“Amy? You still there?”
“Yes, Dad. Just thinking.”
“So how about it? You coming?”
No, she thought, and I'll be the only one who isn't. She stifled a giggle. “I'd better not. Mr. Hallam's counting on me, and with school starting on Tuesday … Another time, okay?”
“Okay. But if you change your mind …”
“Maybe you and I could go sometime,” she said impulsively, “just the two of us.”
“Sure we can.”
But she could hear the faint hesitancy in his voice, and that was what made her say, “Like we used to when we were a family, before you left home.”
“Yeah, well,” he said, “I've got a new home now. Another family, too, maybe. Megan and me, we may get married one of these days. How about that?”
“Great.” Shitty.
“Well … you take care, huh? Love you.”
“Love you, too.”
Amy put the receiver down. He doesn't want to be alone with me, she thought, at the Dunes or anywhere else. He doesn't know what to say to me when we're alone. He doesn't know me and I don't know him, not anymore.
What if I never did?
The thought depressed her. Better think about something else, something pleasant… him? No, not him. Whatever happened would happen, and fantasy-tripping wasn't going to make it happen any faster. All fantasy-tripping did was get you horny. The package. Maybe there was something in the package to cheer her up.
She picked up the scissors, cut the tape at both ends, and stripped off the brown wrapping paper. Inside was a gift box wrapped in fancy gold paper. No bow, and no card either. Probably a card inside, she thought. She pried one end of the gold paper loose, being careful not to rip it. It was expensive-looking and it could be used again.
Mom was home. She always came zooming into the driveway, gunning the wagon's engine like Richard Petty or somebody.
Amy thought: Oh, no, I've done all the work opening it, I get to look first. Quickly, she slit the Scotch tape on the other end with her fingernail and peeled off the gold paper. Then she lifted the lid on the box. Tissue paper, wads of it. Smiling, eager, she pulled it apart, spread it so she could see what was hidden inside—
She was staring into the box, not smiling anymore, when Mom came in. The sound of the back screen door banging made her jump. But it didn't make her stop staring.
“Amy? What's the matter?”
“Look.”
Mom came over and looked. Amy heard her suck in her breath, make a noise like a dog growling.
“For God's sake! Where did you get this?”
“It was on the porch when I got home a few minutes ago. It was addressed to both of us, so I—”
“Your name, too? Where's the wrapping?”
“Right there on the chair …”
Mom found it, uncrumpled it so she could look at the block printing. Amy kept staring into the box; she couldn't seem to take her eyes off the three things in the nest of tissue paper. There were goose pimples all over her.
A white bra with embroidered rosettes, one cup almost completely burned away, the rest of it scorched and smoke-streaked.
A pair of blue monogrammed panties, torn, burned like the bra.
A photo of her and Mom in bikinis with their arms around each other, the edges curled and blackened, char marks reaching like ugly fingers over their bodies and faces.
“I don't recognize the printing,” Mom said.
Amy shook her head. “Me neither.”
“There was no card inside, no message?”
“No. Mom … why?”
“I don't know, baby.”
“The weirdo?”
No answer.
“It must be,” Amy said. “Who else would send us stuff like this? But then that means …”
She didn't finish the sentence. She didn't have to; Mom had to be thinking the same thing. For the first time in as long as she could remember, she was scared.
That bra with the embroidered rosettes … it was one of Mom's best. And the blue monogrammed panties … hers, her initials, AB, part of a set Dad and Megan had given her for Christmas last year. And the photo … taken two summers ago, at Eileen and Ted's cabin at Blue Lake, no other one like it, and she remembered putting it into the album herself—the family album that was upstairs on the shelf in Mom's closet.
Whoever he was, he'd been in the house.
He'd been in their bedrooms.…
TWELVE
Jerry's Saturday cookout was already under way when Dix arrived. Voices, a burst of laughter, rose from the backyard; he could smell charcoal smoke on the late-afternoon breeze. A fresh reluctance, almost an aversion, built in him as he opened the Buick's rear door and lifted out the bag with the three six-packs of beer—his contribution to the potluck affair. People, eight or ten of them. Friends, old friends, but still people to have to talk to, an entire evening of socializing to get through. He was not sure he was ready for this yet.
Not with the chance, however remote, that one of them might be the tormentor.
He stood for a little time with the beer cradled in one arm, listening to the party sounds. The heat wave was over now; the temperature hadn't gotten out of the seventies all day. Might even be cold once it got dark, if the wind picked up. He'd brought a sweater just in case.
Walnut Street intruded on his consciousness. Quiet residential street, one of the nicer ones, in the oldest section of town. Mixed architectural styles, everything from turn-of-the-century Victorians to modern three- and four-unit apartment houses. Shade trees lining this block and others, down the way three boys chucking a football back and forth, two dogs chasing each other, an old man dozing on a porch swing at the house next to Jerry's. The outside world had changed radically in the past thirty-odd years, Los Alegres had changed, but Walnut Street was still more or less the same. Take away the apartment houses, substitute Ford Galaxies and Chevy Impalas for the contemporary Detroit and Japanese products, and it would look and feel exactly as it had in 1960, when he was a kid riding over here on his Schwinn after school to play crazy eights with Eddie Slayton, shoot hoops in Eddie's backyard. Eddie was dead now … dead more than twenty years. Killed in Vietnam, blown up by a goddamn land mine. Another one gone. But the street, the town, the old way of life, were all still alive.
Weren't they?
I don't know anymore, he thought.
The feeling of aloneness was strong in him again.
The light wind gusted, brought a sharp whiff of the burning charcoal. It stirred him out of his frozen stance, prodded him along the front drive and onto the path between the house and the detached garage. The house was small, really a bungalow, built sometime in the forties, but the front yard was good-sized, dominated by a flowering magnolia tree, and the backyard was huge: lawn, patio area, vegetable patch, walnut and kumquat trees. Jerry had a lease option on it; he still wasn't sure if he wanted to stay there or move into something smaller like a condo apartment, but the betting was that he'd stay. Cecca had arranged the deal for him when he first came to Los Alegres. That was how he'd met the members of their little circle, through Cecca; how he'd become a part of it.…
Jerry?
Fun-loving, do-anything-for-you Jerry Whittington?
Newest member of the group, didn't talk much about his background or his divorce … what did anybody know about him, really? Katy had always found him attractive—“deliciously good-looking,” she'd said once. Katy and Jerry? That much was conceivable, but the rest of it, the phone calls, the earrings, the burned things to Cecca and Amy … cold-blooded murder? Even madmen had motives for what they did, no matter how warped. It was inconceivable that Jerry could so viciously hurt people who had befriended him, been good to him.