'Can I show you a good time, or what?' he asked, smugly.
'A lot better than what you used to think was a good time,' she retorted. 'A mug of beer, a loaf of rhetoric, and thou-'
He started to get angry, and stopped himself just in time. Things were going well. He wouldn't gain a thing by starting an argument. Besides, she had a point.
'I guess I've loosened up some, since then,' he said mildly, and grinned when he saw the blank look on her face, the surprise that he hadn't plowed right into a fight. 'You could stand to loosen up some, yourself, Jen.'
She flushed, but he realized how she could take that last comment, and went on.
'What I mean is, you don't have fun enough. Take some time out, for godsake. See a movie! What was the last movie you saw?' He knew he had her then, when she had to think about it.
'Uh. Beauty and the Beast?' she said. I 'See what I mean!' he responded triumphantly. 'You haven't even gone out for a walk, or rented a horse, or anything unless it had something to do with your work! Right?'
She shuffled her feet a little in the gravel of the parking lot. 'I guess so. . . .'
'You need more fun in your life,' he said, decisively. 'If you get bleeding ulcers and wind up in the hospital, who's gonna put Calligan away? Who's gonna make sure he doesn't sell our people up the river? Who's gonna keep Mooncrow from living on pizza and ice cream?'
'All right, all right!' she conceded, throwing up her hands. 'I surrender! If you want to be the designated maker-of-fun, go right ahead! Just remember, the work has to be done first, before we have fun.'
He executed a fancy-dance step, right there in the lot, and amazingly, didn't fall on his face or turn an ankle in all that gravel. She chuckled.
He took that as a good omen.
Toni Calligan put her forehead down on the kitchen table, and fought tears. She was beginning to think she ought to pack the kids up for the summer and take them someplace safe.
Like maybe a maximum-security prison! There certainly didn't seem to be any safety around here!
No one, not any of the repairmen she'd called, had been able to figure just what had gone wrong with the dryer. One of them had even accused her of sabotaging it herself! He'd said it looked as if someone had just gotten in there and cut the insulation off of everything in sight. . . .
She succeeded in persuading Rod to buy a new dryer-after making certain he didn't hear that particular story. But that had only been the start of her problems.
A few days later, a fire started in the garage; fortunately, a neighbor saw it and put it out before it did any damage, He really saw it start, too; he'd been taking a break from mowing and told Toni he thought he'd seen a dog or something run into their garage. He described it perfectly; a grayish-yellow dog with pointed ears and a bushy tail, about the size of a spitz. Since he knew they didn't have a dog, and since there was a rabies scare going on, he'd gone in after it, armed with a stick, only to see the back corner of the garage go up-'like a torch,' he'd said. 'I couldn't believe it. One minute, everything's fine; the next, the wall's on fire!'
Funny thing, there was no dog, either, and it couldn't have gotten past him.
Rod had been livid about that. He'd been certain she'd let the kids play with matches, or that she'd stored greasy rags there, or something. And it didn't matter that the only things in that corner were the garden tools; it had to be her fault.
Then she'd come out into the backyard yesterday just in time to see Jill in her sandbox, about to pick up a scorpion! Thank God she'd come out when she did! No one could believe it, not even when they saw the crushed insect for themselves; there hadn't been scorpions around ever, for as long as this subdivision had been here.
She certainly set off a round of exterminators, though. Every house in the neighborhood had exterminators poking under it; theirs included.
And now, today-
Oh God.
Ryan came in crying not a half hour ago, bruised and scraped, claiming something had pushed him into the street, in front of a car-
And right behind him came a strange woman with a face as white as Toni's had turned, corroborating the child.
'He was just standing there, like a good boy, waiting for me to go by,' she babbled, 'just standing there, all alone. I thought, just as I got to the corner, that it was a good thing he was such a good little boy. Then, suddenly there was a man standing next to him, then the poor tyke went flying into the street, right in front of me, exactly like that man had shoved him from behind! Then the man was gone, and I hit the brakes-'
Ryan had only saved himself by rolling, then going flat, so that the car actually passed over him without hitting him, The driver had nearly had a heart attack before he crawled out from under her car. She had brought him home herself, quickly, at that point.
Toni was so close to hysteria herself by then that she actually felt calm.
She assured the poor woman that everything was all right, that no, there was no need to leave her name and address, that things would be fine. She was dead certain that Rod would have been on the phone to his lawyer-but she wasn't Rod, and Rod wasn't going to hear about this, not if she could help it.
He'd probably find a way to blame her as well as that poor woman, anyway.
After she'd somehow said the right things to the stranger, and had sent her off to her car babbling gratitude, she bathed and bandaged Ryan's scrapes and put him to bed with cartoons and a bowl of ice cream. Then she sat herself down at the kitchen table and shook.
If this kind of thing kept up, she was going to need a prescription for Valium. . . .
As soon as she stopped shaking, she was suddenly seized with the need to see that the kids were all right. She checked on Jill-she was still playing safely in the sandbox (checked, double-checked, and refilled with clean sand, and the exterminator had been all over the house and yard this morning), Rod Junior was at a Little League practice, and those were supervised. Ryan was asleep.
She went back to the kitchen, slumped in her favorite chair, and stared at the wall for a while.
That was when some of what the stranger had said-and she had dismissed-came back to her.
Ryan had been standing alone at the corner, and in this neighborhood, there was nothing to hide behind at the corners, nothing to make it hard for a driver to see the kids. Yet-Ryan and the stranger agreed, that one moment he had been alone, but the next second, someone had jumped up behind him and pushed him out into the street.
Then, inexplicably, the attacker had vanished.
Now, the woman was hysterical, and Ryan was too. And in the few seconds it took for the woman to slam on her brakes and run to the front of her car, it was perfectly possible for a child, a bully who had gone too far, to run for the cover of one of the backyards.
Except that both Ryan and the woman agreed that it hadn't been a child. And this adult would have found it very difficult to hide in a normal suburban neighborhood like theirs.
For according to both the stranger-who had no reason to make up such a wild story, and Ryan-who had never lied, this adult had not been the kind of person you saw on the street.
In fact, he had been an Indian. In beads, mohawk, blanket, and leather pants. Everything but war-paint.
The next day, David talked Jennie into giving him some of the paperwork to do so that they could take in a movie. The day after, he dragged her off to Bell's Amusement Park. The day after that, he varied the routine by kidnapping her for a picnic at lunch.
It all paid off handsomely. That worry-line was becoming fainter, and she had less of a pinched look about her. And there still was no talk of him moving out of the spare room.
In the meantime, he split his time between doing that 'legwork' ,for her-which included, to his surprise and pleasure, being granted some of the surveillance she had been doing-and reading the books and private notebooks that 'mysteriously' turned up in his room. Some of them surprised him; stuff he would have thought was far too much along the lines of what you'd find in a so-called 'occult bookstore' for Mooncrow to have any respect for. But then he remembered that business about learning things from unlikely sources, and read what had been left him without comment.
When he wasn't away from the house on one errand or another, he watched Mooncrow teaching the neighborhood kids without them ever realizing that they were learning anything. They just thought he told neat stories, and knew how to do excellent things. He'd even weaned them from Nintendo to real archery practice, and
