Beyond Midnight (61 page)

"
Your judgment
stinks,
"
she said, losing it at last. She slammed down the phone, taking out all her pent-up emotion on AT&T.

By the time she got back outside, she could see the sleek black car bearing down on them. Helen stood on the curb like a prison matron, arms folded across her chest, trying to decide whom to pummel first: him or her son.

The car pulled up alongside and the boys jumped out, oblivious to her fury.

"
Oh, man, that was so-o cool,
"
crowed Scotty.
"
I
'
m not gonna forget that as long as I live!
"

"
Yeah, but my dad was in lotsa chases better
'
n that,
"
Russ argued, loyal to the last.

"
Man, I
'
m savin
'
up for a cell phone. Gotta have a cell phone. The cops got
'
im, just
'
cuz of us. Can that guy drive or what?
"

"
It was the Porsche,
"
said Russ.
"
It practically drove itself.
"

"
Oh, like you know—
"

Helen wasn
'
t really listening. She was watching the driver, shadowed by the low roof of the car, for some sign, some
...
anything. The passenger door was still open. Out of nowhere, Peaches slung her lithe body gracefully into
the bucket seat and closed the door. The Porsche took off, leaving Helen in its dust.

She rounded on her son.
"
What
'
s the matter with you?
"
she said, whacking him on the shoulder.
"
Are you crazy? Jumping in a car like that on a high-speed chase through the city? What
'
s the matter with you?
"

Russell, mortally embarrassed in front of the gathering, rallied to his own defense.
"
We didn
'
t even run a light! He just kept behind the guy and called the cops and told them where he was!
"

"
Yeah, Mrs. Evett,
"
said Scotty, dimly sensing disapproval through his euphoria.
"
He even used his turn signals.
"

"
I don
'
t care what he used! When you see something dangerous going on, you
'
re supposed to jump
out
of the way, not
in
the way!
"
To Scott she said,
"
Wait till your mother hears about this!
"

She began shooing them toward the school building like a couple of errant lambs until she realized, quite suddenly, that both the boys were taller than she was. When had that happened? Here they were on the cusp of manhood, and she was still treating them like ten-year-olds—treating them like the boys they were when Hank died. Becky was right.

It had to stop.
"
I
'
m sorry for losing my temper in front of everyone,
"
she said to both of them outside her office.

Scotty, suspecting a trick, looked at Russell for his reaction.

Russ said tersely,
"
It
'
s a little late now.
"

"
Yeah,
"
said Scott, still with a wary look.

"
I know it is,
"
Helen admitted, suddenly tired of it all.
"
Go see Janet and she
'
ll set you up with the paint you need.
"

After the child was returned to her grateful mother, Helen spent the rest of the day aching to pick up the phone and call Nat. But she resisted, preferring to wait to see who came for Katie after school.

Peaches came. Suppressing a sense of disappointment that bordered on despair, Helen watched from a classroom window as Peaches, with an animated Katie skipping alongside, steered the child to her own car, a two-door
Toyota
. Next to the
Toyota
was parked a silver Mercedes convertible with its top down. Peaches settled Katie into her car seat, then paused for a long, admiring once-over of the sleek silver automobile before slipping into the driver
'
s seat of her
Toyota
.

She'd rather have the Mercedes,
Helen realized.

Or, for that matter, the Porsche.

The thought came out of nowhere, but once formed, it lingered.

The Porsche, the mansion, the diamond bracelet.
Peaches wanted it all. She didn
'
t give a damn about Nat; she certainly didn
'
t give a damn about Katie. She was after the money, pure and simple.

Suddenly it all seemed so clear. How else to explain the nanny
'
s unending pleasantness; her constant, hovering manner? It went beyond mere professionalism—beyond sainthood, even; Mother
Teresa
scowled more often than Peaches. All this time, Helen had assumed that Peaches was genuinely in love with Nat. Those adoring looks, that smitten laugh—lies! She was after the money. Helen knew it, now, in her soul.

The question was, how far would Peaches go to get it?

Helen spent the next half hour on the phone, tracking down herbalists in the area. She
'
d formed a crazy little theory, almost on the spot, as she watched Peaches drooling over the Mercedes convertible. Ironically, it came as a result of the research she
'
d done into the possible causes of the 1692
Salem
hysteria.

At least one scholar had theorized that the girls who
'
d been bewitched had in fact been suffering the effects of a fungus that had contaminated their bread. The disease was called
ergot,
caused by a grain fungus of the same name. The effects of the poison were far-ranging: everything from extreme headaches to convulsions, psychosis, and death.

Ergot.
Naturally the word had jumped out at Helen. Last night, amid the thunder and lightning and driving rain, it had seemed merely a bizarre, eerie coincidence that Linda Byrne had died of an overdose of a prescribed ergot derivative. But now, after the Mercedes, Helen was not so sure.

After dropping off Russ and Scotty, Helen sought out her herbalist. She
'
d been told that the owner of the Health and Happiness Food Store, tucked away in a dingy side street in nearby
Peabody
, would be back at four-thirty.

She was there waiting at four-twenty-five, trying to look as if she shopped regularly in the funky, dark, unfashionably dreary store with its two crowded aisles of mysterious roots and herbs and limp, untreated vegetables.

At the half hour, an ancient wall clock with a neurotic tick let out a burp of a chime, and an old Chinese man, older even than the clock, pushed open the wood-framed door and shuffled inside. Small, dark, as wizened and dusty as his store, the owner was dressed in traditional garb, from the small cap that fit snugly over the white hairs of his skull, to the black cotton slippers on his small, delicate feet.

"
You find you want?
"
he asked Helen with a shopkeeper
'
s concern as he passed.

"
Not exactly,
"
said Helen, feeling her way into her strange request.
"
I
'
m looking for certain information. They told me on the phone that you would know if anyone would
...."

The shopkeeper
'
s expression remained impassive.

Helen smiled ingratiatingly.
"
Ergot,
"
she said.
"
Is it still around nowadays?
"

"
Skiorshum?
"
he said.

"
I
'
m sorry?
"

"
You want skiorshum?
"

"
No, I
'
m talking about the disease—ergot. In rye bread. Is it still possible to get bread that
'
s infected with ergot?
"

"
Ah
...
skiorshum.
"

"
No,
"
she said, feeling as if one of them was speaking martian and one of them wasn
'
t. She tried again.
"
When you buy commercial rye bread from a supermarket, it
'
s made from flour that
'
s free of any fungus—ergot, that is. But I want to know if someone could get hold of flour that
'
s bad. If someone could make bread from it, say, that would get someone else sick.
"

The shopkeeper
'
s eyelids lowered an infinitesimal amount.
"
My flour good flour.
"

"
Oh, no, I didn
'
t mean to imply
—
I just meant, is the fungus still around that was such a scourge for so many hundreds of years? You know, in
France
; in the rest of Europe; maybe even in
Salem
?
"

A veil came down between the shopkeeper and Helen.
"
You from FDA?
"

"
No, not at all,
"
said Helen, annoyed with herself for not anticipating the language barrier. She condensed her quest to its essence:
"
I
'
m only trying to find out whether it
'
s possible to get hold of ergot. If an evil person could still do that.
"

"
You want skiorshum, you go Bristol-Myers,
"
he said gruffly, and then he shuffled to the back of the store and disappeared behind a curtain.

S
orry I
'
m late, kids,
"
Helen yelled to no one in particular as she dropped her purse and briefcase in the hail. When no one in particular answered, she paused, still holding the bag of groceries she
'
d picked up after her farcical visit to the herbalist, and said,
"
Anyone home?
"

Becky was on the kitchen phone. Her voice, louder than usual, sounded puzzled and animated. The pitch, the tone, the speed of it were unlike anything Helen had ever heard from her before.

Helen went straight to the kitchen.

Becky hung up the phone, took one look at her mother, and blurted,
"
Someone killed Anna
'
s cat!
"

"
Oh, no,
"
said Helen. The floor beneath her feet seemed to sink halfway to hell.
"
Oh, no.
"

Becky stood there, making quick fluttery motions with her hands, like a baby bird flapping its wings in distress.

"
And her mother thinks I did it! Mom! She thinks I did it! That was her on the phone. She called and said they found the cat behind the house and its throat was slit—and I was like, Oh my God, and she sa
id
, what do you know about it, Becky? like I knew something about it, and I said, nothing, and she says, Becky, tell me the truth and I said I
am
te
ll
ing you the truth and she just
...
freaks.
Like, she just started
screaming
at me on the phone, Mom—screaming! I didn
'
t hear half of what she said, it was all about Satanists and dead chickens and black clothes and things like that and oh my God—what is going on, Mom? And she said, she said she knew about our house being exorcised and I said what are you talking about? And she said that we cooked blood and the police had to come because of the smell and—
"

At that point Becky finally stopped for a breath and burst, instead, into tears. She threw herself into her mother
'
s arms and clung to her.
"
What
'
s happening, Mom?
"
she cried, racked with sobs.
"
What
'
s going on
...
what
'
s going on? I
'
m not a devil worshipper
...
what does she mean?
"