Eleven
Lori phoned Amy the following day, hoping she had
endured her ordeal without lasting injury. When she received no answer,
she phoned Karen at work for an update. "Amy's spending a day or two in
the hospital," Karen said dryly.
"And the twins?"
"I have friends here in Clayton who watch the twins
during the day. Lori, I need to talk to you this evening."
Lori sighed in frustration. “Come on over for
dinner. We’ll have tacos.”
Karen showed up just before the school bus dropped
off Wendy and Leslie at the corner. The two took charge of the twins.
Karen followed Lori to the kitchen to prepare dinner. "We have a peeping
tom in the neighborhood," she announced.
Lori grated cheese for tacos at the counter and
mulled over the opportunities for peeping toms in the small town. "You
sure about that?"
"I saw him last night."
Lori hid her smile. "Peeping in your window?"
"I saw someone cutting across the alley at about
midnight. I went outside to see where he might go. I still have Leslie's
bat."
"He's been asking about it."
"Your attitude is entirely too flippant, Lori. I'm
pretty sure it was Ronnie Bates. He went into your yard. I saw him go
around the side of the shed."
Lori took the news in stride. She could cope with
the likes of Ronnie Bates, but she had bones to pick with Karen about her
campaign of persecution against the boy. "Do you really think Ronnie's
responsible for Gloria's disappearance? You've started more than your
share of unpleasant rumors about town."
"Ronnie's a grown man, Lori. He may have the mind of
a child, but his innocence is an illusion. We had a peeping tom before
Gloria disappeared. Gloria said more than once that someone was looking
through her bedroom window at night. That's why I'm warning you now.
Nobody's going to listen to me unless it happens again, but I don't want
it to be Wendy. God help this town if another child disappears."
Lori unwrapped a package of frozen hamburger. She
popped it into the microwave to defrost, thinking that she had all the
compassion in the world for Karen's suffering and the unpleasant effects
it was having on her personality. Sooner or later, though, Karen would
have to understand that she had no right to damage the reputation of a
disabled boy to lend substance to paranoid suspicions. As Lori had
discovered for herself, Ronnie had no means of defending himself.
The twins were famished. Leslie and Wendy laughed
themselves to tears watching the toddlers annihilate their messy tacos and
stuff leftover tidbits from one another's clothing into their mouths.
Hours later, the world was sleeping, dark and still.
The mess had been cleaned up, the dishes washed, and Karen and the twins
had gone home. Lori sat cross-legged on the couch with her fists stuffed
into her lap, lost in a flow of half-formed thoughts that followed no
logical pattern. Someone dropped onto the couch beside her in the
darkness. She refocused upon hard-core reality with a start.
Wendy smiled at her.
"Wendy, it's past midnight."
"I couldn't sleep."
"You have school tomorrow."
"School's out Friday for the summer, Mother. I
couldn't flunk now if I tried.”
The refrigerator hummed in the kitchen. A train
bellowed in the distance, soon to be thundering its way through Sorrel.
Wendy shifted closer. "You scare me sitting alone in
the dark all the time."
Lori shrugged. "I worry about things. I'm afraid
for Carol and that boyfriend of hers. He's dangerous, and she won't let
go of him. I'm afraid Ralph might come back and hurt Amy and the twins.
I'm tired of fighting with your father and afraid of being broke and
abandoned. Housewives aren't exactly prime candidates for employment at
the twenty bucks an hour your father makes. I get so angry and say such
horrible things to him. Men can be such bastards."
"I think you're neat when you get mad. I wouldn't
want you to sit around bawling like Amy."
Lori caressed Wendy's long, dark hair. "I'm a tough
cookie. What about you?"
Wendy looked quickly away.
"You've got your own sore spots, I see. Is it Dad?"
She shrugged.
"Gloria still?"
Wendy resisted, but nodded after a moment.
"We go through this over and over. I know it doesn't
help."
Wendy spoke in a frightened whisper. "What if Karen
is right? What if it was someone here in Sorrel who got Gloria? Ronnie,
maybe, or some other man. It could even be the same horrible man who
killed poor Mrs. Cornell."
"Wendy, that's assuming way too much. We have no way
of knowing what may have happened to Gloria, or who may have been
responsible for what happened at the Cornell ranch. We have to be
cautious, but we can't let our imaginations run away with us."
"I think the worst things."
Lori understood. Left to the human imagination, the
world would fall apart in an avalanche of worst-case scenarios.
"I keep having dreams," Wendy said. "Just like you,
but they're a lot worse than dreaming about some old glass eye."
Wendy had spent many long hours with a psychologist
when her own nightmares had been at their worst shortly after Gloria's
disappearance. Talking helped, and Lori had discovered that silence was
the best way to entice the girl to talk.
"I dream that there's a man in the dark watching me,
the same man that got Gloria," Wendy said after a time. "I think that
maybe he was after me, but that Gloria got in the way. I'm afraid he
might come back and try again."
"Do you want to speak with Doctor Lake again?"
Tears gleamed in the darkness. "He told me I
shouldn't worry about things I don't understand. Why does he think I
can’t be hurt by something I don't understand?"
"I think he meant that you shouldn't worry about
things you have no control over."
"Like rape and murder? It's not something he has to
worry about, that's for sure." Wendy looked up and smiled faintly. "Men
can be such bastards."
Warm and sunny days followed. Carol and Ruben seldom
ventured from their house across the street in the evenings. Amy's life
slowly returned to what passed for normal under the uncertain protection
of a court injunction.
Lori continued to write checks for essentials.
Without knowing what deposits were being made, she had no way to keep
track of a balance. Inquiries at the bank always showed small change
remaining. Dave quickly covered an occasional overdraft.
She drove the Volkswagen into town one weekday
afternoon and jotted down the address of the house where Dave kept his
truck parked at night. Thereafter, she slipped the mounting bills into
manila envelopes and mailed them to Clayton. Step by uneasy step, she
began acquiring the savvy she would need to defend herself and her
children should Dave's financial support fail entirely.
The summer promised to be peaceful despite her
recurring dream. School let out for the summer, but Lori could stand on
her front porch in the morning and not see a school-age child anywhere in
sight. There were so few left in town as the lay-offs at the factory
commenced and families began to move to Clayton, or elsewhere. Most of
her immediate neighbors were elderly singles, or couples who seldom
ventured beyond their own spacious properties. Even the more modest
houses in town sat on double or triple-sized lots, helping to fuel a sense
of isolation.
Leslie came and went quietly with friends as the
summer progressed. Wendy spent her days and often her nights with her
girlfriends. Lori allowed slumber parties on weekends, silently comparing
her dark and lovely daughter with her peers and smiling secret smiles of
pride.
The recurring nightmare of the glass eye generated
chronic insomnia, and too much time at the windows alerted her to how
often Trent Scarelli’s cruiser passed slowly through town. It puzzled her
that he was about so often and yet made no effort to engineer an
occasional accidental meeting. Still, she luxuriated in her relative
independence. She slept in the middle of the bed and put away one of the
pillows.
Carol's next door neighbor died of liver cancer at
age eighty-four. Mrs. Robinson had been a pleasant woman who had enjoyed
the children in the neighborhood when there had been more of them about
town and before constant pain had begun to wrack her aging body. Lori
remembered a younger Wendy paying visits to feed an occasional litter of
kittens before the woman's old Persian cat had itself died of old age.
The dead woman's house was stripped of its contents and joined a growing
number of vacant houses in Sorrel. For Sale signs littered the forty-two
square block residential district. The hardware store closed, as did the
agricultural implement dealer on the highway.
In the early twilight of a deceptively calm, mid-June
afternoon, a dark blue Mercedes pulled up in front of the house and
parked. A strikingly handsome, middle-aged man with silver-gray hair
climbed out and walked up the sidewalk to the door. Something in his
stance and expression warned Lori of a cold-blooded professionalism.
Whoever he was, she was willing to bet he wouldn't be pitching
encyclopedias. She met him at the foot of the porch, safely away from the
sanctity of her home.
"This is the David Malcolm residence?"
"Minus the Dave Malcolm."
"You're Mrs. Malcolm, then. Lori Malcolm?"
She tried to keep her tone of voice as void of
emotion as his own. "I guess I must be."
"I was hoping your husband would be here. I seem to
be having difficulty catching him."
"We've all been having that problem. If I see him,
who shall I say called?"
The man drew close enough to hand her a business
card, smiling pleasantly and smelling of expensive cologne. "Give him
this. Dave will know who I am."
"Is there a message?"
"He knows the message. I'll catch up to him sooner
or later."
The man returned to his car and left without looking
back. Lori stood on the walk long after the car had vanished from sight,
holding a panic attack at bay. The lull before the storm had ended.
Clouds were gathering in her life, the kind that she could sense rather
than see, closing in on all sides.
The business card read Henry Kahn, President,
Optometric Industries. Lori was willing to lay odds that Dave's new flame
belonged to this man, either a wife or a daughter. Henry Kahn's wealth
would explain the expensive little house and sports car. A clerical job
at the Denton plant had never accounted for it.
The logo on the card was that of a large, stylized
eye. Henry Kahn made lenses for eyeglasses. In a manner of speaking,
horror of horrors, Henry Kahn was a dealer in glass eyes.
