Chain Letter (14 page)

“There had better not be.” She appeared satisfied. “Joan could fill a book. Even if
you were driving, I don’t think there’s any question that it was mainly her fault.
Maybe she figured that the truth would eventually come out, and she set up this
whole thing to make us do something that would somehow implicate us further.” Alison
stopped suddenly.

“What is it?”

“Something that Joan said to me once.” She put her hand to her head. “Something that
reminded me of the Caretaker.” She pounded her knee lightly with her fist. “I can’t
remember. It’s there, but it won’t come out.”

“It will, eventually.”

“Yeah, probably when the guillotine blade is falling toward my neck. Did you check
on Joan’s window?”

“Closely, last night when I was in her bedroom . . . ” Alison reacted quickly but
he was waiting for her. “Jealous, aren’t you? Kipp went over, not into her house,
but by her street. He brought binoculars. He couldn’t tell whether the window had
just been replaced. It didn’t look like it. There wasn’t a single putty stain on the
glass. But he did learn that Joan wears purple lace underwear, not that that was news
to me . . . ”

“Would you stop that!”

He laughed. “Don’t be so much fun to tease and I will.” He checked his watch. “We
had better be going. We don’t seem cut out to be detectives.”

“They all sound guilty. Tony, did you read
Murder on the Orient Express
? What if it is
all
of them?”

“Then we had better leave the country.” He didn’t seriously consider the possibility.
But the question did raise another idea that he took very seriously, one he kept to
himself.

I am not one of you.

That would not be a lie if the Caretaker were, say, two of them.

· · ·

The meeting at the rocket ship was going as Tony had feared it would. Joan kept throwing
Alison nasty looks, Kipp kept ridiculing Joan, Brenda kept complaining about the time
they were wasting, and Neil kept looking sad and miserable. No one even thought to
ask Tony how he had fared at the paper and he had to bring it up himself.

“They wanted to know if the ads were personally harassing me or if they were connected
with an illegal activity. I had expected as much going down there, but I had also
hoped to talk to the person who had taken the ads, to see if they remembered if it
had been a male or female on the phone. But the supervisor wouldn’t let me in the
back without ‘good reason.’ If I had told her the truth, it would have been the same
as going to the police.”

“It was a nice try,” Neil said, sitting on the sand, leaning against the low wall
that enclosed the rocket ship. He was holding a half-peeled orange, nibbling on it
like a bird. Last week, Tony had brought Neil’s mother over a fortified protein powder,
but it did not look as if Neil had been taking it.

This whole thing is killing me. Please, Tony?

“Chances are a different person took each ad,” Kipp said, relaxing at the end of the
slide, looking perfectly jovial for
someone whose life was in danger. “Those people take thousands of ads a day.”

“But how many in code?” Tony asked.

“Half the ads in the paper are incomprehensible to me,” Kipp said.

“Aren’t you even a little scared?” Alison asked.

Kipp smiled. “I’m sleeping with my night-light on.”

“I don’t know why you just don’t admit to cheating on the SAT,” Joan said, her bare
legs hanging through the bent bars on the third stage of the rocket. Taking a drag
on her cigarette, she sprinkled the ashes toward Kipp’s head. “A perfect score, hah!
The whole school knows you had a black market answer sheet.”

“I could have gotten 2400 on that test after finishing a six-pack,” Kipp said, leaning
his head back, shielding his eyes from the sun. “I like that skirt, Joan, it goes
with your purple underwear.”

“I’m not wearing any underwear.”

“Where’s Fran?” Brenda asked, shouldering a clay fort, standing away from the rest
of them when one would have expected her to be holding on to her boyfriend. Tony cautioned
himself, however, that he might be overstressing the unimportant. Brenda and Kipp
were not a touch-crazy couple. They often sat apart. “Why isn’t she here?”

“She’s in hiding,” Alison said. She was sitting beside him on the monkey bars. “Don’t
you remember?”

“Oh, yeah. Up . . . wherever she went.”

Alison jumped on that. “Why did you say
up
?”

“Huh?”

“How did you know she had headed north?” Alison insisted.

“I didn’t,” Brenda snapped, annoyed. “I just said up. I could have said down.”

Neil lost his orange and it rolled in the sand. He picked it up and began to brush
it off. The fruit was obviously ruined. “Bakersfield isn’t exactly north,” he said
casually.

Alison was shocked. “How did you know she went to Bakersfield?”

Neil looked up, startled, and lost his orange again. Her tone—
his angel’s harshness
, Tony thought—seemed to bruise him. “Wasn’t I supposed to know? I was talking to
Brenda yesterday and—”

“Brenda?”
Alison interrupted. All eyes went to the clay fort. Brenda no longer looked bored.

“F-Fran’s parents told me,” she stuttered. “Big deal.”

“But you just denied knowing where Fran was!” Alison said.

“Because I thought that’s what you wanted me to do!”

“Who else knew where Fran is?” Tony asked. Kipp and Joan remained silent. He glanced
at the rest room down the hill by the lake. There was a phone attached to the ladies’
side. “Do you have Fran’s grandmother’s number?” he asked Alison.

“In my purse. But I just called her yesterday. She was fine.”

“Call her again, please, right now.” He nodded toward the phone, fishing change from
his pocket. “Use this. We’ll wait here for you.”

While Alison was gone, Tony studied the faces of each member of their gang and tried
to imagine which two could make up a conspiracy. None matched, possibly because it
was impossible to forget that he trusted these people.

Alison was back soon, too soon. Looking lost, not saying a word, she sat down beside
him. He did not have to ask.

“Well?” Kipp said.

“Her grandmother doesn’t know where she is,” Alison said. “When the woman got up this
morning, Fran was gone.”

“She probably went home,” Brenda said.

Alison shook her head. “I called there.”

“Maybe she went out for a long walk,” Joan said.

“No,” Alison sighed. “She’s gone.”

A
loud noise woke Alison. She sat up in bed. It was dark in her room but she could
see. This did not seem strange to her, not as strange as the knocking on the door
downstairs. It was loud, and the house cringed at each blow. She waited for it to
stop, to go on to another house, but it stayed. It wanted her to answer the door.

She got out of bed. Her feet hardly seemed to touch the floor. She was surprised to
discover that she was dressed. She could not remember when she had gone to bed but
she was puzzled that she had not changed out of her clothes. She always did. Why then,
she asked herself, was she wearing the same clothes she had worn to the concert last
summer? They were covered with dirt. And her nails were black, like she had been digging
with her hands.

She walked to her bedroom door and stepped into the hall. All the lights in the house
were out but the walls, the ceiling, and the floor were emitting a dull gray glow,
a questionable improvement over utter blackness. Her feet were bare, except for a
film of dust, but she was not cold. The house temperature was difficult to gauge.
She was certain, however, that it was freezing outside. That was one of the reasons
the person knocking wanted to get inside. The other reason was he wanted to get to
her. She knew who this person was, though she could not remember his name. He was
not someone she wanted to meet in a dark and lonely place. The person was dangerous.

The knocking got louder, more insistent, and she began to feel afraid. The person
was not knocking with his hands. He was using something heavy, something he might
want to use to crush her head to a pulp. She hurried down the hall to her parents’
bedroom. The door was open and she peeked inside. The room was empty, the bed bare
of blankets and sheets. Her parents were long gone. There was no one to protect her,
no one else who could answer the door.

She started down the stairs. She wanted to return to her bedroom and lock the door
and hide in the closet but she knew that would make her a sitting duck. She had to
get out of the house. Once outside, she would have the whole tract to hide in.

Halfway down the stairs, she realized the banging was at the back door, not the front.
The blows were changing, as the wood began to soften and splinter, giving in under
the beating.

She quickened her steps, passing through the empty living room. A faintly luminous,
red-tinged gas had filled the lower portion of the house. She could not imagine what
it was or where it had come from. Yet it was familiar, smelling of dry weeds and parched
earth, making it difficult to breathe. But she could not hear her panting lungs, only
feel the suffocation. All she could hear was her pounding heart and the pounding on
the disinte-grating door.

The front door would not open. It was not locked and the knob was not stuck; it simply
would not open. She began to panic, especially when the banging suddenly halted. Terrifying
as the pounding had been, its abrupt stopping could only mean the final obstacle to
getting to her had been removed. She closed her eyes, cringing into the corner, waiting
for the blade that would split her skull in two.

But it never came. No one crossed the astral lagoon that was the living room. Praying
for a second chance, she again tried the front door. Then something terrible happened,
something worse than waking up in the middle of the night to the sound of an ax murderer
chopping his way inside.

Her hand stuck to the doorknob.

It would not come off.

On the other side of the door, someone began to knock, a polite civilized knock.

“Who is it?” she cried.

“You know,” the person said. “You have always known.”

It was true, she did know, and the knowledge filled her with horror. She began to
scream. And the door began to open.

· · ·

“Don’t come in!” Alison gasped, bolting upright in bed, her nightmare momentarily
superimposed over her waking state, the cold, etheric light giving way in halting
steps to the warm blanket of the normal dark room. Her right hand was interlocked
with her left hand, losing an impossible tug-of-war. She relaxed her fingers and placed
her palm on her moist forehead, the pounding blood reminding her all too clearly of
the pounding on the dream door.

The phone was ringing. Which had awakened her, the call or the terror? She glanced
at her digital clock, saw it was 3
A.M
., and reached for the phone.

“Hello?”

“Alison?”

“I think so . . . Tony?”

There was an eternal pause. “There’s been an accident. It’s Kipp.”

She was slipping back into her nightmare. “Is he dead?” she whispered.

“We don’t know.” He sounded crushed, defeated. “I’m calling from his house. The police
are here.”

“I’m coming.”

“Don’t.” But the word had no force behind it. “Oh, if you want, I guess. But don’t
speak to anyone till you talk to either Neil or me.”

Putting down the phone, crying a little, she remembered the question.

“Who is it?”

But she could not remember the answer.

· · ·

The ax-wielding psychopath and the ringing phone had not awakened her parents, and
she was able to get away without having to make impossible explanations. Although
it took her better than an hour to reach Kipp’s house, two police cars were still
there, their red lights spinning like maddened phantasms. She coasted by the house
and parked up the street, using her rearview mirror to search for a glimpse of Tony.
Somehow, she missed Neil’s approach, and when he knocked on her window, her taut nerves
rammed her head into the car ceiling.

“Sorry,” Neil said.

Rubbing her bruised scalp, she rolled down the window. “It wasn’t your fault.” He
leaned against the car as if he would otherwise fall down. Kipp’s street was old and
the lights were dim. She could scarcely see Neil’s expression, but she saw enough
to know it was bad. Kipp’s big-nosed face sprang into her mind, laughing in the sun,
chewing on a blade of grass in the park, totally unconcerned that he was next on the
list.
You brilliant fool, what have they done to you?
“Tony didn’t tell me . . . ” she began.

“He should be here soon,” Neil answered, obviously wanting to spare her details she
was in no hurry to hear. Neil moved aside, and she climbed out of the car and it cut
her to the heart to see how he hobbled on one leg. She hugged him with her right arm.

“We’re losing, aren’t we?” she said.

He looked at her with what seemed surprise, and for a moment, depended solely upon
her for support. She could feel him trembling. “It seems that way,” he said.

That she could have mistrusted him, as she had told Tony, filled her with shame. A
breeze, warm but still causing her to shiver, blew from the direction of Kipp’s brightly
lit house, and she hugged him closer. “I’m sorry, Neil,” she said.

“I am, too.”

“I mean, I’m sorry for not understanding you.”

There was no moon, but a snow white light gleamed deep in his eyes as he peered at
her, inches away. “Alison?”

“I wish we had talked more before all this started. You’re a great guy. I wish . . .
I wish my dreams were different.” She winced, close to crying. She was making no sense
but, for Christsakes, they were only kids! “I had a nightmare tonight. I’ve had it
before. I’m alone in my house at night and someone is trying to get me—hacking at
the door with an ax.” She closed her aching eyes for a moment. “And the worst part
is, I know who it is.”