Nursery Tale Read online

  "Mrs. Gellis, are you all right?"

  "My God!" She looked up. The confusion was gone—a stark and knowing fear had replaced it. "Sheriff, he . . . that boy, I mean, he . . ."

  The deputy stood quickly, went to her, put his arms around her shoulders to steady her. "Come over here, Mrs. Gellis." He coaxed her gently to the La-Z-Boy and helped her into it. She sat with her hands flat on the arms of the chair, her head down.

  The deputy knelt on one knee beside the chair. He put his hand on her hand and spoke softly, reassuringly. "Now, Mrs. Gellis, I want you to take a few deep breaths . . ." He paused, hoped for some response, got none. "A few deep breaths, Mrs. Gellis. You're obviously in some kind of shock—" She lifted her head suddenly. Turned it. Looked him squarely in the eye. "Mrs. Gals?" he said. Her looked unnerved him. The fear had vanished; now great relief was obvious around her eyes and mouth. "Mrs. Gellis, do you have something you'd like to add to what you've already told me?"

  She answered quickly, "Norm's right."

  "I don't understand, Mrs. Gellis."

  "I said Norm's right. I didn't see anything."

  The deputy heard Norm Gellis change position on the couch. He turned his head and looked at him. Norm was smiling oddly. The deputy turned back to Marge. "The boy was running away from you," he began, in an attempt to coax her, "and in the light from the bathroom, you say you–"

  "I'm sorry," she cut in, "but I can't tell you a thing. I really can't."

  Deputy Peters studied her face. He saw that she actually believed what she was telling him now. At last, and reluctantly, he said, "Yes. Forgive me." He stood, took a small, Sony cassette recorder from a pocket on his belt. "Mr. Gellis," he began, "I'd like you to repeat everything you've told me, for the record, please."

  Norm Gellis said, "No, I don't think so. It was her idea"—he nodded quickly at his wife, as if embarrassed—"to call you in the first place. And the more I think about it, the more I think I shouldn'ta gone along with her. It ain't real important, is it? I can handle it. Just some goddamned kid playin' around, and if he comes back, I'll take care of him." He smiled again; the deputy saw hostility in that smile and he wondered at whom it was directed, exactly. "I'll take good care of him, don't you worry."

  The deputy put the tape recorder back on his belt. "You know, Mr. Gellis, that the laws regarding trespass do not allow—"

  "I know all about the law, Sheriff." He paused for effect. "And so will that boy if he ever shows up here again." He nodded at the door. "Thanks for coming by, Sheriff."

  John Marsh stopped the pickup truck just to the left of the big, ornate, black iron gate. The word GRANADA, done in what looked, in the glare of the headlights, like stainless steel, stretched across the gate; GRAN on the left side, ADA on the right. He had noted the other signs weeks ago—crisp, black capital letters on large, white, rectangular backgrounds, spaced like Burma Shave signs down the length of the road:

  REYNOLDS ROAD. PRIVATE PROPERTY. KEEP OUT. NO UNAUTHORIZED PERSONS OR VEHICLES ALLOWED.

  He supposed now that he should not have come here again. But, for the first time in a decade, he was very drunk. And when he got drunk he got especially nostalgic and sloppy. And when that happened, he did foolish things—which was why, he considered, he so rarely got drunk.

  "Granada," he mumbled, "Granada," he repeated, as if the word were a ball of phlegm he'd managed to cough up. And then he did start to cough in earnest a liquid, gurgling kind of cough. The very sound of it made him queasy. The coughing continued for several minutes, then it stopped abruptly. And he realized that Matt Peters was tapping on the driver's window.

  Marsh grinned stupidly and rolled the window down. "Hello, Matt. Whatcha doin'? You tuckin' these people in?"

  "John, do you have business here?"

  "At this hour of the damned morning? Shit no."

  "Then do you mind telling me . . ." The deputy paused a moment. "Are you drunk, John?"

  "Uh-huh. Sick, too. You got some Bromo?" he chuckled softly. "I could really use some Bromo."

  "Christ, John, I wish you hadn't done this! We've got special orders from the sheriff himself about this place—"

  "Shit on this place, Matt!"

  The deputy put his hand on the door handle. "You're going to have to come back with me, John. I'll drop you at your place—"

  "You like what they're doin' here, Matt?" Marsh nodded in the general direction of the iron gate. "You really like what they're doin' here?"

  Deputy Peters opened the door slowly. "I haven't given it a lot of thought, John. Now do you want to climb out of that truck, please."

  "You don't remember the Griffins, do you, Matt?"

  "No, John, I don't. That was before my time. Now I'm going to have to insist that you get out of the truck. I've got a report to file, and I'm very tired—"

  "Real . . . fine people, Matt." He was beginning to slur his words badly; the deputy had trouble understanding him. "Stupid, foolish . . . people, for sure, but fine people, too, and they had fine dreams, Matt."

  The deputy shook his head slowly. "John, will you please–"

  And John Marsh fell very heavily and quickly from the driver's seat to the road. He lay face down, vomit trickling from his mouth. The deputy leaned over, rolled him to his side. "Christ, John!" With great effort he pulled and prodded and pushed the man to a sitting position against the driver's door. "John, are you all right?"

  A slight, sad grin appeared on Marsh's face. He burped several times in quick succession, then put his hand on his stomach. "Yeah," he said finally. "Yeah, I'm okay." He nodded slightly to indicate the iron gate and the massive, dark shapes of the houses—many were still in various stages of construction—beyond it. He saw a light wink on in one of the houses. "I'm fine," he repeated. A half mile west of the farthest houses, the small, deciduous forest was silhouetted against a pale sky. Directly overhead, a few of the brighter stars still were visible. "But I'll tell you something, Matt." His voice was steady now. "Kind of a secret—between you and me, I mean."

  "John, why don't you just try standing up. I'll give you a lift home and tomorrow we can—"

  "'Cuz I been comin' here from time to time in the last couple weeks, Matt, and I been seein' things, and I wanta share this secret with you. I wanta tell you that these people here, behind that godawful fence, in those goddamn houses, Matt—" He closed his eyes briefly, as if in pain. "These people ain't all right, Matt. I don't know why, for sure, not for sure." He pressed his hand hard into his stomach. He grinned again. "But I know this, Matt—I know they're gonna learn to regret ever comin' here. I know that for a fact. And if there was somethin' I could do about it, I would. But I can't."

  And he passed into unconsciousness.

  Fifteen Years Earlier

  It was all much better now, Rachel Griffin told herself

  She leaned against the living room doorway and folded her arms across her stomach. It hadn't taken much, she thought, to make it better—just a few odds and ends of furniture: a white wicker chair, hers; a red winged-back chair, Paul's; a small cherry wood table; a rolltop writing desk, very old; a brightly colored rug; and, more importantly, plans to erase the awful damage done to the house. That wasn't much. In time it would be quite a beautiful little house. One day, she might even be able to call it home.

  She felt something tickling her ankle. She looked. "Hello, cat," she said. She'd have to think of a name for the animal, of course. She couldn't go on calling it "cat," although Paul seemed to feel it was all that was required. "It's not like it's a bona fide member of the family," he'd told her. "It's just a cat, and it's supposed to be quite a mouser. God knows this house needs one."

  She stroked the cat, pleased by the upward-thrusting motions of its huge gray head. "I don't care what Paul says," she cooed. "You're going to have a name, like everyone else."

  Chapter 6

  October 1

  "When's fall start?" Sam Wentis asked.

  "I don't know," Timmy Meade answer
ed. "I guess whenever it's good and ready to start—when it gets colder, I guess."

  "Naw, my mom says it starts in September sometime," Sam Wentis said, and he pointed suddenly, enthusiastically, to the middle of an acre-size, malodorous swamp they'd just come upon. "Hey, looka that! Turtle stuck his nose right up outa the water! You see that!?"

  Timmy Meade looked quizzically at him. "Big deal," he said. "How are they gonna breathe unless they stick their noses up outa the water?"

  "I know that," Sam Wentis said. "What're you sayin'? You sayin' I think turtles are fish or somethin'? I know a lot about turtles."

  Timmy Meade raised his head and rolled his eyes. He wondered if he would ever figure Sam Wentis out. "No, Sam, I'm not sayin' that. I know you know about turtles. Everyone knows about turtles."

  "Sure as hell!" said Sam Wentis, and he smirked a little, proud of his curse.

  "Damn it to hell!" said Timmy Meade, and he turned away so his friend wouldn't see his broad smile and know the truth—that he was trying to best him in cursing.

  "Shit damn it all to hell and back!" exclaimed Sam Wentis, and both of them burst into loud, nervous, adolescent laughter. The laughter lasted nearly five minutes, then, like a spinning top, slowly subsided and finally stopped. Timmy Meade said, "Hey, let's get outa here. It smells like shit damn rotten eggs." And, after some thought, Sam Wentis agreed that the swamp really did smell like "shit damn rotten eggs, now that you mention it." So, Timmy checked his new watch—an eleventh birthday gift—decided, after consultation with Sam, that they had a good hour left before dinner, and, side by side, they headed north, into a particularly dark, thick, and very intriguing area of the woods.

  Sam Wentis and Timmy Meade had become inseparable in the ten weeks they'd lived in Granada. As much as any two boys can be they were an amazing study in contrasts. Sam was tall, dark-haired, olive-skinned. His adoptive mother was fond of saying he had a "decidedly Mediterranean look about him," and her friends invariably commented that "the girls are going to be falling all over him," and, "he's going to be a real lady's man," which, for reasons she couldn't understand, made Trudy Wentis very uncomfortable. And Sam was also "impetuous," which, his parents realized, might have been a euphemism for "bullheaded" and "slow," although the second word was never used in the Wentis household, because it was agreed that perhaps Sam wasn't really "slow" so much as "contemplative," in his own unique way.

  Timmy Meade, on the other hand, was short, fair-skinned, and fair-haired, with the kind of "thoughtful good looks" which, later in his life (his father maintained) only a few, especially sensitive women would find appealing. And he was extremely bright. His mother often wished that IQ testing hadn't fallen into general disuse. She was sure that her son's score would really be something to brag about. She was that kind of woman.

  "'Round the end of September, sometime," Sam Wentis said.

  Timmy Meade didn't understand. "What's around the end of September, Sam?"

  Sam Wentis put his open hand against the trunk of a tree. "That's when fall starts. I just remembered." He noticed the long thorns spaced randomly on the tree. "Hey, Timmy, looka this!" He took his hand away and fingered one of the thorns, fascinated. "Jees—you could really get speared by one of these things." He pushed his finger deliberately into the tip of the thorn and watched, still fascinated, as a small bead of blood formed. "Jees, these things could kill ya."

  "That was a dumb thing to do," Timmy Meade said. "How do you know it's not poisonous? You could be rolling around on the ground there in a couple minutes." He nodded meaningfully at the ground. "Then you could be dead! Shit damn! That was dumb! Dumbest thing I've seen you do all week! Why do you do things like that?"

  Sam Wentis said nothing. He brought his finger slowly to his mouth and licked the blood off. Then, abruptly, he turned and started walking north. Timmy Meade lowered his head; Jees, not again!? He looked up. "Sam," he called, "I didn't mean nothin'. Really." But Sam Wentis kept walking; he quickened his pace a little. Timmy Meade stayed where he was; he had decided, at that moment, that his friend's temper wasn't going to get the best of him this time. It seemed like every day he had to apologize to him for saying one thing or another. Yesterday, it had been the thing with the garbage cans ("Sam, why would you wanta go pokin' around in someone else's garbage? You could catch a disease." . . . "I'm sorry, Sam. I didn't mean nothin'."). And the day before that it had been the thing with the puppy ("Sam, don't do that, can't you see yer hurtin' him?" . . . "I'm sorry, Sam."), because Sam couldn't seem to understand that some of the things he did made no sense at all. Or that they were stupid and cruel things.

  "I'm not going to apologize this time, Sam," Timmy Meade called. "I don't think I need to, 'cuz if you just think about it a little, Sam, you'll know you did a dumb thing!" He paused. And realized, on the instant, that Sam had vanished. A nervous smile played along his lips. "Sam?" He looked quickly to his right, his left. Then at the spot where Sam had last been. "Sam, you hidin' behind a tree?" He paused very briefly. "You behind a tree or somethin', Sam?" From far to his left to the west—he heard the crack of a rifle. He turned his head toward the sound; the phrase hunting season passed through his mind and made him grimace. He turned his head back, focused on the spot where Sam had been. And saw him standing, facing him, smiling an odd, crooked kind of smile. "Shit damn!" Sam Wentis said, and he looked very pleased, as if he had just won some great victory. "Shit damn!" he repeated.

  Clyde Watkins and Manny Kent. Townies

  Clyde Watkins called, "What'd you shoot at, Manny?"

  Manny Kent ("Manny" was short for "Manfred," which he despised) looked up from the deer spoor. "Damn buck," he called back. "Didn'tcha see it? Great big damned buck, Clyde. Mighta got him, too, weren't the sun in my eyes."

  Clyde walked over to him, very careful of how he carried his rifle (the year before, Clyde's Uncle Winston had accidentally shot himself in the chin. Miraculously, he had survived but, Clyde thought now, he'd never again be much to look at). "I didn't see a thing, Manny. You got X-ray vision or somethin'?"

  "Naw, I ain't got X-ray vision. Yer just blind, Clyde." He laughed. "Blind's a bat in a snowstorm, Clyde."

  Clyde nodded to indicate the deer spoor. "That ain't no deer spoor, Manny." It lay on a slight rise in the land. To the east, the land sloped downward at a gentle angle for several hundred yards, where a newly installed, six-foot-high chain-link fence bisected it. Just beyond the fence, the land gave way to heavy thickets and small stands of evergreens. Granada lay three-quarters of a mile east of the fence.

  "Sure that's a deer spoor, Clyde. You gonna tell me I shot at some damn cow?"

  'That ain't a deer spoor at all Manny." He paused, suppressed a giggle. "That's a Steg-oh-saurus spoor. And it's a very rare thing, Manny."

  Manny eyed him suspiciously. "That's a what, Clyde?"

  "A Steg-oh-saurus spoor." He felt the laughter building in his stomach, like a whirlpool; he fought it back. "You ain't hearda the Steg-oh-saurus?"

  "You jokin' with me, Clyde?"

  "I ain't jokin' with you, Manny. That's an actual Steg-oh-saurus spoor, there. It looks like a deer spoor, but it ain't." He paused, grinned. "Woulda fooled me, too, if I didn't know the difference. It's a real subtle difference, Manny."

  "Yer fulla shit, Clyde, 'cuz I know what a Stegoh-lasoris is! It's some kinda fuckin' dinosaur, some kinda fuckin' damn big dinosaur, and yer tryin' to make me look like a damn fool! Admit it, Clyde. Go on, admit it." There was no animosity in Manny's tone; he'd grown accustomed to his brother-in-law's off-key sense of humor, and it made him feel good when one of Clyde's jokes fell flat. "Go on, Clyde, admit it."

  "Yeah, you're right," Clyde said, as if in apology. "But it ain't no dinosaur, Manny." Again he suppressed a giggle. "It's actually a kind of wild pig!" And then the whirlpool of laughter burst from his mouth, he dropped his rifle, fell to his knees and, the laughter frothing out of him, enjoyed himself immensely,

  Minutes later, when he could open
his eyes again, when, at last, the laughter had died, he saw that Manny was holding something in front of his—Clyde's—eyes; a small, rectangular piece of tarnished metal; a badly rusted chain hung from it. "What's that, Manny?"

  Manny held it up to his own eyes, and studied it critically. "I think it's somebody's bracelet, Clyde. And I think it's made of pure silver."

  Clyde stood and picked his rifle up; he examined the bracelet closely, while Manny clung possessively to it, then he announced, "Sure looks like pure silver, Manny." He tried to take it from him; Manny yanked it away. "Finders are keepers, Clyde." He nodded at what appeared to be a broad, flat, dull white rock, half buried in the bare earth, about a yard away. "I found it. Over there, under that rock. I saw the chain stickin' out."

  "Well let me tell you this, Manny. If it is silver, you just remember that it was my pickup that brought you out here, and my thirty-ought-thirty yer huntin' with, and my damned boots yer wearing—"

  "There's a name on it, Clyde."

  "You listenin' to me, Manny?"

  "Ever hearda someone named Mark Collins, Clyde?—'Cuz that's the name here: 'Mark Collins.'"

  Clyde thought for just a moment, then, "Give it here, Manny."

  "I sure as hell will not!"

  "It's evidence, Manny."

  "Evidence? What kind of evidence?" He sounded on the verge of a pout.

  "You're thick, Manny! You got no brains, nor memory! Mark Collins was that colored man who disappeared around here six or seven years ago. You remember? It was in the papers, and I know you can read."