Windmaster's Bane (10 page)

Little Billy raised dubious eyebrows. “You got a girlfriend?”

“Don’t
tell…
please?”

“Okay,” Little Billy agreed, a bit too quickly.

“Promise?”

“Yeah.”

“Good….
Oh, and thanks.”

“Had my fingers crossed,” Little Billy whispered gleefully as David left him alone in the bathroom.
Teach him to keep secrets!

So much was whirling through David’s mind as he drifted down the hall to breakfast that he felt almost numb. There was the night before to consider, of course, when things he had thought unreal, or at best safely distanced, had suddenly crowded hard and near upon him, so that the entire composition of reality had shifted around him. And there was the matter of the ring, and of the lie he had just told Little Billy and already regretted. He had always preferred telling as much of the truth as he could when in a difficult situation—it made getting caught harder.
Oh well,
he thought as he slumped into the kitchen and sank down at the table that dominated the center of the room,
maybe Little Billy has already forgotten about it; at least he doesn’t seem to remember last night. Thank God for that!

That! The encounter with the Sidhe! Had it really happened? David shivered suddenly. If things had not gone as they had—if he had not won the riddle game—he would not be sitting down to breakfast now. All at once he saw his parents with a new appreciation…and with a trace of sadness as well, for the drabness of their lives. He knew his own would never be drab again.

David felt certain they would instantly pounce upon him. God knew they had plenty of reason, if they suspected what he’d been up to—if they could understand it at all. But, instead, his mother laid a shiny new romance novel facedown by the butter dish and got up to stick a couple more slices of bread in the toaster. Nothing out of the ordinary there. Big Billy was drinking strong black coffee with his bacon and eggs and reading the Sunday edition of the
Atlanta Journal and Constitution.
Everything normal there, too. David’s guilt was still his own.

Little Billy bounced in and sat down next to him and helped himself to a pile of bacon and eggs and toast nearly as big as he was, with homemade blackberry jelly for the toast.

“You goin’ to church this morning, boy?” Big Billy asked loudly without looking up.

The abruptness of the question so startled David from the apprehensive stupor into which he had settled that he nearly fell out of his chair. Fortunately nobody noticed.

“Hadn’t planned to,” David answered as nonchalantly as he could, pouring himself a cup of coffee, black for a change.

“Way you was talkin’ yesterday, and way you been talkin’ lately, you better go,” Big Billy replied in turn.

David suppressed the urge to follow with the inevitable response that Big Billy didn’t go either, but held his tongue. He had more important things on his mind just then than rehearsing that tired old argument.

“David’s got a girlfriend,” mumbled Little Billy through a mouthful of toast.

David tried to look daggers in two directions at once and found he couldn’t. Too much too fast. What had possessed Little Billy to blurt out his secret like that? It was not even a true secret, either, just a hastily constructed fabrication that could not stand scrutiny. He needed time to sort things out, to get his stories straight, or he would get so far in he’d never get out. Maybe his pa had a point at that; maybe he
should
go to church. Now that David had proof of at least some supernatural creatures existing in the world, didn’t it follow that there could be more?

Suddenly God was in his Heaven and all wasn’t right in David’s world. His ambivalent agnosticism was hanging in tatters like the scrambled eggs hanging from his fork.

“Don’t talk with your mouth full, Little Billy,” his mother told him. “Now don’t let me have to tell you again, hear?”

Little Billy chewed noisily for a moment.

“I said
David’s got a girlfriend
!”
The boy looked so smug it took all David’s willpower to keep from pushing his face down into his cornflakes then and there.

Big Billy slowly lowered his paper and looked up incredulously. It had taken a moment for the words to sink in.

David kicked at Little Billy under the table, missed, and got a chair leg instead. He grimaced and pretended interest in a slice of bacon.

“He’s got a ring and everything,” Little Billy went on, delighted by David’s discomfort. David discovered to his horror that he was wearing the ring again, in plain sight. Big Billy was looking straight at it.

“Son-of-a-gun!”
Big Billy exclaimed, with unexpected good humor. “It’s about time!” He set his coffee cup down hard and laughed. “Sneaky old son-of-a-gun—like his daddy. Who is she, boy?” he asked conspiratorially. David was more than a little taken aback by his interest.

“Uh…
you don’t know her. She’s a
girl…
a girl at school.”

“You ain’t been to school this summer,” Little Billy pointed out.

“I didn’t say it was this summer,” David replied angrily, feeling as if he were rapidly digging his own grave.

“A girl!” repeated Big Billy. “Well, I’ll be damned! You may make a man yet! But who is she, boy? Don’t do to be ashamed of your woman.” His eyes narrowed. “You ain’t done nothin’ you’d be sorry for, have you?”

David looked horrified. Suddenly he felt
very
uneasy.

His mother seemed surprisingly disinterested. She picked up her coffee and her romance, shuffled into the den, and turned on the TV. The raucous noise of cartoons sounded for a moment, followed quickly by the crackling hiss of fuzzing wavelengths and then somebody with an oil-on-water voice wanting to tell a nation of wretched sinners about Jee-ee-uh-sus-uh.

Big Billy changed tactics. “What’s her name, Little Billy? Who’s your brother’s gal?”

Little Billy shrugged. “I dunno. All
I
know is he’s got a ring he’s been tryin’ to hide, and I could hear him mumblin’ last night about seein’ the she.”

David rolled his eyes skyward in dismay. Had he talked in his sleep as well? And so loud Little Billy could hear him from his room?

“A ring and everything! Must be serious. You give her one too, boy? Goin’ steady?”

“Uh, not yet,” David lied. Things were getting worse by the minute. “She just happened to have this one, so she gave it to me; it was sudden—unexpected, you know. I met her down in Atlanta at that Beta Club convention back before school was out. Nothing
serious…
really,” he added lamely.

“But you just said she was a girl at school,” Little Billy noted.

“Maybe I
will
go to church,” David said, grasping at anything to change the subject and get himself away from the breakfast table. “I haven’t been in a while.”

“I ’spect that’d be a good idea,” Big Billy nodded, returning to his paper. “Get yourself some practice,” he added, “before that gal down in Atlanta drags you to the altar.”

David got up and took a long cold shower—long because he needed to think, and cold because his wits were obviously still muddled, or he never would have got himself in such a
fix.
Neither helped. In the end church seemed the best option.
Any
help would do now.

*

Worse and worse,
David thought as he eased his mother’s two-year-old Ford LTD into the gravel parking lot of the First Antioch and Damascus Baptist Church, too late to sneak in unobtrusively. Normally, when he went to church at all, he accompanied Alec to the much more liberal MacTyrie Methodist; but that was usually when he’d spent Saturday night at Alec’s house. David hadn’t been to services in a Baptist church in maybe three years.

As soon as his mother opened her door, Little Billy squirmed between the seat back and the doorjamb and ran off to play with some of his friends.

His mother got out with considerably more grace, and David couldn’t help noticing that she did cut a fine figure—when she wanted to, and spent half the morning putting it on. It was also apparent that she was completely delighted to be seen at church with her delinquent older son, since her husband—despite his talk—had not set foot in a church in eighteen years except for weddings and funerals.

David took a deep breath, straightened his tie, and opened his door. Some girls he knew from school were standing on the semicircular steps at the door of the white frame building, watching his arrival with considerable interest and no little surprise. One of the girls pointed, and there was a chorus of giggles behind hands, David felt extremely self-conscious, and wondered what sin they imagined he had committed that was bad enough to bring him to church. An even worse thought struck him briefly, and he glanced casually down to check his fly, breathing a small sigh of relief that it was still securely fastened. He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his dark blue suit—it was getting a little tight through the armpits—and felt the coolness of the ring on his finger.

His mother was waiting a bit impatiently at the foot of the steps. She smiled at him as he shuffled up the walk. “I ain’t had a chance to be escorted into church by my handsome son in a long time—not since he got to be taller’n me—and I’m gonna take it.” She offered her arm and he could not refuse.

David didn’t pay much attention to the sermon; he spent most of the time trying to lay out a consistent story about the nameless girl from Atlanta he had suddenly invented, and kept getting tangled up in it, especially as he had told two different versions of the story at breakfast already.
And he could not get the confounded ring off.
His finger had swollen just enough to make it stick. It sat there on his finger gleaming brightly, looking as smug as Little Billy had when he’d blurted out David’s supposed secret at the breakfast table. What could possibly have possessed his little brother to tell that? He was usually reliable about secrets.

David scanned the congregation, noticing another thing he didn’t like. There was Little Billy sitting over on the other side with several of his Sunday school cronies, whispering together and giggling and pointing at David.

Does everybody have to do that?
David folded his arms and stared straight ahead while trying to work the ring off under his armpit. But it still would not budge. And to make matters worse, his mother expected him to hold the hymnal open for her every time there was a song or a responsive reading, which seemed to be about every other minute. He rather believed he’d prefer sitting in his pew stark naked to sitting there with that silver ring on just then. It was not that he didn’t want it; he just didn’t want it on
now,
in church, didn’t want it too widely known. But he had an uneasy feeling that it was already too late for that.

He glared at Little Billy as his brother whispered something else into the ear of one of his cronies. Soon as they got home, he would give that little boy a talking-to he’d be a long time forgetting. It was
his
fault—for telling everything.
No, it isn’t.
David knew full well it was his own, for not being straight with him, among other things, and for his lack of self-control which had led him into the woods in the first place. He was jealous, too, he realized, jealous of his real secret. But he might warm Little Billy’s bottom anyway. And he wanted to take another look at that trail up in the woods, this time by daylight.

*

But he never got the chance.

Because Liz phoned him practically as he came in the door to tell him the music show started at two, and to ask when he could be by to pick her up, and would not hear his excuses for not wanting to go.

And then it started to rain.

And then lunch was ready.

And right after lunch the phone rang again.

“Is this Lover Boy Sullivan?” came the voice of Alec McLean.

David nearly hung up in disgust. “Sorry, there’s nobody of that name here.”

“That’s not what I heard.”

“What
did
you hear, then? I mean news travels fast and all, but
this
fast?”

“Then you admit there
is
news?”

Damn,
thought David
, should have kept my mouth shut.

“I have my sources,” Alec continued slyly.

“So do I, but I haven’t heard anything.”

“Sure, sure.”

“There’s nothing to hear, Alec.”

“That’s not what your brother said at church this morning.”

“I really should have given him to the undertaker,” David muttered.

“What’s that?”

David cleared his throat. “Little Billy has a way
of…
exaggerating.”

“He also has a way of telling the truth, especially when it’ll get you in trouble,” Alec went on complacently.

“Look, Alec, level with me. What did you hear? From whom? And how?”

“What is this? The Spanish Inquisition? No, okay, seriously: Your brother told Buster Smith, who told his Sister Carolyn, who told one of her crew, who told a mutual friend of ours who shall remain nameless as I need my spies, who told me, that you were sporting a ring at church this morning, a ring you said you got from a girl down in Atlanta—at Beta Club Convention, as a matter of fact.”