Nightshade

by John Saul

  * * *

  TRIP WAINWRIGHT DIDN’T need to look at his watch to know that it was getting close to ten: if the angle of the sun hadn’t told him it was mid-morning, the gnawing in his belly would have; ever since he’d given up breakfast in the latest of his ongoing battles against an irreversibly expanding waistline, his stomach had begun demanding food — preferably an apple Danish — at exactly nine-thirty. By ten o’clock, when his teeth literally began to hurt and he was unconsciously snapping at his secretary, the need for a Danish usually became so overwhelming that he left his office and went next door to the bakery, promising himself that tomorrow morning he would find the strength to resist his stomach’s demands. So far his broken promises had resulted in five more pounds and an extra half inch on his waistline, and he was still only a month into the no-breakfast diet.

  But it was more than his stomach that was gnawing at him right now, for during the nearly three hours he had spent helping Joan and Matt search for Emily Moore, they found no trace. They had started in the house, searching every room again, opening every closet. Then the lawyer retraced Matt’s route through the outbuildings, even climbing the ladder to the hayloft himself, though he knew by the third step that there was no way Emily Moore could have made it even as far as that.

  Certain that the old woman wasn’t in any of the buildings, they searched the grounds. For an hour they had slowly moved back and forth in an ever-widening semicircle through the forest that half surrounded the house. But finally, half an hour ago, Wainwright had insisted that they give it up. They were in the midst of a thicket of underbrush which had twice nearly succeeded in immobilizing the attorney, whose hiking — for the last twenty years, anyway — had been confined to the neatly trimmed fairways of the Granite Falls Golf Club, which, if not exactly kept up to the standards of some of the wealthier country clubs down around Boston, were at least mown once a week.

  “There aren’t even any trails, Joan. There isn’t any way your mother could have gotten in here — not even in the daylight, let alone in the middle of the night.”

  For a moment he thought Joan would refuse to give up, would insist that they keep on pushing through the heavy undergrowth, but then her shoulders sagged and the hope had gone out of her eyes. “I know,” she sighed. “I know you’re right, but . . .” Her voice trailed off, and the defeated look in her eyes made him want to reach out and comfort her.

  “We’ll find her, Mom,” Matt had said. “I know we will.”

  Barely responding, Joan followed along as Matt started guiding them back toward the house.

  They were at the edge of the forest now; the house was visible through the trees, and the low stone wall that edged the lawn was only a few yards ahead. Joan suddenly stopped short.

  “What is it?” Wainwright asked, scanning the area but seeing nothing except a trail that would lead them to a gap in the wall, and the broad expanse of closely mown grass that surrounded the house.

  “The river path,” Joan said, her voice hollow, her gaze fixed on the narrow path. “We never looked there.” She looked at Wainwright. “The trail leads to the falls. Mother always liked the falls.” Her eyes glistening with hope again, she started down the path. “That’s where she would have gone! I know it!”

  Wainwright’s first instinct was to try to stop her, but the sudden buoyancy in her step made him abandon the impulse. Determinedly ignoring his growing hunger, he followed Joan down the trail, Matt behind him.

  They were no more than two hundred yards from the falls, and starting to feel the chill of its mists in the air, when Joan stopped so abruptly that Trip Wainwright almost bumped into her.

  “Look!” The word was more of a yelp than anything else, and when Wainwright followed her gaze, he at first saw nothing. But then he spotted it.

  Half buried in the soft dirt of the path was a slipper.

  A worn shearling slipper, the same kind that Wainwright himself liked to wear when he was home alone at night. “It’s a man’s slipper,” he said, starting forward.

  Joan’s hand closed on his arm, stopping him. “Mother has a pair just like that,” she said, her voice trembling. Wainwright wasn’t sure whether the quaver in her voice was from fear or excitement, but her next words made it clear. “She came down here! I know she did!” Snatching up the slipper before the lawyer could stop her, Joan hurried down the trail, her step now quick and eager. “Mother?” she called out. “Mother, where are you?”

  With Matt still following him, Wainwright started after Joan, but they’d gone no more than fifty yards when his own eye was caught by something.

  A scrap of thin, white material was caught on the jagged end of a limb that someone had broken off to prevent it from blocking the trail. “Joan?” the lawyer called out. “Joan, look at this.” But before Joan could get back to the scrap of cloth, Matt had told him what he needed to know.

  “Gram’s nightgown,” he said.

  Now Joan was next to Wainwright, and he stopped her as she instinctively reached out to touch the scrap of cloth. “Let’s just leave it exactly where it is,” he said. Joan’s eyes met his, and for a moment he wasn’t sure she understood what he was saying. But then her eyes cleared.

  “It’s going to be all right,” she said. “We’re going to find her — I know we are!” Turning away, she hurried on down the path.

  They came to the last bend in the narrow trail, and a few yards farther stepped out onto the bare expanse of granite that surrounded the pool at the base of the falls. Forty yards away the cataract tumbled from an uneven crag that split it into three separate streams. The base of the falls was all but lost in the plume of mist that hung over the pool, and though the water was crystal clear, the roiling surface concealed anything that might lie on the pool’s floor.

  It was at the very edge of the pool that they found Emily Moore’s other slipper. Joan’s breath caught as she spied it, and a strangled cry rose in her throat as she realized what it might mean. But even as she stared at the slipper, she refused to give up hope. “Mother?” she called out, her voice breaking. She tried to call once more, but this time her emotions overflowed, stifling her words.

  Now Trip Wainwright put his arms around her, clumsily trying to soothe her. “We’d better call Dan Pullman,” he said. “I just don’t think we can wait any longer.”

  For a moment he thought Joan might still object, and then she nodded. “But she’s all right,” she said. “I know she is.” She looked into his face, as if seeking confirmation of her own feelings. “If she was dead, I’d know, wouldn’t I? Wouldn’t I feel it?”

  Though Trip Wainwright made no answer, he had a feeling of his own.

  A feeling that was the exact opposite of Joan Hapgood’s.

  CHAPTER 12

  DAN PULLMAN LISTENED in silence as Trip Wainwright explained why he was once more needed at the Hapgood house. Dan, like nearly everyone else in Granite Falls, had attended Bill Hapgood’s funeral yesterday and — also like nearly everyone else — had found himself paying more attention to Matthew Moore than to the service itself. Hardly an hour had gone by since Bill Hapgood’s death that someone hadn’t called him to ask why the boy hadn’t been charged in his stepfather’s killing. Though most of his callers had at least made an attempt to feign nothing more than the interest of a responsible citizen, more than one had spoken what the rest thought but wouldn’t admit: “Everybody knows he did it.”

  Dan, who had long ago learned that anything he might say would instantly be ground into unrecognizable dust by the Granite Falls rumor mill, had ventured nothing more than that the case was “still under investigation,” and that any charges to be brought would be filed “at such time as is deemed appropriate by the county prosecutor.” He’d steadfastly resisted the urge to tell the callers that what everybody knows often proves to be completely wrong, since he’d also learned very early in his tenure as the town’s police chief that when “everybody” knows something, the last thing they want to hear is even a
hint of a contradiction.

  Still, he’d kept a careful eye on Matt Moore at the funeral, trying to fathom what might be going on in the boy’s mind. Matt had looked pale and tired, but that was only to be expected. The question Dan had been trying to answer was whether his pallor and exhaustion were a product of grief or of guilt.

  Either one could keep a person from sleeping; either one could drive someone to the ragged edge of emotional collapse. But as he’d watched Matt Moore, Pullman hadn’t been able to make up his mind which problem was preying on the boy. Certainly his display of emotion at the coffin seemed genuine, but even that could be interpreted in more than one way:

  Matt could have been apologizing for being at the root of a terrible accident.

  Or he could have been apologizing for a murder.

  Indeed, Pullman had been pondering it when the call from Trip Wainwright came in, and even as the lawyer explained what had happened that morning, Pullman found himself wondering what part Matt might have played in Emily Moore’s disappearance.

  None, he told himself as he drove the two miles from his office behind the fire station to the gates of Hapgood Farm. Emily Moore had Alzheimer’s, and most likely she just wandered off. Don’t turn into the kind of cop who sees crimes everywhere he looks.

  But as he followed the same path that Trip Wainwright, Joan, and Matt had trod only half an hour earlier, he found himself wondering.

  “The first slipper was right here,” Wainwright told him. “Joan picked it up before I could stop her.”

  “I didn’t know I was doing anything wrong,” Joan said, her eyes begging him to understand. “When I saw it, I just — ”

  “It’s all right,” Pullman assured her. “There’s no harm done. She probably didn’t even notice it was gone.” But in his own mind, Pullman wasn’t so sure — even if you were lost, you’d still feel your slipper go, feel the mud oozing between your toes. Though he’d said nothing, his eyes had quickly scanned the path for signs of a bare foot, but all he saw were the faint prints left by several pairs of shoes.

  Nothing that looked like either a bare foot or one that might have been clad in a slipper. Of course, it was possible that whatever tracks Emily Moore might have left had simply been covered over by the three other people who had walked the path this morning.

  They continued on, pausing at the spot where the scrap of cloth still clung to the broken branch. Again Dan Pullman found no signs of tracks that might have been left by a bare foot, but on the other hand, the path here was hard enough that he could barely make out the signs of any footprints at all.

  Finally they came to the shelf of rock bordering the pool at the base of the falls, where Emily’s other slipper still lay. Now, as he listened to Joan Hapgood recount every detail of what had happened that morning, his eyes were drawn to Matt, just as they had been yesterday at the funeral.

  The boy looked even paler than before, and more exhausted.

  But there was something else in his face too.

  Not guilt, exactly, but something close to it — a furtiveness, as if there was something he didn’t want to be asked about. When Joan finally fell silent, Pullman decided to take a shot in the dark.

  “What happened last night, Matt?” he asked. The boy flinched, and Pullman knew he’d struck a nerve. When Matt said nothing, he pressed harder. “Something did happen, didn’t it, Matt?”

  Matt’s eyes finally met Pullman’s, and the police chief could see the misery in them.

  The boy’s eyes flicked away again.

  Looking for a means of escape?

  Then, hesitantly, Matt said, “I’m not sure,” choosing his words carefully. “I thought it was a dream, but now . . .” His voice trailed off, and he gazed off into the distance, as if he were looking at something far away.

  “What, Matt?” Pullman asked, feeling faintly uneasy as he sensed that Matt might be on the verge of confessing something. Until now, most of the confessions Pullman had heard from frightened teenagers involved nothing more serious than minor vandalism or “borrowing” someone’s car for a joyride, and it had always been his hope that he would be able to retire without having to hear anything worse. Right now, though, it looked as if that might not happen. “What did you see?”

  Slowly, Matt recounted hearing his grandmother’s voice and going out into the corridor to see if she was all right. Again the strange look came into his eyes, as if he were looking far into the distance. “I didn’t see Gram right away,” he said, his voice so low that Pullman had to strain to hear it. “I — I saw someone else.”

  Pullman glanced at Joan, then at the lawyer. It was obvious that neither of them had heard this before.

  “Someone else?” Pullman urged. “Someone you knew?”

  Matt’s eyes darted as if he were once again seeking escape, but at last he nodded. “It was my aunt,” he said. “My aunt Cynthia.”

  Pullman’s eyes narrowed. “Your aunt Cynthia,” he repeated, his brow furrowing. “Now come on, Matt, you know — ”

  “I know she’s dead,” Matt broke in, his words suddenly coming in a rush. “That’s why I thought it was a dream! And after I saw Aunt Cynthia, Gram came out of her room, and she was calling Aunt Cynthia. Then Gram followed her downstairs!” Quickly, he recounted the rest of it: being so shocked by what he’d seen that he couldn’t move, then finally going to the head of the stairs and looking down.

  Looking down, and seeing nothing.

  “And that’s it?” Pullman asked when Matt was finished. “You didn’t see anything, so you just went back to bed? You didn’t even go downstairs to check on your grandmother?”

  A look of panic came into Matt’s eyes. “I didn’t know what to do — I thought — oh, God, I don’t know what I thought.” His eyes shifted from Pullman to his mother. “I thought it was a dream, Mom.”

  Joan slipped a protective arm around her son. “It’s all right,” she said. “We’re going to find Gram. We’re going to find her, and she’s going to be all right.” But even as she said it, Joan could see in the chief’s eyes that Pullman didn’t believe it would happen that way.

  CHAPTER 13

  THE AIR SPARKLED with the shimmering of a million flecks of gold, making the woods glow with a light Matt had never seen before. Dust, he told himself. It’s just dust. But it didn’t seem like dust; it seemed like magic, suffusing everything it touched with a luminescence that made his spirit soar.

  He wasn’t certain where he was, or exactly how long he’d been wandering through the trees, sometimes following a trail or path, but mostly following his urges wherever they led him. He paused, partly to try to get his bearings, but even more for the sheer enjoyment of the perfect morning. He sucked in his breath, filling his lungs with the cool forest air. As he was letting it out again he saw a flicker of movement out of the corner of his left eye. His hand tightening on the rifle that was slung over his shoulder with a leather strap, he searched the forest. At first he saw nothing, but a moment later caught the movement again, and this time knew what it was right away.

  A deer — a large buck — standing still, but flicking its ears in search of any lurking danger.

  It was no more than fifty yards away, perhaps less.

  Feeling a twinge of excitement at the sight, Matt froze too. A rush of adrenaline heated his blood as his senses peaked in synchronization with the stag’s. A faint breeze on his face told him he was downwind of the animal, and as he took a step forward, his tread was so light that there was no crackling underfoot.

  He took a second step, then a third.

  The buck was staring straight at him, its head high, its ears still flicking. It waited until Matt was within twenty yards, then slowly — almost languidly — turned away and moved silently through the trees. When it had once more placed itself some fifty yards from Matt, it stopped again, and turned back to look.

  Almost as if it were expecting him to follow.

  As if it wanted him to follow.

  Matt mov
ed forward again, and again the deer waited until he was only fifteen or twenty yards away before retreating. The cat and mouse game continued, the buck leading him deeper and deeper into the woods. But after a while the forest took on a more familiar cast. The deer was in a thicket now, visible, but indistinct. Again it turned to face him, its ears still flicking as it tracked his progress, and Matt edged closer until his view was clear.

  He raised his rifle, pressing its butt firmly against his right shoulder, laying his cheek on the smooth walnut of the stock as his right eye lined up with the telescopic sight.

  The deer’s head appeared in the crosshairs.

  Matt’s finger curled around the trigger, and he felt an almost physical surge of strength flow into him, as if the power of the gun had become a part of him.

  Then, as he concentrated on the image in the scope, the deer’s head began to change. Its antlers faded away and its muzzle contracted.

  Its wide-set eyes drew closer together, and as the muzzle turned into a nose, the lips also began to transform.

  Now, through the scope, Matt was looking at a human face.

  His stepfather’s face.

  The heat in his blood drained away, and a terrible cold fell over him. He began to shiver, and tried to pull his finger away from the trigger for fear the palsied trembling that had overcome him might inadvertently fire the weapon. But his finger seemed frozen to the metal now, and when he tried to lower the gun, his arm refused to obey the demands of his mind.

  The gun held steady on the face of his father.

  Then he heard the voice.

  “You know what you have to do, Matthew.”

  A faint memory stirred deep within Matt’s consciousness. “No,” he whispered. “No . . .”

  “Do it, Matthew,” the voice whispered. “Do it for me. . . .”

  “No,” he whispered again. But even as he uttered the plea, he felt his finger tightening around the trigger.

  “Do it,” the voice whispered once more. “Do it.”