Bad Desire by Gary; Devon Read Free Book Online

where street lamps burnished the lawn with light. There was nothing to do but to cross through it, and so she fled toward the far corner of the iron fence.
    Behind her, in the garden, the figure in the rose arbor remained in darkness except for the transitory gleam of his wire-rimmed glasses. Beecham stood watching the girl as she ran through the moonlight. That was close, Beecham thought. Now that she had vanished, he moved out from under the canopy of vines. He wondered how long the girl would be gone, when she would come back, but he really didn’t need to see any more. Tonight he had studied the interior of the house through its downstairs windows; he knew everything he needed to know.
    Swinging up over the old iron fence, Sheila shrank into the dark crevice between the lilacs. A hand—she saw a boy’s hand—reached for her, and Denny drew her into his arms. “The curtains,” he whispered, “upstairs,” and he looked toward the front of the house, all awash in shadows. “I saw something.”
    Catching her breath, Sheila looked in the same direction Denny was looking, but the upstairs windows only appeared dark to her and blank. “No,” she told him, “it’s nothing. She’s asleep; I checked.”
    Denny was a year older than she was and several inches taller; his hair lay in dark rumpled curls. He touched her cheek with his hand, and her mouth was soft and slick when he kissed her. “They’re waiting,” he said, quietly, leading her through the crooked lilac branches toward a car that emerged from the shade of the roadside oaks, a gray Firebird idling at the curb with its lights out.
    The charcoal-colored door swung open for them, the seat fell forward, and first Sheila and then Denny scrambled into the back of the car. “Hi, Mary,” Sheila whispered and then to the driver, who had shifted gears, “Tommy, please, please , don’t gun it. Don’t wake her up. I think maybe she heard you last time.”
    Tommy Ames looked back over his shoulder and grinned at her. “Sheila,” he said, “you worry too much.” But he did as she asked him.
    Invisible except for the streetlight glancing from its chrome, the gray Firebird moved smoothly into the night. Behind it, the air carried only a trace of the warbling in its mufflers.
    When there was no sound at all left beating the air, the brown-spotted fingers let go and the part in the upstairs curtains fell to, as if weighted. That boy, Rachel thought. It was maddening—all this sneaking around. One minute she would think, I’ve got to put my foot down; the next she was torn with indecision. She knew that Denny Rivera was the least of her troubles; she wanted Sheila to be interested in someone her own age. This wasn’t the only time the girl had slipped away in the last few hours—Sheila had also disappeared before suppertime for almost half an hour and Rachel was certain she knew who she had gone to meet.
    â€œI’m going to have to do it,” she whispered to herself. “I said I would; now I have to.” She crossed the dark landing and entered Sheila’s bedroom. Reaching under the shade, she flipped on the bedside lamp and tugged open the drawer of the nightstand. The key was still there, where it always was. Taking it firmly in her fingers, she went toward the shoe boxes in Sheila’s closet, wondering what new bauble Henry Slater had given her this time.
    I’ve got to do it, Rachel thought. She’s my little girl—and he won’t quit. He’s still after her.
    The gray Firebird rumbled through the country club parking lot, staunched its headlights and swung in beside the black and gold Trans Am. Doors flew open, dome lights blinked, doors slammed shut. A murmuring rose among the gathering of high school boys and their girlfriends—ten of them, juniors and seniors, congregated between their parked cars. Cans of cold beer