by John Saul
Another spasm struck her, and she retched once more, but this time only a thin dribble of foul-tasting spittle ran down her chin. And then she heard her mother’s voice as the doorknob rattled loudly.
“Melissa? Melissa, unlock this door and let me in!”
Melissa coughed, spat into the toilet, then raised her head slightly. “Leave me alone,” she wailed.
Outside, Phyllis’s lips tightened and she rapped loudly on the door. “Didn’t you hear me?” she demanded. “I told you to open this door!” She grasped the handle once more, jerking on the door so hard it rattled on its hinges.
“I’m all right,” Melissa called, her voice muffled by the heavy door. “Just go away and leave me alone.”
Her anger inflamed into fury by her daughter’s words, Phyllis turned to Teri. “You have a key to this door, haven’t you?” she demanded.
Teri hesitated. Why didn’t Phyllis just go around to the other door? But even as she asked herself the question, she knew the answer—Phyllis’s fury had robbed her of reason. Teri shrank away from her stepmother’s anger and hurried to her room. A moment later she was back. Wordlessly, she handed Phyllis the key.
Phyllis, hands trembling with anger, fumbled for a moment, then got the key into the lock and twisted it. Turning the knob once more, she jerked the door open to find her daughter curled up on the floor, her hands clutching her stomach, staring up at her.
“Get up!” she demanded. Reaching down, she grasped Melissa’s arm and yanked her to her feet. “My God, just look at you!” Phyllis hissed. Melissa shrank away from her mother, but Phyllis twisted her arm, spinning her around to face the mirror.
Melissa stared at herself, her eyes red and puffy, her blouse stained with vomit, her hair damp with the perspiration that had accompanied the nausea, plastered to her scalp.
“How could you do such a thing?” Phyllis hissed. “If you knew you were going to get sick, why did you get on that boat?”
Melissa’s eyes widened with fear. “I didn’t want to—” she began.
But her mother squeezed her arm so hard her words dissolved into an incoherent squeal of pain. “Didn’t want to?” Phyllis repeated, her voice harsh and mocking. “Didn’t want to? If you didn’t want to, then why did you?”
“I—Teri said—”
“Stop it!” Phyllis screeched. “Stop trying to blame Teri! I won’t have it! Do you hear? I won’t have you blaming anyone else for your own failings!”
Melissa gasped as her mother’s hand clamped down on her arm once again, then felt a wrenching pain in her back as Phyllis spun her around. Suddenly, her mother’s hand released her arm and reached for her blouse.
“Look at your clothes,” Phyllis hissed. “They’re ruined! Take them off!”
Grasping the front of Melissa’s blouse with both hands, Phyllis jerked at the material and the buttons ripped loose, scattering over the floor. With another jerk, Phyllis spun Melissa around again and stripped the blouse off, hurling it into the far corner of the bathroom. “Now take off those pants,” she ordered, suddenly letting go of Melissa to turn the water on in the shower. “Do you hear me?” she shouted when Melissa, apparently rooted to the floor, didn’t move.
Teri, who had been standing in the open doorway, watching the scene in silence, took a step toward Melissa, but Phyllis shook her head. “Don’t help her,” she snapped. “She has to learn to take responsibility for the things she does.” Her hands dropping to her sides, Teri stepped back again.
The bathroom began to fill with steam as the stream of water pouring from the shower head turned hot. Phyllis glared angrily at her recalcitrant daughter. “Take off those pants,” she repeated, her voice quivering with anger.
Numbly, Melissa fumbled with the button at the waistband of her pants, and a moment later they dropped to the floor. She kicked her feet loose from them, then stripped off her underwear.
“Get in the shower,” her mother commanded.
Melissa stared at the billowing cloud of steam filling up the bathroom. “I-It’s too hot,” she whimpered.
Phyllis ignored her words, grabbing her daughter’s arm again, then twisting it around her back into a clumsy hammerlock. “I said, get in the shower!” Tightening her grip on Melissa’s arm, Phyllis pushed the girl forward. Melissa reached out to brace herself against the wall, but Phyllis knocked her arm aside and grabbed her hair, yanking her head back.
“No!” Melissa cried out. “Please, Mama, no—”
But it was as if her mother didn’t even hear her words, and Melissa stared at the steam, wide-eyed, as her mother forced her into the shower. The first drops of the scalding water struck her skin and she gasped.
Then, in her mind, she screamed out one more time.
D’Arcy! D’Arcy, help me!
And out of the mists of steam she saw a face coming toward her, smiling at her. Then she felt the presence of her friend and heard her voice. It’s all right, Melissa. I’m here, and it’s all right. Just go to sleep.
She let the comforting blackness close around her, and listened only to D’Arcy’s gentle voice. That’s right … go to sleep … just go to sleep …
As Phyllis forced Melissa’s head under the shower a moment later and the scalding water struck her daughter’s face, she felt her child relax in her grip. “Stay there,” she said. She reached for a rough washcloth and a bar of soap, and a moment later began scrubbing furiously at Melissa’s skin.
Melissa stood still, oblivious to it all, lost in the strange sleep to which she had retreated.
Teri, still watching the macabre spectacle from the bathroom door, saw the change come over Melissa’s face, saw her features suddenly relax, saw her eyes go oddly blank.
At last, as Phyllis continued to scour Melissa’s skin, Teri turned away.
She smiled to herself as she started down the stairs to spend the rest of the afternoon lying in the sun by the pool. It had been fun watching Phyllis torture Melissa.
Almost as much fun as it was torturing Melissa herself.
CHAPTER 18
“What do you think?” Teri asked. It was Saturday afternoon, and she was in Melissa’s room, staring critically at her reflected image in the mirror on the closet door. The two of them had spent most of the morning attaching rhinestones to the tulle netting on the pink dress—hundreds of them, it seemed, which their father had brought with him when he’d flown up from New York the night before—and now, as the sun streamed through the window, the whole dress sparkled with myriad colors as the tiny prisms refracted the light.
“It’s fabulous,” Melissa breathed. “Put on the tiara, too.”
Teri picked up the tiara from Melissa’s vanity and carefully placed it on her head. Finally she picked up the “magic wand,” a piece of wood cut from an old broom Cora had found in her cleaning closet, which they’d wound with pink ribbon and capped with a tinsel-covered Christmas tree finial that had been Phyllis’s contribution to the costume.
“Well?” Teri asked, pirouetting in front of the mirror, then touching Melissa’s shoulder with the “wand.”
“It’s perfect,” Melissa breathed, smiling at her half sister. “You’re going to be the most beautiful girl there.”
“Who is?” her father asked from the door to the hall.
Melissa turned. “Look,” she said proudly. “Isn’t she gorgeous?”
Charles uttered a soft whistle of approval. “That’s some tiara,” he said. “Where’d it come from?”
“The thrift shop,” Teri replied. “Melissa bought it for me. I told her not to, but—”
“But it’s perfect,” Melissa broke in. “Without the tiara, it’s just an old dress. Nobody’d know what you were supposed to be.”
Charles cocked his head at his younger daughter. “So we know Teri’s going as a fairy godmother. What about you?”
Melissa’s grin faded. “I—I don’t think I’m going to go,” she said.
Charles frowned. “What do you mean, not go? Why not?�
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What could she tell him? That she was sure Jeff Barnstable wouldn’t show up tonight? But why would he, after what had happened on the Fieldings’ boat Wednesday afternoon?
Even now she could still feel the embarrassment of it. She’d stayed home yesterday and the day before, unwilling to risk the stares she was sure she’d get from anyone she might run into. She could picture the kids playing volleyball on the beach. They’d start laughing at her, bending over with their fingers down their throats, making gagging sounds and pretending to throw up on the sand.
“No they won’t,” Teri had insisted when Melissa had told her why she wouldn’t go to the club, or even the beach. “It wasn’t your fault you got sick. Why would anyone laugh at you?”
Melissa hadn’t been able to answer her. How could she explain it to Teri? Teri was beautiful, and everyone liked her, and no one ever laughed at her. How could she explain what it felt like to know people were talking about you behind your back, and making fun of you? If it had never happened to you, you couldn’t know how it felt.
“I—I just don’t want to go,” she said now. “Can’t I stay home? Please?”
Charles’s shoulders rose in a small shrug. “Well, I think you’d better see what your mother has to say,” he suggested. “After all, you did tell Jeff Barnstable you’d go with him.”
“And she most certainly will go,” Phyllis declared, appearing in the doorway, frowning at Melissa. “There isn’t a problem, is there?” she asked.
Melissa felt suddenly weak under her mother’s icy gaze. “But I don’t have anything to wear,” she pleaded.
Phyllis brushed the objection aside. “I’m sure Teri can figure out something for you,” she said.
Teri nodded, taking off the tiara and reaching up to pull the zipper of the dress down her back. “Help me get out of this,” she told Melissa. “Then we’ll go up to the attic. There’s got to be all kinds of neat things up there.”
But in her own mind, she’d long ago chosen the costume Melissa would wear that night.
A few minutes later, as Teri led the way up the stairs to the attic, Melissa found herself hanging back. In her mind’s eye she still had a vivid image of coming up these stairs when she’d seen Blackie, a rope around his neck, hanging from one of the rafters.
But it hadn’t been real—it had only been a dream.
All week she’d been repeating the words, trying to convince herself that what she’d seen hadn’t been real. But the image was so vivid …
And Blackie was still gone. Even Tag had finally given up looking for him yesterday. “I don’t know what happened to him,” he’d said. “I guess maybe your mom’s right. He must have just run away.”
Her reverie was broken by Teri’s voice. “Come on,” her half sister was urging her. Then, smiling as if she understood what was going through Melissa’s mind, she reached out and took the other girl’s hand in her own. “It’s okay,” she said. “Remember when we were up here the other day? There’s nothing here but a bunch of old junk.”
Melissa took a deep breath, then determinedly put her fears aside. Teri was right—it was just an attic. There was nothing in it she needed to be afraid of.
Teri opened the door and stepped inside, and a second later Melissa followed her. She looked around and felt herself relaxing a little. Now, with sunlight coming through the small dormers, the attic didn’t look nearly as scary as it did at night, when the single bulb left most of it lost in seemingly endless shadows. Now only a few corners were still dark, and even they didn’t have that horrible, threatening blackness to them. She giggled self-consciously, looking around, but her laughter died abruptly on her lips as she spotted the dress on the mannequin. Yet now, in the muted daylight, the dress seemed only to be exactly what it was—a long-discarded garment, put on the mannequin for some planned alteration and then forgotten.
“Where shall we start?” she asked Teri.
Teri looked perplexed. “Do you know what’s in the trunks?”
“All kinds of stuff,” Melissa replied. “A lot of it’s stuff for winter, in case we come out here for Christmas. You know—quilts and blankets and things.” She started moving across the attic, stepping around some of the larger pieces of discarded furniture, pausing here and there to show Teri something. “Daddy keeps threatening to get rid of all this junk,” she said, staring at an old sofa whose rotted upholstery had finally given way, letting a spring pop through. “He says if we keep bringing more stuff up, the whole house is going to collapse. This one was my grandmother’s.” She pointed to a tattered wing chair. “Daddy says she put it up here when he was our age, and every time Grandfather wanted to get rid of it, she’d say she had plans for it.” She chuckled again, poking experimentally at the fabric, which crumbled under her touch. “Daddy says she had plans for it right up until she died, and after that Grandfather wouldn’t get rid of it because he was afraid of what Grandmother would say when he met her after he died.”
Teri shook her head. “But there’s so much of it,” she said. “I bet it’s worth a lot of money.”
Melissa shrugged, her eyes shifting over to the corner near the mannequin. “Let’s look over there,” she suggested. “I think there’s some old stuff in those trunks.”
They crossed to three large steamer trunks lined up in one of the dormers, and Melissa fumbled with the catch of the first one for a few seconds, then swung its door open. There was a scuffling noise, and a second later a mouse darted out, disappearing into a crack between two of the planks on the floor. Melissa jumped back, recovered from the shock of the sudden movement, then reached out and thumped the trunk. Finally she shook it a couple of times, and when nothing else scampered out of its depths, began pulling open its drawers.
Except for some old shoes—their leather so dried out it had begun to crack and peel—the trunk was empty.
The second trunk yielded another mouse, and a collection of linen tablecloths and napkins that were yellowed and riddled with holes.
The third trunk, though, turned out to be full, and when they opened it, both girls simply stared silently at its contents for a moment.
“It’s weird,” Teri finally breathed. “It looks like someone came back from a trip and never bothered to unpack it.”
Melissa gasped and her eyes widened. “Great-Aunt Dahlia,” she said. “I bet it was Great-Aunt Dahlia’s.”
Teri glanced at her half sister out of the corner of her eye. “Who was she?”
“Grandmother’s sister, I think. Daddy says she was really strange. And I bet this stuff is hers.” Melissa’s eyes left the trunk and met Teri’s. “She went on a cruise somewhere, and she just disappeared. Nobody ever found out what happened to her.”
Teri’s lips twisted into a crooked grin. “Come on,” she said. “Nobody just disappears.”
“Great-Aunt Dahlia did,” Melissa insisted. “Everybody thinks she probably jumped overboard. Anyway, I bet this is her stuff. I bet they sent it back, but nobody ever unpacked it.”
The two girls began to sort through the clothes. There were several dresses, all of them in the style of the 1930s, along with silk blouses, several jackets, a coat, and several pairs of lounging pants. In the small drawers that filled half the trunk, they found a collection of underwear, stockings, lingerie, and half a dozen pairs of shoes.
Melissa pulled one of the dresses out and held it up. Teri giggled. “No wonder she killed herself,” she said, gazing at the folds of material trailing on the floor at Melissa’s feet. “She must have been six feet tall.”
Melissa sighed with disappointment, knowing there was no way the dress would fit her. And then she saw Teri staring speculatively at something behind her.
Turning, she once more saw the old white dress, covered with ruffles and bows, hanging from the mannequin. A moment later she understood what Teri was thinking.
“That?” she breathed.
Teri nodded. “Why not?” she said, grinning. “You could go as D’Arcy.�
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Melissa stared at her, trying to decide if she was kidding. “But I couldn’t,” she started to protest.
“Why not?” Teri asked. Moving around Melissa, she began carefully to unbutton the back of the dress, and a moment later pulled it off the mannequin. “It’ll be fun. And after what happened at the bonfire, you can prove to the rest of the kids that you’re not afraid of D’Arcy. And we won’t tell any—”
She suddenly fell silent as Melissa, eyes wide, stared at the bare floorboard, now exposed, that the skirt of the dress had covered only a moment before. Frowning, Teri let her own gaze follow her half sister’s.
On the floor near the base of the mannequin lay a worn leather strap. Fastened onto a metal ring near the buckle at one end was a small plastic tag. A single word was etched in white on its dark blue surface.
BLACKIE.
Trembling, Melissa reached down and picked up the dog’s collar, then her eyes went to Teri. “I was right,” she breathed. “I did see him up here.”
Teri stared at the collar silently for a moment, finally shifting her eyes to her terrified half sister. “But what did you do with him?” she asked.
Melissa felt a wave of dizziness come over her. “D-Do with him?” she repeated.
Teri nodded. “Don’t you see?” she asked. “If he really was up here and you really did see him, you must have done something to him.”
Melissa’s head slowly swung back and forth. “N-No,” she stammered. “I didn’t …”
Teri reached out and took the collar from Melissa’s hand. “I didn’t say you did it on purpose,” she said. Then, as if she’d just thought of it, she spoke again, seeming to formulate the idea while she talked. “Maybe—Maybe it wasn’t you at all,” she suggested. “Maybe it was D’Arcy.”
Melissa gasped. “D-D’Arcy?”
