The Influence(94)
Lita breathed deeply, knowing she didn’t want to hear what the person on the other end of the line wanted to tell her, but taking the phone anyway. “Hello?”
She listened as the woman on the other end of the line identified herself as Dr. Warren from Albuquerque General Hospital and informed her in tones of practiced sympathy that her mother had been in an automobile accident. She’d been hit head-on by the drunk driver of an SUV—
just like Dave’s parents
—and had been rushed to the hospital by ambulance, where emergency surgery had been performed.
There was a pause.
Her mother, Dr. Warren said, was dead.
Lita did not hear any more. The phone dropped from her hand onto the bed, and as the thunder and lightning resumed with a wild fury, she screamed out her anguish in an involuntary cry of pain that came from the deepest part of her soul and felt as though it was never going to end.
****
Jill was baking cookies when the rain started.
She hadn’t been able to sleep, and though she’d gone to bed shortly after nine, she was up again by eleven, restless and wide awake. Drawing usually helped her relax, but the pencil felt heavy in her hand, and after ten awkward minutes with her sketchbook, she tossed it aside.
What she really felt like doing was making cookies, and despite the lateness of the hour, she went out to the kitchen, put on her apron, got a mixing bowl out of the cupboard; eggs, milk and butter from the refrigerator, and yeast, flour, sugar and salt from the pantry. She hadn’t made cookies for over a week, hadn’t gone to the farmer’s market last Thursday, and even though it was nearly midnight, she felt good getting back to baking.
After mixing and rolling out the dough, she decided to make cookies in the shapes of angels. Real angels. They were on everyone’s mind lately, and maybe seeing some of the traditional variety would make people realize that that thing they’d shot down wasn’t one. Using a knife, she carved out an angel freehand: a long-haired woman in a billowy dress, hands raised in benediction. She carved out three more, placed them on a baking sheet and put the baking sheet in the oven.
Outside, it began to rain, the sound of it on the roof reminding her of an onomatopoeic Dr. Seuss book from her childhood. Dibble dibble dop dop. She’d been planning to whip up a few colors of frosting with which to paint her cookies, but she paused. There were no shades on the kitchen window, and she stared out at the darkness, remembering when she’d found the heavily damaged Puka walking in circles on the floor where she was standing.
Now he was in a garbage can at the side of the house.
Lightning flashed, and she saw the desert behind her house illuminated for a brief second. There was too much darkness, too many shadows, and as thunder roared above her, she wished that she had put in drapes or shutters or shades, something to block the view, to keep the night out of the house. Lightning flashed again, and something in the sky caught her attention. As much as she wanted to look away from the window, she moved closer, leaning over the sink, waiting for the next lightning flash. It came, and the burst of electricity illuminated the heart of the storm.
Was there a face in the cloud?
She waited again.
Yes.
But the next time it was gone, and it did not reappear, though she stood watching for the next five minutes.
Glancing at the timer to see how long it would be before she could take out the cookies, she heard, in the lull between peals of thunder, an insistent tapping coming from the oven. Some sort of propane leak? She hurried over. For the millionth time, she wished she had an electric stove and oven. But the house had come with a propane hookup, and she couldn’t afford to—
She stopped three feet in front of the appliance.
One of the angel cookies was upright, standing behind the oven window, tapping on the inside of the glass and trying to get out.
She was too scared to even scream. Her first impulse was to run away, to get the hell out of the house and drive to Ross’ place or the home of one of her friends, but she realized almost instantly that in this situation, she had the means to fight back.
Keeping her eye on that six-inch figure in the oven window, Jill took two steps forward. Turning the knob from “Bake” to “Broil,” she cranked the temperature up all the way. Almost instantly, the tapping grew more frantic. The angel was pushed aside as one of the other cookies took its place, its little baked dough arms bending at the elbow, its fists smacking against the thick glass. This cookie was darker than the first, brown in patches, and there was a desperation to its movements that almost made her feel sorry for it. But, despite outward appearances, it was not alive, and she waited and watched as it cooked in the heat, darkening further before finally burning. It had fallen over, and smoke was coming out of the oven, but she was not about to turn the appliance off until that thing was a crispy crumble, and she grabbed a chair, stood on it and pulled the battery out of the smoke alarm before it went off.