From Jeff’s letters, he’d mined the clues. They’d led him here and there and everywhere in between. They’d led him to a young girl in Chicago who was blind and thought Shep was Jeff. They’d led him to a group home in Minneapolis and a kid about Jeff’s age, a kid as old as Jeff had been, who remembered. He’d watched, and he’d listened, and he’d followed. And slowly, he’d sensed it. The vague, living edges of a group. A structure.
He’d sensed it in Penny Gregson, and in Tony Browning, and in some of the others. They were part of something bigger. Not a group. No, not a group. Something else. They shared a secret. The creche.
Jeff had written about it, and Shep had heard it talked about in hushed tones. The answer to the mystery of Jeff’s death lay there, and he was going to find it.
It had been six months since Mom died. Six months of following a six-year-old trail. Six months of sniffing and looking and hunting. Six months that had finally led him to Empire Street, and something bigger.
He finished the coffee in his cup, poured another, and lit a cigarette. It was almost 2:30. As he drew on his cigarette, the front door of the house opened.
Shep held the smoke in his lungs.
A woman came out onto the steps. Even from here he could see she was well made. Nice summer dress, high heels, long red hair. Classy. Behind her, in the darkened doorway, something moved. She turned for a moment, and then the door closed.
Goosebumps rose on Shep’s neck.
He pulled Jeff’s letter from the glove compartment, and from the envelope extracted the photograph. Dawn was in the foreground, smiling. Behind her was a car. Cut off at the left of the picture, was a person. Half a person. One breast. One hip. Half a face. Red hair falling around a shoulder.
“It’s you,” Shep muttered, exhaling smoke.
She walked down to the street, then to a sporty red Mazda parked in front of the sedan that had dropped off Penny Gregson last night. She got in, started the car, lit a cigarette. She dropped sunglasses over her eyes, shoulder checked, and pulled into the street. Shep started the car, making a decision as he did so.
The house would always be here. The woman, on the other hand, might not.
It was a rationalization. But he was dying out here doing nothing. Screw patience.
Bonnie checked on Evan through the day. His temperature had returned to normal, and she decided not to call a doctor. Maybe sleep would be enough. She hoped so.
Talking to Peterson had not made her feel better. Harris had really, honest to God, disappeared. She had been married to Harris for two years, had known him for nearly nine, and while he had a number of disagreeable habits, disappearing was not in his repertoire. She had never known a more responsible father. Except, perhaps, her own.
The way Peterson had been talking, he’d almost suggested that Harris might have done something to cause the car accident. But she did not believe that. Not Harris. Something had happened to him.
She imagined him wandering about, lost, struck by amnesia. The image was made worse by the knowledge that it would mean she’d have to keep Evan longer. And that brought with it a stab of excruciating guilt.
Already she was hoping his stay would not be too long!
At 3:00 she checked on Evan again. He was still asleep. His face half buried in the pillow, hand pressed up to his chin. She leaned over him and moved hair away from his eyes. He moaned softly and stirred, but did not wake.
This was her son. My God, her son.
As she left the room, gently closing the door, the front bell rang. She hurried to answer it.
“Hello, Bonnie,” Tom Laws said.
Behind him, Roberta looked as if she had stepped in something awful.
“We want to see Evan,” she said.
Bonnie stepped back, at a loss for words, again unable to stand up to the force of her in-laws.
“He’s sleeping,” she said.
“Sleeping?” Roberta demanded. “In the middle of the day? That’s nonsense.”
“He’s feeling sick.”
Roberta stiffened. “Will you let us in?”
Tom, all the while, had been studying her face thoughtfully. “Just for a little while,” he said.
“We have a right to see him,” Roberta said.
Bonnie sighed, not up to the fight. She didn’t want them here. Didn’t want them to see where she lived. Especially didn’t want them to see Evan right now. But she stepped aside, head down.
Roberta went immediately into the living room and lit a cigarette. Tom took a seat next to the mantel, crossed his legs, and resolutely looked at his knees.
“Can I get you a Pepsi?”
“Nothing,” Roberta said.
Tom looked up, opened his mouth, shook his head, and looked back down again.
“Um,” Bonnie said.
“Please, just sit down,” Roberta said impatiently, and waved at the sofa.
Bonnie sat. She clasped her hands between her knees. She should never have let them in, at least not without somebody here to back her up. Somebody like Lieutenant Peterson, to whom she could turn for authority, if not for support.
“Now, you’ve had a day to see what it’s like to look after an eight-year-old boy. Not as easy as you thought, is it?”
“I never thought it would be easy.”
“We want him.”
“I want him to stay here.”
Roberta chuckled softly and drew on her cigarette. “If you’re saying that seriously, then I don’t believe you really care for the boy. Look at this place. Look at this neighborhood.”
“It’s not as bad as it looks.”
Roberta took a deep breath, and then her look softened. She crushed out her cigarette in an ornamental ashtray on the mantel. She shook her head.
“Bonnie, Bonnie. What kind of life do you lead? What can you offer the boy?”
“You keep calling him the boy. His name is Evan. He’s my son. And I can offer him myself. I’m his mother. And why do you keep talking like it’s forever? When they find Harris, Evan can go back to him, and then you can see him all you want.”
“Harris isn’t coming back.”
“What do you mean? Lieutenant Peterson said they would find him. They have police looking, and if he’s anywhere they’ll find him.”
“I don’t know what happened to Harris. All I know is that he would never leave Evan alone. He’d either have to be out of his mind. Or dead.”
He’s not like you, my dear, Bonnie read into the words. She had no argument for that. She nodded mutely.
“The very fact that the boy was alone, and hurt, is indication enough to me that something is very, very wrong.”
Bonnie didn’t know what to say.
“And there is something we haven’t told you,” Tom said, looking up for the first time. “We’d noticed changes recently.”
“Tom, be quiet!” Roberta glared at him.
“I think she’s got a right to know”
“She’s got no right!”
“What were you going to say?” Bonnie asked.
Tom cast a worried glance at Roberta, then rubbed his chin. “It was nothing, really.”
But there had been something, something nasty and secretive. She wanted to grab Roberta, to shake her and make her talk, but standing before her in-laws she felt disfranchised, helpless.
“So you see, it’s quite possible that the boy will need looking after for a long, long time,” Roberta said, composure regained.
Bonnie let that sink in. A long, long time. Not just a day or two. Full-time mother. Images of day-care, and nurseries, and baby-sitters, and bills flashed through her mind. My God, what was she going to do?
“By the looks of this place, you make hardly enough money to live by yourself.”
“I get by.”
“Is getting by all you have planned for Evan?”
“No.”
“I’m simply asking that you think about the boy. You decided once, long ago, that you weren’t able to look after him. Has your s
ituation changed much? Evan’s certainly hasn’t. He’s never been the healthiest of children, you know.”
“I was sick then. I was in the hospital.”
“Sanitarium,” Roberta corrected.
“I was depressed, that’s all. And I was confused. And Harris was leaving me.”
“The point is, even then, you knew what was best for Evan.”
Bonnie felt her resolve crumbling, felt tears of frustration and confusion welling up. She choked them back, and thought of Evan.
He’s my son, not theirs.
“I’ll find a way to look after him. I am thinking about what’s best for him. He wants to be with me.”
“Did he tell you that? And even if he did, he’s only eight years old, he hardly knows what’s good for him.”
Bonnie stood up. “He’s staying with me.”
“Sit down,” Roberta said.
Bonnie almost obeyed, but instead moved away from the sofa, looked out the window. Sunlight beamed into her face.
“No. I won’t sit. And I won’t give up Evan. Not this time.”
“You little fool.”
“Get out.”
“What did you say?”
“I said, get out.”
Roberta stiffened, looked at Tom. “We want to see the boy.”
“He’s sleeping. I don’t want him disturbed.”
Tom stood slowly and cleared his throat. “I think we should be going.”
“No!” Roberta protested, but turned away when Tom put a hand on her arm.
For the first time, Bonnie realized that they must be suffering about Harris, as well as about Evan, and she felt sorry for them.
“If Harris is gone for long,” she said, “you can see Evan some days. Take him for a weekend, or something.”
Tom nodded.
“We have a lawyer,” Roberta said, voice trembling.
“Roberta.” Tom’s voice was commanding. He motioned to the door.
She closed her mouth, cast a withering glance at Bonnie, and went to the door. Tom ushered her out, and she walked slowly down the path toward the car.
Tom turned to Bonnie.
“She’s very upset about Harris. And we do love Evan very much.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
He reached into his pocket and brought out a check. He handed it to her. It was made out in her name, for one thousand dollars. Bonnie stared at it, incredulous.
“I can’t take this.”
Tom smiled, the wrinkles around his eyes deepening. “You’re being very brave to take Evan. Don’t be stupid and refuse any help that’s offered. You’re going to need that. How do you think Harris managed on his salary?”
She had never really thought about it.
“Take the check. I’ll call you soon and find out how you’re doing. You may have custody of the boy, Bonnie, but you won’t be alone in this.”
Bonnie felt tears welling. She leaned toward Tom and he hugged her. “Thank you,” she said.
“Never understood why Harris left you in the first place. Stupid boy.”
She watched him walk down to the car, his shoulders slumped, and watched as the car drove down the block and finally turned off.
In the living room she lay out on the sofa and buried her face in a cushion. The check would help, no doubt about that. For a while, anyway. But what about the rest? What about being a mother, and taking care of Evan, and raising him? Was she so different now than she had been six years ago? And if not, then how was she going to manage?
Cushion clasped around her face, she tried not to think about it.
Evan was floating. He was suspended from a stuccoed ceiling by invisible wires, spinning slowly. The corners of the room twirled and became the points of a star. The single naked light bulb above glowed, pulsated. He could feel its warmth.
Faces moved into his field of vision, and he recognized them all. The redheaded woman, eyes smiling, lips curled gently. The boy /man, drooling, grinning. His dad, eyes now empty.
“Hello, Evan,” the woman said. “You’re coming to us.”
Evan could not speak.
He felt the weight of sleep on him.
The boy/man leaned over him, reached out a thick, fleshy finger to touch him. Evan tried to withdraw, but he kept spinning, spinning. The boy/man, who Evan knew was named Henry, touched him, touched his injured finger.
The woman leaned over and kissed him on the mouth. Her lips pressed onto him, and he felt something wet and warm move beyond them. He could taste her lipstick. He tried to twist away, but could not.
When she stood up, she was still smiling.
“Come on,” she said.
The room kept spinning. A picture kept passing on the wall. It was a seashore, with a big boat in the distance.
“Evan, Evan,” his dad said.
Then the faces were drawing away, and the room was spinning faster, and the star became a circle, and the ceiling blurred, and the picture on the wall became a thick black line encircling him.
Evan sat up in bed, clamping down on the cry that rose to burst past his teeth. He was soaked in sweat.
He breathed deeply, trying to calm the pounding of his heart. The nightmare clung to him like a bad smell. He could still taste the lipstick in his mouth, and his stomach churned.
The faces. He remembered some of them. They fitted into the blackness of the missing time, the time before the accident. They were from then, and before then.
He felt the bandage on his hand. His finger itched terribly beneath the covering, worse than it ever had before. The doctor said that it would, but he hadn’t warned about this. It was impossible to ignore, impossible to withstand.
He tugged at the bandage, at the tape holding it together, and began to uncoil it. As the air touched the moist skin, it tingled.
As the bandage fell to the bed exposing the stump of the amputated finger, Evan stopped breathing. The skin around the stump was puckered and red. They had removed a graft from his thigh to cover the end of the finger, but the skin there was shiny, glistening, moist. He squeezed the finger, and milky liquid oozed out of the grafted skin.
“Oh, yech.”
It hurt terribly, and itched, and as he looked at it he realized something else, and his heart pounded harder than it had since waking.
The pinkie finger of his left hand had been lopped off nearly at the third knuckle. But now it seemed slightly longer.
Evan gritted his teeth, and started wrapping the hand again. He could not look at it, could not bear to see it, or think about it, or about what it might mean. When he had finished as best he could, he lay back on the bed and closed his eyes. He was shivering, despite the heat, sweat drying on his skin.
Visions danced behind his eyes.
He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to block them off. But that only made the tears come out.
“Mommy,” he whispered softly, for no one to hear but himself. “Mommy. Mommy.”
Chapter Five
Bonnie woke to the sound of the television. She opened her eyes, yawning. Evan was sitting in the easy chair, looking at her thoughtfully.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi.”
“Looks like we slept the afternoon away, huh? What time is it?”
“Five.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Okay.”
“No more sick?”
“Guess not.”
“What happened to your bandage?”
“It was itchy.”
“We better get that wrapped again. Come on through to the kitchen.”
Bonnie rolled off the sofa, still yawning. She felt cleansed, somehow. Awake and alert. A fog had cleared.
“Grandma and Grandpa were here, weren’t they?” Evan asked.
Sitting on the edge of the sofa, Bonnie looked at him steadily.
“Yes. How did you know?”
“I can smell Grandma’s perfume.”
“Oh.”
“What did they want?
”
Sometime while she had slept, she had come to a decision, and she only realized now what it was. She had to explain everything to Evan, get it out in the open. She led him through to the kitchen and sat him at the table. He held out his arm for her, and she unwrapped the bandage slowly.
“Your Grandma wanted to take you home with her.”
“Oh.” No surprise in his voice.
She pushed the bandage aside and looked at his finger. The skin was puffy, very red. The graft over the stump looked horrible, but she kept her revulsion off her face. She was not sure if it was infected or not.
“How does it feel?”
“Itchy.”
“Sit still for a minute.”
She got hydrogen peroxide from the cupboard, along with one of the bandages she had bought and scissors.
“Why did Grandma want to take me?”
“Your Grandma and Grandpa are very worried about you,” Bonnie said carefully. With a cotton swab she dabbed hydrogen peroxide on the red skin of his finger. It foamed and bubbled. “You see, they’re not sure I’ll be able to take care of you all by myself.”
“Will you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Daddy did.”
“I know he did.” With another swab, she dried his finger, and then began to unroll a length of bandage. She started wrapping. He kept his eyes on her face, not watching the operation at all. “Do you remember, you asked me why I didn’t keep you?”
“Uh huh.”
“Did you really want to know?”
A longer pause than she had expected. “I guess.”
“Well, when you were born, I was very, very young. I was only eighteen, Evan. And your daddy was twenty-five.” Telling it, the memories came back, some bitter, some sweet. She made her fingers continue with the job of wrapping. “I don’t think either of us was even ready to be married, never mind to have a little baby. Things were very hard for your dad and me. We didn’t have much money, and neither of us had a very good job, and with a baby along it just didn’t seem to work at all.”
“You got sick and went to the hospital,” Evan said softly.
So, somewhere along the line, he’d heard the story.
“Yes. I was very depressed. That happens sometimes to people. But I was especially depressed, because of everything that was going wrong with our marriage. I just wasn’t able to handle it.”
Nightscape Page 4