Bring Me Children

by David Martin

  Carl glances over at Mary and sees how miserable she looks. The deputy feels vaguely sorry for her — but if the Doc makes Mary go to bed with him, Carl ain’t saying no.

  “Another thing, she has a certain odor problem —”

  “Stop it!” Mary screams.

  Quinndell laughs.

  When Mary is getting a Kleenex out of her shoulder bag, she sees the wooden box. Biting her lower lip, she takes the box in hand.

  “I’ll have to be in the room of course,” the doctor is saying. “When you and Carl ‘do it.’ The boy may need some pointers, although with an old pro like you —”

  Mary walks quickly to Quinndell and slaps the box down on the desk, right in front of him. “I found it by the front door yesterday morning.”

  Still smiling, he runs his hands over the box’s exterior, picks it up, puts it back down, gets the lid open, then touches what’s inside.

  “I would describe it as a little white coffin,” Mary says. “What you’re feeling now is a wax figure with hair and feathers on it. Wrapped in string. Someone has cut out a bunch of Qs — the letter Q — and stuck them all over the figure.”

  Then Mary stands there enjoying the doctor lose his smile.

  “Lyon gave you this.”

  “No, I found it by the front door yesterday morning before he got here.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me then?”

  Mary doesn’t answer.

  “If I thought you were in this with Lyon I’d take you to Mr. Gigli right now.”

  “Mr. Gigli!” Carl shouts with a laugh.

  Mary insists that she’s had nothing to do with John Lyon. “I never even talked to him until he showed up here yesterday. I’m sorry, I should’ve brought it to you right away but I didn’t want to upset you.”

  “Didn’t want to upset me.” Quinndell pushes the box away with the tips of his fingers. “Take this and do something with it.”

  Mary grabs the box, closes it, and stuffs it back in her shoulder bag.

  Now it is Quinndell who is suddenly all business. “Carl!”

  “Right here, Doc.”

  “I called you because our ambitious sheriff has turned up missing. The sudden appearance of John Lyon may have given Stone a case of cold feet, I want you to go to his place and see if he’s packed up.”

  “You got it, Doc.”

  “Then go out to that rental cabin and sneak up on John Lyon — if such a thing is possible for you — and find out if anyone is staying with him. Specifically a black woman. Maybe she’s not dead after all, Claire and Lyon in this together, cooking up some kind of …” Quinndell loses his thought. Mary can’t help smiling.

  Carl finally says, “Still here, Doc.”

  “Yes.” The doctor is distracted. “After you find out who’s staying at the cabin, drive over to Randolph Welby’s place and bring the little idiot back here, I’ll talk to him myself.”

  “That’s where the sheriff was heading last time he reported.”

  “I know that, Carl.”

  “I don’t like them dogs of his.”

  “Carl, I don’t care what you like, you will do precisely as I say — understand?”

  “Yeah,” the deputy responds like a chastised child, a four-hundred-and-thirty-five-pound chastised child.

  “And your assignment, Mary …” Quinndell is sweating, which worries Mary because she’s not sure she’s ever seen him sweat before. “Your assignment is to take off your clothes and get down on all fours and bark, crawl around on the floor barking like the BITCH YOU ARE!”

  Mary stands there frozen. He’s scary enough when he’s methodical in his humiliations, but his rages are terrifying.

  “Are you taking off your clothes?”

  “She’s just standing there,” Carl says.

  Quinndell swivels in his chair, bends to open a safe, and comes up with two white business envelopes. “Here they are, Mary! Just as I promised. You know I always keep my word.” Then he opens the desk’s center drawer and finds a lighter. “I’ll burn them!” he tells her. “Swear to God I’ll burn them!” He flicks the lighter three times before he gets a flame — and then plays that flame close to the corners of the envelopes.

  “Please don’t make me do this,” she begs.

  “Do it! I want Carl to see what he’s getting. That’s right, Carl, if you complete your tasks successfully, when you return here, Mary will be waiting in all her glory, naked and on all fours, you can take her like you were fucking a sheep. Now do it, Mary!”

  She is trembling, crying, slowly working the buttons of her blouse.

  “Goddamn you!” Quinndell shouts, lighting the corner of one envelope.

  “I’m doing it!” she screams.

  “Yeah, she is, Doc!” Carl adds.

  Quinndell snuffs out the flame and waits a moment before asking, “Well?”

  “She’s got her blouse undone but she ain’t took it off yet,” Carl informs him.

  “Come on, Mary, we’re on a tight schedule.”

  She slips the blouse off and then steps out of her shorts before making the mistake of looking at Carl, who has pushed the tip of his tongue between his teeth, causing him to appear as if he had three lips, the center one pink, fat, and wet.

  “I think she’s going to throw up, Doc.”

  Quinndell laughs.

  Closing her eyes, Mary removes her bra and panties before dropping to the floor on her hands and knees.

  “She’s doing it, Doc!” Carl crows. “Buck naked and down on all fours like a dog!”

  Quinndell returns the envelopes to the safe and then stands, pulling down his suitcoat and adjusting his cuffs. He has regained control, his voice once again smoothly modulated. “I don’t hear any barking,” he says quietly.

  “Yeah,” Carl shouts, well into the spirit of things, “go on and bark! And she ain’t supposed to be staying there in one spot, she’s supposed to be moving around, ain’t she, Doc?”

  “Indeed she is.” The doctor takes out his handkerchief again, wiping his brow and then dabbing delicately at the moisture beneath his glass eyes. “Mary?”

  Sobbing now, hating herself as much as she does Dr. Quinndell, Mary begins her crawl about the room, sobbing and barking.

  “Louder,” Quinndell says softly. “Bark louder, dear.”

  CHAPTER 24

  John Lyon awakens alone in bed that Tuesday morning, taking a moment to lie there and recall the events of last night, feeling a dull but not altogether unpleasant ache in his pubic bone. She wouldn’t answer his questions last night, promising to tell him whatever he wanted to know in the morning — but now Lyon assumes the woman is once again gone. Then he smells breakfast.

  He uses the bathroom, pulls on a pair of slacks and a shirt, hurrying into the kitchen to see her standing at the stove with her back to him. She’s wearing one of his teeshirts, which strikes her just below the ass, bare-legged and barefooted and nothing on under that white cotton teeshirt. When she stirs whatever it is she’s cooking in that frying pan, her ass shakes tautly.

  “Good morning,” he says, the woman turning and smiling at him. He can see her large, dark nipples beneath the teeshirt.

  “Sit down, John. I didn’t have much to work with but it’ll pass for breakfast.”

  “Smells good.”

  She serves him and pours two cups of coffee, taking hers to the opposite end of the table.

  “Aren’t you eating?” he asks.

  “No, you go ahead.”

  Lyon looks at the plateful of food — corned beef hash from one of the cans he brought, combined with onions and salsa (he doesn’t know where they came from). He picks up the fork but then hesitates, wondering why she isn’t having any.

  “According to some hoodoo beliefs,” she tells him, “if a woman mixes in her menstrual blood with a man’s food and then watches him eat it, he will forever be powerless to betray her.” She has her hand on her chin, watching Lyon.

  He chuckles nervously. “Hoodoo?�
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  “It’s an African-American reference to voodoo.”

  “Oh.”

  She smiles over the cup of coffee she’s bringing to her mouth, waiting to see if he’s going to eat.

  “Menstrual blood, huh?” Lyon asks, using his fork to move the hash around. “You certainly are a strange young woman.” Then he figures, what the hell, he’s famished. Forking in the food, he tells her how good it tastes.

  She keeps watching him.

  “I have a million questions,” he says between bites.

  “I told you I would answer all your questions this morning.”

  “What’re you doing here? How did you get here? Where do you keep disappearing to?”

  “Whoa.”

  “Okay, what’s your name?”

  “Claire Cept.”

  Lyon puts down his fork and looks away.

  “The Claire Cept you met in New York, John, was my grandmother — my mother’s mother, after whom I was named.”

  “Oh.”

  “And the reason I’m here is to help you prove Claire’s accusations against Quinndell — because I promised my grandmother I would.”

  “Why the crate or coffin or whatever it was, and what happened to it?”

  “Yes, well, that takes a bit of explanation.”

  “You were awake the entire time, weren’t you?”

  She doesn’t reply but he can tell by her expression that she was.

  “God, what you must think of me.”

  “It was an unusual evening.”

  Lyon is embarrassed as he stares into her dark eyes, marveling at how small she seems in his big white teeshirt. “How old are you?”

  “Fourteen,” she answers without hesitation.

  Lyon stops breathing.

  And it isn’t until she laughs that he resumes breathing. Then he asks, “How old — really?”

  “Of all the things I thought you’d be worried about, my age isn’t one of them. I’m twenty-six, a professor of American folklore at NYU.”

  He wonders if this is another joke. “Really?”

  “Yes. My mother was the youngest of Claire’s four daughters and I’m one of eleven grandchildren. I have two older sisters. I was orphaned by my parents’ divorce, I went to live with Claire. I took her last name. She raised me from age eight until I went to college. And she’s been living with me in New York for the past year or so. I watched her deteriorate, getting worse every day because of Mason Quinndell, her crusade against him, and I promised her I would come here to help you.”

  “But why the crate?”

  “Do I get to ask questions about you too?”

  “I’m afraid my story is not very interesting.”

  “I want to hear it anyway. Are your parents living?”

  “No. My father was a corporate executive and my mother was devoted to playing the piano. I have one sister, Millie. The rule in our family was, Don’t talk about it. So that’s how I grew up, learning to keep a lid on what I was feeling. It was safer that way.” He doesn’t tell her about his mother’s queer behavior. Neither does he tell Claire about his father’s nightly routine, closing himself up in his study, drinking until he passed out, spending the night there instead of in bed with his wife. What Lyon does tell Claire is that his parents were nice. “Not particularly demonstrative but nice. They were always sort of … I don’t know, distracted, I guess you’d say. My sister has two sons and a daughter but I haven’t seen any of them in years. I’ve always been a loner. When I’m around people too long they begin to … bother me.”

  “Bother you?”

  “Irritate me. Their tics and habits, the way they misuse certain words or keep repeating a favorite phrase, certain physical flaws —”

  “That’s awful.”

  Lyon feels as if he’s been caught at something embarrassing.

  “No close friends?”

  “Tommy Door,” he answers quickly. “But he’s dead.”

  “Dead?”

  Lyon nods.

  “Wait a second,” he says, “we’re off the point here.”

  “The point?”

  “You and the crate, that point.”

  “Yes, we keep coming back to that, don’t we?” Her slender fingers toy with the tightly curled hair above her left ear. “Claire was a nurse, a pediatric nurse. Her interest in hoodoo was purely on the level of a hobby, collecting books and paraphernalia; she was interested in her heritage. She was born in New Orleans and was fascinated with how the powerless try to gain some element of control over their lives. Witchcraft, the supernatural, voodoo-hoodoo, even religion. I studied American folklore because Claire passed her fascination along to me. She never really became serious about hoodoo practices — never believed in them — until after she found out about the children Quinndell had killed, then he got her fired from the local hospital here, and my grandfather died — and Claire became obsessed. Seeing her lose control of her life, it was heartbreaking.”

  Claire looks up at the ceiling. She is softly biting the inside of her cheek.

  “My grandmother took a special interest in me because I’ve always been overly quiet. One of my older sisters is an actress, the other is a fashion model. They’re both much lighter than I am, more flamboyant. The whole reason I stayed in the academic world is that I could succeed there simply by moving from grade to grade, degree to degree, just doing the work. I received my bachelor’s degree at age twenty-one, master’s at twenty-three, a year’s fieldwork, Ph.D., teaching for the past two years.

  “But you didn’t ask for a biography, you asked why I was in that crate.” Her tongue comes pinkly from her mouth, touching her upper lip briefly before withdrawing. “I believe in the power of the unexpected. And I was afraid that if I simply showed up here, introduced myself, and offered to help … I was afraid you would tell me that I’d be in the way, that you preferred to conduct the investigation on your own. I needed some method for affecting you just as Claire affected you by committing suicide in your presence.”

  “You know about that.”

  She nods.

  “Before Claire … before your grandmother died, she gave me a small white box that was very similar to the crate you were in. I left it here in the kitchen somewhere. It had a wax figure in it, representing Quinndell, I guess.”

  While Lyon is looking for the little white box, Claire tells him, “Sticking pins in dolls is not a primary practice of hoodoo, in spite of the movies you’ve seen. The point is to get something into the hands of the person you’re trying to affect, an enemy you want to hurt or a lover you’re hoping to win back. When they receive something that demonstrates you’re working your magic on them, they keep thinking about it, and if they’re believers, it has an effect on them. Psychology. Sitting somewhere in private and sticking pins in a doll wouldn’t work unless the person knew you were doing it.”

  He returns to the table. “I can’t find it. Do you know what I’m talking about, that little white box your grandmother gave me — have you seen it?”

  Claire shakes her head.

  He watches her a moment and then asks, “What about the big box, the one you were in — what did you do with it?”

  “My grandfather, Stuart, was quite a bit older than Claire. He came here to retire. They owned a house right in Hameln and then this cabin, which they used as a getaway. They brought me out here when I was having troubles.”

  Lyon realizes she’s not answering his question. “And the crate you were in?”

  “I got that from Claire’s house in town. That’s where she kept her hoodoo collection, except everything in that house has been thoroughly trashed. Claire doesn’t own the house anymore anyway, lost it in the bankruptcy. Same with this cabin.”

  He’s trying not to lose his patience. “But what did you do with the crate?”

  “Claire was buried in the Hameln cemetery this past Saturday.”

  Lyon nods. “Oh. And that’s why you came here from New York, for her funeral.”
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br />   “Yes.”

  “And then hearing that I was here, you decided —”

  “I knew where you were staying, I didn’t have to hear about it.”

  “How long have you been plotting —”

  “John, I had to find a way to insert myself in your life.”

  “You certainly did that.”

  She makes a sound of exasperation. “I get sick to my stomach when I have to face a roomful of people at a cocktail party, no way could I have forced myself on the famous John Lyon. If I had just shown up here and knocked on the door, offered my help, you would’ve dismissed me.”

  “You weren’t dismissable last night.”

  She covers her face with both hands, laughing — John Lyon finding this enormously attractive.

  He asks her, “How do you manage to lie there so still?”

  Even when Claire lowers her hands, she still won’t look him in the eye. “It’s a form of self-hypnosis. I’ve done a lot of meditation and … I’ve never been very successful with men, they find my silences off-putting. I have difficulty expressing my emotions. People think I’m a cold fish. I’m too black.”

  Lyon keeps watching her as she speaks.

  “What I did with you, in the box the first night and then in your bed last night, just lying there, hypnotizing myself into a trance — it’s what I do best.”

  “Did you …” And now it is Lyon who is hesitant. “Did you want to make love to me, I mean from the beginning, from when you first got into bed with me and I was still asleep, is that where you thought it would lead — to our making love?”

  She thinks about it for a moment before speaking. “I don’t know. Sometimes I just put myself into certain situations and then let events unfold.”

  “Let events unfold?”

  She finally looks him in the eye. “I guess neither one of us should analyze it too deeply. I know I certainly don’t want to defend my need to be that passive.”

  Yeah, Lyon thinks, and he doesn’t want to explain his untoward interest in her that first night either — back when he was still assuming she was a corpse but touched her anyway.