Greg Iles: 24 Hours

When the house came into sight, Karen felt the ambivalence that always suffused her at the sight of it. Her first emotion was pride. She and Will had designed the house, and she had handled all the contracting work herself. Despite the dire warnings of friends, she had enjoyed this, but when the family finally moved in, she had felt more anticlimax than accomplishment. She could not escape the feeling that she’d constructed her own prison, a gilded cage like all the others on Crooked Mile Road, each inhabited by its own Mississippi version of Martha Stewart, the new millennium’s Stepford wives.

Karen pulled into the garage bay nearest the laundry room entrance. Abby unhooked her own safety straps but waited for her mother to open her door.

“Let’s get some iced tea,” Karen said, setting Abby on the concrete. “How do you feel?”

“Good.”

“Did you tee-tee a lot this afternoon?”

“No. I need to go now, though.”

“All right. We’ll check your sugar after. Then we’ll get the tea. We’re going to have some fun today, kid. Just us girls.”

Abby grinned, her green eyes sparkling. “Just us girls!”

Karen opened the door that led from the laundry room to the walk-through pantry and kitchen. Abby squeezed around her and went inside. Karen followed but stopped at the digital alarm panel on the laundry room wall and punched in the security code.

“All set,” she called, walking through the pantry to the sparkling white kitchen. “You want crackers with your tea?”

“I want Oreos!”

Karen squeezed Abby’s shoulder. “You know better than that.”

“It’s only a little while till my shot, Mom. Or you could give me that new kind of shot right now. Couldn’t you?”

Abby was too smart for her own good. Conventional forms of insulin had to be injected thirty minutes to an hour before meals, which made controlling juvenile diabetes difficult. If a child lost her appetite after the shot and refused to eat, as children often did, blood sugar could plummet to a dangerous level. To solve this problem, a new form of insulin called Humalog had been developed, which was absorbed by human cells almost instantly. It could be injected right before a meal, during the meal, or even just after. Physicians like Will were some of the first to get access to the drug, and its convenience had revolutionized the daily lives of families with diabetic children. However, Humalog also tempted children to break their dietary rules, since they knew that an “antidote” was near to hand.

“No Oreos, kiddo,” Karen said firmly.

“Okay,” Abby griped. “Iced tea with a lemon. I’m going to tee-tee.”

“I’ll have it waiting when you get back.”

Abby paused at the hall door. “Will you come with me?”

“You’re a big girl now. You know where the light is. I’m going to fix the tea while you’re gone.”

“Okay.”

As Abby trudged up the hallway, Karen looked down at The New England Journal of Medicine and felt the twinge of anger and regret she always did when confronted by tangible symbols of the profession she’d been forced to abandon. She was secretly glad that the flower show had given her an excuse to miss the medical convention, where she would be relegated to “wife” status by men who couldn’t have stayed within fifteen points of her in a chemistry class. Next month, Will’s drug research would be published in this very magazine, while she would be entangled in the next Junior League service project. She shoved the magazine across the counter with the rest of the mail and opened the stainless-steel refrigerator.

Every appliance in the kitchen was a Viking. The upscale appliances were built in Greenwood, Mississippi, and since Will had done the epidurals on two pregnant wives from the “corporate family,” the Jennings house boasted a kitchen that could have been featured in the AD that had come in today’s mail-at a discounted price, of course. Karen had grown up with a noisy old Coldspot from Sears, and a clothes-line to dry the wash. She could appreciate luxury, but she knew there was more to life than a showpiece home and flower shows. She took the tea pitcher from the Viking, set it on the counter, and began slicing a lemon.

Abby slowed her pace as she moved up the dark hallway. Passing her bedroom, she glanced through the half-open door. Her dolls were arranged against the headboard of her tester bed, just as she’d left them in the morning, Barbies, Beatrix Potter bunnies, and Beanie Babies, all mixed together like a big family. The way she liked them.

Five more steps carried her to the hall bathroom, where she stretched on tiptoe to reach the light switch. She pulled up her jumper and used the commode, glad that she didn’t tee-tee very much. That meant her sugar was okay. After fixing her clothes, she climbed up on a stool before the basin and carefully washed and dried her hands. Then she started for the kitchen, leaving the bathroom light on in case she needed to come back.

As she passed her bedroom, she noticed a funny smell. Her dolls all looked happy, but something didn’t seem right. She started to walk in and check, but her mother’s voice echoed up the hall, saying the tea was ready.

When Abby turned away from the bedroom, something gray fluttered in front of her eyes. She instinctively swatted the air, as she would at a spiderweb, but her hand hit something solid behind the gray. The gray thing was a towel, and there was a hand inside it. The hand clamped the towel over her nose, mouth, and one eye, and the strange smell she’d noticed earlier swept into her lungs with each gasp.

Terror closed her throat too tightly to scream. She tried to fight, but another arm went around her stomach and lifted her into the air, so that her kicking legs flailed uselessly between the wide-spaced walls of the hallway. The towel was cold against her face. For an instant Abby wondered if her daddy had come home early to play a joke on her. But he couldn’t have. He was in his plane. And he would never scare her on purpose. Not really. And she was scared. As scared as the time she’d gone into ketoacidosis, her thoughts flying out of her ears as soon as she could think them, her voice speaking words no one had ever heard before. She tried to fight the monster holding her, but the harder she fought, the weaker she became. Suddenly everything began to go dark, even the eye that was uncovered. She concentrated as hard as she could on saying one word, the only word that could help her now. With a great feeling of triumph, she said, “Mama,” but the word died instantly in the wet towel.

Huey Cotton stood outside the Jennings house, nervously rubbing his palms against the legs of his coveralls and peering through Abby’s bedroom window. Abby. Unlike most names, he could remember that one without trouble. His mother had once read letters to a woman named Abby out loud to him. Dear Abby, she would drawl in her cigarette-parched voice, sitting at the kitchen table in her hair-rollers and housecoat. The people who wrote to that Abby never signed their real names. They were embarrassed, his mother said. They signed big words instead of names, and sometimes they signed places, too, like Bewildered in Omaha. He always remembered that one.

Huey heard the scuff of a heel on wood. He looked up to see his cousin walking through the pink bedroom with the little Abby in his arms. She was fighting, kicking her skinny legs to beat the band. Joey held her at the center of the room so that her feet wouldn’t hit the furniture or the tall bedposts. The kicks got weaker and weaker until finally they were just little jerks, like a hound’s legs when it dreamed of hunting.

The little girl looked like another of the hundred or so dolls that lay around the room like the sleeping occupants of some fairyland, only bigger. Joey walked to the open window and passed her through it. Huey accepted Abby as gingerly as he would a wounded bird, his mouth open in wonder.