“I’ve made her afraid of what?”
“The policeman,” Sarah said and wept.
“What policeman?”
“Sweetheart, try to tell us about it.”
“Oh, Mommy, the policeman.”
“We did our best,” the principal said. “You’ve got to understand that. I don’t know what’s been going on, but there’s been a policeman watching her for the last few weeks while she’s been back to school. Today there was a different one.”
“No.”
“He told me he needed to ask her some questions, that something new had happened and he needed to ask her about it. How was I to know what’s been going on? Nobody’s told me anything.”
“We wanted her to lead some kind of life.”
“What?”
“It wasn’t right keeping her at home all the time. She was going crazy. We wanted her to meet new children, play, do something to keep her mind off things. If we had told you what was happening, you wouldn’t have let her come, or else word would have gotten around and everybody would have been staring at her. We figured the policeman was enough to protect her.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The policeman. Just tell me about the policeman. I was wrong.”
“He came this morning and asked to have your daughter taken out of class so he could talk with her.” The sweat stain was spreading under the principal’s arms. “So I let him. You understand why I let him, don’t you? The next thing, one of the teachers heard her screaming in the basement. She was bleeding and screaming and—”
“Where?”
“In the basement.”
“No. Where was she bleeding?” But he already knew and his throat was gagging him but he had to hear for certain anyway, and then the principal was telling him how she had been assaulted and the logical thing that the armed policeman had used to do it and he thought he was going to be sick.
“No,” he said. “No,” he kept repeating.
21
He drove her home between Claire and himself on the front seat. The bleeding was finally stopped—the doctors at the hospital had stared at him when he explained. They disinfected the area. They cushioned her with pads that would need to be changed, and they gave her pills to help with the pain. He thought of poison again. They wanted to keep her there for observation, but he said, “No way. The next time it might be a doctor instead of a policeman. She’s coming home with me.” So now Sarah huddled between them, clutching a blanket, holding herself, and her face was the gray of cement.
“Why, Daddy? Why did he want to hurt me there?”
He had to think it through before he could explain. “Sweetheart, when your mother was getting big with Ethan, do you remember you asked how she got him?” The image of Ethan made him pause, the body stiff and senseless in his coffin in his grave. He realized he had started speeding and eased his foot off the gas pedal. “Do you remember you thought that a baby started to grow inside a woman as soon as she reached a certain age, or else as soon as she got married, and you wanted to know if that was true?”
She held herself closer.
“So I told you no,” he said.
“Stop it,” Claire said.
“She asked me a question and I’m going to answer it.” Then to Sarah: “And I told you how your mother and I had gotten together, and what we had done to make Ethan. Well, that was a good thing to do. Your mother wanted me to do it, and I wanted to do it, and it made us feel very happy together. It’s something special that you do only with someone you love, and if everything goes properly and you do have a baby, well that can be even more special.”
“But why did he want to hurt me there?”
He rounded a corner and couldn’t keep from saying it. “Sarah, not everybody will always be as kind to you as we have. There are some people in the world, bad people, who enjoy taking something special and abusing it. We don’t know why they want to enjoy hurting us, but they like to do it anyhow, and we need to keep watching for them.”
“Stop this,” Claire told him sharply.
“I’m going to answer her question,” he said. “Sarah, that’s why we told you never to take anything like candy from a stranger, never to go for a ride with somebody you don’t know. That’s why I’m telling you now to be careful of every person you meet. They might be good, but they might be one of the bad ones, and there are a lot of bad ones around, not just the people who are after us, but a lot of others too. They like to hurt you, tell you lies, cheat and steal from you and ruin your reputation out of jealousy. They—”
He rounded the corner into their street, and when he saw what was happening, his first impulse was to slam on the brakes, his second to rush the car down to the fire trucks. There were sirens coming. There were thick black hoses stretched out from the fire hydrant on the corner. He raced the car thumping over them, past people standing watching, toward the firemen in slick black rubber raincoats struggling with the pressure in the hoses, spewing water loudly onto the house, onto the garage.
Flames licked through the top of the garage, bright orange in the black smoke rolling skyward. He braked so hard that he and Claire and Sarah jerked forward, and just in time he thrust out his right hand to keep Sarah from hitting the dashboard, and then he was out of the car, hearing the shouts and the truck motors and more sirens coming, feeling the black sticky soot drifting down on him, the air a fine cool mist from the backspray of the hoses. And there was Webster in his gray suit leaning somberly, hands in his pockets, against the nearest fire engine.
He walked slowly over, looking once more at the smoke and flames. “It’s just the garage,” he said. “From what I’m told, the house has a good chance to be saved.”
He couldn’t answer. The wind changed and the smoke came drifting over, burning his nostrils and his throat when he breathed. He watched the bright orange flames bursting through the black smoke on top of the garage. He looked at Claire holding Sarah in the car. He looked back at Webster.
“So how did they start it?” he managed to ask.
“Don’t know yet. I came just after the trucks got here. One of the neighbors phoned the fire department.”
“Did they see who did it? Enough for a description?”
“I have a man checking on that. Actually I didn’t know about the fire until I got here. The reason I came out was to say that the teacher at the school gave us a description of the man who attacked your daughter, and we ran it through the files, and there’s no policeman on the force who matches it. I don’t know where he got the uniform, but I know he wasn’t one of us.” There were big black flakes of soot on his suit and face. “What’s the matter?” he said. “You look like you don’t believe me.”
“I can’t tell who to believe anymore. My son is dead, my daughter assaulted, my home on fire. All that and the police won’t protect us, and—”
“We’ll protect you now all right. The chief admits he was wrong, and he’s assigned a special detail to keep watch on you.”
“Sure, and what if it’s one of your men who lent this other guy his uniform? What if that one is on the detail?”
“You’ve got me there. We can’t very well have police come out here to watch the police.”
“Then I’m right back where I started. Only worse.”
22
“You can see where it started,” the fire chief said.
The back wall of the garage was burned through in the middle, circled by char that was blacker than any place else except the beams from the roof. The rim of the circle was uneven, with black fingers splayed out in every direction. They waited while the firemen hosed down the smoking, hissing wood once more, and then they stepped carefully in among the pools of water and the rubble. The heat from the wet cracked cement floor came up through the soles of his shoes. Sarah’s bicycle was twisted, its tires melted. The stench choked him.
“There,” the fire chief said. “You can see what I mean.” He was pointing at the broken glass on the back floor, then up to the charred design around the hole in the wall.
He took a moment, and then he saw all right. “Molotov cocktail.”
Mix one-third liquid detergent and two-thirds gasoline in a soft-drink bottle, cap
it,
and attach a rag
.
Sure. They drove up fast, got out, lit the rag, and threw the bottle against the garage’s back wall. The bottle shattered. The detergent stuck the gasoline to the wall and concentrated it like napalm. That’s why there was a hole in the wall and charred fingers out from it. That’s where the gasoline splashed and stuck.
But he wasn’t only thinking it, he must have been saying it as well. Because the fire chief was looking at him, asking, “How come
you
know so much about it?”
23
He had no other choice: they had to spend the night in the house. If they were going to be attacked anymore, he couldn’t let it happen in a friend’s house, or in a hotel where he wouldn’t know the routine and couldn’t be warned by something out of the ordinary. He waited in the car with Claire and Sarah until the fire chief made certain that the fire would not start again. Sarah was in too much pain to walk. He had to carry her into the house, and Claire did what she could to make the place look like it used to be. The stairs, the upper floor were pooled with water. The walls were black and stained with water. He put Sarah on the bed in his and Claire’s room. Her own room down the hall was a mess after the firemen got through with it. He and Claire opened windows, but there was little breeze, and the thick smell of the smoke was everywhere.
Then Claire disappeared, and when he went looking for her, he found her behind the unlocked closed door in the bathroom. She was sitting with the toilet cover down, her face slack and tired, staring emptily at the bathtub. Her jeans were wet and black from cleaning up.
“Maybe that would help,” he said. “Go on and take a bath, why don’t you? Nothing’s going to happen this soon after the fire.”
“There isn’t anything that will help,” she told him.
“The police car is out front again, and the man is downstairs with the phone again. We’re safe enough now. Go on.”
“I don’t even hate you anymore. That’s how tired I am.”
He had been smiling, and the smile froze on his face, and the little spirit he had left simply died just then. It was all he could do to go back across the hall and check on Sarah in their room. She was asleep. In a moment he heard the water start rumbling into the bathtub, and at least that was something. The best he could hope for at any rate.
By nine Claire was asleep next to Sarah, and he kept the house in darkness, wandering through it. He drank coffee with the detective on duty by the phone. He went back upstairs, couldn’t bear the smell of the smoke, and stood by the open window to clear his head and breathe.
It was raining, had been raining for an hour, a slow steady drizzle that came straight down whispering onto the grass and the pavement. He raised the screen and leaned his head out, letting the rain soak his hair and trickle coldly across his neck, breathing the fresh cool air. The streetlight was out again. Except for a few rain-misted lights in some houses at the end of the street, everything was dark and dripping wet.
The streetlight. He tried to convince himself that the busy anxious feeling in his stomach was just nerves, no reason for panic, but something was tugging at him from behind and something was pushing at him from in front and he panicked anyway, jerking his head back in through the window, cracking it as the explosions lit up the night like fireworks, like thunder and lightning that might have come with the rain. Five, eight, ten roaring flashes, he was never sure how many. A constant string of them from between the houses on the other side of the street, shotguns, downstairs windows shattering as he dove to the floor, and the window above him burst inward, glass crashing down on him, pellets whapping against the far wall.
Claire sat up, startled. Sarah screamed. He groped to his knees, heart racing, water from his wet hair running ice cold down his back. A blast hit another window, slashing glass over Claire and Sarah. Claire wailed, dragging Sarah out of the bed with her, huddling with her on the floor as another volley hit the house and more glass ripped across the room and Sarah was hysterical.
“Daddy! Daddy!”
The shotguns stopped. He heard car doors opening, men shouting in the night. He was on his feet, trembling, peering out one corner of the window. The police. They were out of the cruiser, separating, running splashing through the pools of water and the rain toward the cover of the two big fir trees in front of the house. Webster, he was thinking. He had to get Webster. The police would have radioed for help. That didn’t matter. He had to get Webster.
He swung around the bed to the phone, picking it up, trying to remember Webster’s number, and there was no dial tone. The line had been cut.
“Stay here,” he told Claire and Sarah. He headed out the door toward the hall. “No,” he told them. “Get in the bathroom. Get in the bathtub. Anything for cover.” He didn’t wait. He was already hurrying down the hall, Sarah crying in the room behind him as he stumbled down the stairs, nearly bumping into the detective who had left the phone and was standing in the dark by the front door.
“The phone’s been cut,” he told the detective.
“I know.”
He felt the detective’s handgun against his shoulder. Realizing this might be one of Kess’s men, he recoiled, falling back against the banister of the stairs.
“Easy. Don’t get in the way,” the detective told him thickly. “Go back upstairs.”
“I’ve got to help. Tell me what to do.”
“Get back upstairs.”
Someone outside shouted.
“Me. They’re calling me,” the detective said. He went into the living room, crouching beside the big shattered window, calling out, “Fine! Everything’s fine in here!”
The man outside shouted again.
He kept on, the words indistinct. The detective came back into the hallway, swearing.
“What is it?” he asked.
“A damned mess,” the thick voice came at him. “The shotguns opened up on the cruiser too. Our guys ran for those trees out there, but one of them was hit in the head, and now he’s got blood coming down over his eyes so he can’t see.”