Nightmare Child (2 page)

Finally Mindy sat
plumply
down next to him and put a soft hand gently on his shoulder and said, "Hon, I'm sorry but she's dead. She suffocated."

But far into the night, he rocked the little girl and sang to her, there in the buffalo grass with the crickets, which were later joined by barn owls and Savannah sparrows in crying tribute to the warm, starry night.

Finally, the little girl began to smell and Mindy, quieter than he had ever seen her, took Jenny from Jeff's arms and put her back in the box.

"We'd better get it over with," she said.

Nodding, numb, Jeff took a brand-new shovel from the trunk and followed Mindy down the hill.

They buried her where they planned to bury her, beneath a stand of heavy scrub pine where nobody would find her for a long time. The grave was four feet deep.

Jeff, exhausted, sat in the car running the air conditioning. He didn't care if he later got a chest cold. He needed relief and now. The digging had been incredibly exhausting.

In the shadow-light of quarter-moon, he saw the lumpen silhouette of his wife as she stood near the grave site. She was talking. To herself or to Jenny, he wasn't certain.

When she came back, she got in the car and quietly shut the door.

"You all right?" he said.

She said nothing.

"Honey," he said. She had taken care of him. Now it was his turn to take care of her.

"Please," she said. "Drive."

Forty-five minutes later they came to the DQ again. It was an oasis of light against the prairie night.

"You want a DQ?" he said.

"No, thanks."

"A nice big one?"

"No, thanks."

"A Buster Bar, then?"

"No, thanks. I don't want to look like Dr. Goldberg's wife," she said.

And then she started crying.

He had never heard her sob this way. She sobbed all the way back home. Once, he put his hand on her, hoping to stop her. But she pushed it gently away. Another time, he started saying "honey" there in the roaring highway darkness sweet with the smell of corn and grass and alfalfa, but that did no good, either.

She spoke only once. She said, "She was my little sister."

Today Mr. Culhane had a new diamond ring. In case you failed to note this fact, Mr. Culhane made it easy for you by rolling his pinkie finger back and forth and examining the ring the way a jeweler might.

Of course, if you did remark on it (and, by God, you'd better), he'd play coy and say, "Oh, it's nothing much. Just something my old football team gave me at the University Club last week when Hank…
er
…I mean the vice-president was in the city."

This disclaimer conveyed three important pieces of in-formation: 1) the "nothing much" told you that Mr. Culhane, though a millionaire many times over, still thought of himself as a self-effacing man of the people; 2) the "old football team" told you all over again that Mr. Culhane had been the star running back of the 1939 team at the U, the one that had gone to Pasadena for the Rose Bowl, and to the record books forever; 3) the "vice-president was in town" told you that Mr. Culhane knew the vice-president of the United States well enough to call him Hank…
er
…V. P..

He was fat, pink, bald, usually dressed in a black pin-striped suit that only a Mafioso could love, and an indefatigable user of
Binaca
breath spray. He was also two other things: 1) the Foster Dawson Agency's largest account; and 2) Jeff
McCay's
wife's uncle, which, in some people's cynical minds, came to explain how a mediocre account executive like Jeff
McCay
came to handle the Reddy Teddy Dog Food account, Reddy Teddy being the four-decades-old drawing of a cocker spaniel that appeared on every can of RT food and every RT TV commercial.

"Gosh, that's a great ring."

"Oh, it's nothing much."

"Nothing much? Hey," Jeff said, "as if I didn't know the circumstances surrounding it. You guys hear about the dinner at the University Club last week?"

In the formal conference room, replete with Eames chairs, a mahogany table as long as a basketball court, and Impressionist paintings by a nineteenth-century French artist whose name no one could pronounce--three men shook their heads.

"God, Mr. Culhane, you didn't get another award, did you?" Ken Miner said.

"How many does that make this year? Twenty? Thirty?" Bob Conroy wanted to know.

"Is it another one from that organization for crippled kids?" George Hart inquired.

Mr. Culhane shook his bald head and put on his after dinner-speaker smile. "You boys just insist on flattering an old man like me."

All four agency men laughed along with Mr.
Culhane's
usual protestation of modesty.

So Jeff, enthusiastic as a game-show host, walked the other guys through all the brownie points: the football team's 1939 triumphs (heard at every meeting), and calling the vice-president "Hank" (heard at every other meeting and usually alternated with Mr.
Culhane's
story about having a date with Jane Russell right after World War II, and "making Howard Hughes damned mad, let me tell you").

The social amenities out of the way, Mr. Culhane leaned forward, steepled his pudgy fingers, and said, "Now I want to see some goddamned good advertising from you boys."

Reddy Teddy Dog Food had a problem. Three years ago it had changed formulas, and, while it was nutritionally a better dog food than ever before, it stank. Dogs would point their wet, black noses at the food bowl and then back away slowly and inexorably, never to eat the stuff no matter how long their masters starved them.

Reddy Teddy went from number one in its category (meat-based, medium price range) to number three, which scared the hell out of everybody involved, Mr. Ray Culhane included.

A year ago, finally perceiving the situation correctly, Reddy Teddy chemists found a way to leap all the new nutritional benefits while going back to the old texture (the new stuff goopy in the way diarrhea was goopy) and the old smell.

So Reddy Teddy was in phase two, phase one having been a successful campaign that told consumers the old smell was back.

But now Mr. Culhane wanted the agency to be bolder. Where before they'd been merely informational (
You remember the good old smell of Reddy Teddy? Well, it's back and nobody knows it better than your dog
), now he wanted them to
sell the sizzle, the goddamned, you know, magic.

Jeff, trembling slightly, rose and walked to the rear of the conference room where a draped easel stood.

"I know you don't like any preamble, Mr. Culhane, but if you don't mind, I'd like to pay my respects to our creative department in advance. They hunkered down for this one. They hunkered way down." One of Mr.
Culhane's
favorite phrases was "hunkered down," so Jeff used it whenever possible. (Over beers one night, wanting to impress Mr. Culhane—he never called him Ray—with how much he loved Mindy, Jeff had said, "When I met Mindy, I knew I'd have to hunker down to win her love, Mr. Culhane, hunker way down," a piece of ass-kissing that had left him vaguely disgusted with himself for months after.)

"Just show me the advertising, son, and cut the bullshit."

Flushing, not liking to be berated in front of the rest of the team, Jeff said, "
Yessir
."

And whipped back the covering to reveal a brand-new print ad on which three brand-new TV commercials had been based.

Jeff read the theme line: "Reddy Teddy. With the smell and taste of charcoal-broiled steak."

What ensued then was what always ensued when you pitched a client. You sat and studied his face as he thought it over. If it twitched, was that a bad sign? If he cleared his throat, was that a good sign? Once they'd even had a client pass gas, and God only knew what that had meant.

Five minutes later Mr. Culhane said, "I'll tell you one thing, boys. It sure doesn't give me the chills. I guess I expected a lot better campaign than this."

Eleven months before, Diane Purcell wouldn't have been able to tell you the difference between an annual and a perennial. Tending soil, preparing plant beds, spacing seedlings properly, fertilizing—none of this had ever appealed to the forty-one-year-old schoolteacher until her husband, Charlie, had died so suddenly of a heart attack.

Now—having quit her job because of all the insurance money and because she vaguely had the idea of writing a book along the lines of the Victoria Holt novels she loved so much—her daily reality was her garden.

Wearing one of Charlie's blue work shirts and a faded pair of her own jeans, Diane worked in the garden, tending her nasturtiums and marigolds. The autumn wind coming down the hill was melancholy with the smells of smoke and sunlight. Here it was, already the first week of November, and the temperature remained at sixty-seven. The Midwest was rarely this warm.

Knees tired, Diane rose, dabbing at her face with her forearm, her rubber-gloved hand full with a trowel. A slender woman with dark hair usually worn in a soft chignon, Diane's blue-eyed face had clarity that some mistook for beauty. But she had long known better.

The slight hill her house sat on gave her the opportunity to look around the rest of
Stoneridge
Estates, seventeen expensive homes set against the backdrop of a massive forest. She particularly admired the way everybody had insisted on different styles for their homes, helping to avoid the look of a development. On her block, a U-shaped dead end, you found a Georgian next to a French Normandy—style farmhouse next to a sprawling, two-level ranch. Her own home was a country style with a dramatic two-story foyer, a formal living room with a marble fireplace, whitewashed oak floors, extensive wood moldings, and French doors. There was even a sumptuous master bath with a vaulted ceiling, skylights, and a sunken whirlpool tub, with planter boxes on the surrounding deck.

Their dream home, it had been. Both having come from relatively wealthy families, and Charlie being a most handsomely rewarded general surgeon, the Purcell's had spent the last six years there as blissful as any couple could be. Not even the fact that Diane was unable to bear children troubled them unduly. They had each other and that was more than enough.

Some nights now were unendurable, memories too vivid, lonely-ache too raw. She was beyond tears, into something far more vast and terrifying. A shrink had been suggested, and while she'd tried one twice, the sessions had yielded nothing but a certain embarrassing self-consciousness. Diane had always been a very private person.

She was just about to drop to her knees once more and resume working with the trowel when the caw of a silken blackbird caught her attention and she looked up the timbered, sloping hill behind her where sunlight dappled the brown grass of a clearing.

A young girl stood in the clearing, obviously staring at Diane.

Diane's first reaction was to reject what her eye told her was true. It could not be. Impossible.

Her second reaction was to whisper to herself, "My God, I don't believe it."

In the clearing stood nine-year-old Jenny, the next-door neighbor girl who had this past summer been kidnapped and presumably killed. Diane had always been enormously fond of the girl, perhaps even thinking of her subconsciously as a substitute for the daughter she could never have.

Dropping her trowel, putting out her arms, Diane started running up the hill, laughing and crying at the same time.

As she drew closer, she shouted, "It is you, Jenny! It is you! You're home!"

Mindy had not always been fat. She dated her obesity from the day she'd lost her first and only pregnancy to a miscarriage. In dreams, nightmares really, Mindy still spoke to the shadowy little girl who'd come to nothing but a bloody puddle. From then on, she'd eaten with an almost psychotic hunger.

Attempting to sate that hunger, she presently did jumping jacks on the sunny redwood deck in the rear of her opulent Mediterranean-style white-brick home, just west of the landscaped courtyard.

As the disco music pounded from the small Sony recorder, as the sweat inside her pink jogging suit with the black piping began to have the viscous texture of oil, she opened her eyes to see if there were any bunnies on the hill behind their place.

It was then that she saw the girl.

Doing a double take that Abbott and Costello would have been proud of, Mindy's stare became a glare and she stalked so abruptly to the edge of the deck that she stumbled over the tape recorder. So angry and frightened was she, that she drop-kicked the tape-player clear over the edge of the deck, into an orange swirl of autumn flowers.

It could not be.

No way.

But it was.

Fleeing inside, slamming into the sliding-glass door that led to the deck, Mindy began to hyperventilate. Within two more steps her nose began to bleed.

"Oh, God," she said, recalling what Dr. Moeller, the psychotherapist, had told her to do.

Stretching herself out on the oak floor of the living room, she was at once attacked by her golden toy poodle,
Ringo
.