Ed Gorman - Nightmare Child

"Just show me the advertising, son, and cut the bullshit."

Flushing, not liking to be berated in front of the rest of the team, Jeff said, "Yessir."

And whipped back the covering to reveal a brand-new print ad on which three brand-new TV commercials had been based.

Jeff read the theme line: "Reddy Teddy. With the smell and taste of charcoal-broiled steak."

What ensued then was what always ensued when you pitched a client. You sat and studied his face as he thought it over. If it twitched, was that a bad sign? If he cleared his throat, was that a good sign? Once they'd even had a client pass gas, and God only knew what that had meant.

Five minutes later Mr. Culhane said, "I'll tell you one thing, boys. It sure doesn't give me the chills. I guess I expected a lot better campaign than this."

Eleven months before, Diane Purcell wouldn't have been able to tell you the difference between an annual and a perennial. Tending soil, preparing plant beds, spacing seedlings properly, fertilizing-none of this had ever appealed to the forty-one-year-old schoolteacher until her husband, Charlie, had died so suddenly of a heart attack.

Now-having quit her job because of all the insurance money and because she vaguely had the idea of writing a book along the lines of the Victoria Holt novels she loved so much-her daily reality was her garden.

Wearing one of Charlie's blue work shirts and a faded pair of her own jeans, Diane worked in the garden, tending her nasturtiums and marigolds. The autumn wind coming down the hill was melancholy with the smells of smoke and sunlight. Here it was, already the first week of November, and the temperature remained at sixty-seven. The Midwest was rarely this warm.

Knees tired, Diane rose, dabbing at her face with her forearm, her rubber-gloved hand full with a trowel. A slender woman with dark hair usually worn in a soft chignon, Diane's blue-eyed face had clarity that some mistook for beauty. But she had long known better.

The slight hill her house sat on gave her the opportunity to look around the rest of Stoneridge Estates, seventeen expensive homes set against the backdrop of a massive forest. She particularly admired the way everybody had insisted on different styles for their homes, helping to avoid the look of a development. On her block, a U-shaped dead end, you found a Georgian next to a French Normandy-style farmhouse next to a sprawling, two-level ranch. Her own home was a country style with a dramatic two-story foyer, a formal living room with a marble fireplace, whitewashed oak floors, extensive wood moldings, and French doors. There was even a sumptuous master bath with a vaulted ceiling, skylights, and a sunken whirlpool tub, with planter boxes on the surrounding deck.

Their dream home, it had been. Both having come from relatively wealthy families, and Charlie being a most handsomely rewarded general surgeon, the Purcell's had spent the last six years there as blissful as any couple could be. Not even the fact that Diane was unable to bear children troubled them unduly. They had each other and that was more than enough.

Some nights now were unendurable, memories too vivid, lonely-ache too raw. She was beyond tears, into something far more vast and terrifying. A shrink had been suggested, and while she'd tried one twice, the sessions had yielded nothing but a certain embarrassing self-consciousness. Diane had always been a very private person.

She was just about to drop to her knees once more and resume working with the trowel when the caw of a silken blackbird caught her attention and she looked up the timbered, sloping hill behind her where sunlight dappled the brown grass of a clearing.

A young girl stood in the clearing, obviously staring at Diane.

Diane's first reaction was to reject what her eye told her was true. It could not be. Impossible.

Her second reaction was to whisper to herself, "My God, I don't believe it."

In the clearing stood nine-year-old Jenny, the next-door neighbor girl who had this past summer been kidnapped and presumably killed. Diane had always been enormously fond of the girl, perhaps even thinking of her subconsciously as a substitute for the daughter she could never have.

Dropping her trowel, putting out her arms, Diane started running up the hill, laughing and crying at the same time.

As she drew closer, she shouted, "It is you, Jenny! It is you! You're home!"

Mindy had not always been fat. She dated her obesity from the day she'd lost her first and only pregnancy to a miscarriage. In dreams, nightmares really, Mindy still spoke to the shadowy little girl who'd come to nothing but a bloody puddle. From then on, she'd eaten with an almost psychotic hunger.

Attempting to sate that hunger, she presently did jumping jacks on the sunny redwood deck in the rear of her opulent Mediterranean-style white-brick home, just west of the landscaped courtyard.

As the disco music pounded from the small Sony recorder, as the sweat inside her pink jogging suit with the black piping began to have the viscous texture of oil, she opened her eyes to see if there were any bunnies on the hill behind their place.

It was then that she saw the girl.

Doing a double take that Abbott and Costello would have been proud of, Mindy's stare became a glare and she stalked so abruptly to the edge of the deck that she stumbled over the tape recorder. So angry and frightened was she, that she drop-kicked the tape-player clear over the edge of the deck, into an orange swirl of autumn flowers.

It could not be.

No way.

But it was.

Fleeing inside, slamming into the sliding-glass door that led to the deck, Mindy began to hyperventilate. Within two more steps her nose began to bleed.

"Oh, God," she said, recalling what Dr. Moeller, the psychotherapist, had told her to do.

Stretching herself out on the oak floor of the living room, she was at once attacked by her golden toy poodle, Ringo.

Liking blood, the dog began to lap at her nose, his quick pink tongue sandpaper-rough on her face.

"Oh, please Ringo. I don't need any more grief," she said, trying to push the dog away.

But even this much movement caused her nose to spurt more red blood, so that all she could do was back-down, and let Ringo have at her.

"She's alive," Mindy said miserably. "We killed her, we buried her two hundred miles from here, but she's alive. Do you hear that, Ringo? She's alive!"

Ringo just continued to yip and lick her face.

Once Jenny was in her arms, Diane knelt next to the small girl for a closer look at her. Dirt darkened Jenny's face and smudged her white blouse, jeans, and Reeboks. Her blond hair was a bird's nest of tiny leaves. She looked as if she'd been traveling for days. But kneeling there in the clearing, the sun warm on her back, Diane was far more disturbed by Jenny's eyes, a blank blue that suggested shock.

"Where did you come from, Jenny?"

Jenny's gaze registered understanding but she said nothing, just stared at Diane.

"Why don't we go tell Mindy you're home? Do you know how happy she'll be?"

Diane rose and took Jenny's fragile hand, starting to lead her toward the McCay property.

Jenny's grip suddenly became iron. She jerked on Diane's hand, pulling Diane back.

"You don't want to go home? You don't want to see your sister?" Diane asked.

With the severe blue gaze unchanged, Jenny shook her head.

"Where do you want to go, then?" Diane said, her glee having turned abruptly to a curious exasperation.

With her free hand, Jenny pointed to the house: Diane's house.

"Do you have any idea how many people were looking for you? The TV stations estimated that more than one thousand people joined the search one Saturday. And that wasn't counting the police and the State Patrol and the State Bureau of Investigation." Diane said all this as they stood in the bathroom. She washed Jenny's face and hands with a soft pink washcloth soaked in warm, soapy water. "They searched parks and farmland and the clay hills to the north and they put your picture in all the supermarkets and sports arenas and department stores. And once a night, there was an update about you." Diane frowned. "I hate to say this, Jenny, but everybody started believing that you were dead. They just assumed that your kidnappers had gotten scared and murdered you."