Chain Letter Page 11

  This whole thing is killing me. Please, Tony?

  “Chances are a different person took each ad,” Kipp said, relaxing at the end of the slide, looking perfectly jovial for someone whose life was in danger. “Those people take thousands of ads a day.”

  “But how many in code?” Tony asked.

  “Half the ads in the paper are incomprehensible to me,” Kipp said.

  “Aren’t you even a little scared?” Alison asked.

  Kipp smiled. “I’m sleeping with my night-light on.”

  “I don’t know why you just don’t admit to cheating on the SAT,” Joan said, her bare legs hanging through the bent bars on the third stage of the rocket. Taking a drag on her cigarette, she sprinkled the ashes toward Kipp’s head. “A perfect score, hah! The whole school knows you had a black market answer sheet.”

  “I could have gotten 2400 on that test after finishing a six-pack,” Kipp said, leaning his head back, shielding his eyes from the sun. “I like that skirt, Joan, it goes with your purple underwear.”

  “I’m not wearing any underwear.”

  “Where’s Fran?” Brenda asked, shouldering a clay fort, standing away from the rest of them when one would have expected her to be holding on to her boyfriend. Tony cautioned himself, however, that he might be overstressing the unimportant. Brenda and Kipp were not a touch-crazy couple. They often sat apart. “Why isn’t she here?”

  “She’s in hiding,” Alison said. She was sitting beside him on the monkey bars. “Don’t you remember?”

  “Oh, yeah. Up . . . wherever she went.”

  Alison jumped on that. “Why did you say up?”

  “Huh?”

  “How did you know she had headed north?” Alison insisted.

  “I didn’t,” Brenda snapped, annoyed. “I just said up. I could have said down.”

  Neil lost his orange and it rolled in the sand. He picked it up and began to brush it off. The fruit was obviously ruined. “Bakersfield isn’t exactly north,” he said casually.

  Alison was shocked. “How did you know she went to Bakersfield?”

  Neil looked up, startled, and lost his orange again. Her tone—his angel’s harshness, Tony thought—seemed to bruise him. “Wasn’t I supposed to know? I was talking to Brenda yesterday and—”

  “Brenda?” Alison interrupted. All eyes went to the clay fort. Brenda no longer looked bored.

  “F-Fran’s parents told me,” she stuttered. “Big deal.”

  “But you just denied knowing where Fran was!” Alison said.

  “Because I thought that’s what you wanted me to do!”

  “Who else knew where Fran is?” Tony asked. Kipp and Joan remained silent. He glanced at the rest room down the hill by the lake. There was a phone attached to the ladies’ side. “Do you have Fran’s grandmother’s number?” he asked Alison.

  “In my purse. But I just called her yesterday. She was fine.”

  “Call her again, please, right now.” He nodded toward the phone, fishing change from his pocket. “Use this. We’ll wait here for you.”

  While Alison was gone, Tony studied the faces of each member of their gang and tried to imagine which two could make up a conspiracy. None matched, possibly because it was impossible to forget that he trusted these people.

  Alison was back soon, too soon. Looking lost, not saying a word, she sat down beside him. He did not have to ask.

  “Well?” Kipp said.

  “Her grandmother doesn’t know where she is,” Alison said. “When the woman got up this morning, Fran was gone.”

  “She probably went home,” Brenda said.

  Alison shook her head. “I called there.”

  “Maybe she went out for a long walk,” Joan said.

  “No,” Alison sighed. “She’s gone.”

  Chapter Twelve

  A loud noise woke Alison. She sat up in bed. It was dark in her room but she could see. This did not seem strange to her, not as strange as the knocking on the door downstairs. It was loud, and the house cringed at each blow. She waited for it to stop, to go on to another house, but it stayed. It wanted her to answer the door.

  She got out of bed. Her feet hardly seemed to touch the floor. She was surprised to discover that she was dressed. She could not remember when she had gone to bed but she was puzzled that she had not changed out of her clothes. She always did. Why then, she asked herself, was she wearing the same clothes she had worn to the concert last summer? They were covered with dirt. And her nails were black, like she had been digging with her hands.

  She walked to her bedroom door and stepped into the hall. All the lights in the house were out but the walls, the ceiling, and the floor were emitting a dull gray glow, a questionable improvement over utter blackness. Her feet were bare, except for a film of dust, but she was not cold. The house temperature was difficult to gauge. She was certain, however, that it was freezing outside. That was one of the reasons the person knocking wanted to get inside. The other reason was he wanted to get to her. She knew who this person was, though she could not remember his name. He was not someone she wanted to meet in a dark and lonely place. The person was dangerous.

  The knocking got louder, more insistent, and she began to feel afraid. The person was not knocking with his hands. He was using something heavy, something he might want to use to crush her head to a pulp. She hurried down the hall to her parents’ bedroom. The door was open and she peeked inside. The room was empty, the bed bare of blankets and sheets. Her parents were long gone. There was no one to protect her, no one else who could answer the door.

  She started down the stairs. She wanted to return to her bedroom and lock the door and hide in the closet but she knew that would make her a sitting duck. She had to get out of the house. Once outside, she would have the whole tract to hide in.

  Halfway down the stairs, she realized the banging was at the back door, not the front. The blows were changing, as the wood began to soften and splinter, giving in under the beating.

  She quickened her steps, passing through the empty living room. A faintly luminous, red-tinged gas had filled the lower portion of the house. She could not imagine what it was or where it had come from. Yet it was familiar, smelling of dry weeds and parched earth, making it difficult to breathe. But she could not hear her panting lungs, only feel the suffocation. All she could hear was her pounding heart and the pounding on the disinte-grating door.

  The front door would not open. It was not locked and the knob was not stuck; it simply would not open. She began to panic, especially when the banging suddenly halted. Terrifying as the pounding had been, its abrupt stopping could only mean the final obstacle to getting to her had been removed. She closed her eyes, cringing into the corner, waiting for the blade that would split her skull in two.

  But it never came. No one crossed the astral lagoon that was the living room. Praying for a second chance, she again tried the front door. Then something terrible happened, something worse than waking up in the middle of the night to the sound of an ax murderer chopping his way inside.

  Her hand stuck to the doorknob.

  It would not come off.

  On the other side of the door, someone began to knock, a polite civilized knock.

  “Who is it?” she cried.

  “You know,” the person said. “You have always known.”

  It was true, she did know, and the knowledge filled her with horror. She began to scream. And the door began to open.

  · · ·

  “Don’t come in!” Alison gasped, bolting upright in bed, her nightmare momentarily superimposed over her waking state, the cold, etheric light giving way in halting steps to the warm blanket of the normal dark room. Her right hand was interlocked with her left hand, losing an impossible tug-of-war. She relaxed her fingers and placed her palm on her moist forehead, the pounding blood reminding her all too clearly of the pounding on the dream door.

  The phone was ringing. Which had awakened her, the call or the terror? She glan
ced at her digital clock, saw it was 3 A.M., and reached for the phone.

  “Hello?”

  “Alison?”

  “I think so . . . Tony?”

  There was an eternal pause. “There’s been an accident. It’s Kipp.”

  She was slipping back into her nightmare. “Is he dead?” she whispered.

  “We don’t know.” He sounded crushed, defeated. “I’m calling from his house. The police are here.”

  “I’m coming.”

  “Don’t.” But the word had no force behind it. “Oh, if you want, I guess. But don’t speak to anyone till you talk to either Neil or me.”

  Putting down the phone, crying a little, she remembered the question.

  “Who is it?”

  But she could not remember the answer.

  · · ·

  The ax-wielding psychopath and the ringing phone had not awakened her parents, and she was able to get away without having to make impossible explanations. Although it took her better than an hour to reach Kipp’s house, two police cars were still there, their red lights spinning like maddened phantasms. She coasted by the house and parked up the street, using her rearview mirror to search for a glimpse of Tony. Somehow, she missed Neil’s approach, and when he knocked on her window, her taut nerves rammed her head into the car ceiling.

  “Sorry,” Neil said.

  Rubbing her bruised scalp, she rolled down the window. “It wasn’t your fault.” He leaned against the car as if he would otherwise fall down. Kipp’s street was old and the lights were dim. She could scarcely see Neil’s expression, but she saw enough to know it was bad. Kipp’s big-nosed face sprang into her mind, laughing in the sun, chewing on a blade of grass in the park, totally unconcerned that he was next on the list. You brilliant fool, what have they done to you? “Tony didn’t tell me . . . ” she began.

  “He should be here soon,” Neil answered, obviously wanting to spare her details she was in no hurry to hear. Neil moved aside, and she climbed out of the car and it cut her to the heart to see how he hobbled on one leg. She hugged him with her right arm.

  “We’re losing, aren’t we?” she said.

  He looked at her with what seemed surprise, and for a moment, depended solely upon her for support. She could feel him trembling. “It seems that way,” he said.

  That she could have mistrusted him, as she had told Tony, filled her with shame. A breeze, warm but still causing her to shiver, blew from the direction of Kipp’s brightly lit house, and she hugged him closer. “I’m sorry, Neil,” she said.

  “I am, too.”

  “I mean, I’m sorry for not understanding you.”

  There was no moon, but a snow white light gleamed deep in his eyes as he peered at her, inches away. “Alison?”

  “I wish we had talked more before all this started. You’re a great guy. I wish . . . I wish my dreams were different.” She winced, close to crying. She was making no sense but, for Christsakes, they were only kids! “I had a nightmare tonight. I’ve had it before. I’m alone in my house at night and someone is trying to get me—hacking at the door with an ax.” She closed her aching eyes for a moment. “And the worst part is, I know who it is.”

  “Who?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “The man?”

  “Neil?” she said suddenly, and she was almost begging. “Are you having nightmares?”

  “Not all the time.” He tilted his head back, staring at the hazy black sky. “I have some wonderful dreams. They’re full of colors and music and singing. When I’m in them, I wish they would never end. They remind me of the days before all this started.” His voice faltered and he lowered his head. “But I’m like you, I’ve been forgetting.” He frowned. “Yeah, I’ve been having nightmares.”

  “We shouldn’t talk about them. It doesn’t help. Tell me something happy. Was I . . . ?”

  Was I in your wonderful dreams?

  She didn’t get a chance to ask. Maybe she wouldn’t have, anyway; it was sort of a sentimental question to put to someone she knew only because she’d helped kill a stranger with him. Tony interrupted at that point, walking quickly up the street. She released Neil and he returned to leaning against her car. Wearing cutoffs, his sweatshirt inside out and backward, the tag hanging at his Adam’s apple, Tony embraced them both. His eyes were dry and when he spoke, his voice was calm. He had been hit hard but had mastered himself.

  “Do you know what has happened, Ali?” he asked.

  She shook her head. One of the patrol car’s red lights had come to a halt pointed directly at them, making the street look like Lucifer’s Lane. A policeman came out of the house and stared their way. Tony shifted his body in front of hers. “Kipp has disappeared,” he said. “He left behind . . . a lot of blood.”

  Sleeping with my night-light on.

  The shadowed street, the shining house, even Neil and Tony, receded and took on an unreal quality. She was watching a badly filmed colorless movie that ran on an unending reel. She was slipping away, feeling she had to get away. She had to force herself to ask, “How much is a lot?”

  “The police believe he could still be alive,” Tony said quickly. “We just don’t know. Somehow, without a lot of noise, he was overcome and dragged out his bedroom window. The trail of blood leads from the backyard to the street. His mother woke up when she heard what sounded like a truck starting up out front. She was the one who found the soaked mattress.” He added quietly, “She had to be sedated and taken to the hospital.”

  “How did you two come to be here?” she asked. The answer to the question did not really interest her. The puddle of blood said it all. She sought for the picture of Kipp in her head, but he was no longer laughing, fading as if even the life were running out of his memory.

  “After our meeting this afternoon,” Tony said, “Neil and I decided we wouldn’t let Kipp out of our sight. We came back to his house with him and sat around listening to music, talking, whatever. Then about nine Brenda came over with some beer. We were all so uptight with Fran disappearing, I guess we drank too much and forgot that we were supposed to be protecting Kipp. When he told us to leave so he could get some sleep, we figured no one would come after him in his own bedroom.” Tony ran his hand through his hair. “Then a couple of hours ago, when I was in bed, I got this call. It was a detective. Since Neil and I were the last ones to see him—Brenda didn’t stay long after bringing over the beer—he wanted to question us. He wanted to know if Kipp had any enemies.” Tony stopped and pulled a purple envelope out of his pocket. “I swear I would have told him the whole story, but I found this on my car seat when I went to drive over here.”

  The page inside the envelope was the familiar pale green. This time, the Caretaker came right to the point:

  If you are not certain they are dead, do what you know you shouldn’t, and be certain.

  Your Caretaker

  “What are we going to do?” Alison asked miserably.

  “I don’t know,” Tony said. “Not yet.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  They sat in the deserted courtyard of Grant High on the raunchy wooden benches Alison had always despised. The bell signaling the end of break had rung ten minutes ago, and Brenda and she had watched without moving while the other students had migrated to their next classes. The day was like every other day had been for what seemed like the last ten years: a little smoggy, a lot hot.

  “You don’t have to come with me,” Brenda said, refolding the morning paper. As with Kipp, none of them had passed on the letter to her, and still, she had not been spared. Fran’s and Kipp’s names had been blanked out but otherwise the Caretaker was sticking to his formula. Decoded, the ad in the paper read:

  B.P. Tell Every Teacher School Go To Hell

  Brenda had spent last week in a trance after learning the circumstances surrounding Kipp’s kidnapping. She was a fair actress but Alison had mentally crossed her off her list of suspects. No one could fake the anguish she was going throug
h. The only thing that had got her back on her feet was her strong desire to do her “duty.”

  “I’ll wait outside each classroom and give you pep talks in between teachers,” Alison said.

  “Who should I start with?” Brenda’s hair was unwashed and she wore no make-up. Incredibly, in the space of the last few days, gray hairs had begun to show near her ears.

  “Start with someone you hate. You may as well get some satisfaction out of this.” She added, “You won’t get far.”

  Brenda nodded wearily. “As long as I get an A for effort.” She climbed unsteadily to her feet. “Let’s go to Mrs. Franklin’s art class. That bitch gave me a D on a pretty giraffe I made my freshman year.”

  Waiting outside the door, Alison anticipated a loud commotion a few seconds after Brenda’s entrance. But she heard nothing and when Brenda reappeared a minute later, her expression was little changed. “The moron just stared at me like she didn’t understand,” she explained. “The class was too busy painting to notice.”

  They went to Mr. Cleaner’s history class next. Young and precise and as bald as an egg, he had made fun of Brenda’s choice of lipstick her junior year. He was not one of her favorite people. This time, Alison kept the door open a crack. It was terrible of her, but she really wanted to see the look on the teacher’s face.

  Brenda had not made it all the way to the front when Mr. Cleaner broke from his lecture and said, sounding slightly annoyed, “Yes, Miss Paxson. What can I do for you?”

  Brenda cleared her throat. “I wanted to tell you that you can go to hell.”

  The class went very still. Mr. Cleaner frowned and scratched the top of his shiny head. “Are you preaching, or what? This is hardly the time for it.”

  “No, no. I’m not trying to save your soul. I’m telling you that you can go to hell, and that I hope you do.”

  He responded briskly. “In that case, you can go to hell yourself. And while you’re at it, get the hell out of my class.”

  The kids started laughing. Red faced—she had not got the best of it—Brenda turned and ran for the door. Alison took her by the arm and pulled her outside and around the side of the building, where they hid between the bushes.