Quicksand Pond

by Janet Taylor Lisle

  “I would like to know what this is all about,” her father’s voice says, strong and slow. “What is it you want? Money?”

  “Nothing, pal,” a rough voice says. “We already got ours.”

  Somebody laughs. A dry, coughing chuckle.

  Henrietta runs to the hall banister and looks over. She crouches down behind it. Her father and mother are standing in their bedclothes in the downstairs foyer. The front door is wide open. The man in the cap and gray overcoat is looking over his shoulder at someone in the dining room. He says, “Not now. We’ll get that stuff after.”

  “Hey, close that door,” another voice says. “You want to wake up the whole world?”

  Through the banister Henrietta can see only the feet of this speaker. Hunting boots laced up halfway. And wet. The leather is sodden. Gray with mud.

  The person in the dining room comes into view, moving toward the front door. He closes it and turns around. He’s wearing an overcoat too and has reddish hair, thinning on top. His trousers are stained and dirty. There’s a gun in his hand, a large, dark pistol. He holds it out at arm’s length in front of him.

  Her father speaks, using the voice of reason Henrietta knows so well. He sounds so calm, so perfectly in control, that Henrietta relaxes her grip on the banister railing. Everything will be fine now. The problem will be fixed. In a moment she will run downstairs to her mother, or her mother will look up at her and smile. Her father speaks, steadily and clearly:

  “There’s no need for all this. Just tell us what you want. If someone has paid you, I will pay you more. Right now. I have cash upstairs. My wife has jewelry here. You can take what you like. There’s plenty to go around. All three of you will find yourselves well compensated. The authorities need not know. We’ll keep this among ourselves, shall we? Have we met before? I don’t think we have. Let me introduce myself. I am George C. Cutting, president and owner of the Providence Evening News.”

  After his speech there’s a long pause until the man with the dry laugh laughs again. The man wearing the cap takes a step toward her father and says, “Sorry, buddy.”

  He has a bigger gun, one with a fat barrel. He raises it, tucks the back part against the gray overcoat, and fires with one hand, a tremendous blast. Henrietta jumps. The noise is like an earthquake. Her eyes squeeze shut. She tries to open them, but for some reason the lids are sealed against her face. She fights to open them before the next blast, the second one she knows is coming. If she could just open her eyes, she might stop this horrible dream. She might hold the universe still, go back in time to before any of this happened. . . .

  The second explosion goes off and a whole world bursts inside her head. Henrietta screams, squashing her face between her hands. She screams and screams and screams and screams until a blinding light goes on suddenly.

  A voice says: “Miss Cutting? Henrietta! Stop that! You are all right. I’m here, look at me. Look! It’s me, Mrs. Parks. You’ve had another dream. It’s just a dream. You’re in bed. You’ve been asleep. There’s nothing to be afraid of. That’s better. Quiet now. Deep breaths. Calm yourself. You know these dreams. You know they’re only dreams. There now, nothing can hurt you. It’s only in your head. Only in your head. Only in your head.”

  * * *

  In a little while, or perhaps it was a long while, Henrietta returned to the real world. She remembered that she was no longer the girl holding on to the banister in the hall. She remembered Sally Parks, who had gone down to the kitchen for a glass of juice and was now offering it to her as she lay stiffly, with knotted fists, on the bed. She sat up for a spoonful of sleep medicine and lay back on the pillows.

  “I’m so sorry to bother you,” she said to Sally in a low voice. And truly, she was sorry, ashamed that after all these years that dream, that terrible dream, should still find its way into her sleeping head.

  “No bother,” Sally said. “It’s what I’m paid for. Don’t worry yourself about it.”

  Henrietta nodded. “I think I’ll sleep now.”

  “I’ll leave the glass by your bed. In case you’d like another sip.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I think now we’d better have the night-light on,” Sally said firmly.

  Henrietta did not reply. She waited for Sally Parks to leave. When she was sure the woman had reached the far end of the hall (Sally slept in a room once reserved for her father’s writer friends; Robert Frost had stayed there one time), Henrietta got up, crossed to the night-light, switched it off, and returned to bed. The dark was safer, she knew from experience. You could hide in the dark. Should someone come looking for you, they might not see you in a dark room, in a dark corner. If you were quiet, they might pass you by. You must not cry. You must barely breathe. You must freeze your body, freeze your mind. You must not move a muscle until the killers go away.

  FOURTEEN

  Sometime during the night the weather changed. Waking at five a.m. in his closet-size room, Richard Kettel heard the first rain of their summer vacation spattering against the screen. He got up to close the window and padded down the hall to the bathroom. He was coming back to bed when he heard a noise downstairs. A soft rustle of movement.

  “Jessie?”

  He thought it must be Jessie. She was the early riser in the house. Julia slept the sleep of the teenage dead until eight and beyond. Jonathan rarely woke before seven. He was growing so fast these days. It wasn’t unusual for him to be out of commission for a solid ten hours.

  “Jessica!”

  There was no answer. The rustle had stopped.

  Richard stood in his boxers at the top of the stairs and said his daughter’s name a third time. When there was still no answer, he walked to his children’s shared bedroom at the end of the hall and looked in.

  They were both in bed, sound asleep. Julia was in her room too.

  He returned to the stairs and walked boldly down. A draft of cool, damp air hit his face as he rounded into the dim living room. The long-necked lamps appeared almost human at first, wiry shapes standing guard over the couch. He looked past them into the kitchen and saw that the back door was wide open, swinging in the rainy breeze.

  So that was it. The wind had worried the old wooden latch and blown the door open. He walked across the room and into the kitchen to close it.

  A furtive movement in the pantry corner caught his eye. He spun around in time to see a small, lithe form stooped over the trash container, grubbing inside. The invader reared up, faced him with an animal snarl, and sprang for the door. Richard Kettel clutched the counter and cried out in alarm. By the time he’d recovered and raced to look outside, the thing was gone, slipped away into the dense vegetation that hid the pond.

  A dog, he thought it was. A wild dog with small, pointed teeth and hungry eyes. “Ravenous” was the word he used to his children. Jessie arrived in the kitchen seconds later. A minute afterward Jonathan stumbled in. Both had been woken by their father’s cry. Julia, of course, slept through the entire incident.

  “All I know is the back door was closed when I came home,” she said, a touch defensively, when she finally came down for breakfast around eight thirty.

  “And what time was that, anyway?”

  Her father, sipping his third espresso of the day at the kitchen table, gave her an accusing look. “What’s happened to our midnight curfew?”

  “Sorry. I know. I was a little late.”

  “A little! It was close to two a.m. by my clock.”

  “No, it wasn’t, Dad! I was here long before one.”

  “Julia, I saw the headlights when you came back. It was definitely two a.m.”

  “What headlights? I wasn’t in a car. I walked home from the beach.”

  Richard Kettel surveyed his daughter’s face. “There were headlights that came down our driveway. What was it? A wrong turn?”

  “Don’t ask me. I was asleep.” Julia’s eyes landed hard on her father. “What, you don’t believe me?’

  “What can I s
ay?”

  “That you believe me.”

  “So, Dad, back to the main subject, what did come in our kitchen last night?” Jessie asked. “Was it really a dog?”

  “Something was eating our garbage,” her father said. “I don’t know what. Maybe a big cat. It had a lot of gray hair.”

  “Philip said there’s a family of foxes that lives across the pond,” Jonathan said. “It could’ve been one of them. They make these horrible screaming sounds at night.”

  Julia nodded. “Actually, I might’ve heard that.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know. A few nights ago. Late.”

  Her father spoke up. “Listen, Julia. I don’t want you walking home by yourself from the beach anymore. Not at that hour. Get a ride with one of the kids, okay? It shouldn’t be that hard.”

  “It isn’t, except Aaron Bostwick keeps asking me and I don’t want to ride with him. He doesn’t talk. He just stares at me and waits for me to say something.”

  “So go with one of the girls. They’ve all got cars around here,” her father said. “I’ve never seen so many kids with fancy cars and nothing to do. When I was young, we had bikes and summer jobs.”

  Jessie said, a little meanly, “How about Ripley Schute? I bet he has a Mercedes.”

  “Actually, he has a vintage Thunderbird.” Julia swept her dark, sleep-tousled hair back from her face with both hands. “He isn’t somebody you can just ask like that. He’s kind of . . .”

  “Older,” Jessie said. “Oh yeah, that’s right. He’s going to Princeton in the fall.”

  “Shut up! It has nothing to do with that.”

  “A vintage Thunderbird. Wow! And Aaron Bostwick can’t even talk.”

  “Well, he can’t. Or he doesn’t. You were there, you saw him. Nobody in our group can stand him. He’s a weirdo.”

  “Another weirdo. There are so many around here.”

  “I am not the only one who thinks that!”

  It was as this conversation was heating up in the kitchen that their father, entering the living room, made another discovery. His laptop was not in its usual place.

  “It was on the coffee table last night,” he said from the living room. “Did somebody borrow it?” He came back and gazed at his three children, who all shook their heads.

  Jessie said, “Are you sure you didn’t take it upstairs?”

  He definitely had not. A trip to his room proved him right. The laptop was not in the kitchen, not in the bathroom, not fallen down behind a chair. It was not anywhere in the house.

  Jonathan said eagerly, “I bet somebody stoled it. In the night!”

  A ridiculous statement.

  Until they began to think about it. The lights at two a.m. The back door wide open.

  “Hey, Dad. Could the animal that was eating our garbage have stolen your laptop?”

  “Julia, please! This is serious.”

  “The animal must’ve come in after,” Jessie said. “It probably smelled the garbage and came in. The back door must’ve already been open. Some person must’ve come in.”

  “Someone came in our house last night?” Julia looked alarmed.

  “What about the headlights you saw?” Jessie asked her father.

  “Well, I thought it was headlights because I thought it was Julia coming home. I was half-asleep.”

  “It could’ve been a flashlight,” Julia said. “That would make more sense. Especially if someone was sneaking around here in the dark.” She sent Jessie a meaningful glance. “If that someone found the back door unlocked, which it always is, they just might have decided to come in—”

  “Wait a minute,” Jessie interrupted.

  “And look around. And there’s this nice laptop just sitting on—”

  “What are you saying, Julia?”

  “Well, there’s only one person I know of who hangs around this house at strange hours watching us.”

  “She has never been in this house,” Jessie said. “She wouldn’t do that.”

  “Oh really?” Julia’s dark lashes curved into crescents. “Did you know she got caught at a CVS shoplifting some stuff?”

  “That was a mistake. She forgot to pay.”

  “Oh, right. She walked out with a load of stuff in a backpack and she forgot to pay?”

  “How do you know that?”

  “People in town know about her, about her family. They know at the beach, too.”

  “Well, what did she take?”

  “Everything, I guess. Books, pens, lipstick, skin cream. What would you take from a CVS?”

  “I don’t know, Julia. What would you take?”

  “I wouldn’t bother taking anything,” Julia sniffed. “There’s nothing in a CVS that’s worth the risk of doing that. Except drugs, which I guess she didn’t take. If she’d stolen them, she wouldn’t be hanging around here at all. She’d already be in jail.”

  “Okay, okay, that’s enough.” Their father stepped between them. “I’m sure Terri did not steal my laptop. Why would she? Jessie is her friend.”

  “I don’t know,” Julia said, “but I bet I’m right. And anyway, where is she this morning?”

  Jonathan ran across the living room to the front door and tugged it open. “Not here!” he yelled back.

  Julia nodded. “So there you are.”

  FIFTEEN

  Jessie knew the safest thing would be to stay away from Terri Carr.

  She didn’t think Terri was a bad person. She didn’t believe she’d stolen the laptop. It was everything else that made up the frightening swamp around her: her violent father; her desperate family; their hopeless, dead-end lives. No wonder Terri thought she had to carry a knife. And shoplifting. Of course anyone who had to steal from her own father might turn to that. Jessie didn’t blame Terri. She sympathized with her and felt sorry that she was stuck where she was. She just didn’t want to get any closer.

  For a while it seemed possible that she wouldn’t have to. The raft was in Terri’s hands now, which made it fair to call it quits. Terri had taken the raft back up the pond to her house. Or she was somewhere hiding out on it, living on it the way she’d said she wanted to. When three days went by without any sign of her, Jessie began to believe that she’d disappeared for good, and she was relieved. The break-in at the garage had rattled her. The more she thought about it, the more she saw how close she’d come to real danger. She might have run into some druggies up there and been hurt. She might be dragged in even now, accused of stealing if the police found the track leading down to the pond.

  “Still no Terri,” Jonathan would say, looking out the front door in the mornings. He’d say it to Jessie in the kitchen at breakfast, and again to Julia when she appeared an hour later.

  “Right,” Julia answered one morning. “It’s more and more obvious that she did it. Dad should report her to the police. She was never your friend, Jessie. She wanted our stuff. She got our laptop and now she’s taken off.”

  “Jessie, could that be true?” her father said. He liked Terri. He didn’t want to involve her if he didn’t have to.

  “No! It’s not true!”

  Jessie wanted to end things with Terri, but she didn’t want to lie about her. She explained again: “Look, the reason Terri’s not here is because of something that happened between us. We decided to go our separate ways. It has nothing to do with the laptop.”

  Julia laughed. “You’re trying to protect her.”

  “I’m not!”

  “Well, everyone I’ve told says there’s absolutely no doubt she’s the one. She has a reputation.”

  “Why are you telling people anything? It’s none of their business!”

  “It’s everybody’s business when somebody starts breaking into houses.”

  “Julia! That is so arrogant. You can’t talk that way about a person when you’re not even sure.”

  “But I am sure, Jessie. There’s nobody else. Terri has stolen stuff before and she’ll do it again. Dad, you should call the
police. You should call them right now!”

  “All right, all right.” He gave in at last. He wouldn’t telephone. Everything sounded so drastic on the phone. “I’ll go up to the station and have a friendly chat. Anyone want to come with me?”

  “Me! Me!” Jonathan said. “I’ve never been in a police station.”

  “You can go if you behave and keep quiet,” his father said. “Jessie, why don’t you come too? I’d think that you’d want to get out of the house for a change.”

  “No, thank you,” Jessie said. The thought of the police made her sick.

  “She won’t go,” Julia said. “She’s planning to spend the rest of this vacation moping in her room. She’s already been in there for three solid days.”

  “Shut up, Julia. Why don’t you go with Dad? You’re the one who’s accusing everybody.”

  “I would, but I promised Rip I’d meet him at the beach. He’s taking me to play tennis at the club later.”

  “Coward!” Jessie said, and stormed upstairs.

  She wasn’t moping in her room, she was reading. No she wasn’t, she was writing a letter to her mother. Except the letter wouldn’t start. Too much had happened. Then, unexpectedly, she was writing to Terri. She was explaining why things hadn’t worked out between them, even though she really liked Terri and had wanted things to work.

  The trouble was (Jessie wrote) that she was way behind on her summer reading and had to stay home to do it.

  The trouble was that their friendship had no future, since Jessie lived in Pittsburgh and would probably never be back to this town again.

  The trouble was that they came from different kinds of families, families that wouldn’t get along, that were on completely different wavelengths and understood different things about how the world worked and . . .

  Jessie tore up the letter and threw it away.