When the Day of Evil Comes (2 page)

I’m not shy, so I walked up next to him. “You want a turn?” I asked.

“What do you do?” His voice was strong and deep, incongruous against his appearance.

I wasn’t sure if he was asking what I did for a living or what you do with a rope swing. Since I don’t like to tell people what I do for a living, I opted for the rope swing question. “You just grab on and swing out,” I said. “And then let go as far out as you can. I’ll show you.”

I took the rope from him and walked backward to the rock I’d been jumping off of, then made a run for it, landing again in my favorite spot.

When I came up for air, he was in the water right next to me. I suddenly felt uncomfortable.

I fell back on a lame old line.

“Come here often?” I asked.

“Never,” he said. “I’m not from Austin.”

“Where are you from?”

“I live in Houston now.”

Which made sense, since that’s where the big cancer center is. Maybe he was just there for treatment or something. I felt sorry for him, but something about him wasn’t sitting right with
me. I have pretty good instincts about people. I decided to listen to myself and end the encounter.

“The cold water’s starting to get to me,” I said. “I think I’m going to get out. Nice meeting you.”

“We didn’t actually meet,” he said. “I’m Peter Terry.”

I gave him a little nod and said, “nice meeting you” again. “I’m Dylan,” I said, and immediately regretted it.

“Nice meeting you,” he said.

Okay. Done meeting this guy.
I swam for the shore and climbed out onto the bank, making a point to look back at him and wave after I got on solid ground.

I felt my stomach clench as he turned to swim away. His back had a big gash in it, red and unspeakably violent against all that pasty white skin.

I strained to see it clearly The wound was jagged and severe, brutal enough to be fatal, it looked like to me, in my quick view of it. It ran horizontally, between his shoulders, blade to blade. It was red and ugly, shredded, pulpy flesh pulled back from a scarlet strip of bleeding muscle.

My mind started casting about for a better explanation, needing to make some sense of what I was seeing. Surely it wasn’t a real gash. No one with a wound like that would be walking around.

I finally decided it could be a tattoo. In fact, it must be a tattoo. That was the only logical conclusion. Which just confirmed my impression that something was off with this guy. Anyone with a tattoo like that had some issues, in my professional opinion. Good riddance.

I toweled off and walked back to my group, glad to be with the lumpy whities. Suddenly they looked pretty good to me. I sat down next to Helene and reached into my swim bag.

I found a surprise. A box, ribboned and wrapped.

I held it up. “Hey, what’s this?”

Helene looked over. “I have no idea. I got one too. I thought it was from you.”

The others started looking into purses and bags. Eventually, each person came up with a box, all identically wrapped.

We opened them together, accusing one another of being the thoughtful culprit behind such a fun surprise. No one copped to it, though.

Each box contained something different, but they were all personal gifts. Expensive personal gifts. No one at that picnic could afford such extravagance on faculty salaries. Even those of us who were in private practice wouldn’t have spent that kind of money. We didn’t like each other that much.

Someone must have a secret, I assumed. Someone who was equally wealthy and codependent. And slightly manipulative.

I didn’t really care. I like presents.

My gift was a black leather cord necklace with one big, rough black stone trimmed in silver. It was beautiful and very funky. Perfect for me, since I’m sort of a hippie and like strange jewelry. Whoever picked it out knew me pretty well.

We accused each other for a while longer, until it became obvious that no one was going to confess. Finally, we packed up our stuff and called it a weekend, the faculty retreat officially over. I suspected everyone would show up Monday morning wearing or using their gifts. John would mark his appointments in his new leather Day-timer. Helene would be using her fountain pen. And you bet I’d be wearing that nifty necklace.

I said my good-byes and walked to my old, worn-out pickup truck—a ’72 Ford I’d purchased for seven hundred dollars—yanking the door open and promising myself once again I was going to buy a can of WD-40. That door was stubborn as a donkey and twice as loud.

I threw my bag in and started to scoot onto the seat when something caught my eye.

It was another package, wrapped just like the necklace had been. Identically.

I picked it up, examining this one more closely. The paper was expensive. Not the kind of wrapping paper you get at the drugstore. The kind you buy from specialty stores that sell handmade journals and twenty-dollar soap. The ribbon was fresh, unwrinkled satin. Off-white paper, off-white ribbon. Lovely and tasteful.

Warily I pulled one end of the ribbon and eased the paper away from the box. The box was generic, as the others had been. Thick pressed white cardboard, expensively made. But no store logo on it. Nothing that would identify where it came from.

I tilted open the lid, took a peek, and dropped the box. Inside was an engagement ring. It was platinum, an antique setting, with a beautiful 1.2-carat diamond set among a few dainty smaller stones.

The reason I knew the weight of the diamond is that I knew the ring. Intimately. It was my mother’s ring. And it was supposed to be on her finger, six feet under at the cemetery outside her hometown.

I’d decided to bury her with it instead of keeping it for myself. I’d seen it on her finger before they closed the lid. That was two years ago last March.

I fished my new necklace out of my purse, opening that box carefully, suspiciously. The necklace was still there, funky and chunky I took it out of the box and closed my fingers around it in a fist.

I got out of the truck, slammed that noisy door, and marched back to the water’s edge. I stood on my launching rock and wound up, throwing that necklace as far as I could into the
spring. It was a good, long throw, reminiscent of years of childhood lessons from my brother. The necklace hit with barely a plop and sank to the bottom.

I sat down on the rock for a minute. Queasy and green with emotion.

I waited there until my head stopped spinning, then walked out to the parking lot and got in my truck. It started with its usual rumble, reminding me that I needed a new muffler too. But it got me home, which is where I wanted to be.

I pulled up in my driveway in Dallas four hours later, relieved at the impending comfort of my house and looking forward to a warm, soapy bath. I unloaded my gear, tucking the box with the ring in it carefully into my swim bag, and hauled all my stuff to the front door.

And there, hanging on my front doorknob, was that necklace, still dripping with the cold water of Barton Springs.

I
HAD A TIME DECIDING
what to do with that necklace overnight. I didn’t want it in the house. That I was certain of. But I was afraid that if I tried to dispose of it, it would keep following me around, as ridiculous as that seemed.

What if I threw it in the dumpster, only to find it on my bedside table when I crawled out from under the covers the next morning? I couldn’t stand the thought. It was just too creepy.

I felt somehow that the solution was to satisfy the ghost. Or whatever it was that had brought the necklace back to me.

Now let me say here that I do not believe in ghosts. And though I am a Christian person and consider myself to be fairly serious about my faith, I am not one to see a demon under every rock. The supernatural is not something I think a lot about.

But this experience had me rocked. Ghost. Demon. Weirdo Peter Terry. Whatever or whoever had retrieved that necklace from the bottom of the Springs and hung it on my doorknob had my attention. I intended to play the odds.

So I took the necklace and the ring, put them both in a little velvet bag that had held some other jewelry at one time, and locked them in the buffet cabinet in my living room.

The cabinet was old, a hand-me-down from my mother.
The connection to Mother seemed to have an appropriate vibe to it. Maybe she wanted me to have both gifts or something, as weird as that sounded. I trusted her furniture to hold the jewelry for me overnight.

I locked it in there, said a long prayer for safety, and went to bed. Slept like a stone, believe it or not.

Somehow I always manage to run late the first day of the semester. Some subconscious resistance on my part to working, no doubt, since I’m truly lazy by nature. I overslept that day and had to get myself ready for work in a hurry.

But I made it to class on time, with about four seconds to spare, and found myself standing in front of thirty-seven freshmen, all of whom had signed up for my Intro to Psychology class at Southern Methodist University.

I should say a few things about SMU. Though the “M” stands for “Methodist,” SMU is a liberal arts school. Not a church school like some other universities that have churchy words in their names. No theology or religion classes are required, and you can get through your entire academic career on campus and never hear a word about God or the Methodist church, either one.

That worked for me. It is an atmosphere for free thinkers (unless you are a Democrat, but that’s another conversation), and I like to keep my theology and religion to myself, thank you very much.

And where my colleagues at other churchy-named schools are regularly getting themselves called before boards to defend their beliefs (or lack thereof), my superiors are happy if I can get my students to use their actual brains and get myself published on a regular basis. I am rigorously faithful to both of these tasks. Faculty events, thankfully, are optional.

I like to start the semester off, especially when I have nice
fresh, green minds in the seats, with an exercise in the psychology of assumptions. It throws the students a curve, gets the semester started out right.

I stood in front of the class and tried to look authoritative, which is a stretch for me, since I don’t look much older than my students do.

“Everyone look at me,” I said sternly. I am not terribly stern, in actuality, but they didn’t know that yet.

They all looked up at me like they were in trouble.

“Keep your eyes on me,” I said, “and clear your desks. Do not look down at what you’re doing. No pens and paper allowed on your desks.”

They shuffled around with their stuff, trying to maintain eye contact with me, but dying to look at one another. They wanted to pass the question around the room with their eyes—“What’s up with this psycho?”

After a minute or two, the desks were clear. I took out a tennis ball and held it up for everyone to look at, as though it had some sort of cosmic importance.

Without saying a word, I tossed the ball to a kid in the first row He caught it, and I said, “Name, please?”

“Jeremy,” he said, and tossed the ball back to me.

I tossed it to another kid and raised my eyebrows, as though I were asking him a question.

“Darin,” he said without prompting, and threw the ball back to me.

I repeated the exercise until everyone had caught the ball, recited his or her first name, and thrown the ball back to me. It happened, like magic, thirty-seven times.

“Now,” I said, “what did you learn?” I looked over the faces. “Lauren.” I called on a girl in the second row. By the look on her face you’d have thought I’d punched her in the gut.

She turned to her left and right. “This is Stephanie,” she said. “And that’s Chris.”

“Anything else?” I asked.

“I don’t remember any of the others.”

I looked disappointed and called on another kid. He remembered six or seven names. I asked around the class, prodding them all to tell me what they’d learned. One after another, they listed all the names they could remember.

Finally one kid sitting near the back raised his hand.

I called on him.

“I learned something,” he offered.

I liked the look of him. He was scruffy and seemed slightly disreputable. He had an ankh on a leather rope around his neck and earrings in both ears. His hair was bleached yellow-white and his clothes could have been purchased at an Army surplus store. Or stolen from one, maybe.

“And what might that be?” I searched my memory for his name. “Gavin?”

“We’re all a bunch of sheep.”

People turned around to look at him.

I grinned. “Go on.”

“You never told us to say our names.”

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“Positive. You asked the first guy what his name was, then everyone else just went along. We all assumed that’s what you wanted. But you never said that at all.”

“Good observation. Anything else?”

“Yeah. Come to think of it, you never asked us to throw the ball back either. We just did it. Every last one of us. like sheep.”

“Gavin, you are a genius.” I threw him a bite-size Snickers bar, my standard reward for creative thinking. “You get the first candy of the semester.”