House of Reckoning

by John Saul

No answer came from the kitchen, even though he could hear Lily in there chopping something. And if she was working but not talking, something was wrong.

  Crap. Just when he was figuring on pouring a good stiff drink, putting his feet up on the coffee table, and relaxing. Double crap!

  He left his briefcase on the side table and walked into the kitchen. Sure enough, Lily wouldn’t meet his eyes. No smile, let alone a kiss. Instead she just kept chopping celery into finer and finer pieces. The way she was going, there wasn’t going to be anything left of it when she finally put it into whatever she was cooking.

  Which meant one thing. Nick.

  “Okay,” Shep sighed. “What is it this time? What’s he done now?”

  Lily sighed. “He didn’t come home after school today.” She turned toward him, her eyes cold, her lips set in a thin line that told him she blamed him for whatever trouble their son had gotten himself into. “What did you say to him last night?” Lily demanded. “Why wouldn’t he even come home today?”

  Shep tried to deflect the question. “Have you called his cell phone?”

  But Lily was not to be put off. “What did you say to him, Shep?”

  His jaw muscles starting to clench, Shep picked up the kitchen phone and dialed his son’s cell number.

  The call rolled instantly to Nick’s voice mail. “This is Nick. Leave a message.”

  Shep’s voice was hard when he spoke, his words like chips of ice. “You should be home, Nick. You know that. So wherever you are, you call us so we won’t worry, and then get yourself home. Got it?” He clicked off and turned back to face his wife’s accusing eyes.

  “You said something,” Lily repeated. “I know you did, and you know you did. What was it?”

  Shep’s eyes narrowed defensively. “I told him not to be hanging around with that crippled girl anymore.”

  Lily shook her head and rolled her eyes. “Oh, great,” she said, her voice fairly dripping with sarcasm. “That was real smart, wasn’t it? What do you think happens with teenagers when they’re forbidden to do something?”

  “If they’ve got any smarts at all, they do what their fathers tell them.”

  “Like you always did?” Lily countered, her eyes rolling a second time.

  “Okay, so maybe I shouldn’t have been so hard on him,” Shep muttered. “But at least now we know who he’s with.” And he had a pretty good idea where the two of them were, too.

  He pulled out the Warwick phone book, looked up Mitch Garvey’s phone number, and dialed.

  After two rings he heard Angie Garvey’s voice. “Hello?”

  “Hey, Angie, it’s Shep Dunnigan. I don’t suppose Nick is over at your place with—” He searched his mind for the name of the girl Mitch had taken in, but before he found it, Angie Garvey answered his question.

  “Sarah hasn’t come home from school yet.” Though she was trying to keep the anger out of her voice, Shep could hear it clearly. “I’m starting to get a little worried about her.”

  Worried, or pissed off? Shep wondered, but then he tried to sound just as worried as Angie. “I have a feeling maybe the two of them are together somewhere,” he said.

  He could almost hear the cogs grinding as Angie turned this news over in her mind, but when she spoke again, she sounded as carefully bland as before. “Well, if I hear from her, I’ll definitely give you a call.”

  “Thanks, Angie,” Shep replied. “And I’ll do the same.” He put the phone back into the cradle.

  “Should we call Dan West?” Lily asked.

  Shep shook his head. “Not yet. Let’s give them a little more time.” He touched her shoulder, but the gesture didn’t soften her anger. “I’m going to go change,” he said, loosening his tie.

  “Dinner in ten minutes,” Lily said.

  Plenty of time. He’d change clothes, wash up for dinner, and still have time to use the upstairs phone to make one more call. With Bettina Philips having visited Sarah’s father, and Nick now hanging around with Sarah, he was pretty sure he knew exactly where they were.

  Sarah stood at the long table in Bettina’s studio, all the pain in her hip forgotten as she began preparing paint. Had either Bettina or Nick asked her how she knew what to do, she wouldn’t have been able to put it into words. All she could have said was that she knew some force coming from somewhere in the house was guiding her. She worked quickly, using Bettina’s old stone mortar and pestle to grind one scrap of bone after another into a fine powder, keeping the small mound of powder from each bone separate from the others. When she began preparing her palette, she mixed a little of the powder into every color she blended, sometimes from one of the mounds, sometimes from two, three, or even four of them.

  Finally satisfied with her palette, she took a clean canvas from the shelf beneath the worktable and set it up on an easel.

  And then she stood, very still, in front of the empty canvas, her eyes fixed on it, not a muscle in her body seeming to move at all. As the seconds turned into minutes, Bettina finally stepped closer to Sarah, putting out a hand as if to touch her, but Nick stopped her.

  “She’s all right,” he said. “She’s—I think she’s listening to the voices.”

  “I loved them all,” the voice said. Though it was emerging from Nick Dunnigan’s lips, it wasn’t Nick’s voice. It was older—much older—and had an empty tone to it, as if whoever was speaking was describing something that had happened to someone else and hadn’t affected him at all. And as the voice droned on, Sarah stood at the easel, painting rapidly, the strokes of her brush illustrating the words falling from Nick’s mouth. “Ruth Lincoln was the first. She was beautiful—her eyes the blue of turquoise. And hair the color of flax. But the baby was ugly. We called her Florence, but she wasn’t a comely lass. Not like her mother at all.”

  Already two faces had appeared on the canvas: a beautiful Madonna-like figure, cradling a small child in her arms. But the child was not like the mother. Its features were uneven, its upper lip split.

  “Ruth wanted me to do it,” the voice went on. “She sat perfectly still as I put the knife to her throat, cutting it deep and true so she would feel nothing.”

  A great flood of red gushed across the canvas as Sarah slashed at it with her brush.

  “Her head dropped down, and when I cut the baby, too, Ruth was watching.”

  Sarah’s brush moved again, and now the babe was bleeding also, blood pouring from its throat.

  Bettina, transfixed, listened and watched as the voice kept speaking and Sarah’s brush continued to move. She knew this story—it was in the old manuscript that now lay on her ancestor’s desk.

  The voice emanating from Nick’s throat droned on, and more and more of the canvas was filled.

  “And then I was done and Ruth was gone, and Florence, and my beautiful Laura and our little Freddie were gone and buried too, and I knew that Mary was next, and our little baby Mamie. …”

  More faces appeared, two more beautiful women and the babies the man had sired, and Bettina watched in mute fascination as each of them died, their agony perfectly limned by Sarah’s brush.

  “But Mary knew. She knew, and brought me here, and left me and never came back. Mary and little Mamie. They never come and see me. They tell everyone I’m dead.” The voice fell wistfully silent for a moment, then went on. “After I finished my story and Dr. Philips asked me if there was any more and I told him there wasn’t, he got up and went to his desk. I thought he was getting me more brandy—he always gave us brandy when we talked to him to loosen our tongues—but it wasn’t brandy at all.

  “It was a knife.

  “A knife like I used on Ruth and Laura and would have used on Mary, too—my perfect Mary. But Dr. Philips used it on me, and then sent me down to the darkness to join the others. And he’d promised, too—promised that if I told him everything, he’d set me free. But he lied. He lied, and put me with the others. …”

  The voice trailed off, and Bettina knew it would not speak again. A new
face had appeared on a fresh canvas. The face of a man whose empty eyes seemed utterly unaware of the carnage he’d inflicted on the people he claimed to love, and as Sarah quickly finished the drawing, Nick spoke again. This time, though, it was his own voice that emerged from his lips.

  “He was in the book,” he said softly. “The one in the library. He was one of the men allowed to work in the house.”

  “And his story is in another book,” Bettina replied. “I’ll show it to you.” She led Nick and Sarah into the study where the yellowed manuscript still sat on Boone Philips’s old mahogany desk. “My three-times-great-grandfather wrote it,” Bettina said as Nick stared down at the ancient pages. “He called it ‘Stories from My Imagination,’ but I don’t think they were from his imagination at all.”

  Nick reached out, his hand hovering over the stack of yellowed paper for an instant before he finally touched it. Then his eyes widened, his face paled, and Bettina heard a quick, gasping intake of air. “What is it?” she asked. “What happened?”

  “He killed them all,” Nick whispered, his eyes fixed on the manuscript. “He made them tell him everything they’d done, made them describe it to him.” His voice faltered for a moment, then: “He killed them. He hid all their records, and he killed them and hid them down there.” Now he looked up, his eyes meeting Bettina’s. “For a book,” he whispered. “Just so he could write a book.” Nick began paging through the manuscript, scanning the pages quickly, recalling so many of the things he’d seen and heard since the voices and visions began when he was so young he hardly remembered some of them. He’d turned nearly half the pages of the manuscript when the jangle of the old-fashioned telephone on the desk tore his attention out of the past and back into the present, and when he heard Bettina Philips speak his father’s name, he started to rise from the chair.

  Bettina waved him back but held the phone just far enough away from her ear so Nick, too, could hear whatever his father was going to say.

  “I’m thinking you’ve got Nick out there. And that girl the Garveys took in, too—the one who’s father almost killed her.”

  “Why would you think they’re out here?” Bettina countered.

  “Don’t play dumb with me!” Dunnigan shot back, his voice hardening and taking on a tone that sent a chill through Bettina. “Everybody knows—”

  “Everybody knows a lot of things, Shep,” Bettina cut in. But before she could say anything else the memory of that other call—the coldly anonymous call that had unearthed the old nightmares—suddenly rose in her mind.

  Shep Dunnigan?

  Had it been Shep Dunnigan who’d called her?

  Now he was speaking again, and Bettina’s knuckles whitened as she held the receiver. “So if I came up there to pay you a little visit, just to make absolutely sure Nick’s not there—”

  “I’m sure you’ll do whatever you want to do,” Bettina said, struggling to keep her voice from betraying the sudden panic rising in her. “I don’t think I could stop you, could I?” Without waiting for him to answer, she hung up the phone.

  Nick’s face was pale and his eyes darted around the room as if his father might suddenly appear out of one of its darker corners. “I’ve got to go,” he said. “If he finds me here, he’ll send me back to the hospital.”

  “Why would he do tha—” Bettina began, but Nick was already heading for the door.

  “I’ve got to get out of here. He can’t find me here.”

  “Then let me drive you,” Bettina said, following him out into the foyer, then back toward the conservatory. “You’ll freeze out there!”

  “No, I won’t,” Nick insisted, starting to pull his coat back on. “And even if I do, so what? It’d be better than going back to the hospital.”

  Now Sarah turned around, her back to the easel. “Nick? What’s wrong? Where are you going?”

  “My dad’s coming out here!” he told her. “If he finds me here—”

  He didn’t have to finish his sentence—Sarah, too, had grabbed her coat and was shoving her arms into the sleeves, then picking up her backpack from where it still lay on the chaise. “I’m going with you—”

  “No!” Nick protested, but she shook her head.

  “We shouldn’t ever have come out here! So let’s just go back to the libra—”

  “Sarah, listen to me!” Bettina said as they both started toward the door. “I’ll drive you—”

  Sarah shook her head, cutting Bettina off. “If Nick’s dad really does come out here, you have to be here. Otherwise, he’ll know! We’ll be okay. Come on, Nick!”

  And they were gone, hurrying out the French doors and across the terrace, then down the steps to vanish into the darkness. Bettina followed them out onto the terrace, calling after them, but all she heard in response was Sarah’s voice, once more insisting that they’d be all right.

  Should she get into the car and go after them? But they wouldn’t take the driveway—they’d go back through the woods, the way they’d come. And Nick, she was sure, knew every path and trail as well as every other kid in Warwick. They wouldn’t get lost, but if they didn’t want to be found, there was no way she could do it.

  Should she call Dan West?

  That might make things even worse for Nick and Sarah when they finally got home.

  But she had to do something—she couldn’t just leave them out there in the dark. Turning away from the night, she closed the French doors behind her.

  And her eyes fell on the canvas Sarah Crane had been working on.

  The room began a slow spin, and she had to reach out to the work-table to catch herself as the wave of dizziness crested. Finally, she sank down on the stool she sometimes used when she painted, closed her eyes and slowly counted to ten.

  The dizziness passed.

  What she’d seen—thought she’d seen—had to be nothing more than some kind of bizarre hallucination.

  Her heartbeat slowed, her breathing evened out.

  She opened her eyes.

  It had been no hallucination.

  In the few minutes Sarah was at the easel, she had painted a clear, detailed image of a scene that had taken place in the forest outside this house before she’d even been born.

  Bettina was gazing at a depiction of her own rape, except that in the picture Sarah had limned, Bettina could see something she hadn’t been able to see on that terrible night.

  Sarah had drawn not only her, but the man who had raped her as well.

  Shep Dunnigan.

  As she stared at the painting, she replayed what she’d just heard on the telephone.

  The same threatening voice as the man who called yesterday, the voice that triggered the horrible dream about the brutal rape when she was only sixteen.

  The rape that resulted in a child born on Sarah Crane’s birthday, and which Bettina had immediately given up for adoption.

  It was all impossible, but now, as she stared at the painting, it all made sense.

  And right this minute, Sarah Crane’s father—her real father—was on his way to Shutters.

  Tiffany Garvey felt Conner West’s hand caressing her breast and squirmed with pleasure under the weight of his body. Even though the backseat of Conner’s car might not be the most comfortable place, she was enjoying what was happening enough that she didn’t care that one of her legs was propped up on the back of the front seat.

  His hand reached up her skirt, his fingers pulling at the elastic of her panties, and she began tugging at the buckle of his belt. It would have been a lot nicer—and a lot more comfortable—if they could have gone somewhere, but her mother was always home and so was Conner’s, and neither one of them could afford a hotel room.

  Conner’s hands were all over her now, and he was pulling her panties off and—

  A flicker of movement outside caught her eye.

  Someone was out there! Someone had seen them!

  With a sudden surge of strength fueled by a moment of panic, she shoved Conner, sat up, and peere
d out the window.

  Sarah Crane was standing on the side of the old dirt road—the road Conner had sworn nobody ever came down.

  And she was staring right at them, her eyes wide under her wool cap.

  Their eyes met for a moment, and then Sarah—looking as startled as Tiffany felt—turned and stumbled away into the woods.

  “Sarah!” Tiffany said, barely believing her eyes as she finally managed to get Conner’s hands off her. “Do you believe it? Sarah Crane is out there, and she just saw us.”

  “You’re nuts,” Conner said, reaching out again, his hands groping at her.

  “No!” Tiffany punched him on the chest hard enough to make Conner flinch back. “She’s going to go home and tell my parents that we were parked out here.”

  Conner was looking at her warily now. “What are you—crazy? What would Sarah Crane be doing out here in the woods? She can barely even walk.”

  “Well, she was walking pretty good just now,” Tiffany shot back, adjusting her bra and pulling her sweater down. “And I have to go. Now,” she added pointedly when Conner made no move to return to the driver’s seat.

  “You saw a deer,” Conner said.

  “I know what I saw, so let’s just go, okay? I’m already late.”

  “Come on, Tiff,” he pleaded, “let’s just—”

  “Let’s go, Conner!” She struggled her way back into the front seat and waited while Conner zipped his pants, buttoned his shirt, then got out of the car, slammed the back door hard enough to make Tiffany jump, jerked the driver’s door open, got in behind the wheel, and slammed that door even harder.

  Tiffany said nothing, knowing Conner well enough to know that if she pushed him too hard, he might very well throw her out of the car and just leave her there. Which wouldn’t do at all. She needed to get home first, to be setting the table and doing her homework before Sarah got home. But Conner apparently wasn’t convinced yet.

  “Sarah Crane is not out here,” he said quietly.

  Tiffany could actually feel him getting ready to make another pass at her. “Can we just go?” she asked. “We’ll come back here next time, okay?” Like there was ever going to be a next time, she silently added to herself.