by Cave, Hugh
Again she shrugged. A little taller than most kids her age, a lot thinner, with dark, silky hair that hung to her shoulders, she seemed more self-possessed than a child her age ought to be. Maybe she'd had to grow up in a hurry when she lost her parents, Lighthill thought.
"Well?" he prompted.
"Raymond isn't a friend of mine, as you put it," she said. "I don't even like him. So why should I remember when I saw him last?"
"He comes here to play, doesn't he?"
"I can't help that. Lots of kids come here to play."
"And they're not all your friends?"
"Well"—again that eloquent shrug—"I'm sure you know how it is. Some are my friends, and others just come because they do."
It was going to be very hard, the chief realized, to back this little girl into a corner. "All right, tell me something." He leaned toward her until the chair he was on creaked warningly under his weight. "You recall the time Raymond was missing before? The day he ran away from school after breaking up that marble game in the school yard?"
"Yes."
"Did he come here that day?" If the boy had been here, and had walked straight home, he would have passed old Tom Ranney's shack on his way to the park, where he had accused Mrs. Fortuna of drowning her baby. This was not the first time the thought had crossed Lighthill's mind, but it might be the best time to establish, once and for all, if Raymond had been here that day.
Almost too quickly, it seemed to him—so very quickly that she might have been trying to clue her niece—Elizabeth Peckham said, "You asked me that before, and I told you no."
"Did I?" He had called a good many people that day in his frantic effort to find the boy and get the mayor off his back, but did not recall having called her. "Anyway, I've never asked Teresa, have I?" Returning his gaze to the child, he said with a frown, "So you didn't see Raymond that day? Is that right?"
"If that is what I said then. I mean if Aunt Elizabeth asked me. I really don't remember now."
"You say you don't like Raymond. Why don't you like him? Any special reason?"
Teresa gazed into space for a moment, seemingly in deep thought. Then a look of innocence replaced her frown. "I don't think I know, actually. Do you have to have a reason for not liking somebody? Can't you just not like them?"
Lighthill saw he was getting nowhere and was not likely to get anywhere so long as the atmosphere remained as it was. Questioning this child was like firing at armor plate. Or at a mile-thick feather pillow she held in front of her. He grinned to admit she was beating him, and then changed his tactics.
"I know one thing, Teresa," he said, solemnly nodding. "The smartest of all the kids who play here is you. I've talked to most of the others, and not one them answered me like a grown-up, the way you do. How would you like me to make you a kind of deputy, so you could be my helper?"
Elizabeth said, "If you please, Chief Lighthill, I hardly think this is a time for frivolity."
The chief managed to look hurt as he turned to her. "I'm not joking, Miss Peckham. I really need help."
"Nonsense."
"No, no. Look, Miss Peckham. The mayor's only son is missing. Do you realize what will happen to me if I don't find him? I'm in big trouble, and I think Teresa can help me." Big-eyed with his own feigned innocence, he turned back to the child. "What do you say, Teresa? Isn't there something you can tell me that will help me find that boy?"
"I don't know what," she said with perfect composure.
"Think. Please."
She thought, or seemed to. A moment or two of silence ensued, at any rate. Then she shrugged again, for the last time. "I'm sorry," she said. "I'm probably not as smart as you think I am."
No, Lighthill thought, giving up, you're a thousand times smarter. With a sigh, he pushed himself up from his chair. "Well, Miss Peckham, thanks. I'm sorry we had to trouble you."
"It's quite all right," Elizabeth said with obvious relish. "I only hope you are now convinced."
The chief said, "Yes, of course," and "Good night," and then, with Blair trailing him, paced out of the room, out of the house, and down the front walk to his car. He was silent as Blair slid in beside him. Not until the house was well behind them did be speak.
"What do you think, Worth? Was that kid telling the truth?"
"It's hard to say, Chief. She's a very cute little girl, I'd say. Cute meaning shrewd and resourceful. She could have been lying her head off."
"Probably was. I had the damnedest feeling she was laughing at me every minute, knowing she was way out of my reach. Could you have handled her any better, you think?"
Blair had to smile at the left-handed concession to his more formal education, which he knew the chief respected. "No," he said without hesitation. "With my lack of experience she'd have had me in the first round. With the first punch, more than likely."
"I'm not sure she didn't get me just as quick. What about the rest of it? The house, I mean. Was everything what it seemed to be?"
"No, Chief."
"What caught your eye?"
"That powder in the empty room upstairs, for one thing. If it was roach powder, why was it only in that room?"
"And why in the middle of the room?" Lighthill said. "The place to look for roaches is around the baseboards. Tell me something else. How come, if she never uses the old man's study, she had the key on her? From the time we walked into the house, she was never out of our sight. She couldn't have gone somewhere and got it. It was right there in the pocket of her dress."
"Maybe she'd been cleaning the room, Chief."
"At this hour?"
"M'm. I guess not."
They were almost at the station when Blair spoke again. "Chief?"
"Yes?"
"There was something else. I can't put my finger on it, but there was something in that study."
"The books, maybe?"
"Maybe. I just don't know. But it's itching me like a dose of poison oak, and if I scratch hard enough I'll come up with it."
13
Olive Jansen put down the telephone and frowned at her daughter. The call from Chief Lighthill had upset her. Her mind's version of the conversation revolved in her head like a Fourth-of-July pinwheel, throwing off sparks.
"Olive, the Hostetter boy is missing again and I want to ask Jerri if she was at the Peckham house today and saw him there."
"She isn't allowed to go there, Chief."
"But she may know if he went there or was planning to." A pause, while she had put the question to Jerri and got a mumbled answer. "She doesn't know, Chief. She didn't talk to him in school today."
On the floor of the apartment living room Jerri now seemed suspiciously engrossed in a picture book for children. Olive watched her for some time, and then said, "Did you see the Hostetter boy today?"
"No, Mommy."
"You were late gettin' home from school. Mrs. Trevett told me it was after four when you showed up. Where were you?"
"I played around school a little while."
"Who with?"
"I don't remember. Teresa was there. And Debbie."
"Why don't you look at me when I'm talkin' to you? Is that book so great you can't lay it down? You're lyin', aren't you?"
Closing the book, Jerri lifted her head and silently returned her mother's gaze.
"What's wrong with your eyes?" Olive said.
"Wrong?"
Olive got up and went to her. Bending over, she put a hand under the child's chin and peered into her eyes. "They're red. You been readin' too much."
"Yes, Mommy."
"I want to talk to you, anyway. Put your book away and sit in a chair." Returning to her own chair, Olive waited for her daughter to obey. Then she said, "I want to go over what you told Keith and Melanie when they came here Friday after you spent the day at the nursery. I know we talked about it after, but I'm not satisfied."
Jerri gazed at her in silence, not squirming, not even blinking. There really was something wrong with the child's eyes, Oliv
e thought. Maybe she should call Doc.
"Suppose we just begin again at the beginnin'," she said. "You told us the only time you left Vin at the nursery was to go to the john. Vin says no. He says he discovered you missin' three or four times when you was—when you were workin'. You wandered off to play in other parts of the nursery, he says. He called to you and you answered. Now who of you is lyin'?"
"I never went to where the trees were pulled up, Mommy."
"But you did leave him."
"Not for long. Honest."
"Why'd you tell us you only left him to go to the john?"
"You were mad at me."
"I'm gonna be a whole heap madder if I don't get the truth out of you. You better believe me. Now if you never went to where the plants were tore up, how'd your footprints get there? Answer me that."
"I told you. There was another girl. She came in car with her mother."
"Baby, both Vin and Keith say that just isn't so. No customer came with any child."
"They didn't see her. Her mother left her in the car. But she didn't stay in the car." Jerri voiced an exaggerated sigh. "I've already told you this, Mommy. It's true."
And that's the one hope I have to cling to, Olive thought: Even if you lied about other things, there may really have been a little girl in a car.
It just might be true. Keith, of course, had taken the shoes Jerri wore that day and compared them with the prints, and there was no doubt the shoes and the prints matched. But she had bought those at Moody's in Nebulon. Plenty of other Nebulon children must be wearing the same kind and size.
But if the girl in the car was just a figment of Jerri's imagination—if she herself had pulled up those plants—the big question had to be why. Was it to make trouble for Vin, just as she had tried to get him in trouble at the concert?
Olive had been reading a book on the problems of divorced women. It contained a discussion of the hostility some children felt toward their stepfathers. Sometimes the feeling was not even recognized by the child, the book said. It could be subconscious.
Could this be the answer to Jerri's behavior? Was she, even without knowing it, revolting against having Vin for a father? That would explain the scene at the concert. It would explain her tearing up the young trees to get Vin in trouble with Keith Wilding. But what about the kitten?
"Jerri."
"Yes, Mommy?"
"I been thinkin'. We'll be movin' out of this apartment soon and goin' to the new house. Almost everybody who lives in a house has a pet of some kind. You know? A dog or a cat. Should we get a cat, you think? A kitten?"
"Oh yes, Mommy!"
"You like kittens?"
"Yes!"
"Then why'd you kill the one in the nursery?"
"Mommy, I didn't. I told you it wasn't me."
The four of them—Mel and Keith, she and Vin—had taken Jerri back to the nursery Friday evening to confront her with the uprooted trees and demand an explanation. To make her look again at what she had done to the kitten. To find out what the symbol or diagram meant. She had denied everything, of course. She still did. But there was something wrong all the same . . . and not just with her eyes.
If pressed to be specific about what was wrong, Olive could only have said the child seemed afraid of something. Yes. She had not been afraid when questioned Friday. Over the weekend she had seemed quite normal. But on Monday when Olive returned from work and picked her up at Mrs. Trevett's, downstairs, there had been something wrong.
Mrs. Trevett had noticed it too. "Something must have happened at school," she said. "The minute Jerri walked in here, I could tell she was upset."
"Did anything happen at school today, baby?" Olive had asked her daughter.
"No, Mommy."
"What are you so jumpy about, then?"
"I'm not."
She was, though. Usually in the evening she watched TV or read a book or looked at magazines. She liked to draw—for a seven-year-old she was certainly artistic —and would often spend hours doing that. But Monday evening she had seemed unable to settle down. It was one thing after another, nothing lasting for more than a few minutes, until Olive, trying to do some ironing, became jittery herself and said, "For God's sake, Jerri, light someplace and do somethin'!"
"Mommy?"
"Now what?"
"Will Keith tell people what happened at the nursery?"
"I don't know."
"Will it be in the paper?"
"I suppose so, if he tells the police. If you didn't have anythin' to do with it, why should you care?"
"Will it rain tonight, Mommy?"
"Rain?" Apparently something had happened at school. "You mean hard enough so you won't have to go to school tomorrow?"
"Not for that. Just will it rain?"
"For God's sake, how do I know?"
It hadn't.
Yesterday, Tuesday, Jerri's nervousness had been even more obvious. She had gone to school scared and come back more so. In the evening she had asked whether there was anything in the paper about what "that girl in the car" had done at the nursery.
"No," Olive said. "And I don't suppose there will be. But I wish I knew why you're so interested."
"Will it rain tonight, Mommy?"
"That too. Why do you want it to rain?"
"Well, Keith put the plants back in the ground, didn't he? Rain will make them grow."
Olive had thought of something and tossed it into the conversation on the mere chance it might hit home. "And a good rain would wash away that picture you scratched in the path, wouldn't it?" She had said this in the apartment's tiny kitchenette while preparing supper. Jerri was in the doorway.
The child's response had been so totally unexpected, it caused her to juggle a plate and drop it. The plate broke on the floor while Jerri's voice still screamed, "I didn't make any picture in the path! I didn't! Don't say I did!"
The loss of the plate had angered Olive and she marched to the doorway. Sitting on her heels, she reached out and gripped Jerri's shoulders. "Now that'll be just quite enough!" she said sharply. "That's just all I want to hear out of you!"
Tears welled in her daughter's eyes. "I didn't do it, Mommy. Please don't say I did."
"So the girl in the car did it. All right. And you want rain so the plants'll grow again. I hear you. I don't believe a word you're tellin' me, but I hear you. Now go and wash for supper."
In the night it had rained, and this morning Jerri had seemed herself again, an innocent little girl with no problems. But now in the evening the fear seemed to be back. Olive gazed at her daughter, seated woodenly in a chair facing her, and wondered again if she ought to call Doc Broderick.
If she did, what would she say? "Jerri doesn't look right, Doc. She's pale. She acts as though something happened to frighten her again, but I can't think what it might be. She was late getting home from school today. Says she played around school with some of the kids. I'm not sure I believe her. Oh God, Doc, I don't know what to believe lately. I just don't."
Uh-uh. She couldn't be as vague as that.
"I think you ought to go to bed, baby," she said. "You look tired."
"Mommy, when will we move to the new house?"
"I'm not sure. Soon, though."
"Will I be going to a different school?"
"No, you'll still be in this district. Why? Don't you like the school you go to?"
Jerri did not have to answer that. Before she could do so there was a drumming of fingers on the hall door, a key turned in the lock, and Vin Otto walked in. "Hi." He kissed Olive, walked over to Jerri and touched his lips to the end of her nose. "I brought some ice cream from Ziegler's." He reached for Jerri's hand. "Come, sweetheart. Help me in the kitchen."
They ate butterscotch ice cream, Jerri's favorite flavor, and Vin talked about a woman who had come to the nursery asking for peanut trees. She had been reading a columnist in a Fort Lauderdale paper who kept up a running joke about his peanut-tree farm. It was good to laugh again, Olive tho
ught. It was wonderful to hear Jerri laugh. "Peanuts don't grow on trees," Jerri said primly. "They grow in the ground."
Vin carried the dishes to the kitchen and washed them. Returning, he took from his shirt pocket a folded yellow envelope that had the words ELLSTROM'S PHOTO STUDIO printed on it. "Keith snapped some pictures of what happened at the nursery," he said. "It is a good thing he did, because the rain last night washed away the footprints and the diagram." He drew the prints out of the envelope and handed them to Olive.
She looked at them closely, placing each on the small table beside her chair as she finished with it. There were several photos of the uprooted exotics, showing the footprints among them. Two of the kitten. One of the diagrams scratched in the dirt where the paths crossed. "I suppose he had to do it," she said, shaking her head. "It's a thing I'd rather forget, though, I can tell you."
"All of us. But he feels we cannot be sure until we have seen the end of it."
"Oh God. Don't say that."
"We should have a record in the event something more happens, Keith says. It is strange. When I went for these today, Willard Ellstrom seemed quite interested in that one of the diagram. He inquired where it was taken. His wife discovered a drawing just like it in the school yard, he told me. The Hostetter boy did it. By the way, I bought something for the new house today at Caxton's. It was on sale."
"Oh? What?"
"Have you today's paper? There is a picture in the Caxton ad."
"It's in the bedroom; I'll get it," she said. But he followed her in and opened the newspaper on the bed, and after showing her the picture of the lamp he had bought, took her in his arms for a moment of loving. He knew she liked the lamp. She had stopped to admire it one day when they were shopping for something else.
They returned to the living room hand in hand and Olive abruptly halted. "What's that smell?" she said. She turned toward the kitchen and saw her daughter standing at the gas stove, holding something over a blazing burner.
"Jerri!" She raced in and grabbed the child's arm, pulling her away. "What do you think you're doing?"
The child held a flaming photograph but dropped it as the line of yellow fire reached her thumb and forefinger. Stepping back from it, she began to tremble. Her hands shook wildly. Her Cupid's-bow mouth would not be still. All the color had vanished from her face.