Nightmare Child Read online

  "What's tonight?"

  "We're going to kill Jenny. And this time do it the right way."

  With that, she hung up.

  It was by accident that Jeff ran into—literally—Brenda Kohl.

  Out of coffee in his office, and his secretary having gone home early because her oldest boy was ill, Jeff carried his Mr. Coffee pot down to the lunchroom for more water and to see if there was any Danish left from that morning. Jeff liked Danish just as it started to turn stale.

  Finished with his task, carrying both pot filled with water and peach Danish, he came around the corner and slammed directly into Brenda, dousing the front of her white linen suit with water.

  Jeff made all the expected noises of apology and regret. He had not been in the Hubba-Hubba Room with Brenda in more than three months. Not that he hadn't asked her. He did so regularly, at least once a week. She always turned him down. Having finally gotten her promotion to Art Director—thanks to Jeff's intervening—it soon became obvious that she wanted no more to do with him. There was even talk that she had a new boyfriend, an intense, swarthy young man in the television production department named Gillian.

  Finished daubing at her with several pieces of paper towels, he took her elbow and led her away, to an alcove in the hallway.

  "You don't know how badly I feel," he said.

  "It's not that big a deal. It's just water." She glanced at her diamond-studded watch, obviously eager to be gone.

  "That's not what I mean. I mean—" He knew he was whining again. He couldn't help himself. "I mean, you're all I've been thinking about, and I finally get a chance to see you and I end up doing something stupid like this."

  "It's all right, Jeff. It's really all right." This time she looked at her watch in a dramatic, unmistakable fashion so he'd get the point.

  She started walking past him, but he stopped her with the hand carrying the Mr. Coffee.

  "How about going—you know—downstairs?"

  She seemed startled. "God, Jeff, don't be pathetic. You know it's over between us."

  He had never seen a woman with less compassion in her eyes than Brenda displayed at this moment.

  "I just want to talk to you for a few minutes."

  Pretending not to hear him, she waved at two men passing by. One of them winked at her. Jeff's failed love for her was common knowledge in this pitiless hallway.

  "A few minutes. In my office. We don't even have to go downstairs, then. In my office? How would that be?"

  She frowned. "God, Jeff, you're really frightening me. You're losing it. Don't you see that? You're losing it."

  He felt the heat begin in his belly. It was like the pain of an ulcer, only fifty times worse. He started to double over and clutch for the wall, but it was then that he noticed his hand and heard her begin to scream.

  Across from where he stood was a framed oil painting of the agency founder, a white-haired man all got up in a white commodore's suit. In the glass of the painting, Jeff could see his own reflection. He understood why Brenda was screaming. He wanted to scream, too.

  His head was a bubbling mass of leprosy-like open sores dripping green pus. Over this was a scraggly covering of oily black hair. His hands had also distended and were large, gnarled claws with the same open sores as on his head.

  He reached for her to assure her everything would soon be all right, but she only screamed all the more and fled down the hall.

  He could hear doors opening and male voices shouting, asking her what was wrong. She was so upset that she couldn't tell them in any coherent way.

  Jeff glanced around. In either direction he went, he was bound to run into somebody. He had no idea what had happened to him, and there was no time right now to think about it.

  Instinctively, he started down the carpeted hall. Footfalls sounded behind him. People--getting closer.

  Seeing a broom closet, he dived forward, grasping the doorknob, and jumping inside.

  In the darkness, pushed far back against the wall, he stood sweating, chest heaving, feeling the searing warmth cover his body, smelling a fetid odor that was like an animal that had lain dead for days in extreme heat.

  At some point in his terror and delirium, he passed out, sliding down the wall, unconscious before he reached the floor in a heap.

  He had no idea what time it was when he awoke. Disoriented, he grasped into the darkness, touching the edge of a tin bucket and the handle of a broom.

  Closet.

  A few memories came flooding back. He had been talking—well, pleading was a more accurate term—with Brenda when suddenly he had…

  He did not want to think about it.

  On hands and knees, he crawled to the door, eased it open.

  The hall was in shadow. The building thrummed with building sounds. No human voices, not even faint ones, could be heard.

  He glanced down at his digital watch. It was nearly midnight.

  Stunned, he realized he must have been in the closet for nearly…ten hours!

  Grappling to his feet, he went down the hallway, past darkened and silent work areas, to his own office.

  In the frost-rimmed window was a portrait of the city late at night, the red light on the fifty-story Hawthorne Building warning pilots, the downtown area still ablaze and vast display windows filled with goodies, and the further city, up in the timbered hills, an unbroken chain of lights from the suburbs.

  He was enjoying a certain peace looking at all this when the phone rang.

  He turned sharply and looked at it as if it were a gun that had just been fired at his back.

  It continued ringing, shatteringly loud, almost ugly in its ceaselessness.

  He picked it up.

  "You should have seen yourself, Jeff. You were really scary this afternoon."

  Then she started laughing as, lately, she always laughed.

  She hung up.

  He stood there, frozen, numb, listening to the words she'd just spoken, wondering how she'd known about—Naked. Snow. Brook Crash.

  The terrible memories were a little plainer now. He felt last night's pain from the cold, from his suicide attempt.

  Yes, she had had something to do with that, too. Just as she'd had something to do with turning him into a repellent beast this afternoon right in front of Brenda…

  He looked back at the phone.

  How had she known just when to call?

  "Oh, God," he said, slipping down into his chair, covering his face with his damp hands. He was no longer a monster, but he was not quite a man, either.

  Jenny and her phone call had seen to that.

  Jenny.

  The following morning, Diane got up early to bake chocolate-chip cookies for an orphanage she worked at a few hours a month. She found the young people of the orphanage very appreciative of her efforts. She'd gotten to know many of them and liked them.

  By ten o'clock that morning, the temperature outside below zero, the kitchen was warm and smelled sweetly of baking.

  A yellow apron tied around her thin waist, Diane sat at the counter sipping decaf coffee and reading the paper. A festive red ribbon was affixed to the side of her lustrous dark hair.

  From across the way, the McCay house came a shout.

  When she looked up, she recalled for the first time that morning how a similar shout had awakened her last night. Her initial impression had been that Jeff and Mindy had been having a furious argument. But while one voice was definitely Jeff's, the other voice did not necessarily belong to Mindy.

  Now, she realized that voice definitely was not Mindy's. A harsh crone's voice, the person made screeching noises that Diane could not quite comprehend as words.

  As abruptly as it had come up, the voice vanished. Diane sat in the kitchen, brow furrowed, looking across the way at the McCay house. The curtains all drawn, smoke curling up from the chimney, the place seemed quiet and normal enough.

  Shrugging, Diane went back to her newspaper, reading for twenty minutes until the timer wen
t off, and she took the first batch of cookies from the oven.

  Using a spatula to pick the cookies up neatly from the cookie sheet, Diane was filling a plate with plump chocolate-chip dreams when she heard another shout from next door. The voice was positively that of Jeff McCay.

  Sensing the urgency of his tone, she set the spatula down next to the cookie sheet, and then ran across the kitchen to the window.

  Jeff, dressed for the cold weather this time, stood on the front porch shouting to a closed door, "This is your only chance, Mindy! You'd better take it!"

  With that, he turned, picked up a lone leather suitcase, and started down the stairs to the shoveled drive, where the BMW was parked.

  He turned around once again and addressed the house. Because there was no sign of Mindy at any of the windows, his shouts seemed theatrical, even a bit mad.

  "Don't you understand, Mindy? Don't you understand by now? We've got to get out—and get out now! Mindy, please! Believe me!"

  Maybe his tormented style would have seemed less crazy if it had not been a sunny winter morning and if "The Young and the Restless" hadn't been playing in the background.

  Under the circumstances, however, he struck Diane as being insane, pathetically so.

  Apparently waiting for a response, Jeff stood in the driveway rubbing his head with a black-gloved hand, staring up at a second-story window.

  Three minutes went by, during which time Diane heard two complete plot turns take place on "The Young and the Restless."

  "Mindy! I'm going to get in the car now! I mean it!"

  With that, Jeff picked up the massive brown leather bag and walked down the driveway to where the red BMW had been parked overnight in front of the three-car garage.

  Opening the trunk, Jeff set his suitcase inside, then walked around to the front of the car, opened the door, and leaned on the horn.

  The noise was loud and irritating on the quiet, lovely winter morning. He kept it up, his dark gaze mad for sure now.

  "Mindy!" he shouted over the sound of the horn. "Mindy, please come with me!"

  Three or four minutes rolled by. Mindy, wherever she was inside, chose not to respond.

  Finally, shoulders slumping, a tearful expression tightening his face, Jeff slid inside the BMW and started the engine. From the exhaust pipe a putt-putt of cold-morning exhaust could be seen and, anticipating the work of the defroster, Jeff wiped away steam from the inside windshield.

  He had not given up entirely. The engine running smoothly now, he sat in the driveway and gave the horn one last try, a mournful, foghorn bass that seemed to rattle the windows of Diane's house. There was a pleading tone to the horn now, a futile summoning that Mindy, for whatever reason, was obviously not going to answer.

  Slumping toward the steering wheel, Jeff started pounding the dashboard with his fists, a five-year-old throwing a tantrum.

  Then, abruptly, he quit his pounding, sat back, put the car into gear, and started backing out of the driveway.

  He had gone perhaps ten yards when smoke started pouring in thick gray clouds from the trunk.

  Slamming on the brakes, jumping from the car, Jeff ran to the rear of the car, jammed in the key, and threw back the lid.

  The smoke became massive now, and for a moment Jeff was lost to Diane—all but his trousers from the knees down—inside the smudgy gray-black smoke.

  She heard him curse once and then she saw him emerging from the smoke. He carried the suitcase. It was on fire and was the source of all the smoke.

  He hurled it into a snowbank and began scooping up soft white snow to put out the fire. It did not take long. Jeff worked with a certain manic compulsion, as if he needed something physical to do at this moment to keep from going clinically insane.

  The fire out, Jeff closed the lid, stood looking up at the house a long moment, then went around and got back behind the wheel again.

  He started the engine, put the car in reverse, and started out of the driveway again.

  This time he reached the edge of the street before the engine caught on fire.

  They were almost pretty, the red and yellow flames against the pure white snow, the pure blue sky.

  His life was in no way endangered—he got out of the car in plenty of time—but the engine was most likely ruined, fire and smoke pouring up from under the hood.

  He raised his eyes to his house. In the doorway now stood Mindy, dressed in a pale blue robe, gaunt from her loss of weight. She beckoned to him to return and so he did, leaving the car in the driveway to burn out.

  He went inside his house and closed the door.

  It had been a very short trip.

  Dinner that Saturday night was braised beef tips, a salad, and whole-wheat bread that Diane had made from scratch.

  She had not used the dining room since well before her husband's death. Now, the candlelight made the room luxurious with the gleam of light on mahogany, of rich warm shadows.

  During the meal, Diane told Robert what had happened that day to Jeff McCay's trip.

  "He just disappeared into the house," she explained. "Then around four this afternoon, he went out and pushed the car up the driveway, away from the road."

  "Sounds pretty strange."

  "That's what I hoped you'd say."

  He glanced up from his salad. "Why?"

  "Because then you can go over there and find out what's going on."

  He shrugged. Tonight he wore a white shirt, gray cardigan sweater, and chinos. She felt far more comfortable with him than she wanted to admit to herself.

  "Mindy would come to the door and that would be that."

  "Meaning what?"

  "Meaning that she'd say, yes, their car did catch on fire and that, yes, everything is all right now."

  "In other words, she wouldn't let you inside?"

  "Right."

  "On TV, detectives are always getting search warrants."

  He laughed. "Maybe on TV, Diane. In real life, judges don't hand those out without a good reason."

  "But something's going on over there."

  "But what's going on exactly?"

  "You said yourself it was 'pretty strange.'"

  "Yes, I did. But that doesn't mean I can show cause."

  "But—"

  He put his fork down and reached across the table, his hand brushing hers there in the romantic shadows. "A little girl lives in the house. She's sick. Two adults live with her. They're kind of funny sometimes, kind of odd. Today their car caught on fire. Nobody was injured, and later in the day Jeff pushed the car back up the drive. Now, does that sound like it's worth giving me a search warrant over?"

  "You forgot about him running out into the night stark naked."

  "A good point, but what does it prove? That he walks in his sleep? Obviously, he wasn't injured, and apparently nobody else was. You yourself saw Mindy in the doorway."

  "She looked gaunt."

  "Gaunt, but not in any trouble?"

  "Well…"

  "Or looking as if she needed help?"

  "Well…"

  "Or in any way asking you for help?"

  "No, but—"

  "I think you see what I'm talking about, Diane."

  "But we know that something's going on over there."

  "No, I'm afraid we don't know anything. What you're really saying is that we suspect, and as yet we don't have any hard evidence for even intelligent speculation. Just fears."

  The timer went off, announcing that the chocolate cake she'd baked was ready for frosting.

  Once they got off the subject of the McCays, they had a fine time.

  Two hours later, snug in Robert's arms on the couch, White Christmas with Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly on television, she said, "Do you really think everything's all right over there?"

  He smiled. "No, I don't. But right now there's nothing I can do about it except wait until you call me and tell me they're gone. Then we'll pay their house a quick, unofficial visit and make sure Jenny's all right."
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  "Jenny." Diane sighed. "It'd really be nice to see her again."

  Twenty minutes later, Robert raised her face to his and kissed her tenderly on the lips.

  "Is that going too fast?" he asked.

  "No, that's just going the legal speed limit." She smiled.

  He kissed her again.

  Terry, the one they'd gotten to replace Ringo, the dog they'd said had run away.

  At first, the sounds startled her, loud and sharp as gunshots on the silence. But then the sounds only reminded her of how much she disliked the little dog. Not his fault that he was so aggravating—always drooling all over your hand if you tried to pet him, always tearing your nylons, jumping at you in the street —but she would never feel any affection for him no matter what.

  Not quite knowing why, she first rang the bell. She supposed it was her good middle-class training. Even when you're breaking into a place, always be polite.

  It was one of those afternoons when she really enjoyed domestic work. In the morning she dusted and straightened up the living room and in the afternoon she worked in the warm, sunny kitchen rearranging shelves. Occasionally, memories of last Saturday night came to mind. Hard to believe four days had passed already. Certain things Robert had said and done remained so vivid.

  Working on the shelf with all the spices, she sneezed when she held up the paprika, and climbed down from the stool to get some Kleenex from the counter.

  Blowing her nose, she looked out over the startling brilliance of white snow. The sun wasn't hot enough to melt it; it just gave it an almost blinding surface.

  Watching the way the wind whipped the snowflakes around in a dazzling, diamond-like display, she saw on the edge of her vision something that seemed wrong.

  Leaving from the front door of their home, bundled up so heavily that Diane could not see their faces, were Mindy and Jeff McCay.

  Expecting them to walk around to the side to get their second car, a blue Volvo station wagon, she was surprised when they kept going down the walk and then into the street and then straight across the snowy field Jeff had crossed the other night to reach the brook.