by Devon, Gary;
“I can’t,” she whispered. “No, you know I can’t. Denny! Not this close to the prom. You think I’m crazy? If I got caught, she’d ground me for sure. You know my Gramma!” Sheila brought a strand of her hair up through her lips and chewed it. Then with her fingers, she drew it away, wet, across her cheek. “Uh-hum,” she murmured.
The cassette had finished its cycle. She flipped the switch to the radio, and music of a different tempo spilled from the cheap speakers. She smothered a laugh in her hand, her cheeks reddened and she looked back at the closed door as if expecting to find her grandmother there. “You know I do,” she murmured, and she took a few steps, swaying, dancing to the music, watching herself in the vanity mirror. “You’re terrible.”
Her whisper grew even more discreet. “I can’t. Dennnee, stop it! Stop it. I really can’t … I’ve already—” She checked herself and didn’t finish. She didn’t say: I’ve already lied to my Gramma once today. In the end, she told him, “Okay. Okay, I’ll try.” She cupped her hand against the receiver so that nothing she said would escape. “Wait for me … you know. If I’m not there by ten-thirty, I can’t make it. Okay? Okay, I promise. Okay, bye.”
At a quarter to ten, she heard her grandmother’s footsteps climbing the stairs. With her face washed, her teeth brushed, wearing her nightgown, Sheila drew the quilt up, nestled her head deeper into the pillow and shut her eyes. She took long, slow breaths, as if already sound asleep. On the black screen of her eyelids, she could almost see her grandmother mounting the wide tier of steps. Her hand, nowadays, always clasped the rail. Rachel was humming some old tune as she reached the landing this evening. If she saw that Sheila was awake, she would linger in her room, talking and saying good night, as they usually did.
Lying very still, she listened as her grandmother went into the bathroom across the hall where she would change into her night-clothes—as she called them; Sheila heard the water turned on, then off; she heard the doorknob jangle, the click of the latch, the yawning creak of the hinge as the bathroom door opened.
With her eyes closed, Sheila sensed more than felt her grandmother in the bedroom with her. She imagined Rachel hovering closely over her, inches from her pillow. The clock on the nightstand was taken up. The striking mechanism chimed once, softly, as Rachel checked to see that the alarm was set.
Sheila took another slow, sleep-deep breath.
The slippered footsteps padded around the bed, a window was wrenched up, then the steps faded away altogether. Still, Sheila waited a few minutes longer before she opened her eyes and sat up. She looked at the clock—five after ten.
All the lights were out; the silence settled through the house like emptiness in a jar. From the large front bedroom, as if through a funnel, she heard her grandmother’s mumblings and knew by heart the words that were always spoken: “… and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for Thine is the kingdom, and the power and the glory. Forever and ever. Amen.”
Through the two east windows, moonlight fell across Sheila’s bed like silver rails. She stood away from the sheets, the hem of her nightgown falling about her ankles. As she passed through the moonlight her body glimmered through the sheer cloth. Reaching beneath the cushion on the old chaise, she grabbed her bathing suit—even in the dark, it gave off a faint scintillation.
Going into the shadows, she shed her nightgown and pulled on the black bathing suit, drawing the spaghetti straps over her shoulders. The suit fit her like a second skin, making her body feel smooth and power packed. Over it, she pulled on jeans and a denim shirt, her fingers rushing to close the zipper and the buttons. Again she looked at the bedside clock. Eight minutes had passed. 10:13. It didn’t seem possible. I have to hurry, she thought.
Without making a sound, she bent to the vanity mirror, uncapped her lipstick and applied red color that looked black on her mouth. She ran a brush through her hair, then took up the spritzer of cologne but instantly changed her mind and shoved the glass vial into the pocket of her jeans. Even the slightest scent might betray her in the dark. Sheila lifted her canvas shoes, hugged them against her—a thrill of fear and excitement ran through her.
On tiptoe, she edged up to the doorway of her grandmother’s bedroom. The raised doorsill pressed firmly against the arch of her foot; through her hair, a cool draft from the stairwell licked the back of her neck. With the moon’s sudden passage through clouds, the light in the front bedroom waned, then burgeoned to a ghostly glow and shrank back to gray again.
A corner of dull moonlight exposed the monogrammed B on the pillowcase; the carvings of the headboard stood out in delicate, twisted tendrils. Gradually Sheila’s eyesight adjusted to the shifting darkness; she saw her grandmother’s sleeping face. She went no farther into the room. In the stillness, she could hear the slow progression of her grandmother’s raspy breaths.
Feeling her way back across the landing, she started down the carpeted stairs, trying to remember every loose plank, stepping over the familiar stair that creaked so loudly and then, halfway down, where there was an audible weakness in the joists, sitting down and sliding from step to step until she counted four and stood upright again. The rooms downstairs seemed to ebb with the changeable moonlight. Emerging through the gloom, Sheila sat on the last of the stairs and slipped on her shoes.
The double front doors lay in a line almost directly beneath her grandmother’s bed, so she retreated from them—went back through the house, taking the cologne spritzer from her pocket. She lifted her hair and sprayed the back of her neck once and then sprayed once more inside the collar of her shirt for good measure. Returning the vial to her pocket, Sheila crept to the back door, looked over her shoulder and grasped the doorknob.
When she drew the door open, the pane of glass quivered, and she stepped outside, holding back a deep sigh. The night rushed up around her, full of tiny sounds. The glass shuddered softly a second time when she pulled the door shut.
The sky was swept with dazzling stars. Mist thinned and broke around the dark columns of trees. Sheila leapt from the porch step to the grass and darted around the corner of the house. Suddenly, she stopped, her nerve endings tense with fright. She had the overwhelming sensation that she had passed someone close by, brushed by some breathing thing in the dark. Her toes dug down, gripping at the insides of her shoes. She looked back toward the garden, searching the dark trellises and arbors. Leaves stirred and grew quiet. There’s something I can’t see. Rotating on her toes, Sheila turned, crept back to the corner of the house and stepped out bravely into the moonlight. She peered at the back porch, but the door she had closed only moments before was still shut, exactly as she had left it. Touched by the wind, the pane of glass again shimmered in the door frame. No one was there. This is silly, she told herself. I’m imagining things.
She hurried down the side of the house to the front yard, where street lamps burnished the lawn with light. There was nothing to do but to cross through it, and so she fled toward the far corner of the iron fence.
Behind her, in the garden, the figure in the rose arbor remained in darkness except for the transitory gleam of his wire-rimmed glasses. Beecham stood watching the girl as she ran through the moonlight. That was close, Beecham thought. Now that she had vanished, he moved out from under the canopy of vines. He wondered how long the girl would be gone, when she would come back, but he really didn’t need to see any more. Tonight he had studied the interior of the house through its downstairs windows; he knew everything he needed to know.
Swinging up over the old iron fence, Sheila shrank into the dark crevice between the lilacs. A hand—she saw a boy’s hand—reached for her, and Denny drew her into his arms. “The curtains,” he whispered, “upstairs,” and he looked toward the front of the house, all awash in shadows. “I saw something.”
Catching her breath, Sheila looked in the same direction Denny was looking, but the upstairs windows only appeared dark to her and blank. “No,” she told him, “it’s nothing. She’s asl
eep; I checked.”
Denny was a year older than she was and several inches taller; his hair lay in dark rumpled curls. He touched her cheek with his hand, and her mouth was soft and slick when he kissed her. “They’re waiting,” he said, quietly, leading her through the crooked lilac branches toward a car that emerged from the shade of the roadside oaks, a gray Firebird idling at the curb with its lights out.
The charcoal-colored door swung open for them, the seat fell forward, and first Sheila and then Denny scrambled into the back of the car. “Hi, Mary,” Sheila whispered and then to the driver, who had shifted gears, “Tommy, please, please, don’t gun it. Don’t wake her up. I think maybe she heard you last time.”
Tommy Ames looked back over his shoulder and grinned at her. “Sheila,” he said, “you worry too much.” But he did as she asked him.
Invisible except for the streetlight glancing from its chrome, the gray Firebird moved smoothly into the night. Behind it, the air carried only a trace of the warbling in its mufflers.
When there was no sound at all left beating the air, the brown-spotted fingers let go and the part in the upstairs curtains fell to, as if weighted. That boy, Rachel thought. It was maddening—all this sneaking around. One minute she would think, I’ve got to put my foot down; the next she was torn with indecision. She knew that Denny Rivera was the least of her troubles; she wanted Sheila to be interested in someone her own age. This wasn’t the only time the girl had slipped away in the last few hours—Sheila had also disappeared before suppertime for almost half an hour and Rachel was certain she knew who she had gone to meet.
“I’m going to have to do it,” she whispered to herself. “I said I would; now I have to.” She crossed the dark landing and entered Sheila’s bedroom. Reaching under the shade, she flipped on the bedside lamp and tugged open the drawer of the nightstand. The key was still there, where it always was. Taking it firmly in her fingers, she went toward the shoe boxes in Sheila’s closet, wondering what new bauble Henry Slater had given her this time.
I’ve got to do it, Rachel thought. She’s my little girl—and he won’t quit. He’s still after her.
The gray Firebird rumbled through the country club parking lot, staunched its headlights and swung in beside the black and gold Trans Am. Doors flew open, dome lights blinked, doors slammed shut. A murmuring rose among the gathering of high school boys and their girlfriends—ten of them, juniors and seniors, congregated between their parked cars. Cans of cold beer were passed around; a joint was lit, burning a red point in the night. One of the boys streaked across the dun-colored grass to the privacy fence. Seconds later, the gate squealed open and the underlit, Olympic-size swimming pool glowed before them like an eerie green lagoon.
“That thing better be heated,” Claudia Finney said.
“Trust me,” said two of the boys simultaneously.
Zippers and buttons slipped undone. They were quickly pulling off their outer clothes. On Mary McPhearson’s swimsuit, a sprig of blue sequins glittered. Twisting her hips, Lana Russo wiggled out of her bib-overalls, revealing a bikini of bright chrome yellow. Two of the couples ran off toward the pool.
“It looks radioactive,” Claudia groaned.
“Just think,” her boyfriend said, “tomorrow we’ll be salamanders.”
Denny was stripped to his trunks before Sheila had folded her jeans. “Go ahead,” she told him. “I’ll be just a minute.”
In the carbon light, he looked lean and tough. “I’ll wait,” he said and stood looking at the pool.
“No, go on, Denny,” she insisted. “Go ahead. I want you to. I’ll come with Mary.” Sheila smiled at him, her fingers motionless on the top button of her denim shirt.
“Oh, I get it,” he said. “Another heart-to-heart.” He backed away in the direction of the pool. Sheila went on, then, unbuttoning her shirt, watching until he had trotted from view. Slowly, she turned her head.
Across the thirty yards of asphalt, parked in a reserved space near the front of the clubhouse, she had seen Mr. Slater’s dark blue Cadillac. Just looking at his car and knowing that he was in there drew her like a magnet. From inside the main building, she heard the muted throb of a band playing, and she felt oddly left out. It was impossible not to imagine him dancing with Mrs. Slater, holding her close in his arms. Sheila wanted to do something to let him know that she had been here, too. I’ll surprise you, she thought.
But how?
Mary McPhearson interrupted her reverie. “Doolin’s got the nerve, hasn’t he?” she said. “Sneaking his old man’s keys like this.” The two of them were alone now between the Firebird and the Trans Am. “Sheila, if we get caught, it’s my ass.”
“Me, too,” Sheila said. “This’s crazy. If it wasn’t for Denny …” She shrugged. Peeling off her shirt, she laid it, along with her jeans, on the backseat of the Firebird.
Mary stood appraising her, shaking her head with appreciation. “I love that bathing suit on you. You always look so damned fabulous—it makes me sick.” Mary handed her a towel, which Sheila knotted over the top of her bathing suit.
“You ready?”
“I think so,” Sheila said.
They stepped over the curb, onto the grass. Again, Sheila looked back toward the Cadillac; she had a habit of playing with her necklace when she was preoccupied and now her hand trailed thoughtfully to her throat. My necklace, she thought. “Mary,” she said, “I forgot to take off my necklace. You go ahead. I’ll take it back to the car.”
Mary waved and kept on walking.
If Sheila was going to do something, she knew she had only a minute or two to do it in before Denny would come looking for her. As Mary’s plump shape disappeared inside the privacy fence, Sheila rushed across the parking lot and slipped in alongside the large polished fender of the Cadillac.
The late evening mist had condensed to dew; it stood in bright, glistening beads on the car’s long surfaces. Sheila felt the urge to write something in it with her finger like a child. HI HENRY or even something more private, but she knew she shouldn’t. She couldn’t. She didn’t want to cause him any trouble. When she came to the door handle, she stopped and touched it, rubbing the wet condensation between her fingers.
When the evening was over, the two of them would come out to the car. His wife would walk ahead of him; Mr. Slater would open the door for her on the passenger side and come around to the driver’s door. And … then what? What could she do?
Something should be waiting for him.
Quickly, Sheila lifted the fine, gold chain from around her throat. She pulled it through the press of her fingers until she came to the clasp, which she undid with her fingernails. What would he think? Would he wonder whose it was? She carefully draped the unfastened necklace over his door handle. No, he would realize immediately who had put it there. He had given it to her, once, and now he would give it back to her again.
Turning and glancing at what she had done, Sheila ran across the asphalt with a feeling of elation. The knotted towel came loose and fell; she swooped down and snatched it up, suddenly in a hurry to join the others in the smoky green depths of the pool.
Against the dark flank of Slater’s Cadillac, the thread of gold dangled in the moonlight, sparkling, catching and giving off slivers of brilliance, like the loveliest, the most delicate, the tenderest bait.
4
Henry Slater kept to his regular half-day routine on Saturday morning, stopping at the Beachcomber Cafe for a breakfast roll and coffee and arriving at the office shortly before nine. He knew that on this day nothing could seem even slightly out of the ordinary. He told himself he had nothing to fear, but fear continued to gnaw at him when it was least expected. All his senses were heightened and on the alert. Tonight, he thought. Tonight, it’s over.
The glass door flashed around him as he strode into the secretarial lair, deserted this morning except for Abigail Giddings, his executive assistant, who was speaking on the telephone. Hard-working and efficient, she was a mid
dle-aged woman who had been with him for the last eight years. Without lifting an eyelash, she held up a thin stack of messages as he headed toward the side door of his office.
The sixth-floor mayoral suite was like a pied-à-terre, spacious and austere; entering it always gave him a tremendous sense of power and well being. Windows ran floor to ceiling along two of the walls; his large desk was situated in the crossfire of natural light. From almost any angle, the view of the Pacific was immeasurable. This morning, looking out at the endless gray strata of ocean and sky, he felt as if he had arrived at the end of the world and this office was his home, his last good anchor. He shuffled through the messages, discarding most of them, slipped out of his suit jacket and hung it in the closet. Don’t look at the time, he told himself. Just don’t do it.
After he had forced himself to sit behind his desk, the morning began to go quickly. He took two calls, back-to-back, and then summarily answered with a note or a call the few remaining messages he’d kept. Abigail brought in the morning mail and pulled the files he asked for. She handed him his fourth cup of coffee from the kitchenette, then corrected her notes while he outlined in final draft the strategic details of his upcoming city council presentation. But Slater was no more aware of her and the world surrounding them than he had to be.
Everything seemed distorted and unreal. It was as though a great bell of glass had descended around him, and life reached him through its warp. All of his actions were conscious and mannered, focused outward, but his mind wandered inexorably back to the thought that an unknown murderer was waiting somewhere out in the streets. Only he knew of the malignancy about to visit their lives. Never before had Slater experienced such a commingling of dread and expectation. Tonight, he thought. After tonight, I’ll be all right.
At a quarter to twelve, Abigail came to his office doorway to say she was on her way out. “Don’t forget your umbrella,” she told him. “It’s going to rain.” Slater nodded, smiling at her solicitude, told her to lock up and waved good-bye as she stepped from sight. Listening to the door close behind her, he rubbed his eyes with the tips of his fingers. The desk clock sat directly across from him. The second hand hummed in the stillness of the noon hour; the movement of each minute was like a slow, steely step. He couldn’t keep his eyes from the clock’s face.