The presence of the child, and the fact that Cathy hadn’t mentioned it, gnawed at Marion’s mind all day. She questioned Cathy about it as soon as she came home.
“You didn’t tell me the Smiths have a child.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know why not.”
“Is it a boy or a girl?”
“Girl.”
“How old?”
Cathy thought it over carefully, frowning up at the ceiling. “About ten.”
“Doesn’t she go to school?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“She doesn’t want to.”
“That’s not a very good reason.”
“It’s her reason,” Cathy said flatly. “Can I go out to play now?”
“I’m not sure you should. You look a little feverish. Come here and let me feel your forehead.”
Cathy’s forehead was cool and moist, but her cheeks and the bridge of her nose were very pink, almost as if she’d been sun-burned.
“You’d better stay inside,” Marion said, “and watch some cartoons.”
“I don’t like cartoons.”
“You used to.”
“I like real people.”
She means the Smiths, of course, Marion thought as her mouth tightened. “People who dance and play baseball all the time?”
If the sarcasm had any effect on Cathy she didn’t show it. After waiting until Marion had become engrossed in her quiz program, Cathy lined up all her dolls in her room and gave a concert for them, to thunderous applause.
“Where are your old Navy binoculars?” Marion asked Paul when she was getting ready for bed.
“Oh, somewhere in the sea chest, I imagine. Why?”
“I want them.”
“Not thinking of spying on the neighbors, are you?”
“I’m thinking of just that,” Marion said grimly.
The next morning, as soon as she saw the Smith child come out on the patio, Marion went downstairs to the storage room to search through the sea chest. She located the binoculars and was in the act of dusting them off when the telephone started to ring in the living room. She hurried upstairs and said breathlessly, “Hello?”
“Mrs. Borton?”
“Yes.”
“This is Miss Park speaking, Cathy’s teacher.”
Marion had met Miss Park several times at P.T.A. meetings and report-card conferences. She was a large, ruddy-faced, and unfailingly cheerful young woman—the kind, as Paul said, you wouldn’t want to live with but who’d be nice to have around in an emergency. “How are you, Miss Park?”
“Oh, fine, thank you, Mrs. Borton. I meant to call you yesterday but things were a bit out of hand around here, and I knew there was no great hurry to check on Cathy; she’s such a wellbehaved little girl.”
Even Miss Park’s loud, jovial voice couldn’t cover up the ominous sound of the word check. “I don’t think I quite understand. Why should you check on Cathy?”
“Purely routine. The school doctor and the health department like to keep records of how many cases of measles or flu or chicken pox are going the rounds. Right now it looks like the season for mumps. Is Cathy all right?”
“She seemed a little feverish yesterday afternoon when she got home from school, but she acted perfectly normal when she left this morning.”
Miss Park’s silence was so protracted that Marion became painfully conscious of things she wouldn’t otherwise have noticed—the weight of the binoculars in her lap, the thud of her own heartbeat in her ears. Across the canyon the Smith child was playing quietly and alone on the patio. There is definitely something the matter with that girl, Marion thought. Perhaps I’d better not let Cathy go over there anymore, she’s so imitative. “Miss Park, are you still on the line? Hello? Hello—”
“I’m here,” Miss Park’s voice seemed fainter than usual, and less positive. “What time did Cathy leave the house this morning?”
“Eight, as usual.”
“Did she take the school bus?”
“Of course. She always does.”
“Did you see her get on?”
“I kissed her goodbye at the front door,” Marion said. “What’s this all about, Miss Park?”
“Cathy hasn’t been at school for two days, Mrs. Borton.”
“Why, that’s absurd, impossible! You must be mistaken.” But even as she was speaking the words, Marion was raising the binoculars to her eyes: the little girl on the Smiths’ patio had a straw curtain of hair and eyes as blue as the periwinkles along the creek banks.
“Mrs. Borton, I’m not likely to be mistaken about which of my children are in class or not.”
“No. No, you’re—you’re not mistaken, Miss Park. I can see Cathy from here—she’s over at the neighbor’s house.”
“Good. That’s a load off my mind.”
“Off yours, yes,” Marion said. “Not mine.”
“Now we mustn’t become excited, Mrs. Borton. Don’t make too much of this incident before we’ve had a chance to confer. Suppose you come and talk to me during my lunch hour and bring Cathy along. We’ll all have a friendly chat.”
But it soon became apparent, even to the optimistic Miss Park, that Cathy didn’t intend to take part in any friendly chat. She stood by the window in the classroom, blank-eyed, mute, unresponsive to the simplest questions, refusing to be drawn into any conversation even about her favorite topic, the Smiths. Miss Park finally decided to send Cathy out to play in the schoolyard while she talked to Marion alone.
“Obviously,” Miss Park said, enunciating the word very distinctly because it was one of her favorites, “obviously, Cathy’s got a crush on this young couple and has concocted a fantasy about belonging to them.”
“It’s not so obvious what my husband and I are going to do about it.”
“Live through it, the same as other parents. Crushes like this are common at Cathy’s age. Sometimes the object is a person, a whole family, even a horse. And, of course, to Cathy a nightclub dancer and a baseball player must seem very glamorous indeed. Tell me, Mrs. Borton, does she watch television a great deal?”
Marion stiffened. “No more than any other child.”
Oh dear, Miss Park thought sadly, they all do it; the most confirmed addicts are always the most defensive. “I just wondered,” she said. “Cathy likes to sing to herself and I’ve never heard such a repertoire of television commercials.”
“She picks things up very fast.”
“Yes. Yes, she does indeed.” Miss Park studied her hands, which were always a little pale from chalk dust and were even paler now because she was angry—at the child for deceiving her, at Mrs. Borton for brushing aside the television issue, at herself for not preventing, or at least anticipating, the current situation, and perhaps most of all at the Smiths who ought to have known better than to allow a child to hang around their house when she should obviously be in school.
“Don’t put too much pressure on Cathy about this,” she said finally, “until I talk the matter over with the school psychologist. By the way, have you met the Smiths, Mrs. Borton?”
“Not yet,” Marion said grimly. “But believe me, I intend to.”
“Yes, I think it would be a good idea for you to talk to them and make it clear that they’re not to encourage Cathy in this fantasy.”
The meeting came sooner than Marion expected.
She waited at the school until classes were dismissed, then she took Cathy into town to do some shopping. She had parked the car and she and Cathy were standing hand in hand at a corner waiting for a traffic light to change; Marion was worried and impatient, Cathy still silent, unresisting, inert, as she had been ever since Marion had called her home from the Smiths’ patio.