All for One (25 page)

“I don’t know,” Joey said, his expression going from wan and withered to focused and forceful. “But we’re going to find out who it is and what they want.”

“And stop them,” Jeff added. Sharp eyes turned on him, defying the finality of his remark. “What?”

“We’ll deal with it,” Joey said. “We’ll deal with it. Come on.”

Joey started back toward Bigfoot Woods, PJ and Jeff right behind. Michael started to follow, too, but stopped when he realized that Bryce wasn’t with him. He trotted back to his best friend.

“Bryce?”

“Yeah?” he answered, unable yet to pull his stare from the headstone. From those three words: ‘Our Little Boy.’

Little Boy
. Someone really thought of Guy that way. He really
was
someone’s ‘Little Boy.’

Their Little Boy.

“Are you coming?” Michael prodded him.

Bryce finally nodded and turned from the grave. But he could not walk away. Michael, his eyes narrowed with wonder and worry, had a hand on his friend’s chest, holding him there. He was staring at Bryce’s face. At something low on his face.

“Your mouth’s bleeding,” Michael said. The thin red trickle was just cresting his friend’s lower lip and looked like it had the flow to make it to the chin.

Bryce reached up and blotted the spot with the tips of his fingers. He pulled his hand away and looked at the red stain.

Just like the stain on the bat.

Guy’s blood.

My blood.

“Are you okay?” Michael asked.

Bryce gave no answer one way or another. He gently shifted his best friend’s hand from his chest and moved past him, heading slowly, steadily for Bigfoot Woods.

*  *  *

Mandy Fine sat cross-legged on her bed, leaning so far forward over her drawing tablet that, in the flower print dress she wore, she looked like a folded bolt of spring. One hand held a crayon and guided it repeatedly through the same lazy arc she’d drawn on the textured paper, an arc like the other two, waxy thick ribs of red and yellow curving from a child’s eye ocean, gentle rolls of pure blue, toward a bright orange pot on the brown shore. Mandy worked green into the last ribbon of color, her tongue wriggling sideways from her mouth as she concentrated hard, wanting this picture to be just right, wanting the rainbow to look like a real rainbow, and the pot of gold like a real pot of gold. Wanting it to be perfect because this drawing was not like the ones she did for herself. This one was going to be a present. For a very special person.

When the final ribbon in the rainbow was green and only green, with no white from the paper showing through, Mandy sat up, her back perfectly straight, and considered what she’d created looking down past her nose. For a long, silent moment she inspected it, the only sound an occasional gasp from the eaves over her bedroom window as the wind picked its way through the soffit vents. After she’d looked at it straight on she turned her head a bit to the right and checked it from that angle, and a minute later with her head cocked left, her eyes stern like an old schoolmarm’s, hording praise as if it was the gold in the pot at the end of the rainbow she’d drawn.

Yes, stern like that, but not unfair.

The stern eyes brightened and Mandy’s head moved into a pleased nod. “I believe that is one of the best pictures I’ve ever drawn.” Her eyes came up from the tablet. “Don’t you agree, Charlie?”

Charlie stood at the foot of Mandy’s bed, his face passionless, lacking even a hint of a smile. The kind of expression one might expect when looking down into an open coffin at a young boy’s funeral, except that Charlie’s eyes were most definitely open. Open round like big green quarters. Sometimes it seemed like Charlie didn’t know how to smile. Or maybe even what a smile really was.

“Well?” Mandy pressed her best friend, lifting the tablet in both hands and holding the picture straight out to her front like a message board. “What do
you
think?”

Charlie stared at the picture, blinking a few times as he did, the mottled shock of orange and blonde hair atop his head stiff like some candle flame molded to a singular, fuzzy brilliance for all time. “It’s a good picture.”

Mandy lowered the tablet so she could give her friend the evil eye.

“You draw lots of pictures, Mandy,” Charlie said. His voice was thin, airy, almost too soft on the ears, unsettling like the void left after sound has passed.

“
This
one is special,” Mandy said, sighing disapproval at her friend’s less than acceptable answer. “Now, come on; what do you think of it?”

Charlie gave the picture another look as Mandy held it up, not as high as before. Her eyes burned at him over the top. “I really like the rainbow. It looks real.”

Mandy spun the tablet back toward herself and placed it on her lap. Her white teeth glared with pleasure. “I think it’s the best rainbow I’ve ever drawn.”

Charlie nodded like a puppet might, all motion and nothing else.

“It’s my best,” Mandy said, gazing proudly at what she’d made.

“You have a whole drawer full of pictures,” Charlie said, just recounting a fact. She did have a drawer brimming with pictures. Probably every one she’d ever drawn. He’d seen it, right behind him in her dresser. “Why is this one special?”

Charlie’s question dampened the glee within her not a bit. She ran the tips of her fingers softly along the curve of the rainbow and announced, “Because it’s for my favorite teacher of all time.”

Charlie’s stale expression twitched at the top, one bushy eyebrow rising. “It’s for Miss Austin?”

“Yes,” Mandy confirmed, nodding. “She’s the best teacher ever. I’ll bet you’ve never had a teacher like her.”

The eyebrow settled back to its flat horizon over Charlie’s eye. “I thought you were mad at her.”

Strain crept into Mandy’s happy mask, chasing pleasantness away. As it scurried off, something quite different took its place.

“I could never be mad at her,” Mandy said, her voice flat like a taut wire, one pulled at each end by forces she did not understand. Would never understand. “She’s perfect.”

“But you said she was playing favorites,” Charlie reminded her. He couldn’t actually recall her saying that, but he knew that that was how his best friend felt.

“
They think they’re the teacher’s pets
,” Mandy mocked childishly, her voice bobbing through the accusation, her shoulders twisting haughtily along.

“Who?”

Mandy sneered, not looking at her picture now, nor at Charlie. Just looking, and seeing their faces. “Joey, and Jeff, and Michael, and Bryce, and PJ, and...” She saw the last face, the one that always looked a little like a lost fawn, all doe-eyed and sad. “...Elena.” A breath hissed slow through her nose, coming cold and leaving colder. “I don’t like Elena.”

“I thought you didn’t like any of them,” Charlie said.

“I don’t like her the most,” Mandy said. Her eyes compressed to slits as she thought of them. Of all the teacher’s little pets. “They all think they’re so good, that they’re so smart.” A bitter little grin began to twist her lips. “But they’re not as smart as me.”

Charlie puzzled at what his best friend had said. “Huh?”

Mandy’s eyes angled slowly to her friend. “I get all hundreds on my work. On all my class work, on all my homework, and on all my tests. I’ve never missed a single answer.”

Charlie agreed with a nod. “I believe you.”

“That makes me smarter than them.”

He nodded again.

Mandy looked away from Charlie, toward her window, the remnants of the snow melting rapidly on the sill. Beads of water were trickling down the pane, the morning light exploding from each of the watery pearls, throwing spikes of color in all directions. Like little bursts of rainbow, Mandy thought, smiling soft, smiling true. Smiling for herself.

“I’m a smart, pretty girl,” Mandy said aloud, then looked back to her best friend, his face dead except the eyes. “Smarter than the teacher’s pets.” A giggle built in her mouth behind her closed, simpering lips, a bit of it slipping out before Mandy put a few dainty fingers up to suppress it.

“What’s funny, Mandy?”

More of the giggle made its way out. She could hardly contain herself. “Nothing.”

“What?”

Mandy simply shook her head, but the giggle she’d tried to stifle had now built to a full fledged laugh that burst from her mouth like a cackling rocket, tossing her head back to the bed, racking her body with fits as she thought of how smart she was, and how stupid they were. The stupid teacher’s pets.

Laughter erupted again like a volcano blowing its top, and she rolled to one side, away from Charlie, clutching her stomach and sucking big gulps of air until the gleeful throe settled to a few residual giggles that bubbled occasionally free of her tenuous composure.

Charlie stared blandly at her back. “Mandy?”

“What?” she asked, her eyes fixed on the vibrant spokes of light on the window.

“It seems like a long time since I saw you last.”

Wind moved the streaks of melt along the pane, the rainbow sparkles dancing with the blow.

“Am I any different?” Mandy asked in response.

Charlie thought for a moment. “No. Not really.”

Mandy smiled at the sparkles. They would make a very pretty picture. “Then it can’t have been very long.”

*  *  *

The scream pierced the night, shrill and blood curdling as it raced through the upper floor of the Markworth house like a mad dog set free of its cage.

“AAAAAAAAAAHHH! AAAAAAAAHH!”

Light erupted, spilling from under the closed door to Tim and Willa Markworth’s bedroom. Feet stabbed into slippers, and those flopped fast across the floor. The door snapped inward, the glow burning into the hall, yellow and harsh.

“AAAAAAAHHH! AAAAAAAAH! AAAAAHHHHH!”

Tim Markworth dashed into the hall still tying his robe and raced to his daughter’s room. He could almost do so blindfolded now.

“AAAHH! AAAAHH! AAAAAAHHHHH!”

When he pushed Elena’s door in he found her sitting in bed, covers to her waist, teary eyes closed and gaping mouth spewing alarm so sharp it cut him each time he had to hear it. It cut his heart right from him.

“Baby. Baby. It’s okay.” He put a knee on Elena’s bed and a hand on each of her shoulders. His wife raced in and came to his side. To her daughter’s side.

“AAHH! AAHH! AAHH!” Elena cried in short puffs, spittle misting from her lips, as if she were trying to spit a caustic demon from within and it just wouldn’t go.

Or was it some demon wailing from deep inside?

“Baby,” Tim Markworth said again to his traumatized daughter.

“Mommy’s here,” Willa Markworth assured her little girl, sitting on the bed and pulling Elena close with a gentle arm. “It’s okay.”

“Ahhh,” Elena whimpered now, a weak, pitiful sound that was accompanied by deep, choppy gulps of air, wide lines of tears streaking her pale cheeks. “Ahh.”

“It’s okay,” Tim Markworth repeated, looking to his wife. Her eyes asked him silently if he really believed that everything
was
all right.

His head shook doubtfully as his little girl crumbled, still asleep, into his wife’s arms.

Nineteen

The day had seemed pretty normal, most everyone thought, until just after two o’clock when Miss Austin gave the class book work and secluded herself at her desk. Her pen tapped at her open roll book, at the same page for nearly an hour.

When the three o’clock bell rang she stopped and looked up at the class.

“There are two worksheets for the assignment tonight,” Mary said from her desk. As the students assigned to clean up returned to their seats she added, “Back and front both. Will the class council please see me before they leave.”

The last request bore the marks of an afterthought. The speaker’s eyes flitted about casually, disinterested, and the voice hinted ever so mildly at annoyance. As if this wildly unimportant thing just had to be dealt with, a characterization only half wrong.

Chairs banged into desks and twenty pairs of feet paraded through room 18's door into the long shadows of the blustery afternoon. Elena Markworth was last to leave and glanced back from the stoop at her teacher and five classmates as the door swung shut.

The council came slowly to Mary’s desk and stood shoulder to shoulder before her, expressions mirrored, ten little eyes mining for information in the reluctant face.

“You wanted to see us,” Joey said, speaking for all. Eager feet stampeded past outside.

“Yes.” Mary closed her roll book and twisted the cap onto the pen in her hand, a red pen that she feigned fascination with for several very long seconds before dropping it into the Space Needle mug that held its black and blue brethren. “I need to talk to you all about...” She paused and folded her hands over her roll book, fingertips crawling nervously in place, a pain sparking behind her brow. Like an on-off switch tripped in a pitch black room, a stinging, almost blinding light coming on. A light that she had to look inward to see. A light that hurt. That hurt. A warning light.

But I have to...

A powerful light.

I have to do the right thing...

IF
YOU
WON’T PROTECT THEM...

...who will?
Mary finished the growling question coming from the light this time.

But it was not a question.

Like the beam of a hot, burning lantern the brilliance swept across the backs of her eyes, coming, warning, coming, telling, coming...

...and then gone. Gone as if never there.

Her eyes came up and met theirs finally, one at a time.

Joey had that faint hint of worry in his gaze, so faint that it was almost lost in the misty green of his eyes. PJ’s distress hid behind a battered, defiant pride. Michael swallowed hard and seemed on the verge of flight, his feet shifting, hands buried deep in the pockets of his jeans. Jeff met her review with a confidence that did not belong to one so young. A confidence ignorant of its sameness with arrogance. And Bryce. He fixed his glasses upward as she looked his way, eyes bugging behind the lenses. His appearance became that of a small, frightened animal caught in the glare of a truck’s growing headlights.