Strangers (9 page)

She tipped back her head. Though Claire Wnykoop’s hair had made the transition to snowy white a decade earlier, she was a woman who wore her age well. Her neck was neither wattled nor excessively wrinkled, and the lines bracketing her mouth were friendly, indicating she’d spent more time smiling than scowling. She prided herself that weight was not a factor contributing to her high blood pressure; she was no heavier at sixty than she’d been at twenty, and while she granted that some of her pounds had “relocated themselves,” she carried herself with the erect dignity of one who’d gone to school at a time when posture was a vital part of the elementary curriculum.

Claire’s eyes, however, were not what they had once been, so she peered at the western sky through the upper lenses of bifocals. The isolated puffs of white cloud, the fine, golden ball of sun against the tranquil blue, made for a peaceful scene, so lovely that it was hard to accept that something
bad
was on Fate’s calendar.

It was. She knew that.
What?
When?
She
didn’t know yet. Nor did she have any guarantee of clear, comprehensible answers; often her visions were vague, as though she were seeing abstract-impressionist paintings in motion. It was only rarely that a premonition jumped into three-dimensional focus.

But inevitably her future glimpses were not assurances of glad tidings. Others with psychic gifts might predict winning racehorses or know that a tumor would prove benign. Claire’s intuitive impressions varied only in the degrees of misfortune they foretold.

She felt this precognition—
You nasty thing
!
—
lurking just past the border of consciousness. Glumly, the told herself,
I will see what I see when I see it.
That was how the tricky
whatsis
operated. She could neither avoid a look at the future nor hasten its arrival.

When Claire rose, book in hand, she was dizzy and a shower of sparkling angel’s hair floated before her eyes. Definitely hypertension, she thought. Her dizziness passed and she went into the house, leaving
Tomorrow’s Forevers
on the kitchen table. In the living room, she clicked on the old, nineteen-inch black and white television. She seated herself on the couch for the Channel Nine News. The six o’clock anchorman was smiling as he reported the firing squad deaths of forty-six “enemies of Islam” in Iran. The “close-up” reporter smiled through his feature on teenage suicide. On a commercial, a woman grinned at learning her husband preferred stuffing to potatoes.

Claire had enough of capped-teeth artificiality and she got up and turned off the set. The picture vanished, leaving behind a white dot in the center of the screen, a white dot that glowed and spun as something cold and spider-legged scurried down Claire’s spine.

Claire staggered back a step. She straightened, eyes fixed on the pinwheeling, expanding dot. The television screen was smeared with globs of whiteness then shadow, and Claire thought,
Now
…

And
now
became the future as she saw…
A mouth and eyes.
The mouth is wrapped around a terrible scream and the eyes are screaming too. A child screams, flies and floats and twists so slowly through depths of air, flying and floating and screaming.

The child is… All mouth and eyes… I cannot see. Who… She… This little girt so terrified… I feel her fear…

I cannot see!

I cannot see but somehow I know and this is my grandchild, the child of my child…

But Kim?
Or Marcy? I hear the scream and I feel the fright but so dark this vision, I cannot see her face…

Cannot see!

The scream ends with the thudding brutality of the pain-enveloped fall, the impact on the ground, the darkness…

Claire Wynkoop blinked. It was finished.

Shivering, she exhaled and then nodded, her decision definite. She had to call. Beth would laugh and try to pretend there was no reason to be upset.
But you’ve learned, haven’t you, my dear?
One of the children, Marcy or Kim, was in danger, or would be.

And this time, oh please this time, let the awareness of danger-to-be prevent it coming to pass!

Claire dialed her daughter’s number. Circuits hissed and crackled and then there was a ringing.

Sixty miles north, in Park Estates, Beth Louden answered the telephone. “Michael?”

“It’s…”

“Oh. Mom.”

Claire squeezed shut her eyes. She heard it in Beth’s voice. Something
was
wrong—now.

“The children… Are they all right?”

“Of course, Mom,” Beth said. “Home from camp today. They’re fine.”

“I saw something, Beth.”

Beth’s sigh was a breathy dismissal. “Not now, Mom. I’m just not in the mood, okay?”

“Beth…”

“Mom,” Beth curtly interrupted, “the girls are all right,
I’m
all right. Michael’s all right and that’s it.”

“Then what’s bothering you?” Claire demanded, because Beth’s words thrummed with tension.

“Nothing I feel like talking about, okay I’ll give you a call tomorrow.”

“All right, then,” Claire said quietly. There was nothing else she could do now except worry.

Before she hung up, Beth assured her mother yet again that everything was all right.

No, Claire Wynkoop silently responded, it was not.

Nor would it be.

“Dad’s here!” In a Camp PineTop T shirt and raggedy-kneed jeans, Kim shot down the stairs. Smiling, Marcy trailed her younger sister.

Eight-year-old Kim was solid and chunky, able to belt a softball farther than most boys her age. With the short, brutally blunt haircut she’d insisted on before camp—she was then in one of her “I hate Marcy” periods and didn’t want anyone saying they looked like sisters—her ‘round face sunburned and peeling, and two missing lower teeth, Kim was straddling the borderline between cute and homely.

Not so Marcy, so lovely that people frequently commented that she ought to model or do TV commercials. Summer sun had lightened the blond hair that tumbled onto the ten-year-old’s shoulders. Her oval face was delicately featured and her lip line was finely sculptured so that her mouth didn’t have the poutiness common to many children. In green, white-trimmed jogging shorts and a sleeveless yellow top, Marcy radiated the graceful, yet unmannered poise of a ballerina born to the dance.

In the foyer, Michael braced himself for the children’s rush. Squatting, his arms encircling the girls, he kissed them and then, with a grin said, “Don’t get the idea we missed you brats. It was so nice and quiet around here, Mom and I were thinking of leaving you at camp for the next ten years.”

“Oh, Daddy,” Marcy whimpered, clinging to his neck.

Oh, Daddy!
Michael thought. Marcy was a beautiful mouse who usually responded to his teasing with a helpless “Oh, Daddy”—unless she failed to realize he was joking, in which case her wounded feelings were likely to prompt tears.

Quavery-voiced, Marcy said, “Daddy, you did so miss us, didn’t you.

“Hey, I was only fooling, baby.” As Michael assured Marcy, “just how much you kids mean to me,” Kim broke in with a
nyah-nyah
inflected, “So what, Dad? There’s this camp where you send grownups, you know. I’ll put
you
there!”

“Oh, that so?” Michael said. He let Kim wriggle free of his arms. When Kim chose, Michael thought, she could be something else. He’d tease and she’d tease in return. If he yelled, she yelled. And there were times when her high spiritedness led her across the border from the realm of mischievousness to the domain of pure brattiness, times when Michael could almost feel his hand gripping her throat and…

“I’ll send you to… Camp Crummy it’s called!” Kim said.

“Never heard of it,” Michael said placidly. “Is it a nice place?”

“It stinks. They feed you stale bread with lots of yucky bugs on it. How do you like that?”

Michael pretended to ponder,
then
said, “Toasted.”

Kim doubled over in laughter. Giggling, Marcy said, “You are so funny, Daddy.”

“Yup, shore am,”
Michael
drawled. “Yuh bet yore life I am, l’il Missy.” He tickled Marcy, a finger scooting down the ribs, and, still giggling, she jerked away from him.

Michael straightened up. “Where’s Mom?” Ordinarily when he came home at the normal 6:30 or so, Beth greeted him at the door.

“In there,” Kim pointed, and then led the way into the living room. Holding Marcy’s hand, Michael frowned.

Not quite whispering, Marcy said, “Something bad happened today, Daddy. Mom’s real upset.”

She was; he knew that when he saw Beth seated on the sofa, jerking her head with a sharp start-stop movement like a bird when he and the kids entered. “I… I’m so glad you’re home, Michael,” Beth said, her face sickly pale.

Michael let go of Marcy’s fingers. “What’s wrong, honey?”

Beth blinked as though the question hadn’t registered. It was Kim who shouted the answer as if she had a wondrous secret she’d been saving: “Someone went and killed Dusty, Mr. Zeller’s dog. Isn’t that gross?”

Oh, that so, Michael thought. How about that?

“God,” was all he said. He sat down, turning to face Beth and taking her hand. He sent Kim and Marcy up to their room and then asked Beth, “What exactly happened, honey?”

“It’s just awful, Michael,” Beth said, shaking her head. “So wicked and senseless.”

Michael quietly urged, “Tell me, Beth.”

She did not, not right away. Michael understood. Wifey dear had to approach this horrible
thing
at her own slow pace, lessen its impact by creeping up on it with a recitation of the typical, common
normal
things that had preceded it.

“I started out feeling so fine today,” Beth said wearily. “Before I got the kids, I did go out to Lincoln Junior College. It was something. As soon as I stepped in the building, I felt ten years younger.”

“Sure,” Michael said.

“I spoke with the advisor. He was nice. I’m going to take the abnormal psych class.”

“That’s just great,” Michael said. “I’ll bet it will be interesting.”
Get on with it, you silly bitch,
he mentally commanded.

After the college visit, Beth had picked up the children, and then they’d gone shopping, stopping at McDonald’s for lunch on the way home. “Then we got in, oh, it must have been 1:30, I guess.”

They hadn’t been back five minutes when there was a pounding at the front door—a visitor. “Brad was drunk. I’ve never seen him like that. I never saw
anyone
that drunk.”

“Jeez,” Michael said.

“I thought he was going to pass out. Every time I got him to sit down, he’d bounce right back up. He wasn’t making much sense at first. He kept asking, ‘Who’d want to hurt good old Dusty?’ Finally he managed to tell me…the story.”

Beth squeezed Michael’s hand so hard his fingers went numb. “Someone broke Dusty’s neck,” Beth said. “Killed him and left the body in the garbage.”

“Good lord,” Michael said. “And the kids heard all of this?”

“Pretty much,” Beth said miserably. “I tried to shoo them away, but Brad was so loud…”

“Sure,” Michael said. “I understand. It’s awful. It’s just awful for Brad and for the kids and you.” Michael fell silent a moment, then asked, “Did Brad call the police?”