The Christmas season was beautiful in Stoneridge Estates. Not only were the rooftops and the scrub pines mantled festively in white, but on each home were hung elaborate electrical ornaments that at night were as spectacular as anything that could be seen in the downtown areas of large cities. Against the chill starry night sky you saw a red-cheeked Santa urging on his long team of reindeer; over the soft fall of feet through powdery snow, you heard a chorus sing "Silent Night" to a front-yard replica of the famous manger scene; and on a hill behind the Estates, you saw a large plastic Frosty the Snowman, lighted from inside, waving hello to all the good boys and girls.
This was also the time when the people of Stoneridge realized that they were friends and not just folks who happened to live next door to one another. Women exchanged recipes and cookies and holiday cakes; men exchanged Sunday-afternoon football highlights and hunting tips and helped in digging out a car buried in snow.
All the neighbors, that was, except the McCays.
From the time little Jenny had come home, the McCays had become almost suspiciously insular, showing a downright aversion to exchanging anything more than the briefest of greetings with their neighbors. Mindy-who had been variously "into" Amway, the Junior League, mall fashion shows, and the Negro-for-an-afternoon program that the country club once sponsored until one of the ungrateful little wretches bit the white hand that happened to be feeding it-was especially silent.
And skinnier.
The women of Stoneridge didn't know what kind of diet Mindy was on this time, but whatever it was, it certainly seemed to work. By Stoneridge estimates, Mindy had dropped as much as twenty-five pounds, the one drawback being that the woman's face looked terrible-gaunt, with eye rings as pronounced as a raccoon's, and a disposition problem that bordered on psychosis.
Eventually, the women of Stoneridge-who did not like to think of themselves as gossips but merely exchangers of information-came to realize that Mindy was on no diet at all.
No, the trouble was Jenny, whom none of the Stoneridge ladies had seen since the day of her return. Only Diane had seen her. Jenny's problems were so severe that they were causing Mindy to lose weight. That was the conclusion of the Stoneridge women, and presumably they were correct because since November 2, the day of Jenny's return, the McCay driveway had held the cars of three psychiatrists, a priest, a Bishop, an Orthodox Rabbi, a steel-haired Presbyterian Minister whom the Stoneridge women instantly dubbed "sexy," seven different officers from local, state, and federal bureaus, a psychic whom the Stoneridge ladies recognized from her show between bouts on the local professional wrestling "Saturday Wipeout," three women from a church bearing flowers, four men from the Jaycees bearing balloons, and two men in a hearse who said they were from Wisconsin and had devoted their lives to checking out stories of possible abductions by UFOs, of which poor little Jenny might be an example.
Ed Gorman
Nightmare Child