Thirty-four
Wendy brought Ronnie to the house after school
Thursday afternoon. The boy shuffled in ahead of the girl, glancing up at
Lori with fear-laden eyes.
"How much time do we have?" Lori said.
"Ronnie says he has to be in by six."
Lori ordered Leslie to play outside and watched from
the sidelines as Wendy brought drawing pads and pencils from her room and
seated Ronnie at the dining room table.
"I'd like to see him draw one of his pictures of
you," Lori said from the kitchen entrance.
Wendy whispered in the boy's ear. Ronnie smiled,
bunched the pencil between two fingers, and leaned over the drawing pad.
Lori was well aware of the skill it took to render an
accurate likeness of a human face. Ronnie worked without conscious
effort. He drew each line with meticulous care, and she could see that
Ronnie was duplicating an image by rote memorization. Despite the lack of
creativity, there had to be something very special about Ronnie to put a
mental image on paper with such photographic accuracy. It took ten
minutes to render a large-scale, smiling bust of Wendy.
Lori glanced at the clock. They were going to be
pressed for time. She retrieved the four drawings and handed them reluctantly
to Wendy. She had hoped to spare Wendy the shock and the horror they
implied, but their safety depended on identifying the unknown women and
tracking the origin of the body they shared.
Wendy reacted with appropriate upset. Ronnie seemed
neither aroused nor even aware of the impropriety of images he had drawn.
He was leaning close to a fresh page of paper, carefully scratching out a
likeness of Gloria Radcliff, when Wendy spread the drawings out for him to
see.
"Have Ronnie draw busts of these women just like he's
doing now," were Lori's instructions. She retreated to the kitchen to
avoid disturbing the boy. Once out of his view, Ronnie's
self-consciousness evaporated and he worked at a quicker pace.
Ronnie finished the four drawings at six sharp.
Wendy gathered them together in a business-like manner and handed them to
her mother. "Can you get rid of the bad ones, Mom? They really scare
me."
"You shouldn't ever have to see them again,
Princess."
"Do you want me to ask Ronnie where he got the idea?
Maybe it's just a nasty magazine we can throw away."
"Too risky. Let me do the snooping."
Karen showed up just before dark, dressed in her
jogging outfit in forty degree temperatures with sweat running down her
face. Brown and gold leaves falling from the trees in the neighborhood
swirled at her feet. "Broke the mile yesterday. Twelve blocks without
dropping dead. Fat and ugly I may be, but watch my smoke at five miles."
"You're going to run five nonstop miles?" Lori had
her doubts. She couldn't picture Karen committing herself beyond
reasonable limits to such punishment.
Karen stood over her with her hands on her broad
hips. "Look at you. Trim and shapely, but in deplorable cardiovascular
condition. You couldn't run a single block without bursting a lung."
Lori considered the challenge. She had jogged once
upon a time and had thought about resuming some form of physical
exercise. Could she run a single block without dropping dead? "Like hell
I can't," she decided.
Karen's smile was marvelous to behold. "Bet you
can't do it!"
Lori headed for the bedroom. "You stay put for a few
minutes. I haven't run since high school, but a block I can do standing
on my head."
Leslie looked astonished by her sudden enthusiasm.
Wendy followed in nervous frenzy. "You're not really going to, are you,
Mom? You'll embarrass me to no end if someone sees you!"
"Someone?"
"Anyone!"
Lori found the jogging outfit smelling of mothballs
in the bedroom closet and quickly changed. Karen led the way back outside
when she was ready. Once on the front sidewalk, she began lifting her
knees high in a ludicrous gait that had layers of fat moving in opposite
directions and colliding at mid-torso.
Lori outpaced the woman for a quarter block down the
sidewalk. Halfway the distance to Amy's house, Karen passed her and Lori
ran out of breath. She persisted until an excruciating pain flared in her
side, then staggered off the sidewalk.
"Block and a half!" she gasped, laughing and starving
for air. "Told you so!"
Karen backtracked and patted her shoulder. "Nicely
done. I'll see you in the morning, bright and early."
Lori limped back home alone. She showered and washed
and folded the sweat-suit and left it sitting on the drier, determined to
make good use of the need to keep an eye on Karen should a morning jog
become a new routine.
Karen made her appearance at nine the next morning
and they fitfully ran the fourteen block circumference of Sorrel in
labored silence. As soon as Karen departed, Lori showered and changed and
drove to Jumer with Ronnie's new set of drawings on the seat of the
Volkswagen beside her.
She tapped at the front door of the white mansion. A
frightened face peered through beveled panes of dusty glass before Maggie
recognized her and broke into a nervous smile. The heavy door creaked
open, wafting an odor of decay from the gray depths of the old house. "I
remember you. Lori Malcolm, isn't it? You were asking about our handsome
young friend next door."
"I'm sorry to bother you again." The new drawings
Ronnie had made were tucked beneath her arm. She unrolled them for Maggie
to see. "I was wondering if you could you tell me whether you recognize
any of these women?"
Maggie took the drawings with a gnarled hand and an
intense frown. She held them up to the light, first one way, then
another. "Oh, what exquisite drawings! Are you an artist, Lori Malcolm?"
"No, I'm afraid not. A local boy drew these for me
from memory, probably from some other pictures we no longer have
available.”
Maggie dwelled on one of the images for a moment.
"This one is very familiar." She shuffled it to the bottom of the pile.
"Why, here's Robin Foster! My goodness, such an uncanny likeness!"
Lori felt light-headed with excitement. "That's
wonderful. Does she live nearby?"
Maggie's face clouded. "She did. Many years ago."
Maggie put her fingers to her mouth in surprise. "Goodness, that's
right. I told you about Laura and how she disappeared. I've never really
thought to connect the two. How odd."
Lori swallowed hard. "Robin Foster disappeared?"
"Up and left without telling anyone. Not that I
thought anything of it at the time."
Lori had so many questions. How many would the
nervous little woman tolerate? "Did she live here in Jumer, Maggie? I
feel so bad about making a pest of myself, but it's really important to
me."
"Well, I believe she did live for a time with our
mutual acquaintance." Maggie's nod of the head indicated Trent's house.
"I'm not sure if anyone attached much importance to her disappearance.
She had something of a reputation, if you catch my drift."
"Are any of the other faces familiar?"
Maggie went back through the drawings. She frowned
at one, but handed them back. "Just Robin Foster for certain. To be
honest, I have a poor memory for faces. I wouldn't have remembered dear
little Robin had she not complimented my moss rose so often."
"I see." Lori caught herself staring at the dark
windows next door. She had difficulty placing Trent in that old, dank
tomb. "Can you tell me if Robin Foster had family in the area?"
Maggie chuckled. "Why, of course. Janice Winters
still lives in Clayton. It's been so many years, but she was such a
stable, dependable woman, not like her younger sister at all. I'm sure
Janice can answer any question you might have about Robin, and about our
handsome young deputy, too."
Lori felt a bleak twinge of relief. "That's
marvelous, Maggie. Thanks so much for helping me."
A fleeting look of desperation crossed the old
woman's face. "My, I do forget my manners these days. Would you like to
come in, Lori, and share a cup of tea with me? I have such wonderful
stories of Jumer I could tell to you."
"I think I'd enjoy that very much. I can't right
now, but I'll stop by again."
Maggie sighed in dismay. "I have so few visitors.
It's not like it used to be. Everybody runs about in their automobiles
and just won't stay put."
It was too early to call it a day. The county roads
were empty, and she made good time driving to Clayton. She stopped at a
filling station for gas and consulted a phone book and its city map to
pinpoint the residence of Janice Winters, the sister of a woman who had
disappeared except as a naked and bound pencil-drawn image on a piece of
wrapping paper torn from a roll in the back of Carl Adler's Grocery and
Meat Market. She went in search of the address feeling as if she had
entered a dream world uncomfortably close to the horror that had dogged
her during the course of the summer. It struck her so very strange that
the origin of a dream might be found among people she had never met, and
perhaps among people no longer alive.
It wasn't possible, of course. Dreams had far more
prosaic explanations, and the fate of women she had never met had no
possible bearing on her life in the here and now. If she couldn't be
certain of that, then who could be certain of anything?
