Ed Gorman - Nightmare Child

From across the way, the McCay house came a shout.

When she looked up, she recalled for the first time that morning how a similar shout had awakened her last night. Her initial impression had been that Jeff and Mindy had been having a furious argument. But while one voice was definitely Jeff's, the other voice did not necessarily belong to Mindy.

Now, she realized that voice definitely was not Mindy's. A harsh crone's voice, the person made screeching noises that Diane could not quite comprehend as words.

As abruptly as it had come up, the voice vanished. Diane sat in the kitchen, brow furrowed, looking across the way at the McCay house. The curtains all drawn, smoke curling up from the chimney, the place seemed quiet and normal enough.

Shrugging, Diane went back to her newspaper, reading for twenty minutes until the timer went off, and she took the first batch of cookies from the oven.

Using a spatula to pick the cookies up neatly from the cookie sheet, Diane was filling a plate with plump chocolate-chip dreams when she heard another shout from next door. The voice was positively that of Jeff McCay.

Sensing the urgency of his tone, she set the spatula down next to the cookie sheet, and then ran across the kitchen to the window.

Jeff, dressed for the cold weather this time, stood on the front porch shouting to a closed door, "This is your only chance, Mindy! You'd better take it!"

With that, he turned, picked up a lone leather suitcase, and started down the stairs to the shoveled drive, where the BMW was parked.

He turned around once again and addressed the house. Because there was no sign of Mindy at any of the windows, his shouts seemed theatrical, even a bit mad.

"Don't you understand, Mindy? Don't you understand by now? We've got to get out-and get out now! Mindy, please! Believe me!"

Maybe his tormented style would have seemed less crazy if it had not been a sunny winter morning and if "The Young and the Restless" hadn't been playing in the background.

Under the circumstances, however, he struck Diane as being insane, pathetically so.

Apparently waiting for a response, Jeff stood in the driveway rubbing his head with a black-gloved hand, staring up at a second-story window.

Three minutes went by, during which time Diane heard two complete plot turns take place on "The Young and the Restless."

"Mindy! I'm going to get in the car now! I mean it!"

With that, Jeff picked up the massive brown leather bag and walked down the driveway to where the red BMW had been parked overnight in front of the three-car garage.

Opening the trunk, Jeff set his suitcase inside, then walked around to the front of the car, opened the door, and leaned on the horn.

The noise was loud and irritating on the quiet, lovely winter morning. He kept it up, his dark gaze mad for sure now.

"Mindy!" he shouted over the sound of the horn. "Mindy, please come with me!"

Three or four minutes rolled by. Mindy, wherever she was inside, chose not to respond.

Finally, shoulders slumping, a tearful expression tightening his face, Jeff slid inside the BMW and started the engine. From the exhaust pipe a putt-putt of cold-morning exhaust could be seen and, anticipating the work of the defroster, Jeff wiped away steam from the inside windshield.

He had not given up entirely. The engine running smoothly now, he sat in the driveway and gave the horn one last try, a mournful, foghorn bass that seemed to rattle the windows of Diane's house. There was a pleading tone to the horn now, a futile summoning that Mindy, for whatever reason, was obviously not going to answer.

Slumping toward the steering wheel, Jeff started pounding the dashboard with his fists, a five-year-old throwing a tantrum.

Then, abruptly, he quit his pounding, sat back, put the car into gear, and started backing out of the driveway.

He had gone perhaps ten yards when smoke started pouring in thick gray clouds from the trunk.

Slamming on the brakes, jumping from the car, Jeff ran to the rear of the car, jammed in the key, and threw back the lid.

The smoke became massive now, and for a moment Jeff was lost to Diane-all but his trousers from the knees down-inside the smudgy gray-black smoke.

She heard him curse once and then she saw him emerging from the smoke. He carried the suitcase. It was on fire and was the source of all the smoke.

He hurled it into a snowbank and began scooping up soft white snow to put out the fire. It did not take long. Jeff worked with a certain manic compulsion, as if he needed something physical to do at this moment to keep from going clinically insane.

The fire out, Jeff closed the lid, stood looking up at the house a long moment, then went around and got back behind the wheel again.

He started the engine, put the car in reverse, and started out of the driveway again.

This time he reached the edge of the street before the engine caught on fire.

They were almost pretty, the red and yellow flames against the pure white snow, the pure blue sky.

His life was in no way endangered-he got out of the car in plenty of time-but the engine was most likely ruined, fire and smoke pouring up from under the hood.

He raised his eyes to his house. In the doorway now stood Mindy, dressed in a pale blue robe, gaunt from her loss of weight. She beckoned to him to return and so he did, leaving the car in the driveway to burn out.

He went inside his house and closed the door.

It had been a very short trip.

Dinner that Saturday night was braised beef tips, a salad, and whole-wheat bread that Diane had made from scratch.

She had not used the dining room since well before her husband's death. Now, the candlelight made the room luxurious with the gleam of light on mahogany, of rich warm shadows.

During the meal, Diane told Robert what had happened that day to Jeff McCay's trip.

"He just disappeared into the house," she explained. "Then around four this afternoon, he went out and pushed the car up the driveway, away from the road."

"Sounds pretty strange."

"That's what I hoped you'd say."

He glanced up from his salad. "Why?"

"Because then you can go over there and find out what's going on."

He shrugged. Tonight he wore a white shirt, gray cardigan sweater, and chinos. She felt far more comfortable with him than she wanted to admit to herself.

"Mindy would come to the door and that would be that."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning that she'd say, yes, their car did catch on fire and that, yes, everything is all right now."

"In other words, she wouldn't let you inside?"

"Right."

"On TV, detectives are always getting search warrants."

He laughed. "Maybe on TV, Diane. In real life, judges don't hand those out without a good reason."

"But something's going on over there."

"But what's going on exactly?"

"You said yourself it was 'pretty strange.'"

"Yes, I did. But that doesn't mean I can show cause."

"But-"

He put his fork down and reached across the table, his hand brushing hers there in the romantic shadows. "A little girl lives in the house. She's sick. Two adults live with her. They're kind of funny sometimes, kind of odd. Today their car caught on fire. Nobody was injured, and later in the day Jeff pushed the car back up the drive. Now, does that sound like it's worth giving me a search warrant over?"

"You forgot about him running out into the night stark naked."

"A good point, but what does it prove? That he walks in his sleep? Obviously, he wasn't injured, and apparently nobody else was. You yourself saw Mindy in the doorway."

"She looked gaunt."

"Gaunt, but not in any trouble?"

"Well…"

"Or looking as if she needed help?"

"Well…"

"Or in any way asking you for help?"