Certain Prey

wouldn’t help: they’d get you anywhere. She decided to stick to routine.
    Heather had been going to day school all summer, getting a head start on first grade. Davis had hoped against hope that somehow, in the morning, Heather would have forgotten what happened the night before. But she hadn’t— she looked like she’d gotten as little sleep as her mother.
    “Should I go to school?” she asked, first thing.
    “Yes. We are going to forget what happened last night. That was a bad dream.” Davis tried to be cheery; but it wasn’t working.
    “Is she going to come back and hurt us?”
    “No, no, no, nothing is going to happen. Let’s just pretend that nothing happened, nobody came.”
    “But the lady came.”
    Davis wanted to shake her. Wanted to scream at her, wanted to impress her with the danger, but didn’t know how. “Heather, listen: that was a very bad lady. Very bad. We have to pretend that she wasn’t here. We have to pretend that she was a bad dream. Remember the bad dream you had about Mrs. Gartin chasing you? We have to forget it, just like we forgot the dream about Mrs. Gartin.”
    “I didn’t forget that dream,” Heather said solemnly. “I just told you I did.”
    “But you don’t have it anymore.”
    “No . . .” She ate cornflakes.
    And before she could bring the subject back to the lady, Davis said, “I’m supposed to see your father this afternoon.”
    Heather looked up from the cornflakes. “Is he going to come to see me?”
    “Not this afternoon, I don’t think. This is business. But I’ll tell him you’d like it if he came over.”
    “Okay. Do you think he’ll come . . .”
    And the talk went that way. All the way to school, Davis looked for trailing cars, looked for short women with red hair, looked for those small competent hands, but she didn’t see anybody exactly like that. And Heather never mentioned the bad lady, not once, all the way to school.

    M RS. G ARTIN’S S CHOOL took children from three to six, and taught them letters and numbers and shapes and colors, music, and phonics for the older children. Mrs. Gartin and her two associates tried to keep the little boys from beating each other and victimizing the little girls, and to encourage the little girls to socialize.
    At the back of the big kids’ room—Mrs. Gartin never even saw it anymore, just another blob in the background— was Officer Friendly’s full-size, stand-up cutout, sponsored by Logan’s Rendering Co. Officer Friendly’s telephone number was on the front of the poster. Officer Friendly had visited the school, and talked to them about being careful, about bad men and women, and how the police were there to help children. He left behind the cutout.
    Heather saw his picture every day, and this day, summoning all her intentness of purpose, she went into Mrs. Roman’s cubbyhole when the rest of the class followed Mrs. Roman out to recess, and called the number. She’d called her mom several times, and knew about dialing nine.
    Officer Friendly, whose real name was Dick Ennis, was something of a drunk (“Not an alcoholic,” he said. “ Alcoholics go to meetings”), and was late to work more than half the time; not that anybody cared. And mostly, when he was sober, he was a pretty good Officer Friendly. For one thing, he liked kids, and had several of his own by two exwives. For another, he’d been a decent street cop. In any case, he’d just arrived at his office, put his sack lunch in his desk drawer, and had turned to go for coffee when the phone rang. He dropped into his chair and picked it up.
    Heather said, “Is this Officer Friendly?”
    And Ennis said, “Yes, it is. Can I help you?” He thought the little girl on the other end of the line might be five years old.
    “Yes. A bad lady came to my house and scared my mom and me.”
    “Uh-huh. Who is this? What is your name?”
    “This is Heather Davis. My phone number is . . .”
    Smart kid, Ennis thought as he scribbled down the number. “Okay, Heather, how did the bad lady scare your mom and you?”
    “She had a gun and she had a mask that she pulled down over her face, and she said if we told anybody, she would come and kill us. And she shooted a picture of my mom. And now my mom is scared to tell anybody.”
    Ennis sat up, his forehead wrinkled. “When did this happen?”
    “Last night when it was dark.”
    “Nobody called a policeman?”
    “No. Some policemen came to see us, but they went away. Then this lady