by John Saul
Joni Fletcher licked her lips nervously, then took a deep breath. “You’re right—I do have to tell you. It seems that—well, something happened here a few years ago, and—”
“What?” Myra interrupted. “The way you look, someone must have gotten killed, or—” Her voice died abruptly as she realized she’d come very close to the truth. “Holy Mary, Mother of God,” she whispered, her right hand quickly tracing the four points of the cross on herself. “What happened?”
Joni Fletcher bit her lower lip, searching for the right words, but knowing there really weren’t any. Still, there was no way she could legally avoid telling any prospective buyer what had happened in this house, and sooner or later they would hear it anyway. “It was actually quite some time ago,” she began, the fingers of her right hand toying nervously with the tab on the zipper of her shoulder bag. “One of those domestic things.”
Myra’s expression tightened. “ ‘One of those domestic things,’ ” she repeated. “I think you’re going to have to be a little clearer, Joni.”
Joni took a deep breath, and then her words came in a rush. “A man went crazy, Myra. No one really knows exactly what happened, but—well, apparently he killed his wife and daughter while they were asleep.”
Myra Sullivan gaped at her sister, the words stunning her into complete immobility. As their meaning slowly sank in, she turned to her daughter. But instead of looking as horrified as her mother felt, Angel was looking at her aunt as if waiting for the story to go on. It left Myra feeling disoriented, and as she looked once more around the living room of the house on Black Creek Road, she was certain that somehow—in the light of what she’d just heard—it would look different.
But it didn’t.
It looked exactly the same.
Yet how could it? After what had happened here, shouldn’t the house look like someplace a murder would have occurred?
Shouldn’t it reflect the horror that had taken place within its walls?
Then she thought: Why would it look any different? After all, it was just a house. Only in movies did they make places where terrible crimes had occurred look foreboding.
Stupid, Myra told herself. Just find out what happened, and don’t read anything into it. In an unconscious imitation of her sister, she took a deep breath to steady her nerves. “Maybe you’d better tell us exactly what you do know about it,” she said. When Joni’s eyes flicked warningly toward Angel, Myra shook her head. “If we should happen to buy this place—which I seriously doubt—Angel’s going to be living here too. So I think she has a right to know what happened, at least if she wants to.” She smiled thinly at her daughter. “Do you want to hear, Angel? If you don’t want to, you certainly don’t have to. In fact,” she added, shuddering and glancing around the room one more time, as if searching for ghosts, “we can leave right now and just forget this place.”
Angel’s eyes, too, prowled the room for a moment. Then she shook her head. “It’s okay—it’s not like I’ve never seen people get murdered on TV.”
“The thing is, we don’t actually know it was a murder,” Joni said.
“Seems to me like it couldn’t have been much else,” Marty Sullivan grumbled. “You don’t kill your wife and kid by accident.”
“It’s hardly that simple, Marty,” Joni went on. “There were only the three of them living here when it happened—a couple in their thirties, who’d only moved to town a few months earlier, and their daughter. She was about eleven, I think. Anyway, they’d barely had a chance to get to know anyone yet, and then . . .” Her voice trailed off and she shook her head, shrugging helplessly. “He called the police one night—actually, early one morning—and told them something terrible had happened. When they got here, they found him sitting upstairs with his wife.” She bit her lower lip, then went on. “She’d been stabbed several times—I don’t really know how many—and he was covered with blood. And the knife was on the floor, right by the chair he was sitting on. The little girl was in the next room. She was—” Joni choked on her own words, tried to speak again, but couldn’t.
A silence fell over the little group, and then Myra said, “Show me,” her voice little more than a whisper. “I think I need to see where it happened.”
Joni hesitated, then led them up to the second floor and into the large room that occupied the entire south side of the house. “The bed was at the back,” she explained, nodding to the spot where Angel had placed it in her mind earlier. “There was a table and two chairs, I think. Anyway, Nate Rogers—that was his name—was sitting in one of them, and the knife was lying on the floor next to him.”
“Nate Rogers,” Myra breathed softly. “I remember hearing about him.” She turned and looked directly at her sister. “Wasn’t there something about him saying he couldn’t remember what happened?”
Joni nodded, and Marty Sullivan snorted in derision. “Yeah, right—‘couldn’t remember.’ Amazing how these guys kill their wives and kids and ‘can’t remember.’ Like it means they didn’t do it or something.”
“Nate Rogers never said he didn’t do it,” Joni said. “That’s the strange thing—he always said he must have done it but he just couldn’t remember. All he could recall was a voice whispering to him, but he couldn’t even remember what the voice said. He went through hypnosis and those truth drugs—lie detectors and everything else—and nobody could ever get anything else out of him. Even the doctors finally said that if he did it, he’d blotted the memory out so completely that they doubted it would ever come back to him.”
“Maybe he really didn’t do it,” Angel suggested. “Maybe—”
But before she could even formulate what might have happened, her aunt shook her head. “Oh, he did it, all right. They got enough experts in here to make sure, and by the time they were done, there wasn’t any question at all.” She frowned, recalling the reports she’d read that were in the papers at the time of the trial. “They found blood spatters on his face and clothes and hands that were only consistent with what would have happened if he’d—” Again she hesitated, but forced herself to go on. “Well, if he’d done it all himself. And there was a lot else—I can’t really remember it all. But there wasn’t any sign of anyone else having been in the house—I mean, not since the day they’d moved in.”
Myra Sullivan said nothing, scanning the bedroom, trying to picture it as it must have been the day its last occupant died. Her eyes roved over the floor, searching for bloodstains.
She looked at the walls as if seeking something—anything—that might give some physical sign of what had happened here. But there was nothing. “Did they ever find out why he did it?” she finally asked.
Joni Fletcher shook her head. “That was another of the weird things—there didn’t seem to be a motive. Everyone who knew them—their families, their friends from before they came here—said they were crazy about each other and had a terrific kid. No problems. But I guess you never know, do you?”
“So what happened to him?” Marty Sullivan asked. “They burn him?”
Joni chose to ignore the callousness of her brother-in-law’s tone. “In the end they sent him to a hospital for the criminally insane. I guess he’ll be there for the rest of his life.” She fell silent, then tugged at her sleeve and fingered the top button of the blue blazer she always wore when she was working.
“At any rate, that’s the story, and it’s why the price is negotiable. The bank took it over after Nate Rogers went into default on the mortgage, and the thing is, it appears that nobody wants to live in it. The bank keeps dropping the price, but it doesn’t seem to matter. So here it sits, and I think if you can deal with what happened, you can pretty much name your price—the bank just wants to get rid of it.”
“How come no one’s just bought it and torn it down?” Marty asked.
“Someone already tried,” Joni told him. “But as you saw from the beams downstairs and the fireplace and mantel, this is one of the oldest houses in the area—parts of it might
date from the seventeenth century. So the Historical Society made sure it was protected years ago.”
Marty was quiet, as if turning it all over in his mind. Finally, he turned to Myra. “What do you think? If we really go in low and wind up getting it for next to nothing . . .” He let his voice trail off, leaving temptation hanging in the air.
No, Myra thought. It’s too awful. But even as she thought it, her eyes were again wandering over the room, examining every corner, searching the walls and ceiling, trying to find any trace of what had taken place here.
And then, in one of the filthy windows, she saw something. A face . . . the face of the Holy Mother . . . the Holy Mother smiling at her . . . As quickly as the fleeting vision came, it was gone, but it was enough for Myra. She’d seen the Holy Mother before—not often, but enough times—and knew that whenever the Virgin appeared to her, it was a sign of something good.
Something good. But what was it? Why had she appeared here, in this house?
A second later, when her husband spoke, she knew.
“Come on, Myra,” Marty said as they went back downstairs. “You’ve been talking about wanting a house for years, and maybe it’s just what we both need.”
With the vision of the Holy Mother still in her memory, Myra looked into her husband’s eyes, and for the first time in years saw the warm, gentle look he used to give her when they were dating and he could never do enough for her.
“A place of our own—a new beginning,” he said. “Maybe it’s what we all need. I can do most of the fix-up myself. You know I can.”
You can if you will, Myra thought, and instantly regretted the unspoken words. “Charity begins at home,” Father Raphaello had admonished her only a week ago. “You must be as charitable and forgiving toward your husband as God is toward you.” That must have been why the Virgin had appeared—to give her a new beginning.
“But how will we qualify for a loan?” Myra asked. “With you not working—”
“Ed’s very busy right now,” Joni Fletcher broke in. “He can use Marty. I know he can.”
Myra saw her husband’s expression darken, but then he shrugged. “If he’s got a job, I’ll take it. I say we go for it.”
Angel, her heart suddenly racing, turned to her mother, waiting.
Once again Myra moved through the rooms of the house, even going upstairs for one more look at the rooms on the second floor. At last she came back down and spread her arms in submission. “Okay,” she said. “If we can figure a way to swing it, I don’t suppose I should object. It’s not like we have anything to lose, is it?”
Five minutes later they were back in the old Chevelle, getting ready to follow Joni Fletcher back to her office to work out the details of making an offer. Angel, alone in the backseat, peered out the window at the little house at 122 Black Creek Road. Now that it might actually be theirs, it seemed to look different—as if it knew someone was coming to live in it again.
Just as her father pulled away from the curb, she looked up at the window of the room that would be her own. And for just an instant she thought she saw someone looking back at her.
So distracted was she by what she thought she’d seen in the window that Angel didn’t notice Seth Baker, standing in the shelter of the tree across the street from the house, taking pictures.
Chapter 7
ETH?” JANE BAKER CALLED, KNOCKING SHARPLY ON her son’s closed bedroom door. As she waited for a response she glanced at her watch, then tapped her foot nervously on the floor. They were due at the country club in twenty minutes, and it was a ten-minute drive.
And she’d told Seth to be ready ten minutes ago.
When he didn’t answer, she rapped again, harder this time, then turned the knob and pushed the door open. “Seth, we have to—” she began, and abruptly fell silent.
Seth was sitting at his desk, staring at the computer screen, still dressed in the same ratty jeans and stained shirt she’d told him to change when he came downstairs that morning. Not that he ever listened to her, which Jane supposed was her penance for having given birth to a boy, instead of the girl she’d been counting on.
“Really, Seth,” she said, making no attempt to hide her annoyance. “Didn’t I tell you what time we had to leave? And you haven’t even started getting ready yet!” Quickly turning off the monitor, Seth turned to look at her, and Jane could see by his expression that there was going to be an argument.
An argument she was in no mood for, given how badly her day had gone so far. First, she’d been late getting to the Gardening Club luncheon, and was certain from the moment she walked into the restaurant that the other women had been talking about her. Then the lunch itself had run late, and as the last to arrive, she hadn’t dared be the first to leave.
This, in turn, made her late to the Junior League Membership Committee meeting, which was to have been her first as chair of the committee. But when she arrived, LuciAnne Harmon had already begun conducting the meeting, and instead of sitting at the head of the table, Jane had to content herself with the only chair left—at the foot of the table.
And now she was going to have to contend with Seth.
“Why did you turn off the monitor?” she asked, her eyes narrowing. “Were you looking at something you shouldn’t have been?”
“I don’t—” Seth began, but his mother didn’t let him finish.
“Turn it back on,” she said. “Now. And don’t look at me that way, young man,” she added as Seth’s brows knit into a deep scowl.
Sighing heavily, he pushed the power button on the monitor, and a few seconds later the screen lit up. On it was a picture of the old house out on Black Creek Road by the Crossing where that man—Jane couldn’t remember his name—had murdered his wife and daughter.
“Where on earth did you get that?” she asked.
“I took it, Mom,” Seth said, closing the program with a quick mouse click.
Jane gazed at her son in puzzlement. Why couldn’t he be like the rest of the boys; why couldn’t he at least play tennis? There was a wonderful pro at the country club—she’d seen to that when she was on the Tennis Committee three years ago, and it was one of the few things the new members on the committee hadn’t tried to change. But even Rick Stacey hadn’t been able to get Seth to pick up a racket. “Can’t you find something better to do with your time?” she finally said. Before Seth could reply, she plunged on. “I want you to shut that computer off and change your clothes—you won’t have time to take a shower. We have to leave in—” She glanced at her watch. “—seven minutes, exactly.”
“Why do I have to go at all?” Seth asked. “Why can’t I just stay home?”
Jane felt another surge of annoyance. “Because it’s Saturday afternoon, and that’s when families get together at the club. You know that perfectly well!”
“But it’s just the Dunnes, isn’t it?” Seth complained.
“And Mel Dunne is just one of your father’s most important clients, isn’t he?” Jane countered, mimicking her son’s complaining tone almost perfectly.
“Mr. and Mrs. Dunne won’t care if I’m there or not.”
Jane lifted one of her carefully plucked eyebrows. “And what about Heather?”
Seth felt himself flushing, but could do nothing to stop it, and when he spoke, his voice was an unintelligible mumble.
“For heaven’s sake, Seth! Speak clearly!”
“I said, Heather doesn’t even like me!” Seth replied, his face burning now. “And none of her friends like me either.”
“And whose fault is that?” Jane shot back. “If you’d just make a little bit of an effort to—” Her words were cut off by her husband’s appearance at Seth’s door. Jane could see that Blake was even more annoyed than she was.
“What the hell is going on in here?” Blake Baker demanded. “Do either of you know what time it is? The last thing I need is—” Seeing how his son was dressed, his face darkened. “Goddamit, didn’t I tell you to be dressed and ready to
go by three?”
Seth paled in the face of his father’s anger, but said nothing.
“Didn’t I?” Blake repeated, taking a step closer to Seth, who shrank back in his chair. When he still didn’t answer, Blake glanced at his wife. “Leave us alone, Jane,” he said in a tone that made Seth’s eyes widen.
He turned to his mother. “I’ll be ready in just a minute,” he said, finally getting up.
Jane shook her head. “Too late,” she said. “Maybe next time you’ll learn to keep track of time and do as you’re told.” Turning her back on her son, Jane left the room, pulling the door closed behind her. She didn’t want to know about her husband’s disciplinary methods. She’d turned her back on them before, and she knew she’d do it again.
“Turn around and drop your pants, Seth,” Blake Baker said. Though he spoke quietly, Seth began to tremble, and when his father unbuckled his belt, Seth’s eyes glistened with tears. “And don’t cry,” Blake added coldly. “For once in your life, be a man.”
Silently, Seth turned around, dropped his jeans and underwear around his ankles, and bent over.
A moment later he heard his father’s belt whistle as it lashed through the air, and felt the sting of the thick leather against his bare flesh. He clamped his jaw shut, stifling the scream of agony and allowing only a low grunt to betray the pain he was feeling.
Twice more his father’s belt lashed his backside, and though each lash sent a spasm of pain through him, Seth bore it in near silence, and let only a single tear slide down his cheek.
“Two minutes,” Blake Baker said as he slid his belt back through the loops of his pants. “Be dressed and downstairs, or we’ll go without you. And believe me when I tell you that you don’t want that to happen.”
Exactly 115 seconds later, Seth appeared at the bottom of the stairs, wearing a clean blue shirt stuffed into equally clean khaki pants. His bare feet had been shoved into the loafers he hated, but that his mother always insisted he wear when they went to the country club. The welts on his buttocks still stung and had already begun to swell, but at least they weren’t bleeding. In silence, he followed his parents out to the Lexus. He hesitated before getting into the backseat, but knew better than to stall too long.
