Dean Koontz - The Voice of the Night

After the movie, as the sun settled toward the Pacific, Colin walked her home. The air from the ocean was sweet. Overhead, the palms swayed and whispered.

Two blocks from the theater, Heather tripped on a hoved-up piece of the sidewalk. She didn’t fall or even come close to losing her balance, but she said, “Damnit!” She blushed. “I’m so damned clumsy.”

“They shouldn’t let the sidewalk deteriorate like that,” Colin said. “Someone could get hurt.”

“Even if they made it perfectly straight and smooth, I’d probably trip on it.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I’m such a klutz.”

“No, you aren‘t,” he said.

“Yes, I am.” They started to walk again, and she said, “I’d give anything to be just half as graceful as my mother.”

“You are graceful.”

“I’m a klutz. You should see my mother. She doesn’t walk-she glides. If you saw her in a long dress, something long enough to cover her feet, you’d think she wasn’t really walking at all. You’d think she was just floating along on a cushion of air.”

For a minute they walked in silence.

Then Heather sighed and said, “I’m a disappointment to her.”.

“Who?”

“My mother.”

“Why?”

“I don’t measure up.”

“Up to what?”

“To her,” Heather said. “Did you know that my mother was Miss California?”

“You mean like in a beauty contest?”

“Yeah. She won. She won a lot of other contests, too.”

“When was this?”

“She was Miss California seventeen years ago, when she was nineteen.”

“Wow!” Colin said. “That’s really something.”

“When I was a little girl, she entered me in a lot of beauty pageants for children.”

“Yeah? What titles did you win?”

“None,” Heather said.

“I find that hard to believe.”

“It’s true.”

“What were the judges-blind? Come on, Heather. You must have won something.”

“No, really. I never placed better than second. And I was usually just third.”

“Usually? You mean most of the time you won either second or third place?”

“I placed second four times. I got third place ten times. And five times I didn’t place at all.”

“But that’s fantastic!” Colin said. “You made it to the top three spots in fourteen out of nineteen tries!”

“In a beauty contest,” Heather said, “the only thing that counts is being No. 1, winning the title. In children’s contests, nearly everyone gets to be No. 2 or No. 3 every once in a while.”

“Your mother must have been proud of you,” Colin insisted.

“She always said she was, every time that I came in second or third. But I always got the impression she was really very disappointed. When I hadn’t won a first place by the time I was ten, she stopped entering me in the contests. I guess she figured I was a hopeless case.”

“But you did great!”

“You forget that she was No. 1,” Heather said. “She was Miss California. Not No. 3 or No. 2. No. 1.”

He marveled at this lovely girl who didn’t seem to know how truly lovely she was. Her mouth was sensuous; she thought it was merely too wide. Her teeth were straighter and whiter than most kids’ teeth; she thought they were a bit crooked. Her hair was thick and shiny; she thought it was lank and dull. Graceful as a cat, she called herself a klutz. She was a girl who ought to be brimming with self-assurance; instead, she was plagued by self-doubt. Beneath her sparkling surface she was just as uncertain and worried about life as Colin was; and suddenly he felt very protective toward her.

“If I’d been one of the judges,” he said, “you’d have won all of those contests.”

She blushed again and smiled at him. “You’re sweet.”

A moment later they reached her house and stopped at the end of the front walkway.

“You know what I like about you?” she asked.

“I’ve been wracking my brain, trying to figure out what it could possibly be,” he said.

“Well, for one thing, you don’t talk about the same stuff that all the other boys talk about. They all seem to think that guys aren’t supposed to be interested in anything but football and baseball and cars. All of that stuff bores me. And besides, you don’t just talk-you listen. Almost no one else listens.”

“Well,” he said, “one of the things I like about you is that you don’t care that I’m not much like other boys.”

They stared self-consciously at each other for a moment, and then she said, “Call me tomorrow, okay?”

“I will.”

“You better be getting home. You don’t want to make your mother angry.”

She planted a shy little kiss on the comer of his mouth, turned away, and hurried into the house.

For a few blocks Colin drifted like a sleepwalker, meandering toward home in a pleasant daze. But suddenly he became aware of the darkening sky, the spreading pools of shadow, and the creeping night chill. He was not afraid of violating the curfew, not afraid of his mother. But he was afraid of encountering Roy after dark. He ran the rest of the way home.

Thursday morning, Colin returned to the library and continued his search through the microfilm files of the local newspaper. He studied only two parts of each edition: the front page and the list of hospital admissions and discharges. Nevertheless, he needed more than six hours to find what he was looking for.

One year to the day after his baby sister’s death, Roy Borden was admitted to the Santa Leona General Hospital. The one-line notice in the May 1 edition of the News Register didn’t mention the nature of his illness; however, Colin was certain that it had to do with the strange accident that Roy had refused to discuss, the injury that had left such a great deal of terrible scar tissue on his back.

The name immediately below Roy’s on the admissions roster was Helen Borden. His mother. Colin stared at that line for a long time, wondering. Because of the scars he had seen, he had expected to find Roy’s name sooner or later, but the mother’s appearance surprised him. Had she and her son been hurt in the same mishap?

Colin rolled the film back and carefully scanned every page of the April 30 and May 1 editions of the newspaper. He was looking for a story about an automobile wreck, or an explosion, or a fire, some sort of accident in which the Bordens had been involved. He found nothing.

He wound the film forward again, finished that spool and a few more, but uncovered only two additional bits of useful information, the first of which was rather puzzling. Two days after being admitted to Santa Leona General, Mrs. Borden was transferred to a larger hospital, St. Joseph‘s, over at the county seat. Colin wondered why she had been moved, and he could think of only one reason. She must have been so badly injured that she required very special care, something exotic that the smaller Santa Leona General could not provide.

He didn’t discover anything more about Mrs. Borden, but he did learn that Roy had spent exactly three weeks in the local hospital. Whatever the source of the wounds on his back, they clearly had been quite serious.

At a quarter till five, Colin finished with the microfilm and went to Mrs. Larkin’s desk.

“That new Arthur C. Clarke novel was just returned,” she said before Colin could speak. “I’ve already checked it out for you.”

He didn’t really want the novel right now, but he didn’t want to appear ungrateful. He took it, looked at the jacket, front and back. “Thanks a lot, Mrs. Larkin.”

“Let me know what you think of it.”

“I was wondering if you could help me find a couple of books on psychology.”