House Of Reckoning Part 6

"I just like to draw," Sarah said, signing her name and handing the sketch to the teacher. "Usually I draw people, but this was fun."

Bettina Philips laid the drawing flat on the table and looked at it. "Do you know this house?"

"No," Sarah said. "It just sort of came into my mind."

"Really? You just imagined this?"

Sarah nodded, and struggled with her backpack.

Miss Philips added the drawing to the stack of paper already on her desk, reached over and lifted up the bottom of Sarah's backpack so she could slip the straps over her shoulders.

"Thanks," Sarah said, settling the weight evenly.

"I'm glad you're in this cla.s.s," Bettina said. "You'll do very well."

She looked up at the teacher one more time and felt an easy warmth flow through her.

Seventh period art had just become her favorite cla.s.s of the day.

Chapter Six.

Bettina Philips turned her battered Mini Cooper onto the rutted driveway and through the ornate wrought-iron gates that hung rusted and crooked from two once-proud granite columns that were now so covered with moss and lichen that the inscription carved into them when they were new was now illegible. Sighing softly at the decay, Bettina downshifted and gunned the little car up the long curving driveway toward the house she'd lived in all her life.

When she was little, a gardener had been employed for almost half the year in an attempt to keep the grounds of the old mansion up to her grandfather's exacting standards, but after he died, the gardener was the first expense to be cut, but hardly the last. And Shutters-as the house had always been known-fell into worse disrepair every year since. Bettina did what she could to try to keep the place up, but just paying the heating bill in the winter was beyond her meager salary, and when the shortest and coldest days came, she retreated to the kitchen and her studio, letting the rest of the house freeze.

Someday the historical society would make her an offer she couldn't refuse, hopefully before the manse was beyond repair.

She parked in the garage, entered the house through the kitchen door, and called to her two dogs and three cats, but as usual none of them came to greet her. That was all right; one by one they'd eventually show themselves, eyeing her suspiciously and looking vaguely guilty, as if they had been up to no good while she was at work.

She moved on through the big kitchen and through the huge dining room and the salon beyond, coming finally to the north side of the house, where she had turned her great-great-grandfather's old conservatory into an art studio.

As was her ritual, Bettina took a moment to look out the back windows, across the terrace, and down the broad lawn to the sh.o.r.e of Shutters Lake. The waterfowl had long ago flown south, but the lake still held its ethereal beauty, looking different every day of every season. Now, in late fall, the lake was rippled with a northern breeze, a precursor of the bitter cold to come. What was left of the cattails drooped in the fading afternoon sun. Soon, the lake would be frozen over and snow would cover everything, and the eerie silence of winter would fall over not only the lake, but the house as well.

Bettina took a deep breath, unzipped the portfolio containing her students' work for the day, and laid its contents on her worktable. The top drawing was the one done by Sarah Crane, the new girl with the crippled leg.

Sarah had done a study of a stone house, using a single brown pastel crayon, which gave the drawing an old, sepia-toned mood. Her talent was evident in every stroke of the sketch. Her perspective was precisely correct, from the artful shadows on the gabled, multilevel roof to the corresponding aspects of the roofline with the shutters on the front and side. She'd accomplished a lot in a very limited amount of time, even adding touches-more like indications, actually-of landscaping and shading on some of the stones around the heavy, double front door.

The door.

Bettina stood back and looked at the drawing again.

Shutters?

She moved the drawing under the light and looked more closely. Sarah's drawing looked much like a smaller version of her own house. The house in the drawing had a gabled roof and a circular drive similar to hers and oversized shutters very much like the ones that had not only given her house its name, but the lake upon whose sh.o.r.es it had been built as well.

But Shutters had a carriage house-now her garage-to the east, and servants' quarters to the west. An enormous maple tree, the leaves of which were now falling fast and blowing into the angles of the house and roof, stood in the center of the circular drive.

Still, despite the differences, the similarities could not be denied.

Bettina looked up through the conservatory's enormous roof of gla.s.s. Daylight was fading, but if she went out now, she'd still have time to see the front of the house clearly before it was obscured by dusk. She hurried across the large marble-floored foyer, an orange tabby cat scuttling out of her way and ducking under the ma.s.sive round table.

Bettina opened the great front door and took the drawing out into the cold twilight. Crisp brown leaves swirled around her ankles in the wind and she shivered in her light sweater, but there wasn't time to go back for a jacket.

Holding the sketch high, she backed away from the house onto the big driveway and began working her way toward a point of view that might duplicate the one in Sarah Crane's drawing.

There wouldn't be one, of course, since Sarah's house existed only in her imagination, but even in the face of this impossibility, Bettina had a feeling she would find something close.

Something very close.

She found herself in front of the garage, the old servants' quarters on the other side and to the rear of the house hidden by the house itself. Again she held the drawing up in front of her, blocking off the view of the garage, and there it was.

With the leaves stripped from the enormous trees, she could see that the complex, multilevel roofline on Sarah Crane's drawing perfectly matched that of the old house. The windows were all in the same place, and though there were different details on the double front door, the shiver that ran up Bettina's arms was not caused by the chill November air.

Still, this couldn't be; surely she was only imagining the similarities in the fading light. She went back in through the double front doors, started back down the length of the foyer toward the conservatory, then heard Rocky whining softly. The mottled terrier mix had been brought in from the woods as a tiny puppy by one of the cats half a dozen years ago. Now, he sat facing the door to her grandfather's study, twisting his neck so he could look back at her.

Bettina moved toward the conservatory again, and Rocky barked, just once, but as he always did when he intended to get his way. And right now, apparently what he wanted was to get into her grandfather's study. "Oh, all right," she muttered, turning back. "G.o.d, I am such a pushover." Rocky stood up as she approached, his tail wagging, and he slithered inside as soon as she opened the door.

The room still smelled like brandy and cigars.

Suddenly, Bettina felt like a little girl, looking around at book-lined walls, the leather chairs, and enormous desk. Not only did her grandfather's spirit still seem to be in this room, but so did those of Harold Philips's own father and grandfather. Rocky was now sniffing at the double doors of a cabinet below one of the bookcases, and Bettina, her curiosity aroused, knelt down and pulled open the cabinet's doors.

Dozens of identical dark leather photograph alb.u.ms stood lined up on the shelves. Bettina pulled out the first one, took it to the big desk, turned on the desk lamp and opened the alb.u.m as the dog curled up at her feet. The first few black pages held yellowed newspaper clippings from the Warwick Sentinel Warwick Sentinel, announcing the appointment of Boone Philips as the superintendent of Shutters Lake Inst.i.tute for the Criminally Insane, followed by formal photographs of her great-great-grandfather as a middle-aged man. In succeeding pages there were photographs of him in front of what the townspeople referred to as the old "retreat."

Bettina kept turning pages, and then, there it was: a sepia-toned photograph of Boone Philips standing next to the door of Shutters as it was when he'd first moved in.

The enormous maple tree, then no more than a sapling, grew from the center of the circular drive.

The photograph was taken from the west side of the driveway, and there were no servants' quarters on that side of the house. If there was a carriage house on the east side, it was out of sight, but she could see nothing that indicated a roadway to that side.

So the servants' quarters had been added later, and most likely the carriage house as well.

Bettina lifted the photograph from the little corners that held it to the black alb.u.m pages and set it on her grandfather's desk, next to the drawing by the young student.

Sarah had even included the sapling.

A chill ran up Bettina's spine.

Today, the enormous shutters that protected the fragile windows and occupants of the old stone house from the nor'easters that roared down the lake in the winter sagged on their hinges. But they were still operable, and Bettina occasionally employed them when the winds were bad enough.

But in both the photograph and the drawing, the shutters were the same-square and even.

New.

The front doors in the drawing and the photograph were the same, and different from the current front doors, which Bettina's mother had replaced before she had even been born.

Somehow, Sarah Crane-new to Warwick-had plucked the image of her house out of thin air, and drawn it in her cla.s.sroom not as it was now, but as it had been when it was new.

Bettina unconsciously rubbed the goose b.u.mps that rose on her arms and turned to look at Rocky, who now sat quietly at the doorway and gazed at her with calm brown eyes.

"What do you think?" she asked him.

The dog merely kept looking at her for another moment, then stood up and trotted away, probably in search of the cat who had been the only mother he'd ever known.

"Spooks me, too," Bettina said softly to the now empty room. As she leaned in to turn off the desk lamp, she looked one more time at both the photograph and the incomprehensible drawing.

Sarah Crane would get an A for the a.s.signment.

And she would keep a close, watchful eye on the girl.

Sarah waited until everyone was seated and everything was as perfect as she could make it at the Garveys' dinner table before she slipped into her seat and put her napkin on her lap, then checked to make sure everyone else had already helped themselves to the tuna noodle ca.s.serole before putting a single small portion on her own plate.

And she made sure there was plenty left for both Mitch and Zach to have second helpings, even though her own stomach was begging for more food. But already she'd learned that the more invisible she could make herself, the better off she'd be in the Garveys' house.

Almost as if she'd heard Sarah's thoughts, Angie Garvey's eyes fixed on her. "How was your first day at school, Sarah?"

Now all four of the Garveys were looking at her, and Sarah sensed some kind of trap being set. But how could such a simple question-a question her own mother must have asked her thousands of times-be a trap?

Maybe it wasn't-maybe Angie really was wondering how she'd liked school. "Good," she finally said.

Everyone kept looking at her.

"Fine, I mean," she hurried on. "I liked it. School was really good." Her eyes darted from Angie to Mitch, and she could see she still hadn't said enough. "Lots of homework," she ventured.

Without taking his eyes off her, Mitch drained his beer and tipped the empty bottle toward Zach, who took it and immediately jumped up to get his father another one. "Homework's good," Mitch said. "Trouble with schools nowadays is not enough homework. When I was your age, we didn't have time to hang out and get in trouble-we had work to do. Lots of it." Then his eyes bored into her. "And when we were asked a question, we answered it. Didn't make folks pull every word out one by one."

Sarah took a sip of water and sucked in her breath, thinking fast. What did her foster father want to hear? What was she supposed to say? "Well," she finally began, "I found all my cla.s.srooms without too much trouble, and my locker is in a really good place, practically in the middle of the whole school."

Mitch went back to his meal, and as if they had been signaled, so did the rest of the family.

Sarah relaxed slightly. "I really like my art teacher, Miss Philips."

All four heads snapped up, and once again the family was staring at her.

"D-Did I say something wrong?" Sarah stammered. What was going on? What had she said?

Angie Garvey sipped from her own gla.s.s of water, then dabbed her napkin at the corners of her mouth. "Bettina Philips is not someone you should be a.s.sociating with," she said, the distaste for the woman's name clear on her face. Then she added, "She is a witch."

Sarah's mouth dropped open. A witch? What on earth was Angie talking about? But before she could ask, her foster mother answered her unspoken question.

"This is a Christian community," she declared. "And there is no place in it for the likes of Bettina Philips."

Sarah's eyes flicked toward Mitch, but his expression was as implacable as Angie's.

"Outside of cla.s.s, you must never speak to her," Angie went on. "In this house-in every good house in Warwick-we do our best never to speak of her at all."

Sarah could barely believe what she was hearing, but her foster mother was still not finished.

"On Sunday," Angie Garvey continued, "you'll have a chance to cleanse your spirit in church."

"I-I don't understand," Sarah began, finally setting down her fork as her appet.i.te deserted her. "She's my teacher. All we talked about was ..." Her voice trailed off, but now everyone's eyes were fixed on her again and she knew she had to say something else. "We talked about art," she said, her voice coming out in a whisper that sounded desperate even to her own ears.

"Then let me make it real clear," Mitch said, jabbing at the air with his fork. "You don't speak to that woman except to do whatever you need to do to pa.s.s her cla.s.s. Not one extra word. You don't talk to her, you don't talk about her, you don't even look at her. Got it?"

Sarah put her hands in her lap. "Yes, sir," she whispered.

"Jesus Christ, Angie," Mitch said, still glowering at Sarah. "All we need is for this kid to be getting ideas from Bettina Philips!"

Angie put a calming hand over her husband's, and a moment later he shook his head in disgust and returned to his meal. But Angie's expression told Sarah that she was in total agreement with her husband and that she had better pay very close attention to what Angie had just said.

She chanced a look at Tiffany, who only shook her head and looked away.

The message was more than clear.

She was now forbidden to speak to the one and only person in Warwick who had been nice to her.

[image]

Lily Dunnigan tried to work the crossword puzzle while her husband read the evening newspaper, but the house was quiet.

Too quiet.

She couldn't concentrate.

And Nick had been unusually cheerful at dinner. He'd eaten everything she served him, then disappeared up to his room to do his homework.

And she hadn't heard a peep out of him since.

No wonder she couldn't concentrate: usually by this time of day the voices in his head were so out of control that he was upstairs sobbing or banging his head against the wall-anything to shut them out. But not tonight.

Could they finally have hit on the right medication? Was it actually possible? She set her crossword aside. "I'm going up to check on Nick."

Shep Dunnigan barely glanced up from his paper. "He'll never be normal if you don't start treating him like a normal kid."

"I'll just go see what he's doing."

Shep sighed loudly and rattled the paper as he turned the page. Lily walked softly up the stairs and tapped on Nick's door. "Come on in," Nick said.

Lily opened the door and peeked in. Nick sat at his desk, writing in a spiral notebook. "What are you doing?" she asked.

"Chemistry," Nick said. He made a couple more notations, then set his pen down. "Done."

"All finished?" She moved into his room and perched nervously on his bed. Though it seemed as if she'd been praying for a sight this ordinary all Nick's life, actually seeing him act like a normal teenager with no worse problems than too much homework was difficult to believe.