Читать книгу Gemini Rising - Brian McNaughton - Страница 7

CHAPTER FOUR

Ken had designed their home as an advertisement for his professional ability, to show what kind of house he could build when given a free hand and plenty of money. Glass and redwood predominated. Its canted roofs suggested wings, as if it were an ungainly creature straining to take flight from the hill where it had been bound.

Marcia had never really liked it. It was a California house, designed to take advantage of an environment perpetually bright and sunny. Here, its open, glassy style made the often-dismal weather a more intimate and unavoidable part of their lives. No part of it could be called cozy. In their most bitter argument, Marcia had called it a futuristic henhouse. It had taken Ken a long time to forgive her for that.

Now, surprisingly, light flooded from the glass walls of the living room. As Marcia came up the long drive, she saw that lights were on everywhere. Ken’s car wasn’t in the carport. She felt a chill. Had something happened to one of the children while she’d been dawdling at the office or taking the hitchhiker out of her way?

She ran from her car, not bothering to close the door. Her fears multiplied when Lucifer didn’t appear, barking and dancing in circles to celebrate her homecoming. Something was very wrong.

The front door wasn’t locked, but that wasn’t unusual. She raced up the front stairs and through the brick-walled atrium, another feature inappropriate to the climate: the plastic bubbles that roofed it always leaked when it rained or snowed. She hurried into the immense living room, where Melody sat listening to the stereo.

The spotlights running on two tracks in the high ceiling had been turned to illuminate the Japanese garden outside. One of them was arranged dramatically to spotlight Melody’s gold hair. She looked unperturbed—but then, she always did. Even so, her quiet, relaxed pose had a calming effect on Marcia. She paused to catch her breath.

Analyze Melody feature by feature, and you would have said she was a weird-looking girl; but the totality of her face transcended the sum of its parts to produce something that was striking and original and almost alarmingly attractive. Her blue eyes were narrow and slanted over very high and prominent cheekbones. Her nose was short, and tilted up at an angle that might have made it seem ugly on another face. Her mouth was wide, her lips firm and full above a squarish chin that was cleft in the middle. She wore her hair in two gold braids encircling her small, regal head. Her expression was habitually one of total impassivity, but it nevertheless gave to strangers an impression of contemptuous arrogance, even cruelty: with her slanted eyes and lithe, compact body, she might have been a princess of the Huns.

Melody was Marcia’s oldest child—her child, not Ken’s. She had been conceived at the time of Marcia’s nervous breakdown at the commune in the Black Hills, and Marcia didn’t know who her father was.

Marcia found the courage necessary to walk into the living room and determine what was going on. Melody turned her expressionless face toward her mother. She could light up a room when she smiled, but she seldom did.

“Lucy’s gone,” Melody said gravely.

“Oh, God,” Marcia groaned, half in relief. “Turn the music down, won’t you?”

Melody got up to comply as her mother sank into a chair. Melody had highbrow taste that ran to the more obscure baroque composers. Marcia preferred rock. Sometimes she had the odd feeling that her daughter was more mature than she was.

“What happened?” Marcia asked when the music had been muted to a silvery whisper.

Melody shrugged. “He just didn’t show up for his dinner. The kids carried on something awful. They wouldn’t go to bed until Ken promised to drive around and look for him.”

“He’s probably in love again.”

Melody studied her for a long moment, then said: “Maybe. He’s been wandering off at night a lot. But I think this is the first time in his life he ever missed his dinner. I think the dognappers got him this time.”

“Oh, I don’t think so. Who’d steal a Doberman?”

“That’s the kind they want. I read in this article. Because everybody is scared and wants to have a killer dog. Plus they want them for dog-fights, with betting.”

“Well. If that’s the case, they’ll give him back when they find out what they’ve stolen.”

Marcia’s relief that her children were safe didn’t last long. A sudden pang of grief hit her at the thought of Lucifer’s possible theft. His personality was unique among his breed. He would make playful but timid overtures to cats and rabbits. He had always reminded her of Ferdinand the Bull, who would rather smell flowers than face matadors. The idea of his theft by men who would try to train him to viciousness was almost unbearable.

Nor was that her only worry. “How did Ken take all this? I mean, what kind of mood was he in?”

“You mean, was he drunk?” Melody asked.

Marcia was often disconcerted by her daughter’s talent for discerning her unspoken thoughts.

“Not really,” Melody went on, as if answering herself. “He was sort of harassed and fretful, you know, with the kids acting up. And he thinks Lucifer is a royal pain in the ass anyway. I guess mostly he was happy for an excuse to get out of the house.”

Melody had resisted early efforts to make her call Ken “Dad,” and she had always felt free to speak her mind about him. In many ways, she was more like a younger sister to Marcia than a daughter. For babysitting wages, she took much of the burden of the younger children—Roger, ten, and Karen, eight—from Marcia’s shoulders. Marcia wasn’t sure whether this arrangement was the healthiest one for her and Melody, but it seemed to work smoothly; and it permitted her to keep her job at the Banner.

It was awkward, therefore, to assume a parental manner as she asked, “And why aren’t you in bed?”

Melody shrugged. Marcia thought she caught a flicker of emotion on her daughter’s face, an emotion that might have been anxiety.

“You have school tomorrow, don’t you?”

“School sucks.”

“Oh, Melody. I wish you wouldn’t talk that way.”

“Well, it does. When I get interested in something, it always turns out to be so easy that it bores me. And the other stuff just bores me, period. Plus all the kids act like they’re still twelve years old.”

Marcia stared out at the well-swept carpet of pebbles, dominated by a grotesque stone god, that was the Japanese garden. Melody was a precocious girl, mentally and physically mature beyond her years. Because she was so intelligent and self-sufficient, because she looked and talked so much like a self-possessed young adult, it was easy to put aside her problems until more pressing matters had been settled. But she did have problems. She couldn’t relate to her contemporaries, she had no close female friends, and she habitually chilled suitors with her incisive wit. It must have taken great emotional effort for her to maintain her cool façade at all times, and maybe that effort would eventually prove too much of a strain for someone who was really still a child.

But, as always seemed to be the case, this wasn’t the time to hold a serious talk with Melody. She ought to be in bed. Marcia herself was tired, and she had to look in on the other children.

“School bored me, too,” Marcia said, rising. “But you have to put up with it so you can go on to college, where it gets interesting.”

“You didn’t go to college,” Melody stated.

“No, but I regret it. Get ready for bed, okay?”

Marcia left the room, fully aware that her argument had been unconvincing; but it had been the best she could offer at this hour, in this state of mind. Ken had once told her that the motto that had sustained him through the army had been, “Grit your teeth and put in your time.” Had this become the motto of her own life, and was she trying to pass on this wisdom to her daughter? It was an arid philosophy, but it worked from day to day.

She gently opened the door of the room that the two younger children shared, an arrangement that Roger was growing to resent. He had reached the age when he preferred snakes and turtles to girls, and he regarded his little sister as the worst of a bad lot.

Marcia was surprised, even so, to find them sleeping in their own beds. In far less traumatic crises than the present one, Karen would wait for Roger to drop off, then sneak into his bed and cuddle up beside him. That never failed to provoke a bellow of rage from Roger when he woke up in the morning.

They had inherited her coloring: raven-black hair, dark eyes, rosy-white complexions. She watched them sleeping for a while by the dim illumination of their night-light, then stepped forward quietly to fuss with Karen’s covers. The act was unnecessary, but she wanted to do something to express the sudden upsurge of warmth she felt at the sight of her sleeping children.

She was forced to admit that life was more than an exercise in meaningless stoicism. Quiet moments like this gave meaning to all of it.

“Mommy?”

Karen’s sleep had apparently not been sound. Eyes that seemed bottomless in their night-adapted darkness gazed up at Marcia.

“Shh. Sleep now.”

“Mommy, are the doctors going to cut Lucy up into pieces for experiments?”

“Good God. Of course not! Who told you that?”

“Roger said.”

She shot a vexed glance at Roger’s bed. He slept like a log.

“That’s not true, honey. He was telling you a story. Daddy will find Lucy. Go to sleep now, and he’ll be here in the morning when you wake up.”

“Why is Roger so mean to me?”

“Hush. He feels bad about Lucy himself, and so he imagined the worst possible thing he could think of. But Lucy will be all right. You’ll see.”

The little speech was wasted, because Karen had already drifted back to sleep. Marcia made a final adjustment to her covers and stole from the room, closing the door quietly behind her. She had resisted telling Karen a truth that seemed obvious to her: no one would waste a dog as valuable as Lucifer on medical experiments. Growing up in this ostentatious house, the children could easily fall into the trap of believing that money was omnipotent.

She rapped lightly at Melody’s door.

“Come in.”

Her eldest daughter sat on the edge of her bed in a white nightdress, giving her hair its customary hundred brush-strokes. It was as long as Marcia’s own, even fuller, and it gleamed like shimmery metal. Melody looked younger, and uncharacteristically vulnerable when her hair was unbound like this.

“What’s wrong, Mom?”

“I…” She had entered with the vague idea of giving Melody some comfort, perhaps adding something to her earlier, inadequate words. But Melody had detected her uneasiness. “Nothing. What time did Ken go out?”

“I don’t know. Eight, eight-thirty.”

Marcia was startled. It was now well past midnight. He couldn’t have spent all this time looking for the dog. He wasn’t even fond of the dog. Her earlier anxieties, still without clear focus, began to return. Maybe Ken had picked up the wrong hitchhiker. Nonsense: Ken would never stop for a hitchhiker.

“You really ought to be in bed.”

“I’m getting there,” Melody said with a shrug. “Sometimes…”

“What?”

“Sometimes I just don’t feel like sleeping,” she said, but the statement had overtones of evasion.

“Do you feel like talking about it?”

Melody managed a laugh. “There’s nothing to say about it. I’m just not sleepy, that’s all.”

“Good night, dear.”

‘Night.”

Marcia remembered the quiet drink she had wanted earlier. She went to the kitchen and mixed it. She was just pouring it from the pitcher into one of the glasses Ken kept chilled in the freezer when headlights swept across the windows.

“Damn,” she breathed, but she went to the freezer and got a second glass. There was enough left in the pitcher to fill it. She put an olive in each, and she was just carrying the drinks into the living room when Ken entered through the atrium.

“Wow,” he said. “That’s what I call service.”

She smiled as she set the drinks on a table before the unlighted fireplace, but she was bitterly disappointed to have been denied a few quiet moments by herself. “You didn’t find Lucifer,” she said.

Ken was a big man, heavier than he ought to be, with a ruddy complexion. He was handsome, and he knew that his grin was charming. People who didn’t know the situation sometimes remarked that Melody had inherited her blue eyes and blonde hair from her father, but Ken would always set them straight. In his fawn leisure suit, colorful sportshirt, and Gucci loafers, he seemed overdressed for hunting a stray dog.

He shrugged. “I went around to the neighbors. Told the police. It’s too late for an ad in your paper, isn’t it?”

She disliked the way he always said “your” paper, as if referring to something that existed solely for her amusement. But maybe he didn’t mean it that way. She said, “Yes.”

“Then I popped into the office to finish up some specs. Took a roundabout way home, still looking. No dice. I wouldn’t get my hopes up, honey. Thieves put a premium on Dobies, and Lucy would be easy to steal.”

Ken knocked back his drink in two swallows, then went to the kitchen to mix some more. Marcia took a sip of hers and shivered. She wondered why the drink had seemed so desirable in anticipation and now she didn’t like the taste of the martini at all. She felt very tired.