She made it down the ramp to street level, was vaguely aware of the mass of Rally’s on her right and a vacant lot to her left, but then the building pressure in her chest wouldn’t let her go any farther. She stumbled into the shadow of an empty loading dock, sagged against a wall, and began to sob.
9
“Hi, Mom.” Mamie started and turned. This little boy, this ragamuffin with orange hair was tugging on her skirt and looking up at her. She brushed his hand off.
“Get away,” she said. “I’m not your—” Those eyes… those blue, blue eyes…
She looked closer.
“Oh… my… God!” It was Katie! Feeling faint, she dropped to one knee and grasped both her shoulders.
“What has he done to you? Your hair! Your clothes!”
“Poppy—”
“Is that what he has you calling him now? Poppy? What else does he have you doing?” She wrapped Katie in her arms, but the child didn’t return the embrace. She remained stiff, wooden. Almost as if she were afraid. John’s work—no question about it. Here was proof positive of how he’d been filling the child’s head with terrible lies about her mother.
Suddenly Mamie was furious. John was such an expert at twisting the truth. And now he was twisting Katie—in body as well as soul. Look at her! How could he do this to his own daughter? What sort of perversion was this? Coloring her hair and dressing her like a boy? She sensed sickness here.Deep sickness. Sickness the courts should know about, should see with their own eyes…
A wonderful idea leaped full blown into her mind.
“Katie,” she said. “I’m going to take you home.”
Suddenly Katie seemed to relax. “Goodie! I want to see Daddy!”
Poppy… Daddy… the poor child didn’t know what to call her father.
Mamie glanced out at the boardwalk. John was still by the phones. The negligent bastard! Leaving poor Katie alone in here while he waits for a call. But from whom? Some bimbo? Or worse—someone who liked little girls dressed up to look like boys?
Her stomach turned. It was a sick, sick world out there, and little girls like Katie needed to be protected from exploiters—especially if their father was doing the exploiting.
John was staring out at the ocean. Now seemed like the best time to move. Mamie lifted Katie and carried her from the store, keeping Katie’s face and her own averted from John.
A matter of fifteen seconds and they were down on the street and out of sight of the boardwalk.
Mamie breathed a sigh of relief and set Katie back on the ground. She took a firm grip on her hand and led her toward Bally’s parking garage.
“Where are we going?” Katie said.
“To get the car.”
“And then we’re gonna see Daddy?”
“No. Then we’re going to the airport. We’re flying back home.” I’ve got a lawyer and a judge who’ll be very interested in seeing you just as you are. And then they’ll change their exalted opinion of Dr. John Vanduyne.
Katie pulled her hand free. “No! I want to see Daddy!”
“You will. I promise you.” When he has to appear in court.
“I want to see him now!” Mamie grabbed Katie’s upper arm and yanked her to ward the garage’s glass-enclosed elevator area.
“No arguing now. Come along.”
“No!” Mamie felt her anger rising. Out of the corner of her eye she noticed people standing nearby on the sidewalk. She didn’t want a scene here. As she pulled Katie inside the glass enclosure, she raised her voice, yet kept it cloyingly sweet for the benefit of anyone within earshot.
“Come on, baby,” she said. “You can press the button when we get into the elevator. It’s three. You know three, don’t you?” An elevator stood open and Mamie gave Katie the bum’s rush through the doors.
“No!” Katie cried. “I don’t want to be with you! I want to be with Daddy!”
That did it. Before she knew what she was doing, Mamie jabbed the“3” button herself, then gave Katie a well-deserved slap across her whiny little face. The sound echoing harshly in the tiny elevator cab as the doors slid closed.
“That’s just about enough,” she said. She glanced down at Katie who was holding her face with her free hand and sobbing softly. “One thing you’re going to learn and learn well is to do as you’re told and keep a civil tongue in your head.”
The car stopped on the third level, the door slid open; and Mamie stepped out, pulling the still-sobbing Katie after her. Another glass enclosure. She stepped through the doors into the parking area and looked around. Now where had she left her car?
Suddenly a noise to her left as the exit door slammed open; a slim young woman in jeans and a plaid shirt was moving toward her, breathing hard as if she’d been running.
She had short, jet-black hair, and red-rimmed eyes.
She looked as if she’d been crying. Those eyes blazed as they found Katie. She never stopped moving as she spoke through clenched teeth, bared in a snarl.
“You bitch!” And then Mamie’s face exploded with pain as the woman smashed a fist into her nose.
Mommy dearest staggered back as blood began pouring from her nose. She let go of Katie and raised her hands to her face. She began to scream and so Poppy hit her again, right in the bread basket.
She grunted, doubled over and lurched away, like she was going to run. Poppy started after her, fists raised, itching to hit her again.
Poppy had been crouched in the loading bay, bawling, feeling sorry for herself, when she spotted the mother dragging Katie down the street toward Bally’s garage.
Immediately she’d sensed something wasn’t right. Why hadn’t Katie been reunited with her daddy?
Poppy had followed them into the garage and seen her slap Katie just as the elevator doors shut.
What followed was mostly a blur running up the steps with murder in her heart, pacing the elevator, getting to level three and seeing Katie with tears on her face and a big red slap mark across her cheek.
Something snapped in Poppy then, and Jesus it had felt so good flattening that bitch’s nose. She wanted to keep on pounding her, let her know how it felt.
And now the bitch was trying to run. Still bent over, she staggered away. But she didn’t get far. She ran the top of her head dead on into a concrete support. Poppy heard a meaty smack and then the bitch was crumbling to the floor like an empty burlap sack.
She stood over her, waiting for her to get up, but she didn’t move. And as suddenly as it had come, the red rage was gone.
Poppy turned and hurried back to Katie. She swept her up in her arms and carried her toward the stairs.
“C’mon honey bunch. We’re getting out of here.”
She’d parked the truck across the street in a church parking lot. The place was plastered with no parking signs but she’d left a note on the dashboard about engine trouble and how she’d gone to get a mechanic—Please, please, PLEASE don’t tow me! Risky, yeah, but she hadn’t wanted to get trapped in one of these multilevel garages if she had to make a fast exit. Like now.
Poppy belted Katie into the passenger seat and pulled out onto Pacific.
Not sure yet where she was going, she gunned past the medical center and headed up to Atlantic.
A sign said no right on red there but she made one anyway, just to keep moving.
As she braked for a stoplight at Kentucky, she turned to Katie who was still sobbing softly.
“You mad at me for hitting your mother?” Katie sniffed.
“No. I’m glad. She hurt me,” she said, holding her reddened cheek. “She always hurts me.”
“Yeah? Well she ain’t never hurting you again.”
“That’s what my daddy said, but she did.”
Your daddy’s not too good at keeping promises, is he, Poppy thought. If he was, this never would have happened.
But in a way she was kind of glad things had gone wrong. It was like a sign.