SEVEN

LEXI TEMPLETON WAS NOT LIKE OTHER LITTLE GIRLS.

When she was five years old, her father received a phone call at the office.

“I’m afraid you’re going to have to come and pick Lexi up right away.”

It was Mrs. Thackeray, the principal of Lexi’s kindergarten. She sounded distressed.

“Has something happened? Is Lexi okay?”

“Your daughter is fine, Mr. Templeton. It’s the other children I’m worried about.”

When Peter arrived at the Little Cherubs Preschool, a tearful Lexi hurtled into his arms. “I didn’t do anything, Daddy! It wasn’t my fault.”

Mrs. Thackeray pulled Peter to one side.

“I’ve had to send two children to the emergency room this morning. Your daughter attacked them with scissors. One little boy was lucky not to lose an eye.”

“But that’s ridiculous.” Peter looked at Lexi. Clinging to his legs in a yellow cotton sundress with matching yellow ribbons in her hair, she looked the picture of innocence. “Why would she do a thing like that?”

“I have no idea. My staff assures me that the attack was entirely unprovoked. I’m afraid we won’t be able to have Lexi back at Little Cherubs. You must make alternative arrangements.”

In the back of the limousine, Peter asked his daughter what had happened.

“It was nothing.” Lexi swung her legs merrily, entirely unrepentant. “I don’t know why they all made such a fuss. I was doing my collage. It was a picture of Kruger-Brent. You know, your big tower where you go to work?”

Peter nodded.

“It was really pretty and silvery and I did all tinfoil on it. But then Timmy Willard said my picture was ‘damn stupid.’ And Malcolm Malloy laughed at me.”

“That was mean of them, honey. So what did you do?”

Lexi looked at him pityingly, as if to say, What sort of a question is that?

“I stuck up for myself, like you told me. I stabbed Timmy in his head. Don’t worry, Daddy,” she added, seeing Peter’s stricken face. “He didn’t get dead. Can we go to McDonald’s for lunch?”

The child psychologists were all in agreement.

Lexi was highly intelligent and highly sensitive. Her behavioral problems all stemmed from the loss of her mother.

Peter asked: “But what about this vengeful streak? Her lack of moral boundaries?”

The answer was always the same.

She’ll grow out of it.

“Don’t let me hear your excuses! You have poisoned the queen. You will have your head chopped off straight away.”

Lexi grappled with her limited-edition Little Mermaid Barbie doll.

“That’ll teach you, you fishy-tailed crin-i-mal.” She grinned triumphantly as the head came free. “Now you are absolutely DEAD!”

“Lexi!”

Mrs. Grainger, the new nanny, walked into the bedroom. A sea of decapitated dolls littered the floor. She sighed.

Again? Whatever happened to tea parties and teddy bear’s picnics?

Eight-year-old girls had sure changed since her day.

In her midfifties, widowed, with no children of her own, Mrs. Grainger had been hired as a replacement to the infamous Mrs. Carter. (The Templetons’ former housekeeper had made the most of her blood money, divorcing her grumpy husband, Mike, and running off to Hawaii. She was last seen on a beach in Maui having coconut oil massaged into her ample backside by a half-naked twenty-year-old called Keanu. Mrs. Grainger had never gotten along with coconut oil.)

Mrs. Grainger was fond of Lexi, but she was no pushover. Those Barbie dolls cost money. She’d scolded Lexi more times than she could remember about taking better care of them.

“What’s going on?”

Lexi’s mind began to whir: Mrs. Grainger is mad. What will stop her being mad? What does she want to hear?

“Don’t worry, Mrs. G. I was just playing a game. I can easily fix them again. Look.”

Retrieving Ariel’s head from the far side of the room, Lexi struggled vainly to reattach it to the body. It wasn’t as easy as it looked. The stump of the neck was too fat for the hole above the shoulders that seemed to have magically shrunk since she ripped the head off. Strands of red nylon hair kept getting tangled around Lexi’s fingers. Sweat began to bead on her forehead.

“Honestly, I can do it. I’ve done it before.”

“That’s not the point, Lexi. You shouldn’t have pulled her head off in the first place. This carpet looks like The Night of the Living Dead.”

“It’s not my fault. Ariel was trying to kill the queen.”

Lexi gestured toward one of the few Barbie dolls still sporting a full complement of limbs. Dressed in regal red velvet, with a string of tinsel wrapped around her head, the blond effigy lay prostrate on the extortionately overpriced “Barbie’s Four-Poster” that Robbie had bought his sister last week.

Just what Lexi needed. More toys.

“She’s been poisoned. See? That’s why she’s gone a funny color.”

With a groan, Mrs. Grainger noticed that the doll’s cheeks had been defaced in what could only be described as a frenzied attack with a green felt-tip pen. She prayed that Lexi hadn’t gotten green ink all over her clothes and bedding as well. That stuff was murder to get out.

Lexi said solemnly: “If you poison someone, you do get your head chopped off. That is a real, true fact, Mrs. G. I learned it in history.”

Her expression was so adorably earnest, it was a struggle not to laugh.

“Yes, well. I’d prefer it if history didn’t repeat itself quite so often all over the bedroom floor.”

The nanny’s tone was stern. But Lexi knew she had won. There was mad and there was pretend mad, and she was smart enough to know the difference.

Raised adult voices drifted up from downstairs. Lexi’s face clouded with anxiety.

“Daddy’s shouting. You think Robbie’s in trouble again?”

“I have no idea.” Mrs. Grainger shut the bedroom door firmly. “If he is, it’s nothing for you to worry about. Your brother’s big and ugly enough to take care of himself.”

Lexi looked furious. “Robbie isn’t ugly. He’s the handsomest brother in the entire universe in space. Everyone says so.”

Mrs. Grainger sighed. She wished Lexi wouldn’t take everything quite so literally. She also wished Mr. Templeton would learn to keep his voice down. He had no idea how sensitive his daughter was, or how bright. Lexi was like a tiny satellite receiver, picking up all the tension in the house and translating it into a view of the world that was becoming increasingly skewed.

Today she was chopping the heads off her dollies.

But what about tomorrow?

Pervert!…Preying on innocent children…Sickos like him should be castrated.

Peter Templeton tried to focus on his breathing. He must keep calm. He must not lose his temper with the dreadful woman standing in his drawing room, screaming obscenities at him like a crack whore.

Ludo and I could go to the police, you know.

The woman might sound like a crack whore. In fact, her name was Angelica Dellal, wife of prominent JPMorgan banker Ludo Dellal and mother of sixteen-year-old Dominic Dellal: football star, head boy at Andover and (if Peter had interpreted her potty-mouthed ranting correctly) his son Robert’s homosexual lover.

Homo! Freak!

The abuse washed in and out of Peter’s consciousness like a toxic tide of effluence spewing from a sewer.

In her early forties, with handsome, aristocratic features and the sort of immaculately blow-dried, highlighted hair that immediately stamped her a rich man’s wife, Angelica Dellal must once have been a great beauty. But any sex appeal she might once have possessed had long since been groomed to death, buffed and manicured and Botoxed into oblivion. At this moment she looked positively ugly, mouth stretched wide, face contorted with rage, diamond-encrusted hands flailing wildly.