“That’s a very appropriate gesture,” Irene had said.
The other faces faded before the strong image; there on Tammy’s mind’s screen there glowed the face of Irene Stark. How young she’d looked, as young as any one of them, with her thick hair flying loose and her black eyes shining! She’d seemed to be surrounded by a field of electric energy; an invisible current radiated from her in waves.
“Now!” she’d whispered to them excitedly. “Now! Get him—now!” as the car had come crunching toward them through the night.
“For Laura—for our sister, Laura!”
But, it won’t help Laura now!
“He must be punished! Peter must be punished! When people hurt our sisters, it is we who must punish them!”
It’s horrible! I hate it! Please, Irene, stop them!
Why hadn’t she shouted the words aloud? How could she have stood there, motionless, conducting the whole exchange within her mind? But she had. She hadn’t opened her mouth as they ripped off his clothes, hadn’t made a single move to stop them. Even when he screamed. When he realized what it was they were doing, he had screamed, a high, shrill bleat of horror, not the cry of a man, but the wail of an animal!
She couldn’t hear that sound again, not even in memory. If she did, she would break apart. The part of the mind that protects the soul while the body is sleeping gave her a mighty wrench, and she came awake, sweating and shaking.
Thin, sweet sunlight was streaming through the bedroom window.
The room was oddly bright, as though lit by some ethereal source. The blue painted walls were like slabs of sky. Each object in the room stood out from its background, outlined in brilliance. The oval mirror over the dresser snatched at the sunbeams and sent them out in all directions in a blinding shower.
I must still be dreaming, Tammy told herself groggily. Then, as she lifted her head from the pillow, she saw that the branches of the trees outside her window were layered with snow.
“Was it snowing last night when you got home from the church?” Mrs. Underwood asked at breakfast.
“No,” Holly said. “In fact, the sky was clear. There was lots of moonlight.”
“How did the practice go?”
“What? Oh—fine. Just fine.”
“How else would it go?” her dad asked as he helped himself to the bacon. “She spends half her life banging away at that organ over at the church and the other half at the piano here. It would be a wonder if she wasn’t able to hit the right notes by this time.”
“I don’t ‘bang away,’ ” Holly said.
“Oh, you don’t, huh?” Mr. Underwood said in amusement. “I’ll tell you, Miss Hollyhock, when I come home from work at night this house is shaking like there’s an earthquake going on. I’m thinking of selling that blasted instrument just to get some peace and quiet.”
“You can’t sell the piano,” Holly said. “It belongs to Mom.”
“What’s hers is mine as long as she lives in my house.”
“No, it isn’t,” Holly told him coldly. “Not if it’s something she owned before you were married. That’s not the way the community property law works.”
“Well, aren’t you the smart one,” her father said. “ ‘Smart’ meaning ‘sassy.’ What are they teaching you over at that school, anyway, how to be a lawyer?”
“I don’t like to hear you talk back to your father like that, Holly,” Mrs. Underwood said. “You know he’s just kidding around.”
“No, he’s not, Mom. He really thinks he has a right to own everything in this house just because he makes the mortgage payment.” Holly shoved her chair back from the table. “Excuse me. I’ve got to go find my library book. It’s due back today.”
“What’s with her these days?” Mr. Underwood asked when his daughter had left the room. “She’s grown quills like a porcupine. You can’t joke with her about anything without getting a face full of stickers.”
“Maybe she’s coming down with something,” his wife said. “She looks sort of flushed and funny.” She paused. “Or maybe it’s just the age. I was talking to Jean Brummell the other day, and she was saying it’s the same with Paula. She was always such a sweet, well-adjusted girl, and all of a sudden this year, she’s just gone haywire.”
Mr. Schneider left for work at 7:35 a.m.
At 7:38 he was back in the house again, the snow on his shoes dripping rivulets onto the kitchen linoleum, shouting, “Erika, come down here! What the hell have you been doing with my car?!”
“Harry, please,” Mrs. Schneider protested. “Boyd is still sleeping.”
“I don’t give a damn who’s sleeping, I want to know where that girl went last night.” He crossed to the middle of the kitchen and raised his voice in a bellow that caused his wife to cover her ears. “Erika, do you hear me? I want you downstairs right now!”
“I’m here, Dad,” Erika said, appearing in the doorway. “I was feeding the rats. What’s the matter?”
“The matter is that half the paint is scraped off my car,” Mr. Schneider said angrily. “Where did you take it last night? That sure didn’t happen over at the pet store.”
“I’m sorry,” Erika said. “I don’t know what could’ve scratched it.”
“Well, you’d better start thinking. This isn’t the sort of damage caused by some car clipping you in a parking lot. It looks as though you went driving through a patch of thornbushes.”
“There’s a bush of some kind by the side of the Carncrosses’ driveway,” Erika told him. “I guess I could’ve pulled in too close when I stopped for the forms for the science fair.”
“It’s not one side that’s scratched up, it’s both!”
“Well, maybe there were two bushes.”
“And maybe there weren’t any. You can’t make me believe that happened by pulling into somebody’s driveway. You had that car out in the woods, now, didn’t you?”
“In the woods!” Erika exclaimed. “Why would I go there?”
“That’s a good question. Why would you?”
“I didn’t.”
“Then where did you go?”
“I already told you. To the Pet Emporium and then to the Carncrosses’.”
“Would you like me to phone Mr. Carncross and check on that?”
“You can if you want to. I don’t care.” Erika took off her glasses and breathed on them and began to polish them with the front of her blouse. Without the rims to give emphasis, her eyes looked suddenly very small and pale, overpowered by the length and sharpness of her nose.
Mrs. Schneider said, “Why won’t you ever wear mascara? It would make such a difference in your looks, Erika.”
“We’re not discussing Erika’s looks, we’re discussing my car,” Mr. Schneider said.
“Well, if she says she took it to Carncrosses’, that’s where she took it.” Mrs. Schneider regarded her husband reprovingly. “It’s a terrible thing to accuse your own daughter of lying. Erika’s never given us any cause to doubt her. If she doesn’t know how the scratches got there, then she doesn’t know, and all the yelling in the world isn’t going to make her suddenly come up with an answer.”
“I’m really sorry, Dad,” Erika said. “I’ll save up and have the car repainted.”
“I never asked you to do that.”
“But I want to do it. It’s your car, and I got it scratched up and I owe you a paint job. Now, can I go up and clean those cages before I have to leave for school?”
“Oh, go ahead. I don’t have time to go into this any further. Tonight, when I get home, I’m going to ask you about it again. You think about that during the day, all right? See if you can’t revise the story so that it rings true.”
“There won’t be anything different to tell you,” Erika said, putting her glasses back on.
She left the room, and her parents could hear her footsteps as she ascended the stairs. The footsteps went down the upstairs hall, and they heard the door of her bedroom close.
“She was lying
,” Mr. Schneider said bluntly.
“I imagine she was.”
“You imagine—what?” Harry Schneider turned to his wife in amazement. “Then why the hell did you give me that speech about how Erika’s word is to be trusted? Do you know something about this situation that I don’t?”
“No, nothing. It’s just that, Harry, you know as well as I do that no girl drives out and parks in the woods by herself.”
“You mean, you think—”
“She was with a boy. It has to be that. Eighteen years old, and she’s finally got a boyfriend! If you do one thing, one single thing, to mess this up, I swear, I’ll never speak to you again as long as I live.”
“Our daughter’s sneaking out on a school night, lying to her parents, and parking with some creep who doesn’t even have his own car, and you’re happy about it?” Harry Schneider shook his head in bewilderment. “You’ve got to be crazy.”
“She’s a normal young girl who’s fallen in love.”
“You don’t know a thing about who this guy is or what he might be doing to her.”
“Erika isn’t stupid, dear. She’s waited a long time for this. She isn’t about to go out and pick somebody awful.” Mrs. Schneider put a hand on her husband’s arm. “We’ve worried about her for so long, about this thing of hers about wanting to be a scientist. That bedroom full of rats! I have nightmares about it. I wake up at night, and I’m afraid to walk to the bathroom for fear one of them has gotten out and is running around in the hall somewhere. You’ve kept telling me it was just a stage and she’d outgrow it. Well, maybe she has. Wouldn’t that be wonderful!”
“But why can’t she tell us about him? Why can’t she bring him home and introduce us to him?”
“She will when she’s ready. She’s probably shy about it. Erika’s awfully young for her age in a lot of ways. When I was eighteen, you and I were already engaged!”
“We were?” Mr. Schneider’s voice softened. “Were you really that young, Barb?”
“Of course I was. Don’t you even remember?” Barbara Schneider sighed. “All I want for Erika is for her to find somebody like you and marry him and be as happy as I’ve been. Is that too much to ask for your only daughter?”
“Mom!” Niles said. “You’ve got to come quick! Something’s happened to Pete!”
“What do you mean, ‘something’s happened’ to him?” Edna Grange pried open her eyes to gaze groggily up into the face of her second-oldest son. There were fifteen minutes left before her alarm went off and it was her habit to luxuriate in every one of them. George was up and out of the house at 5 a.m. and picked up breakfast at a truck stop, but Edna was accustomed to sleeping in for an extra hour and a half before facing the hectic ritual of feeding three teenagers and a nine-year-old and getting dressed to prepare for her own day at work.
“Is he sick?” she asked Niles.
“It’s worse than that! He just got home and he’s—he’s—” Niles choked on the words as if his throat were constricted.
“He just got home?” She was wide awake now and was throwing back the sheets. “How could that be? It’s almost six thirty in the morning!”
“He was out all night. But, Mom, that’s not what’s so scary! He doesn’t have hair, and something happened to his head!”
“What?! What do you mean something happened to his head?” Leaping up from the bed, she shoved her way past Niles as if he were the size of a toddler and took off at a run down the hall to her older sons’ bedroom.
“Peter? Peter, where are you?”
“He’s in bed,” Niles told her, racing along in her wake. “He’s got his head wrapped in a bath towel, and he won’t talk to me. He’s lying there shaking. He’s freezing. He didn’t have a jacket on. Just—um—a dress.”
The room that the two boys shared was dimmer than their parents’ room. The blinds had been lowered against the glare of the morning light. There was one empty bed with blankets draped to the floor. The other contained a figure.
“Peter, what happened?”
“Go away.”
“Petey?” She went over to the foot of the bed and stood gazing helplessly down at the blanket-covered form. “What’s wrong with your head? Have you been injured?”
“I told you, go away! Get out of here!”
“Unwrap that towel.” Edna went around and sat down on the bed and put her hands on the sides of his head, turning it gently so that she could see his face. She caught her breath. “You’ve been crying! Look, sweetie, I want to know what happened. I’m not leaving for work until I find out what this is all about.”
“Okay, okay, so you want to see it—take a look.” Peter shoved her hands away and sat up. Reaching up, he unwound the towel and let it drop to his lap. “Okay. Now you know. Are you satisfied?”
“Good god!” Edna Grange had never used the Lord’s name in vain in her entire life. Now, she did so without even realizing it. “My god, what happened?” There was blood on the towel.
“I got mugged.”
“Somebody jumped you?”
“It wasn’t just one guy, it was a bunch of them. If it had been just one or even two I could’ve defended myself, but this was a mob.”
“I can’t believe it! How could anybody be so horrible?!” She reached instinctively once more for his head, and he jerked quickly back from her touch. “Honey, I just want to help. Does it hurt?”
“Goddamn it, of course, it hurts! It makes me want to puke!” His voice was shaking. “The bastards shaved off my hair, all of it, even my eyebrows and chest hair and my… you know. And… and…” he broke off with a hiccup and turned so she could see the back of his head. Scratched into his skull was a word: SLUT. Niles balled his hands into fists so tight that they turned white. “And they left me out in the woods in my underwear. I couldn’t even drive home because my keys were in my jacket pocket. I had to walk all the way. I nearly froze my ass off.”
“You didn’t come upstairs in your underwear,” Niles said. “You had a dress on. Where did you get a dress?! Mom, it’s there on the floor. That blue thing over there.”
“They left it for me. Some sick sort of joke. They must’ve gotten it out of a trash can. It was lying beside me when I managed to get my hands free. They had me tied up, but loose. And there was that dress, and I was naked, and I had to walk back into town. I had to put it on.”
“Did anybody see you?” Niles asked.
“Of course people saw me. Ann Whitten’s farmer boyfriend was out slopping his pigs and I had to run past the corner of his farm. And once I got into town, the joggers were out. Steve Penrose was out on his paper route, and he drove by. I could see him leering out the window, but he sure didn’t offer me a lift. By this time tomorrow everybody in town will know about it!”
“Oh, honey! Oh, Petey!” Edna had to restrain herself from putting her arms around him as she had when he was a child. “Who did this to you?”
“I don’t know. I never saw them before.”
“Where did it happen?” Niles asked him. “Was it down at the creek?”
“Yeah.”
“Where you went to meet Madison?”
“Madison wasn’t there. It was these guys instead.”
“But she wrote the note.”
“I said it wasn’t her!” His voice rose sharply. “I told you back when I got it that it didn’t look like Maddie’s handwriting. Somebody forged it. Somebody pretended to be Madison so they could get me to go down there where they could jump me with nobody around.”
“Why would anybody do that?” Niles asked matter-of-factly. “Did they take your wallet?”
“I don’t know.” Peter lifted the towel and began to wrap it again around his head. “It was in my pants pocket. I guess they must have.”
“What did they look like? Were they young guys, like in high school?”
“It was dark. I couldn’t see them well. I just know they were big. They had arms and shoulders like gorillas. One of them got a rope around m
y neck and choked me with it while another one grabbed me and pulled me down and sat on me. I must have blacked out, because the next thing I knew I was lying there alone in the clearing, and I didn’t have clothes on. Everybody was gone. My head felt funny. I reached up and felt it—and—I didn’t have hair. They’d left me a baggy dress, like from a costume party. I put it on because I didn’t have any choice.”
“Thank god they didn’t kill you,” his mother said softly. “Money is such a small thing to part with. It could’ve been your life.”
“You’re sure Madison wasn’t in on it?” Niles asked.
“Madison!” Edna Grange exclaimed in astonishment. “But she’s Pete’s girlfriend!”
“She’s the one he went out to meet. She knew where the place was.”
“Madison didn’t have a damned thing to do with this,” Peter exploded. “Even if she got mad at me about something, can you picture a skinny girl like that attacking a full-grown man?”
“She could’ve gotten some guys to help her.”
“Well, she didn’t.” Peter turned to his mother. “You better just deal with it—I’m not leaving this house until my hair grows back. And you’d better tell Kristy that if she dares to breathe a word, and I mean one single word, about this to those loudmouthed bitches she runs with, she’ll be sorry.”
“Dear, you’re being ridiculous,” Edna said. “This is your senior year. You can’t drop out of school. First, though, we need to call the police.”
“No way,” Peter told her.
“Those men are monsters. They were probably on drugs or something. If they could do this to you, they could do something even worse to somebody else.”
“I’m not going to call the cops and get all written up in the paper.”
“We’ve got to report it—”
“Mom, lay off.” Niles moved over to stand beside her. “Pete knows what he’s talking about. You don’t know what it would do to him if this got around school. I’ll go talk to his teachers and get his homework. I’ll say he’s got mono and the doctor won’t let him come back until after Christmas.”