The Incident Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  A Selection of Titles by Andrew Neiderman

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  A Selection of Titles by Andrew Neiderman

  DEFICIENCY *

  LIFE SENTENCE *

  DEADLY VERDICT *

  GARDEN OF THE DEAD *

  LOST IN HIS EYES *

  THE INCIDENT *

  Writing as V.C. Andrews

  INTO THE DARKNESS

  CAPTURING ANGELS

  THE UNWELCOMED CHILD

  BITTERSWEET DREAMS

  * available from Severn House

  THE INCIDENT

  Andrew Neiderman

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  This first world edition published 2016

  in Great Britain and the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  19 Cedar Road, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM2 5DA.

  Trade paperback edition first published 2016 in Great

  Britain and the USA by SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.

  eBook edition first published in 2016 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2016 by Andrew Neiderman.

  The right of Andrew Neiderman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the Biritsh Library

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8609-5 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-712-8 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-773-8 (e-book)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents

  are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described

  for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are

  fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,

  business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk,

  Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  For Diane, without whom

  I could do nothing important.

  PROLOGUE

  She heard him call out to her, and, for a moment, all the days, months and years from the Incident until now evaporated. She was back in high school and, like most of the girls in her sophomore class, smitten with Bart Stonefield, a senior who, at six feet one, with broad shoulders and rich ebony hair complementing his striking blue-gray eyes, looked ready at a moment’s notice to step on to the cover of a teen magazine. His glance and smile toward her set her heart pacing.

  Halfway to the customers’ lobby to wait for her car to be serviced, she turned to see him emerge from his service manager’s office and head toward her. Time, which could be so wicked to so many, seemed to have become his servant. If anything, he was even more handsome, the maturity in his face enhancing his stature. Unlike so many high school boys she had known, he hadn’t lost his youthful, athletic figure. Bart was always a better dresser than most of his friends, so seeing him now in a white shirt, black tie and black slacks seemed appropriate.

  Her parents had bought her Chevy Impala at Stonefield’s as a graduation present. It was waiting for her in the driveway when her father brought her home from the bus stop. She had graduated Columbia summa cum laude with a major in English. There had been a time when getting through any four-year college program would have equated to reaching the moon.

  After a week of driving her new car, she had trouble with the ignition. It was her car, but assuming responsibility for herself had so much more significance than for most girls her age. When would the asterisk beside her name be erased? Sometimes she imagined it was visible above or beside her head. Time hadn’t erased or even dimmed it. It was always the first reason that she believed local residents looked at her.

  She was afraid to look back at anyone, even to acknowledge her parents’ friends, but especially young men. The shadows followed her and could slip into the body of that man eyeing her. That evil could turn his smile into a lustful glare. How do you walk alone in the evening ever again or simply cross the street to your car without feeling followed and terrified?

  She knew that Bart had gone to work for his father after he had toyed with some community college attendance and had become the service manager, so she thought he was doing what he was trained to do for any of their customers: be pleasant and accommodating. But there was something more in his smile, and it wasn’t that soft pitiful look she got from former local high school graduates.

  ‘Sorry about the car trouble,’ he began. ‘We’ll get it solved quickly.’

  Her heart seemed to dip a little with the disappointment. He did sound as if he was placating just another customer.

  ‘Congratulations. Summa cum laude! Wow,’ he said.

  She smiled, not surprised her father had been bragging while he was buying her the car.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘What are your plans now?’ he asked.

  He suddenly looked very nervous, moving his hands from his hips to behind his back, averting his gaze.

  ‘I’m not sure. I’m taking some time off. I’m not sure.’

  Damn, how dumb that sounded, repeating I’m not sure.

  ‘So, you’re back for a while?’

  ‘For a while,’ she said. She felt her whole life was for a while.

  She looked around. A secretary was watching them, her hand resting on a phone as if planning at any moment to call someone and report this chat between Victoria Myers and Bart Stonefield.

  ‘I took a course with your mother at the community college, but I didn’t complete it. Dad talked me into coming into the business. He had expanded the dealership. We employ almost forty people now.’

  ‘How exciting for you.’

  ‘So, did you enjoy college in New York?’

  ‘I didn’t take enough advantage of what it has to offer,’ she confessed.

  ‘More than here, I’m sure.’

  ‘Sandburg still has its charm,’ she said, surprised that she had said it. She wanted so much to love it again.

  Was that weird?

  She and her parents lived in Sandburg, New York, a hamlet in the Catskill Mountains, spawned by the railroad that feathered the failed farms converted in desperation into boarding houses and small hotels. For
ten weeks, it turned the community into a New York City satellite, servicing tourists who fled the oppressive summer heat cooking their shoe soles on the pavements. The fresh, cool country air was even believed to be a remedy for tuberculosis. Here, there was spring water, fresh produce and bakeries that rivaled anything in the five boroughs. A continuous flow of traffic snaked up the New York Thruway and Route 17, some cars so loaded down with luggage that they looked more like families fleeing an invasion.

  For the remainder of the year, though, there was a semi-rural life here that should have always been thought of as idyllic.

  ‘There have been quite a few changes,’ Bart said. ‘They developed that ski hill and lodge in Centerville, and there are some new restaurants and housing developments.’

  ‘You sound like you work for the chamber of commerce.’

  He blushed, a delightful ruby shade that only made his eyes more striking.

  ‘Training to be sales manager,’ he said, laughing at himself.

  Her one close girlfriend here, Jena Daniels, occasionally peppered her gossip with headlines about Bart Stonefield – how he had come close to an engagement with a girl from Monticello, but broke up, and how, in fact, despite his good looks and bright financial future, he hadn’t developed any serious relationships.

  ‘My father fills me in from time to time,’ she said.

  ‘I tried to get my father to steal him away from the high school and become our business manager,’ Bart said. ‘Your dad’s a great guy. He always reminded me of Randolph Scott, the Southern gentleman cowboy.’

  ‘My mother claims that was why she fell in love with him.’

  ‘Yeah, well, he’s just as good-looking as Scott. I can see it in you, too.’

  Now she was blushing. It felt good to blush because of a compliment.

  ‘Not that your mother couldn’t be a beauty queen.’

  ‘Oh, she’d hate to hear that,’ Victoria said. ‘You know that famous question, if you had one wish, what would it be?’

  ‘World peace,’ he recited with her, and they both laughed, followed by a moment of silence – the kind her world literature teacher called a pregnant silence. What it would give birth to was unclear. She looked at the lobby sofa.

  ‘Nice to see you, Bart,’ she said and turned.

  Before she took two steps, she felt his hand on her arm and turned back to him, surprised.

  ‘I was wondering if you had any commitments tonight. I’d like to take you to dinner at Dante’s.’

  ‘Dinner? No, I’m not doing anything,’ she said.

  ‘Great. I’ll come by about six thirty.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Let me get on my mechanic,’ he said quickly. He looked stunned about what he had just proposed and what had happened as a result. Was he sorry she had said she was free? Was he simply being polite?

  She nodded and he hurried away.

  Did this just happen? she asked herself. She hadn’t been out on a real date for years, and the first offer she gets is from her old high school’s heart-throb, a young man who is even better-looking now and more of a catch.

  Social life had always seemed out of reach. She had never joined a sorority or attended college parties. She had never gone out on a date in New York City with a college boy, or any boy for that matter. She had gone into therapy, but that hadn’t brought her back to where she had been. She didn’t really go out much afterward and had accepted an invitation to the high school prom more to satisfy her father and mother than herself.

  Who would have blamed her for her self-imposed celibacy? While many of Victoria’s friends drifted away after the Incident, as her mother liked to refer to it euphemistically, Jena Daniels had drawn closer. She was the only girlfriend to visit at the hospital. Victoria told her far more than she had told her mother or her father – even the police, for that matter.

  Sometimes Jena’s probing questions were downright pornographic, but Victoria tolerated it simply because of Jena’s willingness to listen without overt pity. Over time, she became a sort of filter, a way for Victoria to test her own feelings.

  The local police department had no female officer then and still didn’t. She couldn’t imagine saying much to anyone during those first twenty-four hours or so anyway. She was under sedation. Eventually, the state police sent in a female officer, but with her cropped hair, manly shoulders and clipped, military-style speech, she wasn’t much different from any of the male detectives and police.

  It was 1962, not exactly the Dark Ages, but the emphasis was mainly on her physical injuries even though psychotherapy was desperately needed. In the emergency room, she had been prescribed a tranquillizer, and Dr Bloom, their family doctor, continued the prescription after she had left the hospital. He was thinking of giving her mood enhancers to fight depression, but her psychologist, Dr Thornton, wanted her drug-free, if possible.

  Dr Thornton’s practice was located in Middletown, New York, a small city about thirty-five miles away. Her mother took her there because Thornton was female, more likely to sympathize, and she was someone with clients who had suffered similar ‘incidents’. Victoria’s mother didn’t want anyone in the community knowing what went on in these sessions. No matter what local therapists claimed, private information would surely slip out. Just mentioning Victoria’s name at a social event would result in some facial expression that would inevitably lead to a revelation. Better to be with someone who didn’t know people familiar with Victoria or the Myers family.

  Despite that, whenever they had guests for dinner or relatives visited, she could practically feel their eyes moving over her, looking for scars. She had gotten so that she rarely looked directly at anyone who knew what had happened to her, and really, in this small community, who didn’t? She was terrified of their inquiring, intrusive eyes. They were waiting for her to burst into tears or uncontrollable screams. Her gaze was always to the side or down when she spoke. Her mother often blurted, ‘Victoria, look at people when you speak to them.’

  No one in her class was more excited about getting away from home than she was, but something had caused her to postpone taking the next step in her life; something had brought her back. Did she want to confront the old demons and destroy them before moving off?

  Neither of her parents was home when she arrived. They had the better part of two acres on one of the newer residential roads leading out of the hamlet to the New York Thruway. They were just under a mile from the center of the town where the only traffic light was turned on in early July and turned off in mid-September. During the late fall and winter, it hung like a dead crow and moaned in the wind.

  Ever since she was twelve, Victoria was permitted to walk to the drugstore or the candy store and soda fountain. She would go to town to pick up some small grocery items as well, and never was there a sense of danger, even during the summer months.

  Like most everyone in Sandburg, her father enjoyed looking after the property himself, doing his maintenance on weekends and some gardening when spring came. It was something he had done on his family’s farm in Richmond, Virginia. Her parents gave up on a vegetable garden because deer and rabbits and other animals got through any fencing. They toyed with the idea of putting in a small pool, but never did it. There were six other homes on their particular street, only two of which – theirs and the Weiners’ – were ranch-style. The other four were variations of Queen Anne, with attics and wood siding that required painting often.

  Despite the distance between the homes, everyone knew everyone else. According to the old-timers, many of whom had come to America after the Second World War, Sandburg hamlet and the surrounding community were reminiscent of European communities, save for the resorts that were on almost every side road. Their road, Wildwood Drive, catty-cornered into Oak Tree, on which there was Okun’s bungalow colony. On summer nights, the vacationers took long walks after dinner, and she could hear their voices and laughter. Beside the peepers and distant car horns, the music flowing from a conver
tible, that laughter was the music of a summer night. Everything conspired to make her world serene and blissful, but wasn’t that why Satan entered paradise? He wanted to ruin it, and ruin it he did for her.

  She hurried to her room and threw open her closet. What would she wear? What about her hair? She regretted now not going to the beauty salon when her mother offered to make her an appointment at the same time as her own. But who expected this? It was like a streak of lightning. She glanced at herself in the Chinese Chippendale mirror. She thought she wore the look of someone caught in a frenzy. Had she been too eager to say yes? The invitation was practically still on his lips when she agreed. Had Bart gone back into his office and laughed?

  Did he expect her to tell him she had a college boyfriend? She had been so nervous. She had surely made a fool of herself. Her mother might even be disappointed. ‘You – someone who graduated from a prestigious university with honors – leaps to go out with a car service manager? What are you going to talk about – carburetors?’

  How would she feel if her mother said that?

  All these complications and worries were attacking her like wasps while she pondered what to wear. She fiddled with some loose strands of her amber-brown hair, the color of the patches of freckles on the crests of both her cheeks. She had almost had it styled in a bouffant with curled flicked-up ends, a hairdo popularized by Jackie Kennedy, as well as actresses and singers such as Dusty Springfield, but she anticipated her mother criticizing her and telling her, ‘Like all girls your age, you behave like lemmings.’ Then there would be that speech about how young people don’t think for themselves anymore.

  As she stood before her full-length mirror and turned to look at herself from different angles, she recalled how her mother would prepare for an event, how she would scrutinize herself, her clothes, her makeup and jewelry. Everything coordinated. She looked perfected but not sensuous, and she could easily if she wanted to, Victoria thought. Her mother could be quite stunning, in fact.