take his car and go looking for them, but he’d always changed his mind, afraid that one or aie other might call him, needing help, and he wouldn’t be there. So he’d waited, nervously pacing the house, willing the phone to ring, glancing out the window every few minutes in hopes of seeing one of the people he loved best.
And at last his son had come home.
“Where’ve you been?” he asked again, his voice gentle now. “Why didn’t you go to school?”
Jason, sensing that his father was no longer angry at him, sniffled a couple of times.
“ ’Cause of the fight,” he said.
“The fight with Joey?”
The little boy shook his head.
“Then why didn’t you come home?”
“ ’Cause of the fight you and Mom were having,” Jason explained. Then, as if sensing something wrong, he glanced uneasily around. “Isn’t Mom here?”
“Not right now,” Steve replied. What could he say to Jason? That his mother had run away, and no one knew where she was? Then, for the first time, he noticed Jason’s torn clothes. “That must have been some fight you had with Joey,” he commented. “Want to tell me about it?”
Slowly Jason began to unfold the story. “And my eye was swollen,” he finished, “and my arm was bleeding, and my clothes were torn, so I didn’t go to school. But he started it, Dad.”
Steve nodded absently, not really hearing Jason’s last words. Instead, he was trying to match Jason’s list of wounds with what he saw.
His eye was swollen?
His arm was bleeding?
And the torn leg on his pants. Where had that come from?
“What happened to your jeans?”
Jason scowled. “He pushed me down on the sidewalk, and I skinned my knee?”
“Show me.”
Obediently, Jason rolled up his pant leg. The skin on his knee was clear and smooth. And yet, when Steve examined the jeans, he could see what looked like blood on the inside.
“And what about your arm? Where did he bite you?”
“Right here.” Jason touched a spot just above his wrist It showed no signs of damage either. Nor was there any blemish on Jason’s face.
What the hell was going on? Both boys gave the same account of the fight, and Joey Connors had been a mess this morning. “Come on, son,” he said quietly. He led Jason into the kitchen, opened a Coke for the boy, then picked up the phone.
“Kay?” he asked when the connection was made. “This is Steve Montgomery. I was just wondering how Joey’s doing.”
There was a slight pause, then a sigh. “All right, I guess. He’s sore, and his bruises won’t go away for a couple of days, but there’s no real damage.” She paused, then added, “Has Jason come home yet? Or Sally?”
“Jason’s here,” Steve said.
“Is he okay?”
“I’m not sure,” Steve said slowly. “But apparently the fight went just about the way Joey said, except that Jason insists Joey started it.”
“Which he did,” Kay Connors admitted. “What do you mean, you’re not sure if Jason’s okay? Is he hurt?”
“No, no—nothing like that.” He laughed, but the sound was hollow. “In fact, it seems to me he should be hurt worse than he is. I’m afraid that Joey got by far the worst of it.”
“I see,” Kay replied, her voice noticeably cooler. In fact, she did not see at all, but privately decided that in the future, Joey would be instructed to have nothing whatever to do with Jason Montgomery. Indeed, from now on, the entire Connors family would avoid the Montgomerys. A moment later she found an excuse to end the conversation and cut the connection.
Steve sat silently, wondering what to do. There was no damage where there should have been damage. Even Jason said he’d been hurt in the fight. But what had happened to the wounds?
And then he remembered the fudge and the muriatic acid. Both times it had been Sally who claimed to have seen the damage, and both times he’d thought she was overreacting. But what about now? This time Joey, and Jason himself, had seen the damage. Were they lying? But there was no reason for them to. He reached for the phone again, glancing at the numbers that were scrawled all over the cover of the directory. A moment later he was talking to Eastbury Community Hospital.
“This is Steve Montgomery. Is Dr. Malone in?”
“No, he isn’t, Mr. Montgomery.”
“Can he be reached somewhere else?”
“One moment” He was put on hold for what seemed an interminable length of time, but at last the operator came back on the