lost boy lost girl by Peter Straub Read Free Book Online Page B

remember her.”
    Philip stared down at the effigy in the coffin. So did Tim. Nancy appeared to have been dead since birth.
    In a strangled voice, Philip said, “Thank you for all you’ve done.”
    “And if you will take the advice of someone who is pretty much an expert in this sort of thing,” Joyce Brophy whispered close to Philip’s ear, “you make sure that handsome boy of yours comes up here and communes with his mama, because believe you me, if he misses this chance he’ll never have another and he’ll regret it all the rest of his life.”
    “Excellent advice,” said Philip.
    With a neighborly pat of his wrist, she bustled out of the room.
    “Mark, this is your last chance to see your mother,” Philip said, speaking in the general direction of his left shoulder.
    Mark mumbled something that sounded unpleasant.
    “It’s the reason we’re here, son.” He turned all the way around and kept his voice low and reasonable. “Jimbo, you can come up or not, as you wish, but Mark has to say good-bye to his mother.”
    Both boys stood up, looking anywhere but at the coffin, then moved awkwardly into the center aisle. Tim drifted away to the side of the room. Halfway to the coffin, Mark looked directly at his mother, instantly glanced away, swallowed, and looked back. Jimbo whispered something to him and settled himself into an aisle chair. When Mark stood before the coffin, frozen-faced, Philip nodded at him with what seemed a schoolmaster’s approval of a cooperative student. For a moment only, father and son remained together at the head of the room; then Philip lightly settled a hand on Mark’s shoulder, removed it, and without another glance turned away and joined Tim at the side of the room. In wordless agreement, the two men returned to their earlier station next to the dark, polished table and the stacks of memorial cards. A few other people had entered the room.
    Slowly, Jimbo rose to his feet and walked up the aisle to stand beside his friend.
    “You have to feel sorry for the poor kid,” Philip said softly. “Terrible shock.”
    “You had a terrible shock yourself,” Tim said. At Philip’s questioning glance, he added, “When you found the body. Found Nancy like that.”
    “The first time I saw Nancy’s body, she was all wrapped up, and they were taking her out of the house.”
    “Well, who . . .” A dreadful recognition stopped his throat.
    “Mark found her that afternoon—came home from God knows where, went into the bathroom, and there she was. He called me, and I told him to dial 911 and then go outside. By the time I got home, they were taking her to the ambulance.”
    “Oh, no,” Tim breathed out. He looked down the aisle at the boy, locked into unreadable emotions before his mother’s casket.
    Inside his brother’s house on the following afternoon, after the sad little funeral, a good number of the neighbors, many more than Tim had anticipated, were sitting on the furniture or standing around with soft drinks in their hands. (Most of them held soft drinks, anyhow. Since his arrival at the gathering, Jimbo’s father, Jackie Monaghan, whose ruddy, good-humored face was the template for his son’s, had acquired a dull shine in his eyes and a band of red across his cheekbones. These were probably less the product of grief than of the contents of the flask outlined in his hip pocket. Tim had witnessed two of the other attendees quietly stepping out of the room with good old Jackie.)
    Jimbo’s mother, Margo Monaghan, had startled Tim by revealing that she had read one of his books. Even more startling was her extraordinary natural beauty. Without a trace of makeup Margo Monaghan looked like two or three famous actresses but did not really resemble any of them. She looked the way the actresses would look if you rang their bell and caught them unprepared at three o’clock on an ordinary afternoon. Amazingly, the other men in the room paid no attention to her. If anything, they