Off Season - Jack Ketchum [92]
She got into bed and pretended to sleep. I looked at her face. She was still smiling.
I went to the kitchen and sat at the table and waited until I heard my father get out of bed. When he came in, yawning, surprised and amused to find me there, I was still holding onto the Monitor.
It was the first of many nights all throughout the Fall when I awoke and she was gone. But after that I always knew where she was, and only once, to reassure myself that I was in fact correct, did I ever try to find her again. She stood beside his bedside with her back to me and her long legs parted, her hands moving down in front of her just as before. I turned and went back to bed.
I worried. I worried about my father and about these visitations. You weren’t supposed to creep into adults’ rooms while they were sleeping and do things to your body. She wasn’t hurting him, not physically, but I knew she was hurting him some other way I didn’t quite understand.
I wondered what would happen when I told him. I always knew I was going to tell him. I had to. It was only a matter of how and when. But how and when were what gave me problems. He thought there was nothing wrong with her, really. She was a little strange, sure, maybe a little slow. He hadn’t seen what I’d seen. And I suppose that in his way he loved her. Certainly he cared about her, had feelings for her. I was afraid of losing the happy father I’d regained and renewing my acquaintance with the unhappy one I’d lost.
I was afraid of her too. I’d changed my estimation of Elizabeth. She wasn’t crazy. She was bad. Evil.
The thing in the forest.
I’d be awake when she returned from his room sometimes and I’d see the look on her face and the slow languid movement of her body and I’d wonder, what if she wants more? What if this is just the beginning? I wasn’t even sure what I meant by more. But the idea kept nagging me.
I kept remembering Betty’s pup.
So I put it off, over and over again, knowing it was wrong, that I was helping her in some way by not telling. I know now that I was waiting for some kind of sign. A sign that it was okay to tell him. And finally, it came.
We had only one relative nearby and that was my mother’s sister Lucy who lived twenty miles away in Lubec. She was a widow fifteen years older than my mother, seventy by then, a cheerful woman who favored burgundy skirts and high-necked white cotton blouses. Her two girls lived with families of their own in Hartford and New Haven. Her husband had left her money when he died and he left her the house, a big Edwardian monstrosity which she kept neat and tidy with the aid of a full-time maid. She used only the first floor, sealing off the rest in winter to save on heating bills. Besides, she said, that much space made her lonely.
Her birthday fell on December 19th and every year around that time she got to feeling particularly lonely. She couldn’t get around very much. The arthritis was so bad in her right hip that she was considering a hip replacement. She hadn’t been out our way in years because the maid couldn’t drive. So she asked my father if I could visit for a few days over the weekend right before Christmas. My father asked me was that okay and I agreed. I think he was relieved not to have to spend too much time there himself over the holidays because Aunt Lucy reminded him of my mother and visiting there in happier days. So I would be his ambassador. As for me, I liked Aunt Lucy, who seemed to have a joke for every occasion, and being in a town for a change—where there was a movie theatre and a bookstore, and an antique shop filled with old winches, halyards, tillers and rigging, where there was so much more going on—was a treat. I didn’t mind being free of Elizabeth for a few days either.
But leaving my father bothered me.
In fact I worried so much about him being left alone with her, about what I’d seen, that on the way to Lubec