The Night Visitors

by Carol Goodman

  “Do you want me to get tape to bind his hands?” I ask. “There’s some in the dining room.”

  “Yeah,” Frank says to me. Then to Davis: “Roll over, asshole, hands behind your back.”

  “Oh man, don’t tie them behind my back. That will hurt like a mother—”

  Frank lands another kick in Davis’s side. I turn and go for the tape. The sooner we’ve got Davis bound the better. For us—and maybe for Davis too. I’ve glimpsed this violent side of Frank once or twice before. I blame the boot camp my father sent him to, and then the military school his father sent him to after that. He’s never really been the same since.

  I grab the roll of packing tape from the dining room and turn back to the study. Frank has hauled Davis into my father’s chair. His arms are wrenched behind his back, which really does look painful, and his face has gone chalk white. I secure his hands with the packing tape and then his torso to the chair. I have to put down the gun, but I’m careful to put it on top of the bookcase, next to the hurricane lamp, far away from Davis.

  “Get his feet too,” Frank tells me.

  When we’ve got him secured, Frank spins the chair around and jabs the gun into the middle of Davis’s chest. “What the fuck were you thinking, asshole?”

  “I was only trying to get my son back, man. My crazy-ass girlfriend kidnapped him. And this cu—woman was hiding them. That can’t be legal, man, can it?”

  “He also killed a man downstairs,” I offer. “That guy Jason who was bothering Atefeh at Stewart’s the other night. He followed us here and Davis shot him after we tied him up.”

  Frank looks at me and shakes his head. “Damn, Mattie, you sure as hell know how to make enemies. Anyone else you pissed off I should know about?”

  I take a deep breath. Frank’s gruff ribbing has calmed my racing heart. “I don’t think our Republican congressman is too fond of me after my last email to his office, but since he can’t even be bothered to show up at our town halls, I don’t think he’ll be making an appearance here.”

  Frank smiles—the first real smile he’s given me in thirty-four years—and, God help me, I feel the stirring of an unaccustomed hope. Doreen always says that out of our darkest moments come our greatest gifts. I’ve always thought that was bullshit, but if Frank and I can come out of this night . . . friends, well then it won’t have been a total loss.

  Frank’s smile vanishes when he looks down at the desk. The gunfire has scattered some of the files and papers to the floor but there’s still a few stacks on the desk. He picks up one of the files and gives it a puzzled look. “What’s all this?”

  I think about the last thing that Davis was showing Alice and feel a quiver of dread. I am not ready for Frank to see that. “Davis nosed around in here and found some files that were locked in the bottom drawer . . .” I look down at the files, but I don’t see the birth certificate anywhere on the desk. “The files my father was looking at the night he died. Davis thought he could blackmail me by threatening to expose him. As if I care who knows about that now. Sometimes . . .” I look up at Frank and find that he’s staring at me. “Sometimes I think it would have been better if we’d come clean about it all back then.”

  “Oh, Mattie,” he says, hanging his head. “What’s the use of going over all that? We did what we thought best. We were only trying to protect you. You need to let it go—you need”—he gestures at all the papers—“to get rid of all this. I can’t believe you held on to it all.”

  He’s right; I never have let it go. Ever since that night I’ve blamed myself for what happened to Caleb. And although it had made sense when Frank’s father said they could make my family’s death look like an accident, it had felt dirty. I had felt dirty. “I thought . . . I thought that someday I might be able to make amends to all these kids”—I wave at the papers on the desk and those that have spilled over the floor—“all the kids my father sent away.”

  “Haven’t you done that by building Sanctuary?” Frank says. “And by starting the home for at-risk youth? The battered women’s shelter? All financed by your parents’ estate.”

  “It’s not enough. Those kids’ lives were ruined. Look at what it did to us.”

  “Actually, I think getting sent to boot camp was the best thing that ever happened to me,” Frank says, anger sharpening his voice. “It wiped clean all my illusions. I saw the world for what it really was. And as for all those kids your father sent to Pine Crest, hell, most of them were thugs who were better off for the experience. I know because my father arrested most of them—”

  A low chuckle from Davis stops Frank cold. I think we’d both forgotten he was there. “What are you laughing at, asshole?” Frank demands.

  “Oh, not you, buddy, her. She doesn’t know, does she?”

  “Know what?” I ask, and then mentally kick myself for playing into his game.

  “His father wasn’t the arresting officer on most of the cases in that stack. He was the arresting officer on all of them. I noticed it right away. He was probably in on the whole thing.”

  Frank’s jaw is clenched and his eyes are narrowing, looking at me as if I’m the dangerous criminal. I take a step toward him to reassure him and my foot lands on something . . . a metal button, which I see, when I kneel down and pick it up, has the same pattern as the one Alice found in the basement, the seal of New York State. Did it fall out of my pocket? But when I check, the other button is still there.

  I glance up from the button to Frank, and my eye catches on his uniform. On the buttons. New York State police officer buttons emblazoned with the state seal. Well, sure. Frank’s father sat in this office a thousand times and could have lost a button any of those times—

  But how did he lose one in the crawl space behind the furnace?

  “Frank? Is that true? Was your father involved in putting those kids away at Pine Crest?”

  “And what if he was?” Frank snaps, all the softness gone from his voice now. “Those kids needed a firm hand. I see it all the time now—kids getting away with too much, their parents going too easy on them. Your father knew that, but he was too high-minded to understand what it took to make a place like Pine Crest work. When he found out a few details that weren’t up to his standards he was going to turn my father in. Can you blame my father for wanting to stop him?”

  “Stop him?” I ask, appalled. “By killing him? What about my mother? What about Caleb?”

  “My father said they would be all right. He planned to come by and rescue Caleb and your mother, but then you came home. You were supposed to be with me but then we fought and you came back here. When you came down the stairs with Caleb, your father revived and came out of the study, and Caleb ran and saw my father.”

  I replay the scene in my head: my father stumbling out of his study, waving his gun . . . not at me and Caleb, but at Hank Barnes standing in the doorway behind me. “I heard a shot . . .”

  “Your father fired at my dad. You were turning. If you had seen my dad we would have had to kill you too, so I hit you over the head.”

  I feel like I’ve been hit over the head now. “You let your father kill Caleb?”

  “I didn’t know that’s what he was going to do until it was done. What could I do about it then, Mattie? If I said anything my father would have killed you too. I kept quiet to save you. All these years . . . I could barely look you in the eye because of Caleb, but I knew that I had saved you.”

  “Aw,” Davis says, “that’s really kind of sweet . . .”

  “If you don’t shut the fuck up,” Frank says, pointing the gun at Davis, “I will shut you up.”

  He’s just trying to scare him, I think. The Frank I know wouldn’t shoot an unarmed man. But then the Frank I knew wouldn’t have gone along with covering up Caleb’s death.

  “Like father like son, eh?” Davis says.

  Maybe, I think as I see Frank’s finger tighten on the trigger, I never knew him at all.

  Davis’s head jerks back and seems to vanis
h in a red cloud. I hear a scream and turn to find Alice and Oren, openmouthed and wide-eyed, standing in the doorway.

  “Run,” I tell them.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Alice

  I GRAB OREN and turn. Behind me I hear a scream and then a gunshot, and a bullet thuds into the wood sideboard two feet to our left. I push Oren toward the foyer, not looking back even when I hear a door slam behind us.

  Oren wrenches open the front door and a gust of snow blows into the house. I try to stop him—we should stay in the house, hide in the basement or the attic—but he’s already outside, barreling down the steps and into the snow. I am afraid we will both die out here like the boy in that story Lisa told us, but what choice do I have? I fling myself down the porch steps, landing in an open patch of ice at the bottom, stumbling to my knees.

  When I look up I’m held by a sense of wonder. In front of me is the path Oren shoveled earlier today, impossibly free of snow. The howling wind must have blown the snow up into drifts that tower on either side, so that the path is like a tunnel carved out of ice. But what’s truly remarkable is that it’s lit up. There are little hollows scooped out of the ice where plastic figures stand—Han Solo, Princess Leia, Luke Skywalker, Chewbacca—all the Star Wars heroes glowing as if they were lit by candles. But there are no candles. The light seems to be coming from the snow itself, from the ice walls and the swirling crystals.

  I remember the feeling I had in the attic that Caleb was in the glittering snow, and I’m certain that he is here now, lighting the path that Oren shoveled to the barn. In fact, I can just make out a figure on the path ahead of me, flickering in and out of focus as the wind scours the snow. It doubles, turns into one, and doubles again until there are two boys on the path. Caleb is leading Oren to the barn.

  I used to dream that the frozen boy came knocking at my window. I would look outside and there he’d be, his white face shining like a second moon, his eyes dark as the surrounding night, his lips moving in a whisper only I could hear. All I had to do was open the window and take his hand, and we would fly away like Peter Pan and Wendy. He would take me to my real home, to my real mother.

  But in the dream I also knew that he was dead and that if I went with him I would be dead too. So I wouldn’t open the window, no matter how long he knocked or how many ice tears he shed. I’d wake up still hearing that knocking in my chest, the tears on my face chilling in the gray morning light.

  Now Oren has taken the frozen boy’s hand and is following him into the barn. Take me instead, I want to call out, but the wind would only whip my words to the sky. The path is already closing around me, snow drifting across the shoveled tunnel. I put my head down and push against the wind. Take me, take me, I whisper under my breath, I’m ready.

  I fight my way to the barn door, which gapes open like a rotten tooth. I catch the whiff of iron I’d smelled earlier and know it now for what it is: the stench of death. As I see Oren go inside I brace myself for one last push against the wind, but the wind shifts, comes around behind me, and pushes me forward, so that I fly through that black hole, like I always knew I would if I took the frozen boy’s hand. It’s easy to fly, he whispered to me in my dreams, all you have to do is let go.

  I land in the dark. There’s no magical glow here, no Peter Pan pixie dust, just the smothering dark and the smell of death pressing in all around me. “Oren?” I whisper, afraid to shout in this place, afraid of what might answer back.

  There’s only a creak, and then another, somewhere in front of me, and then a rustle high above my head. For a moment I imagine that floating boy, grown wings, roosting in the rafters above my head, but then I remember the loft. Oren has climbed up the ladder to the loft, which is the best place to hide, especially if we can take up the ladder.

  “Oren,” I whisper again, this time a little louder, “I’m coming.” I put my hands out and walk forward, trying to remember the layout of the barn. There was a path in the middle that was relatively clear, and the ladder was at the end of it. I should be able to find it if I walk straight ahead.

  I shuffle forward, hands out, testing the terrain with my feet. Newspapers rustle underneath my steps, the brittle old pages whispering like gossips’ tongues. What had that article said?

  “Chief Henry Barnes discovered the body . . .”

  But he was on the scene much earlier. That’s what the button behind the furnace meant, that’s what Mattie found out. Her cop friend’s father killed her father, her mother—and then he followed Caleb out here to the barn and killed him too. I can smell blood here, getting stronger with every step I take—

  My hand grazes something hard and cold. I push it away and it groans and screeches and swings back at me, hard cold iron slamming into my chest. It knocks the wind out of me but I manage to grab it and it judders in my hand, the sound traveling up and across the barn. How could I have forgotten that awful iron hook hanging from the ceiling by heavy chains? Mattie said it was how they hauled hay into the loft, but holding it now I can smell blood coming off it. This is where the smell comes from.

  I leave the hook swinging behind me and keep walking toward the loft, holding my hands out until I find the ladder. Thank God Oren has left it down for me. I climb up, each step sounding loud as a gunshot in the snow-covered barn. When I reach the top I feel a hand on mine. I nearly flinch away and fall backward, but the hand is warm and so is the breath whispering in my ear.

  “We have to lift up the ladder before he comes. Quick!”

  I scramble into the loft and pull at the top rung of the ladder. I feel Oren’s hands beside mine, but it’s too heavy . . . and then another pair of hands is beside ours and the ladder lifts up. We slide it across the loft floor, stirring old hay and dust, the smell welcome after the reek of iron and blood.

  “Oren?” I whisper, needing to know it’s Oren here with me and not that other boy.

  “Shh,” Oren says, pushing me down flat on the floor. “He’s here.”

  Does he mean Caleb? But then I hear a noise coming from across the barn, a footstep in the doorway. A flashlight beam slices the dark, lighting up a hulking figure of a man in the doorway. It’s that policeman. When he sweeps the barn with the flashlight the light catches on all those brass buttons and the dull glint of a gun. Why is he here and not Mattie? Does that mean that Mattie is dead, that he’s killed her? That we’re all alone with this murderer?

  The light travels across the barn, pausing on the hook, which is still swaying on its chain. Then the light moves swiftly upward toward the loft. I flatten myself down harder to the floor and reach out my right hand to squeeze Oren’s warm hand—and my left to hold the bone-cold hand of the other boy.

  Chapter Thirty

  Mattie

  AS I TURN back to Frank I am praying that I will find that the last few minutes have been a product of my clearly deteriorating mind. Frank, my childhood best friend and first sweetheart, upstanding citizen and protector of justice in the village of Delphi, has not just blown out the brains of an unarmed, restrained man, and therefore it is also not true that his father murdered my family and he helped cover it up.

  But as I turn I am also taking the second knife out of my pocket.

  Hope for the best, prepare for the worst, my mother used to say.

  When did you ever hope for anything good? my father, weary of her eternal pessimism, would quip back.

  In this case the pessimists have it. Frank is aiming the gun at me, a sad but firm set to his face. I throw the knife at his right arm, a trick he taught me, and his shot goes wide, striking the sideboard as I run into the dining room. I slam the door behind me and am reaching for the key in my pocket when a second bullet rips through the door. I turn the lock, pocket the key, and run. Behind me I hear the rattle of the doorknob and then a thud as Frank throws himself at the door. Good luck with that, I think. My father had that door made from a four-inch-thick slab of oak, cut from a tree that had been planted before the Revolutionary War, and fitte
d with tempered steel hinges. He was a man who liked his privacy, my father.

  A shot blows a hole in the lock, followed by a splintering thud. I run out into the foyer and see the open door, snow swirling in, footsteps in the snow on the porch. Alice and Oren have fled to the barn. I have an overwhelming urge to follow them—as I tried to follow Caleb that night—

  When Frank hit me over the head. That’s what blacked me out, not a graze from my father’s bullet. Frank had been here. He knew what his father was planning. He’d known as we argued at the hollow.

  Another blow to the door sends me up the stairs to get the gun from my bedroom. As I run up I remember the argument we’d had that night. It had started when he accused me of avoiding him all that Christmas break. He was right; I had been avoiding him. But not for the reason he thought.

  It’s your parents, isn’t it? They disapprove of me.

  Again, there was truth in that. My mother disapproved simply because the Barnes family was not in the same class as the Lanes. The Barnes men are graspers, my father had said one night at dinner, and my mother had chimed in, That Hank Barnes is always hanging on to your coattails, Matthew.

  Because they were colluding on taking kickbacks from Pine Crest? Or because Hank Barnes was making sure my father didn’t suspect he was?

  “Forgive me, but justice must be served.”

  That wasn’t my father’s suicide note; it was part of a letter he’d sent to Hank Barnes.

  What does it matter? I think as I reach my room. Either way, the end result was Caleb’s death. He looks back at me now from the photograph on the night table. When he was born, Sister Martine put him in my arms. She told me I didn’t have to go along with what my parents were planning.

  What else can I do? I asked her. I’d have to give him up to strangers otherwise.

  She had nodded and then said, Your father thinks he is doing the right thing, the just thing, raising your son as his own, and he may be right. But justice isn’t the same as love.