House Of Reckoning Part 35

That was it-a painting that looked perfectly real, so you felt like you were looking out windows even though it was only a wall.

A blank wall!

She heard the chittering then, and the sc.r.a.ping, as the rats began to penetrate the door behind her. She glanced back and saw them, coming through the door, and out of the walls, and- Panic seized her, and without thinking, Angie pulled herself to her feet, ignoring the agony in her right leg and hip as a stream of adrenaline surged through her, spurring her onward.

Out! She had to get out before the rats could reach her. If she couldn't- She had to get out before the rats could reach her. If she couldn't- She could already feel them, biting into her legs, tearing her flesh from her bones, ripping at her until- She hurled herself toward the image of the world outside, where the sun was s.h.i.+ning and the flowers were in bloom and it was a perfect summer day and- One of the French doors flew open before her, and Angie tumbled through it, falling into a swirling maelstrom of air and and light.

Bright light, light that hurt her eyes.

Unearthly light.

She closed her eyes tight against the blinding light and tried to twist her body away from the pain of her broken bone.

"Okay, move her out," a woman said.

Angie opened her eyes. A heavyset woman in an ancient nurse's uniform stood over her, glowering down with furious eyes. "Are you going to behave now?" a harsh, guttural voice demanded.

Angie tried to move but couldn't. She could barely even breathe. "Let's go," the woman said sharply, clapping her hands.

Two men lifted Angie off a bed. Except it wasn't a bed at all-just a few wooden slats in a frame.

She could barely move her legs and her upper body was immobile.

She looked down and finally understood. With its large buckles and the heavy cloth, there was no mistaking what she was wearing.

It was a straitjacket.

Bound in a straitjacket, she was being half carried and half dragged by the two men through the door of a tiny cell and into a dark hallway, barely lit by the gaslights hung along its walls.

She tried to speak, tried to ask where she was, but even though she could work her lips, no sound came out. Now she looked frantically around for someone who might help her, but except for the two men flanking her and the stolid woman marching ahead, all she could see were glimpses of haunted-looking faces behind the barred windows that pierced each iron-strapped door she pa.s.sed.

m.u.f.fled voices muttered.

A woman screamed.

Fingers came through a window, as if reaching for her.

They were near the end of the long corridor when Angie Garvey's eyes suddenly locked on to those of someone whose face was all but invisible in the darkness of his cell. But it didn't matter, for she recognized those eyes in an instant, and finally found her voice.

Her mouth opened and with all the energy she could muster she howled out the name of the man behind those eyes.

"MIIIITCH!"

Her husband's name echoed up and down the corridor for what seemed to Angie like an eternity, then faded away.

For her, though, eternity had just begun.

Chapter Thirty-one.

Kate Williams drove slowly through the early morning rain as she turned off the highway toward Warwick. The morning had dawned unseasonably warm, and the heat along with the rain had dissolved almost all evidence of the snowstorm that blew in so suddenly last night.

Ed Crane's voice on the telephone this morning had struck a chord with the nagging feeling growing inside her that things might not be entirely right at the Garvey house. She had managed to shelve that feeling in the hope that she was wrong and that she wouldn't have to add Sarah Crane to her already crus.h.i.+ng caseload. But Ed Crane had sounded not just worried, but actually frightened, and right after his call, she canceled her entire morning calendar and headed for Warwick.

Kate turned onto Quail Run and parked in front of the Garvey house. The draperies were still drawn, as if the household hadn't awakened yet.

She grabbed her shoulder bag, walked up to the door and pressed the bell. She heard the spaniel bark, but n.o.body came, and finally she opened the storm door and tried the k.n.o.b.

It turned.

She hesitated. Should she go in? Or should she call the police? But what would she say? That she'd found a house left unlocked on a Sat.u.r.day morning with n.o.body home but the dog? They'd think she was an idiot!

She pushed the front door open. "h.e.l.lo?"

No answer, except the tail-wagging of the dog, who ran toward the back door, whining to be let out.

Kate paused in the living room. "Is anybody home?" she called. More silence, so she continued on through the small dining room into the kitchen.

Half-cooked chicken lay in a cold frying pan on the stove. Wilted salad sat in a bowl on the counter. And the dining room table was set for dinner. The Garveys had left last night, and they'd left in a hurry. She let the dog out to relieve himself, waited for him to come back in, then retraced her steps and left the house, closing the front door firmly behind her but leaving it unlocked, just the way she'd found it. She paused on the porch, surveying the Garveys' neighborhood.

It looked exactly as it should on a quiet Sat.u.r.day morning.

The door to the house next door opened, and a man in his bathrobe stepped out to retrieve the morning paper. "Good morning," Kate called to him.

"Eh?" He looked startled, but then nodded. "Yuh-it is is a good morning, isn't it?" a good morning, isn't it?"

"I'm wondering if you might know where the Garveys are this morning?"

The man frowned, pursing his lips as if wondering just how much he should say to this person he'd never seen before in his life. But as Kate was reaching into her purse for her county identification card, he answered: "The wife said their girl was in some kind of accident last night. Saw it on the news."

"Which girl?" Kate asked, the quick breakfast she'd grabbed forty minutes ago suddenly congealing in her stomach.

"'Ats all I know," the man said. "Some crazy weather, eh?" He waved his paper at her and went back inside.

Kate ran down the steps and got into her car. She'd been to the Warwick police station a couple of years ago, and now found it in less than two minutes. She parked in front and strode through the gla.s.s entry.

The uniformed deputy behind a desk glanced up at her. "Take a seat," he said. "I'll be with you in a minute." Before she could protest that she had an emergency-which might not exactly be true-he'd turned his attention back to a distraught woman who was sitting in a chair next to his desk.

"He didn't come home last night," the woman said, twisting a sodden handkerchief, then dabbing ineffectively at her eyes. "Dan always comes home. Always!"

The deputy spread his hands in a helpless gesture. "I'm really, really sorry, Andrea, but there's nothing I can tell you. We haven't heard from him, and believe me, we've been trying to get hold of him for hours."

But the woman wouldn't be put off. "Zach Garvey said Dan went with his parents to Bettina Philips's house. Have you been out there yet?"

Kate sat up straight.

"Bill Harney and I just got back from there half an hour ago," the deputy said. "Dan isn't there and neither are the Garveys."

"What about his car?" the woman demanded. "Where's his car?"

The deputy shook his head. "I don't know that, either, Andrea." His voice took on the kind of weary note Kate had often heard from police officers trying to respond to all the demands of distraught people whose spouses or children had vanished, often because they wanted to vanish rather than because they'd fallen victim to some sort of crime. "I know it's not at the Philips place, and I put out an APB on it, but I haven't heard anything. You've got to give it some time."

"Time?" the woman echoed, her voice rising and taking on a note of hysteria. "My son's been murdered and my husband is missing, and you say I have to give it 'time'?"

"Conner wasn't murdered, Andrea," the deputy said quietly. "It was an accident."

Kate stood up. "Excuse me," she said. "I'm Kate Williams with the Vermont Department of Social Services, and I'm here looking for the Garveys."

Andrea West turned a puffy-eyed face toward her. "We're all looking for the Garveys," she said. "And my husband," she added, her gaze s.h.i.+fting back to fix on the deputy again. "Who is the sheriff here!"

Kate saw the deputy redden. "I'm actually looking for Sarah Crane, the Garveys' foster child," she said.

Andrea's expression changed then, morphing into a mask of pure fury. "She's the one who murdered my son!" she burst out. "And almost killed Tiffany Garvey, too!"

The deputy stood up and started around his desk toward Kate. "n.o.body murdered your son, Andrea," he repeated, then s.h.i.+fted his attention back to Kate. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm Tim Ross. I-"

"The girl you're looking for is probably out there with that witch Bettina Philips," Andrea West cut in. "If you can call it living-they should have torn that wreck down years ago."

Tim Ross shot Kate a sympathetic look. "The Crane girl is out there," he said. "Actually, the next call I was going to make was to you, but ..." His voice trailed off and his head tipped almost imperceptibly toward Andrea West. "You'll see the gates at the entrance to the property," the deputy said, "a little less than a mile out of town, off 157."

"Thanks," Kate said, then turned to offer her sympathy to the sheriff's wife, but Andrea West only glared at her.

"If the gates haven't rusted off by now," she muttered so quietly that Kate wasn't even sure the words were directed at her.

She left the sheriff's office and got into her car, her mind racing. Bettina Philips was the one who had gone to see Sarah's father, the art teacher concerned about Sarah's placement with the Garveys.

And Bettina Philips was the one who got Mitch Garvey so angry that he'd frightened Ed Crane enough to call her this morning and beg her to check on his daughter.

And now the sheriff's wife had called the teacher a witch? Or had she actually just subst.i.tuted a W for a B before she'd spat out the word? Suddenly, Kate wished she'd paid more attention to that feeling she'd had that all was not as well with Sarah as both the girl and Angie Garvey had insisted.

As she turned left off Main Street onto Route 157, the rain stopped completely, and by the time she'd driven half a mile farther, the sun was starting to break through the clouds. As the sky turned bluer, she kept one eye on the odometer and searched for the gates with the other. And sure enough, just a little less than a mile out of town, she found them.

Except they weren't the kind of rusted, ruined gates the sheriff's wife had talked about. Instead she saw a pair of handsome-and ma.s.sive-wrought-iron gates that hung perfectly straight on st.u.r.dy hinges. Both the gates and the hinges looked freshly painted, and the gates stood open as if to welcome her.

She turned up a long curving drive, and the last of the clouds dispersed and the sun came out, s.h.i.+ning brilliantly on the wet driveway, making it sparkle as if it were paved with diamonds rather than gravel. The drive curved gently through the forest for a couple hundred yards, then emerged into the grounds surrounding the house. The gravel drive formed a circle around an enormous maple tree; obviously, whatever else Bettina Philips was, she had a green thumb. The gardens were filled with asters and half a dozen other fall-blooming plants, and the lawns were green, well-mown, and-at least from what Kate could see-totally weedless.

Nor was the old stone mansion the "wreck" she had been led to expect. Rather, it was a handsome structure with heavy shutters at every window and the kind of slate roof she had always envied. The house appeared every bit as well-tended as the grounds surrounding it. The front door looked inviting, and even with winter coming on, there were perfectly matched topiaries in the ma.s.sive stone urns that flanked the entry.

Kate pulled into the freshly graveled circular drive and parked next to a Mini Cooper that was the only other visible vehicle.

A lone bark greeted her when she rang the bell, and a moment later a woman who looked as if she hadn't slept all night opened the front door, with a little terrier wagging happily at her feet. The woman scooped it up so it wouldn't dart outside, but before either Kate or the woman could speak, a familiar voice called out Kate's name and a second later Sarah Crane appeared.

But this was not the subdued girl Kate had last seen at Mitch and Angie Garvey's house. This was the Sarah Crane she had grown to know, even love, during the months of her recuperation from the accident that crippled her. Kate dropped her shoulder bag and enfolded Sarah in an enormous, and relieved, hug. "Are you all right?"

Sarah nodded, wiping moisture from her eyes with her sleeve, then gesturing toward the woman who had opened the door. "This is Bettina Philips," she said, taking Kate's hand and pulling her into the foyer. "And this is Kate Williams, Bettina. She's my caseworker with the county. Except she's not just my caseworker-she's my friend, too."

"I know who Kate is, or at least I know of her," Bettina said, leading Kate into the huge entry gallery. "I think you'd better come and sit down," she said to the caseworker. "There's been a lot happening here." She led the way to the parlor, where morning sun was flooding through open windows. A pale woman and boy about the same age as Sarah were sitting on a small couch, both of them looking as tired as Bettina and Sarah.

The woman stood up as Bettina explained who Kate was, and offered her hand. "I'm Lily Dunnigan," she said, the words coming out in a nearly exhausted sigh. "This is my son, Nick."

Kate perched on the edge of an antique brocade wing chair as Sarah sank down next to Bettina on a second sofa.

"Sarah's father called me this morning," Kate said, deciding to approach Bettina Philips head-on. "Apparently Mitch Garvey was threatening Sarah about you."

"Well, that's not a surprise," Bettina observed, her brows forming a sardonic arch. "Was it the witch thing, or the 'tool of the devil' thing? Both are fairly common around here."

Kate decided at once that she liked Bettina Philips. "Actually, I heard the witch thing at the sheriff's office, but 'tool of the devil' is a new one." Then her voice turned serious. "But Ed Crane was very worried, and I've already heard that something happened last night. A boy was killed in an accident? And the Garveys are missing?" She saw Lily Dunnigan and Bettina Philips exchange a quick glance, but before either could say anything, Sarah answered at least one of her questions.

"There was an accident-Conner West's car caught on fire. He and Tiffany Garvey were trying to run us down-Nick and me. But he skidded or something and hit a wall, and his car caught on fire."

"Dear G.o.d," Kate breathed.

"The sheriff was here last night," Bettina said, and Kate had the feeling she was choosing her words with a great deal of care. "Actually, so were the Garveys, and Nick's father."

Kate waited, but instead of going on, Bettina's eyes moved from Sarah to Lily Dunnigan and her son, as if looking for some kind of signal. It was Lily Dunnigan who nodded so imperceptibly that Kate almost missed it.

"They were making threats," Bettina said. "They seemed to think that somehow the accident was Sarah and Nick's fault. ..."

Her voice trailed off, but Kate was sure there was more-much more-to the story. "And?" she prompted.

"And they left," Bettina said, her eyes never leaving Kate's.

"Left," Kate repeated. She glanced from Bettina to the other people in the room. "I'm not sure I'm following you. The sheriff and the Garveys came out here accusing Sarah and-Nick, is it?-of causing an accident that killed the sheriff's son, and they just ... left? ... left? Where did they go?" Where did they go?"

"I don't know," Bettina replied. "But I don't think they'll be back." Before Kate could say anything else, Lily Dunnigan spoke.

"There's something else you should know. Sarah is Bettina's daughter." She fell silent for a moment, then seemed to gather herself. "Bettina's and my husband's. She is Nick's half sister." Kate stared at Lily Dunnigan, stunned, but Lily wasn't finished. "Shep raped her," she said, her voice trembling with anger. "While I was pregnant with Nick, the man I was married to came out here and raped Bettina. Which I suppose at least explains why he always hated her."

"And you said he was here last night, too?"

Lily nodded. "He was going to take Nick back to the hospital." She took her son's hand protectively, almost as if afraid Kate might try to take him away. "Nick's had problems ever since he was little, and Shep-" She cut herself off, apparently deciding she might be saying too much. Then her voice hardened. "Shep wanted to have Nick committed again."

For a long moment Kate studied the four people around her. "And they all left and you don't know where they went?"

"Actually none of us really knows exactly what happened last night," Bettina said. "This is a strange house-"

"It's a great great house," Nick broke in. "And I was never crazy. I just-" He hesitated, glanced at Sarah, then went on. "-I just have a sort of talent, kind of like Sarah. She can draw things, and I can ... I don't know-sort of visualize and hear them, I guess." house," Nick broke in. "And I was never crazy. I just-" He hesitated, glanced at Sarah, then went on. "-I just have a sort of talent, kind of like Sarah. She can draw things, and I can ... I don't know-sort of visualize and hear them, I guess."

Kate's mind was churning, trying to make sense of what she was hearing. It would be easy to prove whether Bettina was Sarah's mother-either adoption records or a DNA test would do it-but now that she was looking at both of them sitting side by side, she was sure what the outcome would be. As for the rest of it ... "I understand two deputies have already been here this morning?"

Bettina nodded. "We told them exactly what we told you, that the people they were looking for were here, and they left. They searched the house and the garage and everywhere else."

"Looking for what?" Kate asked. "Surely they didn't think-"