Chapter 17
Marcia had never heard of Judy Barrett. She didn't even know anyone named Judy, not since high school, and it took her a while to figure out what the police were talking about. When she did, she was surprised at the way her heart sank. She'd suspected-known, actually-that Ken was seeing another woman, and it came as no special surprise to learn that the woman in question was an eighteen-year-old carhop.
Nevertheless, it hurt to have a name pinned on the other woman, an address, an occupation. For some reason it had been less painful without those gratuitous details.
She couldn't devote much attention to nursing her wounded feelings. Judy Barrett was dead, and the cops seemed to consider her a prime suspect. Why had she gone to Peachtree's house? Why had Ron Green gone to Blackwood's Comers, and what had Melody been doing in the woods? Where had she been last night, and where had Melody been?
She had reasonable answers for all the questions, but they sounded like flimsy lies in her own ears, and she didn't suppose that the police found them any more convincing. But they left. Marcia was sure they would be back.
Soon after they left, she happened to look at the calendar. A wry laugh was forced out of her, but she felt a chill at the same time. It was the thirtieth of April.
The visit by the police explained Ken's hysterical phone call last night. No-it didn't explain it, but it made it slightly less incomprehensible. She hadn't recognized the sobbing voice on the line, not at first. She'd been tempted to hang up. But then it had become apparent that it was her husband, that he was accusing her of all sorts of crazy things, that he was threatening to kill her.
She had believed him. She hadn't been able to get back to sleep, expecting him to burst in at any moment and carry out his threat. He hadn't come. The police had come, instead, at six in the morning, with their accusatory manner, their nightmarish questions about someone she'd never even heard of.
It was painful to think of all the things Ken had said. All these years his dirty mind had been wallowing in jealous fantasies about her past, a past that she couldn't even remember. He'd seen her life at the commune in South Dakota as one long, uninterrupted sex orgy. He'd accused her of continuing it behind his back with every man he could think of, with boyfriends from her youth dropping by while he was at work.
He'd called her a witch, too. He'd sounded suspiciously like Father Collins, twisting sexual fantasies and delusions about the Devil into a self-consistent web of paranoia. Maybe this madness was contagious, some kind of mass hysteria-like the Salem witch craze. Or maybe Ken had been talking to Father Collins and had been converted to his outrageous views.
Or maybe she really was a witch.
Some maternal instinct that she couldn't overcome by reason made her keep Melody home from school. The girl looked tired, run-down, but she wasn't sick. But Marcia felt that she had to keep her home for protection-for mutual protection. She felt no such apprehension about Roger and Karen. She sent them to school.
Then the phone calls began. She wouldn't have believed that there were so many sick, twisted people in Riveredge Township. Everybody in town seemed to have known that this Barrett person had been Ken's mistress. Worse yet, everybody seemed to know that Melody had been found wandering naked in the woods, and they all had constructed disgustingly explicit and elaborate explanations for her midnight excursion. Some of them suggested that she and her mother ought to be burned at the stake. Was that the influence of Father Collins at work?
A couple of newspapers and a television station called, but Marcia firmly declined to be interviewed. She felt like a traitor to her own profession, but it couldn't be helped. Her rumored involvement in these murders had spread too widely already. She didn't want national publicity about it.
She tried to look up May Eve in the dictionary, but found no such entry. The article under "Witchcraft" in the encyclopedia dealt more with the sociological implications of witch hunts than with the practice of witchcraft. The article suggested that it had never, in reality, been practiced, that it was a medieval delusion.
She lay on a platform in the center of a throng of people, a ring of chanting people. They were waiting for ... someone. It was night. Torches.
She shook herself back to reality. Where had that thought, so convincingly realistic, come from? Her mind was playing tricks on her.
Higgins called at ten to suggest that it would be better if she didn't come into the office for a few days. He sounded embarrassed by what he was saying, even when she agreed with him.
Another set of policemen dropped by with the same set of questions. She tried to find out where Ken was. Was he in custody? Uncomfortably, they told her that he was at his office, that he wasn't a suspect. They left, but they were apparently less satisfied with her answers than the first team had been.
In the early afternoon, someone threw a rock through one of the big living room windows, terrorizing Lucifer.
She thought about calling Ken. Maybe he was sober now, or more sane. Maybe he would explain what he'd been talking about last night. Maybe he would even condescend to tell her where he had been for the past three or four nights. To hell with him, she decided. He would come to his senses and apologize for the phone call. Or else he wouldn't. Either way, it didn't matter.
When she went down to the foot of the driveway to get the mail, she noticed an unusual number of cars parked in the road. People-frumpy-looking women in curlers and kerchiefs, a sprinkling of teen-agers who should have been in school, fat men in T-shirts-were loitering near her mailbox or pretending to be strolling by. They all stared at her as if she were a freak.
She called the police. The desk sergeant promised to have a prowl car cruise by regularly, but she knew that was something that would happen anyway, as an everyday matter of police routine. One of the detectives who had interviewed her earlier got on the line and suggested that she might feel more comfortable if she came down and stayed at headquarters for a while, with Melody. She declined the offer.
The people in the torchlight ring came forward to touch her, one by one, and kiss her, in her most secret places. The first one to take her wore a mask and a coarse animal-skin over his shoulders. It hurt, but she'd made up her mind not to feel the pain. After the third or fourth one had taken her ...
The doorbell shattered the vision. A television crew waited outside. She couldn't prevent them from taking her picture, from recording her hysterical refusal to be interviewed. The crowd in the road had grown. A police car was out there now. So was an ice cream truck, the vendor trying to cash in on the excitement. What on earth was the source of excitement? She hadn't done anything. She was involved in a fabric of coincidence, rumor, misinterpretation.
But if she wasn't involved, if she knew nothing of witchcraft, why did she keep remembering those suggestive, terrifying fragments from her past? Maybe the excitement and fear had jogged them loose, cracked the barrier in her mind that had protected her from them. But maybe they weren't memories at all, but hallucinations derived from Father Collins's sick fantasies, and from Ken's. Maybe she too was a victim of the mass hysteria.
Karen and Roger came home from school, looking overexcited and rather bewildered.
"The man took my picture," Karen bubbled. "He said it was going to be in the newspaper."
"Can we go back and talk to the people, Mom? What are they all doing out there?"
"Can I buy an ice cream cone?" Karen demanded.
"No, stay indoors. Those people are sick. Vultures. Rubbernecks."
They demanded an explanation of those words, but Marcia didn't feel up to giving one. She quieted them down with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and they went to their room, grumbling, to play. She hadn't been prepared for their return, and it had disconcerted her. She should have called the school and arranged to pick them up, so she could have shepherded them through the crowd of curiosity-seekers, and she berated herself for the lapse. But they had gotten home safely. That was all that mattered.
The phone rang. She should have taken it off the hook. Perhaps she could call the phone company and ask them to disconnect it temporarily. It was only another obscene call, another threat. It kept ringing. She couldn't stand it any longer.
"Hello!" she almost screamed.
"Marcia, this is Ken."
"Oh. What do you want?"
"I want to talk to you. I think it's important that we have a talk."
"You did a lot of talking last night. I should think that would hold you for a while."
"I ... I'm sorry. I was in a state of shock. You have to understand. I had just found-the body. I didn't know what I was saying. But this is important. I have to talk to you."
"So, talk."
"Don't make it more difficult for me than it has to be, Marcia. Please. We have to settle things. Arrange things. Not over the phone. I have to see you."
"All right. I suppose you could try coming home for a change. I'm right here most of the time, you know."
"No, I don't-we don't think it's right. We want you to come here. I'm at Nora's."
At first she couldn't imagine whom he was talking about. Perhaps the syrupy, unfamiliar inflection that he gave the name threw her off. The way he spoke that name revealed everything.
"Nora Curtis?" she demanded, unbelieving.
"Yes, I-"
"Apparently you didn't waste any time replacing your girlfriend," Marcia observed.
"Please come over here," he said, and he hung up.
Marcia told herself that she wouldn't answer his summons. If he wanted to talk to her, he could come home. But curiosity began to gnaw at her. Nora Curtis? When and where had that started? On the surface it seemed plausible enough, as plausible as a soap opera: the pretty young widow next door. But Nora Curtis was an empty-headed chatterbox, and she'd always assumed that Ken had shared her view. Ken had always found it hard to conceal his displeasure when he would return home to find Nora hanging around the house. Well, people do change their minds about one another. Maybe Ken had been putting on an act all along.
She detested the idea of going to Nora's house to have a talk with her own husband, but she couldn't resist the urge to find out what was going on. She went up to Melody's room and knocked lightly, then entered.
"I have to go next door for a few minutes. Would you watch the kids-make sure they don't go out?"
Melody looked up from her book without much interest. "Sure."
"I'm taking the phone off the hook. Leave it that way, OK?"
"I'm not expecting any calls."
Marcia hesitated. "You seem pretty cool about this."
"About what?"
"Well, the lynch mob hammering at the gate, for one thing." Marcia made her tone light.
Melody shrugged. "A bunch of creeps."
"Yes. Well. I thought Lucifer was in here with you."
"Haven't seen him."
"I'll be right back. I'll be at-Nora's." She choked on the name and turned quickly to leave before she could observe her daughter's reaction.
"Lucy?" she called as she went down the stairs, but she got no response. The dog was probably hiding somewhere, still shaken by the rock that had come through the window.
She went across the lawn and through a patch of woods to Nora's, not even going within sight of the road. Halfway there it occurred to her that she might meet some of the morbid curiosity seekers, or perhaps an outright pervert, lurking on the grounds, but she saw no one. Maybe the police were doing a better job than she was willing to give them credit for.
She knocked at the back door of the old Georgian house and waited. It suddenly occurred to her that if anybody around here was going to be accused of witchcraft, it ought to be Nora. Back in the sixteen century, her dabblings in astrology would have been enough to send her to the stake. On top of that there was the weird story of her husband. He'd been a wealthy man, a bachelor who'd devoted his life to building up an electronics business. Nora had suddenly appeared on the scene, married him, and he'd died within a year, leaving her everything. Maybe she'd cast a spell over Ken, or made him her slave with a love potion. If she was willing to go to all that trouble, she was welcome to the son of a bitch.
Nora answered the door. Dressed in black-sweater, tight slacks, boots, only a silver chain at her neck to relieve it-she looked the part of a witch.
"Nora, what the hell is going on?" she demanded.
"Come in, Marcia," she said quietly, giving her a steady, searching gaze. "Please."
Her green eyes were bright as prison searchlights. Her face was smooth, somehow regal. She had a neat little figure. She looked younger than she was. Maybe Ken had actually fallen for her, hard. But then what was that nonsense with Judy Barrett?
"All right," Marcia said, following her into the huge, expensively rustic-looking kitchen. Copper pans and kettles gleamed in an oaken twilight. Dried herbs hung above the stove. Nora fancied herself a gourmet cook, and she got some of her ingredients from rambles in the woods. Back in the good old days that Father Collins longed for, that would have weighed against her, too.
Ken entered the kitchen, looking concerned. He also looked cold sober, which was a surprise. Marcia couldn't remember when she'd last seen him at this time of day without an edge on. Maybe Nora was good for him.
"You have to understand, Marcia," he said, "that we don't always have control over these things. When a Taurus like myself meets a Leo who-"
"Am I actually hearing this?" Marcia demanded, more shocked by these words than by anything else he had done or said. "I mean, am I standing here in this kitchen and listening to you, Ken Creighton, spouting this astrological bullshit? What in God's name has this woman done to you?"
"Let's try to be reasonable," Nora said. "Let's not raise our voices. We're all grown-ups. We can talk sensibly about this, can't we?"
"I can be reasonable," Marcia said, bringing her voice under control and rapping out her words coldly. "If you want each other, that's fine with me. It seems kind of sudden, Ken, since you haven't even buried your last little playmate yet-or are you too busy casting horoscopes to go to the funeral?"
Ken looked stricken, as Marcia had hoped he would.
"Ken has explained all that to me," Nora said. "It was all over, even before he and I-"
"Then what is there to talk about? Ken's laundry? I'll bring it over for you, Nora."
"It's the children," Ken blurted, "I want them."
"You're not getting them," Marcia snapped back instantly.
"Listen to reason, Marcia. In your condition ... taking your beliefs into consideration ... the way you've brought up Melody-"
"What the hell are you talking about, Ken? What is my condition?"
Ken looked extremely uncomfortable. He glanced at Nora for support, and apparently he found it in her eyes. "You're overwrought. You've been working too hard, perhaps. The fact remains that you've been acting strange lately. Maybe not permanently, but it would give you a rest if I-if Nora and I-took the children off your hands for a while. Roger and Karen, I mean."
"I know what you mean, you bastard, and the answer is still no. I plan to get a lawyer. You ought to do the same. Then they can have nice, reasonable, grown-up chats with each other, and you can spare me the sight of you."
Marcia turned and stalked out the door, slamming it behind her, ignoring their pleas that she stay. It seemed as if the whole world around her had suddenly gone crazy. Maybe that feeling was proof that she herself had gone mad.
She walked slowly through the damp woods, trying to collect her thoughts. She hadn't done anything. Why did her own husband suddenly consider her a menace to her children? It must be Nora's doing. Nora had twisted him around her finger, had convinced him that her slanders were true. But she'd never done anything to earn such hatred from Nora.
She shivered. The western sky glowed red through budding branches. Evening was coming on.
May Eve.
They were already moving now toward the chosen place where the mass would be celebrated, where the way would be opened. He would come to the altar and fill it with his potency, the altar of living flesh ...
She shook her head violently. How did she know such things, and what did they mean? She leaned against a tree for a moment and closed her eyes. She heard noises: splintering wood, breaking glass, screams. God. The sounds were coming from her own house.
She ran blindly, stumbling more than once. It sounded as if the people she'd been laughing at had actually become a lynch mob, were even now tearing her house apart. She heard a scream that was unmistakably Karen's. She collided with a policeman in front of the house. He grabbed her, tried to hold her back, but she wrenched herself free, tearing her blouse.
"Mama!" Melody staggered from the front door. She had blood on her face, on her arms. "Mama-the kids!"
She heard a final crash inside the house as the policeman pushed his way violently past her, drawing his gun. But she knew it was already too late.