Faces of Fear (30 page)

I left the school with Lucy huddled in my arms and by now word about the play-yard incident must have gotten around, so when I walked through the hallway all of my women friends somehow contrived to be looking the other way, or rummaging in their purses, or having some trouble with their contact lens. When your kids get into trouble, you soon find out who your friends aren't.

My new white Caprice was parked under a tree and a flock of starlings had spattered it. By the look of it, they'd been lunching at Lutece. I let Lucy into the back seat, made sure she was buckled up, and then drove back home. It was only nine blocks but owning a car was still a novelty as far as I was concerned, and I was prepared to put up with any kind of traffic snarl-up just for the joy of my own air-conditioned environment, with soul music on the CD, and my sugar plum fairy sitting in back, jabbering on about what she was doing at nursery school.

Except that today my sugar plum fairy didn't jabber. She didn't say a word. She sat staring out of the window, her head sadly inclined to one side, and nothing I said to her made any difference. For some reason, I kept thinking of the story that her teacher had been reading her. “Gradually, the maiden underwent a change. Her
teeth grew long, her nails became claws, and soon her whole body was covered in thick, black hair.”

I glanced in the rear-view mirror. I had never been a father before, but up until now it had all been pretty straightforward. A stomach was empty, you filled it. A diaper was filled up, you changed it. You taught her not to say “horsey” and “baa-lamb” and you tried to teach her a little basic math, like daddy + mommy + sugar plum fairy = great contentment. I don't mean to sound too gooey about it, but marrying Karen and having Lucy had fulfilled me more than anything I had ever done before. It was just as if I had been sitting in a gloomy room, right up until the age of 43, and then suddenly God had opened up the door and let the sunlight come flooding in, and said, “What have you been doing in that gloomy room all of these years, Harry? Your life has been waiting for you out here.”

We reached our apartment on E 86 and I managed to park in a space that was just big enough for a bagel cart. No wonder I used to call myself the Incredible Erskine. I carried Lucy out of the car, and up the steps, but when we reached the door she said, “I want to get down, please, daddy. I don't want you to carry me any more.”

I put her down. “Okay, fine, whatever you want.”

She looked at me with big, dark, serious eyes. She wasn't what you'd call a pretty little girl. She wasn't a Shirley Temple or anything like that. She had straight, dark hair, cut in a bob, and the same delicate bone structure as Karen, elfin almost. I always thought she looked too pale, but then most city children do. She had such skinny arms and legs, you felt you had to be careful when you held her, in case you broke her wrist or something.

“Listen,” I said, “mommy's going to ask what you happened. What are you going to say to her?”

A single tear slid down her left cheek, and dripped onto the collar of her little blue-checkered blouse. “I didn't mean to,” she wept. “I told them they were all bad, which was true, and then they got angry and I had to make them go away.”

“You told them they were bad? Why did you do that, sweetheart?”

“Muldrews, Cullens, they're all bad. They kill people. They kill babies.”

I stroked the tear away from her cheek. “They kill
babies
! Who told you they kill babies?”

She sniffled for a moment, but then she raised her head and looked me directly in the eye. “The
mistai
told me. The
mistai
never tell lies.”

I felt a feeling go through me like swallowing a large lump of ice, painful and very cold. “The
mistai
?” I asked her. “The
mistai
told you? What do you know about the
mistai
?”

But immediately, Lucy burst into tears, and clung to me; and there was nothing I could do but open up the door and take her inside. The lobby was clad in marble, with a compass-rose pattern on the floor. There were mirrors and fresh flowers everywhere, and a reassuring smell of ‘expensive'. Soon after Karen and I were married, her aunt had died, Aunt Millie who doted on her, and she had left this fine three-bedroomed apartment on E 86, fully furnished in a style you could have described as ‘Walt Disney goes to Versailles', with gilded chairs and rococo dressers and brocade drapes that you could have cut into 500 new uniforms for the Vatican Guard. In other words, quantity and tastelessness, in equal proportions. But I never complained. Don't look a gift apartment in the mouth, that's what I always say, even if it does look like Marie Antoinette's second-best boudoir. And
especially don't look in the mouth the $2.1 million that came with it.

I carried Lucy into the apartment and set her down on the wide yellow-striped couch. Karen was sitting at the small walnut desk in the corner, breathlessly preparing her accounts on a laptop computer.

“Hey … you're home!” said Karen. “I won't be a moment… I just have to download the Foggia case.”

I came up and laid my hand on her shoulder. We had been together for five years now, and she was still just as pretty and fragile as the day she first came to see me. There are some women you love because they're best friends, and they're sexy and supportive. But I loved Karen because I
had
to love her. She was my destiny. If the Lord God had put me on earth to do anything, he had put me on earth to take care of her, and I did.

“Listen … Lucy's been in trouble at nursery school.”

“What? What kind of trouble? Lucy! Are you all right?”

Lucy turned her head away and wouldn't look at her. I took hold of Karen's arm and gently restrained her. “This might be serious,” I said. “There's more to this than meets the eye.”

“Harry, stop being all mysterious and just tell me what's happened!”

I went over to Lucy and sat down next to her. “Come on, kiddo. Why don't you tell mommy what happened?”

But Lucy shook her head, and buried her face even more deeply in the cushions.

“Okay,” I said. “According to the school – and before you blow your top, I'm only reporting what they said to me, and I don't believe it either –
according
to the school, Lucy threw Janice Muldrew five or six feet across the play-yard, so that she sustained multiple bruises and a
sprained ankle. She then smashed Laurence Cullen into a wall, so that he damn near broke his nose. Then she did a Bruce Lee job on seven other kids, knocking them over, scratching them, biting them, and kicking the boys in the heritage department.”

Karen stared at Lucy and her face was bloodless. “That's
insane
! Look at her, she's the second-smallest kid in her class! She
threw
Janice Muldrew? I never heard anything so ridiculous in my entire life!”

She stalked over to the eighteenth-century-style telephone table, and picked up the phone.

“What are you doing?” I demanded.

“I'm phoning the school, of course. Nobody, but
nobody
, accuses my daughter of violence! She's only a baby, for God's sake!”

I walked over and pushed my finger down on the cradle. “Don't call anybody, not just yet. There's something else.”

“Harry, what are you talking about, this is our
daughter
!”

“Exactly. And we both know how and when we conceived her, don't we? Which makes her something of a special case.”

Karen slowly raised her hand and touched my sleeve as if to reassure herself that I was real. “I hoped we'd forgotten all that. God, Harry, I never even
dream
about it!”

“All the same, when Lucy was talking to me downstairs, she mentioned the word ‘mistai'. Not just once, but twice.”

“
Mistai
? Where have I heard that before?”

It wasn't easy to tell her. Karen had suffered more than anybody, and the last thing she wanted to hear about was Native American ritual. I had first met her
in the mid-1970s when the Algonquin wonder-worker Misquamacus had tried to use her body to return to New York, for the sole and dedicated purpose of taking his revenge on the white men who had decimated his people. He had used his immense magical powers to impregnate himself into her body, and it was only with the help of a modern medicine-man, Singing Rock, that we had managed to save her. Only four years ago, Misquamacus had tried to possess her for a second time – and it was then, under the shadow of his influence, that Karen and I had first had sex together, and Lucy had been conceived.

It had been up to me to save her that time; Misquamacus had killed Singing Rock by beheading him, just to make sure that his spirit could never find peace.

Karen and I would always have that bond between us. We had both faced the same hideous danger, and survived. But even for survivors, time moves on. These days, Karen was spending more and more time away from home – business meetings, conventions, foreign travel – and as much as I loved her, as much as our lives were intertwined, we had grown more distant in the past eighteen months. But for Lucy's sake, and maybe for our own sake, too, this was a time when we needed to be close.

I took hold of Karen's hand. “
Mistai
are what the Pawnee Indians used to call ghosts. Lucy said that the
mistai
told her that Janice Muldrew and Laurence Cullen were bad people. They killed babies.”

“How on earth could Lucy know about Pawnee ghosts?”

“I don't know. They teach Native American mythology at Lennox. Maybe she picked it up from there. For Christ's sake, she's only four. You know what imaginations they have at that age.”

Karen took hold of my other hand, and gripped it tight. “Did she really throw Janice across the play-yard?”

“I don't know. Ms Eisenheim says they've got witnesses – but, well. You know how unreliable witnesses can be, especially kids.”

“Do
you
believe that Lucy threw Janice across the play-yard?” asked Karen, intently.

I shook my head. “Of course not. Janice is twice Lucy's size.”

Karen released my hands and turned away. “I've been afraid of this,” she said, her face silhouetted against the window. “I've been afraid of this ever since I first found out that I was pregnant.”

I didn't say anything, but came up and laid my hand on her shoulder.

“It's too much of a coincidence, isn't it, her talking about
mistai
on the same day that she attacks all of those children.”

“Come on, Karen, you're not trying to suggest—”

“I'm not trying to suggest anything. Lucy is a gentle, loving, sweet-natured little girl, and the only way that she could have done what she did today was if somebody took hold of her. Somebody stronger – somebody strong enough to throw Janice Muldrew six feet in the air and hit all of those other kids. Somebody that nobody could see, because he wasn't standing behind her, he was right inside her, the way he was right inside me!”

“Karen—”

“I knew this would happen! I knew it! I knew that he would never leave us alone! He wants a way to get back and the only way he can do it now is through Lucy; the same way that he tried to get back through me.”

“You really believe that? Come on, Karen, it's been years.”

Her eyes were bright with fear, but they were determined, too. “When he was right inside me, I could feel what it was like to be him. It was like a raging fire. I felt that I could do anything, and nobody could stop me. I could have killed people then, I could have smashed their heads and cracked their bones, and relished it. I'll never forget it, Harry, and I don't want it to happen again. Not to Lucy, please.”

Neither of us dared to say the name
Misquamacus.
For nearly five years, we had liked to believe that his spirit had been sent back to the skies, or the underworld, or the Hanging Road, which is what the Indians used to call the Milky Way, the sparkling highway of dead souls.

We didn't want to think that he had somehow managed to influence the one person we both cherished more than life itself: our own daughter, Lucy.

“Hey … maybe we're being oversensitive,” I suggested. “Maybe it was just a tantrum. Kids get tantrums. Their adrenaline builds up … you know what people are capable of doing, when their adrenaline builds up. There was that woman in Indiana who lifted a two-ton Pontiac station-wagon, because it was crushing her son. I mean they proved scientifically that she couldn't have done, but she did. Maybe that was what happened to Lucy.”

“I'm going to have to call Janice's parents,” said Karen. “Laurence's, too.”

“She hurt seven other kids besides,” I told her. “And if I were you, I wouldn't start admitting any liability just yet, in case they start thinking about lawsuits and compensation. For the first time in my life, I've got a little money. I don't want to lose it all because of some rumpus in the romper room.

“Besides,” I added, very uncomfortably, “Ms Eisenheim won't let her back until she's had a psychiatric evaluation.”

“
What
?” Karen demanded. “Is she trying to suggest that my daughter's mentally unbalanced? Don't talk to me about lawsuits and compensation! That woman! I'll hang her ass out to dry!”

I tried to calm her down. “Karen … this is crazy. We don't exactly know what happened. There's no point in getting hysterical about it.”

“Our daughter's accused of being a psychopath and I can't get hysterical about it?”

I held her close against me. She was warm, and she smelled, as always, of Chanel. I loved her so much you couldn't believe it. But I was beginning to feel that so long as she and I stayed together, the shadow of Misquamacus would dog us, the way that Indian hunters had dogged their prey over miles and miles of empty prairie, so that in the very end, they could cast their shadows over their enemies' graves.