Sweet Dreams, Irene (4 page)

I must confess I was flabbergasted. And embarrassed. And, yes—well, flattered. “Really?” I managed to choke out.

“Really.” God, she looked so sincere, I wanted to believe her. But I thought about what was going on with Wrigley and fell back to earth.

“Well, you still need to reread anything you’ve read about local politics—any story by anyone.”

“Okay.”

“Take this flyer. And let John know if you can’t make it for some reason—he may want to send someone else.” That was baloney, of course. This meeting was only one of a hundred, and whatever would be said tonight would be repeated at ten or twenty other meetings this week. The candidates were running around to every civic group they could get their hands on. Oh sure, they’d tailor tonight’s speeches along the more liberal side, to fit the coalition. Tomorrow, at the Veterans of Foreign Wars meeting, they’d tailor to the more conservative side. If she was serious, seeing them in each camp would provide good experience.

Before she left my desk, I told her about the VFW meeting and she noted the time and place. She thanked me again and I waved it off. I was going to be furious with myself if I started trusting all of her gratitude and flattery at face value. I reminded myself again that she had been crawling into Wrigley’s bed to get what she wanted. I shivered and went back to work on my pile of papers.

Afternoon rolled around and I called Casa de Esperanza to make sure there wouldn’t be any problem meeting there with Sammy and Jacob. The woman who answered wavered a bit, even though I told her I wasn’t planning on writing anything about the shelter. She wasn’t moved to commitment by my saying I had once worked at the shelter, either. Finally, I dropped Mrs. Fremont’s name as a reference and doors opened—suddenly I was a welcomed guest. “Mrs. Fremont should be here any time now,” the woman said brightly. I thanked her and told her I would be there in about twenty minutes.

I tidied up a few things, still feeling like it was unnatural for this desk to be so clean—O’Connor had always covered it in mountains of loose papers. As I made my way out to my car, I was concerned about going into this meeting without having spent at least a little time trying to get some background on witchcraft or on any previous news of local cults. Hadn’t I just given Stacee a big speech on being prepared?

And all I knew about witches came from a little background on what went on in Salem three hundred years ago and a few episodes of
Bewitched.

“Eye of newt and toe of frog; Wool of bat and tongue of dog,” I mumbled, drawing a look of apprehension from a passer-by. I doubted the incantations from
Macbeth
were going to be of any help either.

Oh well, I thought, climbing into my car, I’d just have to keep in mind that I was meeting with Sammy to confirm Jacob’s purpose for being at a certain gathering—a political story. Not a witchcraft story.

I left the parking lot with those good intentions. By the end of the day, I would be wondering if I was on that famous road that is paved with good intentions.

I
GOT TO
C
ASA DE
E
SPERANZA
before Sammy and Jacob arrived. The place was all decked out for Halloween. Inside, it didn’t look much different than it had fifteen or more years ago—I had to stop and do some math—right, fifteen years ago. The music groups on the posters which adorned its walls had changed, except for one for the Doors. I tried to do a little more math, working out how old Jim Morrison would be today, when a clean-cut, muscular young man came walking toward me. I was wondering if all the runaways looked so well-adjusted these days, when he said, “Irene Kelly? I’m Paul Fremont. My grandmother has often spoken of you.”

As I took the offered hand for a vigorous handshake, I tried to absorb the shock of realizing this “kid” was a twenty-one-year-old college student, not a runaway. “Hello, Paul. Your grandmother has told me a lot about you. She’s certainly very proud of you.”

He looked at me a little oddly, I thought, but I didn’t have time to figure out if I had embarrassed him or if he just didn’t believe me, because at that moment the grandmother in question appeared on the scene.

“Why, Irene! Mrs. Riley told me you’d be coming by this afternoon. And now you’ve met my grandson, Paul. Good, good. Let me show you around, dear. This part of the house hasn’t changed since you worked here, but we’ve been busy out in the back.” She took hold of my arm and led me off. Paul nodded in understanding and went into a small office.

Mrs. Fremont was right. The place had changed. A recreation room had been converted out of a garage. There was a deck and a beautiful garden, including a spot where the residents grew some vegetables. There was some indefinable something that inwardly itched at me about the garden. I knew it wasn’t because I remembered it; the last time I had been in this yard it had just been dirt and grass of dubious parentage.

“Frank and a friend of his built the deck and did all of the landscaping for us,” she said.

I looked at her in surprise, then smiled. “Now I know why something about it seemed familiar.”

“Yes,” she said, returning the smile, “I’m not sure his friend Pete enjoyed the work so much, but Frank put his heart into it. He’s a keeper, Irene.”

“A keeper? As in, ‘my brother’s’?”

She laughed. “No, as in, ‘one you shouldn’t throw back into the pond.’ “She became reflective for a moment. “Come to think of it, Frank is the kind you mention as well. His brother’s keeper. Yes. He certainly isn’t afraid to get involved or lend a hand.”

I looked out at the garden again. She was right. Frank was a keeper by either definition. The
Express
and the LPPD be damned.

This warm fuzzy moment of ours was rudely interrupted by the sudden blare of a stereo and the simultaneous ruckus that can only be raised by a group of teenagers. I was cringing at the loudness, but Mrs. Fremont was looking at me with laughing eyes. “I’ve lost some of my hearing,” she shouted into my ear. “Probably from when people who were in high school with you used to sit around here and play records by the Who and Pink Floyd at full blast. I count my blessings.”

Judging from the noise outside, Mrs. Fremont had about twenty blessings in tow; but when we got back inside the house it turned out to be about half that.

I looked the group over and didn’t see Jacob; I figured Sammy wasn’t here yet either. I was trying to take in this boisterous sea of energy, released from the school day and excited about a Halloween party to be held that night, when it dispersed in varying directions almost as soon as it had arrived. Some of the residents took over the bathrooms, some headed down the separate wings of the house to their rooms, a group went out into the backyard, and a couple of them tried to raid the refrigerator. Mrs. Fremont moved off into the kitchen to chat amiably with them—the generation gap we had talked about in my day narrowed to a sliver.

Paul walked into the front room and reached for the volume control, cutting the decibels in the room in half. He winced as he turned to me and said, “My ears can’t take it as easily as Grandmother’s.”

“Believe me, I’m with you,” I said.

“Don’t ever let any of the residents know, but I prefer classical.”

“Your secret is safe with me.”

At that moment, the front door burst open with such fury it bounced off the wall and almost closed again on the thin young woman who entered the room. She marched past me, pausing long enough to give me an angry look before heading back into the women’s wing. She was pale, dressed totally in black, and had long hair dyed to a dark, raven color. This spidery young lady had to be Sammy.

Quite a few of the other residents I had seen earlier were wearing black, and some had that same look of bravado over pain as well, but something about the creature who had just flown past me made her a better candidate for a witches’ coven. I had just figured out that part of this impression came from a cloying fragrance that still hung in the air—she had smelled strongly of some kind of incense or spice oil—when the door opened a second time, more gently.

Jacob looked at me and blushed to the roots of his hair. “Sorry, Miss Kelly. I told you she was dramatic.”

“Yes, you did. That was quite an entrance. Do you think she’ll talk to me?”

“Oh yeah. Are you kidding? She loves the idea of being interviewed by the newspaper. I think if we just wait outside, she’ll come out again.”

He spoke with the easy assurance of one childhood friend discussing another. He knew Sammy. I wondered if she deserved such loyalty. I shrugged and followed him out to the deck. We sat on some patio chairs surrounding a table. From the recreation room we could hear a game of Ping-Pong in progress.

Jacob chattered excitedly about his afternoon at school. He had gone in to see the journalism teacher—Michael Corbin, an old friend who had gone to college with me, and who was, as Jacob said, “way cool.” Michael had told him that he could add the class, which was about four days in progress for the winter quarter, and wrote a note to that effect for Jacob’s counselor. The counselor had been obliging as well. I smiled at Jacob’s enthusiasm—a day of conquering potential hurdles of adult permission-giving had his spirits soaring. A different kid from the one I had seen in the morning. I wondered if Michael and the counselor had seen that, too. I’d have to give Michael a call.

Jacob had predicted Sammy’s mood swings well. As he reached the end of his tale about the class, she appeared at the back door, and made her way over to us as if nothing had happened fifteen minutes before. She sat next to Jacob and favored me with a long glowering stare. A summer as a camp counselor had taught me all I needed to know about the likes of Sammy.

“Well, Jacob,” I said starting to rise from my chair, “I guess I’d better go. Sorry about your dad’s campaign and all that. I know it means a lot to you.” It was a mean thing to do to Jacob. I hated myself when I saw the look of hurt on his face. But it worked like a charm on Sammy.

“Hey, wait a minute,” she said. “I thought you wanted to talk to me.”

I took my turn staring, then said, “You haven’t indicated to me that you’re really up for that, and I don’t have time to sit around and coax you.”

I started to turn again, and she fairly shouted, “Wait!”

I faced her.

“I’m sorry,” she said, shocking me—I hadn’t expected an apology. She turned to Jacob, but kept speaking to me. “I’ll talk to you. Jacob says you’re okay.”

I sat back down again, and tried to give Jacob a quick reassuring look. “Okay, Sammy—want to tell me the story of this witches’ coven?”

She looked around nervously. I wondered if it was real nervousness or more drama. “Will my name be in the paper?”

“This whole thing may never actually reach print. I’m just trying to be ready in case something breaks. And for that matter, I don’t even know your last name. What is it?”

“You won’t contact my parents?”

“Not my business.”

“Garden.”

Holy Mary. No wonder the kid had problems. Anyone who had been given a handle like Gethsemane Garden had an uphill battle. I tried not to let my face reveal that I knew what Sammy stood for.

“Okay, Miss Garden, why don’t you tell me about the coven?”

“Don’t call me Miss Garden. I hate my name. I’m going to change it. Anyway—call me Sammy, okay?”

“If you’d prefer that, sure. Look, Sammy, I’m not here to cause you problems. Tell me about this group you’re in.”

“Well, last Friday night our coven gathered, and I went and Jacob came by and tried to get me to leave. End of story.”

“Not quite. What kind of group is this? Satanist?”

She rolled her eyes. “No. Satanism is a different thing altogether. We’re not Satanists, no matter what that moron Montgomery says.”

“So what are you?”

She sighed, and looked at Jacob. He just watched her silently, but his eyes were willing her to keep talking. She turned back to me.

“We’re into what you would probably call paganism. It’s a very old religion. It’s a religion of the earth. That’s what we worship—the earth and her creatures are holy to us. It’s a very female thing. Satanism is a very male thing.”

If any of that bothered Jacob, he didn’t show it.

“So these witches met last Friday. Are they male and female, even though this is a female thing?”

“We don’t discriminate.”

“So what happened that night?”

“Jacob came along and he asked me to leave with him.”

“Jacob didn’t participate at all?”

“No.”

“What would participating include?”

“I told you, he didn’t participate.”

“And I asked what participating includes.”

She stewed for a moment. “I can’t tell you.”

“Sworn to secrecy? You take some blood oath or something?”

“No! I mean, yes, I am sworn to secrecy and no, it is not a blood oath. Look, this is like my religion, okay? I won’t tell you what we do. It’s between the members of the coven; it’s not for outsiders.”

“If what Jacob tells me is true, at least one other person not only knows what you do, but has taken photographs. Don’t you want to tell your side of the story?”

“I can’t tell you that. Besides, I left with Jacob on Friday.”

“Really? Does that put you on the outs with the group?”

She shifted uncomfortably. I decided to take a stab at something.

“What are you afraid of, Sammy? Has someone threatened you for leaving that night?”

“No!” she said, betraying herself with her vehemence, and catching herself at it. “If anyone could scare me, would I be sitting out here talking to you?”

“You’re not even afraid of the guy in the goat’s mask?”

She turned white, a startling contrast to her hair and clothing. She turned to Jacob, her eyes brimming with tears. “You told her that? You asshole! Don’t you ever speak to me again!”

She jumped up from the table and would have run into the house, but I was quicker and stronger—I grabbed her by the wrist.

“Let go of me, you bitch!”

“Apologize to the guy who may be the only real friend you have, and maybe I will.”

“Fuck you.”

“Look Sammy, if you want to have a cuss-out, you should know you’re up against a pro. You’re not going to shock me—not with bad manners, witchcraft, tantrums—and not at all with foul language.”

I hadn’t noticed that Jacob had moved up out of his chair. He put an arm around her. “Please let her go,” he said to me.

I shrugged and let her go. She crumpled up into his arms, crying on his shoulder. Twice in one day, I thought. Maybe I really was the meanest reporter in town.

“I’m sorry, Miss Kelly,” Jacob said quietly. “I owe Sammy an apology, too. This whole thing was a bad idea. I never should have bothered you.”

“Jacob, Jacob, Jacob,” I said softly, shaking my head. “It wasn’t a mistake. Sammy, you need to figure out who your friends are. Jacob needs your help. Seriously. Believe me, I don’t get up and jump every time there’s a troubled teenager somewhere. I’m sorry if I scared you or bullied you. It’s just that if I don’t know at least as much of the story as whoever is feeding Montgomery his information, then I can’t present a balanced view of whatever happened. I’ll get one side of this story from the Montgomery campaign. I need your help to get the other side.”

She sat back down in the chair, her face a mess from crying. I pulled out a couple of tissues and handed them to her.

“The…person you were referring to…that person wasn’t there that night. It wasn’t that kind of gathering. That’s all I can say.”

Looking at her, I could see that the fear she had of the character in the goat’s mask was not feigned. It didn’t seem to me that we were going to get much farther. I took out a business card and scribbled my home phone number on the back. I handed it to her.

“If you think of anything more, give me a call.”

I stood up and started to go. Some movement inside the house caught my eye. I remained still for a moment, then realized that the curtains on one window were swaying slightly, as if someone had been watching us. This seemed so strange—we were off to one side of the activities of the recreation room, but surely it would have been easy for someone to have planted themselves within earshot. Why hide in the house, where he or she would be unable to hear us over the music?

I looked back at Jacob and Sammy. He was saying good-bye to her. We left together, and I offered him a lift home. He hesitated only a moment and then accepted.

“Jacob,” I said, when we were in the car, “do you think there’s any possibility that Sammy is in real danger?”

He turned his face away, staring out the window, but answered, “I don’t know. I guess I must think that she is, or I wouldn’t want her to stay away from the coven.”

“Do you know any of the other members of the coven?”

“Yeah—a couple of the other kids at the shelter are into it. Sammy was hanging out with them at school a lot. That was before she got kicked out of her house. Now I kind of feel like it’s my fault.”

“Why?”

“She wasn’t really very into it until she got kicked out. Then I mentioned the shelter, not knowing these kids lived there, and then she really got seriously involved in it. I never should have mentioned the shelter. I should have talked to my mom about it more than I did. I asked if Sammy could live with us, and she said no, but I didn’t really—you know—beg and plead with her or anything. Now look.”