Fountain of Death(61)

Magda stretched out her legs the way Marie wanted her to and winced. The ache was now almost all gone. The shooting pains were excruciating. She wanted to take the Demerol she had brought with her out of her purse and swallow them right now.

“Here we go,” Marie said. “I’ll just step out of the room for a minute. Don’t move that leg while I’m gone.”

Magda couldn’t have moved that leg if she had wanted to. It felt like it was burning up.





2


DESSA CARTER KNEW THAT something was wrong as soon as Mrs. O’Reilly picked up the phone. She could hear all the danger signs in Mrs. O’Reilly’s voice, including the oddly grammatical stiltedness that crept into it when Dessa’s father was not only very bad, but listening. It was a shame. Dessa had only called home out of a sense of duty. When she had called at lunch-time, everything had been all right. Now she had been invited out “for Perrier and a salad or beer and pizza” by Traci Cardinale, and she wanted to go. It had been years since she’d had dinner out with a friend. It had been years since she’d had a friend to have dinner out with. Until Traci Cardinale asked her to go out, Dessa hadn’t even realized how completely her life had been eaten up by what had happened to her father. She had been fat in high school, but not this fat. She’d had only a few friends, but she’d had those few. Now she had nothing but her job (which she hated) and her food (which she wasn’t all that fond of anymore either) and her father, who was something worse than dead.

Once Dessa heard Mrs. O’Reilly on the phone, she had no choice. She had to tell Traci that she wouldn’t be able to go along. She had to get into her car and point it in the direction of Derby. She had to do the right thing, take the responsibility, lead the cavalry to the rescue. There was no one else. She spent the entire drive home wishing she had never made that phone call in the first place. She hadn’t been obligated to make it. Her agreement with Mrs. O’Reilly was clear. One phone call at lunch. That was it. If Mrs. O’Reilly had an emergency, she could call Fountain of Youth.

When Dessa pulled into the driveway of the house in Derby, everything seemed to be quiet. All the lights were on on the first floor, but Mrs. O’Reilly sometimes did that when she was alone with Dessa’s father. Dessa sometimes did it, too. When her father got really spooky, it helped not to have to talk to him in the dark. Dessa got out of the car and half ran to the back door. She got her keys and let herself into the kitchen. One of the things she had been afraid of, when she talked to Mrs. O’Reilly, was that the problem here would not be with her father but with the kids in the neighborhood. Too many of the kids around here knew that Dessa’s father had Alzheimer’s disease. Too many of them were wild. Every once in a while, the kids would come tapping at the windows and rattling at the doors, trying to make the old man scream and shout.

The old man was not screaming and shouting now. There was no sound in the house at all. Dessa walked out of the kitchen and down the hall to the living room. She could see Mrs. O’Reilly standing next to her father’s chair. Mrs. O’Reilly saw her too and nodded.

“Shitfire,” the old man said suddenly.

Dessa Carter stopped in her tracks. Oh, no, she thought. Not this. Not now. The bottom dropped out of her stomach. All the muscles in her back curled into painful knots. Mrs. O’Reilly walked around the old man’s chair and came out into the hallway.

“I’ve got the rope out,” Mrs. O’Reilly said briskly. “Maybe we’re not too late.”

“You should have called the ambulance,” Dessa said. “You should have forced them to come.”

“Nothing forces an ambulance to come to this neighborhood on anything less than an hour’s notice,” Mrs. O’Reilly said. “People bleeding in the street, that doesn’t force them to come. I didn’t want to try it on my own. I didn’t think I could imagine it.”

“Shitfire,” the old man repeated.

Mrs. O’Reilly ducked into the bathroom and came out with a long length of rope.

“We’ve got to come at him from behind,” she said. “If he sees us on the way, he’ll really start screaming.”

He would really start screaming anyway, Dessa knew that. The only way they could stop him was to gag him, and they had never done that. They had tied him up. They had even tied him up and left him in the bathtub, where it was safest. They had never gagged him.

“Take this end and try not to let him see you,” Mrs. O’Reilly said.

Dessa Carter didn’t need instructions in this from Mrs. O’Reilly. She took one end of the rope and began to move, slowly, into the living room. Her father was sitting in his chair, his hands gripping the arms, his back to the hallway. Dessa could see the veins in his hands, blue-black and popping out.