The Tea Party - A Novel of Horror (19 page)

A look, and she saw that she’d missed the point. There was still something about all this that Ollie would not, or could not yet, tell her.

And suddenly, she knew she had it.

“Who’s the father?” she asked quietly.

Ollie sniffed. “Liz, you have to believe me when I tell you that ever since I met Bud I have not slept with another man. Not one. Damnit, not a single damned one!”

She backed away from the vehemence of the denial, and was on the brink of believing her when she stopped in midthought. “Wait. What are you saying?”

“I told you you didn’t get it.”

Exasperation was beginning to wear her temper thin, but she would not lose it, nor would she lose her patience. Instead, she poured herself another cup of coffee, and sipped at it until she could speak without shouting.

“Ollie, listen to me. If you haven’t slept with anyone else, and I’m sure you haven’t if you say so, then the father has to be Bud, right? That’s the way it works. Logic—”

“Logic?” Ollie stood so quickly her chair tipped over and clattered against the wall. She strode to the back door, whirled, and stood in front of her, leaning over, red eyes glaring. “Don’t tell me about logic, Liz Egan. Don’t you dare give me all that lawyer shit about logic and evidence.”

“Now wait, Ollie—”

Her shoulders were grasped so hard she gasped. “Liz, I swear I have not slept with another man since I started living with Bud. I have been so damned old-fashioned and faithful it’s sickening. And this is not Bud’s child! It can’t be!”

“Why the hell not?”

“Because,” Ollie shouted into her face, “nobody gets this pregnant this freaking fast!”

Liz grabbed her hand for fear the woman was going to hit her, held it, and told her mutely she still didn’t understand.

“The doctor—”

“That frigging doctor out there doesn’t know a goddamned thing,” Ollie said wearily, all violence gone, only confusion remaining. She wiped a hand slowly over her face, and down across her breasts where it settled on her stomach before jerking abruptly away. “Look,” she said, stopped, and shook her head. “Look, okay? Every six months Bud and I have complete checkups because, he says, we have to keep an eye out for cancer, right? Every six months we go to the hospital clinic and get the whole works. We get poked, needled, X-rayed, all of it. The last time we went, Liz, was three weeks ago.”

Liz waited, head tilted in question.

“Liz,” Ollie whispered, “three weeks ago I wasn’t pregnant.”

She wanted to laugh until Ollie pulled her other hand free, dug into her hip pocket and tossed a crumbled mass of papers on the table. “Forms. All the goddamn so-called scientific results of the last visit straight from the freaking computer’s mouth. Take a look. Go ahead. According to these I was not pregnant on July second.”

Liz refused the dare. Instead, she leaned back and waited.

“You don’t believe me?” Ollie said, and stood back. “No?” She pulled up her shirt. “Take a look. Take a good look.”

She did. The top button of the jeans was undone, the better to accommodate the slight swelling of her stomach. A small bulge but unmistakable—it was the gentle protrusion of a woman somewhere around five months pregnant.

My god, that’s impossible, she thought with a chill. She remembered seeing Ollie in shorts and a halter only last week and wishing her own stomach were as proudly and as solidly flat. And when Ollie jerked away, she realized she had spoken the thought aloud.

“See? See, I told you.”

“Well, there’s got to be an explanation,” she said lamely. “I mean, surely you must have had symptoms before this week.”

“Nope,” she said, and smoothed the shirt down over her waist. “Not a single damned one.” Then she began to tremble and grabbed for the nearest chair, sat heavily, and put her hands to her face. “Liz, this isn’t happening, you know. This just isn’t happening.”

“The doctor,” Liz said, trying to sort it all out and give it some sense. “Look, the guy at the clinic wasn’t looking for pregnancy, so he didn’t find it. That’s simple enough, and not unusual. You had—”

“The tests, right,” Ollie said tonelessly. “Hey look, I’m not stupid. I know what the symptoms are, I know what to expect. So when I got them again Tuesday morning, I kind of got paranoid, y’know? I don’t always remember to take the pill, but nothing’s happened before. So when I tossed breakfast again, I figured . . . I got scared is what happened. So I went back to the clinic and told them to get a rabbit. And do you know what the guy said to me when he called me at the shop on Thursday? He said I should go out and celebrate, that I was healthy as a horse, and may the kid live to be a hundred.” She inhaled loudly. Closed her eyes. “He told me, Liz, I was at least four months gone.”

“It’s a mistake,” she said automatically.

“Oh, of course it is,” Ollie answered sarcastically. “And do you want to know something else?” she said, her voice tight with hysteria. “Do you want to know something else?” She laughed, a cold and unearthly sound that raised gooseflesh on Liz’s arms. “Are you ready for this?” She pointed to her stomach, her knife too much like a dagger. “That . . . that
thing
wasn’t that big when I went to bed last night.”

6

“You’re nothing but a big fat chicken,” Keith sneered in disgust.

“Oh yeah?” Heather said, flipping her ponytail as though giving him the finger. “Well, who won’t even try to feed a horse, huh, smarty? Who’s so afraid of horses he practically wets his pants every time he sees one?”

“I am not,” he insisted loudly. “I just don’t like them, that’s all. Besides, I could get hurt bad. Even Mr. Muir says so. He says if you don’t hold your hand just right they could take off a finger.”

“Yeah, well, who won’t even try, huh? Who won’t even try to feed Maggie?”

They stood at the Meadow View pillars, each leaning against one, facing each other across the narrow road in undisguised disgust. They had already talked out the bewildering events of the night before and had reluctantly concluded that their mother was right, that she had only tripped over someone’s feet in her rush to get away and had hit her head on the ground—she hadn’t stopped Casey Lockhart from killing anybody at all.

And, as usual, Mr. Davermain was wrong.

That was too bad. It had been fun for a while, thinking Mom was a hero, and if it had been anyone else telling them—like Mr. Muir, or Ollie West—they would have probably believed it for practically ever. Mr. Davermain, on the other hand, wasn’t the best source for legends. He wasn’t, as far as they were concerned, the best source for much of anything, not even a few loose dollars when he wanted to be alone with their mother and they were giggling and perverse enough to hang around until someone got testy.

He was, Keith had once told her, a big fat shithead.

She had scolded him for his language, but she had also been forced to agree. Mr. Davermain was fat, and he patted her on the head, and he acted as if her brother was still in diapers. It was humiliating when he was around, mortifying when he came by and one of their friends was at the house. Like that time in June when he came over and Mother talked him into mowing the lawn and he took off his shirt and looked like a blubbery whale puffing around the grass. The only good thing about that day was the great sunburn he got so bad that he couldn’t even put his shirt back on. Mary Gram had been there, and wouldn’t stop teasing her about how would she like to have that for a new father.

Heather had almost cried.

Though they had long since given up saying their prayers at night, they both managed a plea or two before falling asleep that their mother should not be so stupid as to marry fat Mr. Davermain just because she thought they might need a father.

“Cluck,” Keith said. “Cluck. You’re an ugly hen that can’t even lay an egg.”

“I’m not a chicken either, Keith Michael Egan, so you can just stop that right now. I’m as brave as you are, that’s for sure. It’s just that Mother said—”

“Mother said, Mother said,” he mimicked, high-pitched and derisively. “That’s all you ever say.” He jammed his hands into his pockets, took them out again, and pointed. “You’re no fun anymore. Just because you’re thirteen going on fourteen you think you’re so big. Well, you’re not. You’re just a big chicken.”

When she didn’t respond, he glowered as fiercely as he could at her, pushed off the pillar, and started for the highway.

Heather frowned uncertainly. “Where are you going?”

He paused without looking back, started walking again.

“Keith, where are you
going?”

“Where do you think?”

In dismay, she ran after him and grabbed his arm. “Keith, you can’t go there alone! Mother’ll kill you!”

He smiled, and slowly removed her hand. “I went there last night. While you were over at stupid Mary Grum’s, I went there all by myself.”

Fury turned her hands to fists and made her blush. “I
knew
it. I just
knew
it! All that crap about falling asleep on the floor. I knew you were lying, I knew it, I knew it.”

“Then why didn’t you tell, smarty pants?” he said, turning his back on her to continue on up the road.

She hurried to keep pace, arms swinging wildly at her sides. “Because she’d kill you, that’s why. She’d just kill you.”

“Well, thanks for saving my life. The next time you say you’re at Mary’s and you’re out in the field with Barry Mancuso smoking cigarettes, I won’t tell either.”

“Keith, that’s a lie.”

“Okay.”

“Well, it is.”

“I said okay, didn’t I? You never, never go out into the field with Barry Mancuso, smoke cigarettes, and then chew gum so Mom doesn’t smell it on your breath. You never do, and Artie never told me.”

Heather slapped his shoulder, but not very hard. “Oh, Keith, you’re impossible. You’re really and absolutely impossible.”

“See?” he said. “I told you you sound just like Mom.”

They walked silently to the intersection and stopped. The road was empty in all directions. Sitter McMahon’s chair was there, but he wasn’t in it, and Heather was glad. She didn’t like the way he looked at her when she passed him; she had heard about men like him at school, and whenever she decided to walk into Deerford she always crossed the road long before she got to the intersection.

The light blinked amber; a single dark cloud drifted over the sun, drifted away, and it was summer again.

Heather looked behind her, and wrinkled her nose. “They taste horrible, anyway,” she said, the admission an attempt to get Keith to talk. “Really terrible.”

“Then why do you do it?”

“I don’t know. Barry says it’s cool.”

“It’s stupid. It’ll stunt your growth. You’ll be a midget when you’re thirty.”

“Who told you that?”

“Mom.”

“Mom isn’t always right, you know.”

Keith lifted a hand; he didn’t care.

She checked the empty road again, the empty chair, the rocky hillside across the way. “You’re really going?”

“Sure. Just to the wall, that’s all.”

When he started off again, she stayed with him, her attitude clearly informing him that she was going along just for a little way, and don’t you dare get any smart ideas of getting me into trouble.

Then: “What was it like?”

He grinned. “You really want to know?”

“No,” she said casually. “But just in case somebody asks.”

They passed McMahon’s house before he stopped and looked her straight in the eye. “You’re not gonna say anything?”

“Cross my heart,” she promised, matching gesture to words.

“Really?”

“Keith, I crossed my heart, didn’t I? C’mon, what’s it like over there?”

“Well, first of all,” he said, “there’s this really neat little house, kind of like a shed, out back.”

7

Bernie Hallman was pissed. All that extra gas he had ordered for the weekend rush, and now there wasn’t one. Hell, he hadn’t had a single customer since noon. It was a bitch. And wouldn’t you know the damned phone was ringing and the office door was stuck again and shit on it, he should’ve listened to Wanda and stood in bed. As a wife she wasn’t much good for anything but keeping the sheets warm in winter, but she always knew when there would be days like this.

Yep, no question, he should’ve declared himself a goddamned holiday and stood himself in bed.

Damn, it was a bitch.

The warped door finally gave with a rusty scream, and he slammed it open with a broad, callused palm, paying no attention to its crash against the cinder block wall. He grabbed up the pay phone with a strangle hold that turned all his knuckles white.

“Yeah?”

“Mr. Hallman?”

Bernie stared through the large plate glass window, trying to see through the shade to the real estate office down the street a ways. He turned his head and cleared his throat, his free hand unconsciously brushing through his hair and smoothing down the front of his shirt.

“Yes, Mr. Parrish?”

“Mr. Hallman, I do hate to disturb you since I’m sure that Saturdays are terribly busy for you, especially during the summer months, but I am somewhat pressed for time, and would like to ask a favor of you.”

“Hey, sure thing,” he said expansively, sitting on the corner of his metal desk, shoving aside the credit card press with his rump. “What can I do for you?”

“I have a very dear friend who is just recently arrived in town, Mr. Hallman, and he seems to be having some trouble with his new automobile. I am not a vehicle owner myself, as you well know, so I am unable to give him the advice he requires.”

Bernie stretched, but didn’t see anything that looked like a new car parked at the curb.

“Well, what’s the problem? I’ll see what I can do.”

Parrish gave him a short, self-deprecating laugh that made him stare at the receiver. “That I couldn’t tell you either, I’m forced to admit. Which brings me to why I’m calling. The favor I’m asking is this—would you be so kind as to have a look at the car personally?”

“Well, jeez, Mr. Parrish, it’s Saturday, y’know, and I ain’t got anyone working with me today. Tell you the truth, I don’t think I could leave—”