NOS4A2(20)

“Lily!” cried the woman. “I said breakfast ten minutes ago. Get in here!”

Lily Carter did not reply but only began to back slowly up the driveway, her eyes large and fascinated. Not afraid. Just . . . interested.

“That would be Lily’s mother,” Manx said. “I have made a study of little Lily Carter and her mother. Her mother works nights tending bar in a roadhouse near here. You know about women who work in bars.”

“What about them?” Bing asked.

“Whores,” Manx said. “Almost all of them. At least until their looks go, and in the case of Lily Carter’s mother they’re going fast. Then, I’m afraid, she will quit being a whore and turn to being a pimp. Her daughter’s pimp. Someone has to earn the bacon, and Evangeline Carter doesn’t have a husband. Never married. Probably doesn’t even know who knocked her up. Oh, little Lily is only eight now, but girls . . . girls grow up so much faster than boys. Why, look at what a perfect little lady she is. I am sure her mother will be able to command a high price for her child’s innocence!”

“How do you know?” Bing whispered. “How do you know all that will really happen? Are you . . . are you sure?”

Charlie Manx raised an eyebrow. “There’s only one way to find out. To stand aside and leave Lily in the care of her mother. Perhaps we should check back on her in a few years, see how much her mother will charge us for a turn with her. Maybe she will offer us a two-for-one special!”

Lily had backed all the way to the porch.

From inside, her mother shouted again, her voice hoarse, angry. It sounded to Bing Partridge very like the voice of a drunk with a hangover. A grating, ignorant voice.

“Lily! Get in here right now or I’m givin’ your eggs to the damn dog!”

“Bitch,” Bing Partridge whispered.

“I am inclined to agree, Bing,” Manx said. “When the daughter comes with me to Christmasland, the mother will have to be dealt with as well. It would be better, really, if the mother and the daughter disappeared together. I’d rather not take Ms. Carter with me to Christmasland, but perhaps you could find some use for her. Although I can think of only one use to which she is really suited. In any event, it is no matter to me. Her mother simply cannot be seen again. And, when you consider what she will do to her daughter someday, if left to her own devices . . . well, I won’t shed any tears for her!”

Bing’s heart beat rapidly and lightly behind his breastbone. His mouth was dry. He fumbled for the latch.

Charlie Manx seized his arm, just as he had done when he was helping Bing across the ice in the Graveyard of What Might Be.

“Where are you going, Bing?” Charlie asked.

Bing turned a wild look upon the man beside him. “What are we waiting for? Let’s go in there. Let’s go in right now and save the girl!”

“No,” Charlie said. “Not now. There are preparations to make. Our moment will come, soon enough.”

Bing stared at Charlie Manx with wonder . . . and a certain degree of reverence.

“Oh,” Charlie Manx said. “And, Bing. Mothers can put up an awful racket when they think their daughters are being taken from them, even very wicked mothers like Ms. Carter.”

Bing nodded.

“Do you think you could get us some sevoflurane from your place of employment?” Manx said. “You might want to bring your gun and your gasmask, too. I am sure they will come in handy.”





THE LIBRARIAN

1991





Haverhill, Massachusetts


HER MOTHER HAD SAID, DON’T YOU WALK OUT THAT DOOR, BUT VIC wasn’t walking, she was running, fighting tears the whole way. Before she got outside, she heard her father say to Linda, Oh, lay off, she feels bad enough, which made it worse, not better. Vic caught her bike by the handlebars and ran with it, and at the far edge of the backyard she threw her leg over and plunged down into the cool, sweet-smelling shade of the Pittman Street Woods.

Vic did not think about where she was going. Her body just knew, guiding the Raleigh down the steep pitch of the hill and hitting the dirt track at the bottom at nearly thirty miles an hour.

She went to the river. The river was there. So was the bridge.

This time the thing that had been lost was a photograph, a creased black-and-white snap of a chubby boy in a ten-gallon hat, holding hands with a young woman in a polka-dot dress. The woman was using her free hand to pin the dress down against her thighs; the wind was blowing, trying to lift the hem. That same breeze had tossed a few strands of pale hair across her cocky, wry, almost-pretty features. The boy pointed a toy pistol into the camera. This puffy, blank-eyed little gunslinger was Christopher McQueen, age seven. The woman was his mother, and at the time the photograph was taken she was already dying of the ovarian cancer that would end her life at the ripe age of thirty-three. The picture was the only thing he had left of her, and when Vic asked if she could take it to school to use for an art project, Linda had been against it. Chris McQueen, though, overruled his wife. Chris had said, Hey. I want Vic to draw her. Closest they’ll ever come to spending time together. Just bring it back, Brat. I don’t ever want to forget what she looked like.

At thirteen Vic was the star of her seventh-grade art class with Mr. Ellis. He had selected her watercolor, Covered Bridge, for the annual school show at Town Hall—where it was the only seventh-grade work included among a selection of eighth-grade paintings that varied from bad to worse. (Bad: innumerable pictures of misshapen fruit in warped bowls. Worse: a portrait of a leaping unicorn with a rainbow erupting from its ass, as if in a Technicolor burst of flatulence.) When the Haverhill Gazette ran a story about the show, guess which picture they chose to run alongside the article? Not the unicorn. After Covered Bridge came home, Vic’s father shelled out for a birch frame and hung it on the wall where Vic’s Knight Rider poster had once been displayed. Vic had gotten rid of the Hoff years ago. The Hoff was a loser, and Trans Ams were oil-leaking shitboxes. She didn’t miss him.