Good Girls (27 page)

He finally cornered her against the bark of a lightning-blackened stump, and she froze as he approached, as he stopped and stood staring at her, this miraculous barefoot apparition: a girl, maybe seven, eight years old, brunette hair heavy on her shoulders and down her back like moss, hanging to her waist, bestrewn with wood chips, pinecones. Her feet were bare, her blue jeans smeared with forest, green sweater hanging lopsided almost to her knees. She stared back at him—not at his eyes, but his hands, his mouth—shyly, not quite fearfully enough, like a kitten peering out the top of a bag. A kitten someone had meant to drown.

Kneeling, Caribou hooked his gaze to the girl's. Hers slid instinctively away at first. Then he had her.

“You're from the house,” he said, nodding to his right, into the dark.

“Ju,” she said. Or, Jew?

Caribou blinked, had to conquer an impulse to edge backward. He had her—knew he had her, he could feel it—but she hadn't answered what he'd asked.

“Short for June,” she said.

At least that made sense of the word. And now, even more strangely, Caribou felt himself smile. “I didn't know there was a short for June.”

“Are you here to take me back? I don't want to go back, yet.”

“Well, all right, Miss Ju. Why don't you come with me? Let's go tell them we're going. Do you want to come on an adventure? You can even … invite a few friends. If you like.”

Moments later, she was in his car. The thrill of that was almost overwhelming, and Caribou had no idea why. Part of it was simply the eyes on this girl, the bits of tree and ground cover all over her, as if she were ground cover itself, walking. She was afraid of him, yes, hunched against the passenger-side door, and when he smiled at her, she shuddered the whole grass-blade-length of her frame. But then—tentatively, as though trying it out, as though this was her very first time—she smiled back.

He stopped the LeSabre in the lane twenty feet or so from the house, just outside the halo of glowing green and red cast by the strings of Christmas lights that drooped from the cracked, leaf-engorged gutters above the veranda like old skin off older bones. Of course those lights would never be taken down, Caribou realized, probably hadn't come down in years. Who, in that house, could do such work? And of course they would be lit, every night, for as long as at least a few of the bulbs worked, because there were children in there who would want them lit.

Because
this
girl lived there, and would want them lit.

Oh, yes. Aunt Sally was going to like this one. Aunt Sally was going to take this one herself. The thought of presenting Ju to Sally set off shock waves in Caribou's skin and loins and throat, made his tongue tingle. What a present she would make, this Piney-green-eyed girl, who was still smiling at him.

He smiled back and let her go, and she danced through the droplets of light toward the already-open front doors, the old-woman caretakers, the other children emerging from behind them in their Spider-Man pajamas, their pigtails and braids, opening together into the dark like night-blooms on a single, ancient Delta plant. Grinning, still tingling, Caribou eased out of his car and gathered them to him.

 

20

Kaylene had been conscious for some time before she realized she was holding her breath. What alerted her, finally, was the squeezing in her cold, constricted chest, the involuntary clawing of her hands against the dark. Also, despite the fact that she could see absolutely nothing, her eyes were open; she could tell because she'd just felt herself blink.

So she was already dead?

Then she inhaled, and pain exploded all over her face, shooting firework-ribbons of red and yellow across the blackness around her without illuminating anything. She heard herself gasp, instinctively smashed her teeth shut to cut off the sound, but there wasn't much sound, anyway. Because after he'd finished with her face, the bastard had got hold of her throat again. And now she couldn't get it un-crumpled.

This time, when she breathed, she did so through her mouth, between clenched teeth, sucking air over the blood on her gums. That worked better.

She was thinking clearly enough by this point to know that the room was spinning.
How
she knew that, she had no idea, since she couldn't see a goddamn thing. But it was, around and around. Kaylene's stomach lurched, lurched again, and fluid bubbled out of her mouth and forced her to breathe once more through her shattered nose. Shards of bone pricked her mucous membranes like broken glass.

At least this time she didn't even try to make a noise. She just went on grabbing uselessly at the ice.

The ice.

So she was still in Mrs. Starkey's barn, and therefore not dead. Whatever dead was, Kaylene was pretty sure it wouldn't hurt this much. Not in this many places. And she wouldn't be listening this hard, and she wouldn't be this cold. Or this scared.

Breath sluiced through her teeth as the room slowly, slowly steadied. The rush of air seemed thunderous in her ears. Abruptly, she curled into a ball, everything in her body screaming at her to
hide, play dead.
She lay there a long time, feeling like a roly-poly waiting to be squashed
.

Then she'd had enough of that.
Kaylene,
she ordered herself,
MOVE.

But she didn't move, couldn't even imagine moving. She listened instead, heard nothing. Was it really possible that he had gone? The asshat in the hat?

Memory surfaced, set her clawing at the ice and gasping all over again. And then she remembered Marlene
.

She opened her mouth to scream, didn't scream, somehow held both the impulse and the memory back just far enough, just for this second. She waited, curled up, frozen and still. If her attacker was still in the barn, he had to know where she was by now, given the racket she was making while trying to stay silent, even if he hadn't known before. Even if he
couldn't
somehow see in the dark like a cat. Like the fucking monster he was.

But all she heard was the hum of the rink, and she didn't so much hear that as feel it in her ribs, like a murmur in her heart, which was still beating. Still beating. The ice kept tilting under her hands as the room seesawed. But she thought she might sit up.

The whisper was out of her mouth before she could stop it. “
Jack?
”

Again, she curled into herself, clutched the ice as best she could, waited to be torn apart, or for Jack to call back if he could. If he was still here.

Nothing.

And because there was nothing, more memory swelled to fill the empty space.
His
voice, this time. The monster's voice, whispering right in her ear as he smashed her face again and again into the door she'd been trying, with all her trembling, shrieking might, to drag open.

Except he hadn't been whispering, was mostly singing. He'd been singing her a nonsense-song as he held her off her feet by her hair, swung her like a doll.

“Tell your friend …
(SLAM) …
your sweet operator friend …
(SLAM) …
I'm overcoming the blow. Learning to take it well. And this won't be the way it feels.”

And even as he'd hurled her one last time into the steel door, driven the bridge of her nose up into her forehead and dumped her on the ice and dragged or kicked her across it until she lost consciousness, Kaylene had realized he'd meant Rebecca.

Who had never seen the Sombrero-Man, and had no idea what was coming.

Too fast, Kaylene scrambled to her knees, shoving her hands into her pockets in search of her cell phone. The wave of nausea almost pummeled her prone again. But she stayed up, somehow. Gagging, she thrust her hands deeper into pockets, patted herself all over, but found nothing.

He'd taken her phone. Or—just as likely—it had flown from her pocket and was probably lying all the way at the other end of the ice (from whichever end she was on, whichever way she was facing), or maybe it was right beside her but completely invisible in the smothering dark. Sweating, shivering, still nauseous, Kaylene freed her hands from her jeans and dropped them to the ice. That felt surprisingly good, like caressing a bumpy, stubbled face. A face she knew. Plus, the cold was clarifying.

She had no idea which way to point herself. But she realized, woozily, that it didn't matter. Any direction she crawled, she would eventually reach a wall. Any turn she took from there would lead her, sooner or later, back to the door. And even if Sombrero-Man had managed to lock that, and even if she still couldn't stand, by then, she would raise such a ruckus that someone from Starkey's would have to hear, sooner or later.

Assuming Sombrero-Man hadn't gone in there, too. And that he wasn't still here, right behind her.

This time, as she ducked, Kaylene actually punched the ice. She'd moved too fast again, and the room spun some more, churning the slosh in her stomach. But she managed to stay up on her hands and knees instead of curling into a ball, and she held on, and nothing jumped on her.

There was
no point,
whatsoever, in thoughts like the ones she'd just had. She was still here. Sealed in the dark, smashed to shit, but
here,
and therefore a threat to Sombrero-Men, wherever they lurked. Oh, yes, she was. All she had to do was figure out how to move.

Like a Dig Dug,
she decided, and somehow she scraped up a sort of laugh that hurt all kinds of everywhere. If the monster really was still here, and if he hadn't heard her before, he'd heard her now. So be it.

“Come on,” she hissed to the dark, the Sombrero-Man, her own limbs.

Then she was moving. And that went fine, at first. Better than fine. The icy wetness on her palms, seeping through her pants legs, restored more everyday sensation with every sideways slide she took.
I am just a little Dig Dug in the dark, eating a path to the surface, to all my other fellow Dig Dugs prowling right nearby, so close.
The movement itself calmed her stomach, smothered her thoughts, at least until she put her hand down in pulp.

Splinter of jawbone. Shank of hair.

Marlene.

Or Jack? Or both of them? It could easily be. Was this
his
hair, here? And this his flappy Jack-earlobe?

She could hear—
feel
—her brain screaming at her hands to
STOP,
lift away. But her hands ignored the command, went right on pawing through the slop, all these stringy, shardy bits that might or might not be all that was left of both of her friends. They were definitely Marlene, because Kaylene had seen that happen.

Marlene hadn't frozen, the way Kaylene had (
because Marlene hadn't yet had the Sombrero-Man's hands on her
). Marlene hadn't panicked (
because she didn't yet understand how useless absolutely anything she might do would turn out to be
). Marlene hadn't whirled for the door to run.

Or rather, Marlene had run, all right, at full tilt, straight down the ice, skidding out of the cone of light into the dark, to save Jack, while Kaylene had turned and fled, and failed even to do that successfully.

Apparently, to her own astonishment,
she
was the coward.

Or maybe—simply because she'd already had the Sombrero-Man's hands on her—she already understood what actions might be possible, which movements had the potential to distract that guy, at least, or bring help, and thereby save at least one or two of them. And so she'd reached the door, yanked it, turned around to scream a warning, and seen. Watched.

She still couldn't see anything, now. But she was looking down at her hands, anyway. They were still smearing around on the ice. Her right forefinger and thumb were rolling something slick between them, painting her palm with whatever they'd found.

Get up,
she screamed inside her own head.
GET. UP.

She got up, or started to, coaxing her hands back toward her sides. She put her right palm down again to push all the way to her feet and caught the edge of the flying saucer, Jack's flying saucer, which tilted up and set the roundish, heavy things resting inside it rolling toward her like apples in a bowl, and she burst out weeping, burst out screaming, felt her brain dive back inside itself again, and she was falling even as the dark swarmed her.

 

21

Even as she fought it, grabbed hold inside herself of everything she could call up about Natalie—the blue eyes under long black bangs at age seven, and under short black bangs at twenty-one, the smell of Waffle House that clung to her hair, her sweet Natalie-skin—Jess could feel it happening. Really, it had happened, or finished happening, an hour or so ago, right as she left her horrible, crumbling house and turned and saw Rebecca, sweet and lost, needing someone, just standing there in the doorway holding Eddie. It had
been
happening, really, from the second Jess had pulled the trigger on that nightmare beach. There was nothing she could do, it turned out, to stop it from happening or, at least, nothing she
would
do.

The world was coming to get her, to suck her back out into it. And there was no memory she could grab that was strong or stable enough to keep her where she was, no matter how much she wanted to stay.

And so here she stood, folding the sheets and towels at Amanda's long table in the Halfmoon House kitchen, because Amanda needed help upstairs taking care of the girls, who needed a hell of a lot more help. When Jess was done with this task, she would go straight up to those girls and spend some time with them. She'd concentrate especially on the older one, Danni, whom Amanda didn't seem to know how to reach, since Rebecca was already well on her way to saving Trudi, the little one. When that was done, Jess would come back down and finish the dinner dishes and sweep and clean until her time here was up. And then she would go home
(what a stupid word for that splintery, cindery place)
to her baby
(who wasn't her baby)
and her broken man
(who was indeed her man, maybe more so than her husband had ever really been)
and her grief
(that would never leave her or lessen)
and demand that Rebecca clear out her pathetic apartment. She'd tell Rebecca to bring her ridiculous, clueless guy—who had no idea what he had, yet, but would before Jess was through with him—and move in.