Summer Of Fear (13 page)

But that jar—I had not seen that since she had unpacked. And the picture—

I jumped up from the bed and lifted the edge of the mattress. The photograph that I had placed there was gone.

Gone, as though it had never existed, was the only real evidence I had. I was sickened by my own stupidity. Knowing what I did about Julia, how could I have left the picture in the room? For someone with her powers, locating a hidden photograph must have been child’s play.

I released the mattress and let it fall back into place. The library books still lay as I had left them on the table between the beds. It was clear that Julia considered them unthreatening, or she would have managed to dispose of them also.

I went over and picked up the top book, the one about superstitions. What would Mother say if I carried this downstairs to her right now? Would she read it if I asked her to? I very much doubted it. My only hope was to talk to Professor Jarvis. Perhaps if I could get him to describe to my parents some of the things he had told me it would open their eyes to the possibility that I might be telling the truth.

It was then that I noticed a slight, acrid scent in the air. A sulphur odor, as though someone had been burning matches.

Matches! I turned to the bedside table and there it was, a pile of burnt matchsticks stuck into the base of the lamp exactly as it had been before. I had wondered then what it was that Julia had been doing. Now I did not have to wonder. I knew.

For a moment I stood, stricken, too horrified to move. My heart was beating so hard that I could feel its pounding in my head. The matches—the lamp—the table, swam before my eyes.

So this was why Julia had seem so lighthearted in the face of my threats! She had no intention of letting me bring Professor Jarvis or anyone else to talk to my parents. Somewhere in this house at this very moment there was a little wax figure in which were embedded some orange hairs, taken no doubt from the brush on the bureau. Whenever she chose, Julia would begin to melt it.

Or had she begun to do so already? Even as I asked myself the question, a blinding pain shot through my head directly behind my eyes. Terrified, I staggered backward and fell upon the bed, clapping my hand against my temples.

She’s doing it, I thought frantically. She has shut herself away in a closet somewhere and has lit a match, and at this exact instant she is holding it to the wax doll’s head!

Yet that was impossible, for at that moment I could hear Julia’s voice floating up from the yard beneath my open window. Struggling against my pain, I hauled myself up from the bed and crossed the room to look out. Yes, it was Julia, and she was talking with Bobby who had taken the mower out of the garage and was kneeling beside it, adjusting the blades.

I stood there, staring down at the two heads directly beneath me, the black one with the shag cut, the butter-colored one that was my brother’s.

“—when you cross a parrot with a tiger?” Bobby was asking. “I don’t know, but when it speaks, you’d better pay attention!”

He burst into uproarious laughter, the way he always did when he told idiotic jokes, and Julia’s low, throaty laughter joined his.

“That’s a good one,” she said. “I never heard that one before.”

The yard was filled with sunshine, and the roses along the back fence were a riot of pink and crimson. In the yard on the far side of the fence, I could see Mrs. Gallagher in her vegetable garden picking beans. It was all so peaceful, so innocent a setting. No normal person could look at a scene like that and think about destruction and evil.

What was it my father had said when he had come into the den to find me sleeping on the sofa? “It isn’t normal behavior,” he had told me, and there had been worry in his voice.

So I’m abnormal, I thought. Who wouldn’t be under the circumstances?

The pain in my head had vanished. Evidently I had produced it myself with my own fear. That did not mean that next time it would not be real. At this moment Julia was standing in the yard, chatting with Bobby, but it would not be long before she went back inside. I could not watch her constantly. That would be impossible. Somewhere there existed a wax doll that bore my features, and I was not safe for a moment until I found it.

Would she have left it in the room? It seemed unlikely, but not impossible. It was with no hesitation this time that I pulled forth the bureau drawers and emptied out their contents, that I plowed through the closet and book shelves and tore the sheets from the beds. Without a trace of guilt I investigated the inside of Julia’s pillow slip and rummaged through the pockets of her clothing.

By the time I had completed my search the room looked as though it had been hit by a cyclone, and I had discovered absolutely nothing.

I went again to the window. Bobby and the mower were gone now, but Julia was still there, standing in the same spot that she had been when I had last looked out at her. Her head was tipped sideways as though she was listening. She seemed to be waiting.

For what, I could not imagine, but I found myself waiting too.

In a moment it came. Bobby’s voice shouted something from someplace down the street. I could not understand the words, but in the next yard Mrs. Gallagher could, for she dropped the basket with the beans and took off in a run around the side of the house. I had never seen plump Mrs. Gallagher run before. Under normal circumstances it might have been funny. Now the sight of it sent a stab of fear through me.

I left the window and hurried across the room and out into the hall.

“Mother!” I cried. “Something’s happened!”

When there was no answer from the house below, I raced down the stairs and through the front door and out onto the porch. Mother was already in the yard, and Bobby was there with her, gesturing wildly, his eyes huge against the dead white of his face.

“Slow down, dear,” Mother was saying. “I can’t understand you when you talk so fast. What happened? You’re not hurt, are you?”

“It’s not me!” Bobby drew a long sobbing breath and forced his voice into a lower key. “It’s Professor Jarvis! I went down to his place to mow his lawn. I rang the bell to tell him I was there, and he didn’t come. He didn’t answer the bell.”

“Is that all?” Mother asked with relief. “For heaven’s sake, Bob, there are all kinds of reasons why people don’t answer doorbells. He might have been busy with his writing or taking a nap, or he might have had the television on—”

“I know,” Bobby said. “I thought that too, so I tried the door. It wasn’t locked. It swung right open. The professor was there, right there on the floor in the hall! His eyes and his mouth were open and he wasn’t moving!”

I knew what his next words would be before he spoke them. If I could have I would have lifted my hands and covered my ears. But I could not move. I could simply stand there and listen.

“Mother—” Bobby said brokenly—”Mom—I think he’s dead!”

The next twenty minutes seemed to last forever.

By the time the ambulance arrived, half the neighborhood had congregated in the yard in front of Professor Jarvis’s house. The only ones inside the house were Mrs. Gallagher and Mother, but people kept shoving up onto the porch, trying to see in the window.

“He hanged himself!” somebody shouted. “I can see the rope!”

Bobby, who was standing next to me at the edge of the sidewalk, shuddered convulsively. “There wasn’t any rope,” he whispered hoarsely. “He was just lying there in the hallway. Why are they saying there’s a rope?”

“People just like to make things worse than they are,” I told him, putting an arm around his shoulders. To myself I thought, there was no way anyone could make things worse than they were. The truth was more horrible than any conjecture.

When the ambulance came the crowd parted to make a path for the men with the stretcher. Mother opened the door for them, and they went into the house. When they emerged a few moments later there was a blanket-covered form on the stretcher, and as they came opposite I could see a familiar shock of snowy hair protruding from beneath one end of the blanket. The attendants loaded the professor into the back and Mrs. Gallagher got in with him, and the door closed and they drove away. The thin wail of the siren lingered in the air long after the ambulance itself was gone.

With the excitement over, the crowd began to disperse, chattering eagerly, as though the thing they had just witnessed had been planned for their entertainment only, “—blood all over the place,” the round-faced woman from across the street was saying. “He was literally lying in a pool of it! A regular Jack-the-Ripper case right here in our quiet neighborhood!” And another woman from further down the block was as firmly informing everyone who would listen that “he starved himself to death. Old people should not be allowed to live alone. They don’t know how to take care of themselves properly.”

I crossed the emptying lawn in front of the Jarvis home and went up the steps and in through the front door. Mother was standing at the hall phone, thumbing through a small leather-bound address book. She glanced up and asked, “Do you remember the married name of the Jarvises’ daughter.”

“No,” I said, “but when he speaks of her he calls her Bonnie. I think she lives in Clovis.” Shock had made my voice flat and strange. “Is he really dead?”

“No,” Mother said. “There was a pulse beat but it was a faint one. The ambulance attendant said he thought it was a stroke.” She flipped the pages of the book. “Here, this must be it—Bonnie Chavez in Clovis. Go see about Bobby, will you, Rae? I’ll be home as soon as I make this call.”

“All right,” I said.

When I went back outside Bobby was no longer where I had left him, so I walked slowly along the sidewalk toward our own house with the vague, unfocussed feeling that I was moving through a dream. It’s not real, I thought. I just talked with him yesterday!

The sidewalk was hot under my bare feet and above my head the leaves of the maples stirred softly in a breath of breeze. Professor Jarvis’s petunias were blooming joyously along the edge of his driveway. Beyond the trees the summer sky arched blue and high, and some skinny little strips of clouds were drifting lazily in the direction of the mountains.

It can’t be true, I told myself. If I once admitted that it was I would have to face the other fact as well—that I was the one responsible.

“I’m taking somebody with me,” I had announced to Julia the night before. “He’s a well-known authority on witchcraft.” And I had not stopped there. I had gone so far as to call him by name.

“Professor Jarvis used to be head of the sociology department at the University,” I had cried triumphantly.

Julia had smiled and it was no wonder. I had told her exactly what she needed to know.

I had been correct in my guess about the construction of the doll. My mistake had been in thinking that I was the intended victim. It was useful to Julia to have another girl around, someone whose friends she could captivate, whose clothes she could wear, whose ways she could copy. And it was easier by far to remove the professor who was the one person who could and would support my accusations. Without the help of Professor Jarvis I was helpless to convince my parents of anything.

And so because of my stupidity a wonderful man lay dying or perhaps by this time was already dead.

I turned into our yard and she was there on the porch, waiting.

My cousin Julia.

Bobby was with her, and I could tell by the puffiness of his eyes and the smudges on his cheeks that he had been crying. Julia had her arm around him as I had had mine only a short time before, and she was talking in a gentle voice.

“Things like this are bound to happen when people get old,” she was saying as I came up the porch steps. “It’s all for the best, dear. Nobody can live forever. He was a poor, sick, old man.”

“He was not!” I exclaimed vehemently. “He was a healthy, vital, energetic person! He hasn’t had a sick day in all the time that I’ve known him! He should have lived at least another fifteen years!”

“Oh, really?” Julia’s eyes met mine across the top of Bobby’s blond head. “Well, in that case, perhaps he will. You never can tell about things like that. Some people go on as vegetables for incredibly long stretches of time.”

“As vegetables!” I gasped.

“Oh, you know what I mean. Not able to move or talk.” She turned to Bobby. “Let’s go inside, shall we? It’s getting so hot out here. Why don’t I fix us some lunch, and then we can play a game of dominos.”

“I’m not hungry,” Bobby said.

“Then we’ll have the game first and lunchtime after.” She got to her feet, drawing him with her, and I was amazed to see him lean his head back against her shoulder in a way he never did with anyone but Mother. He blinked his eyes hard and wiped his nose with the back of his hand and said, “Okay, I’ll play you. But I don’t really feel like it much.”

“That’s a good boy,” Julia said warmly, and she even sounded like Mother. “You go wash your face and I’ll find the dominos and get things set up.”

They went into the house together, and I seated myself on the porch steps to wait for Mother. There seemed to be nothing I could do that would not make things worse. Nothing I said would carry any weight without the remains of the wax doll of the professor. Even if by some miracle I were able to locate it, there would be no one to support my conjecture that it was connected with what had happened.

My reverie was interrupted by the mailman who came swinging up the walk, whistling.

“Hi, there,” he said jauntily. “I hear there’s been some excitement on your block. They’ve been talking about it at every house I’ve been to.”

“I guess you could call it excitement,” I said. “I think a better word for it might be ‘tragedy.’”

“It’s a shame,” the postman agreed, dropping his lighthearted approach. “The professor’s a nice, friendly guy. Here’s your mail, a good pile of it today.”

“Thanks,” I said as he dumped the letters into my lap.

As I glanced down at the pile I saw that the top letter was for my father and bore the return address of a law firm called Becht and Bristol. This surprised me because it was seldom that my parents received letters from attorneys. The only occasion I could remember was once when a magazine had used one of Mother’s photographs without paying for it and there had been correspondence between Mother and the lawyer who represented the magazine. This could not be about something like that, for the law firm was a local one and the letter was addressed not to Mother but to my father.