Estates, you saw a large plastic Frosty the Snowman, lighted from inside, waving hello to all the good boys and girls.
This was also the time when the people of Stoneridge realized that they were friends and not just folks who happened to live next door to one another. Women exchanged recipes and cookies and holiday cakes; men exchanged Sunday-afternoon football highlights and hunting tips and helped in digging out a car buried in snow.
All the neighbors, that was, except the McCays.
From the time little Jenny had come home, the McCays had become almost suspiciously insular, showing a downright aversion to exchanging anything more than the briefest of greetings with their neighbors. Mindy-who had been variously 'into' Amway, the Junior League, mall fashion shows, and the Negro-for-an-afternoon program that the country club once sponsored until one of the ungrateful little wretches bit the white hand that happened to be feeding it-was especially silent.
And skinnier.
The women of Stoneridge didn't know what kind of diet Mindy was on this time, but whatever it was, it certainly seemed to work. By Stoneridge estimates, Mindy had dropped as much as twenty-five pounds, the one drawback being that the woman's face looked terrible-gaunt, with eye rings as pronounced as a raccoon's, and a disposition problem that bordered on psychosis.
Eventually, the women of Stoneridge-who did not like to think of themselves as gossips but merely exchangers of information-came to realize that Mindy was on no diet at all.
No, the trouble was Jenny, whom none of the Stoneridge ladies had seen since the day of her return. Only Diane had seen her. Jenny's problems were so severe that they were causing Mindy to lose weight. That was the conclusion of the Stoneridge women, and presumably they were correct because since November 2, the day of Jenny's return, the McCay driveway had held the cars of three psychiatrists, a priest, a Bishop, an Orthodox Rabbi, a steel-haired Presbyterian Minister whom the Stoneridge women instantly dubbed 'sexy,' seven different officers from local, state, and federal bureaus, a psychic whom the Stoneridge ladies recognized from her show between bouts on the local professional wrestling 'Saturday Wipeout,' three women from a church bearing flowers, four men from the Jaycees bearing balloons, and two men in a hearse who said they were from Wisconsin and had devoted their lives to checking out stories of possible abductions by UFOs, of which poor little Jenny might be an example.
Ed Gorman
Nightmare Child
TWO MONTHS LATER
Diane knew why she'd baked the pie, of course. She just wouldn't quite admit it to herself.
All morning she fussed with the preparation — flour felt good on the fingers, and cutting the firm red apples with a paring knife was nice crisp work-and all afternoon she'd pause in her cleaning or her laundering to put her head into the kitchen and smell the sumptuous results of her labor.
Who could resist an apple pie? Could even secretive Mindy McCay turn her down?
At four, Diane went into the kitchen, tugged on a huge blue oven mitt, and brought forth her triumph, a plump, crusty pie that would serve six, or two extremely hungry ten-year-olds, especially if you served cold white milk on the side.
At five-thirty, the pie having cooled sufficiently, Diane wrapped up both it and herself, and proceeded across the snowy expanse separating her house from the McCay's. It was dark already, with stars bright in the gray-black firmament, and the pure chill evening excited her. She would see Robert Clark at seven-thirty. She would suggest a walk. He loved lagging behind, to knock off her festive red winter cap with a soft snowball.
No sound came from the house. Deep behind the downstairs curtain a faint light burned. The upstairs was utterly dark. She knocked.
A distant dog announced the night; a car somewhere fishtailed in too-deep snow, straining for traction; and over all lay the fine gray dusk and the fragile light of stars.
The door opened.
'Hi,' Jeff McCay said. He left the chain lock on. Almost no one in Stoneridge Estates had chain locks on their front doors. It was tacky, redolent of brute life in the city.
'Hi. I brought a gift for you and your family.'
Dressed in white shirt and dark slacks, smelling of cigarette tobacco and whiskey, handsome Jeff looked as hapless as his wife had lately.
'I'm afraid you'll have to open the door.'
'Oh. Right.'
Flustered, he first closed the door, ripped back the golden chain along its train, and then flung the door open again. Behind him the living room was lost in gloom. Farther back from the kitchen, came the soft yellow electric glow Diane had seen behind the curtains.
'Is everything all right?' Diane asked.
Too quickly, he said, 'Everything's fine.'
'I miss seeing Jenny.'
'Well, she's not…quite right yet. You know, the kidnapping and all.'
With that he bent forward and took the towel-wrapped pie from her.
'My God,' he said, sniffing it. 'This is wonderful. Homemade?'
She laughed. 'You always did like my pies.'
He held the pie even closer to his nose. His eyes closed; he seemed to be in some sort of sexual ecstasy. 'You don't know how good this is.'
She giggled uneasily. 'It's just a pie, Jeff.'
'No, what it represents, I mean.'
'What it represents?'
'Yes.' He glanced anxiously over his shoulder. 'Normalcy, I mean. Life as we used to live it.'
'You mean your life is…changed now?'
But before he could answer, a sharp voice that could only be Mindy's called from upstairs, 'You're letting a draft in and Jenny's getting cold! Come up here right now, Jeff.'
A draft? All the way upstairs? What a weak excuse to pull Jeff back from her, Diane thought.
'I'm sorry, I-'
'I understand,' Diane said. She almost said 'Mindy and her moods,' but that was too presumptuous and bitchy so she stopped herself. 'Just tell me one thing, if you can?'
'If I can.'
'How is Jenny?'
He began closing the door.
'Did you hear me, Jeff?'
He met her eyes briefly. 'I'd better not talk about that.'
'But-'
'Thank you very much for the pie, Diane. But I'd really better be going now.'
And with that the door was abruptly shut, and Diane was left alone like a locked-out child there in the pink- streaked dusk, the dying sun an explosion of purple on the curve of the earth.
Upstairs, Mindy began shrieking at Jeff. Diane couldn't catch the words but she certainly understood the tone. As if a child was being chastised. Apparently Mindy treated Jeff no better than she used to treat Jenny.
Shuddering, and not quite knowing why, she set off back to her house, her footsteps crunchy in the snow that the night made dark blue.
'You haven't seen her in how long?'
'Not since the day she came back.'
'They never take her out?'
