Babysitter

  THE BABYSITTER

  Ed Gorman

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Copyright 2013 / Ed Gorman

  Copy-edited by: Patricia Lee Macomber

  LICENSE NOTES

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Meet the Author

  Ed Gorman is an award-winning American author best known for his crime and mystery fiction.

  Book List:

  A Cry of Shadows

  Bad Moon Rising

  Black River Falls

  Blood Moon

  Breaking Up is Hard to Do

  Cast in Dark Waters (with Tom Piccirilli)

  Cold Blue Midnight

  Dark Whispers

  Different Kinds of Dead

  Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool

  Famous Blue Raincoat

  Fools Rush In

  Harlot’s Moon

  Hawk Moon

  Moonchasers and Other Stories

  Murder in the Wings

  Murder on the Aisle

  Murder Straight Up

  New Improved Murder

  Night Screams

  Nightmare Child

  Prisoners and Other Stories

  Rough Cut

  Save the Last Dance for Me

  Serpent’s Kiss

  Several Deaths Later

  Shadow Games

  Showdown

  Survival

  The Autumn Dead

  The Babysitter

  The Dark Fantastic

  The Day the Music Died

  The End of It All

  The Forsaken

  The Girl in the Attic

  The Long Midnight

  The Long Ride Back

  The Long Silence After

  The Night Remembers

  The Poker Club

  The Silver Scream

  The Zone Soldiers

  Ticket to Ride

  Toys in the Attic

  Voodoo Moon

  Wake Up Little Susie

  What the Dead Men Say

  Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow

  Wolf Moon

  http://newimprovedgorman.blogspot.com/

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  THE BABYSITTER

  1976

  “Don’t push him too fast.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “It’s so dark you could hit a crack in the sidewalk and knock him right out of his wheelchair.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “But don’t push him too slow, either.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Cause if you go too slow, he gets bored, and then he starts swearing, and you already know too much anyway for a thirteen-year-old girl raised a good Lutheran.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And remember to respect him, ‘cause he’s your grandpa.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “But on the other hand, don’t take any guff. You know how he gets.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And be back by ten and no later. Don’t get us all worried and having to call Uncle Bill on the police force the way we did that other time.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  And so it was on the firefly summer night of June 23, 1976, Jody left the house with her grandpa, Mr. George Emmet Tolan, a seventy-two-year-old who had suffered a stroke that left him paralyzed completely on his right side, partially on his left side, and mostly unable to speak. You could tell he could still hear, as Uncle Bob liked to say, because every time you mentioned a Republican, Gramps’s eyes bulged like a drunken frog’s.

  Jody, new this summer to starched dresses, hair curlers, and Kotex, had a good reason to want to push Gramps tonight. This would give her the opportunity to see if a red Schwinn belonging to David Fairbain was sitting out on the sidewalk of Lorna Daily’s house. David was the fourteen-year-old that Jody had a burdensome crush on, and Lorna was the most beautiful girl in the class. Down at Rexall this afternoon, sipping a root beer float, Jody had been told that David was going to pay Lorna a visit tonight. Jody wanted to see for herself if this terrible rumor was true, because once in Lorna’s clutches, David Fairbain would never again be available to decent girls.

  After getting home this afternoon, Jody had related all this to Mom and Uncle Bob. Not only was Lorna Daily beautiful, she’d wailed, Lorna Daily was also short! And with this Jody had run up the stairs to her room, with a solemn Mom and Uncle Bob following at a slower pace.

  So Mom and Uncle Bob had had their first real talk with her about boys, Uncle Bob saying at the last, “You ask me, I’d get his goat.”

  “His goat?” Jody asked.

  “Sure. Pretend you don’t care for him one whit. Nothing interests a fellow any faster than a girl who isn’t interested in him.” Here Uncle Bob had winked at Mom. “Or pretends not to be interested, anyway.”

  Uncle Bob and Mom had smiled at each other in a way Jody had never noticed before. Uncle Bob had moved in with them right after her dad had been killed in a car crash last year. Jody was never quite sure why he had moved in, nor exactly what sort of relationship he and her mother shared. Now she was beginning to guess

  “So I just act not-interested?”

  “Hon, you act not-interested as all get-out and then you just watch what happens.”

  “But Lorna’s in eighth grade.”

  “Don’t make no difference.”

  “And she’s beautiful.”

  “Still don’t make no difference.”

  “And she’s short.”

  “Short-port, who cares? You’re gonna have that boy tied around your finger in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.” Uncle Bob always talked in “sayings” like that. Clichés, Mr. Davis her English teacher, called them.

  This was about the time Jody had quit listening.

  Gramps was easy to push. He couldn’t eat much since the stroke and was down to about one hundred and thirty pounds. He’d never been a large man anyway, wiry and bald, with skin brown as an Indian’s, a union man who still wore his UAW-CIO pin on every shirt Mom put on him.

  The warm night smelled of apple blossoms and bloomed yellow with the fat airborne bodies of fireflies. Off in the distance you could hear mothers calling their kids at the very last of the summer light, and even further off you could hear the metal roar of trains bound for the fabulous places that Dad had always promised to take her to.

  As she pushed Gramps down the sidewalk, she could hear people on the porches, the women tinkling glasses of ice tea, the men putting church keys to cans of Gram Belt and Canadian Ace (in this factory neighborhood, the men always drank what the grocers called your “economy” brands). Dorals and Merits and Viceroys were winking their red eyes at you like bold little bugs in the gloom, and through the open window screens floated the sounds of various TV shows, everything from “Laverne and Shirley” to newscaster Walter Cronkite talking about the re-election of President Reagan.

  Then, in a different and splendid neighborhood of endless lawns and homes that always intimidated Jody, they reached Lorna’s house and there was no red Schwinn and Jody couldn’t remember being this happy since the time the Lone Ranger had been at the county fair and had perso
nally shaken her hand and called her “cutie.”

  No red Schwinn.

  But there was something else to see, something so curious that Gramps, for the first time in months, began making sounds. Not words, he couldn’t speak words, but urgent, terrified sounds. He became so agitated that she had to lean down and throw her arm around his sad frail old man’s chest.

  “I see it, too,” she said.

  Once she had seen her father and mother naked in bed together and that had been pretty frightening. Another time she’d seen her collie, Al, car-struck and dying, his innards pink and red and blue sitting in a steaming pile on the pavement, and that had been more than frightening—horrible and unforgettable.

  Yet neither scene had evoked in her what this one did. There, silhouetted on the cotton shade, she glimpsed the sight of Lorna and her mother, the one taller than the other by a foot. Lorna’s mother had one of those hair-do’s, a bee hive, that made her appear even taller still. It was obvious from their stance, the tilt of their bodies, and the shake of Mrs. Daily’s finger, that the two were arguing. And then, a most curious thing happened, something that stopped Jody’s breath and made gramps jitter in his chair.

  Lorna produced a knife, a great long knife with a tapered blade, and she began to stab her mother. One . . . two . . . three…there were more stabs than Jody could count and she watched as the woman’s body sunk lower. She listened until the gurgled, drowning cries trailed off. Then she could watch no more.

  Jody slapped her hands over her eyes and screamed.

  Gramps surprised her by reaching and taking her hand. Feeble though he was, he wanted to comfort her. And in that moment, seeing his essential goodness, she had never loved the man so much. When she opened her eyes again, the silhouettes had vanished from the shade, like an image from a TV screen.

  After she had calmed some, she said, “God. You really think we saw it?”

  Gramps, agitated, once again tried to make intelligible sounds.

  Jody could sense his frustration. This was like having your tongue cut out, the way they did sometimes in horror movies and slasher flicks.

  Loma’s house, a large two-story Colonial with a gabled roof, stood alone on a corner, in the center of a furious ocean of buffalo grass.

  The only way you could see directly into the front window, the way Jody and Gramps had, was to be standing where they were.

  So there was no possibility of other witnesses in other houses having seen, because nobody else could have seen. Just Jody, who was a kid.

  And Gramps, who couldn’t talk.

  The only witnesses.

  “You really think we saw it, Gramps?” Jody asked again, there in the sweet scent of grass newly mown and azaleas newly bloomed. “You really think we did?”

  Mom always read Gramps the paper in the morning. Gramps, who had not gone through more than second grade (he couldn’t remember exactly), could read but not well.

  So while Uncle Bob ate his usual stack of eight pancakes (Mom was always thumping Uncle Bob on his burgeoning belly and saying, “You used to look so skinny in that white Navy uniform of yours”), Mom read Gramps bits and pieces of the paper, starting with the front page and going all the way back to the want ads.

  Today’s items included: Patty Hearst was found guilty of bank robbery; a Maya Anjelou poem; a picture and an article about Farrah Fawcett; the unification of the two Viet Nams; and then movie tips, one for Jody (“There’s that new Tatum O’Neal picture, Bad News Bears, starting this afternoon and you know how you love the air-conditioning in the Rialto”) and one for Gramps (“Maybe tomorrow Jody could push you downtown to the RKO; they’ve got a new Clint Eastwood picture there”); for herself Mom decided on a Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson movie called A Star Is Born. Jody wasn’t sure what it was, but there was definitely something about Kris Kristofferson she didn’t like.

  As always, Jody cleared the breakfast table, did the dishes, and set places for lunch. All the time she did this she was aware of Gramps, sitting feebly in his wheelchair, dressed in his faded blue work shirt now two sizes too big for his boney frame, scribbling awkwardly on a piece of paper with a new yellow number-two pencil.

  Drying her hands, folding the nubby dishtowel neatly, Jody turned around, sensing Gramps’s faded blue gaze on her.

  He held up the piece of scratch paper he’d been drawing on with his left hand.

  She recognized instantly, crude as it was, what he’d drawn. Two females, one larger, one smaller, each little more than a stick figure. And in the hand of the smaller one was a knife, a dagger really, nearly half the size of the smaller figure.

  Jody crossed the room to Gramps in two steps, snatched the paper from his hand, crumpled it up, and threw it in the trash can along with the orange rinds and coffee grounds.

  “Don’t you know what they’d think if we tried to tell them what we saw, Gramps? They’d think we were crazy. Then they’d tell other people, and pretty soon everybody in Winthrop would think we were crazy.”

  Gramps, upset, bugged his eyes out. Jody could tell he was furious.

  “I’ll take you to that Clint Eastwood movie today, Gramps,” she said, trying to pacify him. “We won’t even wait till tomorrow.”

  Still, he glared.

  She threw herself around his useless legs, and hugged him and began to cry softly. “They’d think we were crazy, Gramps, don’t you understand that? Don’t you understand?”

  Summer burned on. Jody saw David Fairbain at the swimming pool, at the Mel Brooks triple feature, at the softball park, at the air-conditioned public library where Jody liked to sit and coolly read Nancy Drews, and at church.

  Almost always he was in the presence of the slender, the beautifully tanned, the flashing-eyed Lorna Daily. Never once did she see Mrs. Daily; not at the theater, not at church, not even at the market.

  Jody had taken Uncle Bob’s advice and tried to get David’s goat by virtually pretending he didn’t exist. She’d walk right by him and say not a word. He always, however pointlessly, said hello and she, however reluctantly, said hello back. But he never once, according to the way Uncle Bob’s plan ran, sounded sad he was with Lorna and not Jody. Not once did he sound sad.

  Jody’s attitude about Lorna had changed considerably. Where once she’d viewed the girl as a snake charmer, spellbinder, and devil incarnate (and all those other phrases she’d picked from old horror movies), she now saw her as nothing more than a murderer, a crazed girl to be feared and avoided at all costs.

  The long knife, those strangled cries.

  The first thing that made the town of Winthrop become aware of Lorna was when she stole her father’s car. She took it in the middle of the night, drove it downtown, and piled right through the plate glass window of Ferguson’s Department Store, knocking over the suspiciously dark mannequin that a few ladies at the Methodist church had speculated was a mulatto.

  The night she smashed through the window was about a week after Jody had seen her stab her mother in silhouette. According to the police, she was very drunk. Hendricks, the police chief who arrested her (arresting a bank president’s thirteen-year-old daughter being a delicate matter), found a fifth of Wild Turkey on the seat next to her. Half of it was gone.

  The next incident, two weeks later, involved the theft of a diamond ring worth five thousand dollars from Hagberg’s Jewelry. Lorna took it in full view of Mr. Hagberg, and when he tried to retrieve it without incident (harmless prank, he’d been willing to say), she went berserk, scratching his face with so much fury that he required eight stitches on his right cheek. She had used only her fingernails.

  The final incident, and the one from which there was no returning, involved Mrs. Hogan’s black Scottie. Mrs. Hogan was what passed for old money in Winthrop, her grandfather having opened the bank where Mr. Daily was currently president. She lived two doors down from the Dailys and considered them friends.

  In the middle of a terrible August afternoon, Mrs. Hogan heard horrible soun
ds from her backyard and went out to check on her Scottie.

  It was there she found him dead on the lap of Lorna Daily, and it was there she found Lorna Daily feasting on the innards of the sweet little animal.

  Nobody knew for sure where Lorna and her parents went. But at 6:00 A.M. the next morning the wide backside of their red Chevy could be seen at the City Limits sign out on the highway.

  School started, the days began to grow shorter, David Fairbain took up with a transfer student from Central City who looked amazingly like Lorna Daily (though evidently the girl had no taste for live dogs), and Gramps died.

  Uncle Bob found Gramps in his room. He was laid out “funeral-style” as Uncle Bob told it, hands folded over his stomach, eyes closed, obviously ready to be buried. “Just like he gave it up. Just decided it was time, poor bastard,” Uncle Bob said, then backed off on the “bastard” with a scalding look from Mom. “Poor old guy,” Uncle Bob amended.

  Then Uncle Bob showed the sheet of notepad paper that had rested under Gramps’s hands.

  He waved it at both Mom and Jody. It depicted, crude as crude could be, the two women he had seen standing in the window, the one stabbing the other with a great knife.

  “Must’ve been that codeine in the cough syrup Doc Barnes gave him,” Uncle Bob explained. “Makes a guy have crazy visions, like when I was on Guam and guys’d get malaria.”

  “May I have that?” Jody asked softly.

  “Huh?”

  “That piece of paper Gramps drew on,” Jody said.

  Uncle Bob glanced down at the paper and then at Jody. He handed it over. “Sure, hon. Sure. It’s all yours.”

  Jody spent the rest of the day up in her room. She cried a very long time about Gramps and thought of all the neat and nice things they’d done before he’d had his stroke, and of how frail he’d been afterwards, and of how frightened she’d been for him.

  Then she looked at the paper on which he’d drawn and she thought of Lorna Daily and the knife she’d used to stab her mother and how afterward Lorna drove the car through the plate glass window and stole the diamond ring and finally ate the little black Scottie.