A Stranger in My Grave (31 page)

A sneak peek at Margaret Millar's
The Fiend

(1)

 

It was the
end of August and the children were getting bored with their summer freedom. They had spent too many hours at the mercy of their own desires. Their legs and arms were scratched, bruised, blistered with poison oak; sea water had turned their hair to straw, and the sun had left cruel red scars across their cheekbones and noses. All the trees had been climbed, the paths explored, the cliffs scaled, the waves con­quered. Now, as if in need and anticipation of the return of rules, they began to hang around the school playground.

So did the man in the old green coupé. Every day at noon Charlie Gowen brought his sandwiches and a carton of milk and parked across the road from the playground, separated from the swings and the jungle gym by a steel fence and some scraggly geraniums. Here he sat and ate and drank and watched.

He knew he shouldn't be there. It was dangerous to be seen near such a place.

“—where children congregate. You understand that, Gowen?”

“I think so, sir.”

“Do you know what
congregate
means?”

“Well, not exactly.”

“Don't give me that dumb act, Gowen. You spent two years at college.”

“I was sick then. You don't retain things when you're sick.”

“Then I'll spell it out for you. You are to stay away from any place frequented by children—parks, certain beach areas, Saturday afternoon movies, school playgrounds—”

The conditions were impossible, of course. He couldn't turn and run in the opposite direction every time he saw a child. They were all over, everywhere, at any hour. Once even at mid­night when he was walking by himself he'd come across a boy and a girl, barely twelve. He told them gruffly to go home or he'd call the police. They disappeared into the darkness; he never saw them again even though he took the same route at the same time every night after that for a week. His conscience gnawed at him. He loved children, he shouldn't have threatened the boy and girl, he should have found out why they were on the streets at such an hour and then escorted them home and lectured their parents very sternly about looking after their kids.

He started on his second sandwich. The first hadn't filled the void in his stomach and neither would the second. He might as well have been eating clouds or pieces of twilight, though he couldn't express it that way to his brother, Benjamin, who made the lunches for both of them. He had to be very careful what he said to Benjamin. The least little fanciful thought or offbeat phrase and Ben would get the strained, set look on his face that reminded Charlie of their dead mother. Then the questions would start: Eating clouds, Charlie? Pieces of twilight? Where do you get screwy ideas like that? You're feeling all right, aren't you? Have you phoned Louise lately? Don't you think she might want to hear from you? Look, Charlie, is something bothering you? You're sure not? . . .

He knew better, by this time, than to mention anything about clouds or twilight. He had said simply that morning, “I need more food, Ben.”

“Why?”

“Why? Well, because I'm hungry. I work hard. I was wonder­ing, maybe some doughnuts and a couple of pieces of pie—”

“For yourself?”

“Sure, for myself. Who else? Oh, now I see what you're thinking about. That was over two years ago, Ben, and the Mexican kid was half starved. Everything would have been fine if that busybody woman hadn't interfered. The kid ate the sand­wich, it filled him up, he felt good for a change. My God, Ben, is it a crime to feed starving children?”

Ben didn't answer. He merely closed the lid of the lunchbox on the usual two sandwiches and carton of milk, and changed the subject. “Louise called last night when you were out. She's coming over after supper. I'll slip out to a movie and leave you two alone for a while.”

“Is it? Is it a crime, Ben?”

“Louise is a fine young woman. She could be the making of a man.”

“If I were a starving child and someone gave me food—”

“Shut up, Charlie. You're not starving, you're overweight. And you're far from being a child. You're thirty-two years old.”

It was not the command that shut Charlie up, it was the sud­den cruel reference to his age. He seldom thought about it on his own because he felt so young, barely older than the little girl hanging upside down from the top bar of the jungle gym.

She was about nine. Having watched them all impartially now for two weeks, Charlie had come to like her the best.

She wasn't the prettiest, and she was so thin Charlie could have spanned her waist with his two hands, but there was a certain cockiness about her that both fascinated and worried him. When she tried some daring new trick on the jungle gym she seemed to be challenging gravity and the bars to try and stop her. If she fell—and she often did—she bounced up off the ground as naturally as a ball. Within five seconds she'd be back on the top bar of the jungle gym, pretending nothing had happened, and Charlie's heart, which had stopped, would start to beat again in double time, its rhythm disturbed by relief and anger.

The other children called her Jessie, and so, inside the car with the windows closed, did Charlie.

“Careful, Jessie, careful. Self-confidence is all very well, but bones can be broken, child, even nine-year-old bones. I ought to warn your parents. Where do you live, Jessie?”

The playground counselor, a physical education major at the local college, was refereeing a sixth-grade basketball game. The sun scorched through his crew cut, he was thirsty, and his eyes stung from the dust raised by scuffling feet, but he was as in­tent on the game as though it were being played in the Los Angeles Coliseum. His name was Scott Roberts, he was twenty, and the children respected him greatly because he could chin himself with one hand and drove a sports car.

He saw the two little girls crossing the field and ignored them as long as possible, which wasn't long, since one of them was crying.

He blew the whistle and stopped the game. “O.K., fellas, take five.” And, to the girl who was crying, “What's the matter, Mary Martha?”

“Jessie fell.”

“It figures, it figures.” Scott wiped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. “If Jessie was the one who fell, why isn't she doing the crying?”

“I couldn't be bothered,” Jessie said loftily. She ached in a number of places but nothing short of an amputation could have forced her to tears in front of the sixth-grade boys. She had a crush on three of them; one had even spoken to her. “Mary Martha always cries at things, like sad events on television and people falling.”

“How are your hands? Any improvement over last week?”

“They're O.K.”

“Let me see, Jessie.”

“Here, in front of everybody?”

“Right here, in front of everybody who's nosy enough to look.”

He didn't even have to glance at the sixth-graders to get his message across. Immediately they all turned away and became absorbed in other things, dribbling the ball, adjusting shoelaces, hitching up shorts, slicking back hair.

Jessie presented her hands and Scott examined them, frown­ing. The palms were a mass of blisters in every stage of de­velopment, some newly formed and still full of liquid, some open and oozing, others covered with layers of scar tissue.

Scott shook his head and frowned. “I told you last week to get your mother to put alcohol on your hands every morning and night to toughen the skin. You didn't do it.”

“No.”

“Don't you have a mother?”

“Of course. Also a father, and a brother in high school, and an aunt and uncle next door—they're not really blood relations but I call them that because they give me lots of things, etcetera —and heaps of cousins in Canada and New Jersey.”

“The cousins are too far away to help,” Scott said. “But surely one of the others could put alcohol on your hands for you.”

“I could do it myself if I wanted to.”

“But you don't want to.”

“It stings.”

“Wouldn't you prefer a little sting to a big case of blood poisoning?”

Jessie didn't know what blood poisoning was, but for the benefit of the sixth-grade boys she said she wasn't the least bit scared of it. This remark stimulated Mary Martha to relate the entire plot of a medical program she'd seen, in which the doctor himself had blood poisoning and didn't realize it until he went into convulsions.

“By then it was too late?” Jessie said, trying not to sound much interested. “He died?”

“No, he couldn't. He's the hero every week. But he suffered terribly. You should have seen the faces he made, worse than my mother when she's plucking her eyebrows.”

Scott interrupted brusquely. “All right, you two, knock it off. The issue is not Mother's eyebrows or Dr. Whoozit's convul­sions. It's Jessie's hands. They're a mess and something has to be done.”

Flushing, Jessie hid her hands in the pockets of her shorts. While she was playing on the jungle gym she'd hardly noticed the pain, but now, with everyone's attention focused on her, it had become almost unbearable.

Scott was aware of this. He touched her shoulder lightly and the two of them began walking toward the back-exit gate, fol­lowed by an excited and perspiring Mary Martha. None of them noticed the green coupé.

“You'd better go home,” Scott said, “Take a warm bath, put alcohol on your hands with a piece of cotton, and stay off the jungle gym until you grow some new skin. You'd better tell your mother, too, Jessie.”

“I won't have to. If I go home at noon and take a bath she'll think I'm dying.”

“Maybe you are,” Mary Martha said in a practical voice. “Imagine me with a dying best friend.”

“Oh, shut up.”

“I'm only trying to help.”

“That's the kind of help you ought to save for your best enemy,” Scott said and turned to go back to the basketball game.

Out of the corner of his eye he noticed the old green coupé pulling away from the curb. What caught his attention was the fact that, although it was a very hot day, the windows were closed. They were also dirty, so that the driver was invisible and the car seemed to be operating itself. A minute later it turned onto a side street and was out of sight.

So were the two girls.

“We could stop in at my house,” Mary Martha said, “for some cinnamon toast to build your strength up.”

“My strength is O.K., but I wouldn't mind some cinnamon toast. Maybe we could even make it ourselves?”

“No. My mother will be home. She always is.”

“Why?”

“To guard the house.”

Jessie had asked the same question and been given the same answer quite a few times. She was always left with an incongru­ous mental picture of Mary Martha's mother sitting large and formidable on the porch with a shotgun across her lap. The real Mrs. Oakley was small and frail and suffered from a num­ber of obscure allergies.

“Why does she have to stay home to guard the house?” Jessie said. “She could just lock the doors.”

“Locks don't keep him out.”

“You mean your father?”

“I mean my
ex
-father.”

“But you can't have an
ex
-father. I asked my Aunt Virginia and she said a wife can divorce her husband and then he's an
ex
-husband. But you can't divorce a father.”

“Yes, you can. We already did, my mother and I.”

“Did he want you to?”

“He didn't care.”

“It would wring my father's heart,” Jessie said, “if I divorced him.”

“How do you know? Did he ever tell you?”

“No, but I never asked.”

“Then you don't know for sure.”

The jacaranda trees, for which the street was named, were in full bloom and their falling petals covered lawns and side­-walks, even the road itself, with purple confetti. Some clung to Jessie's short dark hair and to Mary Martha's blond ponytail.

“I bet we look like brides,” Jessie said. “We could pretend—”

“No.” Mary Martha began brushing the jacaranda petals out of her hair as if they were lice. “I don't want to.”

“You always like pretending things.”

“Sensible
things.”

Jessie knew this wasn't true, since Mary Martha's favorite role was that of child spy for the FBI. But she preferred not to argue. The lunch she'd taken to the playground had all been eaten by ten o'clock and she was more than ready for some of Mrs. Oakley's cinnamon toast. The Oakleys lived at 319 Jacaranda Road in a huge redwood house surrounded by live oak and eucalyptus trees. The trees had been planted, and the house built, by Mr. Oakley's parents. When Jessie had first seen the place she'd assumed that Mary Martha's family was terribly rich, but she discovered on later visits that the attic was just full of junk, the four-car garage contained only Mrs. Oakley's little Volkswagen and Mary Martha's bicycle, and some of die upstairs rooms were empty, with not even a chair in them.