Ed Gorman - Serpent's kiss

"I wish I could help you." O'Sullivan had visions of the small Italian joint around the corner. A little table in the rear with the cliche red-and-white-checkered tablecloth in the back and a green wine bottle with candle drippings running down the neck and a small steady candle glow lighting the really sweet face of Chris Holland across from him. That's how he wanted to spend his break. Not chasing down some stupid story that more properly belonged to the National Enquirer .

"You can help me, Walter."

"Oh, shit. Here we go."

"There's a janitor."

"A janitor." He couldn't help being sarcastic. At least this one time.

"Yes, Walter. A janitor."

"What about him?"

"Emily talked to him on several occasions. He worked at Hastings House for forty years before he retired. He knows what's going on there. Dobyns may have contacted him. He may know something about this Marie Fane. Could you go talk to him?"

"I thought we were going to have dinner."

''We'll have dinner afterward."

"Afterward. Right."

"You want his address?"

"Whose address?"

"The janitor's address. God, Walter, you're supposed to be a news director."

"Yeah. A hungry one."

"Here's his name and address." So she gave it to him.

Reluctantly, he wrote it down.

"We're going to keep trying to find Marie Fane," Chris said.

"I can't believe you're buying all this."

"I'm not. Not entirely, anyway. But it's a lot more interesting than On the Town ."

He sighed. "Yeah, I suppose that's true." He paused. "Holland, I was going to put the moves on you again tonight."

"Really?"

"Really."

"I thought we'd kind of given up on that."

"Well, no harm in trying again."

"I'd like that, Walter."

"I thought I'd buy you some pasta and a nice salad-"

"Come on, Walter. We've got work to do."

"Thanks for reminding me."

"Please go see the janitor. All right?"

"All right."

He hung up.

When he turned around and faced the deserted newsroom, he realised how lonely he felt most of the time. Cynical as he was about human nature, he needed other people around him.

Especially one person in particular named Chris Holland.

He hadn't been kidding about putting the moves on her. Who said a romance couldn't grow out of a friendship? He was already reading about just such relationships in all the magazines ( Redbook, Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping ) that the women were leaving in the unisex john.

He was still hoping that someday somebody would leave new copies of Baseball Digest and Sports Illustrated in there as well.

Resigning himself to the fact that dinner tonight was going to be at the McDonald's drive-up window, he tugged on his unlined London Fog and went out the back door to the parking lot.

She had long been a believer in premonitions, Kathleen Fane had.

One day in second grade she'd stared over at the boy across the aisle from her-Bobby Bannock by name-and saw a strange light encircling his head. Years later, she would come to know this curious configuration of sculptured neon as an 'aura' but on that long-ago day all she knew was that the light-even though she had nothing to compare it to-bespoke something terrible that was soon to happen to Bobby Bannock.

Sister Mary Carmelita had caught her staring at Bobby and had harshly chastised Kathleen for doing so. Sister Mary Carmelita did not much approve of girls and boys interacting, even on so harmless a level as staring.

Blushing, Kathleen had sat up straight in her desk and looked at the blackboard where the nun had just finished writing the words 'Christopher Columbus.'

She did not look at Bobby the rest of the day, not even at recess when she usually sat beneath a shade tree daintily eating the crisp red autumn apple her mother always poked into the pocket of her blue buttoned sweater.

Three days later, just after school, just at the corner that so many parents complained about, Bobby was struck by a black Ford and killed. One little girl actually saw Bobby's head strike the pavement and heard his skull crack. A little boy insisted that he'd actually seen Bobby's brains ooze out through that crack.

Ever since, Kathleen had felt in some way responsible for Bobby's death. Even if he'd laughed at her-he had usually laughed at most things she'd said-she should have warned him, told him about the strange light around his head and what it portended.

She stood now at the dusk window watching the walk below. In three and a half hours, her daughter Marie would be walking up those stairs, on her way back from the bookstore and what amounted to her first date. The autumn sky-salmon pink and grey streaked with yellow now at evening-struggled to give birth to night.

Kathleen wished now that she'd handled the whole matter better.

In her defence, she thought that she might have been more receptive to the idea of a date-even admittedly an informal one-if only Marie had given her a little warning.

Kathleen shook her head.

Sometimes her life seemed to be little more than a long list of regrets.

These days she wished, for example, that she'd been more compliant with her husband where sex was concerned. He really hadn't asked for much but Kathleen had always been something of a prude and the notion of actually putting his thing in her mouth- Well, without exactly knowing why, the whole idea had always frightened her. Now she wished she'd done it, at least a few times, and at least with the pretence of enjoyment. She'd certainly enjoyed it when he'd put his mouth on her down there and-

So many regrets with Marie these days.

How badly Kathleen wanted to strike the right balance of strict but compassionate. That was the key to raising a teenager well. Strict but compassionate.

Tonight was a milestone of sorts in Marie's life. That's where the compassion should have come in. Kathleen should have shared Marie's obvious excitement for the evening.

And now there was the premonition.

It wasn't a vision. She hadn't seen any curious light around Marie's head this afternoon.

It was just a feeling.

A terrible, fluttering feeling in both her chest and her stomach.

Something awful was going to happen to Marie tonight.

That's where the strict came in.

She should have risked disappointing or even angering Marie and just said it- Even though you think I'm being hysterical honey, I've just got this notion about tonight. This feeling, honey. There's no other way to explain it. I know you think your mother's crazy and old-fashioned and just trying to spoil all your fun but, honey- (And then maybe she'd tell Marie, for the first time ever, about little Bobby Bannock in second grade, and about the terrible thing that had happened to him and about the terrible sin Kathleen had committed by not warning him-)

She continued to stare out the window.

The downtown buildings were outlined in black against a dark blue sky. Somewhere in this evening radiance was her daughter who thought she was so big and impervious but was still this little girl-

Then Kathleen smiled.

She thought of how freaky Marie considered herself. No matter how many times you told her how pretty she was or how bright or how giving or caring-

No matter what you said, Marie always considered herself a freak.

Her foot, of course. That was the culprit.

You couldn't really be pretty or bright and walk with a limp. That was what Marie thought. Believed.

So tonight would be good for her.

She hoped the boy somehow convinced Marie that she was a worthy and desirable person.

Self-esteem, Kathleen thought. Oprah and Phil and Sally Jessy and even Geraldo preached it, and so did most modern psychologists.