LITMIR.BIZ

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raging father in her mother’s custody she ran off, and found herself a ride down to the beach.

      The Slick was raided that night. There were twenty-one arrests, mostly for minor drug offences, and the bar was closed down. When the officers arrived Lawrence Farrell’s princess was performing the same bump and grind number she’d been performing nightly for over a week. It was a story not even Lawrence’s crude attempts at bribery could keep out of the newspapers. It became prime reading material up and down the coast. Arleen was put into hospital for a full medical check-up. She was found to have two sexually transmitted diseases, plus an infestation of crabs, and was suffering the kind of wear and tear her exploits had been bound to induce. But at least she wasn’t pregnant. Lawrence and Kathleen Farrell thanked the Lord for that small mercy.

      The revelations about Arleen’s forays to The Slick brought a severe tightening of parental controls around the town. Even in the East Grove there were noticeably fewer kids wandering the streets after dark. Illicit romance became tough to come by. Even Trudi, the last of the four, would soon be obliged to give up her partner, though she’d found a near-perfect cover for her activities: religion. She’d had the wit to seduce one Ralph Contreras, a man of mixed blood who worked as a gardener for the Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Laureltree, and had a stammer of such proportions it to all intents and purposes left him speechless. She liked him that way. He provided the service she required, and kept his mouth shut about it. All in all, the perfect lover. Not that she cared much about his technique, as he valiantly played the male for her. He was simply a functionary. When he had completed his duties – and her body would tell her when that moment came – she would not think of him again. At least, so she told herself.

      As it was, the affairs they were all having (Trudi’s included) were – because of Arleen’s indiscretions – quickly to become public knowledge. Though she might have found it easy to forget her trysts with Ralph the Silent, Palomo Grove would not.

      ii

      The newspaper reports about the scandalous secret life of small-town beauty Arleen Farrell were as explicit as the legal departments of those journals would permit, but the details had to be left for rumour to supply. A small black market in what were claimed to be photographs of the orgy proved lucrative, though the pictures were so dingy it was difficult to be sure they were of the real thing. The family itself – Lawrence, Kate, sister Jocelyn and brother Craig – had a brighter light thrown upon them. Folks living on the other side of the Grove rerouted their shopping trips so as to come along the Crescent past the house of infamy. Craig had to be taken out of school because his peers bullied him unmercifully for the dirt on his big sister; Kate upped her tranquillizer intake until she was slurring any word of more than two syllables. But there was worse to come. Three days after Arleen had been snatched back from the bikers’ den an interview purporting to be with one of Arleen’s nurses appeared in the Chronicle. It said that the Farrell girl spent most of her time in a sexual frenzy, her talk one obscenity after another, interrupted only by tears of frustration. This in itself was newsworthy enough. But, the report went on, the patient’s sickness went beyond that of an overheated libido. Arleen Farrell believed herself possessed.

      The tale she told was elaborate, and bizarre. She, plus three of her friends, had gone swimming in a lake close to Palomo Grove, and been attacked by something that had entered them all. What this occupying entity had demanded of Arleen, and – presumably – of her fellow bathers, was that she get herself with child by whomever was available to provide the service. Hence her adventures at The Slick. The Devil in her womb had simply been looking for a surrogate father amid that rank company.

      The article was presented with no trace of irony; the text of Arleen’s so-called confession was quite absurd enough without requiring editorial gilding. Only those in the Grove blind or illiterate failed to read the revelations brought on by drugs and beauty. No one considered there to be an iota of truth in her claims, of course, except the families of the friends Arleen had been out with on Saturday, July 28th. Though she didn’t name Joyce, Carolyn or Trudi the quartet were known to be fast friends. There could be no doubt in the minds of any who had a passing acquaintance with Arleen whom she’d written into her Satanic fantasies.

      It rapidly became apparent that the girls would have to be shielded from the fall-out following Arleen’s preposterous claims. In the McGuire, Katz and Hotchkiss households the same exchange, give or take an endearment, took place.

      The parent asked: ‘Do you want to leave the Grove for a while, until the worst of this blows over?’ To which the child replied: ‘No, I’m fine. Never better.’

      ‘Are you sure it’s not upsetting you, sweetheart?’

      ‘Do I look upset?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘Then I’m not upset.’

      Such well-balanced children, the parents thought, to face the tragedy of a friend’s lunacy with this show of calm; aren’t they a credit to us?

      For a few weeks they were just that: model daughters, bearing the stress of their situation with admirable aplomb. Then the perfect picture began to deteriorate, as oddities in their behaviour patterns made themselves apparent. It was a subtle process; one which might well have gone unnoticed for longer had the parents not been watching over their babies with such fastidiousness. First, the parents noticed their offspring keeping odd hours: sleeping at noon, and pacing at midnight. Food-fads appeared. Even Carolyn, who had never been known to refuse the edible, took a near pathological dislike to certain items: sea-food in particular. The girls’ air of serenity disappeared. It its place came moods that swung from the monosyllabic to the garrulous, the glacial to the crazed. It was Betty Katz who first suggested her daughter see the family doctor. Trudi didn’t object. Nor did she seem in the slightest surprised when Doctor Gottlieb pronounced her healthy in every respect; and pregnant.

      Carolyn’s parents were the next to fear that the mystery of their offspring’s behaviour merited medical investigation. The news was the same, with the added rider that if their daughter intended to carry her child to full-term then it would be advisable if the mother-to-be lost thirty pounds.

      If there had been any hope of denying a pattern in these diagnoses that hope was undone by the third and final proof. Joyce McGuire’s parents had been the most reluctant to concede their child’s complicity in this scandal, but finally they too sought examination of their daughter. She, like Carolyn and Trudi, was in good health. She too was pregnant. The news called for a reassessment of Arleen Farrell’s story. Was it possible that lurking beneath her insane ramblings was a shred of truth?

      The parents met, and talked together. Between them they beat out the only scenario that made any sense. There had clearly been a pact of some kind made between the girls. They’d decided – for some reason known only to them – to become pregnant. Three of them had succeeded. Arleen had failed, and it had pitched what had always been a highly strung girl into the throes of a nervous breakdown. The problems that now had to be addressed were threefold. First, to locate the would-be fathers and then prosecute them for their sexual opportunism. Second, to terminate the pregnancies as quickly and safely as possible. Thirdly, to keep the whole business quiet so that the reputations of the three families would not suffer the same fate as that of the Farrells, whom the righteous inhabitants of the Grove now treated as pariahs.

      In all three they failed. In the matter of the fathers simply because none of the girls, even under parental duress, would name the culprits. In the issue of aborting the babies, because again the children steadfastly refused to be brow-beaten into giving up what they’d wasted no little sweat procuring. And finally, in their attempts to keep the whole sorry business under wraps, because scandal likes the light, and it only took one indiscreet doctor’s receptionist to begin the journalists sniffing after fresh evidence of delinquency.

      The story broke two days after the parents’ meeting, and Palomo Grove – which had been rocked by Arleen’s disclosures, but not overturned – sustained an almost mortal blow. The Mad Girl’s Tale had made interesting reading for the UFO sighting and Cancer Cure crowd, but it was essentially a one-off. These new

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