Koontz, Dean R. - Hideaway

by Hideaway(Lit)

  years, so I don't act much like a child-"

  "You're certainly acting like one now," Sister Immaculata said, and

  seemed pleased at getting in that zinger.

  But Regina ignored it: "-and what you want, after all, is a child, a

  precious and ignorant blob, so you can show her the world, have the fun

  of watching her learn and blossom, whereas I have already done a lot of

  my blossoming. Intellectual blossoming, that is. I still don't have

  boobs.

  I'm also bored by TV, which means I wouldn't be able to join in a jolly

  family evening around the tube, and I'm allergic to cats in case you've

  got one, and I'm opinionated, which some people find infuriating in a

  ten-year-old girl." She paused, sipped her Pepsi, and smiled at them.

  "There.

  I think that pretty much covers it."

  "She's never like this," Father Jiminez mumbled, more to himself or to

  God than to Hatch and Lindsey. He tossed back half of his Perrier as if

  chugging hard liquor.

  Hatch turned to Lindsey. Her eyes were a little glazed. She didn't

  seem to know what to say, so he returned his attention to the girl. "I

  suppose it's only fair if I tell you something about us."

  Putting aside her drink and starting to get up, Sister Immaculata said,

  "Really, Mr. Harrison, you don't have to put yourself through-"

  Politely waving the nun back into her seat, Hatch said, "No, no. It's

  all right. Regina's a little nervous-"

  "Not particularly," Regina said.

  "Of course, you are," Hatch said.

  "No, I'm not."

  "A little nervous," Hatch insisted, 'just as Lindsey and I are. It's

  okay."

  He smiled at the girl as winningly as he could. "Well, let's see ....

  I've had a lifelong interest in antiques, an affection for things that

  endure and have real character about them, and I have my own antique

  shop with two employees. That's how I earn my living. I don't like

  television much myself or-"What kind of a name is Hatch?" the girl

  interrupted. She giggled as if to imply that it was too funny to be the

  name of anyone except, perhaps, a talking goldfish.

  "My full first name is Hatchford."

  "It's still funny."

  "Blame my mother," Hatch said. "She always thought my dad was going to

  make a lot of money and move us up in society, and she thought Hatchford

  sounded like a really upper-crust name: Hatchford Benjamin Harrison. The

  only thing that would've made it a better name in her mind was if it was

  Hatchford Benjamin Rockefeller."

  "Did he?" the girl asked.

  "Who he, did what?"

  "Did your father make a lot of money?"

  Hatch winked broadly at Lindsey and said, "Looks like we have a gold

  digger on our hands."

  "If you were rich," the girl said, "of course, that would be a

  consideration."

  Sister Immaculata let a hiss of air escape between her teeth, and The

  Nun with No Name leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes with an

  expression of resignation. Father Jiminez got up and, waving Gujilio

  away, went to the wet bar to get something stronger than Perrier, Pepsi,

  or ginger ale. Because neither Hatch nor Lindsey seemed obviously

  offended by the girls behavior, none of the others felt authorized to

  terminate the interview or even further reprimand the child.

  "I'm afraid we're not rich," Hatch told her. "Comfortable, yes. We

  don't want for anything. But we don't drive a Rolls-Royce, and we don't

  wear caviar pajamas."

  A flicker of genuine amusement crossed the girls face, but she quickly

  suppressed it. She looked at Lindsey and said, "What about you?"

  Lindsey blinked. She cleared her throat. "Uh, well, I'm an artist. A

  painter."

  "Like Picasso?"

  "Not that style, no, but an artist like him, yes."

  "I saw a picture once of a bunch of dogs playing poker," the girl said.

  "Did you paint that?"

  Lindsey said, "No, I'm afraid I didn't."

  "Good. It was stupid. I saw a picture once of a bull and a

  bullfighter, it was on velvet, very bright colors. Do you paint in very

  bright colors on velvet?"

  "No," Lindsey said. "But if you like that sort of thing, I could paint

  any scene you wanted on velvet for your room."

  Regina crinkled up her face. "Puli-lecese. I'd rather put a dead cat

  on the wall."

  Nothing surprised the folks from St. Thomas's any more. The younger

  priest actually smiled, and Sister Immaculata murmured "dead cat," not

  In exasperation but as if agreeing that such a bit of macabre decoration

  would, indeed, be preferable to a painting on velvet.

  "My style," Lindsey said, eager to rescue her reputation after offering

  to paint something so tacky, "is generally described as a blending of

  neoclassicism and surrealism. I know that's quite a big mouthful"

  "Well, it's not my favorite sort of thing," Regina said, as if she had a

  hoot-owl's idea in hell what those styles were like and what a blend of

  them might resemble. "If I came to live with you, and if I had a room

  of my own, you wouldn't make me hang a lot of your paintings on my

  walls, would you?" The "your" was emphasized in such a way as to imply

  that she still preferred a dead cat even if velvet was not involved.

  "Not a one," Lindsey assured her.

  "Good."

  "Do you think you might like living with us?" Lindsey asked, and Hatch

  wondered whether that prospect excited or terrified her.

  Abruptly the girl struggled up from the chair, wobbling as she reached

  her feet, as if she might topple headfirst into the coffee table.

  Hatch rose, ready to grab her, even though he suspected it was all part

  of the act.

  When she regained her balance, she put down her glass, from which she'd

  drunk all the Pepsi, and she said, "I've got to go pee, I've got a weak

  bladder. Part of my mutant genes. I can never hold myself. Half the

  time I feel like I'm going to burst in the most embarrassing places,

  like right here in Mr. Gujilio's office, which is another thing you

  should probably consider before taking me into your home. You probably

  have a lot of nice things, being in the antiques and art business, nice

  things you wouldn't want messed up, and here I am lurching into

  everything and breaking it or, worse, I get a bursting bladder attack

  all over something priceless.

  Then you'd ship me back to the orphanage, and I'd be so emotional about

  it, I'd clump up to the roof and throw myself off, a most tragic

  suicide, which none of us really would want to see happen. Nice meeting

  you."

  She turned and wrenched herself across the Persian carpet and out of the

  room in that most unlikely gaitsccccuuuurrrr... THUD!-which no doubt

  sprang from the same well of talent out of which she had drawn her

  goldfish ventriloquism. Her deep-auburn hair swayed and glinted like

  fire.

  They all stood in silence, listening to the girls slowly fading

  footsteps.

  At one point, she bumped against the wall with a solid thunk! that must

  have hurt, then bravely scrape-thudded onward.

  "She does not h
ave a weak bladder," Father Jiminez said, taking a

  swallow from a glassful of amber liquid. He seemed to be drinking

  bourbon now. "That is not part of her disability."

  "She's not really like that," Father Duran said, blinking his owlish

  eyes

  as if smoke had gotten in them. "She's a delightful child. I know

  that's hard for you to believe right now"

  "And she can walk much better than that, immeasurably better," said The

  Nun with No Name. "I don't know what's gotten into her."

  "I do," Sister Immaculata said. She wiped one hand wearily down her

  face. Her eyes were sad. "Two years ago, when she was eight, we

  managed to place her with adoptive parents. A couple in their thirties

  who were told they could never have children of their own. They

  convinced themselves that a disabled child would be a special blessing.

  Then, two weeks after Regina went to live with them, while they were in

  the pre-adoption trial phase, the woman became pregnant. Suddenly they

  were going to have their own child, after all, and the adoption didn't

  seem so wise."

  "And they just brought Regina back?" Lindsey asked. "Just dumped her at

  the orphanage? How terrible."

  "I can't judge them," Sister Immaculata said. "They may have felt they

  didn't have enough love for a child of their own and poor Regina, too,

  in which case they did the right thing. Regina doesn't deserve to be

  raised in a home where every minute of every day she knows she's second

  best, second in love, something of an outsider. Anyway, she was broken

  up by the rejection. She took a long time to get her selfconfidence

  back. And now I think she doesn't want to take another risk."

  They stood in silence.

  The sun was very bright beyond the windows. The palm trees swayed lacy.

  Between the trees lay glimpses of Fashion Island, the Newport Beach

  shopping center and business complex at the perimeter of which Gujilio's

  office was located.

  "Sometimes, with the sensitive ones, a bad experience ruins any chance

  for them. They refuse to try again. I'm afraid our Regina is one of

  those.

  She came in here determined to alienate you and wreck the interview, and

  she succeeded in singular style."

  "It's like somebody who's been in prison all his life," said Father

  Jiminez, "gets paroled, is all excited at first, then finds he can't

  make it on the outside. So he commits a crime just to get back in.

  The institution might be limiting, unsatisfying-but it's known, it's

  safe."

  Salvatore Gujilio bustled around, relieving people of their empty

  glasses. He was still an enormous man by any standard, but even with

  Regina gone from the room, Gujilio no longer dominated it as he had done

  before. He had been forever diminished by that single comparison with

  the delicate, pert-nosed, gray-eyed child.

  "I'm so sorry," Sister Immaculata said, putting a consoling hand on

  Lindsey's shoulder. "We'll try again, my dear. We'll go back to square

  one and match you up with another child, the perfect child this time."

  2

  Lindsey and Hatch left Salvatore Gujilio's office at ten past three that

  Thursday afternoon. They had agreed not to talk about the interview

  until dinner, giving themselves time to contemplate the encounter and

  examine their reactions to it. Neither wanted to make a decision based

  on emotion, or neuance the other to act on initial impression-then live

  to regret it.

  of course, they had never expected the meeting to progress remotely

  along the lines it had gone. Lindsey was eager to talk about it. She

  assumed that their decision was already made, had been made for them by

  the girl, and that there was no point in further contemplation. But

  they had agreed to wait, and Hatch did not seem disposed to violate that

  agreement, so she kept her mouth shut as well.

  She drove their new sporty-red Mitsubishi. Hatch sat in the passenger

  seat with his shades on, one arm out his open window, tapping time

  against the side of the car as he listened to golden oldie rock-'n'-roll

  on the radio. "Please Mister Postman" by the Marvelettes.

  She passed the last of the giant date palms along Newport Center Drive

  and turned left onto Pacific Coast Highway, past vinevered walls, and

  headed south. The late-April day was warm but not hot, with one of

  those intensely blue skies that, toward sunset, would acquire an

  electric luminescence reminiscent of skies in Maxfield Parrish

  paintings. Traffic was light on the Coast Highway, and the ocean

  glimmered like a great swatch of silver- and gold-sequined cloth.

  A quiet exuberance Bowed through Lindsey, as it had done for seven

  weeks. It was exhilaration over just being alive, which was in every

  child but which most adults lost during the process of growing up.

  She'd lost it, too, without realizing. A close encounter with death was

  just the thing to give you back the joie vivre of extreme youth.

  More than two Boors below Hell, naked beneath a blanket on his stained

  and sagging mattress, Vassago passed the daylight hours in sleep. His

  slumber was usually filled with dreams of violated flesh and shattered

  bone, blood and bile, vistas of human skulls. Sometimes he dreamed of

  dying multitudes writhing in agony on barren ground beneath a black sky,

  and he walked among them as a prince of Hell among the common rabble of

  the damned.

  The dreams that occupied him on that day, however, were strange and

  remarkable for their ordinariness. A dark-haired, dark-eyed woman in a

  cherry-red car, viewed from the perspective of an unseen man in the

  passenger seat beside her. Palm trees. Red bougainvillea. The ocean

  spangled with light.

  Harrison's Antiques was at the south end of Laguna Beach, on Pacific

  Coast Highway. It was in a stylish two-story Art Deco building that

  contrasted interestingly with the 18th- and 19th-century merchandise in

  the big display windows.

  Glenda Dockridge, Hatch's assistant and the store manager, was helping

  Lew Booner, their general handyman, with the dusting. In a large

  antique store, dusting was akin to the painting of the Golden Gate

  Bridge: once you reached the far end, it was time to come back to the

  beginning and start all over again. Glenda was in a great mood because

  she had sold a Napoleon III ormolu-mounted black-lacquered cabinet with

  Japanned panels and to the same customer, a 19th century Italian

  polygonaf, tilt top table with elaborate marquetry inlay. They were

  excellent sales-especially considering that she worked on salary against

  a commission.

  While Hatch looked through the day's mail, attended to some

  correspondence, and examined a pair of 18th century rosewood palace

  pedestals with inlaid jade dragons that had arrived from a scout in Hong

  Kong, Lindsey helped Glenda and Lew with the dusting. In her new frame

  of mind, even that chore was a pleasure. It gave her a chance to

  appreciate the details of the antiques-the turn of a linial on a bronze

  lamp, the carving on a table leg, the delicately pierced and

  ha
nd-finished rims on a set of 18th century English porcelains.

  Contemplating the history and cultural meaning of each piece as she

  happily dusted it, she realized that her new attitude had a distinctly

  Zen quality.

  At twilight, sensing the approach of night, Vassago woke and sat up in

  the approximation of a grave that was his home. He was filled with a

  hunger for death and a need to kill.

  The last image he remembered from his dream was of the woman from the

  red car. She was not in the car any more, but in a chamber he could not

  quite see, standing in front of a Chinese screen, wiping it with a white

  cloth. She turned, as if he had spoken to her, and she smiled.

  Her smile was so radiant, so full of life, that Vassago wanted to smash

  her face in with a hammer, break out her teeth, shatter her jaw bones,

  make it impossible for her to smile ever again.

  He had dreamed of her two or three times over the past several weeks.

  The first time she had been in a wheelchair, weeping and laughing

  simultaneously.

  Again, he searched his memory, but he could not recall her face among

  those he had ever seen outside of dreams. He wondered who she was and

  why she visited him when he slept.

  Outside, night fell. He sensed it coming down. A great black drape

  that gave the world a preview of death at the end of every bright and