Jack_ Secret Vengeance - F. Paul Wilson [11]
Shaking his head, Jack wandered into the kitchen and pulled out the phone book.
Mom came in then, drying her hands on a towel. She had hair and eyes the same shade of brown as Jack’s. The weight she’d gained over the past few years had made her face rounder than Jack’s.
“How’s my miracle boy doing?”
Jack snapped the phone book closed and suppressed a groan.
Miracle boy … he hated that almost as much as “Jackie.” He’d broken her of calling him Jackie—at least he hoped he had. It had been a whole month since she’d said the word. But he didn’t think he’d ever break her of the “miracle boy” thing. On the plus side, she used it when only family were present.
“Fine.”
“What were you looking up?”
“Just browsing through, looking at the yellow pages and stuff.”
The “stuff” he’d been looking for was a doctor named Hamilton.
She gave him an amused look. “Since when are you more interested in the phone book than football?”
Oh, yeah. The Monday night game. Normally Dad would be glued to it. Jack loved watching football but the voice of one of the Monday night announcers, Howard Cosell, got on his nerves at times. The guy had made some comment a couple of weeks ago that upset lots of people, but Jack had already forgotten what it was.
“Forgot about it.” No lie there. This thing with Weezy and Toliver had blown it out of his mind. “Who’s playing?”
She gave a dismissive wave. “How should I know? I don’t understand what anyone sees in grown men fighting over a silly ball.”
“You play tennis with Dad, and that involves a ball.”
“Yes, but we’re hitting the ball, not fighting over it.”
As Mom puttered in the kitchen, Jack peeked in and saw the light from the screen reflecting from his father’s glasses and balding head. The Dolphins were playing the Raiders. He wasn’t a big fan of either team.
He wondered when the Eagles would make the Monday night game again. He was still stinging from the Phillies’ World Series loss to the stupid Orioles. People had called it the I-95 series, but Jack called it the Crap Series. Just a week ago they choked in the fifth game—a five-nothing shutout, of all things—and went home losers. A black day for Phillies fans like Jack and his dad.
Well, at least they’d made the series. No hope of the Eagles making the Super Bowl this season. They were awful.
He heard Mom go upstairs, so without saying anything to his dad he returned to the kitchen and reopened the phone book. He found the Physicians section again and ran through the names. His finger froze when he came to the only Hamilton.
Selena Hamilton, MD
Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
Medford, NJ
Psychiatry? Weezy was seeing a shrink? No. Couldn’t be. And yet … Weezy had said, Not again! And Medford … she and her mother had made a trip to Medford every Friday throughout the summer. Weezy had never said what for and Jack had never asked, assuming they were shopping trips.
So many things fit together now, especially her sensitivity about the word “crazy.”
But what was wrong with her head? Her moods bounced all over the place. When she was up she was flying and when she was down she was in the basement, but she wasn’t crazy.
Although she’d sure sounded crazy tonight. Maybe she’d been standing on the edge of some kind of psychological cliff and this “Easy Weezy” business knocked her off.
Only one person to blame for that.
Jack felt a surge of dark and cold sweep through him, as if a latch had suddenly lifted, freeing something that should remain safely locked away. He closed the phone book and slammed out the back door. He headed for the garage and went straight to the corner where they kept all the sporting equipment—tennis racquets, tennis balls, birdies, badminton racquets, footballs, baseballs, mitts … and bats.
He pulled a Louisville Slugger from a bin and hefted it.
Yeah.
6
Jack crouched in the shadowed shrubs along the side of the Toliver garage and waited for Carson.
The Tolivers lived on Johnson’s western boundary, at the tip of the cul-de-sac that capped Emerson Lane. People who lived in this relatively new and ritzy