House of Reckoning

by John Saul

  Chapter Eleven

  I should make her stay, Bettina Philips thought as she stood at the front door of Shutters, watching Sarah make her slow way down the driveway, until finally she vanished into the darkness. But she’d tried, and Sarah Crane had brushed aside every argument she offered.

  She had seen how upset Sarah was by what she’d drawn, but just as she began explaining that an artist can’t always know what’s hidden inside them until the image finds its own moment of expression, Sarah caught sight of the clock and insisted that she had to go home, upset or not.

  She wouldn’t even accept another cup of tea, let alone the ride Bettina offered. But Bettina understood that: if anyone saw Sarah getting out of her car, there was no telling how her foster parents might punish her.

  So Sarah had walked out into the wintry night wearing a jacket barely heavy enough for fall, and now she was gone, and as Bettina finally swung the heavy oak door closed she felt something she hadn’t experienced in a long time.

  She felt lonely.

  Trying to shake off the feeling, she returned to the studio to gaze once more at the drawing that still stood on the easel. Perching on the stool in front of it, she studied the way Sarah had used a combination of light and shadow to indicate total darkness. And the angle of the beams in the dark chamber’s ceiling perfectly indicated the tight proportions of the space.

  The beams …

  Bettina leaned forward, cocking her head.

  There was something familiar about those beams.

  A chill began to crawl up her spine.

  Sarah had drawn Shutters sight unseen on her first day in class. And not as the old manse currently was, either, but the way it had been when it was first built.

  Was it possible this was another view of her house from sometime in the past? Could a room like this have ever existed within these walls?

  No. Of course not. And yet …

  She knew those beams.

  Bettina unclipped the drawing from the easel and took it out into the entry hall, scanning the ceiling and the way the walls joined, but knowing even as she gazed upward that the beams in the picture would be gone in the opposite direction.

  Grabbing a sweater from the coat tree in the foyer and turning lights on as she went, she carried the drawing down the steep flight of stairs that led from the kitchen into the cold basement that never seemed to warm up, even in the midst of the hottest summer.

  Tonight it felt even colder than it ever had.

  The musty smell felt choking in her throat, but she ignored it as she moved among the shrouded furniture and the old filing cabinets that held so much of her family’s history. Tonight, though, she ignored everything but the beams overhead, eyeing not only the angles at which they ran, but the way they connected with one another.

  The enormous timbers that had supported the house for nearly two centuries still held, now chalky white with age and cobwebs, but never painted or covered with plaster or drywall.

  But nothing matched Sarah’s sketch, at least not nearly as perfectly as the drawing of the house had hewn to the original. Still, there were probably areas in the basement that she had never seen. The old coal chute and bin and furnace that took up so much room long ago had been torn out and replaced by the oil-burning furnace that was now installed in a tiny portion of the area the coal-fueled system had required.

  How many other areas of the basement had been reconfigured over the stretch of decades that had run their course since the foundation was laid?

  And where to begin to look?

  Furniture and ancient machinery were stacked high at the far end of the chamber in which she stood, blocking her from even reaching the pull chains on the series of ancient lightbulbs that someone had strung among the joists somewhere in the far distant past.

  Nor could she get close to the far end without moving what looked like several tons of things past generations had consigned to the darkness, and she wasn’t about to go fumbling through it until she could reach the lights.

  But she could see nothing that looked even close to the small dungeonlike chamber Sarah had drawn.

  But if there really were such a room down here, wouldn’t it show on the original plans?

  Of course! And when her parents built the garage forty years ago, they had found the original plans in her great-great-grandfather’s study.

  Yet as she took a final look at the huge timbers in the ceiling—timbers whose proportions seemed perfectly to match those that Sarah had drawn—Bettina suddenly realized that she didn’t need the plans of the house to know the truth. Already she had little doubt that in the long-ago past someone had stored things somewhere in this basement that they intended to keep hidden forever.

  And Sarah had drawn them.

  Bettina pulled the sweater close around her neck and hurried back upstairs, turning off the light and firmly closing and locking the door.

  The kitchen, still smelling of warm spiced tea and filled with bright light, seemed a safe haven, but Bettina moved straight through it, across the inlaid marble floor of the hall, and pushed open one of the heavy mahogany doors to the room that had not been used since it was her thrice-great-grandfather’s study.

  Instead it had been left exactly as it was when Boone Philips died, the one room in the house that was always closed, and never used.

  The one room that she herself had never played in as a child.

  It had always been a cold room, but tonight it felt even colder than the rest of the house.

  Bettina switched on the overhead chandelier and surveyed the glass-fronted cabinets, the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves with the brass library ladder on a rail, the leather chairs and massive desk.

  Where to begin to look for a set of two-hundred-year-old plans?

  Where had her parents found them?

  The desk was as good a starting place as any.

  Bettina perched on the cracking leather of the big desk chair, and the smell of old leather, and even older books, enveloped her.

  She opened the front drawer of the desk, glanced at its jumble of pens, pencils, and paper clips, and closed it again.

  The top drawer on the right-hand pedestal held Boone Philips’s personal engraved stationery, now yellowed and crisp.

  The deep file drawer below that was filled with folders, but none of them thick enough to hold a series of house plans.

  Still, she flipped quickly through them; they looked like old inmate files from the time when her ancestor was the last warden of the old prison. Maybe someday she’d donate these and the contents of the cabinets in the basement to the historical society. At least she’d be rid of them, and maybe the historians would find some use for them.

  Then, just as she was about to close the drawer, she noticed something odd.

  The drawer’s face seemed to be a few inches taller than the drawer was deep.

  She closed the drawer and looked at the front of it, measuring its depth with her fingers, hand, and forearm. Then she opened it again and repeated the exercise. Sure enough, the bottom of the drawer was nearly three inches higher than it needed to be.

  And when she felt the exterior bottom of the drawer, it was nearly even with the bottom of the drawer’s face.

  The drawer had a false bottom.

  Bettina lifted the files out of the drawer, stacking them on the desk.

  Barely visible at the back of the drawer, she found a small notch in the drawer’s bottom. Taking a paper clip from the top drawer, she straightened it out, bent it so it formed a right angle, then fit it into the notch.

  It came up without so much as a squeal.

  And there, hidden away in the secret compartment that had been built into the desk, was a sheaf of handwritten pages.

  A manuscript?

  Bettina carefully pulled the papers out of the drawer.

  AN HOMAGE TO E. A. POE

  BY BOONE PHILIPS

  Her thrice-great-grandfather was a writer? What had he written?


  She quickly replaced the false bottom, put the files back where they’d originally been, and closed the drawer.

  The house plans—even if they were here—could wait.

  Leaving Sarah Crane’s drawing on the desk, she took the manuscript back to her studio, curled up on the chaise with a thick wool throw, and began to read.

  With her coat buttoned up tight, her scarf wrapped around her mouth and nose, and the knit cap pulled well down over her ears, Sarah made her way slowly down the last few yards of the driveway, feeling each step out carefully.

  The last thing she needed to do was trip in the dark.

  And with her hands plunged deep in the warmth of her pockets, she might not be able to pull them out in time to catch herself if she fell. Then what would she do? There was no way Bettina Philips could hear her from here, and even if a car passed on the road, its windows would be closed. But if she pulled her hands out now, her fingers would freeze.

  At last she came to the road, turned left, and started down into the village. For the first part of the long walk back to the Garveys’, all she’d been able to think about was the macabre drawing she’d made at Shutters. Where had it come from? And why couldn’t she remember drawing it? Was it possible that she hadn’t drawn it? That was certainly how it felt: like some strange force had just taken over, moving the charcoal all by itself. But as she came to the bright streetlight across from the town square, her mind shifted from where she’d been to where she was going.

  What would it to be like to face the wrath of Angie Garvey?

  A cold that was different from the icy chill in the air penetrated deep into her, making the night seem almost warm by comparison.

  What was she going to say when her foster mother demanded to know where she’d been?

  Should she try to lie and say she was at the library?

  But she wasn’t very good at lying, and Angie would know right away that she wasn’t telling the truth.

  Just walking out had been bad enough; if she lied about where she’d been—

  She didn’t even want to think about what Angie might do. Not letting her visit her father would only be the beginning of it.

  Five minutes later she turned the corner onto Quail Run, and stopped for a moment, still trying to think what she might say. The Garvey house was dark except for the bluish cast from the big-screen television that showed through the draperies. Still uncertain what she was going to say, Sarah took a deep breath and crossed the street. A moment later she climbed the three steps to the front porch, steeled herself, and opened the storm door.

  The front door was locked.

  Sarah moved to the window, peered through the sheer curtains, and saw Mitch Garvey’s foot propped up on the coffee table as he lay sprawled on the sofa that faced the television.

  She knocked on the glass, but his foot didn’t even twitch.

  She rang the bell and waited, shivering in the cold, but there were no answering lights, no sound, no movement of any kind.

  Maybe they’d left the back door open for her.

  Sarah closed the storm door, went around to the back of the house, and was about to try the back door when she saw a rolled up sleeping bag standing on its end right next to the dog door. Sitting on top of it was a small plate—not even covered—that held half a sandwich.

  There was a note pinned to the bread with a toothpick.

  Sarah’s heart faltered as she began to understand her punishment.

  She unpinned the note and held it up to the glow of the porch light.

  You don’t storm out in a temper tantrum and come back whenever you want to. Good night.

  She read the note again, barely believing that someone would lock her out of the house, leaving her to sleep on a porch in November.

  Even the dog got to sleep in the laundry room.

  But what else could she do?

  Maybe she should go back to Shutters. Bettina would let her sleep there—she’d already offered.

  But the cold was penetrating deeper and deeper into her, and her hip was throbbing and her leg aching so badly she’d barely made it the last couple of blocks before she got back to the Garveys’.

  She’d never make it all the way back to Shutters.

  Sighing, she unrolled the heavy down sleeping bag and kicked off her shoes. Then, still wearing her coat, knit cap, and scarf, she wriggled into the sleeping bag and pulled it close around her.

  She reached out a hand into the cold and picked up the sandwich from the plate.

  She nibbled at it, and then, as the cold began to ebb out of her body, quickly finished the rest of it.

  She stretched out flat on her back, and felt the throbbing in her hip begin to ease, despite the hardness of the porch. As her body warmed, exhaustion flowed through her, and suddenly even the wooden floor of the porch didn’t seem so bad.

  Better, anyway, than trying to keep on walking through the cold and darkness. Letting the last piece of bread crust fall from her fingers, Sarah gave herself up to sleep.

  Tiffany smiled in the darkness of her room when she heard the doorbell ring, and a tingle of excitement ran through her as she waited to see if her parents were really going to make Sarah sleep outside all night.

  She’d never seen her mother as furious as she’d been when Sarah just walked out of the house before dinner. Her mother hadn’t even been that mad when she had to pick Zach up at the Morganton police station after he took her car for a joyride with Conner West.

  And the best thing was that her mother’s fury had only gotten worse as the evening went on and Sarah didn’t come back and apologize. Still, even given how angry her mother was, Tiffany couldn’t quite believe she’d actually make her sleep outside. She’d probably let Sarah shiver out there for a little while longer, then let her in and start yelling at her.

  The doorbell turned into a couple of knocks, but Tiffany knew it didn’t matter how hard she knocked—her mother had gone to bed—or at least disappeared into the big bedroom at the end of the hall, and her father would be asleep on the sofa.

  Except he wasn’t really asleep—he was passed out, and no amount of ringing or knocking would wake him up.

  So it was true—nobody was going to let her in until morning.

  Then an ugly thought occurred to her: What if her mother did the same thing to her?

  Behave, or you’ll sleep on the porch.

  No. Doing it to Sarah Crane was one thing, but her parents would never do that to her. Sarah was no more than a way for her folks to get some extra money, and the way she’d acted, she needed a good slap in the face to learn her place in the family.

  Which was no place at all.

  Suddenly, Tiffany wanted to actually see what was happening, to witness it with her own eyes, so she could relate every detail to everyone at school tomorrow. If people were snickering about Sarah already, just wait until they heard this one—they’d all die laughing.

  She slid out of bed, put on the robe she’d tossed over her desk chair, and silently slipped out of her room on bare feet. She stepped over the creaky step on the stairs just in case her father wasn’t quite as passed out as she thought he’d be, but when she went through the living room, he didn’t so much as twitch.

  Pepper was in his bed in the laundry room, and he got up and wagged his little stump of a tail when she came in, and she crouched down and petted him for a second just to make sure he didn’t start whimpering or barking.

  Then she peeked out the back door window.

  Sarah was in Zach’s sleeping bag.

  Lying on the porch.

  Still wearing her hat.

  Perfect! Exactly what she deserved.

  And for tonight, at least, she had her room all to herself again, the way it should be.

  Which gave her another idea.

  Giving Pepper one more pat on his head, Tiffany quietly retraced her steps until she was safely back in her room, then locked the door, just in case.

  She crouched down in front
of the dresser and opened the bottom drawer.

  Sarah’s drawer.

  The bottle of pain pills was right where she’d left it when she took a few last week. She’d earned enough money from those to buy a new sweater, and now she wanted a skirt to go with it.

  She even knew who her best customer was going to be: Conner West, who’d bought one of the pills last week and asked her for more.

  Now she had more.

  Silently, she closed the drawer, then unzipped her backpack, put the pills in her makeup kit and buried it in the bottom of her pack.

  Then she took off her robe, slipped back into her warm bed, and snuggled down into her soft mattress, thinking of Sarah shivering out on the porch.

  Whatever happened tomorrow, tonight at least had been a great evening.

  No Sarah, and plenty of pills to sell in the morning.

  Chapter Twelve

  Nick stamped his feet against the cold and flexed his fingers inside the mittens his mother had knit for him. He knew he’d be warmer if he kept moving but decided to try to walk to school with Sarah this morning, so for the last twenty minutes he’d been hanging around the corner closest to the Garveys’ house, trying to keep an eye out for her while not appearing to wait for her. By now he was freezing, and if she didn’t show up soon, he knew they’d never make it on time.

  Maybe she was sick.

  Maybe she wasn’t coming at all.

  Tiffany and Zach had left the house at least ten minutes ago and were probably inside the school building by now.

  The nice, warm school building.

  When Conner West drove by—flipping Nick the bird as he passed—Nick glanced at his watch. He’d give her another minute and then—

  The Garveys’ front door opened and Sarah appeared, gripping the railing tightly as she made her way down the three steps of the front porch.

  And then the voices in Nick’s head—the voices that had begun babbling angrily as Conner West lifted his finger at him a minute ago—fell silent as Sarah caught sight of him and waved.

  Nick hurried toward her. Maybe if he carried her book bag they could still get to school on time, but when he caught up to Sarah, he stopped short. She looked as if she’d barely slept at all. “Hey,” he said. “Are you okay?”