Dee

Dee sits by the window looking out at the dark. She strokes the clawless tabby with a gentle hand and wishes she still smoked. ‘Pretty pebble,’ she whispers to herself. The cat looks up at her sharply. It’s late, Ted’s windows are all dark. But Dee fears sleep. The red birds will come flying into her head, with you-know-what in their beaks. Or it will be the other dream, where she sees her mother and father walking hand in hand across a desert under a blanket of stars, still looking, still calling their younger daughter’s name. Her memories cannot be kept at bay. They are nested inside one another. Like one of those Russian dolls, she thinks.

It’s getting harder and harder, the long waiting, the endless watching. Sometimes she wants to scream. Sometimes she wants to get a crowbar, go over there and break down the door – and finish it. Other times like now she just wants to get in her car and drive. Why does it fall to her, this terrible task? But this is how it is. Dee owes it to Lulu, and to all the others. She has seen the newspaper articles, blurry columns lit by the dirty glow of microfiche. Children go to that lake and don’t come back. Seven or eight, at least, over the years. Children without families or anyone to care. That’s why there hasn’t been much notice taken. Recently there have been no more disappearances. None since Lulu, in fact – and there might be a reason for that. Maybe he learned it was better to keep a child than risk taking them, over and over.

The sun is rising through milky cloud over the trees. Pink touches the sky in the east, like a finger.

Something stirs the air at the front of Ted’s house. A rectangular object hurtles out of the mail slot and sails through the air. It makes a crack as it bounces off two steps, then falls silently into the rhododendron bushes that spring up about the steps, glossy and green. The mail slot opens again with a faint creak.

Every one of Dee’s senses is alight. She starts for the door. Her heart is so loud in her ears that she can’t hear anything else. She forces herself to breathe deeply. Her hand is on her door handle, turning it, when she hears the familiar thunk, thunk, thunk of the locks.

Dee freezes for a moment. Then she goes to the window. Ted comes out onto the front steps. He looks slightly neater than usual. He seems to have combed his beard.

As Ted goes down the steps he glances to his left, stops and bends to pick something out of the glossy green leaves. Everything stops inside Dee. Too late. Whatever it was, he has found it.

Ted stands up. He has a little pinecone in his hand. He turns it this way and that, looking at it closely in the morning light.

When he has been gone twenty minutes Dee walks over to his house. She follows her plan carefully. She rings the doorbell. When there is no answer, she lifts the mail flap.

‘Hello?’ she calls into the bowels. The mood of the house strokes her face. It is dust and old despair.

‘Hello,’ she calls again. ‘Neighbour, here to help!’ It took her a while to come up with the right phrasing. Something the little girl would understand, but would also sound innocuous to anyone else listening. The house breathes at her. But there is no other sound. Then Dee puts her lips to the aperture and whispers, ‘Lulu?’ She waits for a minute, and then two. But the silence of the house only thickens.

The day is getting brighter. Some guy passes, walking his dog. There can be no breaking and entering. Sooner or later someone might start to wonder why she’s loitering on Ted’s steps.

She takes out her flashlight, gets on all fours and crawls quickly into the rhododendron. Cobwebs cling to her face like tiny hands. Adrenaline punches her heart. It makes her feel good, alive.

The cassette lies half buried in dry leaves. A beetle sits atop it, waving curious horns. Dee brushes the beetle off and puts the cassette in her bra. She backs slowly out of the bush. The rush is seeping away and she feels cold. To her right something moves through the leaf litter in a long thin line. She gasps and backs out of the undergrowth, hitting her shin painfully on the edge of a step. She beats her head frantically with her hands, feeling the phantom weight of a scaled body clinging and coiling in her hair. She runs, panting, to her front door.