Bloodstream (16 page)

“Mom. Mom?”

She gulped in a breath and forced herself to look at him.

“Can I have a biscuit?”

Wordlessly she held out the platter. She watched him take a biscuit, split it open, and slather it with butter. She held her breath as he took the first bite, as the look of bliss rippled across his face. He had craved it all along, but had denied himself the pleasure. Now he gave himself

up to it, eating a second. And a third. She watched him take every bite, and she felt a mother’s satisfaction, deep and primal.

Noah leaned against the side of the school building, smoking a cigarette. It had been months since he’d last lit up, and it made him cough, his lungs rebelling against the smoke. He imagined all those poisons swirling into his chest, the ones his mom was always lecturing him about, but in the general scheme of his life in this dreary town, he figured a little poison was hardly worth worrying about. He took another drag and coughed some more, not really enjoying the experience. But there wasn’t much else to do between classes, not since the skateboards were banned. At least out here, standing alone by the Dumpster, no one would hassle him.

He heard the soft growl of an engine, and he glanced toward the street. A dark green car was creeping by, so slowly it barely seemed to move. The windows were too darkly tinted to see through, and Noah couldn’t tell if it was a man or woman behind the wheel.

The car stopped right across the street. Somehow Noah knew the driver was staring at him, just as surely as Noah was staring back.

He dropped the cigarette and quickly crushed it under his shoe. No sense getting caught; the last thing he needed was another detention. The evidence now obliterated, he turned and brazenly faced the unseen driver. He felt a sense of victory when the car drove away.

Noah looked down at the crushed cigarette, only half smoked. What a waste. He was weighing the chances of salvaging what remained when he heard the school bell ring, signaling the end of break.

Then he heard the shouting. It came from the front of the school. He rounded the corner of the building and saw a crowd of kids milling on the lawn, chanting: “Cat fight! Cat fight!”

This should be something to see.

He pushed forward, trying to get a peek at the action before the teachers broke it up, and the two battling girls practically flew right into him. Noah stumbled backwards to a safer distance, shocked by the viciousness of the fight. This was worse than any brawl between two boys; this really
was
a cat fight, the girls clawing at each others’ faces, yanking at hair. The shouts of the crowd rang in his ears. He

looked around at the circle of spectators, and saw their frenzied faces, smelled the blood lust, strong as musk.

A strange excitement coiled inside him. He felt his hand close into a fist, felt heat rush to his face. Both the girls were bloodied now, and the sight of it enthralled him. Provoked him. He pushed forward, jostling with the crowd for a better view, and was angry when he could not get closer.

“Cat fight! Cat fight!”

He began to chant too, his excitement building with every glimpse of a bloodied face.

Then his gaze froze on Amelia, standing at the far edge of the lawn, and instantly he fell silent. She was staring at the crowd in disbelief and horror.

Shamefaced, he turned before she could see him, and he fled into the building.

In the boys’ restroom, he stared at himself in the mirror.
What happened to everyone out there?
he thought. What
happened to me?

He splashed icy water on his face, and scarcely felt its sting.

“They were fighting over a boy,” said Fern. “At least, that’s the story I got. It started off with a few insults, and the next thing you know, they were clawing each other’s faces.” She shook her head. “After Mrs. Horatio’s funeral, I was hoping the kids would support each other. Stand by each other. But this is the fourth fight we’ve had in two days, Lincoln. I can’t control them. I need a policeman to stand watch in this school.”

“Well, it seems like overkill,” he responded doubtfully, “but I can have Floyd Spear drop in a few times during the school day, if you want.”

“No, you don’t understand. We need someone here all day. I don’t know what else is going to work.”

Lincoln sighed and ran his hand through his hair. It seemed to Fern that he was getting grayer every day, just as she was. This morning, she had noticed the telltale hairs sprouting among her blond ones, had realized that the face she saw in the mirror was that of a middle-aged woman. Seeing the changes in Lincoln’s face, though, was somehow

more painful than confronting her own aging image, because she carried such vivid memories of the man he’d been at twenty-five: dark-haired, dark-eyed, already a face of strength and character. The days before Doreen caught his eye. She regarded the deepening lines in his face and thought, as she so often did:
I could have made you so much happier than Doreen has.

Together they walked to her office. Fourth period classes had started, and their footsteps echoed in the empty hallway. A banner sagged overhead: Harvest Dance November 20! From Mr. Rubio’s classroom came the sound of bored voices raised in unison:
Me ilamo Pablo. Te llamas Pablo. Se llama Pablo...

Her office was her private territory, and it reflected the way she lived her life, everything neat and in its place. Books lined up, spines out, no stray papers on the desk. Controlled. Children thrived on order, and Fern believed that only through absolute order could a school function properly.

“I know it’s asking for a manpower commitment,” she said, “but I want you to consider assigning a full-time officer to this school.”

“It means pulling a man off patrol, Fern, and I’m not convinced it’s necessary.”

“And what are you patrolling out there? Empty roads! The trouble in this town is right here, in this building. This is where we need a policeman.”

At last he nodded. “I’ll do what I can,” he said, and stood up. His shoulders seemed to sag with the burdens they carried. All day he wrestles with the problems of this town, she thought guiltily, and he gets no praise, only demands and criticism. Then he has no one to go home to, no one to comfort him. A man who makes the mistake of marrying the wrong woman should not have to suffer for the rest of his life. Not a man as decent as Lincoln.

She walked him to the door. They were close enough to touch each other, and the temptation to reach out, to throw her arms around him, was so overwhelming she had to close her hands into fists to resist it.

“I look at what’s happening," she said, “and I can’t help but wonder what I’m doing wrong.”

“You haven’t done anything wrong?’

“Six years as principal, and suddenly Fm fighting to keep order in my school. Fighting to keep my job.”

“Fern, I really think it’s just a temporary reaction to the shooting. The kids need time to recover.” He gave her shoulder a reassuring pat and he turned to the door. “It'll pass.”

Once again Claire was staring into Mairead Temple’s mouth. It seemed like familiar territory to her now, the furry tongue, the tonsillar pillars, the uvula hanging down in a quivering flap of pink flesh. And that smell, like an old ashtray, the same smell that permeated Mairead’s kitchen, where they were now sitting. It was Tuesday, the day Claire made house calls, and Mairead was the next to last patient on her schedule. When one’s medical practice is failing, when patients are switching to other doctors, desperate measures are called for. A home visit to Mairead Temple’s smoky kitchen qualified as a desperate measure. Anything to keep a patient happy.

Claire turned off her pen light. “Your throat looks about the same to me. It’s just a little red.”

“Still hurts wicked bad.”

“The culture came back negative.”

“You mean I don’t get any more penicillin?”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t justify it.”

Mairead clacked her dentures together and glared at Claire with pale eyes. “What kinda treatment is that?”

“Well, I’ll tell you, Mairead, the best treatment is prevention.” “So?”

“So Claire eyed the pack of menthol cigarettes lying on the kitchen table. In the advertisements, it was a brand usually associated with slim sophisticates, women in slinky gowns trailing furs and men. “I think it’s time for you to quit smoking.”

“What’s wrong with penicillin?”

Claire ignored the question, turning her attention instead to the wood-burning stove in the center of the overheated kitchen. “That’s not good for your throat, either. It dries out the air and fills it with smoke and irritants. You do have an oil furnace, don’t you?”

‘Wood’s cheaper.”

“You’d feel better.”

“I get the wood free, from my nephew.”

“All right,” sighed Claire. “So how about just quitting the cigarettes?” “How about the penicillin?”

They looked at each other, budding enemies over a handful of three-buck pills.

In the end, Claire surrendered. She didn’t have the stamina for an argument this late in the afternoon, not with someone as mulish as Mairead Temple. Just
this once
was what she told herself as she rummaged for the appropriate antibiotic samples.

Mairead crossed to the woodstove and threw in another log. Smoke puffed out, adding to the general haze hanging over the room.

Even Claire’s throat was beginning to feel sore.

Mairead picked up a pair of tongs and poked at the logs on the fire. “I heard more talk about those bones,” she said.

Claire was still counting out sample tablets. Only when she looked up did she see Mairead was studying her, eyes strangely alert. Feral.

Mairead turned and slapped the stove’s cast-iron door shut. “Old bones, that’s what I heard.”

“Yes, they are.”

“How old?” The pale eyes were once again locked on hers.

“A hundred years, maybe more.”

“They sure about that?”

“I believe they’re quite sure. Why?”

The unsettling gaze slid away from hers again. “You never know what goes on around these parts. No big surprise they found the bones on her property. You know what she is, don’t you? She’s not the only one around here, either. Last Halloween, they lit themselves a big bonfire, over in Warren Emerson’s cornfield. That Emerson, he’s another one.”

“Another what?”

“What do you call ‘em when they’re men? A warlock.”

Claire burst out laughing. It was the wrong thing to do.

“You go ask around town,” insisted Mairead, now angry “They’ll all tell you there was a bonfire up in Emerson’s field that night. And right afterwards, those kids caused all that trouble in town.”

“It happens everywhere. Kids always get rowdy on Halloween.”

“It’s their holy night. Their black Christmas.”

Looking into the other woman’s eyes, Claire realized she didn’t like Mairead Temple. “Everyone is entitled to their beliefs. As long as no one gets hurt.”

“Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? We just don’t know. Look what’s happened around here since then.”

Abruptly Claire shut her medical bag and stood up. “Rachel Sorkin minds her own business, Mairead. I think everyone else in this town should do likewise.”

The bones again,
thought Claire as she drove to her last house call of the day. Everyone wants to know about the bones. Whom they belonged to, when they were buried. And today a new question, one that had taken her by surprise: why were they found in Rachel Sorkin’s yard.

It’s their holy night, their black Christmas.

In Mairead’s kitchen, Claire had laughed. Now, driving through the deepening gloom, she found nothing humorous about the conversation. Rachel Sorkin was the outsider, the black-haired woman from away who lived alone by the lake. That’s how it had always been through the ages; the young woman alone was an object of suspicion, the subject of gossip. In a small town she is the anomaly that requires explanation. She is the town siren, the irresistible temptation for otherwise virtuous husbands. Or she is the shrew no man wants to marry or the twisted female with unnatural desires. And if one is also attractive, like Rachel, or exotic, or peculiar of taste and whim, then suspicion is mixed with fascination. Fascination which could turn to obsession for someone like Mairead Temple, who brooded all day in her grim kitchen, smoking cigarettes that promised glamour but delivered bronchitis and yellow teeth. Rachel did not have yellow teeth. Rachel was beautiful and unencumbered and a little eccentric.

Rachel must therefore be a witch.

Since Warren Emerson had lit a bonfire in his cornfield on Halloween night, he must be a witch as well.

Though dusk had not yet fallen, Claire turned on her headlights and drew some measure of reassurance from the glow of her dashboard. This time of year, she thought, brings out irrational fears in all of us. And the season hasn’t yet reached its darkest point. As the nights grow longer and the first heavy snows begin to fall, cutting off all access to the outside world, this bleak and lonely landscape becomes our universe. And it’s an unforgiving one, where a patch of black ice, and a night’s bitter cold, can act as both judge and executioner.

She arrived at a rural mailbox labeled “Braxton” and turned onto the dirt road. Her patient’s house stood surrounded by neglected fields. The clapboards were stripped bare, the wood weathered to silver. On the front porch, half a cord of firewood was stacked up precariously against the crooked railing. It would all come tumbling down one of these days—the railing, the porch, the house itself. Divorced, forty-one-year-old Faye Braxton, who lived here with her two children, was as structurally unsound as her dwelling. Both her hips had been destroyed by rheumatoid arthritis, and she could not even step out of this dismal home without assistance.

Carrying her medical bag, Claire climbed the steps to the front porch. Only then did she realize something was not right.

It was thirty-five degrees outside, and the front door was open.

She poked her head inside the house and called into the gloom: