All for One (45 page)

“Until the last couple of weeks. Willa and I have laid in bed waiting for it to happen. It hasn’t.”

Dooley had thought Mary’s fit the other night related to recent happenings. Could Guy Edmond have wrought this much devastation on those around him?

“You’re telling me this, about the psychiatrist and Elena’s nightmares, because...”

“Because Elena’s doctor discovered what was causing the nightmares,” Tim Markworth said, sniffling, his voice on the verge of nothingness. “She had some sort of breakthrough just before the night screams stopped. Elena told her something.”

“Something?”

Tim Markworth’s chin rose into a nod. His grip on the basin more than his legs seemed to hold him upright. A quiet, tearless sob shook through him. His lower teeth bared like a wounded beast and he said, “About that monster. That boy. Guy Edmond.”

Dooley glanced at the window. Shadows on the curtain now, one big, one small, arms joined in silhouette as they spun to happy music. Dancing.

He looked back to Tim Markworth and waited for more.

“He...did things to her, Detective Ashe. He...raped her. He touched her. He made her...” Tim Markworth’s face screwed into a hurt, curious scowl. “...do things to him. He did this from the first day of school. He...”

Dooley hadn’t suspected this, but it did not surprise him either. Not from Guy Edmond it didn’t.

A minute of spasmed silence dragged, then Dooley said, “I’m very sorry, Mr. Markworth.”

Tim Markworth sobbed dryly, his fingers clamped to the basin’s rim, digging at the curved stone.

“How...could...he... How could
anyone
do those things. She’s my little girl.” He looked quizzically at Dooley. Broken.  “She’s my little girl.”

Dooley gave the man his time to compose himself.

“I’m sorry,” Tim Markworth said, wiping a wet sniff down one sleeve.

“Why did want to tell me this?” Dooley asked easily.

“So you would know what kind of...thing that boy was. So you’ll know what the other kids in that class may have gone through. So that boy who did it might not be seen as a murderer in your eyes. Maybe you’ll see him as a savior of those kids. I certainly do.”

Tim Markworth let go of the basin and stood straight. He cleared his throat and looked around the yard. The beds were going to need a better coat of mulch if winter was as cold as the fall had been thus far.

“I moved here to give my family a better life,” Tim Markworth said. He shook his head and looked at Dooley, then went back in the house, dragging regret with him.

Dooley took a deep draw of cold air and walked slowly across the yard to the walkway, music faint behind, and to his new car, green like the forest, a year newer twin to his old one.

As he drove away he imagined little Guy Edmonds spaced along the street like slalom cones, and he imagined himself flattening each and every one.

*  *  *

Michael Prentiss lay on his bed staring at the ceiling and the sparkles fused to its uneven surface.

His baseball glove rested on his chest, rising and falling with each breath. The police had taken his bat.

Waves of sadness swept over him. He thought of Bryce. His friend. His best friend until...

Three quick taps on his window snapped Michael from this latest descent into tears. He looked at the glass and saw a small hand waving.

He went to the window and saw Jeff pressed stealthily against the house.
Open up
, his friend mouthed.

Michael eased the lower sash up and leaned partly out, whispering, “What are you doing here, Bernstein?”

“I need to talk to you,” Jeff explained in an equally hushed tone. The softness seemed unnatural, like a third eye.

“I’m in enough trouble already,” Michael said. “If my folks catch you here...”

“They won’t.” Jeff surveyed the back yard and held his good hand toward his friend. “Come on. Help me in.”

A few seconds of fretting delayed the inevitable, then Michael took Jeff’s hand and helped him through the window. Even with the cast it was no problem. Michael had lifted bigger things at his dad’s garage.

Jeff looked around the room, and seemed particularly interested in the door. “Do they come in a lot?”

Michael shook his head and slowly closed the window. He sat on his bed and said, “They don’t seem to want to see me.”

Jeff squatted to a sit on the floor. “Are you okay?”

“No. Would you be?”

“No.” Jeff wanted to get right to business, but he couldn’t. This wasn’t like talking to Mike his friend. This was like talking to Mike who lots of people thought killed Bryce, his friend. He unzipped his jacket and said idly, “We’re gonna miss you at One Wing.”

“I wish I could go.”

“Yeah.”

Michael considered his friend with reluctant glances, but fixed a steady stare upon him when he saw that Jeff was having more trouble looking at him. “I didn’t do it, Jeff.”

“We know that.”

“Then look at me.”

Jeff did. He swallowed.

“I didn’t do it.”

“What happened then?”

Michael clawed at the denim over his knees. “God, Jeff, it was awful...”

“What?”

The door drew a cautionary glance from Michael, then he said, “I’ve gotta tell you something.”

“What?”

“About that night at Bryce’s house.”

Jeff nodded and listened. He listened for an hour, and then he snuck out of his friend’s bedroom window a different person.

*  *  *

She had gone to bed early, wanting to get a good night’s sleep before leaving for Camp One Wing the next morning. That was what she wanted, but it was not to be.

Right before midnight, a good two hours after drifting off, Mary woke abruptly, her eyes jerking wide open and angling toward her open door. She heard only the faint, ghostly hum that silence reeked in the still din of the night. The nothingness that weighed heavy upon one’s senses if they listened, or looked into it, long enough. She heard that harmless nothingness, and buried almost beneath it the soft purr of Chester slumbering in the hall just outside her room. Heard that and nothing else.

But there had been something.

She eased her feet from under the covers and sat at the edge of her bed. Her eyes peered into the living room, the filtered, ambient glow of the outside lights painting it and all the furnishings in various monochrome shades. She was searching the normal night scene for something. The something that had yanked her from a deep, dreamless sleep. A sound of some kind. Very clear before she woke, but lost in the transition.

Not like what she’d heard when Chuck Edmond had traipsed across her porch that night not so long ago, the night he hurled the stabbed apple through her window. That was sound with a presence; this was just...sound. If it had been more than that it would have stirred Chester.

Mary gave her sleeping tabby a glance and stood slowly. She thought about taking the gun from her nightstand, but decided against it. She felt no threat. She felt only wonder. Wonder at what she’d heard.

I did hear it
, she thought to herself, whatever ‘it’ was.

She walked gingerly past Chester and into the living room, fixing herself near its center. Looking left she could see the flat white glow on the still mismatched linen curtain. To the right into the kitchen. Ahead and a little to the right, the blunt curved end of her piano, its coal blackness deeper than the surrounding ni—

Hee hee hee hee hee.

There it was!

Mary hurried toward the sound, toward the small, giddy laughter coming from the piano’s room. She entered fast and stopped, listening.

Hee hee hee.

There! On the far side, low by the keyboard. Mary scooted around half the big instrument’s perimeter and scanned the floor around the bench, then crouched and looked by the foot pedals. Nothing.

Her eyes scowled with worry.

Hee hee hee hee.

Where was that? Where?
Mary stood quickly and looked beyond the piano. Tiny feet scurried across the hardwood floor.

Hee hee. Hee hee hee.

The laughter and the footsteps moved together to the kitchen. Mary followed, her bare feet squeaking against the floor.

Hee hee hee.

She came into the kitchen and blocked the doorway. One hand reached for the light switch, but she did not flip it up. Her fingers simply rested upon it. Held it there as she listened.

Hee hee hee.

Mary spun fast around. The laughter was behind her now, in the living room.

Who are you?!
her mind demanded.

Hee hee—

The giggle, across the room by the couch now, was cut off by the sudden clamor of the phone. It lanced the quiet and startled Mary. She listened after the first ring, and heard nothing. No laughter. No feet. Just the thick night once more.

Chester strutted into the living room from the hallway and stared at Mary as another ring came. She started toward the phone, Chester purring, a quick, sharp spear of light traversing the dark behind her eyes and...

Forty Two

...she stared out the clear windshield of her car at the buses gathering just past the front of the school, and at the piles of duffels and sleeping bags, and the small clusters of children and the parents there to see them off.

Wha— Wha—

The shocky question came as thought first, then Mary managed to say softly to herself, “What? What?”

Two taps on her side window made her jump.

Nan Jakowitz recoiled apologetically at the reaction. “I’m sorry, Mary. Not the best way to get your attention, is it?”

Mary stared at Nan as normally as she could, drew a composing breath, and shook her head as she lowered the window.

“I guess you think ‘Chuck Edmond’ whenever that happens, huh?”

“It, uh...”
My God, I’m...I’m at school. I was at...at home. Oh God.
“...startles me sometimes.”

Nan gestured at the little bodies and big bodies gathered near the buses. “Everyone looks eager to go. Are you ready for a weekend away from this place?”

Was I at home? Was I? Was it a dream?
“I think so.”

“I wish I was going with you,” Nan Jakowitz said with a smile, then walked off toward the main building.

Mary’s hands slipped off the steering wheel and came to her mouth, close together as if clutching in prayer, or maybe in concert to staunch a scream. All they did, though, was muffle a question that came already soft past her lips. “What is happening to me?”

An answer did come, surprising Mary but not startling her. Not from one of the voices, pleasant or otherwise. Not from any person. This answer came in thought. Came from her, she knew. She just knew. From Mary Austin.

It’s Mr. Bannister.

Still, she had no idea what it meant.

Part of her was pained by that reality. Another was joyous.

Forty Three

There were eight boys’ cabins and eight girls’ cabins at Camp One Wing, whose emblem of a one-winged blue jay hung over the main entrance road in colors painted vibrant once each week, winter or summer. There was also a dining hall with a piano and fireplace, and tables enough for a hundred and eighty hungry little campers. A lodge sat on a slight rise next to the dining hall, and beyond it a T-shaped staff building that always seemed to have rock music blaring from it. The camp manager’s house sat next to the entrance road. Deer came to its back door often to partake of the saltlick. The manager’s name was Ballard. People called him just that.

Joey and Jeff were with four other boys in Jayhawk 2. They’d gotten the luck of the draw and ended up as overflow with a mixed group of campers from the other schools. Uncrowded as it was they each had the ultimate in camp luxury: both a top
and
a bottom bunk. “Hey, who’s watching the stove?” a boy from Greenwood Elementary asked brusquely. The orange glow seen through the slightly parted doors of the coal-black pot belly stove had ebbed, and now crackled barely yellow. It was getting cold. “Who’s watching the fire?”

“Guess
you
are,” Joey said, and got chuckles from three of his cabin mates, brusque-boy not included. Jeff stayed silent. “Jeff?”

“Yeah?”

Joey pulled two sweatshirts and his warm jacket from his bag and laid them on the bottom bunk. That’s what bottom bunks were for, in this case: clothes. The top was for sleeping. Or clowning. It all depended. “What’s up? You haven’t said hardly anything today.”

“I’m just... I don’t know.”

“Is it Mike?”

Jeff tossed his suitcase to the head of the bunk and laid down, using it as a pillow. All the real pillows were piled on the top, ready for sleep or pillow fights. “I don’t know.”

Well, Mike had told him what Joey knew to be true: that he didn’t kill Bryce. But Jeff hadn’t wanted to talk much about their conversation beyond that. Maybe it had just been hard seeing Mike like that, Joey guessed. Locked in his room, accused of murdering his best friend. Or maybe it was something else. Joey couldn’t be sure, especially with Jeff being less than his usual, cocky self.

Something had thrown him for a loop, Joey could tell. He figured only time would tell what it was.

Brusque-boy, whose baseball jersey said his name was Guns, pushed two pieces of wood into the stove and burned himself shutting the twin doors. “Damn the ham!”

Joey gave Guns a
‘What?’
look.

“What?” Guns mumbled, one scalded finger buried in his mouth.

“Nothing,” Joey said, his shaking head pitying Guns as he decided that Greenwood had sent one total dumbshit to One Wing.

Light spilled suddenly into the cabin. The door had opened, and Miss Austin stood there in shadow.

Joey smiled at her. Jeff’s eyes twisted her way.

“The opening session begins in half an hour,” Mary told the occupants of Jayhawk 2. “In the dining hall. Everybody got it?”

Five nods answered her incompletely. “Jeff?”

“Yeah, I heard.”

Mary smiled right at him and backed out of the cabin. The door swung shut and left the space in an afternoon din.

“Jeff?” Joey said. His voice was irritated. “That wasn’t cool.”