The Night Parade(26)

“You’d think they’d notify the school if it was meningitis,” David had said. “Besides, what about the Sandoval kid? That certainly wasn’t meningitis.”

Patrick Sandoval had been the third student to fall ill. He had been a junior, a basketball player, a good-looking kid who’d been in David’s literary criticism class the year before. As far as David was aware, and unlike what had happened with the two previous students, there hadn’t been any clear signs of a physical illness with Sandoval. There was no blood, no convulsing—only that he was spotted by a number of students wandering around campus in the middle of the night completely naked, and with a broad, sleepy smile stretched across his face. Someone even spotted Sandoval holding a conversation with thin air. Campus security showed up, approached him, and assumed he was intoxicated. They took him to the security office, where an officer administered a breathalyzer test. Yet despite his slurred speech and increasingly perplexing statements to the officers, Patrick Sandoval was stone-sober. Assuming he was under the influence of narcotics, he was taken to Mercy Medical Center in Baltimore. Whether or not a toxicology test was done at the hospital, David didn’t know, but the boy had returned to school the next day, apparently fine. Two days later, he found his way to the roof of his dormitory—a twenty-story tower at the east end of campus that everyone called the Fortress—where he walked right over the ledge to his death on the pavement below.

Meningitis, David knew, most likely wouldn’t cause someone to do something like that. In fact, it was even possible that the thing with Sandoval was unrelated to what had happened to the two other students. Yet David couldn’t forget the bewildered look in Deke’s eyes that night, and how the poor guy must have, for some reason that would never be explained, set fire to his own house, where he had died in the inferno. How Sandoval had been wandering around campus naked, while Deke had been doing the same in his underwear outside in the street. Moreover, and even more disturbing to David, Patrick Sandoval had dropped right out of the sky like those geese that had rained down on the parking lot at the college the very night Deke died.

This realization was chilling.

David set his wineglass on the coffee table. His hands were trembling.

“Jesus Christ,” he heard Kathy utter from the kitchen. “No. Oh no, Carly!”

Carly Monroe’s daughter, Phoebe, went to Arnold Elementary with Ellie. The girls had been friends since preschool. David leaned forward on the couch, feeling sweat prickle the small hairs on the nape of his neck.

“Okay, okay,” Kathy was saying in the kitchen.

David stood. He was halfway across the living room when Kathy appeared in the entranceway, the portable phone still to her ear. The look on her face was enough to cause David to freeze in midstep. He knew right then and there that the little girl from Ellie’s school was dead.

“Okay,” Kathy said into the phone. Her voice wavered, unsteady. “Yes, hon. You, too. Please. Okay. Okay. Thank you, Carly. Good night.” She lowered the phone and stared at him, her eyes impossibly wide. David had never seen her look more fearful, more terrified in her life.

“It’s not good,” he said.

“That was Carly Monroe. She just got a call and wanted to pass along the info. Jesus, David, she died,” Kathy said. “The poor kid died.”

“God.” David went to her, hugged her. She shuddered against him. “Did Carly say what caused it? Was the girl sick?”

“No one knows anything yet,” Kathy said, not sobbing now, but just resting against his chest. David smelled her hair, fresh with lavender shampoo, and savored the warmth of her face against the crook of his collarbone. “Mostly rumors. But she’s dead, David. That poor kid. And Eleanor . . .”

“Ellie’s fine. Let’s not overreact. It’s a horrible thing that’s happened, but let’s not lose sight of the fact that our daughter is absolutely fine.”

She pulled away from him, stared up at him. There was a hint of conspiracy behind her eyes now. “What if she’s not?”

“Hon—”

“What if it’s contagious?”

“No one knows what it is,” he told her.

“Which means,” she said, “that no one knows whether it’s contagious or not.”

“We’ll take Ellie to see the pediatrician, if it’ll ease your mind.”

“I don’t know if it will. I don’t know if anyone even knows what to look for. Don’t you watch the news? This is happening all over.”

“I think we just need to stay calm.”

“I’m scared to death, David.”

He nodded, then told her things would be all right. But in his head, all he could hear was Burt’s final comment from that afternoon in the teachers’ lounge, clanging now like a death knell: “It’s some epidemic, some new disease, David. That’s my take, anyway. And the reason no one’s got answers is because it’s like the first appearance of the Black Plague—no one’s ever seen it before.”





14


He pulled off the road and bumped along the uneven shoulder until he spun the wheel and cut across a swath of grass. A large billboard advertising new homes stood in the weeds and faced the highway; some joker had spray-painted END-OF-TIMES PLAGUE SALE—ALL HOUSES ARE FREE! across the billboard in bloody red letters. David pulled the Olds directly behind the billboard, hoping that he’d angled it in a way that would make it invisible to any passing traffic, and shut it down.