Read Online What the Night Knows by Dean Koontz - Free Book Online Page B

Alcott, Louisa May Alcott.’ It’s stupid.”
    “Celebrity-shooters always have three names,” Zach said. “Like Mark David Chapman and Lee Harvey Oswald. There’s a bunch of others, but I can’t think of them right now.”
    “Good,” his mother said. “I’d be very disturbed to have a thirteen-year-old son obsessed with three-name celebrity-shooters.”
    “Zach is totally obsessed with the United States Marines,” Naomi said. “He’s got like eighty-six books about them.”
    “I only have thirty-one books about them,” Zach protested, “and I’m not obsessed with the marines. I just like military history is all. Lots of people are interested in military history.”
    “Relax,” Naomi said. “I wasn’t implying your interest in the marines is a homosexual thing. After all, you’re also obsessed with Laura Leigh Highsmith worse than you are the marines.”
    “Three names,” Minnie observed.
    John said, “Who’s Laura Leigh Highsmith?”
    Minnie said, “Is she related to Louisa May Alcott?”
    “She’s just a girl in my human-head class.”
    The children were primarily home-schooled. For educational purposes, Naomi went out of the house only to music lessons and tojunior-orchestra practices. Zach attended group lessons twice a week as part of an art-institute program for gifted children. Currently he was enrolled in a pencil class to learn the fine points of drawing the human head.
    Teasingly, Naomi said, “Hey, does Laura Leigh Highsmith draw portraits of
you
?”
    “She’s just a challenging subject,” Zach said. “Hard to get right. Other than that, she’s nobody.”
    “Are you gonna marry her?” Minnie asked.
    “Of course not,” Zach said. “Why would I marry a nobody?”
    “What’s wrong with your face?” Minnie asked.
    Naomi said, “It’s sure not sunburn. He’s blushing.”
    “I’m not blushing,” Zach declared.
    “Then it’s a bad rash,” Minnie said. “Mom, he’s got a bad rash.”
    “Permission to leave the table,” Zach said.
    John said, “Denied. You’ve eaten only a salad.”
    “I’ve lost my appetite.”
    “It’s the rash,” Minnie said. “Maybe it’s conflacious.”
    “Contagious,” Naomi corrected.
    Minnie said, “Permission to leave the table.”
    “Why do you want to leave the table?” John asked.
    “I don’t want no rash.”
    “He’s drawn at least ten thousand portraits of Laura Leigh Highsmith,” Naomi revealed.
    Zachary had inherited his mother’s talent—and his father’s grimace. “What’re you doing, snooping in my drawing tablets?”
    “It’s not like reading a diary, for heaven’s sake. I like to look at your drawings, you’re so good, and I can’t draw for beans. Though if I was a good artist, I’d draw all kinds of things, variety, not a gazillion portraits of Laura Leigh Highsmith.”
    “You always exaggerate everything,” Zach said. “First it’s ten thousand, now a gazillion.”
    “Well,” said Naomi, “it’s at least a hundred.”
    “A hundred’s a whole lot less than a gazillion.”
    Nicolette said, “You’ve drawn a hundred portraits of the same girl, and this is the first I’ve heard of her?”
    “That’s a really, really bad rash,” Minnie said.

    For the main course, everyone but Minnie enjoyed the carbonata with polenta and vegetables. Walter served the girl spaghetti and meatballs because she had the culinary stubbornness of the average eight-year-old.
    The conversation turned to Italian history, possibly because Naomi noted, rightly or wrongly, that the Chinese invented spaghetti, not the Italians, and Minnie wanted to know who invented meatballs, and to forestall any further diminishment of their Italian heritage, John invented a colorful story that placed the origin of meatballs squarely in Rome. They talked about Michelangelo lying on his back to paint frescoes on ceilings (according to Minnie, here was another guy with three names—Michael Ann Jello) and about Leonardo da Vinci