The Piper

TWENTY-EIGHT




Olivia and Amelia headed down to the kitchen for coffee.

‘You got any Advil, Olivia? I don’t know what possessed me to drink all those martinis, but I’m paying for it now.’

‘Maybe it was you turning the lights on and off.’

‘It wasn’t. And it wasn’t Teddy either.’

The kitchen was still a wreck, and Olivia had to move glasses and sticky barbecue plates just to get to the coffee maker. She ground fresh beans, and Amelia rummaged through the cabinet over the microwave, looking for the Advil.

They slumped side by side in the sunroom, and neither of them started the conversation till the coffee was ready. There was almost too much to say.

Amelia stirred half and half into her cup, an oversized mug with paw prints on the front that said Bark Less Wag More. A Christmas gift from Teddy and Winston the year before.

‘It wasn’t Teddy messing with the lights, Olivia. She wasn’t there when it started. I got woken up twice before I saw her standing by the door. And I heard when she got up. I sleep light.’

‘Not after that many martinis.’

‘There is that.’

‘You were right when you told me things would get worse with her before they got better. So can you tell me when better will come? Because right now she’s got me so tied up in knots. And it’s getting serious now, Amel. Look what happened at the hospital. Her telling the nurse she was afraid to go home. I came that close to having Child Protective Services on my back. And what if there is something wrong with her, Amel. She keeps talking about this Duncan Lee like he’s a real person. Only now she says he has another name. Decan Ludde.’

‘The name I saw on the Waverly web cam? She said that?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Is that what she meant tonight when she was talking to Jamison about you know who?’

Olivia nodded.

‘Because I have to tell you, that was kind of weird.’

‘She’s so convincing when she talks about this stuff. I can’t tell now when she’s lying or telling the truth.’

‘The thing is, Olivia, she was right in the next room. She probably overheard us talking. My take is that her little cousins planted this Duncan Lee, ghost creepy thing in Teddy’s head. And my guess is she sort of believes it and she sort of doesn’t. Anything can seem real if you concentrate on it too much. Look, do you have good health insurance?’

‘Minimal. And I’m going to have to move her off Hugh’s and on to mine, but at least I’ve got it.’

‘Has Teddy been having any headaches, visual disturbances? Her appetite is normal, she’s eating okay?’

Olivia fiddled with the handle of her coffee cup. Her stomach was too nauseated for her to actually drink. She hadn’t even gotten the Advil down. ‘Nothing like that, other than that night she got really sick, and we wound up in the ER.’

‘I think you should take her to a psychologist, Livie. Someone who specializes in children.’

‘Yeah, Amelia, but you know that’s going to get her labeled, and go on her health records, and cause her all kinds of problems later on. That’s what happened to me and Chris.’

‘Not if you handle it right. Describe the problems as anxiety and school phobia. Those are typical childhood problems that won’t put up red flags. Do you know anybody? Because I can ask around, but most of my contacts are in California.’

‘I do know somebody, yes.’

‘Is she good?’

‘He. Yes, he’s good, if he’s still in practice. He’s the guy Chris and I talked to, after Emily disappeared. When my family was having so much trouble.’

Amelia put her head in her hands. ‘Look, I’m exhausted, I need to go back up to bed. But why don’t we do this. You get Teddy off to school tomorrow, like usual, and I’ll sleep in. Tomorrow afternoon, I’ll go and pick her up – make sure you tell her it will be me there, okay? Let’s not spring anything on her at the last minute. That way I can spend some time with her, one on one. We’ll go shopping, go out to this Long’s place you guys keep talking about and get ice cream. Oh hell, I don’t have a car.’

‘You can have mine. My office is just around the corner, I can walk.’

‘Walk? This from the woman who has extreme claustrophobia, but still takes the elevator rather than climb the stairs?’

‘I’ll walk, Amelia, it’s not that far.’

‘Okay, then. Be sure you make that appointment with the shrink. Especially after what happened at the hospital, with that Dr McClintock. She called my office, and checked up on you, Olivia, did I tell you that?’

‘God. No, you didn’t.’

‘The bottom line here, Livie, is that you need to get Teddy in counseling for two reasons. One she really needs it, and two, you need to cover your ass. If that McClintock bitch took the step of calling my office, then there’s an official record of what happened. So now there’s a paper trail. You need to be seen as being a proactive, careful mom. Look, I’m dead on my feet, I’m heading up to bed. But before I head up, pull out your laptop and google that name, will you? Decan Ludde, wasn’t it? I want to know if maybe Teddy is pulling stuff off the Internet.’

Olivia hunched over the laptop and keyed Decan Ludde into the search engine. Waited. Squinted at the screen. ‘How weird. Look what came up. The Pied Piper of Hamelin.’

‘That kid story?’

Olivia’s fingers trembled over the keyboard. She began to read, bit her lip, and looked up at Amelia. ‘OK. So evidently The Pied Piper was more than just some poem by Robert Browning. It was based on an actual event in Hamelin, Germany during the Middle Ages. When a whole village of children disappeared.’

Amelia grabbed Olivia’s shoulder. ‘But isn’t that what your brother said in his phone call? You told me that, didn’t you? That he paid the piper, so everything would be OK.’

‘Yeah. Amelia, did I tell you what they’re doing for Teddy’s third grade play? The Pied Piper. Teddy’s going to be a rat, she brought home the school instructions for her costume this week.’

‘Take it easy, Livie, it’s just a fairy tale.’

‘Is it? Really? Maybe Charlotte has a point. She won’t let Annette be in the play.’

‘But doesn’t it say anything about what happened to those kids? Surely somebody has theories.’

Olivia scrolled the computer screen. ‘There’s a theory that the Pied Piper was a psychopathic pedophile, kidnapping children and using them in unspeakable ways. Some of them were found dismembered and scattered, or hanging from the branches of trees. Or were never seen again.’

‘So what they’re saying is the Pied Piper of Hamelin was a serial killer? Why did it come up for that name, Decan Ludde?’

Olivia rubbed her forehead. ‘Decan Ludde of Hamelin, 1384. It looks like he may or may not have been a priest. They can’t trace him. But he supposedly had some kind of chorus book with a Latin verse giving an eyewitness account of what happened. There was a stained glass window in the church in Hamelin, circa 1300 – evidently a sort of memorial.’ She frowned at the keyboard. ‘Oh, God. Listen to this – it’s in the town chronicles from 1384. “It is ten years since our children left.”’

‘That sounds so sad. And so creepy.’

‘Put the pieces together, Amel. The Pied Piper is all about making deals. That’s why they call it paying the piper. So Chris and Jamison and Bennington go to this haunted sanatorium the night before their wrestling match. They go into the Death Tunnel where all the bodies went, back when it was an active hospital. And in the most haunted place in America, this Death Tunnel is where they went. The center of paranormal activity.’

Amelia sat back down, staring out the window into the night. ‘The next day they each win every match in their wrestling competition. They all get scholarships.’

‘Right. They get what they ask for. And then Jamison has his car accident and suffers this closed head injury, so for Jamison the scholarship becomes nothing more than a cruel joke.’

‘And your brother Chris?’

‘Comes home in happy triumph only to find his sister has disappeared.’

‘Because they have to pay the piper,’ Amelia whispered.

‘Right. And afterwards, my brother, Chris, is wracked with guilt, like somehow it’s all his fault. And he won’t take that scholarship. Like maybe he doesn’t deserve it. Or it’s tainted.’

‘So what are you telling me here, Livie? That all of them made some kind of deal with this Decan Ludde thing, whatever it is?’

‘Look at the pattern, Amel. Say my brother made a deal, all those years ago, and learns a hard lesson. He gets what he wants but the price is too high. Then he leaves this thing he attracted somehow at the Waverly, whatever it is, he leaves it alone. But then. Then his little girl, Janet, is deathly ill.’

Amelia put a hand to her chin. ‘So he’s a desperate father who will do anything to save his daughter. You’re saying he made another deal.’

‘Look how it played out. Janet is suddenly okay, but Chris doesn’t sleep, he loses sixty pounds, he has nightmares and can’t sleep. He makes his family move out of the house.’

‘He’s afraid.’

‘Right. He knows he’s going to have to pay. Which is exactly what he told me in the phone call. He had to pay the piper.’

‘I wonder what happened to the Bennington guy,’ Amelia said. ‘Do you think Charlotte knows any details about him?’

‘I think she knows more than she’s said.’

Amelia put a hard hand on Olivia’s shoulder. ‘You might want to keep some distance between you and this sister-in-law, Livie. Remember, all of this started up when this was her house.’

‘That won’t be a problem. She treats Teddy and I like we’re . . . infected.’

‘Yeah. But Teddy picked up a lot of nasty ideas from that cousin of hers. Maybe they’re the ones infected. Not you.’