The Dark: A Collection (Point Horror) (8 page)

Bianca could feel
what it must be like to be him, to always be the chief suspect
because he was related to Mike. She bit her lip.

"I didn't do a
thing, officer. Honest I didn't. Roscoe attacked me first. I was
trying to defend Bianca."

"Miss Winters,"
the police chief addressed her, "I'm surprised to find you here
tonight, in such company. Your doctor called us on his cell phone
before he left the theater. He said he offered you a ride home. You
refused to leave with him. Do you think that was wise?"

Bianca looked down at
her feet, then up at the police chief. He was the one who had been in
her hospital room two years ago, praising her to the skies.

"I — I just met
Harry tonight. He helped me out. I'm sticking here to tell him
thank you."

"If I were you, I
wouldn't stick around too much longer." The chief scowled at Rick
and Harry. "I don't know who's telling the truth and who's
lying. So I'll issue a warning to you both. If we get any more
complaints about you down at the station, you'll both be arrested.
Am I making myself clear?"

Both boys nodded.

"It's bad enough
that your brother just escaped from the state penitentiary this
afternoon." The chief addressed his remarks to Harry who went white
and seemed to be struck dumb. It was his worst nightmare. The chief
went on, "He'll probably head right to St. Simons Island to cause
more trouble — for the first time in three years. We haven't
released the news to the press yet, but I've doubled our patrol
around the island. We don't want two Fellinis on our hands!"

The police chief took
a few more notes and then motioned to his fellow officers to leave.

The manager screwed
up his face at Harry. "Maybe the police don't know who to arrest.
But I do. If I find any of my property missing, Fellini, I'm going
to prosecute. Clear out and clear out fast!" He stalked out of the
room without a backward look, anxious to get back to his ticket
taker.

"You poor thing!"
Marianna rushed over to Rick, who was sitting on the sofa holding his
jaw in his hand, rubbing it.

Marianna took some
Kleenex out of her purse. She sat down on Rick's lap, making sure
she was nice and comfortable, and started dabbing at his face. He'd
hit his cheek against the wall when Harry had thrown him off. The
bruises were bleeding.

"That louse!"
Rick muttered about Harry.

Marianna seemed to
love it. She purred and encouraged Ricky to complain. She dabbed his
cheeks and wiped his brow, patting his head and smoothing down his
messed-up, sweaty blond hair. She grabbed her comb from her purse and
tried to tidy his hair, combing the curls into place. Marianna cast
knowing looks at Bianca as if to say, "Didn't I warn you that
Ricky was mine?"

"Let's clear out
of this insane asylum." Harry rushed Bianca out of the employees'
lounge. "I won't be a minute. If anybody gives you trouble, let
out a yell loud enough to wake the dead." He stationed her beside
the men's room.

She stood there while
he went in to change his clothes. She'd never known anybody to
change so fast. Before she had a chance to wonder what would happen
next, now that she was standing in a deserted lobby with the lights
dimmed, Harry was back. He dumped the usher's outfit in front of
the ticket taker's booth, gave it a kick, and took her hand. He led
her out into the Village, the main shopping area of St. Simons
Island. They headed for a parking lot near the pier.

The sultry air sat on
their shoulders and weighed them down as they hurried along the
sidewalk. The leaves of the low-hanging live oak branches brushed
past their cheeks. The twigs and leaves caught in Bianca's hair.
Twice she had to stop to disentangle them.

He helped her into
the passenger side of his old, beat-up, antique 1965 Rambler
Ambassador with its dented front fender and fins. She'd never seen
a car like it before and wondered how it ran after all these years.
The bright aquamarine color was bizarre, unlike anything in a
new-model car. The paint was peeling. The stuffing was coming out of
the seats. It was too old to have seat belts. She was studying the
forty-year-old chrome fittings on the radio and the front dashboard
controls when he slammed the driver's side door shut.

"Can't be too
picky about what you drive when you can't hold down a job." Harry
gunned the motor as he struggled with the key in the ignition.

He grimaced in pain,
an expression he'd been careful to conceal in the movie theater
when everybody had been watching. She took his hand and squeezed it.
She could imagine how bad he felt with Mike on the lam again.

A police car with
flashing lights drove up beside them. "Do you want a police escort
back to your house, Miss Winters?" the policeman asked. "Your
doctor called us again and asked us to find you. Your parents have
been wondering why you weren't home yet."

"You tell her
doctor Bianca doesn't need an escort. She's with me." Harry
thumbed his chest.

"No — no, thank
you, officer! You don't have to go to all that trouble." Bianca
managed a smile. "We're on our way home now."

"It's no trouble
when it's for a heroine like you, Miss Winters. You know, my
daughter in the sixth grade wrote an essay about you. You're the
most inspiring person in her life."

Bianca blushed.
"Really, you don't have to go out of your way."

"All right, but
it's late. Hurry on home." The policeman started to roll up his
window. "I don't want your doctor to have to call us again. My,
he must be dedicated to be worried about you at this hour! But then,
I imagine lots of people would be willing to go out of their way for
you."

Harry backed out on
to the darkened street as the police car drove off. "Mom and I are
used to this. Mom had a good job working as a secretary at the high
school. They fired her as soon as the news got out about Mike's
bank robbery. Couldn't have a secretary who had a son in jail in a
respectable place like a school. Mom lost her state retirement
pension. Tough after twenty years on the job and only ten more to go
until she cashed in."

"How have you
managed to pay the bills?" Bianca was aghast. She'd heard about
Harry's family having a hard time. She had no idea that his
financial problems were this bad.

He shrugged as he
started down Old Church Road toward the Churchyard Oaks Subdivision,
where Bianca lived next to Christ's Church. He didn't have to ask
where to go. Everybody on the island knew where everybody else lived.

She heard an engine
starting up behind them. Bianca didn't see anybody. It must just be
the police car heading home for the night.

"St. Simons Island
is too small to have an employment agency, so my mom signed up with
one of those temporary agencies in Brunswick. That's why she isn't
home most days until late. She has to drive a long way to work. They
assign her jobs all over the place, from St. Simons to Jekyll to
Brunswick, sometimes as far down the highway as Jacksonville,
Florida."

Harry turned and
looked over his shoulder into the darkness, as if he heard something,
too.

"What job is she
working at now?" Bianca asked. The warm night air blew in the
windows, which were rolled all the way down. The car didn't have
any air-conditioning.

"Last I heard Mom
was manning the cash register at a paint store in Brunswick."

"What do you mean
the last you heard!"

"She keeps on
getting fired. Word gets around that she's Mike's mother. The
store owners don't feel safe with her on the premises. Afraid Mike
will pop up. Think he'll escape like he finally did this afternoon.
Sometimes Mom changes jobs a couple times a week. Each time the job
gets farther away — where they haven't heard about Mike yet."

"That's not
fair!"

"Truth is, the
agency's thinking of dropping her. Too much bad publicity."

"What will your
mother do?"

"Promised her I'd
support her. I'm not doing a very good job of it. I can't tell
her I got fired. She'll have a fit. I'll have to find another job
real quick."

Bianca had imagined
she had it bad. At least she had a roof over her head. Her parents
were employed. No one had fired them.

Bianca had an idea.
"I'm almost eighteen. My birthday's right after graduation. I'm
coming into some money in a few weeks."

Up until now she'd
never liked to think about that money, let alone talk about it. It
had always made her feel so mixed up, depressed and guilty, as if she
were stealing the Shipleys' money under the false pretenses of
being a hero. Sharing it with somebody who really needed it made her
feel so much better.

"I could loan some
money to you and your mom. There's supposed to be a money market
cash fund that I can draw upon right away for emergency expenses. I
certainly don't need it all and—"

Harry screeched to a
stop along the side of the road. She put her hands out only just in
time to keep herself from being thrown against the dash.

"Folks can badmouth
me all they want. There's no way anybody will ever say that Harry
Fellini took money from you!"

"You could pay it
back when you wanted to and—

He grasped her
shoulders. "Can't you see what people are going to say about you
and me? They'll gossip that I stole you from Rick so I could take
your money. They'll claim that I was the killer. They'll say that
I counted on the Shipleys giving you loads of money because they're
so rich. That's why I killed the Shipleys' maid and let you and
Little Katie escape."

"No!"

"Remember what I
said about how people will eat you alive if you let them? We can't
give them ammunition by doing something so stupid as having you give
me money. Remember, people think a Fellini would do anything."

She nodded. "You've
been so nice to me. Nobody's ever been so nice to me since. . ."

He gave her a kiss in
the middle of the forehead. "You're so sweet!" His voice was a
little hoarse.

Shyly, she gave him a
little kiss back. It felt so good the way they were sharing their
innermost fears and feelings. Her arms went around his waist. She
wanted him to make her feel better now that Doc had made her so sad.
The more Harry kissed her as they fell to the seat together, the
better she felt. One thing led to another until Harry finally came up
for air.

"It's getting
really late. Time we got you home."

It was hard to
understand her sudden attraction to Harry. She'd never felt
anything for any guy except Doc. It was as violent as it was
unexpected.

Before starting up
the car again, Harry looked back down the road the way they'd come.
This time he paused much longer before continuing on.

"Ah ... do you see
something?" Bianca asked.

"No, it was
probably just a night owl I heard."

Night owls did not
drive cars, though. Bianca still thought she could hear sounds from
another car.

They were getting to
the really deserted part of Old Church Road. It was so dark that
Harry's high beams weren't cutting far into the murk. The road
was becoming much narrower. Live oaks with gnarled, twisted,
overhanging branches, which in places formed a tunnel over the road,
crowded in upon them. Harry had to slow way down. He obviously
couldn't see a thing.

The darkness was
starting to weigh upon Bianca's mind. Night mists floated through
the window and touched her with wet, cold, icy prickles, though the
air was still hot.

"Harry. . ." She
wet her lips. "Could we . . . could we turn on the lights inside
the car?"

She couldn't help
herself. The darkness was becoming so oppressive that she was pulling
at the top of her T-shirt. The darkness touched her with fingers
around her neck.

Harry flicked the
lights on without making any teasing comments about her phobia. She
could trust him the way she could trust nobody else. He wasn't
complaining, though lights inside the car at night made it harder for
him to see.

The lights weren't
doing the trick. Bianca still felt uneasy. She supposed it was the
fact that her memory was starting to come back. The encounter with
the killer in the ladies' rest room had spooked her completely. She
felt as if someone was going to reach inside the car and grab her by
the neck.

She remembered the
last words of the killer as he had left her sitting on top of the
toilet seat. "Now don't you dare leave there, or I'll know."

Bianca had left the
rest room all right. She'd even left the building. She turned and
looked behind her into the darkness. She could swear she heard a car
following them, though she couldn't see any headlights. She
wondered if Harry had heard that sound, too. She wondered if that was
why he'd been turning around in his seat and peering over his
shoulder every other minute.

Could the killer be
coming after her, right now when she was most vulnerable — in the
dark?

Chapter 7

Droplets clouded up
the windshield. Harry turned the wipers on. One got stuck. He leaned
out the window and gave it a whack.

Bianca couldn't see
out the back window very well, couldn't tell for sure who was
following them. The Rambler was making all sorts of clinks and
clacks, whirrs and buzzes under the hood. Did she hear another set of
car tires? Was it her imagination, the night mist, or what?

Br-r-r-r-ring!

Bianca jumped six
inches. The sound was coming from her purse. She fished out her cell
phone.

"Hello?" she
answered in a tremulous voice.

"Bianca? Thank God!
I was getting worried. Your parents said you weren't home yet."

"Doc!"

Normally she'd be
overjoyed. He was always like the breath of sanity in an insane
world. Tonight he'd been angry at her. She wondered if he still
was.