Come Little Children by D. Melhoff Read Free Book Online Page A

concern when she spotted the wet boy.
    “Move,” Moira barked, rushing forward and pushing Camilla aside.
    The old woman opened a cabinet near the back door and took a towel from a stack inside—wrapping it around the immobile child—and escorted him into the house. As they passed under the lights, Camilla went paler than she already was.
    There was mud sandwiched between the boy’s toes and fingernails. His skin looked shrivelled, as if he had taken a bath for too long, and his lips were the faintest shade of indigo.
    But that wasn’t all.
    No, the most jarring aspect of the six-year-old’s appearance was the long scar that stretched from his sternum down to the bottom of his rib cage. It looked raw—so raw that it couldn’t have been more than a day or two old.
    Camilla backed against the counter as Moira came by, kicking the broken glass out of the boy’s barefooted path. She stopped directly in front of her. Anything was possible, from a firing to a face slap.
    The room went silent.
    “Be up by six thirty,” Moira said, pursing her lips. “Downstairs at seven.”
    Moira raised her hand—
here it comes, the slap
—and whipped it forward, snatching the silver hair clip right out of Camilla’s hair.
    And that was it. The old woman kicked another chunk of glass across the kitchen and walked out of the room with the wet boy pressed to her side.

5
    Stag Crescent
    A t six twenty-five a.m. the next morning, Camilla tiptoed up to the second floor of the Vincents’ house on the balls of her toes. She was dripping wet, clinging to a towel that felt like a ream of sandpaper.
    Her legs slid together to lock in every degree of body heat. As her hips rocked back and forth—not that she had “hips” so much as just hip bones—she pictured herself modeling something from one of her favorite fashion houses, maybe Valentino or Givenchy. She had tried modeling in college and was pretty decent at hitting her marks, but after a month of nothing but first and second round callbacks, her tetchy Tim-Gunn-knockoff agent had given her the old, cold boot. “You’ve got the tools, hon,” his lisp was memorably condescending, “but you’re missing the ‘tude.”
    He was right, of course. Doesn’t mean he couldn’t be less pretentious about it
.
Asshole
.
    And then it hit her: the smell of eggs and sausage links rising up from the kitchen. Oil was popping on Teflon as a spatula scraped the burned rims of bacon off a frying pan two floors below. She closed her eyes, breathing deeper, and allowedvisions of greasy breakfast foods in all their glory to chase away her inner model.
    The smells summoned another image, this time a full-bodied memory.
    She was suddenly in the kitchen of her parents’ old trailer home—a drab den of corroded appliances, permanently stained countertops, and linoleum that curled up from the walls like untrimmed toenails. This “dining room” barely qualified as a kitchenette, yet that embarrassing little nook had fed more mouths with fewer resources than Jesus Christ. Five loaves of bread and a couple of fish would have been a feast in those days; usually Camilla and her mother would split two or three scrambled eggs and a glass of milk as they sat in the trailer’s dining booth and watched the smoke curl off a limp cigarette. The only sound would be their FM radio crackling out the morning show: weather, advertisements, five minutes of banter, more advertisements, Tom Petty, more advertisements. Sometimes they could get through their milk and eggs with enough time to catch the first half of the Hot Talk segment with Bert Blightly, but more often than not, the third Petty tune would get cut short by the sudden banging on the side of their trailer. Camilla swore, even now, that she could smell the odor of booze and urine seep through the screen door and murder every pleasant molecule in the room.
    A drop of water rolled down Camilla’s thigh and shot a shiver back up between her legs.
    The