“You quit going into the park?”
Gran shook her head. “I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t give up the park.”
Nest hesitated. “Then what did you do?”
For a minute she thought her grandmother was going to say something awful. She had that look. Then Gran picked up her cigarette, ground it out in the ashtray, and gave a brittle laugh.
“I found a way to keep him from ever coming near me again,” she said. Her jaw muscles tightened and her lips compressed. Her words were fierce and rushed. “I had to. He wasn’t what he seemed.”
It was the way she said it. Nest gave her a hard look. “What do you mean, ‘He wasn’t what he seemed’?”
“Let it be, Nest.”
But Nest shook her head stubbornly. “I want to know.”
Gran’s frail hands knotted. “Oh, Nest! He wasn’t human!”
They stared at each other, eyes locked. Gran’s face was contorted with anger and frustration. The pulse at her temples throbbed, and her mouth worked, as if she were chewing on the words she could not make herself speak. But Nest would not look away. She would not give it up.
“He wasn’t human?” she repeated softly, the words digging and insistent. “If he wasn’t human, what was he?”
Gran shook her head as if to rid herself of all responsibility and exhaled sharply. “He was a demon, Nest!”
Nest felt all the strength drain from her body in a strangled rush. She sat frozen and empty in her chair, her grandmother’s words a harsh whisper of warning in her ears. A demon. A demon. A demon.
Gran bent forward and placed her dry, papery hands over
Nest’s. “I’m sorry to have disappointed you, child,” she whispered.
Nest shook her head quickly, insistently. “No, Gran, it’s all right.”
But it wasn’t, of course, and she knew in the darkest corners of her heart that it might never be again.
CHAPTER 19
Gran did a strange thing then. She rose without another word, went down the hall to her bedroom, and closed the door behind her. Nest sat at the kitchen table and waited. The minutes ticked by, but Gran did not return. She had left her drink and her cigarettes behind. Nest could not remember the last time Gran had left the kitchen table in the middle of the day like this. She kept thinking the old woman would reappear. She sat alone in the kitchen, bathed in the hot July sunlight. Gran stayed in her bedroom.
Finally Nest stood up and walked to the doorway and looked down the hall. The corridor was silent and empty. Nest nudged the wooden floor with the tip of her tennis shoe. A demon, a demon, a demon! Her mind spun with the possibilities. Was the demon Gran had known the same demon that was here now? She remembered John Ross saying he didn’t know why the demon was interested in her, and she wondered if it was because of Gran. Perhaps the demon was trying to get to Gran through her, rather than to John Ross. Maybe that was its intention.
She looked down at her feet, down her tanned legs and narrow body, and she wished that someone would just tell her the truth and be done with it. Because she was pretty certain no one was doing that now.
After a few more moments of waiting unsuccessfully for Gran to emerge, she went back into the kitchen and picked up the phone to call Cass. The house felt oppressive and secretive to her, even in the brightness of midday. She listened to its silence over the ringing of the telephone. Cass Minter’s mother picked up on the third ring and advised Nest that Cass and Bri-anna had already left and would meet her in the park by the toboggan slide. Nest thanked Mrs. Minter and hung up. She looked around the kitchen as if she might find someone watching, haunted by what Gran had told her. A demon. She closed her eyes, but the demon was there waiting for her, bland features smiling, pale eyes steady.
She glanced at the clock and went down the hall and out the back door. The picnic with John Ross was not until three. She had a little less than two hours to spend with Cass and the others before getting back. She stepped out into the heat and squinted up at the brilliant, sunlit sky. The air was thick with the rich smells of dry earth and grasses and leaves. Robins sang in the trees and cars drove down Sinnissippi Road, their tires whining on the hot asphalt. She wet her lips and looked around. Her grandfather came up the drive, returning from carrying up the yard waste. He slowed as he approached, and an uncertain smile creased his weathered face.