Dean Koontz's Frankenstein 4-Book Bundle (97 page)

Mary Margaret was sixty, plump but not fat, with flawless skin and eyes the color of sliced limes. Smart, compassionate, practical, and unfailingly cheerful, she used no language worse than “darn” and “horse manure,” though the latter made her blush.

She was a former nurse, and her past employers spoke of her only in superlatives. Her professional record contained not one blemish, not even a citation for arriving late to work or a reprimand for bending a hospital rule.

Mary Margaret's husband, Brendan, had been a highly decorated police officer who died in the line of duty. Of her two sons, one had become a priest; the other was a career Marine with a chest of medals that honored his father's sacrifice. As for Mary Margaret's three daughters: One was a Benedictine nun; one was a Carmelite nun; and the third was a physician working with Doctors Without Borders, currently serving the poor in Haiti.

After conducting an exhaustive background check, Carson and Michael had almost decided against hiring Mary Margaret. They were put off by the discovery that the physician daughter, Emily Rose Dolan, on vacation from her third-world service, was cited by the California Highway Patrol for driving alone in a clearly marked carpool lane.

In spite of that egregious violation of the law, they at last settled on Mary Margaret, in part because she was the only applicant for the position of nanny who was neither tattooed nor belligerent.

A woman with tattoo-sleeved arms
and
a grudge against the world could be, of course, just as fine a nanny as anyone else. Carson and Michael were not bigots. They believed in equal opportunity both for the flamboyantly decorated and for the perpetually pissed-off. They
just didn't want to come home one day and discover that Scout now sported a serpent with bared fangs winding around her left arm or had started tossing off the F word with aplomb.

“Are you making a pie, Mrs. D?” Carson asked when she entered the kitchen and saw Mary Margaret using the paring knife.

“No, dear. Who would want mere pie when they could have apple dumplings? Did you get your man?”

“I shot him in the foot,” Carson said.

“Good for you, dear. Assuming the miscreant deserved it.”

“He had a gun to Carson's head,” Michael said.

“Then
you
as well should have shot him in the foot, boyo.”

“She also vomited on him,” Michael said.

“You vomited, too,” Carson reminded him.

“But just into the bay. Not on the perp. I'd never vomit on the perp.”

A movable playpen stood in a corner of the kitchen, the wheels locked. In a pink pullover, a disposable diaper, and pink booties, Scout sat in the center of the pen, chewing on the baby-safe nose of a pediatrician-approved teddy bear.

Starting two weeks previously, Scout had been able to sit up on her own. But the feat still dazzled Carson, and she was no less proud of her daughter than she'd been the first time this happened.

As Carson and Michael bent close to beam at her, Scout turned the bear upside down and said, “Ah goo, ah goo,” to its butt.

With alarm, Michael said, “Mary Margaret, what's that in her mouth, there's something in her mouth, what is it?”

“Relax, lad. It's a tooth.”

“A
tooth?
Where did she get a tooth?”

“It came through in the night. She never cried. I found it when I prepared her bottle this morning.”

“She never cries,” Carson said, lifting her smiling baby from the playpen. “She's one tough little cookie.”

“A tooth,” Michael marveled. “Who would ever have thought she'd have a tooth?”

Scout said, “Ga-ga-ga-ga, ba-ba-ba-ba.”

“Chains of vowels and consonants! She's babbling. My God, she's babbling!”

“She is,” Carson said. “She really is. Mary Margaret, did you hear that?”

Clutching the teddy bear by the crotch, Scout said, “Ga-ga-ga-ga-ga-ga, wa-wa-wa-wa-ga-ga.”

“Chains of vowels and consonants,” Michael repeated with wonder just short of awe. “Babbling. Scout's babbling.”

“Not just Scout,” said Mary Margaret.

“She hasn't even finished her seventh month,” Carson said. “Mary Margaret, isn't it amazing, to babble this early?”

“Not considering her parentage,” said the nanny as she continued to peel apples. “Indeed, herself might be a couple of weeks ahead of schedule, the blessed angel, but let's not just yet declare her a prodigy.”

“Ga-ga-ga-ga-ga,” Michael said, encouraging his daughter to repeat her stunning performance.

“Poor Duke,” said Mary Margaret, “you've been displaced,” and she dropped a slice of apple that the dog snatched from the air.

“Let me hold her,” Michael said.

Hesitant to hand over the precious bundle, Carson said, “Well … okay. But don't drop her on her head.”

“Why would I drop her on her head?”

“I'm not saying you'd do it on purpose.”

“Look at that tooth,” Michael said. “A baby crocodile would be proud of that tooth.”

Mary Margaret said, “And what was all the vomiting about?”

Carson and Michael glanced at each other, but neither of them replied.

As the widow of a cop, Mary Margaret had no patience for those who evaded questions. “Am I talking to myself then, hallucinating your presence? See here, you couldn't have worked homicide with a weak stomach.”

“It wasn't a weak-stomach thing,” Michael said, dandling Scout. “It was a fear thing.”

“You were hard-charging policemen for years,” Mary Margaret said. “Or so I've been led to believe. You mean to say you never had a gun held to your head before?”

“Of course we did,” Michael said. “Thousands of times.”

“Tens of thousands,” said Carson. “But never while on a boat. Maybe it was the combination of the gun to the head and the movement of the boat.”

“Ka-ka, ka-ka, ka-ka,” said Scout.

Turning from the sink, facing them forthrightly, apple in one fist, paring knife in the other, fists on her hips, Mary Margaret appeared as stern as the mother of a priest, a Marine, and two nuns might be expected to look when she knew someone was shining her on.

“However I may appear to you,” she said, “I'm in fact not even a wee bit stupid. You were vomiting all over people—”

“Only one person,” Carson clarified.

“—because you now have more to lose, so you do, than when you were single with no tyke in diapers.”

After a silence, Carson said, “I suppose there could be a little truth in that.”

“I suppose,” Michael agreed.

“There's not just a bit of a bit of truth in it,” Mary Margaret said, “it's all truth, plain word for plain word, as sure as anything in Scripture.”

Scout dropped her teddy bear and clutched at her father's nose.

Carson picked up the bear.

Michael gently pried Scout's thumb out of his nostril.

“Do I have to say outright what conclusion this truth leads to?” Mary Margaret asked. “Then I will. If you've got so much to lose that a bit of risk makes you vomit all over people, then you don't have the nerve for risk anymore. You'd best stick with simple divorce cases, bringing justice to wronged women.”

“There's not as much money in that kind of work,” said Carson.

“But surely there's more of it year by year.”

“It's not always the woman who's wronged,” Michael said. “Men are sometimes the faithful ones.”

Mary Margaret frowned. “And I would recommend we don't take pride that we live in an age when such a thing is true.”

As the nanny continued peeling and slicing apples, as Duke resumed his vigil in hope of charity or clumsiness, Carson asked about her brother: “Where's Arnie?”

“In the study,” said Mary Margaret, “doing what the name of the room implies. I've never seen a boy who took such pleasure in learning. It's as admirable as it is unnatural.”

Michael led the way from the kitchen to the study, carrying Scout, repeating, “Ga-ga-ga-ga-ga, ba-ba-ba-ba-ba,” to encourage the baby to babble again, but she only gazed at him with astonishment—blue eyes wide, mouth open—as if aghast that her father appeared to be a gibbering loon.

“Don't drop her,” Carson warned.

“You're becoming a fussbudget,” Michael said.

“What did you call me?”

“I didn't call you anything. I just made an observation.”

“If you weren't carrying that baby, I'd make an observation.”

To Scout, he said, “You are my little bulletproof vest.”

Carson said, “I'd make an observation with my knee in your groin. Fussbudget, my ass.”

“Your mother is a type A personality,” Michael told Scout. “Fortunately, the gene for that is not a dominant gene.”

When they reached the study, they discovered that Arnie was no longer absorbed by his textbooks. He sat at a table, playing chess.

His opponent, looming large over the game board, was Deucalion.

Mr. Lyss was spooked. He looked as scared now as he looked angry earlier. His squinched face was still tight and knotted, but now you could see all the lines were worry lines.

Nummy O'Bannon couldn't sit on the lower bunk, it belonged to Mr. Lyss. So though embarrassed, he sat on the edge of the toilet that didn't have a lid. He watched Mr. Lyss pace back and forth.

Mr. Lyss had tried to talk to the people in the other two cells. None of them said a word.

Then he shouted at them. He called them names like
numbnuts
, whatever that meant. They didn't even glance at him.

Finally he said he would cut off parts of them and then feed the parts to pigs. There weren't pigs in the jail, but the threat was very convincing. Nummy believed it and shuddered. Mr. Lyss cursed the quiet people and insulted them. He spat at them. He shrieked at them while dancing in place in a most excitable way, like an angry troll in one of those fairy tales Grandmama sometimes read to Nummy.

Mr. Lyss was not used to being ignored. He didn't take it very well.

After he calmed down, Mr. Lyss had stood at the bars between this cell and the next, watching the quiet people over there. From time to time, he shared facts he noticed with Nummy.

“They're all in pajamas or underwear, bathrobes. They must've been taken from their homes without being given a chance to dress. None of them is wearing shoes, only slippers. Most are barefoot.”

Mr. Lyss saw Ms. Jessica Wanhaus, the pretty librarian, who was naked from the waist up. He whistled and behaved in a way that made Nummy half sick.

“And they've got some kind of shiny thing on the sides of their heads,” Mr. Lyss said. “At least the ones I can see clearly.”

“What kind of shiny thing?” Nummy asked.

“The kind of shiny thing that shines, you dumbass. How would I know what it is? I've never seen anything like it.”

“Sorry, sir,” said Nummy.

“You should be sorry, Peaches. Sorry you were ever born.”

“I'm not though. I'm happy I was born.”

“Which proves how truly stupid you are. Some of them have almost dead eyes, like zombies.”

“I don't like them kinds of movies,” Nummy said, and shivered.

“Others, their eyes never stop moving, full of terror.”

Nummy wished Mr. Lyss wouldn't share the facts he noticed. Grandmama said happiness was a choice and you should always keep a positive attitude. But it wasn't easy keeping a positive attitude with Mr. Lyss around.

His back to Nummy, gripping the bars, peering between them, Mr. Lyss said,
“Shit!
”

Sitting on the edge of the toilet seat, Nummy wasn't sure if Mr. Lyss was giving him an order. If it was an order, it was rude.

“This is trouble, this is big trouble,” said Mr. Lyss.

Not only rude, it was wrong. Grandmama said that after she was gone, no one could tell Nummy what to do except policemen and Mr. Leland Reese. Mr. Leland Reese was Grandmama's lawyer. He was a good man you could trust. Grandmama said if anyone else told Nummy what to do, they were being presumptuous.
Presumptuous
meant they had no right to order Nummy around. Mr. Lyss had no right to order Nummy around. Besides, Nummy didn't need to poop.

“Over there in the farther cell,” Mr. Lyss said. “There's Chief Jarmillo in his damn underwear. And the sergeant in his uniform. Sergeant Rapp. How can they be in the cell after they locked us in here and went back upstairs?”

Nummy couldn't answer that question. Even if he could answer it, he'd be called dumb no matter what he said. So he just sat with his lips zipped.

Most of the time, according to Grandmama, silence was wise. Only the biggest fools always had something to say.

“Maybe Jarmillo is a twin,” Mr. Lyss said, “or Rapp, but not both of them. Twins isn't what's going on here.”