The Atheist's Daughter Read online

  Mr. Locke’s tongue licked greedily at his lips.

  Entering from the hallway, Mr. Brass drew a brown rag over his crystalline hands. “It’s done.”

  “I hadn’t expected it to take so long.”

  “Me, either.” His broad features grew pinched. “Things take longer when you have to do them by yourself.”

  Mr. Locke said, “I had my own work to do.”

  “And I’ll bet Alice Poe did most of it.”

  Mrs. Norton raised a finger and Mr. Brass fell silent. “Tell me about the fence.”

  “It’s solid enough.” He dropped the rag onto one of the circular tables dotting the dining room. “Eight-foot tall, it runs both sides of the building and across the back. Nobody’s going to see into the yard. I ran a heavy chain through the gate, put a padlock on it. The most expensive model in the hardware store.”

  “Good.”

  “What we need is some cut wire for the top of the fence. It slices skin like a razor blade. Nobody climbs over a fence with cut wire on it.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “We used it in Lancaster. In Bedford, too.”

  “So we did. It’s appropriate for an auto shop or a junkyard; I suppose it’s almost expected. It’s out of place for a small town café.”

  “We were glad to have it in Bedford.”

  “This is Winterhaven. Here, the citizens feel they can trust one another. They show their trust in little ways. They help their neighbors. They watch one another’s homes. Sometimes, they even leave their doors unlocked.” She allowed a tiny smile to tease her mouth.

  Mr. Brass and Mr. Locke grinned broadly, as if they could barely believe their good fortune. Only Alice Poe remained subdued.

  “Did you see her?” she asked, in a voice so small Mrs. Norton barely heard it. “The Other?”

  Mr. Locke said, “Don’t worry about her. She almost pissed herself when she saw me.”

  “Is she one of yours?” Alice Poe asked Mrs. Norton.

  “I imagine so.”

  “She won’t come back,” Mr. Locke insisted. “Why would she? She doesn’t know what we are. She doesn’t even know what she is.” Alice Poe reached for the reassurance of his hand but he denied her, curling his fingers into a fist.

  “You’re scared of a girl? One of their kind?” Mr. Brass shook his large, square head disbelievingly. “She’s nothing.”

  “You didn’t see her. I did. She’s not a nothing.”

  “Her name is Kristin Faraday.” Mrs. Norton’s voice was cool but firm. “Martin knows her. He’ll tell me more about her history tomorrow.”

  “What do we do if she returns?”

  “We invite her in. We offer her a nice carbonated beverage and tell her about the café’s daily special.”

  Worry remained on Alice Poe’s face.

  “She’s a child,” Mrs. Norton said. “Her presence is unexpected, certainly, but not a major concern. If something changes, I’ll deal with her.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  The adding machine’s motor whirred and an inch of paper spit from its mouth. Lowering her reading glasses, Becky gave the numbers a glance. Resting the glasses atop her head, she rubbed at her tired eyes.

  “How ‘bout this one?” Sitting beside her, Kristin rubbed a yellow marker over the newspaper on the table.

  “Tell me.”

  She squinted at the tiny print. “‘X-sharp 4-door with m-g-t-f, all p-w-r, 158K, $850 o-b-o.’”

  “It has 158,000 miles on it?”

  “But it’s extra sharp. If it’s in good condition, those could be very gentle miles.”

  “I don’t know. That’s a large number of very gentle miles.”

  “Probably a little old lady who only drove it to Sunday school,” Kristin said. “Church miles don’t count. Hawkins is always talking about the Bible to me. I’m sure that’s in there somewhere.”

  “Because the Honda Civic was the car of choice in Biblical times.”

  “Exactly what I was thinking. What is ‘m-g-t-f’, anyway?”

  “Much grief to follow? Honey, it doesn’t matter. You don’t have eight hundred and fifty dollars. ”

  “O-b-o, remember? Five hundred and eighty-nine dollars might well be the best offer. Then I’m the proud owner of a sweet Honda Civic –”

  “– driven during the days of David and Goliath, with an odometer to match,” Becky interrupted.

  “I’d have my own wheels, that’s the thing.”

  “That’s another issue. At that price, the car will almost certainly need new tires. And then there’s maintenance costs, registration fees, insurance....”

  “What’s your point?”

  “It’s going to cost more than you expect. You don’t think so but it will. Everything in the universe always cost more than you expect and you try, and you try –” Becky thumped her mechanical pencil against the head of the adding machine “– and it’s never enough.”

  “Ohhh-kay.”

  “Sorry, honey.” She let a whistle of air escape from her nose. “Just another one of your mother’s monthly meltdowns.”

  “Try and say that five times fast.” Kristin folded the newspaper in half. “Bills, huh?”

  “Things have been a little slow at the gallery. Never mind. We’ll get by. We always do.”

  Kristin tucked the paper under one arm. “Mom?”

  “Hmmm?” Becky returned the reading glasses to the bridge of her nose. Shaking a bank statement from its envelope, she bent toward the adding machine.

  “I saw something today. Something – weird.”

  “Were you at the mall?”

  “What?”

  “You said you and Hawkins were going to the mall today.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “Is a new store opening?”

  “No. I mean, what are you trying to say? Not everything in my life revolves around shopping.”

  Becky tapped a finger over the adding machine’s keys. “Shopping or boys, college or a job. And, lately, cars. I’ve pretty much covered the play list, right?”

  “Yes. Yes, I guess you did,” Kristin said, sarcasm coloring her words. “That’s everything I’m interested in. Shopping, boys, a job. Cars.”

  “Oh, and there’s the cable show you like.”

  She threw her hands in the air in disbelief. The newspaper fluttered to the ground as she stomped off.

  “Honey? “ Becky called out. “You forgot to tell me about the new store.”

  From upstairs, Kristin’s bedroom door slammed shut.

  * * *

  It was dark outside before Becky folded the bank statement inside its envelope. She’d spent the last three hours chasing a twenty-four dollar and fifteen cent discrepancy in her checking account. Finally, she’d tracked it down. Only then had she remembered the jammed cash register at the supermarket and the debit slip she’d never received.

  “No big deal,” she told the clerk at the time. Little did she know.

  It wouldn’t have been a big deal, she reflected, clicking off the office lights and closing its door, if you somehow managed to save a few dollars now and then.

  Between the credit card bill and the bounced check fees, insolvency beckons. If you keep this up, you’ll lose the house.

  What will you do then?

  She paused in the hallway. From the floor above her, she heard an unfamiliar voice. It was a male voice, speaking in a low tone. It sounded like the words were coming from her daughter’s bedroom.

  “Kristin?”

  She didn’t answer. The voice continued to talk, muffled behind the closed door.

  Buried in paperwork, did I somehow miss Hawkins, come to visit?

  Not this late. It’s probably just a television show.

  She listened more closely. There weren’t any of the usual television sounds: No gunshots, no squealing tires, no weird sci-fi sound effects. The indistinct voice continued speaking into the emptiness.

  It was probably her imagi
nation but the disembodied voice seemed to be speaking more urgently. She gripped the stair’s railing.

  Has to be the t.v., she thought. No reason to even check.

  She started up the stairs.

  All parents worry about their children. It doesn’t matter how old they get. Kristin is still my child and I will forever worry about her.

  But not like before. Not like when Rick died. When Rick died, things had gotten truly strange.

  “You want to talk paranoid,” she muttered. Lose your husband, lose your mind. If she hadn’t been clinically paranoid during those first terrible months, she’d been close to it.

  In those days, it felt as if only she cared whether Kristin lived or died. Becky’s parents were long dead but Rick’s widowed mother had refused to even touch the baby. Heartbroken over the loss of her only son, she’d died without ever knowing her grandchild.

  Gripped by despair, Becky soon began to imagine everyone else felt the same way about her daughter. Her mind clouded with grief, she thought she was the only person who would ever love Kristin. Could ever love Kristin.

  In reflection, she supposed she’d had a kind of mental breakdown. Since those early days, Kristin had grown into a lovely young woman. She’d found some good friends; not many, admittedly, but some, and that was enough. She had a social life, dated, had gone steady a time or two. She’d even danced at the Junior Prom, something Becky had never done.

  In short, her daughter had lived her life. It was a good life if not an exciting one.

  Becky felt she’d had enough excitement for a lifetime. She didn’t want any more of it tonight.

  She pressed her ear against the bedroom door. From inside, a man spoke, his words maddeningly unintelligible. If her daughter was in the room with him, she was silent.

  Forgive me, kiddo. I try to give you your space, I do. I almost never go into your bedroom.

  This doesn’t count as snooping. This is legitimate parental concern.

  Squeezing the handle, she pushed the door open.

  Hallway light spilled into the dark bedroom. Dressed in her jeans and t-shirt, Kristin lay asleep on her bed. One of her sandals dangled perilously from her left foot. The other shoe had fallen to the floor.

  From inside the darkness, a man said, “Tell me there are no werewolves, I’ll agree with you. If you don’t believe in the Loch Ness Monster, if you question the existence of Bigfoot, you’ll get no argument from me. But tell me there’s no such thing as ghosts and I’ll call you a fool.”

  Entering the room, Becky touched the space bar on the computer’s keyboard. The computer monitor brightened and a dark-haired man glared out at her from the screen. Below the man’s image, subtitles on the screen read: Dr. Marc Ericks, Liefeld College.

  Ericks said, “These aren’t kindly ghosts, concerned with your well-being. Your beloved Uncle Burt isn’t standing beside you, guiding your step. Your sweet Aunt Claudette isn’t floating below your ceiling, watching over you.”

  An overhead light shone down on the professor, accenting the wrinkles under his eyes. From the camera’s view, he came across as tired and alone, sitting by himself in an empty room.

  Probably had to set up his own camera and lighting, too, Becky thought. The obsessed can rarely afford to fund a production crew.

  There were print-outs in the computer’s paper tray. Picking them up, Becky leafed through them. “Wraiths? The invisible man?”

  “Nor are these specters simply misguided souls, trying to find their way to heaven,” Ericks continued, tugging at a patch of gray in his beard. “These are creatures without a heart, without a soul. They’re evil incarnate. They hunger –”

  ”Oh, please.” Taking the computer’s mouse, she turned the machine off. The deluded professor disappeared in mid-sentence.

  A fluttering of curtains told her the bedroom window was open. Moving Kristin’s plastic Tinkerbelle figurine from the bottom sill, Becky grasped the window’s wooden upper rail. She glanced down at the street.

  Slight of build and dressed in a woman’s full-length tan coat, a figure waited on the sidewalk. The jacket’s hood obscured its owner’s face. Under Becky’s gaze, the stranger walked away, quickly moving out of the circle of light provided by the boulevard’s solitary street lamp.

  Who was that?

  Listening closely, she couldn’t hear the stranger’s footsteps as she left.

  “Great,” she told the computer. “Now you’ve got me seeing ghosts.”

  Shutting the window firmly, she slid its sash lock closed.

  Chapter Fourteen

  From Kristin’s Diary

  What if life is like the old movie, The Matrix?

  You take the right pill, you get to believe whatever you want to believe. The same thing everyone else believes. You take the wrong pill and you’re lost in Wonderland forever.

  One pill makes you larger. One pill makes you small.

  This morning, I didn’t flush Dr. Ron’s pink pill down the toilet. I still have it, safely nestled in the bottom of my jewelry box. My old Disney Mad Hatter pin is lying on top of it, in case Mom decides to take a quick peek through my earrings and necklaces.

  Which has never happened, not once in my entire life.

  But just because something hasn’t happened doesn’t mean it can’t happen. Like when I saw the ghost people. Seeing ghost people was definitely a new experience.

  Hawk was there, too, and he got angry, mad at the glass asshole, but he didn’t see anything unusual about the guy. But the ghost man realized I could tell something was wrong with him. As if he was aware he was a see-through monstrosity and he knew I knew but he also knew I wouldn’t tell anyone. Like, somehow, he’d come across people like me before.

  If I’m reading him correctly, then maybe I don’t need to book an immediate return trip to the pastoral grounds of Kendall Sanitarium. Maybe. Because, just when I thought I’d finally figured out all the things that were weird about me, along comes Mr. Glass – sorry, Mr. Locke – to prove me wrong.

  Which makes me wonder if I’m wrong about some other things, too. Like taking the pills Dr. Ron ordered.

  If I’d been using my medication all along, as my psychiatrist insisted, maybe I’d be normal by now. Because what if there’s a process involved? At first, the medication leaves you feeling all fuzzy and wool-headed but, later, you’re turned into a good, upstanding citizen, a little dull of thought and slow to respond but no longer seeing crazy-ass crap that can’t/shouldn’t/doesn’t exist?

  That’s not exactly the life I crave but there are days when I’d settle for it.

  Somewhere along the line, I must have taken the wrong pill. But is the pink pill the one I really need?

  How do I escape Wonderland?

  *

  About my Mad Hatter pin: I bought it about three years ago, when the Debate Team traveled to Southern California for the Nationals and everyone went to Disneyland. We all acted like we were too cool for some overcrowded theme park, and we were, truly, but everybody showed up at the front gates, anyway. The Nationals were a total bust, only Cleve Kisner won anything, but it was fun, anyway.

  At the gift shop, paying three times what a chain store would charge, I bought the Mad Hatter pin. I stuck it on my t-shirt on my way home and Mom spotted it the instant I stepped off the bus. She had a total meltdown. She acted like I was advertising my past, rather than properly hiding it from the world.

  As if everybody in Winterhaven didn’t already know about me.

  “The gift shop had to have other pins,” Mom said. “Why didn’t you get Alice? Or the Cheshire Cat?”

  Her exact words.

  I know this because I wrote everything down the night I came home. It’s maybe the best thing about keeping a diary. If you put in an entry every three or four days, like I do, you can go back and see the things that happened to you. Your memories are right there.

  I flip through the pages and I see all of the stuff I wrote about Dr. Ron. The other stuff, too.
The paragraphs about melting faces. The dreams I’ve experienced. All of the pills I’ve flushed.

  In other words, the complete and total chronicle of my unbalanced life.

  This comes to mind because, sitting at my desk, staring out of my bedroom window, I notice Tinkerbelle has somehow moved off of my window sill. Miss Belle, with your wings so pretty, did you somehow fly down to my end table last night?

  Or did someone put you on the counter and forget? Was someone in my room?

  I don’t remember turning my computer off, either. I’m sure I left the window open. Pretty sure, anyway.

  This is supposed to be my personal space. Years ago, Mom promised she wouldn’t enter this room without my permission. Years ago, I believed her.

  Fuck.

  What use is a journal if you think someone else is going to read what you’ve written? You can’t be totally honest if you suspect someone is spying on you.

  I love having a place to share my thoughts, my best and worst, most wonderful and awful memories...because I can’t share them anywhere else. Now I wonder if I dare write another line, another sentence.

  There are hundreds of pages here, hundreds of entries, but, if somebody finds my words, none of it will remain secret. The cops will be called, just like at school, and I’ll be back in the embrace of Dr. Ron before I get a chance to have a real life.

  I wrote about everything here. My first kiss. My first date, my first boyfriend, my first...

  Everything.

  Fuck, fuck, fuck.

  *

  So what do I do now? Do I hide my diary and hope no one finds it? Do I find a box and lock it up? Or do I destroy it, feeding my memories into the shredder, sheet by sheet?

  I’d like another option, please. One that acknowledges my right to a little privacy. But that’s never going to happen, not unless I get my own place.

  I can’t wait to leave here. Can’t wait to leave Winterhaven. So that’s what I’m going to do.

  But, first, I need to find out who the glass people are. Find out why they’re here. What they’re doing. Because they scare me, more than a little, and I’m the only one who can tell what they are.