Rosalind (16 page)

His guilt was brief
ly lived.

He stood up and went to his study
to salivate over her while she unwrapped his thoughtful gift.

"Go ahead. Open! it!" Susan said.

Rosalind looked at her and then back at the box. She furiously ripped the red and gold paper and the first thing she saw was a white box with black writing which she couldn't understand. If she could, it would have told her that this box and everything inside of it was made by
Mattel. 
She continued to tear at the box and then swiveled it around. On the front of it were several pictures of women wearing several outfits of all different colors and styles. While this representation wasn't as real as the page with the woman in the yellow dress, it was certainly more vibrant.

"It's a new line of dolls
from Germany. They just started making them in the United States this year. At least something good came out of that horrible country," Susan said. "Mr. Byrd insisted on doing something very nice for you this Christmas."

Dolls?
Rosalind thought.

She opened the box and inside she saw
a clump of blond, shiny hair with what appeared to be pointed sunglasses. She pulled it out and there sat, in her very own hands, a slender, pale doll with a zebra-colored swimsuit; her eyebrows inverted V's that said
Like what you see?
She didn’t know whether to cry or laugh hysterically. She vaguely remembered having a doll when she was very little, but it had been a hand-me-down that was missing an arm and had chewing gum matted in the hair. Rosalind looked at Susan again and then back at the doll.

"Is
it for me?" she asked.

Susan nodded.

Rosalind stroked the doll's hair and sobbed. This was the reaction Susan was expecting. She scooted over and put her arm around Rosalind. Rosalind leaned her head into Susan's bosom and continued to cry.

New Year's Day had come and gone and they were well into the middle of January. 1960 promised to be a better year for everyone.

The weather had gotten unseasonably warm for January, and the sun had been making regular appearances lasting more than half the day most days. No one in Whispering Pines held out any hope that the heat wave would continue into February, but they took advantage of the reprieve and built snowmen, shoveled the remaining snow out of their driveways, took walks through town, and some even stopped wearing their coats.

But February did come, and with it, to everyone's dismay, bitter cold. The countryside was splotchy with patches of snow that the sun hadn't melted, but no new snow fell for the rest of the winter.

Rosalind, with Susan's tutelage, had started learning her alphabet and how to read simple books. It was frustrating for Susan at first, but Rosalind, she had found, was a fast learner. She th
ought that in a different world (or even a different universe), Rosalind might even be smart.
But the cards weren't there for her here
, Susan thought. Still, she wanted Rosalind to have every chance.

Sheriff Hanes vis
ited the Byrd house that month to check on Rosalind. His investigation into the break-in at Nancy Fletcher's house had turned up nothing, he had been sad to report. "The guy took some pretty serious precautions. Usually there's some kinda physical evidence at the scene, but we didn't find a thing. To be honest, it didn't help our case that we did the investigation a month after the fact. Hank had already been over and over the house. It was actually a mess with empty beer bottles, but I can't say I blame the man. I know what he lost," he had told Susan one evening at the Byrd house. John had nodded along with Susan as the sheriff had spilled the information. Inside he was pissing himself with relief with a small part of him feeling like he could do anything he wanted in this town, because they were too stupid to figure it out. The sheriff had also checked on Rosalind, and the melancholy, sour child he left at their house a month before was now a vibrant, bouncy young girl. He still didn't know if this was going to be a permanent fix for her situation, but he figured that if no one was any the wiser, and no one was looking for a girl that no one knew existed in the first place, he was alright leaving her here. But there was one more matter he needed to discuss before he left.

"So, do we know yet?" he asked Susan.

"Know? Oh!" She looked at John, ashamed that she hadn't told him yet. "Not for sure, but she still hasn't gotten it?"

"Honey? What are you two scheming
about?" John said with a grin.

The sheriff looked at John and then at Susan. "Maybe you better tell him, I don't have the heart to utter the words," said Sheriff Hanes.

Susan looked around to the room to make sure Rosalind was still upstairs. "The person who broke into her house…did things to her," she said. John was confused. If he covered his tracks so well, how did they know?

Did the little bitch tell?
He thought that the threat of death was good enough for a longer period of silence. She was getting a bit cocky around the house, come to think of it. She was more vocal now than she'd ever been.
And she was quick to strut that body around like she was begging for it!
He began to burn on the inside at her betrayal.

But his face never told the tale of his heart. He calmly nodded in thoughtful motions, "Just horrible what's happened to this young woman," he said.

"It gets worse. She might be pregnant. She is pregnant, I just know," Susan said. While John's face might have hidden his initial reaction to the news about Rosalind's violation, it suffered a shockwave of anger that he quickly hid when he turned away and looked back at his den.

Son of a bitch
, he thought.
I didn't use a rubber? What the hell was I thinking? No, no, don't blame this on yourself, Johnny. It was all her. If she hadn't been flaunting her shit, and those over-sized tits… Yes, it was her fault, proving once again that she was just a conniving little tramp. It was her fault, Susan!

John turned around, and threw on his business face.

"My…God, she's just a child," John said.

"It's disgusting, John," replied the sheriff. "I'm not sure how I'm gonna handle this."

"Dr. McClelland just wants to be included in what is going on. I don't think he can wait any longer to hear from you about her situation," Susan said.

"Has he called me directly
? I know you've been taking some time off to see to Rosalind, but if he called before Christmas…I haven't been in the office much."

"I'm going to see him soon
. I'll tell him that you'll call him with the final report," she said.

"I think we're forgetting one thing," John said. "This is a very, very small town, and when the folks around here see this young lady start to—," he stopped and made a half circle over his stomach with both hands and the
n continued, "then not only will there be gossip the likes of which this county has never seen, but it might be directed at this household. And me!"

T
he sheriff looked at John and then nodded, slowly catching on to what John was hinting at. "I didn't think of that," he said.

"John's very worried about his reputation.
With good reason," said Susan. "Something like that could…it could destroy us." John put his arm around Susan and then took it off. He started pacing back and forth in thoughtful contemplation. He could continue to speak for himself and protect his own ass, or he could take another route.

"My reputation is solid. And I'm sorry I drew attention to that first sheriff, but let's put that aside for now. Let's put Rosalind's interests
first. What would they say about the poor girl? This town is a fine place to live, good people, until you do something out of the ordinary. Then they turn into sharks, or those other fish with teeth. It could get very ugly around here, and I don't think that beautiful young lady up there deserves any of it."

The sheriff nodded again, not looking at anything in particular.
It did bother him that John sought at first to protect his own honor, but he did have a point. And his logic about the effects on Rosalind was solid. "What do you suggest?" said the sheriff.

"First of all, in anything we do from now on, we have to put Rosalind's well-being at the front. Sheriff, if anyone finds out about this, it'll be in The Gazette by morning. So what I suggest is that Susan and I keep her here. She likes it here. We keep her out of sight as her… belly?
…baby?

bastard?

"
…
grows.
A
nd of course we'll make sure she's well fed, well taken care of. It'll be fine," John said.

"John," the sheriff said. "I think that's just about the best thing. Susan, your husband's a great problem-solver if I ever saw one."
He turned to John. "You should've been mayor, sir."

John waved him off and smiled bashfully. "Sheldon's a fine man," he said.

"Okay then. Susan, tell the doctor I'll call him tomorrow and inform him that permanent residence and care has been established for our girl. It still bothers me that this creep is running around, but you leave him to me. I'm not entirely done with that part of the investigation."

John nodded but he didn't smile.
He had business to attend to. Some little girl was getting too comfortable around here, and she needed to learn her place. The sheriff wouldn't find out; he was too stupid, too trusting.

You
should never trust someone too much
, John had learned while climbing to the top of the tire business.

But wait, t
he sheriff wasn't entirely done with his investigation?

Good luck
, he thought.
 

Sheriff Hanes pulled up to Hank Fletcher's house at 7 A.M. He knocked on the door, but when he didn't see Hank's rig sitting in the worn tracks twenty feet to the right of the house, he knew that Hank had gone back out on the road.

Poor guy,
he thought.

The house looked like a skeleton since Nancy had
died. The screen door hung open, flapping against the door frame in the wind and the porch was littered with fragments of leaves and mud that Nancy would surely have cleaned had she been alive. While the rest of the house looked like any other house that time of year, he could tell that something was missing; like a corpse in sitting position on the ground with its heart cut out.

He walked up and down the road to the east first, and then to the west.
He walked a few hundred feet to the west where he stopped, bent down and pulled a cigarette butt from out of a frozen, muddy tire track. He put it in the brown folder he brought to store any evidence he might find. The faint writing on the sliver of white left on it said Marlboro. It was faded by snow and water, but the M and the O were in the right place. Hank was a smoker. He made a mental note to find out what brand he smoked.

He didn't expect to find any physical evidence of Rosalind's intruder, especially so long after the fact, but he would have beat himself up about it if he hadn't at least tried. He took the folder back to his cruiser and drove back to the office.

Susan started coming to the office with more regularity once she was satisfied that Rosalind could handle being alone. Besides, John had told her, they needed the money.

Although he never went back in,
Hanes walked by the diner where Nancy Fletcher worked every morning, staring in at the new waitress behind the counter. She would sometimes see him gawking, and give a friendly wave. Every time, he would snap out of his spell and wave back.

He walked pa
st this morning and didn't look in, but kept on walking until he got to the station. When he walked in, Susan was sitting at her desk, typing on her Oliver typewriter. She looked up and greeted him, but he just nodded and went to his office.

When
Hanes was settled in, Susan got up and knocked on the door frame. The door was already open.

"Good morning," he said dryly.

"Everything okay, sheriff?"

"Huh? Oh, just fine. When there's a break-in around here, the dummies usually leave something behind.
One time I found one of their wallets. But even if they have half a brain, they usually leave a footprint or something. All I have to show for this investigation is a lousy cigarette butt."

"I'm sorry," said Susan. "John used to smoke those until I convinced him that a pipe was more dignified. I prefer the smell, too. Fruity."

John nodded and then looked at Susan. He still had to find out what brand Hank smoked. Hell, it might not even amount to much if he did smoke Marlboros. Anyone driving down the road may have tossed it out the window. But it was the only piece of anything he could find, so he held on to the idea like table vice.

"He doesn't smoke them anymore?" he asked.

"No," Susan said. Her eyebrows bunched up. "What are you saying?"