The Select by F. Paul Wilson

was
becoming enthralled with Quinn Cleary.
     
     
    SPRING BREAK
     
    Adrix (adriazepam), the new
non-habituating benzodiazepine with strong anti-depressant
properties from Kleederman Pharmaceuticals, has quickly become the
most widely prescribed tranquilizer in the world.
    Medical World
News
     
     

CHAPTER FIVE
     
    In what had become a daily ritual,
Quinn sat on her window seat in her cozy little bedroom, raised the
binoculars, and aimed them across the front yard toward the end of
the driveway. And with each new day the suspense grew. It had
swollen to a Hitchcockian level now.
    The front yard wasn't much—a hundred
feet deep, rimmed with oaks and elms, filled with laurel and
natural brush, and a patch of winter-brown grass. Pretty drab and
lifeless now, but soon spring would bring the forsythia into
buttery bloom and then there'd be lots of color. The house was old,
the foundation even older—the first stones had been placed a
century and a half ago. The superstructure had been built and
rebuilt a number of times since then. The current structure had
been completed sometime in the Roaring Twenties. Over the years
Quinn had lined her little bedroom nest with photos, pennants,
posters, honor certificates, medals and trophies from her seasons
as a high school track star. And many a night she had spent
fantasizing about the children who had occupied the room before
her, where they were now, what they had done with their
lives.
    They hadn't all stayed farmers, she
was sure of that.
    The farm. The acres stretched out
behind the house. Lots of land. If this kind of acreage were
situated near the coast, or better yet, along the inner reaches of
Long Island Sound, they'd be rich. Millionaires. Developers would
be banging on their door wanting to buy it for subdivision. But not
here in the hinterlands of northeast Connecticut.
    The farm had changed crops since Quinn
was a child, and that had changed the look of the place. Dad grew
hay, potatoes, and corn now, but back in the seventies the Cleary
place had been a tobacco farm—shade-grown tobacco, for cigar
wrappers. Quinn had helped work the farm then, feeding the
chickens, milking the cows, sweeping out the barns. All of that had
stopped when she went off to college. She no longer thought of
herself as a farm girl, but she could still remember summer days
looking out the door at acres of pale muslins undulating in the
afternoon breeze as they shielded the tender leaves of the tobacco
plants from the direct rays of the sun.
    Thinking of those fields of white
triggered the memory of another color. Red...blood red.
    It had been in the spring. Quinn had
just turned seven and she was out in the fields watching the hands
work. A couple of the men were stretching the wire from post to
post while the others followed, draping the muslin between the
wires. Suddenly one of the men—Jerry, they called him—shouted in
pain and fell to the ground, clutching at his upper leg. He'd
pulled the wire too tight and it had snapped back, gashing his
thigh. He lay in the dirt, white faced as he stared at the blood
leaking out from under his fingers. Then he fainted. And with the
relaxation of the pressure from his hands, a stream of bright red
sprayed into the air, glinting in the sun with each pulsating arc.
One of the men had already run for help, but the other three simply
stood around their fallen fellow in shock, silent,
staring.
    Quinn, too, stared, but only for a
heartbeat or two. She knew Jerry would be dead in no time if
someone didn't stop his bleeding—you couldn't grow up on a farm
without knowing that. As she watched the spurting blood, the story
of the little Dutch boy flashed through her mind. She leaped
forward and did the equivalent of putting her finger in the
dike.
    The blood had been hot and slippery.
The feel of the torn flesh made her woozy at first, but she knelt
there and kept her finger in the dike until Dad had come with a
first-aid kit and a tourniquet.
    For a while