Come Little Children (24 page)

The girls around the table
ewwed
in unison, and then the crowd of six- and seven-year-old boys, not to be outdone, jammed out their tongues and ewwed back with equal enthusiasm. Camilla jumped in and started passing out paper plates, which diffused the chaos and brought everyone’s butts back to their plastic green chairs. Still, she knew the effect was only palliative; inevitably their energy would return with a vengeance, powered by enough sugar to wipe out half of the world’s diabetics.

Peter and Camilla tiptoed backward through the basement of St. Luther’s Northern Parish and slipped into the church’s kitchen. Together they peeked out of the serving window like a pair of surreptitious stage managers, careful not to draw any unwanted attention toward themselves, and watched as the kids
pounced on the cake faster than a pack of hyenas on a wounded gazelle.

“Quick, while they’re scavenging.”

Peter smacked his lips and snagged a jug of knockoff strawberry Kool-Aid from the 1945 Philco refrigerator. As he topped off two Dixie cups, Camilla checked the last remaining box of pizza and found a lonely slice buried under the cardboard flaps.

Peter saw the pizza and his mouth popped open. He leaned over and took a bite, but a pocket of cheese burst and sent tomato sauce shooting up his nose.

“Ugh!”

Camilla snorted with laughter, watching him rear back and try to wipe the sauce off his face. He moved his hand away and flashed another smile, all teeth. “How do I look?”

“Like you were picking your nose with a coat hanger.”

She wasn’t exaggerating; the red sauce was still dripping out of his nostrils, flecked with specks of pepperoni that resembled hunks of brain matter.

“I’ll show you bloody…” He clasped his hands over his nose and wrung out the remaining sauce, then lurched ahead with wet tomato paste fingers.

“Stop it!” She half whispered, half shrieked. “Stop!”

Peter lunged and caught the side of her arm, leaving a dark marinara streak from her wrist up to her elbow.

“I swear—ah!” She dodged again, getting it on her knuckles. “I swear, if you get a
drop
on this cardigan…”

“You’ll what?”

“Eek!”

“Huh? You’ll what?”

“I’ll…I’ll leave you alone with the Lords of the Flies.” She nodded at the birthday table. “Fifteen minutes tops before your head’s stuck on a tetherball pole.”

Peter froze in front of her. He put his hands in the air like a prison convict caught pulling a bad lunchroom stunt. “Checkmate, boss.” He flashed his flirty grin and leaned forward, but Camilla turned and the peck barely grazed her cheek.

“You think it’s that easy?”

“You think you have time to flirt?”

Camilla spied the kids’ table again—they were still distracted with dessert—and she swiveled back and returned the peck on Peter’s lips. Eight years hadn’t changed a lot, at least in that department. She swore she would never be one of those parents who did anything PG-plus in front of her daughter’s friends, no matter how old the kids were or how charming Peter could be, so intimate affection had to be time-boxed. And if there’s one thing new parents are shorter on than money, sleep, and patience, it’s time (which Peter was particularly good at capitalizing on when they caught these short spells of privacy).

Peter poured two more shooters of church juice, and they tapped Dixies, downing the weak strawberry water in one swig each. As she lowered her cup, Camilla’s eyes fell on the scene through the serving window again.

Abigail was sitting at the head of the table, her brown locks pulled back with the pretty lace headband they had given her as an early birthday present. She was poised properly—back straight and feet uncrossed, just like her grandmother had impressed upon her—while licking vanilla icing off a plastic fork.

Come on, sweetheart
, Camilla thought.
Talk to someone. You can do it
.

But Abigail wasn’t saying anything. She sat there, content, eating dessert and listening to the kids around her yap their curly-haired heads off.

Speak up, Abby, you can do it. Don’t be shy
.

Abigail perked up, almost as if she was tuned in to her mother’s wavelength, and swiveled to the pair of girls beside her. She parted her lips, about to say something, when suddenly a boy at the other end of the table let out a loud battle cry and planted his entire face in his slice of cake, pulling focus from the whole group. Whether he did so on a dare or purely for attention, it didn’t matter; the boy looked like a Looney Tunes character now, and a blaze of laughter was spreading around the table faster than wildfire. Within seconds everyone from Abigail and the Cory sisters at one end, to little Tim Lam and Alex Palmer and Farley “Five Chins” Melstrom at the other, was rocking with giggles.

Camilla shook her head, but a smile had crossed her lips too.
They’re laughing. They’re having fun, thank God. Everyone’s having fun
. It was music to her ears. Music, especially, since last year’s party had been nothing to grin about.

Last year was Abigail’s first kick at public school, and the whole summer leading up to September had been incredibly nerve-racking. Scars from Camilla’s own school years stung more and more every time she plucked a petal from the stems of her own past—
I send her, I send her not, I send her, I send her not
—but ultimately, she knew the public school system would teach Abby a few lessons that might benefit a new generation of Vincents. Thankfully, day one wasn’t as awkward as she’d imagined. Abigail was just as quiet as Camilla had been at that age, and she attracted just as many looks walking through the hallways, but at least she hadn’t arrived at show-and-tell with
a dead animal stuffed in her pencil case yet, so by Vincent and Carleton standards, it was a whopping success.

The problem, it turned out—and Camilla should have predicted it—wasn’t so much with the children as it was with their parents. Every time she tried calling another mom to set up a play date, she hit that mighty destroyer of all good intentions: voice mail. Then out of the blue one night in October, Abigail admitted that none of her classmates wanted to play with her because their moms and dads told them to “stay away from the Vincents.” That was the most painful thing Camilla had ever heard.
Stay away from the Vincents? Who do those stuck-up, bucktooth hill trolls think they are?
But thankfully, Abigail hadn’t seemed nearly as distraught as her mother was; in fact, she seemed more curious than anything. “Why do they say that, mom?” she asked, and Camilla had explained that because they lived in a funeral home, a lot of people were superstitious around them. When Abigail asked what “superstitious” meant, Camilla had settled on “scared of dead people,” and Abby, in the perpetual wisdom and naivety of a six-year-old, had returned a puzzled look and replied, “That’s dumb,” to which Camilla had nodded and agreed.

But that was the calm before the storm. Then it hit like an angry tempest—a twister strong enough to lift up a southern farmhouse and toss it somewhere over a gaudy rainbow. The awful sixth birthday party.

To start with, not a single invitee showed up.

The extra chairs sat empty. The black-cherry torte, decorated with dark chocolate and freshly picked strawberries, sat on its special plinth going stale. Jasper’s musical program went unheard.

For over an hour, the whole family had sat in the Vincents’ dining room—which was festooned with long loops of carefully
hung streamers, buckets of black-and-pink confetti, and matching jumbo balloons—and waited it out. But around seven o’clock it was Abigail herself who suggested that everyone eat their supper before it got cold.

Camilla was livid for a month.

It wasn’t because of the wasted decorating effort, or the sunk cost of throwing out three quarters of a ninety-dollar cake. It was because those heartless, high-and-mighty Nolan bastards wouldn’t give her and her daughter the time of day.

But—
yes, there was always a self-deprecating
but
that came with these kinds of parental failures
—things won’t change if I don’t take a proactive approach
. So gradually she started spending more evenings away from the funeral home and more time in the community. She brought Abigail along on errands, took her to the parks and the public library, and explored the walking paths with her every weekend. Any time another family was out, she made a point of introducing herself, and despite how difficult it was on a daily basis, she even managed to keep some of her more eccentric outfits at home. Then as slowly as the Earth’s tectonic plates form new mountain ranges, the Nolan community—or at least the parents of the first grade class—began to build up their mutual trust. As a final clincher, she decided to hold Abigail’s party at a public venue this year: the basement of St. Luther’s Northern Parish. “If the community can’t trust holy ground, I’m giving up,” she had told Peter point-blank. Peter agreed, pointing out that there was a good toboggan hill close by, and so it was decided.
He also hinted that instead of strawberry torte and homemade hors d’oeuvres, we should probably stick to cheese pizza and vanilla cake. Another good call
.

“Solid party, huh?” Peter whispered.

Camilla nodded, chewing her crust.

“Although, they’d probably have just as much fun if you stuck them in a laundry room and told them to fold socks all night.”

The joke wafted by without registering. As she licked the pizza grease off her fingers, Camilla’s eyes hovered on their daughter through the serving window again.

Watching Abigail was like watching a spitting image of herself at that age. Their figures were identical—both she and Abby had tiny frames—and they both shared the same slender, Snow-White faces. Abigail was a brunette though, which Camilla should have expected (
red hair alleles are more recessive than the polar icecaps
) but occasionally it still surprised her. After all, the dream—that famous dream that drove her to take that incredible risk more than seven years ago—showed a redhead. As red as a rose, redder than copper. But not a single scarlet hair had ever graced Abigail’s skull, not even at birth.

The birth and conception of Abigail Grace Vincent had been unusual events, to put it mildly.

Camilla remembered the night she had taken the apple and reentered the mansion, long after Maddock returned to bed. She had crept to the kitchen and cut it open, slicing past the shriveled skin to reveal nothing but brown, decaying mush, and picked out the five seeds with the tip of a knife while examining each one with her naked eye.
They looked so harmless. No one could ever tell the difference
.

She had been eager to test their effects, but not so eager that she considered anything reckless.
Even where the occult is concerned, there’s still room for good procedure and sound hypothesis testing
. So every night over the subsequent week, Camilla had stalked down to the embalming room—summoned by nothing but her
own hunch and a mortician’s toolset—and carried out a variety of experiments after everyone else was fast asleep.

The first order of business had been smashing a seed open. Afterward she found an old microscope and inspected the contents meticulously, but when she couldn’t spot anything unusual compared to the control apple stolen from the south parlor’s fruit bowl, she decided to mash it in a crucible and look again. Nothing.

The second seed was dipped in a solution and measured with a voltmeter to gauge electrical potential. Unsurprisingly, it had carried absolutely no current.
That was a pretty dumb test in the first place
, she recalled, and while she had scorched the remains of seeds one and two with Moira’s crème brûlée torch, she regretted wasting her supply so heedlessly.

For the third trial, she had found an old car battery from the garage and hammered it open, then diluted the fluid to a point where the pH was comparable to stomach acid. Most people didn’t know that apple seeds contain amygdalin—a toxic glycoside that can kill a fully grown adult—and although their shells are usually strong enough to withhold the poison throughout digestion, there was no guarantee that
these
ones would behave the same way. She submerged the seed for ten hours to see how well it held up, and while it ultimately passed the acid test, it became too weakened to risk further use, so she burned it as well.

By that point, a week had passed and Camilla still knew nothing. Only two seeds were left and there was
no chance
she would try anything on herself without first testing a living subject.

Luckily, the perfect candidate presented itself later that same night.

She was down in the kitchen getting a glass of water when there was a sudden scratch at the back door. With a dark flash
of déjà vu, she jumped like a Nam solider standing next to a Roman candle. Somehow she managed to hold on to her glass this time, but it wasn’t until the shock wore off that she could take a deep breath and focus on the patio door.

There was no silhouette. Nothing behind the wafting curtains, no boy in the dark.

Still, the scratching continued. She reached out and turned the latch, pulling it open to reveal Proper, one of the Vincents’ scrawny black cats, pawing on the outer screen.

The idea had dawned on her instantly. She scooped the cat in her arms and grabbed a tin of Fancy Feast from the fridge, then raced all the way to the embalming room as fast as her moccasins could carry her.

“There we go,” she had whispered, setting the cat on a cold countertop and running a hand over its stomach. Finally she found the furless patch—and the scar—on its lower belly. “Good girl, good girl.”

She opened the Fancy Feast and carved out a portion with a scalpel, then planted a seed inside and plopped it in front of the starry-eyed pet. Proper dug in and devoured the glob in twenty seconds—all of it
except
the shiny black kernel. The cat blinked and batted the seed with its paw, then stopped, unimpressed.

Camilla dug out another serving and stuck the seed inside again. This time she fed the animal by hand—forcing every morsel into its mouth—and just when she thought she’d won, it let out a high, retching wheeze. Startled, Camilla let go, and Proper proceeded to improperly puke up its entire meal on the cement counter. After that, the cat leaped to the floor and scampered for the exit, but luckily the doors were shut.
You can’t run, you little rat
.
I’ve got you cornered now
. The pet arched against the frame as Camilla picked out the seed from the vomit and prowled toward
the door.
Enough is enough
. She lunged and caught the cat by its haunches, wrestling it into a tight grip while its back paws kicked murderously for her wrists. She pried its jaw open and dropped the seed inside, then clamped the teeth together and kept them shut while the cat thrashed around with more piss and vinegar than a rabid cougar. Finally it swallowed.