House Of Reckoning Part 11

"That's what Miss Philips said."

"Well, good for her. Sounds like she's all right to me." He shook his head. "A witch. That's a good one."

It got easier then, and for the next hour Sarah found herself talking with her father almost the way they used to at home. And for a while the sterile visiting room in the state prison might as well have been the kitchen in the little farmhouse outside of Brunswick. But soon-too soon-the big clock with the cage over its gla.s.s face read three-fifty and it was time for her to go.

Away from the coziness of being with her father in the prison, to the prison of being in the house with the Garveys.

"I'll be back as soon as I can, Daddy," she promised, refusing to ruin the visit at the very end by bursting into tears.

"I'll look forward to that, honey."

"So you eat your vegetables, okay?"

He nodded. "Okay."

Before her tears could overcome her, she hurried away, suddenly terrified that she might be even a few seconds late to meet Angie Garvey.

That could cost her a visit with her father, and no matter what she had to do, she wasn't going to let that happen. And the next time she came to visit, she'd bring him another drawing.

Maybe she'd do a portrait of her mother. She'd never tried to do that before, and it might be kind of fun, even if it didn't turn out very well.

Not that it mattered how bad it came out.

Her father would love it anyway.

Sarah eyed the object on the counter in front of her as warily as if it were a cobra rather than merely a carrot, knowing that if she didn't cut it exactly as Angie had shown her a moment ago, her foster mother would strike out at her with a venom that might not be fatal, but would sting every bit as much as a serpent's bite. Now, as she held the knife over the carrot at what she hoped was the same angle Angie had demonstrated, she felt the woman's cold gaze over her shoulder. "Presentation is everything," Angie reminded her when she was done, reaching over and rejecting two chunks that failed to meet her standards. "Especially for Sunday dinner. Remember that any job worth doing is worth doing well."

Sarah tried not to think about the fun she and her mother used to have cooking dinner together, laughing and joking and sometimes dancing around in the kitchen, paying no attention at all to the size or shape of carrots. Here, there was no temptation at all to break into song, let alone dance around the Garveys' kitchen.

"Hey," Tiffany said as she came in and opened the refrigerator door.

Sarah stiffened. "Hey," she replied, carefully keeping her eyes on the work in front of her.

"So, what's it like to visit someone in prison?" Tiffany asked with an exaggerated innocence that immediately put Sarah on guard. She glanced over at Tiffany, who was now leaning against the doorjamb, a c.o.ke in her hand.

"It was kind of hard the first time," Sarah said, choosing her words carefully.

"Keep working while you talk," Angie reminded her.

Sarah reached for another carrot. "But I love seeing my dad."

"Your dad the murderer?" murderer?" Zach asked, suddenly appearing in the doorway next to his sister. Sarah felt a twinge of anger at the emphasis he put on the last word. Zach asked, suddenly appearing in the doorway next to his sister. Sarah felt a twinge of anger at the emphasis he put on the last word.

"It was an accident," Sarah said quietly.

"I thought running over you you was the accident," Tiffany said. "That's two too many accidents, if you ask me." was the accident," Tiffany said. "That's two too many accidents, if you ask me."

Sarah's face burned, but she said nothing, keeping her eyes on the carrot as she quickly sliced it into the exact pieces Angie demanded.

"He's going to h.e.l.l, you know," Zach said. "So visiting him is kind of a waste, isn't it?"

Sarah glanced over at Angie, who stirred the boiling pasta and seemed not even to have heard what her children were saying.

"Seems like maybe you should spend your time trying to save your soul instead of hanging out with him," Tiffany said.

"He's my father," Sarah whispered, her voice sounding weak and small even to herself.

"But he's going to h.e.l.l," Zach repeated.

"You should be in church, praying for your own salvation," Tiffany said.

Sarah's fingers tightened on the knife. "If I'm in church, I'll pray that my father gets out as soon as he can, and when I'm not in church, I'll go visit him as often as I can," she said, her voice trembling.

"Keep chopping," Angie said. "If you don't get your work done, you won't be visiting him at all. And when you finish the carrots, you can cut up the broccoli for the salad."

So that was it-soon they weren't going to let her visit her father. No matter what she did-no matter how hard she tried to please them-it wasn't going to be enough.

And the punishment would be keeping her from visiting her father.

She took a deep breath and turned to face Angie. Out of the corner of her eye she could see the smirk that twisted Zach's lips and the brightness in Tiffany's eyes as she waited to see what was about to happen. "You can't keep me from visiting him," Sarah said, struggling to keep her voice under control. "I have a right."

Angie turned around to face Sarah, drying her hands on her ap.r.o.n. "You have no rights at all," she said, her cold eyes fixing on her. "You're here because you need to be brought up properly in a good Christian home, and that's exactly what we are going to provide. Your father is a sinner, and your mother died of sin, and you're headed in that same direction unless you straighten up and start working and praying for your own salvation. Now stop arguing and get back to your work."

Sarah's fingers tightened on the knife and she struggled to keep her fury under control. "My mother did not die of sin," she said quietly. "She died of cancer."

"Same thing," Zach said, and reached over for a handful of chopped carrots.

It was all Sarah could do to keep from driving that kitchen knife right through his hand, pinning him to the cutting board.

"Cancer is evil made manifest," Angie said, draining the pasta into the sink amid a billowing cloud of steam. "All illness is caused by evil and sin, and if your mother had cancer, it was because she had fallen from G.o.d's grace. Hand me that bowl."

For a moment Sarah gazed mutely at the blue bowl Angie was pointing at. Was it possible she'd heard her foster mother's words right? But she knew she had-what Angie Garvey had just said wasn't much different than what Reverend Keener had said only this morning at the church.

And Angie had just called her mother evil.

She'd called a woman she didn't know-a woman she'd never met-evil!

The fury she'd been holding in check began to erupt inside her. How could she live with these people? How could she even sit at a table and eat dinner with them?

She couldn't.

Dropping the knife on the cutting board, she walked past Tiffany and Zach, through the door to the dining room, then on through the living room. Ignoring Angie's demands that she come back and finish her work, she took her hat, her thin coat, and a scarf from the coat tree by the front door, and walked out.

By the time she got to the corner of the block, where she paused to pull on the coat, wrap the scarf around her neck, and pull the knit cap over her ears, she already knew where she was going.

Indeed, there was only one place she could could go where she knew she would be welcome. go where she knew she would be welcome.

Shutters.

Shutters, and the "witch" who lived within its walls.

Chapter Ten.

The looming ma.s.s of the ancient stone house looked even larger against the fast graying sky than the last time Sarah had seen it, when at least there was sunlight to wash away some of the mansion's air of gloom. She paused, gazing at the gabled roof, and for a moment wondered if she'd been wrong.

If instead of making her way up the long and winding driveway through the woods, she should have turned back.

Turned back, returned to the Garveys', and made her peace with Angie and Tiffany and Zach.

But even as the thought formed, she found herself moving forward, closer to the old stone house. And even though it still reminded her of the house from her dreams, it didn't seem frightening now that she was awake. Indeed, the house tugged at her as if it had a gravity of its own, and oddly, instead of fear, she felt a strange familiarity-almost a feeling of homecoming, as if something buried deep inside her had always known that this place was more than just something from her dreams, but was a real place that was waiting for her, patiently waiting, until she came back to it.

Yet she'd only been here once before, and never set so much as a foot inside the house.

She wiped her nose-running from the chill in the air-on a sc.r.a.p of tissue she found in her coat pocket, then climbed the front steps and pressed the bell next to Shutters' enormous oak front door.

A solitary dog's bark echoed from deep inside.

Moments later Bettina Philips opened the door. "Sarah," she said softly, neither looking nor sounding surprised to see her. "Come in."

Sarah stepped through the door and into the cavernous foyer, and immediately a feeling of warmth enveloped her, banis.h.i.+ng the cold that had invaded her body as she made the long walk. And with the cold, all her doubts, nervousness, and anxiety drained away as well.

And the house, too, seemed to change as she took another step. Though she knew it could be nothing but an illusion, the lights seemed to grow a little brighter, and the flames from the fire burning on the great hearth set into the wall of the entry hall halfway between the foyer and the far side of the house seemed to leap higher and throw off more heat.

Bettina glanced into the fast-fading light outside before closing the door, then took a closer look at Sarah. "Are you all right? What's happened?"

Suddenly, all of Sarah's anger at her foster family dropped away and for a moment she felt completely disoriented. Why had she come here? What force had drawn her? Why had she come here? What force had drawn her? She shook her head and felt her face burn with embarra.s.sment. Maybe she should just leave. She shook her head and felt her face burn with embarra.s.sment. Maybe she should just leave.

But she didn't want to leave.

"I'll make us a pot of tea," Bettina said. "Take off your coat."

Leaving her cap, scarf, and coat on a great oaken tree surmounted with an ornately carved owl that stood just inside the foyer, Sarah followed Bettina through an enormous dining room, then a smaller room lined with sideboards that were filled with dusty crystal goblets of more shapes and sizes than she'd ever seen outside a department store, and into a kitchen at least six times the size of either the Garveys' or the one back home on the farm.

As Bettina pulled the teapot from the cupboard over the sink, put four tea bags into it, and filled it from the kettle that was already steaming on a huge eight-burner range, she tilted her head toward a table where a plate of sliced banana bread was already waiting. "Something must have happened," she said. "You didn't just decide to walk all the way up here for no reason at all, did you?"

"They were telling me my father's going to h.e.l.l," Sarah replied. "I didn't want to start yelling at them, and I didn't know where else to go." She paused for a second, then went on. "You've been so nice to me." Then, as Bettina brought the pot and two mugs to the table, Sarah's body trembled with a sense of deja vu: she had been here before, sat on this very chair, eaten a piece of banana bread off this same Franciscan-ware plate.

Sipped tea from that blue stoneware mug.

But instead of fading away, the deja vu grew stronger, and as she looked around at the high ceiling, the scrubbed wooden table that could easily seat twelve, the old wavy-gla.s.s-fronted cabinets that lined the kitchen walls, Sarah felt as if she had eaten countless meals at that table, read a hundred books while curled in that window seat by the door to the side entrance.

This was her house.

She cast around in her mind for something to say that wouldn't betray her strange certainty that she had been here-even lived here-before. "D-Do you live here all by yourself?" she finally asked, unable to keep from stammering. But Bettina Philips didn't seem to notice.

"My great-great-grandfather moved in here when he was the first warden of the old prison. Then when he retired, he bought the place from the state, since the prison was closing. I grew up here."

"It's huge."

Bettina's brows arched. "Huge heating bills, I can tell you that." Then she picked up her cup. "C'mon, let's go have a look at my studio-you're going to love it."

Sarah followed Bettina back the way they had come until they were once more in the mansion's great central hall, the walls of which were studded with half a dozen heavy mahogany doors, all of them closed. "I keep these rooms shut up tight during the winter," Bettina said. As they moved toward the north side of the house, the teacher pointed to the doors they pa.s.sed. "That goes to my grandfather's study, that one to the formal parlor with the music room on the other side. Up the stairs"-she gestured at the curving staircase to the second and third floors-"are more bedrooms than you'd think possible, but only two bathrooms. And above that, on the third floor, is a ballroom. Just what I need, right?"

And as Sarah pa.s.sed each of the closed doors, she was certain-absolutely certain-that she knew exactly what each of the invisible rooms looked like. Even the music room, which she knew contained not only a grand piano, but a harpsichord as well, upon which someone-who?-used to play Vivaldi on a spring morning.

And she could name each of the upstairs bedrooms and describe how each of them was decorated.

She peered up at the crystal chandelier that hung twenty feet above her head, then gazed down at the intricately inlaid marble floor. The shapes of the crystals and the patterns of the floor were as familiar as her face in the mirror.

Then the black lab mix that Sarah had seen on the driveway the other day stuck its nose through the spindles on the staircase and looked down on them. This evening, though, it did not bark.

"That's Cooper," Bettina said. "Sometimes he's friendly, but not often."

As if to prove her point, Cooper backed away and soundlessly disappeared.

Bettina moved on to the last pair of big doors on the left, slid them aside into their pockets. "And this," she announced, "is my studio."

Sarah's breath caught in her throat as Bettina switched on the lights in what had once been a conservatory. Gla.s.s walls soared to a gla.s.s ceiling nearly as high as the one in the entry hall. For a split second Sarah saw it exactly as it had once been, filled with tropical plants, a potted palm and ficus tree, a riot of flowers and foliage that could never have survived a Vermont winter. Then the vision faded and she gazed at the worn area rug at the far end, with a sofa, two chairs, and a coffee table arranged around a freestanding gas fireplace, along with books, teacups, notepads, and woolen throws.

The rest of the s.p.a.ce was mainly occupied by a drafting table, several easels, and makes.h.i.+ft brick-and-board shelving, every square foot of which was jammed full of paints, brushes, pencils, books, and papers.

Beyond the windows, Sarah could still barely see the sweep of overgrown lawn that stretched all the way down to the sh.o.r.es of the lake whose waters were s.h.i.+ning silver in the cloudy twilight.

And this, she knew, was where she belonged.

Here, despite the house's rotting facades and overgrown grounds, and peeling wallpaper and faded upholstery.

Not in the Garveys' house, despite its neatness and its tidiness, with nothing ever out of place.

Then her eyes were drawn to one of the easels and the fresh sheet of thick paper that seemed to be waiting for someone to draw on it.

For her her to draw. to draw.

The stub of a charcoal stick lay in the tray, and without thinking, Sarah walked over, picked it up, and drew a dark vertical line.

Her fingertips began to tingle, and she set her mug down and drew another line.

The tingling increased, moved up her fingertips to her hands, and as her hand moved with increasing certainty, as if guided by some unseen force, she let herself drift into a warm and welcoming world of inspiration.

"Good, Sarah," Bettina whispered. "Keep going. Just let it happen."

Sarah barely heard her. The drawing consumed her-she was was the charcoal-she the charcoal-she was was the image. It was as if she were a mere medium that allowed the image to emerge from the paper of its own volition. the image. It was as if she were a mere medium that allowed the image to emerge from the paper of its own volition.