something about the situation immediately. I won’t allow him to
procrastinate. Not where your health is concerned. Why, your poor dear
mother would be appalled by such a place, a school with rats in the
wall. Rats! My God, rats carry everything from rabies to the plague!”
Faye droned on and on.
Penny tuned her out.
There wasn’t any point in telling them about her own locker and the
silver-eyed things in the school basement.
Faye would insist they had been rats, too. When that woman got
something in her head, there was no way of getting it out again, no way
of changing her mind. Now, Faye was looking forward to confronting
their father about the rats; she relished the thought of blaming him for
putting them in a rat-infested school, and she wouldn’t be the least
receptive to anything Penny said, to any explanation or any conflicting
facts that might put rats completely out of the picture and thereby
spare their father from a scolding.
Even if I tell her about the hand, Penny thought, the little hand that
came under the green gate, she’ll stick to the idea that it’s rats.
She’ll say I was scared and made a mistake about what I saw. She’ll say
it wasn’t really a hand at all, but a rat, a slimy old rat biting at my
boot.
She’ll turn it all around. She’ll make it support the story she wants
to believe, and it’ll just be more ammunition for her to use against
Daddy. Damnit, Aunt Faye, why’re you so stubborn?
Faye was chattering about the need for a parent to thoroughly
investigate a school before sending children to it.
Penny wondered when her father would come to get them, and she prayed he
wouldn’t be too late. She wanted him to come before bedtime. She
didn’t want to be alone, just her and Davey, in a dark room, even if it
was Aunt Faye’s guest room, blocks and blocks away from their own
apartment. She was pretty sure the goblins would find them, even here.
She had decided to take her father aside and tell him everything. He
wouldn’t want to believe in goblins, at first. But now there was
Davey’s lunchbox to consider. And if she went back to their apartment
with her father and showed him the holes in Davey’s plastic baseball
bat, she might be able to convince him. Daddy was a grownup, like Aunt
Faye, sure, but he wasn’t stubborn, and he listened to kids in a way
that few grown-ups did.
Faye said, “With all the money he got from your mother’s insurance and
from the settlement the hospital made, he could afford to send you to a
top-of-the-line school. Absolutely top-of-the-line. I can’t imagine
why he settled on this Wellton joint.”
Penny bit her lip, said nothing.
She stared down at the magazine. The pictures and words swam in and out
of focus.
The worst thing was that now she knew, beyond a doubt, that the goblins
weren’t just after her. They wanted Davey, too.
Rebecca had not waited for Jack, though he had asked her to. While he’d
been with Captain Gresham, working out the details of the protection
that would be provided for Penny and Davey, Rebecca had apparently put
on her coat and gone home.
When Jack found that she had gone, he sighed and said softly, “You sure
aren’t easy, baby.”
On his desk were two books about voodoo, which he had checked out of the
library yesterday. He stared at them for a long moment, then decided he
needed to learn more about Bocors and Houngons before tomorrow morning.
He put on his coat and gloves, picked up the books, tucked them under
one arm, and went down to the subterranean garage, beneath the building.
Because he and Rebecca were now in charge of the emergency task force,
they were entitled to perquisites beyond the reach of ordinary homicide
detectives, including the full-time use of an unmarked police sedan for
each of them, not just during duty hours but around the clock. The car
assigned to Jack was a one-year-old, sour-green Chevrolet that bore a
few dents and more than a few scratches. It was the totally