Sleepwalk (2 page)

She screamed.

The boy looked up as the piercing scream shattered the quiet of the room. For a split second he wasn’t certain where it had come from, but then he saw the teacher.

Her eyes were wide with either pain or terror—he
wasn’t certain which—and her mouth twisted into an anguished grimace as the last of the scream died on her lips.

Her arms rose up as if to ward off some unseen thing that was attacking her, and then she staggered backward, struck the wall and seemed to freeze for a moment.

As he watched, she screamed once more and sank to the floor.

Her arms flailed at the air for a few seconds, then she wrapped them around her body, drawing her knees up to her chest as she rolled helplessly on the worn wooden planks.

The boy rose from his seat and dashed to the front of the room, kneeling down beside her. But as he reached out to touch her, she screamed yet again and scrabbled away, only to collapse a second later, sobbing uncontrollably.

When the ambulance took her away, she was still sobbing, still screaming.

The boy watched the ambulance leave, but even after it had disappeared into the distance, the sobs and screams lingered on, echoing in his memory.

Perhaps the other students who were in the classroom might forget the agony they’d heard and seen that day.

The boy never would.

Judith Sheffield felt the familiar tightening in her stomach as the final bell rang. All that was left of her day was the walk to the parking lot, accompanied, as always, by the prayer that today the tires on her car would still be inflated and none of its windows would be smashed. The day itself hadn’t been too bad. Both her classes had gone well, which, she ruefully reminded herself, meant only that the disruptions had been minor.

At least today no fights had broken out in the classroom. After two years of teaching in East Los Angeles, Judith regarded that as a victory. But still, teaching during the summer session had been a mistake. She should have taken the summer off to relax, to rejuvenate herself and prepare for the far worse chaos of the regular school year. But she’d let herself be tempted by the extra pay, and conned herself into believing that the summer students would be more motivated than the regular term crowd.

The truth—which she knew perfectly well—was that the summer session students were there because
they thought summer school would be a snap. Eventually they’d turned out to be right, for as Judith’s energies had slowly drained through July and into August, she’d begun to slip, ignoring assignments not turned in, and skipping her regular morning quizzes. As the heat and smog of the Los Angeles summer closed in, she’d even begun dismissing her second class early, eager to return to her tiny apartment in Redondo Beach, strip off her clothes, then spend the afternoon lying in the sun on the beach, listening to the surf and trying to pretend that teaching in Los Angeles would get easier as she gained more experience.

It was getting harder to pretend.

The bell rang, and the kids poured out of the classroom into the halls like an overflowing toilet. Judith chided herself for the cruelty of the simile, then decided she didn’t care—she tried to be a good teacher, tried to take an interest in the students, but if they didn’t care, why should she? And what, really, could she do about it?

She could try harder.

And she would.

For the next six weeks she would relax, and by mid-September she would be ready, searching for new ways to capture the kids’ interest, combing through the school’s budget for the money she would need for new books. Perhaps this fall she would even organize a painting party to make her classroom a little less drab. She could hustle some plaster from Bobby Lansky’s father—after all, it was Bobby who had hurled the desk that had made the hole in the wall—and she herself would spring for the pizzas she’d use to bribe some of the better students into participating.

She waited until the last of the kids’ babble had died
away, finished straightening the papers on her desk, then left her room, locking the door behind her. Warily, she glanced up and down the corridor, but it seemed deserted, and she told herself that today there would be no problems—it was the last day of summer session, and even the worst troublemakers would have been eager to get out of the building.

But as she moved toward the back staircase, she thought she heard a faint shuffling sound. She froze, listening.

A snicker, echoing maliciously, drifted through the hall.

She turned and started toward the main staircase at the other end of the hall.

Her step quickened and she instinctively clutched her heavy leather bag tighter, one hand gripping its shoulder strap while the other hovered protectively over the purse’s flap.

A low whistle sounded behind her, and she steeled herself against the urge to break into a run.

Another whistle, slow and seductive, echoed in the hallway, and Judith felt her face turning scarlet.

She should be used to the wolf whistles by now—she heard them every day. Most of the time she simply ignored them.

But today, in the deserted third-floor corridor, the sound held an ominous note.

She hesitated at the top of the stairs, refusing to glance behind her, peering down the stairwell itself.

Empty.

She started down, moving quickly, one hand, on the banister. She had made the first turn, and started down the fifteen steps to the second-floor landing, when suddenly she heard another whistle.

Two boys she didn’t recognize stepped into the wide opening provided by the double doors on the landing below. They gazed up at her, smiling mockingly.

Though Judith knew they were no more than seventeen or eighteen, their eyes seemed much older, and they slouched in the doorway with a dark malevolence.

Judith paused as the familiar fear reached out to her once more. Her fingers tightened on the strap of her bag, and she slowly continued her descent.

One of the boys whistled again, while the other let his fingers stroke suggestively at his groin. “Got something for you, pretty teacher,” he said. “Wanta see it?”

Judith said nothing. She came to the bottom of the stairs and took a tentative step toward the next flight.

The larger of the two moved to block her. “Want to have a good time?” he asked, his voice lilting with menace.

Judith’s mind raced. She could scream, but there was no one to hear. And if someone heard her cry, would he rush to help?

Not likely.

She could try to flee back up the stairs, but a display of fear would only spur the boys on, turning what might have been a game into something far worse.

She moved forward again, focusing her mind on the lessons she’d learned last summer, after her first year of teaching here. “If you’ll excuse me,” she said, willing her voice to remain steady, “I’d just like to get to my meeting.” There wasn’t a meeting, but at least the boys might think she was expected somewhere.

The second boy reached out to her. “I got something wants to meet you.”

As his hand came close to her, Judith spun around, slipping her bag off her shoulder and swinging it hard.
She completed the turn, and the bag slammed into the boy’s head, the weight of the ten rolls of quarters she always carried in its depths lending it enough force to knock the teenager against the wall. As her would-be attacker howled in pain and his friend stared at Judith in open-mouthed surprise, she broke into a run, dashing down the stairs, grabbing at the banister to steady herself

“Get her!” she heard one of them shout as she came to the first-floor landing. Footsteps pounded in the stairwell. She ran into the corridor, turning left toward the side door that led to the faculty parking lot. By the time she reached the door she could hear her pursuers racing down the hall after her. She burst out the doors, praying that someone—anyone—would still be around.

There were a few cars in the lot, but no one in sight.

She stumbled down the steps, fumbling in the bag for her keys, then made a dash for her car She jammed the key into the lock just as her assailants exploded from the building, twisted at it frantically, then managed to pull the door open. Scrambling inside, she jerked the door closed and pushed down on the lock just as the boys reached the car.

As she put the key in the ignition, the boys began rocking the car—a tiny Honda Civic she’d had for five years.

The ignition ground for a moment, then caught, and she stamped hard on the accelerator, racing the engine.

The boys were laughing now, and the car was rocking wildly. Saying nothing at all, Judith put the car in gear and released the brake. The Honda shot forward and her attackers jumped back. Judith turned sharply, heading for the parking lot gate, and suddenly the boys were running to another car, a low-slung Chevy
painted a brilliant candy-apple red. As Judith pulled out of the parking lot and turned left toward the freeway a mile west, the Chevy fell in beside her.

They were going to follow her home!

Thinking quickly, Judith made a quick right turn, drove two blocks, then made a left, and another right.

The red Chevy stayed behind her, so close she was certain they were going to hit her. But then, as she made one more turn, her tormentors must have realized where she was going.

A block ahead was the low-slung building of the precinct station, a few patrol cars sitting in front of it. At the next corner the Chevy turned and disappeared into the traffic along Whittier Boulevard. Shaking, Judith pulled up in front of the police station, put the car in neutral and sat for a few minutes as her breathing returned to normal and her fear began to ease.

At last, when her hands could grip the wheel without trembling, she put the car in gear again and started home. But as she turned onto the freeway and started toward the beach, she realized what was happening to her.

Though she was barely twenty-six years old, she was already beginning to feel burned out. She no longer cared about her students; she couldn’t even be bothered to report what had just happened to the police.

The traffic inched along the broad expanse of the Santa Monica Freeway. In the distance, where she should have been able to see the hills surrounding the Los Angeles basin, there was today only a thick brown veil of smog, as heavy and unpleasant as her mood. Every day, for the next six weeks, she would dread that first day of school more and more.

She’d set out to be a teacher, not a warden.

An hour later she pulled her car into the garage under her building a block from the beach and let herself into the small apartment. She’d intended it only to be temporary, but it was fast looking as though she would spend the rest of her life here. On her salary, there was no way she would ever be able to buy a house in Southern California, and rents everywhere were skyrocketing—only her lease was protecting her now, a lease she would renew this week in the hope that next year rent control would come to her area. If it didn’t, and her rent went up again, she would have to find a roommate, maybe even two.

She unlocked the sliding patio door and dropped her heavy purse onto the coffee table. As she entered the kitchen in search of a Coke, the phone began to ring, and she decided to let the answering machine handle it. Probably it was the boys who’d been following her, calling her up now to continue their harassment.

She made a mental note to have her phone number changed, with the new number unlisted.

But a moment later, as her message tape ran out and a voice she hadn’t heard in years began to speak, she snatched up the phone.

“Aunt Rita?” she asked. “Is it really you?”

“Judith!” Rita Moreland exclaimed. “I thought you weren’t there. I was just going to leave a message.”

“I just don’t answer the phone anymore until I know who’s calling,” Judith said. Propping the receiver against her shoulder, she opened the refrigerator and pulled out a Coke. “I’m afraid it’s been a rough day.”

“Oh, dear,” Rita Moreland murmured apologetically. “If it’s a bad time, I can call back—”

“No!” Judith protested. “It’s just that it was the last day of summer session, and something happened.”
Twenty minutes later, with the Coke finished and another one opened, Judith realized that she’d just unburdened herself of all her problems to a woman whom she hadn’t seen in nearly ten years. Though she’d called Rita Moreland “aunt” all her life, the Morelands were really not relatives at all, but old family friends. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I guess I really needed to talk to someone just now, and you happened to call. And I didn’t even ask you why.”

Rita Moreland laughed softly, an oddly tinkling sound that transported Judith back to the childhood that seemed so long ago and so far away. “Actually,” Rita said, “perhaps it’s providence that made me call today. I have a problem, and I’m getting desperate. And I thought of you. If you want to say no,” she added in a rush, “believe me, I’ll understand completely.”

Judith frowned, mystified. “What on earth is it?” she asked. “You know if there’s anything I can do for you and Uncle Max—”

“Oh, no,” Rita broke in. “It isn’t us. It’s the school. We have an opening for a math teacher. Poor Reba Tucker’s been hospitalized.…”

“Mrs. Tucker?” Judith said, surprised. Reba Tucker had once been her teacher and she remembered her fondly.

“I know it’s awfully late in the year,” Rita hurried on, “and you already have a job, but we’re having a terrible problem finding someone.” Rita Moreland talked on, but Judith was only half listening to what she was saying. Finally, Judith interrupted her.

“Aunt Rita?” she asked. “What’s Borrego like now? It’s been so long since I’ve been back.”

Rita Moreland fell silent for a moment, then, once again, her bell-like laugh came over the line. “It’s about
the same,” she said. “Things out here in New Mexico don’t change very fast, you know. We’re pretty much the way we’ve always been.”

In that instant Judith Sheffield made up her mind. “I’ll take the job, Aunt Rita,” she said.

Jed Arnold slouched in the driver’s seat of his ten-year-old Ford LTD, his fingers drumming impatiently on the steering wheel. The radio was blaring, tuned to the single station with a signal strong enough to reach from Santa Fe up to Borrego. It played country and western music twenty-four hours a day, but he supposed it was better than nothing at all.