The Night Parade(14)

Ellie appeared in the bathroom doorway as he was midway through the coloring process, his dripping head hanging over the bathroom sink, muddy tracks of dye sliding down his forehead.

“Are we in trouble?” she asked him. She had obliged, and was wearing the T-shirt with the trucks on it, the blue baseball cap. She looked alien to him. Some stranger’s little boy.

“No,” he said.

“Are you?” she said.

He looked at her sideways. “I said no, didn’t I?”

Ellie shrugged. “What’s my boy name?”

“Huh?”

“If I’m a boy now, you can’t call me Ellie. Or Eleanor.”

“I’ll just call you Little Spoon.” He grinned at her while he combed the dye through his damp hair.

“I don’t like that,” she said. “Not anymore.”

“I’ve called you that since you were a little kid.”

“Not anymore.” She looked at the bag of hair clippings that sat on the sink counter. “I don’t like it anymore.”

“Since when?”

She rolled her slight shoulders. The T-shirt was a tad too big. “For a while now, I guess.”

“How come?”

“I just don’t. Stop calling me that. I’m not a baby anymore.”

He straightened up, wiping the inky droplets off his forehead with a hand towel. He’d have to take the towel with them, too. No evidence left behind. “Okay. Okay. I won’t call you that anymore. Sorry.”

“Where are we going when we leave here?”

“To get something to eat. Aren’t you hungry?”

“I mean, we can’t just keep staying in hotels. Where are we going to go if we can’t go home?”

“I’ll figure that out after we eat. I’m starving. Aren’t you starving?” He was desperate to change the subject.

“Are you telling me the truth?” she asked him. “About why we can’t go home, I mean.”

The question jarred him. And it wasn’t just the question itself, but the confident and suspicious tone Ellie used when asking it. As if she knew the truth and was testing his honesty. It caused him to pause before answering, and she seemed to pick up on that, too.

“Of course,” he said.

“And about Mom, too?”

“Yes,” he said.

Her gaze hung on him.

She’s special, Kathy’s ghost-voice spoke up in his head then. A special child.

“I’ll only be a few more minutes,” he said, and eased the bathroom door closed with his toe.





9


Nineteen months earlier


It was one of the rare evenings he stayed late at the university grading papers. Walking across the quad, the night was a cold, wet soup. Late-winter snow swirled around the lampposts, weightless as dandelion fluff, and never touched the ground. He took the footpath to the parking lot, slowing in his progress when he noticed something small and dark flapping about on the path. He came within two feet of it and saw that it was a small brown bird. It was still alive, its twig-like feet scrambling for purchase on the stamped concrete. As David watched, one of its wings flared open and fluttered maniacally to no avail.

David crouched down and watched the bird die. It took less than a minute. By the time he stood, a chevron of geese was honking across the sky just above the treetops. He thought it odd that they were there in February. Didn’t geese fly south in the winter?

He coughed into a fist as he continued along the footpath toward the parking lot. There were still a number of cars in the lot, even at this hour. His Bronco was parked at the far end of the lot, since he’d misplaced his faculty pass earlier that month and didn’t want to risk being towed by parking in any of the faculty spots without it. The tow-truck drivers fished the campus parking lots day and night and were ruthless.

He was halfway across the lot to his car when something exploded off to his left. It was very close, the sound of its detonation causing him to drop his briefcase. He looked around but could not see what might have caused it. The lampposts were spaced too far apart, and it was too dark to make out any real— He caught movement out of the corner of his eye, a large object bulleting down from the sky at such an alarming speed, David drew his arms up to cover his head despite the fact that the object was crashing down several yards away. It struck the hood of a Volkswagen with a sickening solidity, rolled up over the windshield, then toppled to the asphalt. It took David only a second to realize what it was, but by that point, more and more had begun to rain from the sky, a mortar attack. Only instead of bombs, they were geese.

A car alarm went off. Windshields imploded. Most of the geese were killed upon impact, but a few of them survived, albeit mortally wounded, and their shrill cries were more like the agonizing shrieks of a child than any bird he’d ever heard. Some of them screamed just a few feet from him, their massive, twisted wings sliding cruelly along the pavement.

The whole thing lasted thirty seconds, maybe less. When it was over, the parking lot was a minefield of dead fowl, the occasional spastic jerk of a massive black wing, the incessant trilling of a chorus of car alarms.

David gathered up his briefcase and ran for the Bronco, thankful that he’d misplaced the parking pass, which had left his own vehicle, parked so far away, unscathed.