She seemed quite unmoved by his bruises and his bloody shirt. When he told her he'd seen what she'd done she cocked her head slightly, as though she wasn't entirely certain what he was talking about. He ordered her into his car. She went without protest. They drove home in silence.
Nothing was said that day. She stayed in her room, and played the radio, while Lawrence spoke to his lawyer about closing down The Slick, to the cops about bringing his assailants to justice, and his analyst about where he'd failed. That night she left again, in the early evening, or at least tried to. He intercepted her in the driveway however, and the round of recriminations postponed from the previous night erupted. All the time, she just stared at him, glassy-eyed. Her indifference inflamed him. She wouldn't come inside when he asked her, nor would she tell why she was doing what she was doing. His concern became fury, his voice rising in decibels and his vocabulary in venom until he was calling her a whore at the top of his voice, and there were drapes being twitched aside all around the Crescent. Eventually, blinded by tears of sheer incomprehension, he struck her, and might have done further damage had Kate not intervened. Arleen didn't wait. With her raging father in her mother's custody she ran off, and found herself a ride down to the beach.
The Slick was raided that night. There were twenty-one arrests, mostly for minor drug offenses, and the bar was closed down. When the officers arrived Lawrence Farrell's princess was performing the same bump and grind number she'd been performing nightly for over a week. It was a story not even Lawrence's crude attempts at bribery could keep out of the newspapers. It became prime reading material up and down the coast. Arleen was put into the hospital for a full medical check-up. She was found to have two sexually transmitted diseases, plus an infestation of crabs, and was suffering the kind of wear and tear her exploits had been bound to induce. But at least she wasn't pregnant. Lawrence and Kathleen Farrell thanked the Lord for that small mercy.
The revelations about Arleen's forays to The Slick brought a severe tightening of parental controls around the town. Even in the East Grove there were noticeably fewer kids wandering the streets after dark. Illicit romance became tough to come by. Even Trudi, the last of the four, would soon be obliged to give up her partner, though she'd found a near-perfect cover for her activities: religion. She'd had the wit to seduce one Ralph Contreras, a man of mixed blood who worked as a gardener for the Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Laureltree, and had a stammer of such proportions it to all intents and purposes left him speechless. She liked him that way. He provided the service she required, and kept his mouth shut about it. All in all, the perfect lover. Not that she cared much about his technique, as he valiantly played the male for her. He was simply a functionary. When he had completed his duties—and her body would tell her when that moment came—she would not think of him again. At least, so she told herself.
As it was, the affairs they were all having (Trudi's included) were—because of Arleen's indiscretions—quickly to become public knowledge. Though she might have found it easy to forget her trysts with Ralph the Silent, Palomo Grove would not.
The newspaper reports about the scandalous secret life of small-town beauty Arleen Farrell were as explicit as the legal departments of those journals would permit, but the details had to be left for rumor to supply. A small black market in what were claimed to be photographs of the orgy proved lucrative, though the pictures were so dingy it was difficult to be sure they were of the real thing. The family itself—Lawrence, Kate, sister Jocelyn and brother Craig—had a brighter light thrown upon them. Folks living on the other side of the Grove rerouted their shopping trips so as to come along the Crescent past the house of infamy. Craig had to be taken out of school because his peers bullied him unmercifully for the dirt on his big sister; Kate upped her tranquilizer intake until she was slurring any word of more than two syllables. But there was worse to come. Three days after Arleen had been snatched back from the bikers' den an interview purporting to be with one of Arleen's nurses appeared in the Chronicle. It said that the Farrell girl spent most of her time in a sexual frenzy, her talk one obscenity after another, interrupted only by tears of frustration. This in itself was newsworthy enough. But, the report went on, the patient's sickness went beyond that of an overheated libido. Arleen Farrell believed herself possessed.
The tale she told was elaborate, and bizarre. She, plus three of her friends, had gone swimming in a lake close to Palomo Grove, and been attacked by something that had entered them all. What this occupying entity had demanded of Arleen, and—presumably—of her fellow bathers, was that she get herself with child by whomever was available to provide the service. Hence her adventures at The Slick. The Devil in her womb had simply been looking for a surrogate father amid that rank company.
The article was presented with no trace of irony; the text of Arleen's so-called confession was quite absurd enough without requiring editorial gilding. Only those in the Grove blind or illiterate failed to read the revelations brought on by drugs and beauty. No one considered there to be an iota of truth in her claims, of course, except the families of the friends Arleen had been out with on Saturday, July 28th. Though she didn't name Joyce, Carolyn or Trudi the quartet were known to be fast friends. There could be no doubt in the minds of any who had a passing acquaintance with Arleen whom she'd written into her Satanic fantasies.
It rapidly became apparent that the girls would have to be shielded from the fallout following Arleen's preposterous claims. In the McGuire, Katz and Hotchkiss households the same exchange, give or take an endearment, took place.
The parent asked: "Do you want to leave the Grove for a while, until the worst of this blows over?" To which the child replied; "No, I'm fine. Never better."
"Are you sure it's not upsetting you, sweetheart?"
"Do I look upset?"
"No."
"Then I'm not upset."
Such well-balanced children, the parents thought, to face the tragedy of a friend's lunacy with this show of calm; aren't they a credit to us?
For a few weeks they were just that: model daughters, bearing the stress of their situation with admirable aplomb. Then the perfect picture began to deteriorate, as oddities in their behavior patterns made themselves apparent. It was a subtle process; one which might well have gone unnoticed for longer had the parents not been watching over their babies with such fastidiousness. First, the parents noticed their offspring keeping odd hours: sleeping at noon, and pacing at midnight. Food-fads appeared. Even Carolyn, who had never been known to refuse the edible, took a near pathological dislike to certain items: seafood in particular. The girls' air of serenity disappeared. It its place came moods that swung from the monosyllabic to the garrulous, the glacial to the crazed. It was Betty Katz who first suggested her daughter see the family doctor. Trudi didn't object. Nor did she seem in the slightest surprised when Doctor Gottlieb pronounced her healthy in every respect; and pregnant.