders coming after her at 1 a.m., fists raised, voice slurred.

“But I have to,” she answered herself.

Then she picked up the phone and called Jeremy’s house.

Chapter Two

Tuesday, May 7. 2:23 p.m.

Being an instant celebrity was overrated, Billy McAllister thought. He pulled his best polo shirt over his head and threw it in the corner of the bedroom. He hated dressing up. And he wasn’t really excited about the high profile, either. He’d spent a few years there trying to keep as low a profile as possible. When you were running drugs between the Florida Keys, having a camera in your face was exactly what you were looking to avoid.

But these days, Billy didn’t have to hide anymore. And after what had happened on Sheila Key, he really couldn’t hide. Every news crew in Florida wanted to talk to him…and several from points beyond. When you were the sole survivor of a slaughter, you were not only news, you were a star.

He pressed the button on his answering machine, and the message light flashed from nine to eight as it began to spit out one recording, “Hello, Mr. McCallister. This is Jesse Solms, from WHRV in Tampa. We were wondering if we could stop by tomorrow to talk with you about your experience on Sheila Island…”

It’s Sheila
Key, he thought with irritation. Clearly she wasn’t from South Florida. Of course, he himself hadn’t even known the actual name of that damned pimple of sand when he’d taken the girls and Mark there the week before. He hadn’t needed to know the name, just the location. It had just been a drop-off point for him, back in his marijuana transportation days. He’d pick up enough of the weed to stuff his below-deck cabin full, and then run it out under the light of the stars to the hidden dock on the island at Latitude 25.155286° / Longitude 80.576477°. It had never needed a name, as far as he’d been concerned. He found it by instrument at night beneath the stars, and never saw another human being there.

That’s why he’d thought it had been the perfect spot to take Jess and Mark and Casey to. There were a thousand tiny islands in the chain of keys, and nobody ever bothered with this one, except midnight drug runners. Ultimately, he’d been caught and done time in jail for drug trafficking. And while he was out of circulation, he figured the runners must have chosen a new drop-off point for their cargo. Certainly they should have if they had any brains at all.

He’d told that story twenty-five times now in the past twenty-four hours. To newspaper reporters and bleach-blonde haughty bims thrusting microphones in his face like electronic phalluses. It was bad enough to think of the microphone as a dick but the image was made worse by the plastic good looks of the white-toothed girls who pushed the things in his face. That was just wrong.

The attack of the microphone cocks had started right after the cops and the docs had had their way with him Sunday night. You didn’t come off the dock one day with a lurid story of three of your friends being eaten alive by bugs and just walk back home the same night.

His first night and day back on the mainland were spent far from his house.

Which is why now, he really just wanted to put things in order. He hadn’t spent much time here over the past few months, and his trip to Sheila Key was supposed to have been the start of a new life. His life back at university. His life moving ahead. The pursuit of dreams, not drugs, girls not guns.

Instead, now he was back home, his friends were dead, and everyone wanted to talk to him about flies and spiders.

Billy saw a pale eight-legged thing scoot up the side of his kitchen cabinet in the fading light of the end of afternoon. He didn’t think for a second before smashing it with the palm of his hand. Spiders. He had always hated the fuckin’ things. But now…

Behind him, the woman stopped talking and the machine issued a terse beep. Almost immediately, another woman started speaking. It was eerie how similar the dialogue was.

“Hello, Mr. McAllister. This is Jennie Kiel from WROI in Catchatobie, Florida. We were wondering if you’d consider giving us an interview…”

Billy shook his head and walked out of the room. “I’ve got gardens to weed,” he grumbled. Never mind that he hadn’t weeded the gardens around his slum of a house ever before. Didn’t matter. He was starting a new life here.

Again.

Billy stepped into the small garage and pulled on a pair of canvass gloves that lay on the shelf in the corner, next to the dusty hand shovel. Then he thumbed the garage door opener and squinted at the bright light of the afternoon sun that streamed in.

He didn’t feel like talking anymore about watching things crawl out of Mark’s mouth as his friend lay dying under the spray of a pesticide as deadly as the creatures it was meant to kill. A deadly pesticide that Billy had unknowingly unleashed on his friends. Billy shook the image of Mark’s face from his head and walked towards the lip of the garage with his gardening tools. He didn’t care if he found worms or water bugs or millipedes or beetles in the overgrown soil near his beat-up bungalow. But if he found any spiders…

He wasn’t doing any more interviews today.

Chapter Three

Tuesday, May 7. 5:14 p.m.

Someone was living across the street again. The front window blinds were open, and the front lawn was cut. Rachel had noticed that something was different about the place this morning when she’d taken her early morning jog before work. (Okay, it was more of a fast walk, but she was working up to a jog, right?)

Tonight when she pulled into her drive, for the first time since she’d been in Passanattee, she could actually see into the front room of the house across the street. It was as if someone had taken the place out of storage. It looked different. You could almost smell the stale air sifting away. It had clearly been getting lost in the weeds for a long time. Until now.

She got out of her car and stood there staring at it for a minute, wondering who had moved in. So far she hadn’t really met many of her neighbors, though she’d seen them racing out of their driveways to wherever. The lady next door—
Agnes?
—had stopped by on the day that Rachel had moved in to welcome her, but that was the only time they’d talked. And Rachel had been a bit distracted at the time.

“Mom? Hurry! I have to show you something.”

Rachel pulled her eyes away from the neighbor’s house and caught the smile of her son, hanging out of the front door. With one hand, she slapped at an insect that buzzed in the air near her shoulder. With the other, she pointed at the front door.

“Close the screen,” she warned, “you’ll let the bugs in.”

Then she locked the car and followed her son inside.

Something twined around her ankles as soon as Rachel stepped into the house. She felt the fur and warmth of the animal before it let out a sound. “What the hell?” she blurted out, as she leapt backwards.

“Isn’t he cute?” Eric asked. “Tracie Wilkins said I could keep him. Her mom said they can’t keep the whole litter and she wants them to go to someone she knows, not some stranger.”

Rachel opened her mouth to say,
No, he absolutely couldn’t just spring a dachshund on her without warning,
and then she had another thought that made her almost as angry. “What were you doing at Tracie Wilkins’s house in the first place?” she asked. “You are supposed to come straight home after school, you know that.”

Eric’s smile fell. “But I did!” he said. “Tracie brought him
here
. We talked today at recess and she said she could bring him over after school so we could meet him.”

Eric crouched down on the carpet with his hands out, and the dog scooted his way, its hindquarters shimmying back and forth like the back end of a slinky. “Tracie’s mom said we could keep him overnight, just to see how we liked him. Can’t we just do that?”

The boy looked up at her with eyes that were impossible to deny.

“We don’t have any dog food or a water dish or anything,” Rachel tried to argue, but before she was even finished, her son was pointing to a silver dish on the tile of the kitchen floor. “Tracie brought that stuff with her,” he said. “She said it could be just like a sleepover.”

In her head, Rachel thought,
Well, you won’t be the one getting up at 4 a.m. to answer a whining puppy two hours before you have to get up to go to work
, but she held her tongue when she saw the look in her son’s eyes. It was a look that hadn’t been there very much in the past few months. The divorce and the move had been hard on Eric. Maybe harder on him truthfully than on her—after all, this was the first time his life had been uprooted ever. He acted so grown up sometimes she could almost forget he was only ten. Just a kid…and everything he’d grown to trust in his first few years had just been ripped apart. Flushed away overnight.

“Well…” she began.

The puppy turned away from Eric at the sound of her voice and shimmied over to sniff excitedly at the cuffs of her capris. The warmth of his breath on her bare calf tickled.

“All right,” Rachel laughed, bending down to pet the small head that bobbed even more frantically at her touch. “He can stay overnight. After that…we’ll have to see. Having a dog is a big responsibility.”

Eric’s hopeful grin spread wide and he threw his arms around her. “You’ll love him, I know you will.”

Rachel nodded with a sad smile. Loving someone didn’t always mean you wanted to live with them. But, she supposed, Eric would have to learn
that
lesson soon enough. It seemed that everybody did, sooner or later.

“So, tell me about your day,” Rachel urged, as she moved back and forth from the stove to the refrigerator, trying to pull together a makeshift dinner in record time.

Eric cooed over the puppy in the corner, scratching its head and belly. “It was fine,” he said.

“Fine?” she laughed. “That’s all you can say about it?”

“Well, what do you want?” he answered. His voice was sterner now. “Do you want to hear about how Mr. Verger gave me a C on our pop quiz in Earth Science because I didn’t know that paleontologists study dinosaurs? Or that this bitch Jamie Ketch…”

“Language!”

“Okay, this
jerk
Jamie Ketch flipped my lunch onto the cafeteria floor for a joke?”

“So you’re not liking the new school so far?” Rachel said quietly, cracking an egg over the mix of breadcrumbs and hamburger meat on the plate in front of her. She’d been afraid of the adjustment he was going to have to make, transferring into a school at the end of the term. And that he might not make it, just because he didn’t want to be here.

“It’s not all bad.” He shrugged. “I met Tracie. And her dogs.”

“Hmmm.” Rachel nodded. “So you like her?”

“She’s cool,” Eric agreed. “She plays DS a lot, so she was giving me some good cheats.”

“Great,” Rachel said. “As if you need to spend more time on video games.”

Eric raised one falsely innocent eye. “Well, if we can keep the puppy, I’ll have to spend a lot more time with
him
.”

“Uh-huh,” Rachel said. “I’m not cleaning up dog crap from the backyard every day. I’ve already got to clean the dishes and your laundry.”

Eric bent down and cradled the pup in his arms, and was quickly rewarded by a wet, pink tongue in the face. “I’ll take care of him, Mom, just like you take care of me.”

Something in Rachel’s chest melted, and she found she couldn’t say a word. Instead, she just blinked back tears as she smashed the hamburger mix into meatballs and dropped them into the hot grease of the pan.

She knew in her heart that no matter what she said, the dog wasn’t going back to Tracie’s tomorrow. And maybe that was okay. Life was moving on. And new life moving in. That’s why she’d come here, right?

To start fresh.

After dinner, Rachel cleared the table and led them to the front room to the couch. “C’mon,” she called. “It’s been a long day.”

As she sank into the cushions with a deep sigh, Eric grinned and hopped up beside her. The dachshund struggled to join them, paws up on the cushions, but not quite able to leap high enough to complete the jump. Rachel smiled at the anxiousness of its gaze as its tiny back feet pushed up and up and up…until Eric reached down, slipped his small hands beneath the dog’s equally small front legs and pulled the puppy up to join them. The dachshund settled its head on Eric’s thigh, tongue lolling out with gasping breaths.

Rachel flicked the TV on to the news. Allie Keblancas, a young blonde reporter, was standing on a beach, the ocean behind her. Despite the business jacket, she looked like the kind of girl you’d find sipping rum and playing volleyball out there on the sand. But instead of looking ready to slip into a bikini, her eyes were stern, her voice deadly serious.

“We’re here with Billy McAllister,” she announced, as the camera swung to the right to reveal a well-tanned young guy with a curly mane of sun-blond hair. “Last Friday, he and three friends got on a boat and headed out on the water in what was intended to be a private vacation on one of the tiny Keys just behind me. But when that boat returned, Billy was the only one of the four left alive. He brought home the bodies of his friends, and a horrible story.”

The camera flashed on the sad face of the tanned man before Allie continued.

“On Friday, the four friends landed on an empty island, set up their tents and got ready for their own private weekend of fun in the sun.” She paused for dramatic effect, looking straight into the camera before saying, “But things didn’t end up going quite as they planned. On Sunday, Billy McAllister returned from their weekend vacation alone. His friends had been killed on Sheila Key, the victims of some kind of mutant, deadly swarm of flies. Billy, can you tell us, what happened back there on that island?”

The camera focused on Billy McAllister, who shook his mane of gold curls and rolled his eyes. “It was horrible,” he said. “There were flies everywhere. They came out of the trees and the grass and they literally just covered Mark and Jess…”