The Unwanted (26 page)

“And maybe a few knives?” someone yelled from the back of the room.

There was a gasp, followed by dead silence, and Charlotte Ambler slowly removed her glasses, letting them drop down to her breast. Abandoning the short speech she’d written a few minutes before, she stepped around the podium and moved forward to the edge of the platform. When she spoke again, her voice needed no amplification from the microphone.

“I shall not ask who said that,” she said, her words echoing coldly through the room, “because if I found out, that person would no longer be a part of this high school.” She paused for a split second, then went on. “What has happened is this: Mr. Simms suffered a sort of mental breakdown in the gymnasium yesterday afternoon, and it caused him to inflict a certain amount of harm upon himself. He is being taken to a hospital in Eastbury, where he will be treated for an indefinite period. For the remainder of this term his coaching duties will be handled by Mr. Johnson, and his classes by myself!” She paused, as if waiting for any of the students to dare make comment on her selection of substitutes for the absent teacher. When there was no response, she continued. “There may be certain scheduling changes, and you will be notified of those in due course. As for the rumors that have been circulating this morning, there is no evidence that Mr. Simms was attacked by anyone, or that there were any weapons involved. That is all. You may return to your homerooms.”

She stepped off the platform and immediately disappeared out the side door of the auditorium, unwilling to allow
even a moment for any of the students to ask a question she might not be prepared to answer.

There was a moment of silence before the realization that the assembly was over sank in. Then, slowly, the students got to their feet and began drifting toward the doors. But everywhere there was a soft buzz of whispered conversation as the teenagers tried to decipher the truth of what had happened in the gymnasium the day before.

By the time the auditorium had emptied, a consensus had been reached, and though Charlotte Ambler wasn’t there to hear it, it would not have surprised her.

Lisa Chambers summed it up as she left the auditorium, the center of a group that only a few days before had always pivoted around Eric.

“I don’t care what anybody says,” Lisa announced. “I could tell Cassie Winslow was weird the first time I saw her. If Mr. Simms said she tried to kill him, I believe it. And if you ask me, Eric better stay away from her before she does something to him too.”

“We can’t just ignore it, Keith,” Rosemary insisted. “If you keep trying to bury your head in the sand, things are just going to get worse and worse!”

“Bury my head?” Keith demanded. He glanced at the clock above the kitchen sink. It was nearly nine. He should have been down at the marina an hour ago, but Rosemary seemed determined to keep arguing with him until he admitted that there was something wrong with Cassie. “I’m not burying my head in any sand, and I’m getting a little tired of you saying I am. If Gene thought there were anything to Harold Simms’s story, don’t you think he’d have been back here by now?” His strong jaw set in an expression of grim determination. “What the hell do you want? Cassie and Eric say they were out at Miranda’s house, and Jennifer backs them up. Even if Eric and Cassie were lying—which I don’t believe—why would Jen lie?”

Rosemary shook her head doggedly, determined that this time she wouldn’t be swayed by Keith’s stubbornness. “You weren’t here,” she insisted. “If you’d heard her, you’d be worried too! I know you would!”

Keith took a final swallow of his coffee, then drained the
rest into the sink. “All right, so she said she wished something would happen to Simms. Why the hell wouldn’t she? He’s always been a mean little wimp, and I don’t blame her for wishing him the worst.” He set the cup on the drain-board, placing it with the overly careful precision that was a certain clue to his growing impatience. “If he’d treated me the way he did the kids, I’d want to kill him too.” He turned to face Rosemary once more, and his voice took on a patronizing tone that made her simmer with anger. “But wanting to do something and actually doing it are two different things. If Templeton accepted her story, I don’t see why you can’t.” The patronizing tone gave way to a sarcastic edge. “Don’t you think I’ve noticed how you’re always watching her, as if you’re just waiting to catch her in a lie, or make a mistake? My God, Rosemary, even when she does something nice you’ve acted like she’s trying to get something for herself!”

“That’s not true!” Rosemary breathed, her heart pounding with indignation. And yet, deep inside, she knew that there was some truth to Keith’s words.

All those strange feelings she’d had about Cassie, which she’d tried to keep to herself. Apparently she hadn’t been successful.

“All right,” she admitted, sagging into one of the kitchen chairs. “I have been suspicious. There’s just something about her, Keith. I keep getting the feeling that she’s hiding something from us.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Keith snapped. “She’s a perfectly normal fifteen-year-old, and when she came here we were perfect strangers to her. Even me, when you get down to it. What did you expect? That she’d open up to us the first minute she was here?”

Rosemary studied Keith beseechingly, trying to find the love that she’d always seen in his eyes. Right now there was none. Only a coldness that made her want to shiver. “But after all that’s happened …” she began again, struggling to keep her voice steady.

“Nothing’s happened, Rosemary,” Keith broke in. He was wiping the cup with a dish towel, then abruptly slammed it down on the counter with such force that it shattered. Keith ignored the fragments of broken china. “All you’re doing is giving in to a whole lot of unfounded gossip.”

It was too much, and Rosemary’s temper suddenly snapped. “I don’t believe it!” she said, angrily snatching up the pieces of the smashed cup, punctuating her words by hurling them into the trash basket in the corner. “Is Miranda being dead nothing but unfounded gossip? What about Harold Simms? Is what happened to him nothing but unfounded gossip too? Isn’t he really in the hospital at all, Keith?”

“You know that’s not what I meant,” Keith replied, his voice icy. “Of course those things happened. What I’m telling you—and what seems quite obvious to me—is that Cassie didn’t have anything to do with them!”

“Then why was she out there?” Rosemary flared. “Why is it that when Miranda died, and when Harold Simms was attacked, Cassie was out there in the marsh, doing … God only knows what?”

A heavy silence fell over the kitchen as Keith and Rosemary faced each other. Finally Keith shook his head. His anger seemed to dissipate visibly, to be replaced by a melancholy sadness. “Listen to us,” he whispered. “Will you just listen to us? What are you trying to say? That Cassie’s some kind of witch?”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Rosemary wailed. “Of course not!”

But it was too late. Snatching his coat from the hook by the door, Keith slammed out the back door. A second later Rosemary heard the sound of his car starting, and then he was gone. But when she was alone, it wasn’t Keith’s words that stuck in her mind, it was her own.

What
had
Cassie been doing in the marsh? But it wasn’t the marsh. It was the cabin in the marsh, the run-down shack that had stood out there, housing generation after generation of Sikes women, apparently each of them as strange as the one who had come before.

Coming to a quick decision, Rosemary abandoned the remains of the morning’s breakfast and put on her own jacket. Locking the back door behind her, she hurried down the driveway then cut across the lawn toward Cambridge Street, at the foot of which lay the park, and beyond it, the marsh surrounding Miranda Sikes’s cabin. It was time she herself had a look at the place that seemed to have such a fascination for her stepdaughter.

Just as she turned the corner onto Cambridge Street, a
gray shadow slipped out the open window of Cassie’s room and dropped nimbly through the tree to the ground.

Crouching low, Sumi began stalking after Rosemary.

Laura Cavanaugh glanced at the clock over the kitchen sink and wondered if she should go upstairs and waken Ed. She didn’t want to, yet at the same time she was almost afraid not to. But it didn’t matter, really—whatever she did would be wrong. If she woke him, he’d be mad at her for not letting him sleep, and if she didn’t wake him, he’d be furious at her for letting him oversleep. She decided to compromise—ten more minutes wouldn’t matter anyway, and it was nice to have the house quiet, at least for a little while. Except that at times like this morning, even the quiet had a tension to it, like the eye of a hurricane; a moment of calm, but with storm clouds pressing in from every direction.

She filled Ed’s thermos with coffee, then clamped it into the top of his lunch pail. There were already three sandwiches and an apple in the pail. After hesitating a moment, she added a can of beer—Ed would take beer on the boat with him anyway, and if she left it out of his pail, he would only accuse her of implying that he drank too much. She was just closing the lunch bucket when she heard him lumbering down the stairs. Then he was in the kitchen, smiling at her.

I don’t believe it, she thought. Last night he whipped Eric and slapped me around the bedroom, and this morning he acts as though nothing happened.

“What’s for breakfast, doll face?” he asked, sliding into the breakfast nook and pulling the sports page out of the pile of newspapers Eric had left on the table.

Laura looked at him uncertainly. “I—I thought you’d just take a Danish and eat it on the boat,” she said. “It’s already after nine, and if you’re not out by nine-thirty, the tide will be too low, won’t it?”

The smile faded from Ed’s face and his eyes flashed dangerously. “What the hell does the tide matter?”

Laura searched her memory for anything he might have said last night about not working today, but there was nothing. “I thought … I thought—”

“I
thought!”
Ed mimicked. “Jesus, Laura, can’t you let me do the thinking around here? I told you last night I wasn’t
going out today. Can’t you remember the simplest goddamned thing?” Tossing the paper aside, he went to the refrigerator, jerked it open, and fished around on the bottom shelf for a beer. Twisting the cap off, he tossed it into the sink then tipped the bottle and drained half of it in one long swig. Wiping his lips with his forearm, he shook his head. “I’m goin’ down to the high school to talk to that snotty principal about Eric. I’m gonna see to it she puts him back on the baseball team.”

Laura shuddered, remembering the last time Ed had gone to talk to Mrs. Ambler. He’d stopped off at the Whaler’s Inn on the way, and by the time he’d gotten to the school, he’d been so drunk he’d barely been able to stand up. Mrs. Ambler had listened to him for only two minutes before calling up Gene Templeton and having Ed escorted out of the building. Gene had taken Ed down to the police station and put him in the town’s single jail cell for the rest of the morning, then sent him home. “Maybe it would be better if—”

Ed’s jaw tightened and his eyes narrowed. “Better if what?” he demanded, his voice dropping to the snarl that was always a warning of impending violence. But it didn’t matter. This time Laura was determined to try to stop her husband.

“Better if you just let everything alone for once,” she said. “Don’t you think you’ve done enough? Don’t you think I know what you did to Eric in the guest room last night? You’re sick, Ed. You don’t need to go talk to Mrs. Ambler about Eric—you need to go talk to a doctor about yourself!”

Ed’s eyes glowed with a manic rage, and Laura knew she’d gone too far. She started to back away, but Ed came after her, his fingers already working spasmodically. He reached out and grabbed her hair with his left hand, jerking her head back as he slapped her across the cheek with his free hand. “I’m sick?” he demanded. “Me? Who the hell are you to be talking? Who the hell do you think keeps this family together? You think I like sacrificing my life for the likes of you? I shoulda gotten rid of you a long time ago!” He slapped her again, then hurled her across the room. Her hip smashed into the counter and she yelped with pain, then sank to the floor, sobbing. “It’s all your fault,” Ed told her, moving
across the room. He drew his foot back and kicked her viciously in the ribs.

“No!” Laura screamed. “Ed, I didn’t do anything—I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”

“Sorry?” Ed mocked. “You’re sorry?”

“But it isn’t my fault!” Laura wailed. “I’ve never done anything to you! I’ve never done—”

“Shut up!”
Ed roared.
“Goddamn it
,
woman, will you just shut up?”

His foot swung back once more, but this time Laura rolled away, scrambling to her feet and managing to bolt out the back door. Ed started after her, but by the time he got outside, she was already up the driveway and limping across the street. He watched her go, then shook his head in disgust.

He’d have one more beer, then head for the school. Let Laura go hide out with the people across the street—he’d deal with her tonight.

Charlotte Ambler wondered if she should signal Patsy Malone to call Gene Templeton, or try to handle the situation herself. But, of course, it was too late now. If she was going to call the police chief, she should have done it thirty minutes ago, when she’d first seen Ed Cavanaugh sitting in his truck, drinking from a bottle of whiskey he hadn’t even tried to hide in a brown paper bag, and glowering darkly in the direction of her office. When she’d first noticed him, she’d stood at her window staring back, putting him on notice that he’d been seen. Usually that was enough, and after sulking in his truck for a few minutes, he would drive away, presumably to the Whaler’s Inn, where, Charlotte knew, he would sit at the bar and brag to whoever would listen about how he’d “set that uppity Ambler woman straight on a few things.” All of which was fine with her. If he wanted to puff himself up that way, it wasn’t any skin off her nose. The one time she had actually called the police, Ed had bided his time through the day, then taken his rage out on his wife and son that evening. When Eric had shown up with bruises on his face the next day, Charlotte had tried to convince him that he should report what had happened to the police, but Eric had refused, insisting that nothing had happened—he’d simply tripped and fallen down the stairs that morning.