Running with the Demon Part 4

She took it all in for a moment, embracing it with her senses, reclaiming it for herself as she did each tune she returned, familiar ground that belonged to her. She felt that about the park - that through her peculiar and endemic familiarity with its myriad creatures, its secretive places, its changeless look and feel, and its oddly compelling solitude, it was hers. She felt this way whenever she stepped into the park, as if she were fulfilling a purpose in her life, as if she knew that here, of all places in the world, she belonged.

Of course, Pick had more than a little to do with that, having enlisted her years ago as his human partner in the care and upkeep of the park's magic.

She walked across the service road, kicking idly at the dirt with her running shoes, moving onto the heat-crisped gra.s.ses of the ball diamond, intent on taking the shortcut across the park to Ca.s.s Minter's house on Spring Drive. The others were ' probably already there: Robert, Brianna, and Jared. She would be the last to arrive, late as usual. But it was summer, and it really didn't matter if she was late. The days stretched on, and tune lost meaning. Today they were going fis.h.i.+ng down by the old boat launch below the dam, just off the east end of the park. Ba.s.s, bluegill, perch, and sunfish, you could still catch them all, if not so easily as once. You didn't eat them, of course. Rock River wasn't clean enough for that, not the way it had been when her grandfather was a boy. But the fis.h.i.+ng was fun, and it was as good a way as any to spend an afternoon.

She was skipping off behind the backstop of the closest ball field when she heard a voice call out.

"Nest! Wait up!"

Turning awkward and flushed the moment she realized who it was, she watched Jared Scott come loping up the service road from the park entry. She glanced down at her Grunge Lives T-s.h.i.+rt and her running shorts, at the stupid way they hung on her, at the flatness of her chest and the leanness of her legs and arms, and she wished for the thousandth time that she looked more like Brianna. She was angry at herself for thinking like that, then for feeling so bizarre over a boy, and then because there he was, right hi front of her, smiling and waving and looking at her in that strange way of his.

"Hey, Nest," he greeted.

"Hey, Jared." She looked quickly away.

They fell into step beside each other, moving along the third-base line of the diamond, both of them looking at their feet. Jared wore old jeans, a faded gray T-s.h.i.+rt, and tennis shoes with no socks. Nothing fit quite right, but Nest thought he looked pretty cute anyway.

"You get any sleep last night?" he asked after a minute.

He was just about her height (oh, all right, he was an inch or so shorter, maybe), with dark blond hair cut short, eyes so blue they were startling, a stoic smile that suggested both familiarity and long-suffering indulgence with life's vicissitudes, and a penchant for clearing his throat before speaking that betrayed his nervousness at making conversation. She didn't know why she liked him. She hadn't felt this way about him a year ago. A year ago, she had thought he was weird. She still wasn't sure what had happened to change things.

She shrugged. "I slept a little."

He cleared his throat. "Well, no thanks to me, I guess. You saved my bacon, bringing Bennett home."

"No, I didn't."

"Big tune. I didn't know what to do. I s.p.a.ced, and the next thing I knew, she was outta there. I didn't know where she'd gone."

"Well, she's pretty little, so -"

"I messed up." He was having trouble getting the words out. "I should have locked the door or something, because the attacks can -"

"It wasn't your fault," she interrupted heatedly. Her eyes flicked to his, then away again. "Your mom shouldn't be leaving you alone to baby-sit those kids. She knows what can happen."

He was silent a moment. "She doesn't have any money for a sitter."

Oh, but she does have money to go out drinking at the bars, I suppose, Nest wanted to say, but didn't. "Your mom needs to get a life," she said instead.

"Yeah, I guess. George sure doesn't give her much of one."

"George Paulsen doesn't know how." Nest spit deliberately. "Do you know what he did with Bennett's kitten?"

Jared looked at her. "Spook? What do you mean? Bennett didn't say anything about it to me."

Nest nodded. "Well, she did to me,. She said George took Spook away somewhere 'cause he doesn't like cats. You don't know anything about it?"

"No. Spook?"

"She was probably scared to tell you. I wouldn't put it past that creep to threaten her not to say anything." She looked off into the park. "I told her I'd help find Spook. But I don't know where to look."

Jared shoved his hands into his jeans pockets. "Me, either. But I'll look, too." He shook his head. "I can't believe this."

They crossed the park toward the woods that bordered the houses leading to Ca.s.s Minter's, lost in their separate thoughts, breathing in the heat and the dryness and watching the dust rise beneath their feet in small clouds.

"Maybe your mom will think twice before she goes out with him again, once she learns about Spook," Nest said after a minute.

"Maybe."

"Does she know about last night?"

He hesitated, then shook his head. "No. I didn't want to tell her. Bennett didn't say anything either."

They walked on in silence to the beginning of the woods and started through the trees toward the houses and the road. From somewhere ahead came the excited shriek of a child, followed by laughter. They could hear the sound of a sprinkler running. Whisk, whisk, whisk. It triggered memories of times already lost to them, gone with childhood's brief innocence.

Nest spoke to Jared Scott without looking at him. "I don't blame you. You know, for not telling your mom. I wouldn't have told her either."

Jared nodded. His hands slipped deeper into his pockets.

She gripped his arm impulsively. "Next time she leaves you alone to baby-sit, give me a call. I'll come over and help."

"Okay," he agreed, giving her a sideways smile.

But she knew just from the way he said it that he wouldn't.

Chapter Six.

Nest and her friends spent the long, slow, lazy hours of the hot July afternoon fis.h.i.+ng, they laughed and joked, swapped gossip and told lies, drank six-packs of pop kept cool at the end of a cord in the waters of the Rock River, and gnawed contentedly on twists of red licorice.

Beyond the shelter of the park, away from the breezes that wafted off the river, the temperature rose above one hundred and stayed there. The blue dome of the cloudless sky turned hazy with reflected light, and the heat seemed to press down upon the homes and businesses of Hopewell with the intention of flattening them. Downtown, the digital signboard on the exterior brick wall of the First National Bank read 103, and the concrete of the streets and sidewalks baked and steamed in the white glare. Within their airconditioned offices, men and women began planning their Friday-afternoon escapes, trying to think of ways they could cool down the blast-furnace interiors of their automobiles long enough to survive the drive home.

On the picket lines at the entrances to MidCon Steel's five shuttered plants, the union workers hunkered down in lawn chairs under makes.h.i.+ft canopies and drank iced tea and beer from large Styrofoam coolers, hot and weary and discouraged, angry at the intransigence of their collective fate, thinking dark thoughts and feeling the threads of their lives slip slowly away.

In the cool, dark confines of Scrubby's Bar, at the west edge of town j ust off Lincoln Highway, Deny Howe sat alone at one end of the serving counter, nursing a beer and mumbling unintelligibly of his plans for MidCon to a creature that no one else could see.

It was nearing five o'clock, the sun sinking west and the dinner hour approaching, when Nest and her friends gathered up their fis.h.i.+ng gear and the last few cans of pop and made their way back through the park. They climbed from the old boat launch (abandoned now since Riverside had bought the land and closed the road leading in), gained the heights of the cemetery, and followed the fence line back along the bluff face to where the cliffs dropped away and the park began. They wormed their way through a gap in the chain-link, Jared and Robert spreading the jagged edges wide for the girls, followed the turnaround past the Indian mounds, and angled through the trees and the playgrounds toward the ball diamonds. The heat lingered even with the sun's slow westward descent, a sullen, brooding presence at the edges of the shade. In the darker stretches of the spruce and pine, where the boughs grew thick and the shadows never faded, amber eyes as flat and hard as stone peered out in cold appraisal. Nest, who alone could see them, was reminded of the increasing boldness of the feeders and was troubled anew by what it meant.

Robert Heppler took a deep drink from his can of c.o.ke, then belched loudly at Brianna Brown and said with supreme insincerity, "Sorry."

Brianna pulled a face. She was small and pretty with delicate features and thick, wavy dark hair. "You're disgusting, Robert!"

"Hey, it's a natural function of the body." Robert tried his best to look put-upon. Short and wiry, with a mischievous face, a shock of unruly white-blond hair, Robert eventually aggravated everyone he came in contact with - particularly Brianna Brown.

"There is nothing natural about anything you do!" Brianna snapped irritably, although there wasn't quite enough force behind the retort to cause any of the others to be concerned. The feud between Robert and Brianna was long-standing. It had become a condition of their lives. No one thought much about it anymore, except where the occasional flare-up exacerbated feelings so thoroughly that no one could get any peace. That had happened only once of late, early in the summer, when Robert had managed to hide a red fizzie in the lining of Brianna's swimsuit just before she went into the pool at Lawrence Park. Mortified beyond any expression of outrage at the resulting red stain, Brianna would have killed Robert if she could have gotten her hands on him. As it was, she hadn't said a word to him for almost two weeks afterward, not until he apologized in front of everyone and admitted he had behaved in a stupid and childish manner - and even that seemed to please Robert in some bizarre way that probably not even he could fathom.

"No, listen, I read this in a report." Robert looked around to be sure they were all listening. "Belching and farting are necessary bodily functions. They release gases that would otherwise poison the body. You know about the exploding cows?"

"Oh, Robert!" Ca.s.s Minter rolled her eyes.

"No, cows can explode if enough gas builds up inside them. It's a medical condition. They produce all this methane gas when they digest gra.s.s. If they don't get rid of it, it can make them explode. There was this whole article on it. I guess it's like what happens to milk cows if you don't milk them." He took another drink of c.o.ke and belched again. With Robert, you never knew if he was making it up. "Think about what could happen to us if we stopped belching."

"Maybe you should give up drinking c.o.ke," Ca.s.s suggested dryly. She was a big, heavyset girl with a round, cheerful face and intelligent green eyes. She always wore jeans and loose-fitting s.h.i.+rts, an unspoken concession to her weight, and her lank brown hair looked as if no comb had pa.s.sed through it any time in recent memory. Ca.s.s was Nest's oldest friend, from all the way back to when they were in second grade together. She winked at Nest now. "Maybe you should stick to tomato juice, Robert."

Robert Heppler hated tomato juice. He'd been forced to drink it once at camp, compelled to do so by a counselor in front of a dozen other campers, after which he had promptly vomited it up again. It was a point of honor with him that he would die before he ever did that again.

"Where did you read all this, anyway?" Jared Scott asked with benign interest.

Robert shrugged. "On the Internet."

"You know, you can't believe everything you read," Brianna declared, repeating something her mother frequently told her.

"Well, duh!" Robert sneered. "Anyway, this was a Dave Barry article."

"Dave Barry?" Ca.s.s was in st.i.tches. "Now there's a reliable source. I suppose you get your world news from Liz Smith."

Robert stopped and slowly turned to face her. "Oh, I am cut to the quick!" He looked pointedly at Nest. "Like I can't tell the difference between what's rebable and what isn't, right?"

"Leave me out of this," Nest begged.

"Don't be so difficult, Robert!" Brianna chided, smoothing down her spotless white shorts. Only Brianna would wear white shorts to go fis.h.i.+ng and somehow manage to keep them white.

"Difficult? I'm not difficult! Am I?" He threw up his hands. "Jared, am I?"

But Jared Scott was staring blankly at nothing, his face calm, his expression detached, as if he had removed himself entirely from everything that was happening around him and gone somewhere else. He was having another episode, Nest realized - his third that afternoon. The medicine he was taking didn't seem to be helping a whole lot. At least his epilepsy never did much more than it was doing now. It just took him away for a while and then brought him back again, snipping out small s.p.a.ces in his life, like panels cut from a comic book.

"Well, anyway, I don't think I'm difficult." Robert turned back to Brianna. "I can't help it if I'm interested in learning about stuff. What am I supposed to do - stop reading?"

Brianna sighed impatiently. "You could at least stop being so dramatic!"

"Oh, now I'm too dramatic, am I? Gee, first I'm too difficult and then I'm too dramatic! How ever will I get on with my life?"

"We all ponder that dilemma on a daily basis," Ca.s.s observed archly.

"You spend too much time in front of your computer!" Brianna snapped.

"Well, you spend too much time in front of your mirror!" Robert snapped right back.

It was no secret that Brianna devoted an inordinate amount of time to looking good, in large part as the result of having a mother who was a hairdresser and who firmly believed that makeup and clothes made the difference in a young girl's lot in life. From the tune her daughter was old enough to pay attention, Brianna's mother had instilled in her the need to "look the part," as she was fond of putting it, training her to style her hair and do her makeup and providing her with an extensive wardrobe of matching outfits that Brianna was required to wear whatever the occasion - even on an outing that centered around fis.h.i.+ng. Lately Brianna had begun to chafe a bit under the constraints of her mother's rigid expectations, but Mom still held the parental reins with a firm grip and full-blown rebellion was a year or so away.

The mirror crack brought an angry flush to Brianna Brown's face, and she glared hotly at Robert.

Ca.s.s Minter was quick to intervene. "You both spend too much tune in front of lighted screens, Robert" - she gave Nest another wink - "but in Brianna's case the results are more obviously successful."

Nest laughed softly in spite of herself. She envied Brianna's smooth curves, her flawless skin, and her soft, feminine look. She was beautiful in a way that Nest never would be. Her tiny, grade-school girl's body was developing curves on schedule while Nest's simply refused to budge. Boys looked at Brianna and were made hungry and awestruck. When they looked at Nest, they were left indifferent.

Robert started to say something and belched, and everyone laughed. Jared Scott cleared his throat, and his eyes refocused on his friends. "Are we going swimming tomorrow?" he asked, as if nothing had happened.

They walked through the center of the park, keeping to the shade of the big oaks that ran along the bluff up from the ball fields bordering Nest's backyard, then cut down toward Ca.s.s Minter's rambling two-story. A game was in progress on the fourth field, the one farthest into the park and closest to the toboggan run. They sauntered toward it, caught up in their conversation, which had turned now to the merits of learning a foreign language, and they were almost to the backstop when Nest realized belatedly that one of the players lounging on the benches, waiting his turn at bat, was Danny Abbott. She tried to veer away from him, pus.h.i.+ng at Ca.s.s to get her to move back toward the roadway, but it was too late. He had already seen her and was on his feet.

"Hey, Nest!" he called out boldly. "Wait up!"

She slowed reluctantly as he started over, already angry with herself for letting this happen. "Oh, great!" Robert muttered under his breath. A scowl twisted his narrow lips.

"Go on," she told Ca.s.s, glancing at her shoes. "I'll be along in a minute."

Ca.s.s kept moving as if that had been her plan all along, and the other three dutifully followed. All of them drifted on for about twenty feet and stopped. Nest held her ground as Danny Abbott approached. He was big, strong, and good-looking, and for some reason he had a thing for her. A high-school junior in the fall, he was two years older than she was and convinced he was the coolest thing in jeans. A few months ago, at a Y dance, flattered by his interest, she had made the mistake of letting him kiss her. The kiss was all she wanted, and after she experienced it, she decided she wasn't that interested in Danny Abbott after all. But Danny couldn't let it go. He began to talk about her to his friends, and some of the stories got back to her. Danny was saying he had gotten a lot further with her than he had. Worse, he was saying she was anxious for more. She stopped having anything to do with him, but this just seemed to fuel his interest.

He strolled up to her with a confident smile, the big jock coming on to the impressionable little groupie. She felt her anger build. "So what's happening?" he asked, his voice slow and languid. "Catch anything?"

She shook her head. "Not much. What do you want?"

"Hey, don't be so p.r.i.c.kly." He brushed at his dark hair and looked off into the distance, like he was seeing into the future and taking its measure. "I was just wondering why I hadn't seen you around."

She s.h.i.+fted her weight from one foot to the other, forcing herself to look at him, refusing to be intimidated. "You know why, Danny."

He pursed his lips and nodded, as if thinking it through. "Okay, I made a mistake. I said some stuff I shouldn't have. I'm sorry. Can we drop it now? I like you, Nest. I don't want you p.i.s.sed off at me. Hey, why don't you stick around while I finish this game, and then we'll go out for a burger."

"I'm with my friends," she said.

"So? I'm with mine, too. They can go their way and we can go ours, right?"

He gave her his most dazzling smile, and it made her want to say yes in spite of herself. Stupid, stupid. She shook her head. "No, I've got to get home."

He nodded solemnly. "Okay. Maybe tomorrow night. You know what? There's a dance here at the park Sunday. The Jaycees are putting it on. Want to go with me?"

She shook her head a second time. "I don't think so."

"Why not?" A hint of irritation crept into his voice.

She bit her lip. "I'll probably come with my friends."

He gave a disgusted sigh. "You spend a lot of time with your friends, don't you?"

She didn't say anything.

He glanced past her and shook his head. "Why do you hang out with them, anyway? I don't get it." He was looking right at her now, facing her down. "It seems to me you're wasting your time."

Her lips tightened, but she still didn't say anything.

"I don't mean to be picking on them or anything, but just think about it. They're weird, Nest, in case you hadn't noticed.

Barbie Doll, Big Bertha, Joe s.p.a.ce Cadet, and Bobby the Mouth. Weird, Nest. What are you doing with them?"