Beyond Midnight (9 page)

Peaches had to smile; her employer could be charming in his helplessness when he wanted to.

"
Katie would be fine,
"
she said.
"
Maybe I can even put in a few hours as a teacher
'
s aide. Sometimes the schools allow it. I assume you want to try to get into The Open Door preschool.
"

"
If that
'
s the one Linda was so keen on.
"

"
I still have the application somewhere. I
'
ll call Helen Evett first thing tomorrow; I hope we
'
re not too late.
"

She added,
"
They may still want to test Katie—although, maybe not. Mrs. Evett saw samples of Katie
'
s work when she was here.
"

Katie
'
s father became indignant.
"
For God
'
s sakes, we
'
re not talking about med school here. Besides, Katie
'
s as bright as a new copper penny. It
'
s obvious.
"

Peaches smiled and added,
"
You also have to realize that Mrs. Evett may insist that someone visit the facility before she accepts Katie.
"

"
Whatever it takes,
"
he said, resigned.
"
Just tell me when and where.
"

"
I will.
"

Relieved to be done with the subject, he glanced at his watch.
"
Huh. It
'
s not all that late,
"
he decided.
"
I think I
'
ll work a little longer.
"

He excused himself with a quick smile and was halfway down the hail when he backtracked and ducked his head through the door of the music room.
"
Peach? You will come with us, won
'
t you?
"

Peaches, cradling an assortment of stuffed toys and plastic parts, laughed and said,
"
Wild horses couldn
'
t keep me away.
"

****

Helen Eve
t
t was in the middle of an argument with her plumber when the phone rang.

It was Peaches Bartholemew, who accepted Helen
'
s belated, awkward condolences with reassuring grace.
"
I
'
ll be sure to pass on your sympathy to Mr. Byrne,
"
the nanny said.
"
It
'
s awfully nice of you to be so concerned about Katie; I can see why your preschool has a reputation for caring.
"

"
But I really do mean it—truly,
"
Helen insisted, somehow managing to imply that the preschool
'
s reputation was a fraud. Frustrated by the sound of her own babble, she added,
"
I can
'
t begin to tell you how
...
how upset I was.
"

"
Yes. . . of course,
"
said Peaches vaguely, sounding a bit put off by the fierceness in Helen
'
s voice.
"
You knew Linda, then?
"

"
Well, no.
"

"
I see,
"
said Peaches, although clearly she did not. She cut short the confusion by explaining her mission: to get Katie into The Open Door preschool.
"
I hope we
'
re not too late,
"
she added, almost as an afterthought.

In fact, registration was full and there was a waiting list. No matter.
"
You
'
re in luck; we have one space left,
"
Helen lied. She made a decision on the spot to squeeze Katie in, even though it meant exceeding the limit she herself had imposed on class size at The Open Door.

Ashamed but unrepentent, Helen added that she had only one requirement, and that was that an adult responsible for Katie come to see the preschool, preferably when it was in session.

Peaches said,
"
Mr. Byrne has promised to be there.
"

Yeah,
right
, thought Helen. Aloud she said,
"
That would be best, under the circumstances.
"

They agreed to meet on the day after next and Peaches hung up, leaving Helen free to return to her battle with the plumber.

He was a big man with red cheeks and wiry hair, a longtime employee of the outfit who
'
d redone the baths during the makeover of Helen
'
s house two years earlier. She was pleased that Tony had been the one sent to solve her madde
ni
ng mystery. She remembered him as being more approachable than the others, more inclined to explain why there was never enough water pressure upstairs and why the sink
back-
siphoned into the dishwasher every once in a while.

But that was then, and this was now.

"
I
'
m te
ll
in
'
you, Mrs. Evett, it
'
s not the pipes you hear knockin
'
all the time. I
'
ve just bled every last one of the radiators, and look,
"
he said, handing her a paper cup.
"
Practically no water. It
'
s not the pipes. I
'
m tellin
'
you.
"

"
Well, something
'
s keeping me up every night,
"
said Helen in an equally testy voice. She was tired and irritable after two weeks of interrupted sleep. What good was it to be over the sinus headache if she was going to be awake all night anyway?

Shaking his head, the plumber chewed on his lip and mulled the possibilities while he stared at his shoes.
"
Wood can shrink and expand with temperature changes, especially in spring and fall.
"
He looked up at her from under bushy eyebrows.
"
You could be hearing beams.
"

From outer space, you mean.
Plainly he didn
'
t believe her. And in fact, the house had been predictably quiet the whole time he was there.

Tony turned to Russ, who
'
d ventured out of his room in search of milk and cookies.
"
Do you hear anything in your bedroom at night?
"
he asked the boy.

Russell—who was singlehandedly supporting half the dairy co-ops in New England—shrugged as he filled a sixteen-ounce tumbler with milk.
"
Nope.
"

The plumber tried another tack.
"
So it would be— where?—in the livin
'
room that you hear these noises?
"

"
Nope. I don
'
t hear that stuff.
"

"
Why are you asking
him?
"
Helen said, rescuing the Oreo bag from her son and handing him four cookies.
"
He walks around under a set of headphones all day.
"

Not that she
'
d given the boy a choice. The latest rap group whose spell he
'
d fallen under was so loud, so vile, so guaranteed to put Helen
'
s teeth on edge, that she
'
d bought him a top-of-the-line personal CD player that he wore strapped to his hip at home.

In any case, Tony didn
'
t have any answers, so Helen gave the joyless plumber a soothing smile and said,
"
I
'
m sure you solved the problem, whatever it was,
"
and asked him to send her the bill.

But that night as she lay sleepless in her bed, waiting for the sounds she knew would come, Helen gave in to a bout of self-pity.

If Hank were here,
she thought,
I wouldn
'
t care about the sounds. If Hank were here we'd make cute jokes about ghosts in the attic. But Hank isn
'
t here.

Unless?

No. Hank was gone forever. Too stoic ever to indulge in false hopes, Hank had always said,
"
When you
'
re dead, you
'
re dead.
"
It used to distress Helen whenever he said that, because she knew that sooner or later one of them would be dead and one of them would not. She
'
d wanted to believe that somehow they
'
d be able to bridge the great divide of mortality. And yet here she lay, cold and alone, without Hank; without hope.

She fell asleep in a state of depression, fu
ll
y expecting to be awakened at three
A.M.
She wasn
'
t disappointed. The first knock, barely audible and yet somehow thunderous, woke her instantly. In the dark she listened without moving her head on the pillow, without breathing, as she waited for the sound to evolve into the next phase.

There it was: the jiggle. After the knock always came the jiggle. It sounded exactly as if someone were trying a door, finding it locked, then rattling the doorknob back and forth impatiently. Whether the someone was locked in or out—that, Helen could not say.

There was another long pause, as she knew there would be, and then came the knock
...
the short pause
...
and the jiggle. Over and over and over again, starting at three in the morning, Helen had endured the maddening sequence of sounds night after night after night. The plumber had been her last hope.

In a deep and mysterious part of her soul, Helen understood that the sounds were unrelated to the pipes and radiators. In the last two weeks she
'
d turned the heat up, down, and off, with every possible variation between, until the kids had begun to beg for mercy. Becky had accused her of entering premature menopause. Russ had threatened to move in with a friend. Everyone was miserable, Helen, most of all—because she was the only one who could hear the sounds.

A couple of nights earlier, when the heat was off entirely, she
'
d actually dragged Becky into her bedroom to bear witness. It made Helen groan with pain even to think about it.

"
Listen!
"
Helen had hissed to her sleepy daughter.
"
Can
'
t you hear it?
"

Becky, a shivering waif in her nightgown and bare feet, had stood in the near dark with her head bowed and her hair tumbling over her eyes and had mumbled,
"
Mom
... please
...
I
'
ve told you.
"

And then Helen had grabbed her daughter by the arm and swung her around to face first one wall, then another.
"
There!
Now
—there!
That jiggle! And then the knock!
"
she
'
d insisted. When Becky had continued to droop and shake her head, Helen had grabbed her other arm and cried,
"
What
'
s the matter with you? Are you deaf?
"

And Becky, the laid-back, well-adjusted, go-with-the-flow darling of her mother
's eye, had broken down into a
fit of sobbing.
"
Don
'
t do th
is, Mom, don't do this," she'd
said through her tears.
"You're scaring me. Please ...
don
'
t!
"

The next morning, despit
e the futility of the gesture,
Helen had called the plumbers.