Seventeen
At three o'clock Monday morning, Sorrel appeared dark
and uninhabited to the casual eye. The few streetlights in town weren't
enough to wash out the diamond dusting of stars shining in the dome of the
sky. A distant jet liner blinked low on the horizon. Larks wheeling
overhead announced the approach of dawn. Their forlorn cries echoed
across the sleeping landscape.
Wendy and Leslie babysat the twins. All were
sleeping when Lori and Carol locked the house behind them and crossed the
street. Together, they retrieved the five packages of powder nobody was
ever going to bother identifying from the basement. Amy and Karen stood
guard at each end of the block, watching for traffic and chattering
nervously over a pair of Leslie's toy walkie-talkies. Nothing human
stirred in Sorrel or the surrounding countryside for as far as the eye
could see.
Lori and Carol tossed the packages into the back seat
of the Volkswagen. They left Amy and Karen behind to guard the children
and drove deep into a heavily forested section of the nearby county park.
They parked the car near a twenty foot high outcropping of rock that ran
the length of the park and carried the packages down a winding deer trail.
The reached the low cliff with dawn a gray light in
the east. Lori had already reconnoitered the area and located a deep hole
at ground level along a section of cliff heavily eroded by rain. The five packages fit with room to spare. They filled
the remaining depression with handfuls of earth, then shifted a two
hundred pound rock to cover the spot.
Lori stood back and slapped dirt from her hands.
"What do you think?"
Carol sighed nervously. "I'm tickled pink." She
used a pen knife to carve a mark into the rock wall. "X marks the spot.
Just in case. Let's go home."
They returned to town with the sun a ball of ruddy
red peeking above the horizon. Lori checked on Leslie and then Wendy.
She found the girl awake and sitting cross-legged on her bed, petting the
purring calico. Wendy avoided eye contact as she had been doing since the
night of the attack in the shed.
"Did the twins keep you up?" Lori said.
Wendy shook her head. She glanced up hopefully. "Is
it over now?"
"It wasn't anything too important," Lori said, hoping
Wendy hadn't picked up any clues as to the nature of their clandestine
activities. Ruben was someone the fourteen-year-old needn't ever know
about.
Lori tried to nap, but temperatures rose to
intolerable levels during the day and only intensified during the course
of the week that followed. Carol slept in the master bedroom, and Lori
lay sleepless on the couch during hours of darkness that became trials of
torment. With more of the windows thrown open to the overheated night,
they doubled the number of string traps around the house. More than once,
Lori stayed at the kitchen window for an entire night, watching for a hint
of movement in the darkness.
Carol took Greg up on his offer to share his
apartment above the diner. "He's got air-conditioning, Hon. I've got to
get my sleep if I expect to survive the day."
Lori had the same problem, if she expected to survive
at all. She adopted a schedule of sleeping in the early morning hours for
three hours or so and again in the evenings before dusk. During the
night, she wandered the house alone, keeping it as dark as possible,
constantly alert to the slightest sound coming from outside.
With the backing of her friends, Amy filed for
divorce. Amy's mother reacted to Amy's newly acquired assertiveness by
disowning her daughter, fearfully certain that Ralph would wreak his
eventual revenge. "She seems to feel that I should let Ralph beat on me
rather than cause trouble," Amy commented with hurt confusion. "She says
we should be more understanding of our husbands. Did I get that from her,
do you think, the awful way she feels about herself?"
Lori began driving Amy to the welfare office in
Clayton to apply for food stamps and welfare for the children. She would
have no option but to follow suit when the rapidly dwindling vacation
checks dried up. Jobs had become scarce in Clayton following the massive
lay-offs at the factory. Even minimal wage jobs were nonexistent in
Sorrel and surrounding communities.
The engine in the Volkswagen failed. Carol had it
fixed again, "for a rather pleasant price, if you have an appetite for
overly enthusiastic mechanics with greasy fingernails." They changed the
locks in Amy's doors and added chains and deadbolts. Lori paid the bill
for Venetian blinds for Amy's downstairs windows. They expected Amy to be
besieged first should Ralph make good his promised raid on Sorrel. Karen
had an extension phone installed in an upstairs bedroom as an early
warning system for the group.
The calico kitten trotted arrogantly about the house
with tail held high, tamed so thoroughly by Wendy and Leslie that it would
go limp with ecstasy when picked up and purr with the intensity of a
mechanical vibrator. Wendy spent more time at home despite the heat, but
Leslie continued his annual three month rampage of the small town,
reporting in three times a day as directed, but otherwise keeping himself
out from under foot.
Wendy slipped in across from Lori at the dining room
table one quiet morning. Lori tapped at a calculator as she fought to
balance two columns of figures. Balancing the checkbook was by far the
least favorite of her two major monthly discomforts.
"Karen picks on Ronnie too much," Wendy said. "Can't
you tell her to stop?"
Lori set her notebook aside. "You're defending
Ronnie? I thought you were terrified of the boy."
Wendy looked down at the table sheepishly. "He can't
help being the way he is. Gloria used to like him. Everybody else made
fun of him. Then she started making fun of him, too, because the other
kids said that she was probably just as retarded."
"And you?"
Wendy dipped her head in shame. "I was Gloria's
friend. I had to stick up for her. Ronnie must have hated both of us for
the way we treated him."
"But the three of you were friends at one time?"
Wendy ventured a guilty smile.
The conversation gave Lori the opportunity to snoop
for Wendy’s knowledge of Ronnie’s background. “I know they have
different last names, but is Carl Adler Ronnie’s
father?”
"He's his guardian," Wendy said. "Ronnie lives in a
room behind the store. I think Ronnie's father was killed when he was a
kid. A tractor rolled over on him. They had a farm just south of here.
The house is still empty, that big white one up on the hill."
She had known of the empty house for a decade without
knowing that it had belonged to Ronnie's parents. Someone had kept it up
through the years.
Lori braved a visit to Carl Adler's store during the
week and drew the man aside. "Do you remember my complaint about Ronnie
not knocking when delivering groceries?"
The man oozed cold neutrality for the subject.
"I overreacted," Lori said. "I apologize, but I've
been concerned. Hasn't it ever caused a problem?"
Carl Adler shook his head solemnly. "Mrs. Malcolm,
many of my customers are elderly. They appreciate having the boy around
to deliver their groceries. A few would be hard pressed to hear him
knocking on their doors, or even to get up and answer them. So Ronnie is
generally welcome to enter unannounced, and if nobody's about, he has
enough sense to put a package of meat or a carton of milk in the
refrigerator. Except for you, and that difficult Radcliff woman, I've
never had a complaint."
The next meeting of the group was at Amy's house.
Lori told Karen of Carl's explanation for Ronnie's behavior. "I don't
understand why you think Ronnie is anything other than what he appears to
be," Lori confessed.
"Dismiss my warnings if you dare, but he does look in
your windows and you'll catch him at it if you try, but we've got a more
immediate problem to contend with. I followed up that lead I got on
Ralph, and I hear he's making threats. The lady that runs the boarding
house where he's staying says she's heard him talk when he comes in
drunk. He says he's going to blow away those bitches in Sorrel. It's her
opinion that some of the man's dogs are running loose."
Amy sat up in alarm. "What are we going to do!
Lori, he might really do it!"
They exchanged looks, polling one another for an
opinion.
"We've done a great deal by changing the locks and
putting a phone upstairs," Karen said, "but I've been thinking. Ralph is
still driving that rusty old pickup. If he's out of a job, he's low on
money. Five pounds of sugar in the gas tank should put him on the
sidewalks of Clayton for the winter."
"You can give me the address," Carol offered. "I did
that once as a kid."
"Be careful!" Amy cried out. "He keeps a shotgun
behind the seat!"
"While you're at it," Karen told Carol blandly, "put
some glue down the barrel of the shotgun.”
The meeting raised Lori's spirits. Their respective
crises were under firm control. With a little caution, it would be
difficult for their enemies to catch them off guard.
Carol headed home to pack an overnight bag. "I'll be
over at about midnight!" she called over her shoulder. Lori walked home
alone feeling secure, more so than she suspected she should.
Wendy retired to her room for the night late that
evening. Leslie had gone to bed earlier. By midnight the house was
silent. Every sound drifting in from outside caught her attention. She
had long since identified the innocent sounds, the distant roar of a jet,
or the whine of the trucks on the highway. Several times a week the
freight trains roared through the east end with their bellowing air-horns.
And Sorrel crawled with stray cats as well as the wild species of
nightlife venturing in from the countryside. Trash cans constantly
tumbled and rolled in deserted alleys. Tomcats howled their challenges,
and she'd occasionally catch a whiff of a passing skunk.
She checked the rear door at midnight, but could see
nothing of the cat. A full moon illuminated the yard. With her eyes
adjusted to the dim light, there were no shadows for an intruder to lurk,
so she slipped outside and looked first down the east side of the house
just off the porch, and then circled around to the well-lighted side along
the driveway. She peeked around the corner…
…and saw a dark shape of a man moving away from her.
While her heart palpitated wildly in her chest, he turned the corner
around the front of the house and disappeared.
Lori gritted her teeth, danced back inside the house
on tiptoes and locked the doors with flying fingers. She was safe in an
instant, but her knees threatened to give out on her entirely. She
checked on Wendy and found the girl sprawled on her stomach, topless in
defense against the heat of the night.
She stood trembling, teeth chattering, as if entombed
in ice. The immediate danger had passed, and Karen had already suggested
the solution to the question of his identity. They would lay a trap
for the man, and shine a light into his eyes.
Trying to catch a few minutes sleep just before dawn
proved disastrous. The dream of the glass eye was upon her in an instant,
having lain in wait with the patience of death itself for her focus of
attention to dissociate from the waking world. Element by element, the
sound of the closing door, the glare of light, and the pressure of a hand
on her body replayed itself. The shock of the blade drawn through her
flesh and then the silver flash brought her awake with a shriek of terror
that she felt certain awakened half of Sorrel.
For an hour afterward, until the sun peeked above the
horizon, Lori listened to Wendy weeping quietly to herself in her bedroom.
