David knew where I was. He would have come to get me if he needed anything.
No doubt she would find him in the exact same place and in the exact same position—on the floor drawing pictures. He might not have even noticed that she was gone. Sometimes he got like that—concentrating so intensely on his project that if you spoke to him it was as if he were waking up from a dream, or returning from a place very far away.
She heard the back door slam and then Miranda rounded the corner of the house. The girl didn’t even appear to see Karen. Her face was red and her teeth were bared.
“Miranda?” Karen asked, but Miranda rushed past her without a word.
She and Lauren must have had an argument, Karen thought with an inward sigh. They hardly ever argued when they were young, but Karen thought she’d detected more friction between them as they got older. Well, it was inevitable, she supposed. They were growing into two very different people.
I wonder if Lauren is upset, Karen thought. Not that Lauren would tell her mother if she was. But her first period plus an argument with her best friend was bound to result in a moody teenager.
I should make spaghetti for dinner. It’s her favorite.
She’d had lots of arguments with her best childhood friend once they reached high school, Karen remembered as she climbed the back porch stairs.
Nancy Butler, Karen thought. Nancy with her long blond hair and fair skin, so fair that she looked like she was imported from Norway. Nancy had loved all the Motown bands, the Supremes and the Four Tops and the Temptations, and unlike every other girl in the country she had been deeply unimpressed by the Beatles—who were, of course, Karen’s favorite band.
She remembered watching them on The Ed Sullivan Show, playing “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” She fell in love with John Lennon right then and there but Nancy thought they were “just a bunch of weird longhairs.”
They had argued about the Beatles and about some boy Nancy had a crush on—what was his name? Jack something? He was a senior and was dating Sonya Wojcek, Karen recalled. And Nancy would just sigh every time he walked by in the hallway no matter how often Karen told her she didn’t have a chance.
What had happened to Nancy Butler? Her family had moved away or something like that, and they lost touch. It was strange, the way Karen could just forget a girl she was friends with for nine years. But she supposed that happened. You grew up and you lost touch and you moved on.
Best friends since the first day of first grade, just like Lauren and Miranda. Karen smiled to herself, remembering both of them in white blouses and colored jumpers. Karen’s jumper was pink and Nancy’s yellow.
She realized she was standing on the back porch, woolgathering, and went inside.
David was exactly where she’d left him, drawing with his crayons. The roll of butcher paper had been pushed all the way across the floor and was covered in a series of drawings. He didn’t even look up when the screen door slammed shut behind her.
“Wow, you really did a lot,” Karen said, leaning over to see what he was drawing.
There was a crayon girl lying flat on the ground, a girl in a yellow dress with long yellow hair all around her head like a halo, and around the yellow halo was a blooming sunrise of red.
The girl’s eyes were two black X marks and her mouth was a black circle.
“Nancy,” Karen gasped. And she remembered.
I went to school that day. It was the thirteenth of November and Nancy wasn’t in homeroom. After homeroom we had biology together with Mr. Parsons, but she wasn’t in biology either, so I thought maybe she was sick.
We’d had an argument the day before, a stupid argument about the Harvest Dance.
And it had been stupid, a stupid thing about how they’d both bought the same dress and who was going to wear it and who was going to get stuck wearing an old one instead because—
“We can’t show up in the gym wearing the same thing like the Bobbsey Twins,” said Nancy.
“So what?” Karen said. “I’m not going to the dance in my same old dress.”
And Karen definitely was not going to, because it had taken ages to convince her father that she needed the new one in the first place. If she wore an older one he would be furious about the wasted expense.
Anyway, she wanted to wear the new dress. It was deep red velvet, the color of wine, and it set off Karen’s dark hair and eyes. Nancy would just look washed out in a color like that with her pale hair and skin, and Karen told her so.
“For your information, my mother said I looked beautiful in that dress,” Nancy snapped.
“Your mother has to say you look beautiful. She’s your mother,” Karen said. “Why don’t you just return it for a different one?”
“Because I want to wear that one!”
“So do I,” Karen said, and privately thought that if they both wore the same dress, everyone would agree she looked better in it and Nancy would suffer by comparison.
And Nancy had pressed her lips together and stormed off, leaving Karen to walk home alone.
The next morning Nancy wasn’t in school and Karen was relieved, because if Nancy was home sick then maybe she would be too sick to go to the Harvest Dance and the argument about the dress would be moot.
But when she got home that afternoon Karen’s mother was sitting in the kitchen with Nancy’s mother and Nancy’s mother was crying like she would never stop.
Nancy had gone missing the night before and no one knew where she could be.
The mothers had looked at Karen and asked if Karen knew where Nancy might be, if she had a boyfriend, if she’d said anything about running off.
And Karen had flushed and said no to all the questions and felt guilty because of the stupid argument about the stupid dress. That couldn’t have been the reason Nancy ran away, could it?
Later Chief Christie had come to talk to her about Nancy’s disappearance, too. His son Van was a little older than Karen and Nancy. The chief had been very nice to Karen, not scary at all, but she had the same answers for the same questions.
No, she hadn’t heard from Nancy.
No, Nancy didn’t have a boyfriend.
No, Nancy had never said anything about running away.
All around the school the next day there were whispers every time Karen walked by, and Jack—
“Bingley,” Karen said to herself. “Bingley, that was it.”
—Jack Bingley had even come up to her while she was at her locker getting her period four math book and told her that he was sorry about Nancy. Karen hadn’t even realized he knew who Nancy was, although she supposed he had to have noticed the way her friend stared at him.
Two days later they found Nancy’s body in the woods. Or rather, what was left of her body. She’d been ripped apart, as if by an animal, and all that was really left of her was her head.
“Just like those girls,” Karen said. “Exactly the same.”
There was a day of mourning at school—they’d all had off—and then the next day everyone came back and it was all normal and regular again, except Nancy wasn’t there.
And then Karen forgot about her.
Nancy didn’t just gradually fade away. There was no period of time where Karen grieved, or looked at the empty seat next to her in biology. Her best friend was gone and Karen forgot her.
She hadn’t even remembered Nancy Butler had ever existed until just that moment.
How could she have forgotten such a terrible event? If she hadn’t seen that picture of David’s she would never have remembered it at all.
And something about that memory twigged another memory, this one much hazier and hard to grasp. It was something about Joe, the night that Joe went missing.
Lauren at the back door in the middle of the night.
Why would Lauren be at the back door in the middle of the night? Karen
reached for the memory. It was like a balloon floating away into an empty sky and she couldn’t reach the string.
A rustle of paper made her look down. David was almost done rolling up the scroll of pictures he’d made. He’d already carefully replaced all of his crayons inside the old cigar box he used for storage.
“David,” Karen said. She wanted to see his drawing before he put it away. Had he really drawn a dead girl?
(It couldn’t be Nancy Butler, though; he never would have heard of her or what happened so long ago)
“What, Mommy?” he asked, rolling the last bit of paper up. His eyes still had some of that faraway quality that he got when he was intensely focused.
He might not remember what he did. I’ll look at the picture later, when he isn’t around.
“Nothing, sweetie,” she said, because he was waiting patiently for her reply.
He might have heard about the murdered girls in Mrs. Schneider’s yard, though, even if he didn’t know about Nancy.
(You know he heard about them, don’t you remember? He stopped dead on the sidewalk and said she was screaming and that there was so much blood.)
Should she be worried about what he was watching on TV or heard about from his sister? Sometimes Lauren and Miranda watched videos at Miranda’s house and Lauren talked about them where David could hear, movies where girls got shredded by crazy killers.
(He doesn’t need to hear about a movie for that. That happens right here in Smiths Hollow, every year)
Karen started. Where had that thought come from? Girls didn’t die in Smiths Hollow every year.
Lauren came into the kitchen then. She had that hollow-eyed look that came from too much crying.
“How about an ice cream sundae?” Karen asked impulsively.
They didn’t really have the money for such a treat, but David was acting so strange and Lauren was so sad and she herself was so bewildered and only ice cream could fix everything.
Joe used to say that.
It was the first time since he died that she could think of him without bitterness.
“Ice cream? Before dinner?” Lauren asked.
David’s eyes lit up. “Really?”
“Really,” Karen said.
13
Saturday
Touhy stared at the headline in the Chicago Tribune. His breakfast eggs and bacon lay untouched on his plate and his coffee grew cold as he read the six words over and over.
SHOCKING MURDERS STUN SMALL-TOWN POLICE
“I’ll have somebody’s head for this,” Touhy said and then read the byline:
George Riley, special correspondent
It was that reporter from Chicago stirring up trouble. And a story like this would make more trouble, would bring more reporters from other places asking questions about things they shouldn’t even know about.
Crystal gave him a mildly inquiring glance from across the table. She was eating a bowl of cottage cheese with pineapple on top. Lately she always seemed to be on a diet even though she was thin as a rail.
Too thin, actually, he thought. Her breasts were visible through the white lawn nightgown she wore. They were starting to look small and saggy. The more weight she lost, the smaller they were.
Her afternoon lover must like them that way, he thought, but he couldn’t work up the energy to be angry about it.
All his anger was directed at the interloper who’d come to his town.
The girls had finally been identified. It appeared that Alex Lopez—another meddler, Touhy thought—had come upon the dead girls’ backpacks in the woods. Touhy wanted to know what he’d been doing poking around out there in the first place but knew if he asked too many questions then Lopez would get suspicious. He’d only lived in Smiths Hollow for a couple of months. Touhy didn’t know if he’d fallen completely under the town’s spell yet.
If the spell is even still working, he thought. The news of the previous afternoon’s layoffs at the factory had reached him that morning. When he’d heard he’d been unable to squelch the panic that rose up inside him.
His job, his entire existence, was built on preserving the prosperity of the town. That was what the girls died for—so everyone else in Smiths Hollow could stay safe and happy. If people were losing their jobs, then what was the point of the sacrifices?
If out-of-town girls were dying in the summer, did that mean there weren’t going to be any more sacrifices?
His father had never told him what to do in the case of such an eventuality. It had always been assumed that things would go on smoothly as long as a girl’s name was drawn from the lottery.
But those two girls didn’t come from the lottery. And now people were out of work.
The cracks are starting to show, he thought, not for the first time. But I can still fix it. I can mend them.
He’d have a word with the factory owners. He was sure this was some temporary lull in business and that the union would call all the workers back soon. Didn’t everyone have a can of chili in their kitchen? Perhaps it was some kind of distribution problem. If so, he could probably call around until the issue was resolved.
All of his attention yesterday had been focused on the Friday night opening of the fair. He’d felt blindsided by the factory layoffs but could deal with them once the fair was up and running. The fair was everything.
The fair was going to draw people to the town. He didn’t want any bumps in its smooth operation. He’d ordered Van Christie to have two police officers patrolling the grounds at all times. Touhy hoped that the presence of uniformed officers would discourage juvenile delinquents from thievery and vandalism. He didn’t want any Smiths Hollow kids giving the town a bad reputation.
The first night had been a huge success. The fair was filled with people and the town had been hopping with the overflow from the fairgrounds. He’d strolled Main Street in twilight, smiling at all of the folks packed into the pizzeria and the sweet shop. Everything had been perfect.
He hadn’t thought about the situation with the girls because he’d thought the situation had been handled. Christie hunted down the next of kin and made arrangements for the remains to be shipped back to Joliet. Christie had told him the girls were runaways, and that the families involved didn’t seem too interested in the girls’ fates.
Touhy supposed they were troublemakers, and that the families were glad to be shot of them.
That was all well and good, to his mind. No family interest meant no demand for an investigation, and once the bodies were gone it was someone else’s problem. Everyone could just settle down and forget the murders ever happened.
Then he saw the newspaper.
“What’s the matter, Rich?” Crystal asked.
“Nothing,” he said, scowling.
She wouldn’t understand even if he tried to explain. She was really very dumb. Why had he married such a bimbo in the first place?
Because she had big tits and a tight ass and you wanted every man in town to be jealous that you got to bang that body every night.
It was easy to ignore her lack of brainpower when he actually was banging her every night. But now that she was getting it elsewhere during the day she wasn’t much interested at night, and as her body shrank down to a toothpick he’d become less interested, too.
Why don’t I just get a divorce? There were no children to worry about. They’d somehow never managed to have any, even though both of them had subjected themselves to a battery of tests to establish fertility. Everything had come back normal, but the seed had never sprouted.
For a long time Touhy had been relieved by this. If he never had a daughter, then his daughter could never be taken by the monster in the woods. But he needed a son. A son had to take over as mayor for him when he retired. There had always been a Mayor Touhy in Smiths Hollow.
Who would draw the names if he was gone
and he had no son to replace him? How could he possibly explain the curse to an outsider?
The Touhys had always been born with the knowledge of the curse, had known and seen it the way no one else did. Did his lack of children mean the curse was coming to an end? Would it all stop when he, the last Touhy of Smiths Hollow, died?
He didn’t think so. Those two dead girls in Mrs. Schneider’s yard were proof of that.
There weren’t supposed to be two dead girls in June. That he knew. So perhaps he just needed to . . . what? Realign the spell?
He didn’t know anything about magic. But that old crone who lived alone at the top of the hill did. She was the only one who’d ever known about the girls, besides him.
Touhy remembered the day, about ten years earlier, when she’d stormed into his office and demanded to know what he was going to do about the dead girls.
He’d been so wrong-footed by the accusation that he’d stuttered and stammered and generally acted like he was guilty of something. Which he was.
But it’s not my fault, he thought. I’m not the one who kills them. It’s that thing in the woods. And if I don’t do my job then it will just go crazy and start killing everyone.
He’d fended off Joanne Gehlinger by telling her that she was imagining things. It hadn’t seemed, at the time, that she knew for certain that he was involved in the process, although she certainly had suspected something.
He knew that she was descended from the relatives of the witches who lived there, though. That was part of the knowledge that was passed down, although he was never certain why.
Perhaps for just this very reason? Perhaps so the curse can be refreshed by someone of the same bloodline?
Touhy wasn’t certain Jo Gehlinger would be willing to assist, however. She’d seemed very angry about the dead girls the last time the subject came up.
He was angry about the deaths too, of course. He’d rather not have to deal with such a thing happening at all.
He didn’t want to be known as the mayor of Monster Town.
But this was his lot, and the lot of all of Smiths Hollow. This was the price they paid for their prosperity.
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