The Voice of the Night, page 18
‘And like I said, I’ve got to be home by nine o’clock or so, before it gets completely dark. That’s a real drag.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘That’s okay, too. You’re not going to be punished forever. The curfew’s only for a month, right? Don’t worry about it. We’ll have fun. See you later.’
‘Later,’ he said.
He watched her walk across the quiet library. When she was gone, he turned his gaze to the graveyard once more.
A dead sister.
30
Colin had no trouble finding the tombstone; it was like a beacon. It was bigger and shinier and fancier than any other rock in the graveyard. Mr and Mrs Borden had spared no expense in the matter. It was a very elaborate stone, done in sections, constructed both of granite and marble, joined together almost seamlessly. Every aspect of it was artfully shaped and highly polished. Wide, beveled letters were cut deep into the richly veined, mirror surface of the marble.
BELINDA JANE BORDEN
According to the data on the marker, she had died more than six years ago, on the last day of April. The monument at the head of the grave was surely several times the size of the body that it memorialised, for Belinda Jane was only five years old when they put her in the ground.
Colin returned to the library and asked Mrs Larkin for the spool of microfilm that contained the six-year-old, 30 April edition of the News Register.
The story was on page one. Roy had killed his baby sister. Not murder.
Just an accident. A horrible accident.
Nothing anyone could have done to prevent it.
An eight-year-old boy finds his father’s car keys on the kitchen counter. He gets it in his head to take a ride around the block. That’ll prove he’s bigger and better than anyone gives him credit for. It’ll prove he’s even big enough to play with Dad’s trains, or at least big enough to sit at Dad’s side and just watch the trains, which is something he’s not permitted to do but which he wants to do very badly. The car is parked in the driveway. The boy puts a pillow on the seat so that he can see over the steering wheel. But then he discovers that he can’t quite reach the brake or the accelerator. He searches for a tool, and beside the garage he finds a piece of lumber, a three-foot length of two-by-two white pine that is just about exactly what he needs. He figures he can use the lumber to push the pedals that his feet won’t reach. One hand to hold the two-by-two, and one hand for steering. In the car he starts the engine and fumbles with the gearshift. His mother hears. Comes out of the house. She’s in time to see her little girl walk behind the car. She shouts at both the boy and the girl, and each of them waves at her. The boy finally throws the car into reverse as the mother rushes toward him, and at the same instant he thumps the accelerator with the wooden prod. The automobile goes backward. Fast. Just shoots backward. Strikes the child. She goes down hard. Goes down with one short scream. A tire thumps across her fragile skull. Her head bursts like a blood-filled balloon. And when the men in the ambulance arrive, they find the mother sitting on the lawn, legs akimbo, face blank, saying the same thing over and over again. ‘It just popped. Just popped open. Just like that. Her little head. It just popped.’
Popped. Popper.
Colin switched off the machine.
He wished he could switch off his mind.
31
He got home a few minutes before five o’clock.
Weezy walked in one minute later. ‘Hello, Skipper.’
‘Hi.’
‘Have a good day?’
‘It was okay.’
‘What’d you do?’
‘Not much.’
‘I’d like to hear about it.’ He sat down on the sofa.
‘I went to the library,’ he said.
‘What time was that?’
‘Nine this morning.’
‘You were gone when I got up.’
‘I went straight to the library.’
‘And after that?’
‘Nowhere.’
‘When did you come home?’
‘Just now.’
She frowned.
‘You were at the library all day?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Come on now.’
‘I was.’
She paced the middle of the living room. He stretched out on his back, on the sofa. ‘You’re making me angry, Colin.’
‘It’s true. I like the library.’
‘I’ll restrict you to the house again.’
‘Because I went to the library?’
‘Don’t get smart with me.’
He closed his eyes. ‘Where else did you go?’ He sighed.
‘I guess you want a juicy story,’ he said.
‘I want to know everywhere you went today.’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I went down to the beach.’
‘Did you stay away from those kids, like I told you to?’
‘I had to meet someone at the beach.’
‘Who?’
‘A dope pusher I know.’
‘What?’
‘He deals out of his van at the beach.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘I bought a mayonnaise jar full of pills.’
‘Oh my God.’
‘Then I brought the pills back here.’
‘Here? Where? Where are they?’
‘I split them up into cellophane ten-packs.’
‘Where have you hidden them?’
‘I took them into town and sold them retail.’
‘Oh Jesus. Oh my God. What have you gotten into? What’s wrong with you?’
‘I paid five thousand bucks for the dope and sold it for fifteen thousand.’
‘Huh?’
‘That’s ten thousand clear. Now, if I can make that much profit every day for one month, I can get enough money together to buy a clipper ship and smuggle tons of opium from the Orient.’
He opened his eyes. She was red-faced.
‘What the hell has gotten into you?’ she demanded.
‘Call Mrs Larkin,’ he said. ‘She’ll probably still be there.’
‘Who is Mrs Larkin?’
‘The librarian. She’ll tell you where I was all day.’
Weezy stared at him for a moment, then went into the kitchen to use the telephone. He couldn’t believe it. She actually called the library. He was humiliated.
When she came back to the living room, she said, ‘You were at the library all day.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Why’d you do that?’
‘’Cause I like the library.’
‘I mean, why’d you make up that story about buying pills down at the beach?’
‘I thought that’s what you wanted to hear.’
‘I suppose you think it’s funny.’
‘Kind of funny.’
‘Well, it’s not.’
She sat down in an armchair.
‘All the conversations I’ve had with you during the past week – haven’t any of them sunk in?’
‘Every word,’ he said.
‘I’ve told you that if you want to be trusted, you’ve got to earn that trust. If you want to be treated like an adult, you’ve got to behave like one. You seem to listen, and I let myself hope we’re getting somewhere, and then you pull a silly stunt like this. Do you understand what that does to me?’
‘I think I do.’
‘This childish thing you did, making up this story about buying pills down at the beach . . . it just makes me distrust you all the more.’
For a while neither of them spoke.
At last Colin broke the silence. ‘Are you eating at home tonight?’
‘I can’t, Skipper. I’ve got—’
‘—a business engagement.’
‘That’s right. But I’ll make your supper before I go.’
‘Don’t bother.’
‘I don’t want you eating junk.’
‘I’ll make a cheese sandwich,’ he said. ‘That’s as good as anything.’
‘Have a glass of milk with it.’
‘Okay.’
‘What are your plans for the evening?’
‘Oh, I guess maybe I’ll go to the movies,’ he said, purposefully failing to mention Heather.
‘Which theater?’
‘The Baronet.’
‘What’s playing?’
‘A horror flick.’
‘I wish you’d outgrow that sort of trash.’ He said nothing.
She said, ‘You’d better not forget your curfew.’
‘I’m going to the early show,’ Colin said. ‘It lets out by eight o’clock, so I’ll be home before dark.’
‘I’ll check on you.’
‘I know.’
She sighed and stood up. ‘I’d better shower and change.’ She walked to the hallway, then turned and looked at him again. ‘If you’d behaved differently a little while ago, maybe I wouldn’t find it necessary to check on you.’
‘Sorry,’ he said. And when he was alone, he said, ‘Bullshit.’
32
Colin’s first date with Heather was wonderful. Although the horror movie was not as good as he had hoped it would be, the last half-hour was very scary; Heather was more frightened than he was, and she leaned toward him, held his hand in the dark, seeking reassurance and security. Colin felt uncharacteristically strong and brave. Sitting in the cool theater, in the velveteen shadows, in the pale, flickering light cast back by the screen, holding his girl’s hand, he thought he knew what heaven must be like.
After the movie, as the sun settled toward the Pacific, Colin walked her home. The air from the ocean was sweet. Overhead, the palms swayed and whispered.
Two blocks from the theater, Heather tripped on a hoved-up piece of sidewalk. She didn’t fall or even come close to losing her balance, but she said, ‘Damnit!’ She blushed. ‘I’m so damned clumsy.’
‘They shouldn’t let the sidewalk deteriorate like that,’ Colin said. ‘Someone could get hurt.’
‘Even if they made it perfectly straight and smooth, I’d probably trip on it.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘I’m such a klutz.’
‘No, you aren’t,’ he said.
‘Yes, I am.’ They started to walk again, and she said, ‘I’d give anything to be just half as graceful as my mother.’
‘You are graceful.’
‘I’m a klutz. You should see my mother. She doesn’t walk – she glides. If you saw her in a long dress, something long enough to cover her feet, you’d think she wasn’t really walking at all. You’d think she was just floating along on a cushion of air.’
For a minute they walked in silence.
Then Heather sighed and said, ‘I’m a disappointment to her.’
‘Who?’
‘My mother.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t measure up.’
‘Up to what?’
‘To her,’ Heather said. ‘Did you know that my mother was Miss California?’
‘You mean like in a beauty contest?’
‘Yeah. She won. She won a lot of other contests, too.’
‘When was this?’
‘She was Miss California seventeen years ago, when she was nineteen.’
‘Wow!’ Colin said. ‘That’s really something.’
‘When I was a little girl, she entered me in lot of beauty pageants for children.’
‘Yeah? What titles did you win?’
‘None,’ Heather said.
‘I find that hard to believe.’
‘It’s true.’
‘What were the judges – blind? Come on, Heather. You must have won something.’
‘No, really. I never placed better than second. And I was usually just third.’
‘Usually? You mean most of the time you won either second or third place?’
‘I placed second four times. I got third place ten times. And five times I didn’t place at all.’
‘But that’s fantastic!’ Colin said. ‘You made it to the top three spots in fourteen out of nineteen tries!’
‘In a beauty contest,’ Heather said, ‘the only thing that counts is being No. 1, winning the title. In children’s contests, nearly everyone gets to be No. 2 or No. 3 every once in a while.’
‘Your mother must have been proud of you,’ Colin insisted.
‘She always said she was, every time that I came in second or third. But I always got the impression she was really very disappointed. When I hadn’t won a first place by the time I was ten, she stopped entering me in the contests. I guess she figured I was a hopeless case.’
‘But you did great!’
‘You forget that she was No. 1,’ Heather said. ‘She was Miss California. Not No. 3 or No. 2. No. 1.’
He marveled at this lovely girl who didn’t seem to know how truly lovely she was. Her mouth was sensuous; she thought it was merely too wide. Her teeth were straighter and whiter than most kids’ teeth; she thought they were a bit crooked. Her hair was thick and shiny; she thought it was lank and dull. Graceful as a cat, she called herself a klutz. She was a girl who ought to be brimming with self-assurance; instead, she was plagued by self-doubt. Beneath her sparkling surface she was just as uncertain and worried about life as Colin was; and suddenly he felt very protective toward her.
‘If I’d been one of the judges,’ he said, ‘you’d have won all of those contests.’
She blushed again and smiled at him. ‘You’re sweet.’
A moment later they reached her house and stopped at the end of the front walkway.
‘You know what I like about you?’ she asked.
‘I’ve been wracking my brain, trying to figure out what it could possibly be,’ he said.
‘Well, for one thing, you don’t talk about the same stuff that all the other boys talk about. They all seem to think that guys aren’t supposed to be interested in anything but football and baseball and cars. All of that stuff bores me. And besides, you don’t just talk – you listen. Almost no one else listens.’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘one of the things I like about you is that you don’t care that I’m not much like other boys.’
They stared self-consciously at each other for a moment, and then she said, ‘Call me tomorrow, okay?’
‘I will.’
‘You better be getting home. You don’t want to make your mother angry.’
She planted a shy little kiss on the corner of his mouth, turned away, and hurried into the house.
For a few blocks Colin drifted like a sleep-walker, meandering toward home in a pleasant daze. But suddenly he became aware of the darkening sky, the spreading pools of shadow, and the creeping night chill. He was not afraid of violating the curfew, not afraid of his mother. But he was afraid of encountering Roy after dark. He ran the rest of the way home.
33
Thursday morning, Colin returned to the library and continued his search through the microfilm files of the local newspaper. He studied only two parts of each edition: the front page and the list of hospital admissions and discharges. Nevertheless, he needed more than six hours to find what he was looking for.
One year to the day after his baby sister’s death, Roy Borden was admitted to the Santa Leona General Hospital. The one-line notice in the 1 May edition of the News Register didn’t mention the nature of his illness; however, Colin was certain that it had to do with the strange accident that Roy had refused to discuss, the injury that had left such a great deal of terrible scar tissue on his back.
The name immediately below Roy’s on the admissions roster was Helen Borden. His mother. Colin stared at that line for a long time, wondering. Because of the scars he had seen, he had expected to find Roy’s name sooner or later, but the mother’s appearance surprised him. Had she and her son been hurt in the same mishap?
Colin rolled the film back and carefully scanned every page of the 30 April and 1 May editions of the newspaper. He was looking for a story about an automobile wreck, or an explosion, or fire, some sort of accident in which the Bordens had been involved. He found nothing.
He wound the film forward again, finished that spool and a few more, but uncovered only two additional bits of useful information, the first of which was rather puzzling. Two days after being admitted to Santa Leona General, Mrs Borden was transferred to a larger hospital, St Joseph’s, over at the county seat. Colin wondered why she had been moved, and he could think of only one reason. She must have been so badly injured that she required very special care, something exotic that the smaller Santa Leona General could not provide.
He didn’t discover anything more about Mrs Borden, but he did learn that Roy had spent exactly three weeks in the local hospital. Whatever the source of the wounds on his back, they clearly had been quite serious.
At a quarter to five, Colin finished with the microfilm and went to Mrs Larkin’s desk.
‘That new Arthur C. Clarke novel was just returned,’ she said before Colin could speak. ‘I’ve already checked it out for you.’
He didn’t really want the novel right now, but he didn’t want to appear ungrateful. He took it, looked at the jacket, front and back. ‘Thanks a lot, Mrs Larkin.’
‘Let me know what you think of it.’
‘I was wondering if you could help me find a couple of books on psychology.’
‘What kind of psychology?’
He blinked. ‘There’s more than one kind?’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘under the general topic, we’ve got books on animal psychology, educational psychology, popular psychology, industrial psychology, political psychology, the psychology of the aged, of the young, Freudian psychology, Jungian psychology, general psychology, abnormal psychology—’
‘Abnormal psychology,’ Colin said. ‘Yeah. That’s what I’ve got to learn all about. But I also want a couple of general books that tell me how the mind works. I mean, I want to know why people do the things they do. I want something that covers the basics. Something easy, for beginners.’
‘I think we can find what you need,’ she said.
‘I’d really appreciate it.’
As he followed her toward the stacks at the far end of the room, she said, ‘Is this another idea for school?’
‘Yeah.’
