When he pulled into the Jacobsons’ driveway on Court Street, Joni leaped out of the car. At nearly the same time, an ambulance, lights flashing and siren screaming, raced around the corner and pulled up to the curb. Now, in the light of the ambulance’s headlights, Joni could see the still form of her son lying on the sidewalk, with a man bent over him. A moment later, as Ed joined her, they rushed over to kneel next to Zack, where medics had edged the man aside and were examining the boy.
“Please, God,” Joni whispered, unaware that she was speaking out loud. “Don’t let him be dead! Let him be—”
“I think he’s okay,” one of the medics said. “Get a stretcher and—” Before he could finish, Zack groaned, lifted an arm, then tried to sit up. “Easy,” the medic said. “Just take it easy.”
Zack let the medic ease him back down onto the sidewalk, but gingerly touched the top of his head with his fingers, winced, and pulled them away.
The fingers were red with blood.
Joni gasped. “My God, Zack — what happened to you?”
Zack said nothing for a moment, then his eyes narrowed angrily. “Seth Baker,” he said. “The prick jumped me! He — He hit me with a rock or something!”
The medic was already examining Zack’s head, while his partner held a powerful flashlight on the wound. “Something in his hair, here,” he muttered softly, and carefully picked a fragment of something that looked like wood out of Zack’s blood-matted hair. “Looks like bark.” He grinned. “Sure you just didn’t try to tackle a tree, big fella?” he asked.
“He threw me!” Zack said. “He threw me right up into—” He fell abruptly silent, as if realizing just how strange he must sound.
The medic with the light frowned, and then shined the light up into the tree directly above Zack. Standing, he moved around, playing the light over the lowest branch. “For Christ’s sake,” he said, holding the light still. “Would you look at that?” He jumped up, barely managed to touch the branch, then looked at his fingers.
More blood.
Now Zack was sitting up, and it was apparent that his injuries weren’t terribly serious.
“You say Seth Baker did this?” Ed Fletcher said, eyeing his son skeptically.
“He jumped me!” Zack repeated. “He grabbed me from behind and—” He seemed to lose track of what he was saying for a moment, then shook his head as if trying to clear it of an idea that made no sense. “It was weird,” he finished.
“And he was by himself?” Ed asked. “Nobody was with him?”
Zack started to shake his head, then changed his mind. “I–I don’t know.”
“Well, did you see anyone?” Ed Fletcher pressed.
“It was dark!” Zack complained. “I could barely even see him!”
Ed seemed about to say something else, but Joni spoke first. “Can we please take care of Zack first, then figure out exactly what happened?” She turned to the medics. “Do you have to take him to the emergency room?”
“We’d better,” one of them replied. “That’s a pretty nasty cut, and it’ll probably take a few stitches to close it up. And it won’t hurt to make sure there’s no concussion.”
“All right,” Joni said. “We’ll follow you.”
A few minutes later Ed backed the Mercedes out of the Jacobsons’ driveway and fell in behind the ambulance.
“Okay,” Joni said. “Do you really believe Seth Baker attacked Zack?”
Ed glanced over at his wife. “What do you mean? He said—”
“I heard what he said,” Joni cut in. “But it just seems so unlikely — I mean,
“Maybe it didn’t suddenly change,” Ed suggested. “I mean, look what he did at the club yesterday, sandbagging us by pretending he couldn’t play golf for nine holes, then never missing a shot on the back nine! I mean, at the beginning I thought it was a fluke, but nobody goes through nine holes the way he did without knowing exactly what he was doing.”
Joni was silent for a moment, then: “And I saw the look on Zack’s face when Seth beat him yesterday, Ed. He looked like he wanted to beat Seth up on the spot. And you weren’t very happy about losing to Blake Baker either. So with Zack being mad at Seth rather than the other way around, why would Seth have jumped Zack? And what was Zack doing there in the first place? Court Street is on the way to the Bakers’ house, not ours.”
Ed’s grip on the wheel tightened. “So what are you saying? That Zack’s lying?”
Faced with the starkness of her husband’s question, Joni found herself unable to answer it directly. “I–I don’t know,” she finally temporized.
“No, you don’t,” Ed said in a tone that Joni recognized. It was the one he always used when he was about to stop discussing something. “And I don’t either. But I know something’s going on with Seth Baker, and tomorrow I’m going to have a talk with Blake and find out just what it is.”
Neither of them spoke again until they were parked in the lot next to the small hospital. “So what do we do?” Joni finally asked. “What do we say to Zack?”
Ed took a deep breath, then slowly let it out. “Nothing,” he finally said. “Tomorrow I’ll talk to Blake and see what he’s got to say. For tonight, we take Zack home.” He looked pointedly at Joni. “And you at least act like you believe what our son told us, all right?”
Joni hesitated, then reluctantly nodded. Yet as they entered the hospital, she had the feeling that nothing was going to be as simple as Ed seemed to think. Something had happened to Zack, and while she knew that her son’s explanation didn’t make much sense — especially since he’d changed it after the medic found blood on the branch high up in the tree — she also knew there had to be something Zack wasn’t telling them.
Marty Sullivan stared dolefully into the bottom of his empty glass, shifted his gaze to the greasy mirror behind the bar, and shoved the glass out for a refill.
“Haven’t you had about enough?” the barman asked, eyeing him with a look of such boredom that Marty didn’t bother to respond to the question. “Your funeral,” the bartender sighed as he filled Marty’s glass with the watered-down whiskey he kept in the well for people like Marty, who had already consumed enough alcohol that they’d barely notice that their drinks no longer carried the punch of the first half dozen, and weren’t in good enough condition to fight even if they caught on and tried to object. “Just try to make sure you don’t kill anybody but yourself on your way home.”
Marty uttered a disinterested grunt, drained the drink, and threw a wad of bills on the bar. The bartender eyed the crumpled paper, decided there was more than enough to cover the tab and a good tip for himself, swept it off the counter, and moved down to the other end, where he began pouring a round for a group near the pool table that were even drunker than Marty.
As he pushed his way through the door and out into the cool of the night, Marty considered the possibilities.
He could go to another bar, have a couple more drinks, and maybe pick up a pool game.
He could go home, where Myra would be all over him for getting drunk, and Angel—
He shuddered as the vision that had hung before him through the long hours he’d sat drinking in the bar rose once again, this time hovering in the quiet darkness of the village’s empty streets.
Angel, holding that damned cat and staring at him with a look he’d never seen before. For a second she’d appeared frightened and her face had gone all pale, but then, just before she came at him, something in her face had changed.
It was her eyes. They’d suddenly taken on the same golden glow — like there was a fire burning inside them — that he’d seen in the cat’s eyes as it lunged at his face.
Then, so quickly he hadn’t seen it at all, she’d come at him, shoving him so hard he flew off his feet, tumbled backward down the stairs, and—
Nothing.
Except that there was one other image that kept popping up in his mind too. It was after Angel had pushed
