Night Mares in the Hamptons (9 page)

“Heaven knows you need our prayers.” Silently, he took the top poster and tacked it to the bulletin board.

The gray-haired cleric had learned not to ask questions, either, it seemed. I know he always preached that, with God, all things were possible, but God would have to be a magician in this place. I thanked him and went back out to the bright sunshine.

 

I crossed the street to the next block, behind the stores on the square.

The bowling alley was closed, not surprisingly, since the owner, Joey Danvers, was the one whose wife ran him over.

Bud from the gas station next door saw me trying to juggle my packages and find the masking tape in my pocket so I could stick a poster to the bowling alley's front door. He came over and hung the notice for me.

“That should hold until someone comes to run the alley for Joey. The men's league plays tomorrow, so one of the guys'll get the keys until Joey's out of the hospital. Or Maureen's out of jail. It's not going to rain until the end of the week.”

Bud was better at forecasting than the weather channel. Everyone knew that. “I'll tell Grandma Eve she'd better water extra.”

“And Claire”—that was his wife—“says her nose is itchy, so tell your grandma to expect company.”

Grandma hadn't mentioned anything to me, so I wondered if Lou was coming back. He worked with Grant at the Department of Unexplained Events, and I didn't much like him. Grandma did.

I doubled back to the square and bought a bottle of water and a corn muffin at the deli, sat on one of the benches, and shared with Little Red. I called Susan on her cell to see how she was doing and told her I just had the art center and the library left. Maybe she'd meet me at the library?

“When pigs fly,” was her answer.

Which might be coming next for all I knew. I put everything I could into the deli bag and headed toward the arts and recreation center.

 

The center was only a few years old and the pride of Paumanok Harbor. Built with a huge legacy from one of the former residents on donated land, the place hadn't cost the taxpayers a lot, and benefited them all. On one side was a gym and a pool where they held youth nights and senior yoga and ballroom dance lessons. On the other was a gallery with much of the donor's private collection, classrooms for after school programs, and studios for visiting artists.

My friend Louisa Rivera used to run the whole thing. With two children and another on the way, she stuck to the arts side now. I was looking forward to seeing her if she had a rare two minutes to spare. We'd been friends forever, it seemed, since both of us were summer kids and not really part of the locals' groups.

Mostly I wanted to know what she was feeling. As far as I knew, neither she nor her parents were born in Paumanok Harbor, and I'd never seen a twinge of paranormal ability in her. Her husband came here as a young boy, a hellion, in fact. His only claim to extraordinary power, other than his amazing good looks, was in making money, first in the computer business, then in land speculation. Now I was curious if they or their children were affected at all by the nightmares.

“I'm pregnant,” Louisa told me. “I barely sleep at night anyway. Who has time for nightmares between peeing every couple of hours?”

“What about mood shifts?”

“Willy, I'm pregnant. That's another name for bitchy. And no, I don't know anything about white horses or the new missing one everyone's talking about this morning. Sorry.”

“What about Dante?”

She smiled, the way she always did when someone mentioned his name. “Nope, he never mentioned anything about them, except to worry that our daughter wants pony lessons, too. We hardly get a chance to speak anyway. He falls into bed exhausted as soon as the kids are asleep and never moves once his head hits the pillow. The poor guy's been taking care of the children all day so I can get the summer programs up and running.”

Which reminded both of us that I had agreed to teach a creative writing course for teenagers in a couple of weeks. It sounded like a good idea at the time. Now it sounded like another nightmare.

I looked at the flyers around Louisa's office while she hung one of mine and took several others to post in the classrooms and the rec center. Yup, my name was right there, with pictures of my latest book covers. No backing out now. I saw Louisa had talked Dante into doing two weeks on designing computer games. Someone else was teaching digital photography, and one of the summer interns had ongoing painting classes. I wish there'd been something like that when I spent summers here. All we had was the library.

Oh, boy.

 

Mrs. Terwilliger had been librarian when my mother was a girl, back when they used the old Shrade house on Main Street for a library. She had to be close to ninety, but no one ever even
thought
about her retiring. Hell, no. Everyone was afraid of the old bat. So maybe she never turned anyone into a toad when they talked out loud or gave them warts if they put a book back on the shelf out of alphabetical order, she was still scary. She'd give Dewey himself nightmares if he spilled juice on one of the books.

Put a gun in her age-spotted hand and you were asking for trouble.

Taking a dog into the library was putting your library privileges on the line—if not your life.

But this was Little Red, who did not take kindly to being left anywhere, anytime. Out in the sun, tied to a bench where seagulls and squirrels could insult him? My mother would kill me. So I left my bags and bottles near the bike rack and tucked the dog under my T-shirt. So what if I looked pregnant with a six-pound Pomeranian?

Mrs. Terwilliger reached down behind her desk when I opened the door. Uh-oh.

Instead of pulling out a pistol, she handed me a stack of books. You never knew what Mrs. Terwilliger was going to give you, but you could be sure it was something you ought to read.

The Horse Whisperer
I was expecting. But three Louis L'Amour westerns?

“These are cowboy books, Mrs. T. I don't usually—”

“You do now.”

“But the horses aren't like the Old West mustangs. Or cow ponies.”

“Read them. And remember, the cowboy always rides off into the sunset.”

“Yes, Mrs. T. Thank you.”

Then she handed me another book,
Women Who Like Too Many Men Too Much
. I'd never heard of it. I looked down at the lump of Little Red. “I'm not . . .”

“For your cousin,” Mrs. Terwilliger said with a curl in her lip. “If she remembers how to read.”

“I'll tell her.”

“This one is for Dr. Lassiter when you see him.”

“I'm not going to—”

She reached back under the desk. I took the book, a pamphlet really, from the Royce Institute Press.
Transuniversal Metaphysics and the Human Mind.
An easy read, for sure. Before she could find more books for me to carry, I gave her a poster to hang, and to think about.

She looked at the colt's picture, then at me. “I'll read
National Velvet
tonight. Aloud. That should encourage him. In fact, I already put Secretariat's biography on various readers' lists.”

“Thank you, ma'am.”

“And the dog needs more air than that.” She handed me a cloth book bag with the library logo on it.

“He doesn't like—”

“For the books, Willow. For the books.”

“Yes, ma'am, thank you. I'll bring it back as soon as I can.” And I'd put it in the book drop instead of coming inside the library. We left in a hurry, sweating, but alive.

I
MET SUSAN OUTSIDE THE POLICE STATION. She showed me the box full of laminated posters but decided to wait outside while I spoke to the chief. I didn't believe her when she said she wanted to sit in the sun. She'd always hated her freckles. What I believed was she wanted to check out the young cop walking a German shepherd that was wearing an orange vest with K9 on it. The officer was short and almost skinny, with a real honker of a nose, but he was Susan's type: male and breathing.

Red and I went in and found Uncle Henry at his desk in his shirtsleeves unwrapping a bologna and mustard sandwich. Red wagged his tail. Uncle Henry offered us a piece. I refused; Red whined.

“I didn't know you had a working dog here,” I said, putting Red down so I could show Uncle Henry the posters. “What does it do?”

“The dog? He's our drug sniffer.”

I looked out the window. Susan and the cop were sharing the bench. The dog was fast asleep on the grass at their feet. “The shepherd reminds me of one of my mother's rescue dogs. Hers had a chewed ear too.”

“Yeah, she gave him to us. Want a soda? Root beer's the only kind we've got left.”

“No, thanks.” I kept watching out the window, more to see how close Susan was sitting to the young cop than to see what the dog was doing. “I didn't think Mom ever trained a dog to smell out drugs.”

Uncle Henry took a bite of his sandwich and shrugged. “She didn't. She didn't teach Ranger to sniff out bombs or track felons either, but he does them, too.”

“One dog can do all that?”

Uncle Henry shrugged again. “No, but Big Eddie can.” He jerked a thumb toward where I was staring and took a long drink from his soda can.

I took a better look while the chief burped. There was nothing big about Eddie . . . except his unfortunate nose. “Oh.”

“Yeah, but try to explain that to the big shots in Riverhead. It's easier to let them think we have a whole squad of trained dogs. The only problem with Big Eddie is you can't overload him with smells. Which means he can't take duty at the drunk tank, disinfected or not. He can't ride patrol with Baitfish Barry, can't be near Ranger after the old boy's been out in the rain.”

He wouldn't be good near Little Red either, if Uncle Henry kept slipping the Pomeranian pieces of bologna.

“Then again,” the chief went on, “we don't have a lot of drug runners, bomb scares, or escaped convicts.”

“Do you think Big Eddie could find a horse?”

“Sure, but you'd be surprised how many horses are out here. Can't hurt to send him and Ranger out in a squad car except I need them in town at night. We've been getting hit hard these days. Every kind of violence, too. No murders yet, but the Danvers thing was a close call. I've got to tell you, Willy, I'm worried.”

He looked it, his clothes more rumpled than usual, his deep-set brown eyes heavily shadowed.

“Me, too. But I'm working on it.” I put two of the posters near the second half of his sandwich.

He studied the reward poster, then the plastic-coated one of the three mares and frolicking colt.

“You're good, Willy.”

I started to thank him, until he said, “Maybe too good.”

“What do you mean?”

He couldn't look me in the eye but took another swig of his soda. “People are beginning to worry that it's you, your drawings, that are calling this stuff to Paumanok Harbor. Like that troll we never saw except the damage the thing caused and now the horses and the nightmares. We all heard Agent Grant call you a Visualizer.”

“But I never called anything to me! Nothing from my earlier books ever showed up. Not the sea dragon or the replicants or the feral child. And I never thought about having a young horse captured and kept from its family.”

“Then how come you dreamed about it?”

“I wish I knew. And I swear I've been wondering about that a lot myself. The best I can come up with is that I'm more sensitive to the appearance of the, uh, aberrations. Maybe I feel them in my subconscious, so I think they're part of the creative process, so I incorporate them in my books. I refuse to believe that I write them into existence. That is just not possible.”