by Ray Garton
Jeff tried to backpedal when he saw the cart but slid into it feet-first. The cart toppled and the projector skidded down the hall, spinning like a top.
"Well, that's fine!" Dwayne barked. "That's fine, that's just great!"
The girl had already left the building, and the door was slowly swinging shut behind her. J.R. was running beside Jeff now, and they burst through the door together into the rain.
In the parking lot, students were climbing aboard idling buses and cars were leaving their parking spaces.
The sidewalk in front of the building looked deserted.
Jeff and J.R. stopped halfway down the steps and looked around.
"Where in the hell did she go?" J.R. exclaimed.
"Maybe somebody was waiting for her in a car," Jeff suggested, scanning the lot for a car that appeared to be leaving in a hurry.
"Not enough time."
Wind blew their clothes and hair as they stood on the steps, and rain cut through the air diagonally, slapping their faces. Jeff saw that J.R.'s shirt was covered with blood.
"Is it bad?" Jeff asked.
"Pretty bad, yeah."
"She was wearing a Crucifax."
J.R. nodded grimly. "I know."
They turned to go back up the steps and saw Lily coming through the door. She started to speak, but something splattered over her left arm and she lifted it with a start, looked at the dark fluid that was dribbling over her skin, washing away with the rain, then looked to her left over the handrail and into the shrubbery below.
Jeff's eyes followed her gaze to what looked, at first, like a miniature oil well spurting from the brush and splashing to the cement. The bushes were shifting, and as Jeff climbed the steps he heard a wet, sputtering gasp that was drowned by Lily's horrified scream as she stumbled away from the rail, covering her mouth with a palm. Jeff and J.R. rushed to the handrail, looked over the edge, and saw her.
The girl was sprawled in the bushes, her left arm stretched above her head, her right arm on her chest, fingers wrapped tightly around the Crucifax, her mouth opening and closing, opening and closing, eyes wide, and her throat—
Sweet Jesus, this isn't happening, Jeff thought, please let this be a nightmare!
—was yawning open like a second mouth, slashed from side to side and spurting blood orgasmically.
"Fuck!" J.R. cried, vaulting over the rail and landing with a grunt in the bushes. "Call an ambulance, get somebody over here noowww!"
Jeff followed him, feeling numb and disoriented, as if under the influence of a drug. As the girl's blood flowed, the rain washed it away almost as quickly, affording a clear view of the gash, of the sliced trachea and gushing veins and arteries.
J.R. began tearing off his shirt, pressing the tattered fabric to the girl's throat, but it was obviously too late.
Her eyes were glazing, her motions ceasing, and the flow of blood was coming to a halt.
"Jesus, Jesus Christ, what is going on here?" J.R. rasped as he continued to press his torn shirt to her open throat. "Just what in the holy fuck is going on here?"
Jeff sat back, taking his eyes from the dead girl's face, trying to catch his breath, trying to keep from throwing up.
Lily had gone inside; Jeff could hear her screams echoing through the halls.
He covered his face with his hands and imagined the Crucifax around Mallory's neck, around Nikki's, and he prayed that they were safe.
That they were still alive…
Twenty-Three
When J.R. returned to the counseling office that evening, the lights were out and everyone was gone. Without the hushed buzz of fluorescent lights and the constant drone of voices and activity, the only sounds were his footsteps and the whisper of rainfall.
He went to Faye's office, flicked on the light, and immediately diverted his eyes from the opposite wall. The blood had been cleaned away, but he knew that if he looked, he would see it as clearly as if her face had just been slashed.
J.R. had followed Faye's ambulance to the hospital and had gone into the emergency room with her. She'd been propped into a sitting position on the gurney to keep the blood from running down her throat, and a temporary bandage had been put over the cut. As the paramedic wheeled her into ER, he'd said again and again, "Don't try to speak, Faye…. Hold your head still…. Don't try to speak…."
When J.R. went to her side, Faye took his hand in a firm grip, ignored the paramedic, and sputtered, "J-Junior, is … sh-she dead?"
As he silently nodded his head she closed her eyes and released a raspy sigh, as if she'd expected and dreaded his reply.
He'd called Mr. Booth from the hospital; the girl's name, Booth said, was Sherry Pacheco, and her parents were on their way to the hospital, although they did not yet know their daughter was dead.
After Faye was taken into surgery, J.R. headed back to the school, still disturbed by the knowing look of defeat on her face once she'd learned of Sherry's death, by the expectant way she'd asked, "Is… sh-she dead?"
In Faye's office, J.R. opened the metal filing cabinet in the corner and pulled Sherry Pacheco's file.
Faye had been her counselor two years in a row. According to the record, the girl had been a straight-A student with a nearly perfect attendance record and had never been in any trouble—
—until six weeks ago.
Her attendance dropped by half, and teachers had been complaining that Sherry was turning in incomplete assignments, or not turning them in at all. Two weeks ago, she'd started a fight in the shower room, injuring another student.
J.R. opened Sherry's personal history folder and was surprised to see how much it contained. Apparently, Faye kept extensive records.
He thought, And Faye told me not to get involved…
Sherry's father was an RTD bus driver; her mother was a babysitter three afternoons a week and worked in a day care center the other two days. They were devout Catholics, Sherry was their only child, and, from Faye's sketchy notes, J.R. gathered that they had hoped to send her to a Catholic high school but had been unable to afford the steep tuition. Wanted her to be nun, she'd written in a margin, and, next to that, underlined twice: Disappointed.
Sherry was disappointed? He wondered. Or they were disappointed in Sherry?
The Pachecos either came into some money or had decided to cut back on expenses, because shortly after Sherry began her junior year at Valley High School, they decided to send her to Our Lady of the Valley High School in Encino. Sherry had resisted strongly; threatens to leave home, Faye had written.
When J.R. compared her personal history to her academic records, he found that it was at that time that Sherry's grades dropped.
Near the bottom of the third page of Sherry Pacheco's personal history, J.R. found something written in the margin and circled in red: Haircut—attitude change— "crucifax"—like Steve Paulson.
J.R. put Sherry's file on top of the cabinet, opened the drawer again, and searched through the Ps until he found Paulson.
Steve Paulson was a senior. His parents were divorced, and his younger brother and sister lived with his mother, Steve lived with his father, a plumber in North Hollywood.
Mother refused to take him, Faye had written.
Steve had been trouble all through high school and had apparently made no effort to change. His father had met with Faye once the year before; uninterested was written beside the record of the meeting. Faye had tried to contact Steve's mother, who now lived in Santa Monica, but none of her calls or letters had been answered.
On the back of the first page in Steve's personal history file, Faye had written in very precise, careful print, Restless and rebellious to angry and violent in three weeks.
At the bottom of the page: Oct. 8 wears crucifax. Got it from "friend." Won't explain—same as others.
"Same as others," he muttered. In the silence, his voice sounded too loud. "What others?" he asked, paging through the other files in the drawer.
Within fifteen minutes, J.R. had
found four other references to Crucifaxes. Feeling a sudden surge of energy, as if he were close to something important, he cleared a space on Faye's desk, stacked several of the files before him, and settled into her chair.
He was at her desk for nearly three hours going through her files—severely unethical, he realized, but under the circumstances, he was willing to bend the rules—and taking notes on a small pad. Occasionally, he ran his fingers through his hair and muttered, "Christ, what is going on here?" or "What do you know that you're not telling, Faye?"
When he was done, he had a list of names of students who were apparently involved with Mace; their behavior had changed, their grades had dropped—even the ones whose grades had not been good in the first place had fallen noticeably—and some of them were not only getting into trouble but appeared to be looking for it.
He sat at the desk for a long time, staring at the notes he'd made, feeling smaller and smaller, as if he were sitting in the shadow of something enormous that was looming over him threateningly, a shadow that was growing bigger and bigger….
"God," he breathed as he looked through the notes a second time, seeing something, vague at first, but clearer the third time through—clearer and undeniable, impossible to ignore, as outrageous as it seemed….
There was a pattern. There seemed to be a definite pattern among the students who had connections with Mace.
But only in Faye's files, he thought.
He looked at his watch; it was eight-nineteen.
He knew all this information would mean nothing unless he could see the same pattern among other students, students who were not under Faye's counsel.
There were five counselors in the department. Five different files of student records.
He pushed away from the desk and sighed to himself, "You've got all night, Haskell…."
After leaving the school, Jeff and Lily went to Jeff's apartment, drained by what they had seen. Erin had already gone to work but had left a note promising to call home later in the evening.
Although each of them had homework assignments that were due the next day, neither felt like working. They turned on the radio, and Jeff called out for pizza while Lily rolled a joint with a little marijuana she'd gotten from a friend over the weekend. Neither said much. Lily walked by Jeff while he was on the phone and briefly touched the back of his neck; after Jeff hung up the phone, he went to the kitchen for a Coke and gently stroked her hair as he passed her. He cracked a window when she lit up the joint, and the sound of rainfall mixed with the music on the radio as they each took a drag in turn.
They sat side by side for a while, finished the grass, leaned on one another as they listened to the music and waited for their pizza.
The pizza never came.
"Stay off those roads, people," the disc jockey said, a sultry-voiced woman named Regina. "It's bad out there. If you're in Northridge right now, you probably can't hear me unless you're runnin' on batteries. Seems there's been a power outage in that area…."
Lily put her head in Jeff's lap and stretched her legs on the sofa; he began to stroke her hair.
"… somebody drove into a telephone pole, and there are reports of live power lines squirming around in the road on Jarette, so stay away from there…."
He lightly touched her forehead with his fingertips, her cheek; she turned her head and kissed his hand.
"… Laurel Canyon Boulevard is still backed up, and I mean waaay up, because of a slide on the pass. It's the second slide in the last twenty-four hours. The first one was cleaned up by four-thirty this afternoon but was followed by another. And there's been some pretty heavy flooding on Ventura near Whitset. If it gets any worse, there may be a detour…"
Lily pressed her head back against Jeff's erection as his hand slid over her throat. He slipped his other hand beneath her neck and lifted her head, kissing her as his hand moved between her breasts, over her belly, then back up again, cupping a breast gently.
"… I'm tellin' you, people, it looks like the Valley is just falling apart at the seams. If you're in the middle of it, just stick with me, and I'll keep playing the hits for you until midnight…."
Lily wrapped an arm around his neck and pressed herself closer to him, and they both sighed as they tangled together on the sofa. She put a hand between his legs and squeezed the firm bulge in his jeans—
—and Jeff thought of Mallory.
He wanted to push her away, hoping it would remove the thought from his mind, take away the image of his naked, sweating sister from behind his eyes, but before he could move, before he could separate his mouth from Lily's, there was a sound in the wall of the living room, a brief but distinct scuttling sound that seemed to come from behind the bookshelf, and Jeff lifted his head, turning his eyes toward the sound as Lily sat up with a gasp, hissing, "Jesus, what was that?"
Jeff was on his feet, moving down the hall to his sister's room, where he found the door open a crack, and he reached out his hands before he was even close to the door, grabbed the knob, and pulled it shut hard, imagining the hole in the closet on the other side as Lily began to cry in the living room.
"It's okay, it's okay," he assured her, "the door's shut, they may be in the walls, but they're not getting out; it's okay." He went to the living room, moved toward her, but the light dimmed, and Lily spun around with a gasp, stared at the lamp by the sofa, and they waited for it to go out, waited for the darkness.
The light stayed on.
She turned on the television; it clashed with the sound of the radio, but it buried any other sounds in the apartment. They sat close on the sofa, watching MTV as the disc jockey said, "Hell, people, it's hell out there, and I mean hell…."
The power was restored in Northridge by the next morning, but the slide on Laurel Pass was still backing up traffic. Several traffic lights had gone out in Van Nuys shortly after dawn, creating a jam on Sepulveda, and a section of Woodman was blocked off due to flooding, only adding to the backup.
J.R. hadn't gone to bed until shortly after three A.M., and even then his sleep had been restless. He'd come home with a stack of notes gathered from the files of his fellow counselors. He'd gone over them one last time before getting into bed as Faye's words repeated themselves over and over in his head:
Then one day the piper comes. And he seldom leaves empty-handed.
When he arrived at work that morning after an interminable wait in bumper-to-bumper traffic, J.R. postponed his morning appointment and went to the hospital to see Faye.
She was asleep when he entered her room. The left side and lower half of her face were bandaged, and there was an I.V. in her left arm.
He stood at her bedside for a moment and watched her sleep, listened to her slow, regular breathing, remembered the troubled look in her eyes last Friday, and wondered what she knew that would drive her to keep such tedious records on all of her students, particularly those involved with Mace. The other counselors had obviously not noticed the things Faye had, and their records were not nearly as detailed; but having gone through Faye's files, J.R. knew what to look for—and he found it.
When he touched her hand, Faye's eyes opened suddenly, and she made a hoarse noise in her throat.
"Hi, Faye."
She moved her head slightly and gestured with her hand.
J.R. looked around until he found a pad and pen on her nightstand. When he handed them to her, she began writing, her hand moving slowly, then handed the pad to J.R.
The note was shakily written but readable:
How did Sherry die? No one will tell me.
"She killed herself," he said quietly.
How?
"With the Crucifax. She cut her throat."
Her heavy eyes widened for a moment.
You know about them? About the Crucifaxes?
He nodded.
How?
J.R. pulled a chair close to the bed, sat down, and leaned toward her, propping an elbow on the railing.
"I found out from a
student of mine. But that was just a few days ago. You've known for quite a while, haven't you?"
She cocked a brow curiously.
"Look, Faye, I know it's unethical, but… well, last night I went through your files. After what happened, when you asked about Sherry, I got the feeling you knew something. I wanted to find out what."
She made a noise that sounded like, Well?
"You know more than I do. And you're scared. Tell you the truth, I'm scared, too, but I'm not quite sure why."
Faye closed her eyes and sighed through her nose; J.R. couldn't tell if it was a sigh of relief or unrest. She lay still for a long time, and he thought she'd fallen back to sleep, but she reached for the pad again.
What do you want to know?
"Who is Mace?"
I don't know.
"What do you know?"
She closed her eyes again, thought a moment.
He's got something the kids want. Need.
"But only certain kids, right?"
A slight nod.
"Look, Faye… this is just between us, right?"
Another nod.
"I went through all the files in the office. Every one of them. We're the only ones who know something's going on, but even though the others don't see it, it's in the records. Changes in some of the kids, in their behavior and grades. Most of the kids, it seems. But there's a thread, a pattern among the ones who change. Something bad has happened recently in their lives, a divorce or a problem with a sibling or… here." He reached into his coat pocket and took out the notes he'd made. They were bound together by a rubber band, which he quickly pulled off, flipping through the pages. "This was in your file. Sherry Pacheco. Her parents wanted her to be a nun, is that right?"
She nodded.
"They were going to send her to a Catholic schqol. She changed then, went straight downhill. Then she started wearing a Crucifax. Like Steve Paulson and Brandon Ott and Holly Porter and many others, Faye, many others. It's beginning to look like—"